Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido Page B

builders, stripped to the waist and shining with sweat, are to be seen at work. They raise picks and lower them to unspoken rhythms and they sing so perfectly in exquisite harmonies as they do so that Dinah is transfixed. She doesn’t know if they are prison gangs or ordinary day labourers, but there is always one white foreman to about twelve of the black men. The white man is also stripped to the waist and burnt lobster red. And he is always screaming at the men with such intense and apparently inexplicable ferocity that it makes him sound raving mad. Then one day there’s just one black man and he’s got a pneumatic drill. The gangs and the foremen are gone for ever and, after that, whenever Dinah asks, nobody can seem to remember that the road-gang songs ever happened.
    Scripture happens after lunch, and it’s taught by Mrs Garson, who looks just like a picture-book granny, with funny half-moon specs. Her hair is parted dead-centre, just like Rosema’s, and she has a bun at the back which is made out of her own hair arranged around a doughnut. Mrs Garson wears her bosom hanging over the belt of her shirtwaister dress and her face is strangely matt with powder. Her eyebrows and eyelashes as well. She looks as though she must immerse her face in a bag of flour every morning and then blow hard. Mrs Garson is so religious that she has a biblical quotation for every occasion. So, if any girls are chattering as they are putting ontheir gym shoes, she’ll write on the blackboard, ‘Let all things be done decently and in order.’ And then she’ll write in brackets after it, ‘II Corinthians, chapter 6, verse ix’ – or whatever the reference is.
    Mrs Garson runs the weekly optional bible class in the lunch-hour and she calls the gospels the Good News. She brings the Good News in Scripture as well and she has exciting visual aids. She’s got a green baize board that she rolls down over the regular blackboard like a roller blind and a whole lot of shiny cut-out pictures that stick to the board. These are all the people in the Bible stories that she tells. Dinah has never heard about any of them before, so the shepherds and the wise men and the raising of Lazarus and Joseph with the many-coloured coat – well, it’s all very Good News to her.
    Mrs Garson teaches them how to say the Lord’s Prayer with their eyes shut and their hands together. Dinah learns it off by heart that very day and she dashes home after school to show her parents. She longs for them to praise her for her new accomplishment. Dinah makes them wait outside the door of the bedroom that she shares with Lisa until she is in kneeling position beside her bed, with her eyes closed and her hands together. Then she calls out, ‘Ready!’ Her parents come in and she starts to recite.
    â€˜Ourfatherwhichartinheavenhallowedbethynamethy –’
    She gets no further before her dad bursts out laughing. Dinah is mortified. It’s probably one of the worst moments of her life. She hates him. She feels so bad that she wants to wither away. But she knows that what Mrs Garson says about the Good News is true – every word of it. Yet Mrs Garson has told all the same stories to Lisa for the last two years without them making any impact. Lisa is a natural materialist and the Good News never gets to her. Sometimes the girls have religious arguments together at home.
    â€˜Well, if there is a God, why can’t you see him?’ Lisa says.
    Dinah thinks of all sorts of reasons. ‘He’s hidden behind the clouds,’ she says.
    â€˜Well, what if there aren’t any clouds?’ Lisa says.
    â€˜It’s because he’s so big he takes up the whole sky,’ Dinah says. ‘What you can see is just a little part of his blue cloak.’
    Sometimes she takes the opposite line and argues against God’s unimaginable largeness.
    â€˜Well, Lisa, you see,’ she says. ‘You