The Exiles

there was only a crack and a bramble muffled bump. Then there was Naomi, too scared to move because she had heard the crack and didn’t know what had snapped. Nevertheless, through everything else she felt faintly triumphant; she’d known she would fall and she had fallen, so she had been right all along. And she was glad to be down.
    Gradually, like a hedgehog unstartling, she began to uncurl.
    ‘Not my legs,’ she thought as she felt them move. ‘Not my back, or I’d be dead. It must be an arm.’
    Opening her eyes she sat up and felt a dreadful yank on her left side. She looked down and quickly looked away again.
    Her left hand had suddenly betrayed her. She had never put it in that outrageous position in her life. For a minute she thought she might start screaming, but then a golden thought arose and saved her. They’d get a rotten shock when she got back and showed them. She pictured their faces and hoped they’d all faint. She even managed a bit of a grin, a very small one though, and it nearly turned into something else.
    With her faithful, untreacherous right hand she picked up her left, put it in her windcheater pocket, recovered from the shock of the pain, stood up, was sick on her right foot, and walked home.

    ‘Here she is,’ announced Phoebe, who had been staring through the kitchen window as Naomi trudged up the garden path.
    ‘She’s not still upset about yesterday is she?’ asked Ruth.
    ‘She doesn’t look as if she is. She just looks …’
    ‘Furious,’ finished Phoebe, as Naomi stamped into the room.
    ‘I’ve broken my arm,’ said Naomi.
    ‘Why?’ asked Phoebe.
    ‘Look at you!’ snapped Big Grandma, before Naomi even had time to get in properly. ‘You’re absolutely soaked! And I wish you children would learn to wipe your feet before you come in! Go and put on some dry clothes!’
    ‘I’ve broken my arm,’ said Naomi.
    ‘What for?’ asked Phoebe.
    ‘I can’t be bothered with arguing,’ said Big Grandma. ‘Go and get changed, and be quick about it if you want any breakfast!’
    ‘What do you mean?’ asked Ruth.
    ‘I’ve broken my arm,’ said Naomi wearily. ‘Can’t you even understand that?’
    ‘Is it still raining?’ asked Rachel. ‘I think I’ve left my diary outside.’
    ‘You haven’t really broken your arm, have you?’ asked Ruth. ‘Neither of them look broken to me.’
    ‘Well, I have.’
    ‘Don’t just sit there, Naomi,’ exclaimed Big Grandma, impatiently joggling the chair into which Naomi had collapsed. ‘Go and take your wet things off! You’ve been told enough times!’
    ‘I’ve broken my arm,’ repeated Naomi, as if the phrase were an evil charm. ‘I heard it crack. Do something.’

    A whirlwind of sweet tea, phone calls, aspirin, hot water bottles, hysterics (by Rachel), blankets, and conflicting orders swept through the kitchen. Worn out and bad-tempered Naomi sat in the eye of the wind, untouched by the storm that was swirling Big Grandma and her sisters in twisted circles about the house. Then, at the sound of a car door slamming, the wind suddenly stopped, and Naomi and Big Grandma were gone, with nothing left of them but some cut up pieces of windcheater lying on the kitchen floor.
    ‘Do you think it hurt?’ asked Phoebe.
    ‘Nobody cares if I got hurt,’ said Rachel, who had been slapped good and hard to stop her screaming.
    ‘Selfish little pig!’
    ‘I don’t care. It made me feel sick.’
    ‘I thought you wanted to be a nurse,’ said Ruth. ‘You’d make a lovely nurse, screaming your head off every time you saw a patient! Nurses see much worse things than that!’
    ‘I like seeing it,’ remarked Phoebe vainly. ‘I’d like to watch them cut it open and nail it back together again too.’
    ‘They sew it, not nail it.’
    ‘Shut up,’ said Rachel with her fingers in her ears.
    ‘They sew the skin and stuff,’ replied Phoebe, ‘and they nail the bones, and then they plaster it up. I’m going to be a doctor one day. I think it would be lovely.’

    Naomi, on her long walk home, had taken some comfort in the thought that the twenty mile journey to the hospital would be accomplished in a large, light flashing, siren blaring ambulance. Big Grandma, who would also have appreciated the charm of such a journey, understood her disappointment, and sought to make it up to Naomi by driving as excitingly as possible.
    ‘To my mind,’ she remarked, swerving round a pot-hole and hooting vigorously at two