A/N: Same warnings as mentioned in previous chapters. Not much Alfie in this until the end, because we're setting up for his return from the war and then it's pretty much Alfie/Willa from there on out. Otherwise, thanks for all comments and responses!

*just to be clear, I had to edit Charlotte's age. I didn't think ahead on dates in this show. Editing on Archive is a lot easier than on FF.

Please review in any way that you can (reviews, favourites, etc), it's greatly appreciated!


four


Soaking in a bowl, Ollie lifted a damp cloth, wrung out its wetness, folded it, and then placed it against her forehead; her purple eyelids flickered weakly from the cool touch of the cloth, disturbed by droplets which slipped around her temples and which fell like tears against her chest. Slumped against an armchair with legs curled beneath me, I blinked through raw, tender sockets, unseeing. I had drained myself of moisture, drained myself of thought, left myself tired and slow.

Subdued by those soft, foreign words which Ollie mumbled for his mother, I found myself fixated on the gentle movements of his slim, delicate hands, like the conductor of an orchestra, entire symphonies held between his fingertips. I looked at my own hand, the right one butchered from that copper slamming a drawer against it; it had become sore, lined in a rusted outline of infection, I could feel it beneath the skin – like worms, worms beneath the skin, like that man who had stood outside the flat –…

Soon enough, I had drifted into some faint in-between, held in slumber but still aware of these unfamiliar shapes and silhouettes around me. Sleepily, I watched Ollie, watched him until his form had blended into all the others, a mass of black and silver contours. Flickering against the candlelight, those wild shapes shifting upward against the wallpaper stirred distant memories of the wagons sinking into the wet fields of Ireland, wherein boy-cousins of mine held contorted hands against the tarp and painted stories in shadows, told folklore in the dip and curl of each digit.

I had buried those stories in the soil of those fields, those same fields that the old Gypsies thought would become my grave if I had not made it beyond my first month. I had been expected to be buried with all those other infants whose lungs withered and whose lips turned blue.

The old Gypsies had different prayers for those infants, only for those infants; prayers withered and blue.

ii

Curled against the sofa, Ollie had long since fallen asleep, his long limbs splayed out around him. He shifted and let out a sigh. I stepped around him, pulled apart the front-door and winced at its harsh creak.

Ollie never stirred.

iii

Pale slivers of moonlight sliced through the railings of the tenements, filled its halls in breaths of white and illuminated those tacky puddles of blood outside the flat. Esther was still there, slumped against the wallpaper. Her mouth was held apart and her hands were clasped in her lap as if she was in prayer, a position I doubted she had ever really been in. I felt an unbearable tightness in my chest which constricted my fingers and made them scrunch in a harsh knot once I reached toward her and I felt the heat of fresh tears.

Esther often said that girls in our world never made it more than twenty-eight years on this earth and she had always said it with this odd reassurance in herself, as if it made her stronger to acknowledge that she might hang from a noose or she might be beaten by coppers in the pinkish warmth of an alleyway or that she might be beaten by Butcher or beaten by some other man, because it would only ever be a man to kill her, she said.

Esther had been thirty-seven, which meant nine years more than she had needed or expected for herself. Yet I sat alongside her on that floor in that flat on Bell Road and there was no great sense of resolution for her, no sense that Esther had held the foresight of the old Gypsies and settled some old score within herself, that had only ever been for herself, nothing to do with anyone else.

Instead, it felt very much like she had been caught unawares, shot in the chest and in the skull. She blinked once in colour. She blinked again and saw blackness.

I thought, too, that Esther might never be mourned. I held tears but not one of them had ever fallen for Esther. I cried for the other girls collapsed behind her. Nellie had dropped in the kitchen, surrounded in shards of glass from the shattered windowpane behind her. Rosie had been in the bedroom, Beth thrown alongside her. Behind Esther, I had caught sight of Daisy with her slack-mouth held open from mouthfuls of blood. Ruth sagged against her chest.

But Esther – I looked into the blankness of her, the blackness of her. I was not sure that I had ever loved her. I felt something toward her; it was just a feeling that had never been described, never been given much of a name. It was just a feeling there, within me. It existed, and there was not much else that I could do about it. I turned toward the bathroom and saw another form there in its threshold. I was in that dream-state again. I appeared in spots around the flat, never fully understanding how I had come to be there.

Dust glittered all around, left untouched from the night beforehand.

iv

Josephine had been in the bathroom. She was still in the basin; her lips had been blue, just like all of her had been blue and bloated and made of blankness but this bothered me more than it had with Esther, made me slap my kneecaps against the tiles to crawl toward her and some part of me had thought that she was still awake – awake, as if she had been asleep, a childlike thought of mine. I could feel the dampness of the basin spreading against my chest, spreading outward like it did within my chest, too.

I touched her. I never should have touched her.

I felt her dampness like I felt mine. She tilted forward, limp and flaccid and it sparked some horror within me to witness it, made me let out this wretched sound that balanced between a scream and a moan – I was trembling so badly that I thought that I was composed of the same rippling which ran through the water in her basin – and I saw – in that pinkish water – I saw her small hands, the hands that had held me after I had bathed her, before she thanked me –…

She was ten, I said aloud, into a flat that listened in swirls of dust. I said, Josephine, can you hear me? I'm here, Josephine.

I thought that she could hear me. I convinced myself that she could hear me, that all the girls could hear me. I smeared my hands against my cheeks to clear away those tears which blurred all that I could see, threw myself against the tiles and frantically searched for a towel. I told myself that I could take her out of that bath. I would bundle her in the warmth that she had lost. I never thought about what might come after – I dipped my arms into the water and looped beneath her armpits; the stiffness of her limbs had not occurred to me and still I wanted to lift her, but I never had the strength and her cheek lolled against mine.

I fell and she fell along with me, dipped low into the bathwater. I was still speaking aloud, I realised, I was speaking as if she could hear me and I told her, come back – I told her, you had eighteen years more, eighteen years stolen from you – and I told her, I'm so sorry – and I told her –…

v

Ollie stepped into the flat. I heard him in the hall, heard him separate the dust. I was in the bathroom, I stroked her hair, I told her – well, what did it matter? Ollie hovered in the threshold, held in that in-between, and I knew that this all disturbed him because his hands did that anxious swirl around each other. I could hear him through an echo that existed solely for me.

He said, "Willa, it really isn't safe, in here – and I know you want to say your goodbyes –…"

"I'm tired of goodbyes," I told him. "I heard enough of them, and he never even said them out loud, you know."

Ollie cleared his throat. "Right, um – I just think we should really leave –…"

I heard his words from earlier and momentarily turned from Josephine, my words stained in distrust. "How did you know my name? I never told you last night."

He blinked. His cheeks flushed pink, a better colour than his typical pallor. "O-Oh. Um – Well, Alfie asked me to look out for you while he was in France – just to make sure you were all right –…"

Droplets slipped along her cheek. I felt some of my own right along with it. I was very tired, all of a sudden, very tired. I said, "All right."

He mumbled, "Please, Willa, could you come back in the flat? I can't leave my Mum too long."

"And I can't leave her," I croaked. I let out a breath, ran a hand against my face and felt the water and sweat there which coated me. "How do I leave her? What will happen to her?"

"I know some people, good people," he said softly. "I can ask them to bury the girls, do it respectfully. I promise you, these are good people."

"Does Alfie know them?" I asked slowly.

"He does."

It reassured me more than I could admit knowing that Alfie knew them, these good people. "Can I visit them?"

Ollie looked confused. "Well, yes of course – yes, I mean – I can find out where they will be buried, bring you to them. But Willa, please – I can't leave my Mum –…"

It occurred to me suddenly, made me feel stupid and careless. Charlotte was not here.

"Charlotte," I called out into the flat, as if she might appear, as if she had been hiding from us all this time. I went to stand but my boots slipped from under me because of the water sloshed from the basin in my scramble to – to what, exactly? Had I wanted to pull her out, to put her on the tiles?

Ollie winced as if he had fallen with me.

I said, "Ollie, my Charlotte isn't here – do you think she got out? Do you think I can go find her?"

His lips were pursed, his eyebrows wrinkled in pity. His voice was firm but still there was his gentle nature laid beneath it. "Willa, Alfie has a lot of friends in our community. I'm going to call each of them and we're going to sort this out – I'll find your friend, too, I'll figure out what happened. But we're not staying here. We're going back to the flat, all right?"

"All right," I said. I was so tired. "All right, Ollie."

Uncertain of himself, he stepped forward but held still for a moment, looking me over as if he did not know how to approach me, how not to startle me. He bent with his awkward limbs and helped me stand for myself, but I was still in that dream and so the walk to his flat never happened. I was just there, in the bedroom where his mother slept, sat upon the armchair as if I had never left it, as if I had never been unfurled by some abrupt and savage madness.

Draped against my shoulders came an alien denseness. I flinched from it and sank into the heavy folds of the armchair, thinking that I could sense foreign hands like the crawl of insects on bare flesh, trickling downward toward parts that had only ever been mine – I could feel the thickened corners of the pantry all around, closing inward. Constricted in the chest, I panted like dogs in the courtyard against the sudden pressure held there until the smudge cleared and I found Ollie there with hands held in surrender.

Slipping from my shoulders, a blanket thumped against the floorboards in bunched pleats. Ollie looked frightened, his mouth fumbling for proper words, balanced on his haunches in front of me. Dimly, I understood that he had only placed a blanket around me, perhaps even tucked it beneath my legs so that it might not fall off if I shifted around. Ollie was pale, his sharp cheekbones hollowed by candlelight.

"I never meant to frighten you, Willa. I only thought you might be cold, you know. You could have my bed, if you like, but I was afraid to offer. I used most of the blankets for my Mum, she feels the cold more than I do," he explained. He lifted the blanket and held it out.

"Thank you, Ollie," I replied quietly. I took it from him, and he smiled; all soft edges, all dimples.

vi

Yet I dreamt of graves, unvisited.

vii

Dawn filtered through the doily-curtains dotted around the bedroom; his mother dozed, her mouth held around rattled wheezes, her skin already taut and waxy, her fingernails sharp and stained in a bluish colour. I knew that his mother was not well. I watched her, because the old Gypsies in those wet fields used to say that there were worlds other than ours in existence and that his mother was balanced on the cusp of another.

I was not sure who had done this to the flat on Bell Road, who had killed all the girls – because it had been killing, it had been slaughter. I thought about Butcher. I thought about whether there might be someone who would come for me, now, strike me down somewhere, alone, beaten into sickly-sweet blackness. Alfie might never hear about it, not from the trenches, so far from here. I would be buried like Elsie, in soil shared, in land left overgrown. I listened to rattled wheezes and slipped off into another sleep.

viii

And I dreamt of my own grave, unvisited.

ix

Because other than God, who would know about it?

x

"Willa," Ollie whispered. I felt him in front of me. He never touched me. I sensed him there. I pulled myself up from the armchair, peeled that blanket off. He said, "It's done, Willa. The girls are buried. Do you want to go there now?"

"Charlotte?" I asked.

"Still looking for her," he answered. "Do you want to go now?"

xi

Squelching through the mud, I struggled to pull dense legs from the dirt and find the plots in the fields. I was oddly disturbed by the fields, reminded me too much of childhood, reminded me too much of Ireland which had always been so damp, so wet. It was a field that sat just beyond the outskirts of the tenements, a square patch of greenery outlined in wooden fences that we jumped over, but it was not really used for anything in particular, this field – so now it was the graveyard for the girls from that flat on Bell Road.

I saw them, then, the graves. I saw each plot surrounded in fresh lumps of soil. I saw wooden planks in the earth with names attached. Ollie had only distantly known the girls, he said, he had known about Esther and heard about the factory through Alfie, had seen the girls in passing while he and his mother lived in his flat. So, he wrote the names himself. I could read them – because of Alfie, I could read them. I thought of him. Alfie was twenty-nine, now.

One year more than Esther expected.

And it was always killing for Alfie, always slaughter for him. He had stepped into many flats of his own, but his flats had been the trenches, he had lifted bodies limp and flaccid and lolled against him.

Did he hold them like I had? Did he convince himself that they could hear him when he had spoken to them?

xii

There was another woman in the flat. She called herself Francine, but she was Franny to all her friends. She had this small purse with her, a neat little purse with a golden clasp and she popped it open, settled herself on the chair beside the kitchen table. I stood with Ollie, my eyes tracing her lithe movements. I trusted Ollie already. Alfie had trusted him, too – that was enough for me. Ollie had shown his worth, anyway. He found the plots and he had written the names. I stood there for a while with him in the kitchen until I felt the pressure of his stare and looked at him.

"Your hand, Willa," he explained. "She wants to help clean your hand."

Holding my hand aloft, I looked at the raw gash which sliced through my right hand, congealed in a thickened mucous, speckled in dots of red. I had forgotten about it. It had burned, itched. I had made it worse. I picked at its wetness and felt the pain. I shuddered from it. I had not thought to clean it properly. I could tell that it was more than likely infected, because that whitish fluid was a poor sign.

Francine had small strips of cloth and bandages laid out across the table in neat bundles. She said, "I'd like to help you, Willa. Would you mind if I tried?"

I was very detached from it all. I was still in the flat, mentally. I was in imagined trenches with Alfie.

So, I did not mind if Francine tried. I settled alongside her because Ollie had herded me toward her, without ever touching me, he simply led me there through his own shuffled gait. Francine lifted my hand onto cloth and squeezed out dollops of ointment onto the skin, so that it burned. I went to pull my hand from her, but she had expected it.

"It has to burn first, to heal," she murmured; she spoke like one speaks to a child – not a child like the children in the flat on Bell Road had been spoken to, because Esther never felt there was much point in childhood, but Francine spoke like I heard parents speak to children whenever I was out on streets like those posh ones in Charterhouse, with gentle holds on small hands and loving touches of affection.

I used to watch that from afar and wonder was it was like to spoken to like that.

I understood it now; it felt like that first trickle of warmth against my skin whenever I stepped into sunlight in the mornings just before I met Alfie in the courtyard, before we walked to the factory together, our arms linked, leaned against one another, and God – he could be dead over there and I could die here and we might never see each other again, in this world, we might never see each other again.

Who other than God would know about it?

xiii

Franny had just finished the stitches, having sewn me together, having repaired me through reams of thread. Ollie came into the kitchen. He was made of anxiety; his hands were fluttering all over like butterflies. He said, "I found Charlotte, Willa. I found her."

Ginger curls, rosy cheeks – Charlotte had only been eleven when she first arrived in Bell Road. She was now fourteen; she was still timid in her own way, but she had become womanly in others, developed the hint of a bust, the slight indents of a waist, but she had always been small.

Ollie opened the door and there she stood at the end of the row of flats, her eyes drawn toward our old one, but she looked toward me and ran – threw herself at me and I caught her, crumbled with her, cradled her.

I held her like a child, and I spoke to her like Francine had spoken to me, all sunlight. I kissed her cheeks, brushed away stray curls and held her skin against mine just to bathe in its warmth, in its certainty that she was here, with me.

"I was with him," she stuttered out. "I know I shouldn't have been, Willa, I knew Esther would have – I knew she would have –…and Butcher is dead, Willa, shot by Harry Reed, he –…"

I shushed her apologies. I could not bring myself to care about the beau or Butcher or this stranger called Reed – what did it matter, now? It spared her from that flat. I held her and held her.

I only separated from her at the sound of Ollie behind me.

"I think I have another blanket around here, somewhere."

xiv

Ollie's mother died in the last few months of 1917 – she breathed out another rattled wheeze like all the others that had come before and then her chest stilled and the flat was terribly quiet, much too quiet, so that we had known in an instant. Ollie left the flat and returned hours later. He never said where he went, and I had never asked him. Charlotte had begun to stay with George – that was the beau who lived on a flat in Chesterfield Avenue. I had planned to find another place before his mother had died, but after she passed, he said, "Just stay, Willa. I told Alfie I would look out for you. Stay."

I heard it in his tone, what he really meant. He was in that dream-state. I had just appeared around him, he could not recall just how he or I had come to be here. I watched him cut a hole in her shirt above her chest, watched him from the doorway, just before her body had been taken from the flat. He was very silent for that, until midnight came, and he was still sat in the kitchen, slouched against the chair with this distant glaze to his stare.

He mumbled, "I have no proper shirt for the burial. I need – I can't be there without a good shirt – and…"

It was not about the shirt. He knew that and I knew that.

Still, I stood and left the flat by myself for the first time in a while. I found Victoria Lane. I stepped into the factory and saw that its dust glittered all around, left untouched.

There was still thread and material, aprons stacked alongside sewing-machines. I pulled one out and brushed its fabric. I threw them all into a bin, cleaned out the dust and sat at my old table. I looked at the drawer which had so badly damaged my hand. The wound was now a hardened line of red scar-tissue, rough around its ridges. I stretched out a long roll of white fabric, snipped out the shapes that I needed and slipped it into the sewing-machine. I was afraid to touch it, afraid of its growl that had once been so familiar, as if the machine was alive.

I had made many shirts for Alfie, made him socks and scarves and gloves.

So, I started with the sleeves and I smoothed out the new collar and I made Ollie a shirt from scratch; the first thank-you for what he did that night outside the flat. I used the best rolls of fabric that Esther had been so mean about – because really, what did it matter, now?

xv

Ollie wore the shirt. I stood with him at the burial, unable to understand Hebrew but able to understand how the rippling ran through him like it had run through me in the flat after I had found Josephine. I understood that more than anything.

xvi

Soon after came the bombings. There had been silver blobs held between the clouds, speckles of light distant and far from us, so distant and far that the rumble which followed them was an afterthought. Coastal towns suffered the most, peppered in sudden assaults, then reported in the morning newspapers. It was sudden for Bell Road, too, evacuated in sirens and wails.

I was with Ollie, because I was almost always with Ollie.

I had become used to him, never minded his touch anymore, even when he grabbed my arm and hauled me off toward a synagogue – which I thought was just his first response because of his faith, but it turns out that many had taken shelter in its tall, sturdy walls, Jewish and Catholic and Protestant and all those things in-between. I was not quite one or the other. I was the in-between.

The children were afraid because the ground was grumbling and white paint fluttered from the ceiling in small flakes, sprinkling their coats. The candlelight was barely there. I saw the world crumble from inside this holy place where I had never been before, and I held out my hands against the light of the walls.

I made shapes like I had once seen from the inside of a wagon – because that was somewhere that I had been before, even if I had tried never to think about it, not since before my ninth summer.

I made dogs with my hands. I made swooping birds and fluttering wings for bats. I painted stories, for a little while, until the ground outside did not cry out in shrieks of stone and dirt, until the screams softened into sirens, drowned out, and the doors of the synagogue were drawn open. The world was still there, even if some of its people had been lost in rubble and fire.

xvii

Between the bombings, I brought the sewing-machine into the flat and I made another shirt for Ollie and then another for his Jewish friend and then another for another Jewish friend of that first friend – and it went onward and onward, because I barely charged for the shirts and the war meant that most had little coin to spare anyway. I made them because I had too much to think about. I tried to send Alfie letters but found that my hand could not spell out those words. I could not tell him about what had happened in the flat, not yet. I had heard whispers of Harry Reed and his little gang sprouting all around London, spilling into those spots left behind by Butcher.

Butcher, too, had died and been forgotten. Nose had been blown off, skull caved inward. It struck me that Butcher had died and there had been little reaction. I used to imagine his downfall as some grand affair, shot dead, splashed all over the walls in blood and splashed all over in the newspapers in ink.

Nobody mentioned him.

Soldiers had died in the trenches and Butcher had died in an alleyway; no sense of resolution, no score settled. It just happened. Butcher blinked once in colour. He blinked again and saw blackness.

xviii

Finally, there was an end for the war, an end which came in 1918; shouts of victory, jubilation in the streets between shouts and screams that were not from fear of bombs and not from telegrams placed into open palms – shouts and screams of happiness and that was alien for those of us left behind. There was a rash of parties all over London.

From the row of flats, I watched the celebrations in Bell Road with Ollie. I was always with Ollie. He saw the women with arms thrown around men and saw the children lifted onto shoulders and he said, "Alfie should be back soon, Willa."

xix

Only Alfie was not back soon. Other soldiers limped out from the train-stations all around England with jaws held together in wooden splints and legs blown off from landmines and sashes held around sockets torn clean of eyeballs and those soldiers wandered around, displaced in a land which had become foreign to them. I saw wives sweep toward husbands disfigured, saw children step uncertainly toward fathers with vacant stares but whose arms automatically held open for them.

Alfie was not amongst all those men pouring from trains.

I stuck my legs between the railings on the tenements and I watched the courtyard for the slightest sign of him. Only he was not back soon. Had he died in the trenches? Had he been buried in the scarves that I had made for him?

Because who other than God –…

xx

It happened once I was out with Charlotte. He had come around and met with Ollie. He had not asked for me. Ollie did not say it, but I knew it all the same. He had come around when I had not been there, because he knew I had not been there. He had come back, but he had not come back for me, I told myself. He had not come back for me. Ollie had watched me carefully after he had told me, watched me nod as if it had not torn me apart to know it. Ollie stood from his chair and prepared himself to step out for prayer.

He glanced back at me, just once, and said, "But he was wearing your scarf, Willa."