A/N: thank you for the feedback! it is greatly appreciated. prepare for a little more misery before we can get onto happier times and perhaps even ready ourselves for the arrival of the shelbys...to any guest reviewers, even if i cannot directly respond to you, i am still very very grateful!
ten
Blinking through the crust of sleepiness, I felt the rustle and shift of blankets around me. I was lifted gently and laid upon fresh pillows, familiar blankets placed against me, tucked beneath my body so that the sheets would not slip off during the night. I was still warm from drugs. I floated somewhere far away and returned only in brief flashes to that room lathered in blueness. I felt the dip of the mattress, skin against skin, hushed murmurs in Hebrew.
I forced apart eyelids coated in lead, found myself in that hospital-room shrouded in a veil of that bleak, watery light which blooms just before dawn. I was stiff. I felt that my limbs were not mine, anymore; alien, as if attached to me but taken from other bodies. I heard his words shift into ones which I could understand, soft words like love and sweet'eart and please don't leave me now angel, yeah?
Plucking at foreign tendons, I felt the spasm of my fingertips first. In a feeble squeeze, I held his hands which so carefully touched mine, as if I was some precious jewel. I felt the spread of another warmth which was not from the flow of drugs spread into tired veins.
Instead, it was the warmth which came at the sight of his own eyelids fluttered shut from a tremor through his spine, expression cast in hopeful anticipation before he looked upward – and his eyes found mine and the wetness of his stare spilled over onto me, onto the skin of my hands, so that his relief soaked into me. I absorbed it all; his and mine, mine and his, intertwined.
"Three days," he told me.
I had suffered an infection in the flesh of my right-arm, which had been ravaged in a ring of blackness where the bullet had split through the skin. It was a blackened pit in otherwise blank paleness, sore and damp and oozing white fluid. I had collapsed in front of him, but I could barely recall that moment after I had stood from the bed and felt as if the earth tilted as it had the evening in front of the flat, after the girls had been murdered. I had stood, tilted, slapped against cold tiles and felt each bead of sweat bloom and burn against hot, frothing skin.
I had a fever and it rippled through my flesh like the water in the bathtub had rippled once I tried to pull Josephine from its coldness. In my feverish dreams, I fell in there with her, fell into the pitch-black depths of lukewarm water. I tried to swim upward but only ever sank downward into its folds.
Three days, he told me. I was in that dream of black water for three days.
I tried to speak. I drooled, instead. Embarrassed, I tried to pull hands from him, but he jolted from his chair, which scraped against the tiles. He found tissues in the drawer, held them against my chin and shushed me, leaned forward to rest his own chin against my hair. He spoke in a rush of Hebrew anew, and its lulling rasps in his throat soothed my shame.
Silent tears slid across reddened cheeks and I rested limp against his stomach, too tired to hold myself like I had always done before I had met him. I thought of how I had held Charlotte like he now held me. I wanted her, then. I said her name, slurred and quiet.
"She was here this mornin'," he explained. "But you were still asleep, darlin'."
Once cleaned, he tossed away the tissues and sat once more. He swept his hands around mine out of habit. I saw purplish marks beneath his eyes. I watched him scratch at his eyes and saw that his stubble had grown into a thickened beard. I liked it and lifted a slack hand to brush at it with a weak smile. His eyes closed. He leaned into my touch. He had not slept without me, I knew.
"Come lie beside me, Alfie," I whispered, stroking his cheek with my left hand.
"No," he said, his eyes still closed. "I'd only 'urt ya."
"You'd never hurt me," I replied. He watched me, as if mulling it over in his mind. I added, "Please, Alfie. I'm sick and I'm tired. So, you have to do what I say, don't you?"
"Don' I do that already? Fuckin' told ya before that you're bossy when you're tired, Willa..."
Hauling himself from the chair, he tried to poise himself on the edge of the mattress so that I had all the space, but he was much too large for it and was already half-balanced. I scooted over and over until I hit the other side of the bed and then pulled him toward me with all the strength that remained in my left arm – the right was still riddled from the infection, so that it lay flaccid and useless alongside me.
Alfie did what he always did once we lay alongside each another: he shuffled me against his chest and gently curled his arm around me, his chin rested against my hair as it had been earlier. I felt him tense for just a couple of seconds. Although he never said it aloud, I knew that it was his spine and his hip.
Breathing in his scent, I thought about those jars of sweet mush that I used to soothe the stiffness of his bones and worried that he had forgotten to use them while he was in here with me.
"Alfie," I murmured into his skin, "…I need to get you more of those jars for your back and your hip, I need to –…"
"Right as rain, I am, Willa," he replied, his words muffled against my hair. "Never felt better than I do right 'ere and now, sweet'eart."
"Tomorrow" I mumbled, overcome by another rush of tiredness. "I'll get up tomorrow, I'll go and get them from the house…"
"All right, love," he said softly, letting me ramble even though he knew that I could not possibly stand from that bed. "All right. Just stay with me a little while longer, yeah?"
His eyes shut almost immediately. I thought of something he had said a while ago: I don't like to sleep, Willa. But I do when you're here.
ii
On the second of those three days in which I had been fast asleep, Alfie had lined a squadron of Jewish lads in the basement of our bakery and doled out orders. Ollie had been stood alongside him. He sent a handful of those same lads toward the racetracks; those first lads drugged the horses, shot jockeys in the kneecaps. Then, Alfie sent out another handful and those lads took alcohol from Italian pubs and locked the doors of the same pubs with Italian patrons trapped within; alcohol soaked into the floorboards and the lads lit Italian cigarettes that were then thrown onto the floors.
Alfie had note pinned onto the ash and ruin of the last pub once its fire had finally fizzled out, watered down by bewildered authorities carting out charred corpses. On it, he wrote: had to light up five of your pubs before I could use the fire to get even one of your wop cigarettes to burn for me to even have a smoke. Shameful, that is.
The last handful of Jewish lads shot any Italian within the territory owned by Sabini. This sent them scrambling for shelter and the lads shot them there, too. Alfie estimated that it was twenty men, a nice chunk of Italian protection in that area. Suddenly, Alfie had visits from other owners of pubs and shops in that street. He had visits from the Jewish folk still left in Bell Road and those stretching outward toward Harrow. He had thickened wads of cash placed into his palm. He passed them onto Ollie to place in a safe in the office of the bakery.
Alfie told me all this in the hospital after the infection had passed. He paused in his speech and awaited some form of response. So, I gave it to him.
"Ruining his racing business, his pubs, turning his own people against him – that's three bullets."
"And the last one, love?"
"To put through his fucking skull."
iii
Hobbling from the bed, I caught sight of myself in the mirror; a tangled mass of black hair, pale skin and cheeks flushed of colour. Slowly, I wobbled toward the armchair which held my possessions, placed there that morning by Alfie. I was half-naked in a gown which left me cold and much too exposed for my liking. I pulled out my old dress and wondered if it might rest painfully on the bandages around my stomach. Healed in most other parts, the nurses were still preoccupied with that wound on the back of my right-arm, but because the infection was cleaned, I was expected to remain at home with only a couple of visits to ensure the whitish fluid did not return. I pulled out the dress and a little drop against the ground told me that something had rolled out with it.
Carefully, I placed a hand against the bed, prepared myself to bend despite the traumatic pain which darted through the wound on my stomach. Before I could even do much more, I heard the door scrape apart and I heard a deep sigh.
"Willa, let me get it," Ollie said. "You'll do yourself even more damage and I'm not sure I could take another week of dealing with Alfie in a temper."
Smiling to myself, I replied, "While you're down there, would you please grab my boots, Ollie?"
He perched on the edge of the mattress and fished beneath it for the fallen object – it was kohl, which I took with a mumble of gratitude, shuffling toward the only mirror in the room. Ollie pulled out my boots. I balanced a hand on his shoulder and let him pull them on. He only just slipped on the left boot before I had to sit, unable to take the strain.
Ollie stood to help me flop onto the bed, his hands all anxious and jerky once more. Ollie panicked a lot more easily – he was all ruffled feathers, our Ollie. Even while I sat, his hands were there, hovered just an inch from my arms as if I might somehow tumble off the bed.
"Ollie, it's all right," I told him. "I'm fine, now that I'm sitting."
"I-I saw you," he blurted out. I stared at him, which made him swallow anxiously. "Alfie found you in the yard and I saw you when he was carrying you. I thought you were dead. You looked awful, Willa."
"I told you I'm all right now."
"Alfie says that. Alfie says that if I ask him. Says he's all right. Or he tells me to stop asking or to fuck off. He tells me that he's all right, but I don't believe him."
I counted the pockmarked dents in the ceiling like I had done for days. I felt Ollie finish with the laces and start on the other boot. I was terrified that the nurses had gotten it all wrong; that the dizziness and sweats and pain and sudden rushes of nausea might never leave. My limbs were too dense, my right arm was agony to lift. I did almost everything with the left. I was afraid, too, of cracking sounds.
One night, the night-nurse had dropped a bedpan in the hall and its clanging metal smacking against the tiles had shot through me like another round of bullets, so that I jumped and jerked in the bed as if I was hit here and there, over and over.
"I'm all right," I murmured distantly, eyes still latched onto those dents in the ceiling.
"I don't believe you," he said.
"Then stop asking or fuck off," I replied, looking at him and smiling.
iv
Pulling into Ivor Square, I let out a sigh of relief and felt Alfie squeeze my hand, eyes flashing toward mine. He had Ollie bring in the bags behind us. I took the staircase which led to our door in slow, gentle steps with his hand around my waist to support me. I breathed in a fresh, floral scent once Alfie pushed open the door; that scent was familiar and welcome after that acid coldness of the hospital.
Ollie stood in the threshold with hands clasped, glancing around. Alfie turned toward him, tilted his head at him, indicating for him to take a step backward, which Ollie did, his eyebrows raised in confusion.
Alfie raised his boot and kicked the door so that it banged shut.
I could almost envision Ollie's expression on the other side, but the boy was more than used to Alfie and his bluntness. He had been around him for years.
Alfie spun around to grasp my arms and lead me into the front-room to sit on our sofa. I collapsed there with him and felt the exhaustion in both of us. I thought of how we were still so young and little snickers escaped me until I burst into full-blown laughter. Alfie looked over at me, eyebrows raised like Ollie's had been just before the door slammed shut on him.
"We're acting like an old couple," I said, sputtered between breathless giggles. "Your bad back, your hip – me, always being tired now, worn out. I forget that we're still young."
Alfie smiled, but it was not one of his proper smiles. "Don't feel young, me. Ain't felt young in a long time. Last time mighta been when we went to that fairground. Maybe just before it, when we went to that bar on Brixton Street. What was it called, again?"
"The Blacksmith," I answered. "I remember after you walked me home to the old flat and Esther was there. She told me about the war."
"I didn't wanna tell ya. I didn't want to ruin the night. Just couldn't pluck up the courage, in the end. Then it was too late. Hm. Always too late with me, innit? But fuck, Willa – if it weren't a fun fuckin' night, eh?"
I smiled and nodded, before I looked at the fireplace. "You know, we should light the fire tonight, Alfie. Let's stay here for a while."
He hummed. "Probably best. Could do some damage to me-self with all that dancin'. Christ, Willa, you'd do more damage to the people 'round us with your dancin'."
I laughed, the sound echoing into the emptiness of the house. "Gypsies dance a little different, Alfie."
"That they do," he nodded. He stood and stepped toward the fireplace to grab some coal and toss it on the rack, but soon winced, his hand clamping onto his back.
Quickly, I stood to help him, even if I was equally a little worn. A wave of dizziness sparked through me, so that I fumbled and had to place one hand against the wall to balance myself. Alfie looked at me, and it was that simple – we burst into laughter again, half-bent. I saw the large print of his own hand on his shirt from where he had pressed it, made from the stain of coal on his palm. I pointed it out to him.
"Fuckin' 'ell," he groaned. "Gonna need you to start rattlin' out more shirts as soon as you can, Willa. No more sleepin' on the job, eh?"
I lost my laughter at the sight of that crinkled furrow between his brows again, realising that it was not very funny at all, the state of us. It hit me very suddenly, this sullen mood. Perhaps he felt it as well, because he licked his lips and looked away from me, moving back toward the sofa to sit there. I was still across from him, hand pressed against the wall.
I said, "You need to see the doctor, Alfie."
"Doctor? What good can a doctor do me, eh? Can't fix nothin', doctors. Ply you with medication, what makes you slow and dim, yeah – and sometimes, right, them doctors tell you that you're imaginin' 'alf your pain, don't they?"
I watched him carefully. "What d'you mean?"
"I got mates what can't tell left from right no more, Willa."
His eyes were cast in that cold and distant light which always filled him once words of war came out. He hardly blinked; it had always been that which disturbed me most, how long he could last without a blink, as if a film was flickering behind his eyelids, one that he was forced to watch.
"I got mates what can't walk right – can't talk right, neither. I got mates what get outta bed to work and I got mates what can't never get out of bed again. Ain't got the capacities, do they? I got mates what talk to our other mates even though they ain't there anymore. And the doctor tells 'em, 'all you need is a stiff upper lip, my lad'. Got loads of mates, I do. Or I did. I – I shot one of me mates before, y'know."
I felt a cold chill rattle through me, aware that Alfie was too far removed from me to hear himself. He had just admitted something that cut right through the laughter which filled us only moments beforehand. I had said it before, too – Alfie had no mates apart from Ollie. Yet he had spoken as if all those friends stood in our house now and his eyes searched for them between those folds in the curtains, between the gaps of the furniture, never found. It had been such a long while since he had spoken that I jerked at his next words, eyes drawn toward him and away from those gaps that I had searched myself. I was not sure what I had thought I might find, but it had not been there.
"It was a mate what deserted in 1917. 'e trained even before the army years, y'know?"
I nodded, although it did not matter what I did, because I was not there for him anymore. Even if I had walked out of that room and into the kitchen, I knew that I would only need lean my ear against the wallpaper to hear him speak, because Alfie would continue whether I was there or not.
He had these odd, disconnected moments; in the same way that I felt my limbs had been disconnected, all his memories came out chopped and dissected, as if he had been handed the photographs which composed the life of another man whom he had never met, and he just pieced them together himself with little thought behind it.
Here was another jigsaw memory, taken from some darkened spot in his brain and slotted into some other place where it did not quite belong and certainly never fit.
"They wanted 'im to be made into an example," Alfie said. "But what was the point of it? We 'ad plenty o' examples o' dead men out there. I told 'em, what good is another? Well, they 'ad the lads line up and shoot, y'know. Only they missed. I think they wanted to miss. They all knew 'im. Trained before the army years, 'e did. Did I tell you that?"
"You did, Alfie."
"Hm. They got 'im in the shoulder. So, I 'ad to put 'im down. Couldn't watch it. And you wanted to 'ear this, didn't ya?" he said, his eyes finally looking into mine. I flinched from it. "I don't want to tell you these things, but they come out anyway. Can't 'elp it, me. What do we always say, Willa? Backwards and wrong. That's it. Backwards and wrong."
His mood, much like mine, had shifted so much that I was unsure what else to do with myself. I stood there in front of the fireplace. I had become the furniture, immobile. He looked at me, his eyes glistening, and he hauled himself up from the sofa with great effort.
"I'll run you a bath, Willa."
He knew that I was not meant to take a bath so soon, that the nurse had to come around for the bandages in the morning and to check all the wounds. He had paid out of his own pocket for it. He knew that and I knew that. And still I said, "Okay, Alf."
He hesitated in the doorway. He turned, just slightly. His gaze was not focused on mine. "I won't let nothin' 'appen to ya, Willa."
"Okay, Alfie."
"I'm glad you're 'ome. I'm 'appier now."
"I am, too." I debated asking, but finally decided on it. "Are you - Are you okay, Alfie?"
"I'm okay, darlin'."
He nodded. He nodded again, although nothing more had been said. The door shut behind him. The fireplace had been forgotten, left unlit. Ollie flashed through my mind, all of a sudden.
I don't believe him.
Shuffling around in the bathroom, I heard him fiddling around with the cupboards. I never heard that familiar thunder of gushing water from the faucet, never heard him lay out towels nor a nightgown like he had always done for me whenever he ran a bath.
I felt a dull ache in my right arm, felt another in my stomach – but there was another part underneath it formed from tension, a thickened layer of it wedged between my organs, because something had happened within him, something had cracked or loosened or fell apart entirely.
I heard him in the bathroom, heard an abrupt round of loud bangs; he had ripped the rack of towels from the wall and I heard it clatter against the tiles. I jumped and jumped against the bangs which sounded so much like bullets shot from somewhere behind me. I clamped trembling hands against my eardrums and leaned forward to bury myself between my knees, breathing heavily.
"Willa," Alfie called out. I looked up and saw that he was on the other side of the room, by the bathroom. He stayed away from me. I knew something was really wrong with him. Alfie rarely ever stayed away from me. "Willa, I've been lyin' to ya, love. I've been lyin' to ya this whole time."
I asked a question which came out croaky and dry. "About what, Alfie? What did you do?"
I always suffered a terrible numbness in my limbs because of words like that. I felt those familiar red patches around my throat. I thought of our whole life together. I thought of our house – our home – and our business. I thought about other women, which had never really crossed my mind before with him. I trusted him. I looked at him now.
Do I trust you?
"Charlotte didn't come to see you."
I swallowed. "Did you tell her where I was? She could be busy, Alfie. "
"She didn't come, love," he said. "Because she tried to get rid of it, Willa. She was very ill. She – Just listen, love, right…"
It was like a pit in my stomach, a pit which was then filled with stones. Once I stood, the stones shifted and knocked my weight to one side so much that I stumbled. Nausea overwhelmed me. Alfie was coated in a light sheen of sweat; he looked very much like the boy I had seen in the courtyard with his teeth held against the throat of another lad, prepared to rip it out, back in the days of the factory. He looked trapped and poised to defend himself. Some part of me understood what he meant; the other part feigned ignorance.
"That woman on Heath Street," I said, "…she did it for lots of girls, Alfie. I went there with her. I'm supposed to go with her again, on the proper date – the real date for it. I'm going with her."
I was moving around the bedroom now. I was smoothing out the bed-sheets that had crinkled beneath me and I was shuffling the shirts around in the drawers and I swept around him into the bathroom to pluck at the towels. All the while, I was saying, "That woman on Heath Street was telling her that she wanted to make sure the coppers didn't find out about it, you know. I told her, find out the proper date and I'll come with you. She didn't want me there for the discussion, but you know, she just wants me in there for the procedure –…"
I was trembling so badly and he was following me between the bedroom and the bathroom with all of these useless towels and clothes in my hands that I placed down, then picked up, then placed down again and he was talking too, talking over my rambling, but I talked louder and faster and always I was picking up things and placing them down until he blocked me at the bathroom and I screamed, screamed and screamed –…
"She got it on that day, Willa," he explained. "She got something from that woman on 'eath Street on the same day that you went with 'er – I don't know what it was, I don't know when exactly she took it, yeah, but I tried to find 'er for ya, Willa – I wanted 'er there when you came 'round, I knew what it would mean to ya. I had Ollie out with the lads from the bakery. They found her in a flat. She'd been dead and gone – gone a long while, love."
"Where? What flat?"
"Some place on Fetter Road," he answered.
I felt like the fabric which I pushed beneath the thumping needle of the sewing-machine after it became caught and tangled and all its threads unfurled and the thumping was still there, pricking away at me until I was threadbare, unusable in all senses, thrown aside. Fetter Road. I had heard him against the pounding ringing in my eardrums. Elsie had sold her own body on that road many years beforehand. I had told Charlotte about it. I had told all the girls in the flat about it in those dark months when I was temporary Best-Girl. I told her.
I said, "I told her about that place – that the girls – they sold themselves and our Elsie died there – a long time ago, before I had even met you. D-Did she use this place, Alfie?"
Did this place use her?
Alfie tried to placate me, like always, holding me in place to stop all this fluttering and moving around. I saw it in his eyes and still I needed the answer. He licked his lips. "From what I 'eard, yeah. Weren't enough to be stealin' pocket-watches anymore for the girl, darlin'. 'ad to make a livin', was strugglin' after the whole racket in the flat ended and Esther weren't 'round no more."
"She would have told me," I whispered. I pushed away from him. I was focused on him, on the anger that I felt for him because it was so much better than focusing on the pit of stones still in my stomach. "You told me she was there – that she came and saw me. Why did you say that, Alfie?!"
He stared at me incredulously. "You'd just been fuckin' shot, Willa! What did you want, eh? You got that infection, you were barely awake – it woulda been too much for you. I couldn't risk it."
"Couldn't fucking risk it," I spat bitterly at him. I was hurting him. I knew I was hurting him because I saw it in his eyes and still I was pushing onward with it. "Where is she?"
"I 'ad 'er buried, Willa."
"Buried?" I repeated. I was crying without wanting it. I wanted to be furious, wanted to thump and hit and scream. But I didn't quite believe him, either. I told myself that she was all right. He had been mistaken – but was Alfie ever really mistaken about things like this? I knew he would never lie about it. Yet I still said, "You're wrong, Alfie."
"I'm not wrong."
"I told her I would go with her. She wouldn't take anything without telling me. Why would she do that?"
"I can't tell you, darlin' – but she mighta known she wanted to do it alone."
I thought about the lad, George, who ran off to Liverpool. "Was it even his?"
"The sprog?" Alfie asked. He chewed at his lip and shrugged. "Mighta been."
I caught how his eyes flit from mine and my anger rushed upward in a swarm. "What do you know?"
"Won't do you any good to know it, Willa," he warned.
"Alfie, you will tell me – now," I hissed. I was becoming anxious all over again, hands starting to pick at skin, at wounds that were not there. I found the ones that were instead, reached for the bandages around my stomach and wanted to unravel them so that I could – well, what did I want to do then? He caught my hands again, as if he knew what I had intended to do. Frantically, I mumbled, "Tell me, Alfie – please, don't lie – just tell me –…"
"She was there a few months. Ollie 'eard it from the girls workin' there. Told that George fella that it was 'is but 'e knew the chances were slim an' all. Booked it outta town, took the first train to Liverpool. What was the girl meant to do, Willa?"
"Tell me!" I screamed. "She should have told me!"
It was in the stomach, first; a shrieking pain that had me bent double before him, falling onto kneecaps which slapped against the floorboards, the impact rattling upward into me and dislodging all those stones then thrown up into my throat. Alfie fell along with me, tried to hold me beneath my arms and lift me, but he accidentally hurt my right arm in his attempt, and I rolled against him from the sheer agony of it. He held us still to let the pain rush through me and I breathed in ragged gasps until it went.
"I'm sorry, love."
For which part he meant, exactly, I was not sure.
"I need to see her," I told him.
"Not now, Willa." His tone was strict, warning. His temper was flaring, blending into mine. I knew that he wanted to rein it in, but he struggled because of the circumstances. "I know you lost someone. But I ain't willin' to lose you, too. I 'ad the girl buried with the others."
I let out an agonised moan. He only held me tighter.
He continued, "I 'ad her buried. She'll be safe there now, won't she?"
"I told her about Fetter Road, Alfie, about the work there," I whispered, pressed against his chest. "I told her when she was so much younger. She only went there because of me telling her. She didn't tell me about what the woman gave her. I was supposed to go with her."
"I'll take you to 'er once you're better, yeah?" he went on. I realised that his cheeks were damp against my hair. I had not understood just how much my pain had affected him. "I'm gonna put you into bed now, Willa. In the mornin', the nurse'll be 'round, won't she? Change your bandages, make you all better, hm. Proper fighter, you are."
"I'm tired of fighting, Alfie," I whispered. "All the girls in the flat, gone. There were two of us, this morning, last time that I checked. One of us, this evening. Just me."
He drew in a sharp breath.
He lifted me from the floorboards, despite his own pain. I was tired of pain, too. I let him settle me in the bed because I knew it brought him comfort to think that I was calmed; and perhaps it was just because that same old part of me thought that he had made a mistake. I resembled a child which could not grasp the concept of death. I convinced myself that he had made a mistake somewhere and she was still here. I had not seen her death like I had seen the others – there had been no sickly-sweet blackness and she was so young; but Josephine had only been ten, so what difference did that make?
Alfie rested on his side of the bed, closest to the door, his arms crossed. He looked ahead, toward the wardrobe. He looked between the gaps. He found no mates there and so he looked away. I was sat upright, leaned against the headboard – slumped against it, absent from myself.
"Thank you, Alfie."
"What for?"
"Burying her."
"Buried lots of people, me."
"I still don't think I can believe it," I told him. "She isn't gone, Alfie."
"Used to think that, too, over there," he replied lowly. "Used to see fellas fall and when evenin' came 'round I'd still call out their names for rations without even realisin' it. Takes time, Willa."
"How much time?" I asked childishly, reluctant to accept it.
"I still call 'em out, sometimes," he said. "Still waitin' for 'em to answer, too."
"I'll keep calling out for her," I said. "I know I will."
He was quiet, thoughtful. "Then I'll just call with you. She's bound to 'ear one of us, ain't she?"
v
Out of the blue, a couple of moments later, he stood from the bed. I thought that he might slip into the bathroom, but I heard him near the wardrobe. He knew perfectly well that I watched him move about the bedroom, watched him fiddle with the bottom piece of wood in the wardrobe, lifting it upward to reveal a hidden space just beneath it that I had not known about.
"What are you doing, Alfie?"
I loathed the tearful rasp in my voice, loathed the pitiful way that my hands scrunched the bed-sheets for something to do other than tremble. He never answered. He pulled out some small box that I had never seen before. I saw how carefully he held it, standing from his crouch to bring it over onto the bed.
He plopped it in front of me and pulled off the lid to show a cluster of letters bound together in a delicate sash of purple, much like the sash tied around the paper he had brought me after he returned from France. He bent before the bed to show me, elbows pressed into the mattress.
"November 1916," he said, pulling out the first letter. "You told me about the dogs on Bell Road. One of them had a funny ear – kind of bent over like folded paper. I remember that dog. Soft little fella, 'e was. December – you told me about the little gift you got your Charlotte, some toy you stole in Charter'ouse. 1917. Wrote about your Josephine, you did. Told me about them problems with Beth. Told me about 'ow Eleanor 'ad outgrown 'er shoes and you'd need to rob another pair. You 'ad cut Rosie's 'air for 'er. That was in February, mind."
Somewhere along the line, his eyes had left the letters. He was speaking the same words written upon each letter, words that I had forgotten myself, especially those little details about the flat on a Sunday morning and the long walks through the streets and how dull it was without him. He was saying it all aloud, never even glancing at those letters. He had memorised them.
"Next one – you told me 'ow proud you were that I was made Captain, remember? Said you never felt more proud in all your life. Sent me two scarves. I remember those, too. All the lads envied them scarves, Willa. And then you wrote to me about 'ow you missed me. And 'ow you loved me. That was 1918. January. It was in January."
I blinked through tears to look at him, pulling apart each letter, drinking in my own spidery scrawl. I had never thought about what he did with the letters, but he had kept each and every one of them. I brushed at the strokes of dirt which stained some of the letters, noted a couple of tears in the paper and crinkles, some dots of rusted blood, all of them worn around the edges. Nestled at the very bottom of the box was a photograph that I had not seen since the fairground: it was the photograph of us. He was stood with his arm around me, his eyelid swollen from that punch after a fight with the photographer.
He dipped into his shirt pocket and pulled out another photograph from the fairground; it was me.
It was Willa from before the war, because there had been another Willa. She had been the Willa before all the girls had died, before Alfie had returned with odd spells in his mood, before the bombings, before the shirts made for Jewish lads, before the bullets shot into me. I traced my own face – my old face – and thought that I looked so young, terribly shy, eyes still searching for Alfie in the crowd. I was very pretty.
I did not feel like that in the bed with him, after all the sorrow had settled in me. I felt much too tired for prettiness and youth. And the Alfie in that other photograph was not here either. He had aged, too. He had lines where before there had only been laughter.
Yet I looked at him and found that I preferred him, lines and all, moods and all.
I saw the stain of dried blood which soaked the rim of white around the photograph of me once I turned it over. Alfie watched me and said, "Was in me pocket when I got shot."
"You had it with you, over there?"
"Every second. Every – fuckin' – second in that fuckin' pit that was the trenches. Every time I 'ad to jump out the fuckin' trench and run at the enemy – you came with me, didn't ya?" He smiled. It was a weak one, but it was one of his real smiles, warm and soft. "The girls in that flat are gone, Willa. But you ain't, love. You're 'ere with me, ain't ya? And it ain't just you, alone. I loved you in January of 1918, too. I loved you before it. I love you now, Willa. So, when I tell you Charlotte's gone, darlin' – I mean it, don't I?"
I nodded weakly and he reached to wipe the tear that fell. He clambered onto the bed again to hold me. He brought me against him, rested me against his chest. I allowed it, too dazed to do more than shuffle toward him.
"I know you do," I whispered. "I just – it hurts so much, Alfie."
"It does," he replied simply. "Hm. It does, yeah. It'll 'urt tonight and it'll 'urt tomorrow. Just 'ow it fuckin' goes, ain't it? But I'll tell you 'ow it goes, now. I'll bring you to 'er once you're better, and you'll be able to understand it better then, Willa. And the day after that, we'll be fightin' the Italians and we'll be makin' our aprons and our rum and it'll 'urt all the time while we're doin' it. Stiff upper lip, darlin'."
I nodded along with him, nodded and nodded.
"And then, the day will come when we've made enough, yeah? And we'll be on that beach in Margate lookin' at the ocean and it might 'urt then, too, but we'll 'ave made it. We'll be there, and the rest of 'em can fuckin' burn for all we'll care."
I listened to the warm rumble of his chest against me, soothed by it. I stretched to kiss his cheek and felt a scabbed patch of skin there, just beneath the stubble of his sideburns. It was red around its edges, inflamed. I lifted a hand to touch it, unsure of what it was. He caught my wrist and held it against his chest.
"Tomorrow is the time for fightin', Willa. You ready for it, darlin'?"
The letters were strewn between us. I caught glimpses of Willa from 1916, saw her again in 1917, saw her finished in 1918. I spotted those little snippets of complaints about sharing a blanket with Eleanor and how Charlotte had grown so fast that I had to let her borrow some of my skirts and that I missed him so much and how is the wether in Frans, Alfie, I can send more scarfs and do you need soks and I hope the war ends soon.
"I'm ready, Alfie," I told him.
