"Here you are," Ada growled, angrily stalking up to her older brother. "You're torturing yourself and the rest of us sitting here, Tommy."
Tommy flicked the butt of his cigarette down to the cobblestones. He hoped it would tumble down to the water.
"You're not sleeping, not eating." Ada stared down at him with her hands propped on either side of her hips. "You're barely home. We all have to take turns with Finn and it's not fair that you're going off at all hours of the day and night. Don't you think we miss her too? Things are hard enough as it is without the rest of us worrying about you too."
"I just need a bit longer," was his quiet response.
Though incensed with him, Ada faltered for a moment and looked over the churning waters of the Cut. A painful lump caught at the base of her throat at the very sight of it. In a softer voice that betrayed her heartache, she said, "Doesn't it hurt looking at it?"
He shook his head. "Hurts less the more I do."
"D'you think it was because of dad like everyone says?"
Another cigarette sent a thin curl of smoke from between Tommy's fingers. "Dunno."
"Arthur doesn't believe it." Ada sat down beside her big brother and took the tab from him. "Always the good little soldier, he is."
"He just lost his mother. Can't lose his father too."
"We've all lost our mother," she corrected bitterly. A gray cloud of smoke withering before her eyes. "That bastard we call a father can go to hell for what he's done."
"Careful, Ada," Tommy warned though his voice wasn't forceful enough to be convincing. He didn't want anyone to overhear. Word seemed to travel fast to Arthur Shelby Senior's ears and, once he got himself drunk enough, he loved handing out hidings to all his children. Ada was never excluded.
"She was so happy in the end. After he left. With just us and Finn and Polly. It almost started to feel normal."
Tommy grunted. It was his turn to go down the cigarette and he did so in silence. He couldn't remember when Ada had left, tears in her eyes. He was sitting there just staring, waiting, watching.
He spent a lot more time at the Cut ever since his mother threw herself in. He would sit on the cobblestone for hours and hours, listening into the roar of the water just to hear her voice once again. He would puff on cigarette after cigarette trying to understand why she would leave her children alone in this world. The unknown answer weighed heavy on Tommy Shelby's mind.
Polly said his mother killed herself from postpartum depression after giving birth to Finn. There were whispers down Watery Lane that she killed herself after discovering her husband, Arthur Shelby Senior, squandered all their money on mistresses, liquor, and dead-end business ventures. Tommy concluded that it might have been a perfect storm of everything. He couldn't know for sure. His mother never voiced her struggles, and Tommy resolved that it was no good keeping it all to yourself. He wished he could have helped her, talked to her, coaxed the sadness out of her.
Tommy didn't want to watch another person he loved die.
So he sat by the Cut, at the same spot his mother ended her own life, and he talked into the mist of water to her. He asked her how to be strong, how to be brave, how to be a good man. God knows he'd never get a proper answer from his father.
But Tommy never heard an answer back.
The night he was so sure he heard his mother's voice. It was a small sound, lovely and light, as her voice always was. He felt, for the first time in months, that a part of his mother had come down from heaven to be with him. When he lifted his head he didn't see his mother. Instead, he saw an Italian girl coughing over a cigarette. Tommy took it as his mother's sense of humor, and he entertained the notion that this was a sign.
That's why he opened his mouth and said, "You're not supposed to breathe in so deep."
When that girl looked up at him, Thomas Shelby was bewitched body and soul. He fell in it, molded himself to it, waded in the shallow pool of that feeling with no name. The Thomas Shelby he would become in twenty years - the man who survived a war, poverty, and so much death - that Thomas Shelby would have crushed that unnamed feeling before it could take root. But this Thomas Shelby - this kind, grieving boy - happily welcomed the flutter in his chest and the overwhelming curiosity to hear this girl speak to him.
"None of your business" she had said when he asked for her name.
It filled his belly with those same flutters. She stood before him like a wild thing, denying answers and prowling the evening streets to the sound of her own heartbeat. Someone like her ought to have a weapon, he had thought. If only to warn others of her arrival. That's why he gave up his own knife. Plus, he hoped, quite naively, that she'd trust him once she was armed instead.
She didn't seem like a girl that was won over so easily.
Every night after that Tommy came back to the Cut. He wasn't looking to grieve, wasn't listening into the silence for his mother. He was looking for that Italian godsend. But she didn't come again. He'd frightened her off.
So, rather than tuck her face away in his memories and move on, Tommy decided to spend many daylight hours coming back to the same spot. He would watch the streets for her and down at the cobblestones too. He even considered wandering across the city, but he didn't know where to start. Birmingham was too large.
That's why, instead of spending hours sitting at the Cut, he'd taken to roaming the areas around Small Heath aimlessly. Small Heath, Greet, Hay Mills, Yardley, fuckin' Stetchford. Some days he'd go to Saltley, Nechells, Aston. He once got halfway up to Walsall once. When he finally came home close to midnight Polly had angrily said that he might as well have gone all the way up to Manchester. After that, the farthest Tommy went was out to the appropriately named Rotten Park. That's how he felt on the inside.
Rotten and lonely.
This went on for weeks. Though feet would hurt Tommy kept going, keep searching. He had long lost hope of finding that Italian girl but the change of scenery did him good. After those long walks he would look forward to stepping out of the roads filled with strangers to be with his family instead. The exercise helped him sleep more and eat more. Some days he would stay back and watch little Finn sleep in a beat up pram. All five Shelby children had once slept in that same pram.
Polly didn't scold as much. She was just happy he wasn't at the Cut relieving his mother's death over and over again in his mind trying to imagine new scenarios where he could have saved her.
The day Tommy Shelby found Greta Jurossi was quite by accident. He was just as surprised as she was.
Greta had shoved a young boy out the door of her father's shop. With a swift kick to his rump, she sent the boy staggering out into the street, she stuck her head out the door and shouted,
"Steal from me again and I'll cut off your fingers!"
The boy scurried away leaving Greta frozen under the faded awning. She was staring intently at the vaguely familiar figure looking back at her just as curiously from across the street. Her head cocked to one side, squinting at his sunlit face and trying to remember. The realization dawned openly on her face and, hiding the red beginning across her cheeks which quickly reached her ears, Greta hurried back into the shop and switched the open sign to closed with a flick of her wrist.
Tommy watched her take one last look at him through the glass before disappearing into the shop. He wouldn't have crossed the street to the shop anyways. A peculiar thrill had taken flight in his chest and pulled him skyward while his legs were cemented to the place he stood. He was chasing after his breath, rubbing away the goosepimples that had raised his arm hairs on end.
"You stupid, lovesick fool," he muttered to himself, taking one last look at V. Bova Jurrosi's Italian Market before making the short walk back to Small Heath.