Vera paused outside the doors of the mortuary, where she prepared to see John Shelby one last time.
With shaking hands she smeared a tube of lipstick around her mouth, and ran her hands over her fringe; dirty red marks spoiled her expensive coat and blouse and skirt and stockings. It would be later that she realized the marks were blood – his or Michael's, she didn't know.
Vera wasn't scared. That was the beautiful thing. She couldn't remember the last time she hadn't felt that heavy burden of fear around her shoulders and over her head, bleeding into all her thoughts and weighing her heart down. Now, it seemed, the worst possible thing had happened. Nothing else could hurt her anymore, Vera thought. She was free.
I'm already dead with him.
When she stood in front of the doors (they had two little windows and instead of wooden paneling they were just smooth and grey – clinical, hospital like) she was only nervous. Nervous, because it was the last time she would see him or spend a moment alone with him. Should she speak to him? Would he hear her?
She wasn't angry yet either. In the blur of bullets and hysteria and barking dogs and crying children that morning, Vera had barely had time to even register the rage that would soon come. She was in shock, and the sight of her shaking and shivering at the hospital like a pink petal reminded Aunt Polly of a girl she had known a long time ago. Perhaps that's why she had slapped her.
When she pushed open the doors, Vera's first thoughts were how clean everything was. Shining, white, pure. It almost blinded her.
As she stepped towards him, lying on the table and covered by a white sheet, all she could hear was the soles of her heeled slippers – click clack click clack click clack – on the smooth laminate floor beneath her. John (John's body) came closer and closer towards her, but it was as if she wasn't really there. She was floating, watching this scene happen through someone else's eyes.
She could feel the tears sliding down her face, and when she finally reached the side of the table, her vision blurred.
I'm going blind, she thinks, but then she blinks the hot wetness away and he's there.
He was soaked through with bright red blood and she hears the gunshots vibrate her skull like a catchy ragtime tune that wont go away. So she tries to look at his face instead, but he's so pale she can see his blue veins ghosting behind his skin and his eyelashes look so long and pretty but fake at the same time. It's him, but it's not him. Everything that made John John is gone – the twinkle in his eyes, the soft smirking mouth, his energy that she felt radiating all around him and enveloping her… when she puts her hand in his she's met with cold, dead flesh.
Vera thought of her brother, Jamie, blown to bits at the Sommes. She had always wished she had gotten to see him one last time. When they said goodbye to each other on that platform in 1917, she thought she would see him again by Christmas. She was very, very wrong.
When they were younger, her, Jamie, Ada and John had spent their days chasing chickens down Watery Lane and playing blind man's bluff inside during Winter. Her father had always said that Jamie and Ada would marry one day, but Aunt Polly said she couldn't read it in their palms.
Vera had always wondered if Polly had known about Jamie. How he liked the company of men. If she had she never mentioned it, but she always seemed to know everything – at least that was what Vera thought between the ages of six and sixteen. She wasn't a little girl anymore, and charming knights like Tommy and fairy godmother's like Polly had crumbled and cracked in front of her very eyes.
"Aunt Polly?" She had asked one day, after Polly had read her palm and told her she would marry a handsome man.
"Yes, my love?"
Vera tried to stay concentrated on the hem she was sewing. "Will I marry John?" She had asked, and now if she could think hard enough she could feel the hot red blotches that had burned her cheeks.
Polly turned around from where she was peeling potatoes by the sink. She always made soup then, after Finn was born and her sister had died and the two babies had been taken away from her. To keep her hands busy, she had said.
"Oh, darling." She smiled at Vera. Polly wasn't really her Aunt, just her neighbor who had been friends with Vera and Jamie's mother before she had died. "You'll marry a very handsome man."
Vera's heart sank. That wasn't the answer she had wanted, but she smiled anyway and went back to sewing and blinked away the tears that dared to escape her eyes when John and Arthur came bustling into the kitchen.
He was sixteen then. Young and fit and in her mind the most handsome man she had ever seen. He could've done no wrong to her at all, and she wanted to badly just to be his.
One day, she thought, when I'm a bitter old hag, I'll think of how young and stupid I was. But not now. Not now. I still love him. I'm still twelve years old.
Lot's of things had changed since John was sixteen and she was twelve. Everything had changed. He had gotten a girl named Martha pregnant, and because her father was the pastor she refused to get rid of it. When he told her, he looked guilty, like he had done something he shouldn't have. He looked like he had expected her to cry.
"Well you're a bloody idiot then." Vera had said sternly. She felt the angry boil at her and it didn't help that she was fourteen and just beginning to deal with blood each month. "Just like your father."
As soon as she had said it she regretted it and John matched her anger twice over.
"And you're a little bitch." He had reprimanded her through gritted teeth and when he stood up to walk away he spat next to her feet.
Vera cried and cried and cried that night, and they avoided one another for a whole week before they both apologized.
That was where everything began. Life steadily became more complicated. Vera and John didn't laugh and talk and play like they had before. He had become a father, and just as things began to feel like old times again he would look terribly guilty and make an excuse to go.
The war only made everything more complicated. John had written her one, very short, letter a few weeks after he had been conscripted. She had sent him a letter every week for two months after that, without getting any replies. At first it comforted her, even if he wasn't reading them she still enjoyed to vent her feelings and frustrations to him, because life in Birmingham during the war was like living in a very, very small cage. They couldn't go out past a certain time and rations were scarce and everything she seemed to do got her scolded by her father.
Then she became embarrassed, because she realized she must look like a silly little girl sending him letters even though he wouldn't write her back and he must have realized she was in love with him.
When he came home in 1915, she ignored him and went to extreme lengths to never be alone in the same room as him (which wasn't difficult, with the amount of Shelby's in one small space). Vera was living with Aunt Polly because both her father and Jamie had been sent to war and it wasn't proper for a girl so young to live by herself, especially during wartime.
He looks like an angel now. She thinks, and it almost makes her laugh. John Shelby was not an angel, she knew that. He's at peace.
Any man or woman in Small Heath would say that the Shelby's were going to make the Devil himself shiver with fear, when they finally got sent downstairs. Vera knew Tommy Shelby was going to Hell, and perhaps Arthur was beyond saving too. But she would be damned if she let the same thing happen to Finn or Michael; and she knew John was – had been - a good man, at heart.
And who could say they had seen his real heart, besides her? She thought of Martha – sweetly stupid and sickly in her hospital bed- who he loved because she was the mother of his children – and Esmè – rough and stubborn – who he had loved because of duty.
Twice upon a time in the smallest room of the smallest house in the smallest street in Small Heath, a man had told a girl he loved his wife(s). It broke the girl's heart, and the man's too, that he should love another woman, when they both knew they belonged together. But it seemed the Gods had always been destined to keep them apart, whether it be by a late period or by Tommy Shelby.
The fucking bastard, Vera suddenly thought and the sobs began to painfully wrack her body as she silently begged John's hand to turn warm under her own, for one last time.
When she goes home to Watery Lane that night, to the home that now haunts her, she spends all night in front of the sink, scrubbing her hands and nails with a bar of soap until they're raw and sore.
Vera bursts into his office that night.
"You fucking bastard, Tommy Shelby!" She screams at him as she pounds her fists against his chest. "You fucking despicable bastard!"
"Stop, stop, stop, stop." Tommy ushers, grabs her by the wrists. "Calm down."
"Calm down! How the fucking hell do you expect me to calm down?" Vera struggles against his grip. "You killed him!"
"No, I didn't." He shakes his head, trying to calm her down, even though the guilt he had felt that day was insurmountable and only forced him to remember Grace.
"Yes, you did." His soft speaking calms her without her realizing. He lets go of her wrists. "You're a monster. I don't know what happened to you during the war. But whatever it was, the Tommy Shelby I knew died and the Devil came back in his place."
Vera had always had the talent of being one of the few people to ever make Tommy unsure of what to say next. Such people usually came few and far between.
"That fucking Changretta nonsense. John didn't want to kill them! He never wanted to kill anyone who was innocent! You just used him and Arthur as fucking cannon fodder whenever you didn't want to do your own dirty work! Arthur's stupid enough to go along with it but John was a good man. He was a good man and you fucking killed him."
"The Changretta's were not innocent. They shot my fucking wife. Did you forget?" Tommy raised his voice.
"You killed her! With all your fucking scheming and lying!"
And with that, Tommy slapped Vera hard and sure across her jaw.
She stumbled backwards, and fell arse first onto the rug. The shock stunned them both for a moment, and they were silent as they looked at one another, mouths agape.
Tommy kneeled in front of her and held a hand against her jaw. "I-"
She slapped his hand away.
"You're a fucking monster, Tommy." She speaks in barely a whisper, eyes never leaving his. "And I swear to God, if you ever do what you did to John to Finn or Michael, if you ever force them to do something they don't want to do, if you ever use them as toy soldiers in your sick little games – I'll fucking kill you, Tommy."
She places her hand against his cheek, and she watches her thumb run across his high cheekbone. "I'll kill you," She tells him, with every ounce of sincerity. "And I'll hang for it, and I'll be happy."
A tear escapes her eye.
"Because when John died, I should've died with him." She says. "So now, everything else is extra."