A/N: we stan johnny dogs in this household. also, i wanted to mention that i'm irish myself, so if i write this period-typical racism towards the irish i hope it doesn't come off to harsh even toward my own people - i'm just basing it off what i have learned in history and what i think would be a rough insult lol i don't mean it anymore than i would if i had to write it toward any other group but this is peaky blinders and as we have seen in the newest episodes, us irish have a very complicated history.

onward with the chapter! thanks for all feedback! :)


five


Soon enough, I was spinning out shirts for most of the Jewish blokes around Bell Road, stretching into Harrow. Even more lads came from the flats along Osmington, another Jewish neighbourhood which bordered ours. Ollie brought them around the flat, introduced them all. Most of his closest friends were devout and wore the same sort of skullcap that Ollie wore, the skullcap which he called a kippah. I learned that the sideburns held in tight curls were called payot. I wanted to understand it all for Ollie, because there were all these rules in his religion, all this structure which outlined what a man was meant to be. I wanted to understand it if only because I wanted to show Ollie how much I respected him.

These rules were also the reason for which most of his friends never touched me, not even for handshakes, and also the reason for which they always maintained a respectful distance, too. They even preferred that Ollie was present in the room whenever I handed over their shirts, which Ollie had explained with cheeks stained beetroot. I noted his embarrassment, noted his discomfort, and understood that he thought I might be offended by the formality, the possible insinuations.

Instead, I was overjoyed.

Before Alfie Solomons, Johnny was the only man who had ever held me softly in my life. I had never been offered the choice in touch. Coppers snatched me around the arms, pinned me by the chest against walls, held me against furniture and kicked me around, sometimes just for the fun of it. I had been thrown into that pantry with Yaxley and felt the true force of touch; pure, unwanted touch.

From all that Ollie had told me of his Jewish friends, I realised that Alfie had been much the same, even I had never really noticed it. I touched him first – touched him in the office that first time he had fought another lad in front of me and I had handed him a cloth to clean off the blood from his skin, touched him after I handed him the first shirt that I had ever made him.

I found trust in him before I found touch.

Somehow, it had just never occurred to me that I could be held softly by men other than Johnny nor had it occurred to me that I could also not be held at all; that is to say that I could simply state aloud that I never wanted to be touched, even if the other person did not listen just like coppers never listened. It never occurred to me that I could express this aversion to touch in ways which was not just my small body contorted by stiffness, limbs shrivelled inward against myself, lips pursed so that the flood of revulsion could not spill from me and cause offense. Then again, I hardly ever spoke much at all in that flat, especially after Elsie had been murdered.

I expected touch because all the touch that had come after Johnny and Elsie had been rough, never soft, always made in grips and strangulations and bruising slaps.

Even when Charlotte came into the flat, I restrained myself if I could. I allowed Charlotte to sleep alongside me, limbs entangled, but I never initiated it, never thought that touch could be more than anything more than something which had to be tolerated, because it had always been so rough.

Rough. Never soft.

The world had not been soft until Alfie had appeared in it, made it soft, made it more than grips and strangulations and bruising slaps, and Alfie was still here, unlike most other men because of that fella who had been shot in that other place, and whose death meant that all our fellas had been shot along with him.

And Alfie was still here, even if his touch was not.


ii

Coated in a blanket of mist, curling upward from the damp soil like restless spirits, the field had been dampened by drizzle and left slick beneath my boots, so that each step was an upward battle toward the plots. I balanced bouquets in both arms, bought in the richest market-stalls of Charterhouse with all the coins made from the shirts. I plucked out the nicest flowers and placed them against each plot, watched them sink into the wetness of the soil, petals speckled in dirt, soiled once more. Esther had been buried a foot from the other girls of Bell Road. I talked while I placed the flowers, told the girls about Ollie and told the girls about the shirts.

Crouched low on my haunches, I lifted a hand to brush away stray tears once I reached Josephine and felt the smudge of dirt on my cheeks; it reminded me of all those days spent in London as Gypsy Girl, hopping around in skirts to amuse rich folk – oh, look at the little savage, darling! – and it made my eyes drift toward Esther's plot.

I let the flowers be returned to the earth, swallowed into its yawning mouth.

Afterward, I sat with the dogs and shared out small slices of meat, held out in a flat palm then lathered in slobber. Some of the dogs hopped onto the small wall upon which I sat and rested alongside me, sopping jowls pressed against my thighs. I talked to the dogs, too. I found comfort in those chocolate eyes which followed me, tails swept languidly against the ground, occasionally flopping over so that I could scratch at pink bellies.

Eventually, I pulled myself from the pile of dogs dozing in the warmth and stepped forward into the courtyard. I climbed the staircase and considered all the rolls of material that I would need for the shirts. Ollie had run himself ragged around London in search of a job that might keep us afloat and the shirts had been my contribution to the flat. Even if Alfie had never charged a penny of rent, there was still other costs like food. I liked to make just that little bit more for the meat, make a little bit more for Ollie too. I owed him more than I could make through shirts.

Ollie never wanted to take the cash.

Still, there were other methods of payment for Ollie. He had become fond of these new pieces of jelly layered in a fine, sugary powder which had come out just after the war. Ollie had pretended not to care for them, because the sweets had been meant for children. Yet if I dropped a bag of them in the kitchen and left for a couple of hours, I was guaranteed to return and find a crumbled, scrunched little bag with its powder licked clean.

Ollie feigned ignorance – or he tried, until I pointed out that he still had powder around his mouth.


iii

Clambering onto the fifth floor of the tenements, I turned onto the row of flats and found myself frozen in my spot at the sight of a man stood in front of our flat – our old flat, which had been left abandoned, stilled in dust and rot. Like that old tambourine that had been used in the days of Gypsy Girl, my heart rattled in its own frantic thump, rattled louder against the shouts which came from that man, the flesh of his throat blotched in scarlet and his fists rained against the door in a constant rhythm; it reached its crescendo and finished in his panting breaths, his forehead leaned against the doorframe while he whispered curses – curses that had come out in a language that I had not heard in many years, a language which I had only ever heard while bounced upon his knee and in the night, before bed, when he spun his stories and tucked me beneath the blankets and –…

"Willa?"

I blinked, unaware that he had turned from the doorway. He swept toward me, arms held apart. I stood blankly, unmoving. I willed my limbs to respond, willed myself to return the gesture, especially once his smile faltered and his arms dropped to his sides and his wrinkles became more prominent. I just could not understand that he was here.

Johnny Dogs was here.

He was here as if he always had been here; as if never had there been an ounce of space between us.

Through the din in my eardrums, I heard his soft lilt and I heard the reflection of my accent in his own. The sound filled me with an odd tenderness for him, but there was something more bubbling in my chest and it had been brewing for quite some time now, it had been festering.

"Willa, you weren't answerin' me letters," he explained softly. Between his hands, he held his paddy-cap, wrung it out. "I wanted to find ya – sent all our kin out in London to find ya, scattered all around these parts for ya and I heard – I heard that Esther had been – Christ, chey, I thought I lost ya –…"

It unravelled me, the gentle nature of his tone whenever he said chey – it made all that tension around touch drip into nothingness, so that I allowed his arms around me, allowed him to stroke my hair and hold me like he had held me when I was a child, between the stories and the trips around in the sulky on those patchwork roads in Ireland.

"You wrote letters?" I croaked. I could not recall just when I had started to cry but I did not brush away the tears this time.

"Ah, I tell a lie – Shelta writes 'em – you remember your cousin Shelta, don't ya, darlin'? She writes 'em for me. Never was good with a pen, me, but I can tell a good story when I get goin'. You always understood me there, didn't ya, chey?"

"I can write now, Johnny," I told him, and my voice cracked. "I can read, too."

Johnny was surprised, at first. Then, slowly, another expression spread across his face and I recognised it as the same expression I had once seen on Alfie after I had written my first sentence a long time ago, written it without his help or prompting.

It was pride, pure and simple. It was pride in me, pride in what I had told him.

He was proud of me.

"I told them since you were a girl – didn't I tell 'em, Willa, that you had brains to burn in that head of yours, girl," he said, his words stained in a rasp of his own from emotion.

He looked me over and pulled me against him once more, his hand cupping the back of my head so that I nestled against his shoulder and breathed the scent of fresh soil turned over, the scent of smoke from a firepit and smoke from cigarettes, too, all blended into a heady scent that was so familiar, so full of that feeling which came whenever he said chey.

I had never known my mother, never known my father; she had died in childbirth, died in that damp soil which birthed me, been buried in it, too, and from what I understood, my father had been buried there many months beforehand, shot through the skull after a dispute which sparked war between families and which Johnny himself had been heavily involved in because my father had been his older brother.

I had never known the hold of my own mother, never known the hold of my own father.

But I always thought that to be held by either of them would be much like how it felt whenever Johnny held me, all the same.

I could feel it in how his hands trembled once he grasped me and how his eyes had welled with joy because he had found me here in the tenements of Bell Road, that I had not been shot with the others and that he could still hold me like he always had.

"Who did it to 'em, chey?" he asked.

I knew what he meant even if he hadn't titled his head toward the old flat. I cleared my throat and felt the lump still there no matter how much I swallowed. "Esther got herself caught up with some bad people, Johnny. She worked with a fella named Butcher – he was killed by another man named Harry Reed. Reed came for Esther and the girls, too."

"Harry fuckin' Reed?" Johnny repeated, shaking his head. He eyed me warily and added, "D'you think he'd come for you, Willa?"

"I thought about it," I said. "But he might not know I worked for her at all – might not care, either, not now he's become top-dog and all that."

Johnny was very quiet for a moment, his eyes filled with that foresight that the old Gypsies held. "Men like that always care about it, chey. Men like that never sleep. It's never enough to become top-dog for 'em. It takes a lot more to stay top-dog than it does to become it, darlin'."

"Then I'll try not to be noticed," I mumbled.

"I have a better idea, sweetheart," he replied easily. "Come back to Ireland with me, for a little while, stay with your cousins, your kin."

I felt my mouth become strangely dry from the eagerness in his eyes, the simplicity of his words. "Oh, Johnny, come on – I can't just up and run – we haven't talked in years, you think I would –…"

"I sent me letters," he interrupted. "You got me letters, chey."

I had been so shocked by his sudden appearance that I had not taken the time to think about what he had first said when he spoke of those letters, because I had understood what he meant but somehow had not fully realised that he really had sent them. He drank in my confusion with hurt in his eyes, his lips wobbled as if he might let out some sound of pain, but he held firm and straightened his shoulders.

Johnny was not a man of much aggression; the only times that I had ever witnessed his anger had been if one of my boy-cousins hurt me accidentally and he would cuff them around the ears for it, send them off and away from me.

"I had Shelta write letter after letter to ya, with my own words in them, chey, meant only for you," he uttered darkly. "And I got one back every couple of weeks from Esther who wrote them because – because you couldn't write yer-self, not like you can now. But she told me that she read them to ya, that every word she wrote in it came from you."

Letters; letters like those that I had written during those times of muck and tumble in the trenches, and all the while, Johnny had written letters of his own and waited for answers, answers which came but were not really mine. I felt the fury in the shaking of his hands held around mine, before he held me against him again and I felt myself cry along with him.

I said, "Why didn't you come for me?"

"I thought you were happy," he murmured; full of regret, full of sadness. "The letters – darlin', I thought that you wanted to be with her and I thought you wanted out of this life – the only life that I could provide you, chey, a life on the road and a life that – that me own daughters never seemed content with, and I thought if I could make even one of ye happier and –…"

He rambled onward, unaware that he had placed me there with his daughters, finally acknowledged it aloud. Johnny had always cared for me, his chey.

For him, that word had never meant anything but daughter.

There had never been any other meaning, for him.

He asked, "Where are you stayin', sweetheart? D'ye need a place? Are you fed, are you comfortable?"

I said, "I was spared, Johnny – a fella named Ollie saved me that night outside the flat, when I found out that Esther had been – he came out, pretended I was his sister, saved me, he did. I've been with him, he lives in that flat right behindyou. Fed, I am – comfortable, too."

"Then I want you to think on this, Willa," he told me, his face pinched in solemnity. "I will take you back to Ireland tomorrow if that is what you want. No letters, this time, I want the words from you, chey. I won't force ye – I would never take you there if you didn't want it. But you have kin. No matter what Esther told you, you have kin – and you'd be safe from this Harry Reed if he ever did find out about you bein' spared that night. You could work with me, instead."

"Never was a singer, Johnny," I smiled warmly, feeling the roughness of his hands in mine.

"Oh, you can sing, chey, but you'd only crack the glass of every pub window in England and Ireland," he grinned. "But you can dance better than any girl in all the world, you can."

I squeezed his hands and looked away from him, because I never wanted to admit it. I had loved to dance, once. I loved to dance like the Gypsies danced, before Esther took it and made it into a caricature of what it was meant to be, drained it of passion and heritage, left it limp and full of rigid movements meant to be followed rather than expressed.

Oh, for there had once been things that I had loved; and the loss of them had been slow and torturous but the realisation of all that I had lost had been sudden – sudden and painful and stinging eternal.

Now stood one of those things that I had thought lost before me, hands held, full of love for me – for me and not the coins that I could offer him. For me; whether I was Willa or chey or Gypsy Girl or all those other things in-between.

He crushed me against him, held me closely. He whispered, "You have kin, Willa – think on it tonight and I'll come for you in the mornin'."


iv

Somewhere in the first trickle of pinkish light from the sunset, there was a knock that filled the flat in its harshness. I was in the bathroom, having just filled a basin with warm water, folding a towel alongside me. I had not yet undressed myself, but I had planned to steep myself in that water and think through the offer that Johnny had offered me. I liked it better when I could really work through every possibility and figure out the benefits.

Still, that knock came and I left Ollie to answer it. It was another Jewish friend, because I heard the clap of a handshake and the gruff words muttered in Hebrew before heavy footsteps passed through the hall and the chair in the kitchen scraped against the floorboards. I had spent the evening at the sewing-machine, and I figured that Ollie could bring out the shirts which had been ordered as his part of the job. He was quite good with organisation, always scratched out the sums and figures of what was owed, dealt with measurements and sketched the details.

I had begun to stitch more patterns into the shirts if required. I had also started to dip into embroidery for those skullcaps, drew out the star of David before I had even known what it was called – Ollie told me just like he had told me all that other stuff about kippah and payot. He had expected me to respond with more attitude than I had. Ollie was finely attuned to verbal abuse that had occasionally broached into physical all because of his faith; that was the reason for which he often bought his wares only from Jewish market-stalls and Jewish vendors because he had received comments and remarks whenever he strayed too far from the surrounding neighbourhoods.

He used to think that I was odd, until he walked with me through Brixton Street one morning and some copper had turned and said, "Oi, paddy-girl – off to nick some more of our goods for all your cousins, eh, all two hundred of 'em, breedin' like fuckin' animals –…"

Ollie never questioned me after that.

I was pulling off my boots when there came another knock – at the bathroom door, this time.

Ollie called out, "Willa, there's a problem with the shirt."

I held one of my boots by its laces, hopping on one foot while I dropped the boot and let it thump against the tiles. "There's never a problem with the shirts, Ollie."

He was quiet for so long that I thought he might have left after all. Then he cleared his throat and said, "Well, there's a problem with this one."

Gritting my teeth, I glanced at my bathwater still steaming with wisps licking at its surface. I looked at the door as if I could see Ollie through its wood and growled out, "Well, tell him I can make another tomorrow!"

"Tell me yourself, Willa Sykes."

I heard the gruff rumble of his words as if I had already lowered myself into the bathwater in the basin, as if I had sunk beneath its warmth and let it swallow me, like that soil had swallowed the flowers; it was Alfie Solomons out there in the hall, I knew, and it made my breath quicken to know it, made my chest swell to know it.

I felt the pinprick of tears behind my eyeballs and felt the heat of them already, but I was glued against those tiles, my limbs once again filled in lead like they had been in front of Johnny. I was torn between frustration and the fierce urge to tear apart that door – torn, too, between whether to beat him or hold him.

"Willa, come out into the kitchen," Ollie said. "Please."

Please. The same word that he had said in front of the old flat on that night that the girls had been killed. Please, please, please –…

I heard them turn for the kitchen and still I could not seem to follow.

I was struck by his boldness, that he had walked into this flat and summoned me after weeks of silence on his part. I was even more annoyed that Ollie had let him. Alfie had visited Ollie, but Ollie had tried to maintain neutrality by never really mentioning it beyond the bare minimum of information before he quickly switched to a more placid, safe conversation about how many buttons we might need to purchase for the new batch of shirts.

I saw myself in the mirror, then. I saw thick curls, sprung outward, never tamed. Esther used to scrape a comb through my curls and tie them all into a neat braid whenever I was not playing Gypsy Girl. Another thing that I had lost and never acknowledged, my curls, flattened and made docile.

After I saw Johnny, I felt the shame in all that taming of the girl he had known in the fields. I could not yet fully confront her, but I realised that I had not braided my hair since Esther had passed. I had lined my eyes in kohl like I had seen the other Gypsies do in the wagons when I was a child. Ollie had noticed but had never commented.

And it was like a spark through me, the thought of Johnny and the thought of kin, out there. I was not alone, anymore. Johnny had found me. Both Willa and Gypsy Girl had always prayed that Johnny would find them and take them from that flat on Bell Road. Now, I had that option.

So, I tore open the door of the bathroom and stepped into the threshold of the kitchen.

And there was Alfie Solomons; there were his broad shoulders held straight and proud, his hat taken off and settled on the tablecloth, dark silhouette and dark stare flickering in candlelight.

"'ello, Willa," he said.

Ollie sat alongside him, but it seemed as if he had sat on pins because of how he shifted around, his hands clasped awkwardly in his lap, between his legs. "Willa," he nodded.

"Out, Ollie," I ordered.

Ollie blinked, his eyes flitting toward Alfie.

"You 'eard the woman, Ollie," Alfie cut in, nodding with a pleasant smile and bumping his shoulder against Ollie. "Time for the adults to talk, innit?"

Ollie threw him a withered glance before he stood and walked toward me. I blocked his path, my eyes meeting his for a brief moment to warn him that he would hear all about this. He swallowed, his throat bobbing up and down, up and down. I stepped aside and he bolted before either of us could trap him there any longer.

I stood and collected myself, then walked around the table and flopped into the chair across from him. He was still smiling as if this was a meeting between old pals – because what had we ever been, anyway? – and I wanted to shout and scream at him, but I had never done that with Alfie before, never been so furious with him before.

Never been so hurt before.

All the times that Esther had battered me, and I had never been so hurt before.

It was something much stronger, I realised, to be hurt on the inside. It was deeper, more like a disease, held in the marrow.

"I'm back, Willa," he said.

"You've been back a while, Alfie."

"'ave I?" he asked. "I don't feel like I 'ave."

I looked away from the intensity of his stare but not before I witnessed the death of that smile. He had an odd sheen in his stare, which was aimed toward me but never focused on me. It was the first time that Alfie Solomons had ever looked through me, beyond me. The war had done that to him. Alfie was looking into the other worlds that the old Gypsies spoke about. He was balanced on the cusp of another world, right then.

"I brought you somethin'," he said suddenly. He had leapt from the ledge of the other world and landed back in ours, because he looked at me again, really looked at me. He reached into his pocket and fiddled around with an exaggerated effort before he pushed a little stack of parchment across the table, its paper soft and delicate, held together by a purple sash.

I truly did appreciate it. So, I bit through the anger, chewed it up and swallowed it before I said, "Thank you, Alfie."

He nodded. He nodded again, then again. He pursed his lips. "D'you want to take a walk 'round Ivor Square tomorrow?"

I stared at him, the parchment still held in my hands. "Are you joking with me, Alfie Solomons?"

"I 'eard we're due a bit o' sunshine," he continued, as if I had never spoken. He hummed and there was that bizarre nod again, as if he could not help himself. "I thought we could go 'round the markets first and then take a walk down to Ivor Square."

"Alfie, you haven't talked to me properly since you got back from France. Now you're asking if we can go for a walk?"

"Yeah," he said simply. "I'm askin' you, yeah, I am."

"I want to know what happened to you, Alfie, I want to know if you're all right, I want to know if you were hurt, or if you –…"

"You fed the dogs."

Thrown by his interruption, I struggled for words. I tried to find the best response, the one that would coax him out of this trance that he was in, in which his eyes watched me and his hands were doing funny twitches that Alfie had never made before and I thought – I thought, dear God, is he like those other soldiers that I saw out there in the streets with those other families, alive and here but looking around as if they thought bombs would fall at any moment?

He was here. He had not lost limbs, he was not bruised or horrifically scarred that I could see from where I sat.

But I had long since learned that scarring could be held in the marrow as much as it could be held on the skin.

"I fed the dogs, Alfie," I murmured gently. "I kept them fed for when you would come back to us."

"I came back," he echoed. Another nod, and then another.

I understood, in some silent way, that Alfie was trying to tell me what he could not say so bluntly: did I come back?

He was looking at me as if he wanted me to pull the words from him like I pulled threads from the sewing-machine, stretch him out and stitch him together like I did with all those shirts. He opened his mouth, closed it again.

I said, "I'll walk with you to Ivor Square, Alf."

He held his lips close together. Then came the flood. "I was – I thought that you 'ad – I thought you 'ad stopped writin' to me there, in the last months o' the war –…" here he let out a scoff and threw his eyes up at the ceiling to control that sheen behind his eyes before he found me again – "…lots of lads 'ad girls what stopped writin' to them after the first couple o' months, y'know, and I could still say, 'my girl's writin' to me' even when 'alf o' them same lads weren't even there anymore 'cause they'd been shot or blown away or – but I could still say, 'my girl's still sendin' me all them scarves so I don't get cold in the trenches, sendin' me socks so I don't get rot in me feet' – I could tell 'em that, them what were left in the end."

I could feel the blister of tears again. I had cried enough today, dried myself out – and still the tears came, still I felt my heart stutter. But I did not interrupt him. I knew that if I did it then, he would never speak like this ever again.

And it would kill him in the way that the bullets or the bombs would have killed him, if he did not speak.

"I came back," he repeated. He drew in a breath. "I came back, and I went to the dogs, first. Hm. I did, I went to the dogs. I thought about what I was supposed to tell you, Willa. Couldn't get the words out. Think only the dogs can understand me, now."

I thought of what he had told me in the factory all those years ago after the incident with Yaxley and it was me who could not speak, it had been my sentences which had been choppy and slow.

Then let it come out backwards and wrong, he said, so long as it comes out.

"Backwards and wrong, Alfie," I reminded him.

He looked at me and I saw the first spark of uncertainty in him. Before, Alfie had never hesitated to tell me anything. But this was not minor gossip in the factory, not a throwaway comment about his brother or his thoughts about Esther and Butcher. This was war. This was trauma – his trauma.

"Backwards and wrong," he breathed out. "But not now, Willa – please, not now."

Alfie had never pleaded for much from me or anybody else on this earth, I knew that much.

I knew I could not force him, either. I thought first of Johnny and then said, "Okay, Alfie. Not now."

He swallowed his relief. I watched it trail along his throat. "Can I 'old you, Willa?"

It was another thing that Alfie had never really done before – ask for touch and sit in precarity until the answer came. He had never turned away from my touch, but he had also never really asked for it either, because Alfie was typically very casual about that stuff. He let me touch him if I wanted to do it. He would place his hand on my arm and look at me to ensure that I was all right with it.

Otherwise, it had never really been asked.

But that had been before the war.

Now we sat in its aftermath, because that had been before the war, and here we were now, where there were no bombs and where there were no fallen soldiers, and still we looked at each other as if the sirens were screaming and still we looked at each other as if there was rubble all around us and still we looked at each other.

And I wanted that nervousness to end here and now in the kitchen, that trepidation between us. I knew that he was only holding himself back because he thought that I would not forgive him for not speaking to me in that first month.

So, I stood from my chair and I came toward him and he stood at the same moment that I reached him and it was all touch, it was skin against skin and my words and his words both blended together. We were remembering all those little touches that had once been automatic and familiar, now clumsy and timid because we had been apart for so long.

He said, "I missed you, Willa".

I said, "I was so scared for you, Alfie".

"I wanted to see you when I got back, I really did – and I couldn't –…"

"I know," I said quietly.

"I couldn't –…"

"I know, Alfie."

"I 'eard what 'appened in the flat," he whispered into my hair. "I 'eard from Ollie when I came 'round that first night. Never expected you to be livin' there – thought it was still goin', that the factory was still goin'-…"

"Ollie saved my life," I mumbled against his chest.

"Well, if 'e fuckin' 'adn't saved ya, I'd 'ave upped 'is rent somethin' terrible."

I snorted, smiling despite myself. "Upped it from nothing?"

He was quiet. "After all the times I ever fuckin' prayed for over in them trenches, I don't think I ever prayed as 'ard as I did after Ollie first told me that the girls in the flat 'ad been killed."

I felt the stiffness of his body then. Another emotion that he had not shown much before the war had been fear.

Alfie continued, "Ollie said, 'the girls were killed, Alfie, Esther too' and I was sittin' there thinkin' that all this time over in France and now me final death would come 'ere in Bell Road, because Ollie never said if you 'ad been in there or not, 'e only explained after what 'e 'ad done for ya. For me. And I prayed to God for the first time since France that you would be alive, Willa. I prayed and I fuckin' prayed."

I was standing very still against him, feeling the wild thump of his heartbeat against my cheek and his hands around me, one scrunched in my hair, the other around the nape of my neck, lowering my head against his chest. He was being so open, so blunt in his words now that I thought this was the result of all that he had held inside of himself.

"We'll take that walk to Ivor Square," he finished. His voice was hoarse. "Feed the dogs, yeah?"

Within myself, I heard what Johnny had said after all that happened in the flat and what he thought about Harry Reed: come back to Ireland with me, for a little while, stay with your cousins, your kin.

"Willa?" Alfie called.

"Ivor Square," I echoed. "And the dogs."

I'll come for you in the mornin'.