A/N: i have heard the cries for willa to be have a little happiness. i'm gonna try my best to brighten her days and then immediately go back to peaky blinder misery because i prefer writing that lol i just wanted willa to make some friends. i was having a bit of a block on what to write and while writing this chapter, some inspiration thankfully struck for later chapters.
i would really like to thank you all for the reviews and feedback which always brighten my day. i often wonder if im making alfie too nice (until i write him beating people and i suppose im overthinking it) but there'll be ups and downs with them. i said this before: i like soft alfie, ok!
onward with the chapter! :)
eleven
Soaking in golden sunlight streaming through the curtains, I slept beneath the blankets for most of the morning. Around ten, I heard the gentle tinkle of the doorbell and then came muffled conversation from below in the hall, followed by the rasping creak of the staircase.
Tapping against the wooden doorframe, Alfie pushed into the bedroom with a slim, petite nurse behind him; her skin was like porcelain, her lips delicate and dabbed in a light pink. Her hands clasped around a large bag and she stepped in the bedroom quite nervously. Often, she glanced upward at Alfie, and her hands would tighten around the strap of her bag.
Alfie hauled an armchair from the other bedroom and placed it alongside me, motioning for the nurse to take it. She sank against the cushion, all the while watching his movements, keeping him in her peripheral.
Once he finished, he plopped himself onto the bed and splayed his hand against my thigh, effectively engulfing it in the heat of his palm. Inwardly, I noted his stern expression and his stare latched onto the nurse, almost as if he was counting each roll of plaster that she pulled out.
Shifting from my slumped position, I sat upward against the headboard and smiled weakly at the nurse. She flicked her eyes toward Alfie before she said, "I will need to remove your nightgown, Mrs Solomons. Perhaps you might like some privacy, or –…"
"Privacy?" Alfie repeated, mentioning nothing of the mistake in surname. "In our own fuckin' 'ouse?"
"Alfie," I murmured, casting him a warning glance. "Please, I'd rather he stayed here."
I reached for the crinkled hem of my nightgown with a soft grunt of effort, but his hands soon replaced mine and he carefully rolled it upward across my thighs and over my hips. Then, I had to lift myself to fully pull it off. I could not find the strength to be shy about it. I had been naked in front of many women before.
I had bathed in rivers beside the wagons in the old fields, surrounded by breasts in blackened water, somehow unaware that my boy-cousins had not possessed the same parts until my sixth summer. I had also stood in the hall of old flat, nude and trembling from the cold, until one of the older girls slipped out from the bathroom and it was my turn for a lukewarm scrub.
I was coated in a light sweat, trembling now – not from cold, but rather from strain. I flopped against the pillow and soon felt a cloth pat against my forehead. I blinked open heavy eyelids to find Alfie there. I lifted a hand to catch his wrist and bring him close so that I could press my lips against his hands, too grateful for him to put it into words.
The old Gypsies had once told me that there were words which humans had not yet found the syllables for, because we had never been able to make sense of certain emotions; so, the words floated out there in the unknown, unpronounced, words that were meant for feelings which humans had known for centuries but had never been able to name.
I kissed his hands and knew what the old Gypsies had meant about man being unable to name his own emotions, those which came more complexly than love, burned more brightly than passion, touched more softly than his fingertips ghosting my jawline and finishing at the plumpness of my lips.
Prickling spikes of pain shot through that blackened pit in my right arm once she peeled away bandages stained in yellowish marks and it felt as if she had unfurled layers of my flesh along with it. I curled with the turn of the bandage, curled at the spine, sinking sharp nails into the pillows. While she wrapped fresh bandages around my arm, Alfie whispered soothing words against my hair.
I scrunched his shoulder once she lifted another roll and I bucked against the skin which lifted with it. I glanced behind at the bandage in her hand and paled at the gooey string of blood which trailed with it. Quietly, I leaned back and spoke into his ear, his stubble scratching against my cheek.
I said, "All you went through in France, Alfie, and I can barely take the bandages being changed, eh?"
He shushed me, pressing his lips against my burning temple. "Ain't the same, love," he replied.
The nurse rubbed some foreign liquid against a piece of cloth and brushed it against my skin; its sharp, harsh sting made me grip him just a little harder. I let out a small yelp, bending forward from her touch.
In a sudden burst of fury, Alfie spun around to face the nurse and roared, "Are you fuckin' tryin' to 'urt 'her, are ya – what kinda fuckin' nurse are ya, anyway? Fuckin' three-legged dog would 'ave more grace and fuckin' delicacy in his min'strations than you …"
Startled by his outburst, the nurse dropped the bottle and a thick, oozing liquid spilled onto the rug in a dense patch of brown. Alfie was silenced by it, his eyes drifting slowly downward toward the bottle, lifting upward to the nurse whose small frame shivered in her armchair. I was sweating badly and breathing heavily, glancing between them both, unsure of the reason for his poor temperament around her.
I reached for the roll of bandages left on the bed, still half-wrapped around me. Alfie rushed to grab it from me, his eyebrows still furrowed from anger, glaring at that nurse, perched at the edge of her seat as if she might bolt at the slightest sign of renewed fury from Alfie. I grabbed his arm and pulled him close against me.
"You take her downstairs," I told him, "…and you apologise, and you pay double what she asked for. I expect you to have one of the lads take her home after that, Alfie."
Alfie looked in my eyes and opened his mouth; perhaps he ran the speech through his mind, his response and mine, before he inevitably pressed his lips shut and settled on a simple nod.
"All right, darlin'. You rest there, yeah, and I'll be right back? You don't move an inch, darlin', right, 'cause I'll be back sharpish. Gotta see out the nurse, don' I?" he rambled.
The nurse had not heard what I said. Therefore, her first indication that she was permitted to abandon her post came from Alfie – and she looked so relieved that she almost forgot to gather her tools from the bed, scrambling to collect them all and hurry after Alfie into the hall, keeping him at arms-length with her bag held tight against her chest. I was still bent on that bed with knees embedded into mattress. I gripped the bandage, saw the white crease of my knuckles once I began to pull the roll around and around like the nurses had done for days in the hospital, but soon I felt my right arm weaken, until I could hold the plasters no more, panting like a tired dog – three-legged and all.
The door creaked.
"Willa," Alfie groaned.
I saw him in the threshold and rolled my eyes at him. "Mean old man."
"Never mean, me," he retorted. "She was bein' far too rough with ya, weren't she?"
"What did you say to her downstairs?"
"I did what you asked. I paid her, said I never meant to be brash, yeah, but a bleedin' donkey could hold a fuckin' plaster better than she could, yeah. Pure fuckin' 'onesty on my part," he replied.
"Not then. Earlier. The girl was afraid of you before she ever even made it to this bedroom. So, what did you say to her before that?"
Alfie blinked and pursed his lips. "Don't know what you mean, treacle."
I was watching him very closely. I heard it said anew: Mrs Solomons. I thought that perhaps the nurse had not made a mistake, but rather she had been misinformed. "Did you tell her that your wife is much too delicate for any kind of manhandling, hm? The wife who has been punched and kicked and hit all her life?"
I spoke with amusement but glanced over to find him still there in the threshold; my eyes dropped and saw his hands furled into fists, knuckles bled white like mine. Alfie had an awful coldness about him once he bordered between his moods and it was not always a coldness narrowed toward me, exactly, but rather toward some faint, unseen figure behind me, because his eyes drifted there, as if he saw into that deep unknown, where words of man had not yet been created, where syllables floated around, unpronounced.
"I told 'er that you suffered enough, yeah."
I felt myself soften, looking away from him. "Alfie, just – just come over here, please."
Slowly, he approached, his gaze full of that same frustration. I held out the bandages for him, imploring him to continue with the rolls which had loosened from my stomach and fluttered around my knees. Alfie was gentle, moving with the wrapping and bending to rip off the ends with his teeth. I could lean against him, rest an arm around his shoulder to support myself. Absently, I stroked my fingers through his hair while he worked, pulling at strands here and there. He liked that. He always had.
"Much better nurse than the other one," I murmured. "Must keep you around."
"More like your fuckin' man-servant, me," he grumbled, but his tone was lighter. Once the nurse had been removed, he was much more relaxed. "And do tell, my lady, what did your last servant die of, if you don't mind me askin'?"
"He asked what the servant before him had died of," I replied. "So, I had to do him in. Though I can't quite recall exactly what I did to him, for what it's worth. Been so many of them."
Alfie whistled. His smile was wide, his eyes still focused on the bandages, pressing them together into folds which meant the plaster would not peel off. "Oh, you are cruel, my lady. Fuckin' brutal, you are."
"Does it bother you? I can always find another manservant, if this position does not suit you."
"Oh, I can think o' plenty more suitable positions," he huffed. "Some of 'em do involve this bed, mind, but most others –…"
I slapped at his shoulder lightly, laughing.
"And there won't be any other fuckin' manservants, I can tell ya that much," he muttered.
"Oh, don't be jealous, Alfie."
"Jealous, me? Nah, I'm just sayin' I ain't sharin' me little pantry what you make me sleep in with any other servant, that's all."
"I'll have you sleep in a cupboard if you keep this attitude up."
Smirking, he checked my arm, too. He liked to reassure himself. He was quiet and I revelled in watching the smaller details of his face whenever he was distracted; furrowed brows, bluish-green eyes swirling thoughtfully.
He said, "I like it when you laugh, Willa."
My lips twitched upward, my cheeks flushing red.
"Like it when you smile, too," he said. "Like it when you blush. Like it more when I'm makin' you do those things."
I dared myself to ask him what had been in my mind ever since the nurse had said it aloud. "Why did she call me Mrs Solomons, Alfie?"
He shrugged his shoulders, sweeping the unused bandages from the bed-sheets, before he dropped all of it and looked directly into my eyes with a soft sigh. "'Cause I been callin' you that since we first met, ain' I? Always said it, in me 'ead. Figured I might it out loud for a little while. 'ear it, taste it."
I stroked his cheek. "Do you like it how it sounds, then? Like how it tastes, too?"
He grinned and leaned into my hand. "Ain't any words that I know to describe it, darlin'."
I watched him, thinking of old Gypsies and the limits of man's tongue. So, I leaned to kiss him, because it was something that I knew more than words, the feel of him. He cupped me at the nape, pressed his forehead against mine. I could feel the swell of dizziness which flooded through me, the ripple of nausea in my stomach from those strange spells.
I said, "If I had died there in the flat that night with all the others, or died in front of the bakery, then I would have died happier than I had ever been, Alfie."
"Don't talk like that," he breathed into the hollows of my collarbone.
"Died happier," I told him, "because I was never truly happy in that flat. All those years spent in there, and not one of them happy – and isn't that the same feeling of a word that hasn't been made for us yet? I could call it sadness, call it some missed chance for a life with Johnny in the wagons. But I don't think it's enough, anymore."
"You're burning up, Willa," he whispered, his brows pinched together in worry. He held the back of his hand against my forehead and pulled it away with his jaw locked.
He shifted us and pulled my legs from beneath me, lay me against the bed-sheets. I felt the coolness of them against skin, prickling in an uncomfortable heat. I watched him reach for a damp cloth to smooth against the redness of me, the sweat and strain.
"Nurses said it will pass, this, just a couple more days, angel –…"
"The Gypsies used to tell me that there was another world other than ours and sometimes souls got trapped in there – those souls died in houses with mirrors," I explained, "and the souls saw themselves in the mirrors and became trapped between the glass, in our world and another. During the war, I was in there, Alfie, trapped and waiting with the dogs for you, you know –…"
"I know," he said. "I know, love. I'm back now."
"Cover the mirrors," I told him. "Or I'll be trapped there, and –…"
He stretched himself out alongside me, tucked himself just underneath me and said, "I know, I know –…"
ii
I know that I dreamt of myself in a bath of lukewarm water. I was bloated and composed of mottled blue skin, just like Josephine had been when I found her. I stood from the water and turned into a pantry full of jars, filled in thickened lumps of sickly-sweet blackness. There was a knock on its door, which had been shut sometime before. I turned toward it and heard her outside the door. I heard her ask, "Do you feel it in your gut yet? Has it reached your brain yet, so that all your body has understood it?"
Beside me, Esther pulled a jar from the shelf and popped open its lid. She scooped out its mush onto her flat palm and dipped her fingertips into it, then lifted them to smear against my forehead. She licked off the remains, before she dropped the jar. The glass shattered. Black mush coated the walls.
There was a dog, in the pantry, with a funny ear bent like paper, folded over. It sniffed at the mush and began to lick at the floors like Esther had licked off those trickles from her skin. I looked at her and saw her skull was caved inward; it had not been like that before, but it was now.
There was another knock on the door, harsh and heavy, so that all the jars trembled on the shelves and rattled toward us as if they might fall off. I went to catch them and heard him say, "I been sittin' on that wall, Willa, waitin' for ya, right, and your Charlotte comes 'round to tell me –…"
I felt a sudden wetness in my shoes and glanced down at them, only to find them filled in that sickly-sweet blackness. I heard the sound of shattering glass, but nothing had fallen.
All the jars sat there and watched me with blinking eyes.
iii
There was another feminine murmur in the bedroom once I came around; the curtains had been drawn and the bedroom was dulled by the heaviness of those drapes, coated in staleness. I saw a woman sat in that armchair. I squinted at her soft blonde hair in curls around her shoulders, then trailed my eyes along her arms and saw that her hands were like songbirds flitting around my limbs, stretching for bandages, snipped with proper scissors, held down in proper strips of plaster. I watched her. I saw blue corpses behind her, corpses from the flat. I blinked fast and the corpses blinked right back, cracking bluish eyelids like shattered porcelain, like the nurse had been made of porcelain.
"D'you remember me, then?" the woman asked softly. "Met you when you first got this lovely mark –…" – here she paused to stroke that blistered scar on my hand from the coppers smacking a drawer against it – "…in Ollie's old flat. D'you remember that, hm?"
Sifting through old memories, I searched for her in the thunder of a headache. "Francine," I answered finally, realising that she was the same woman who had been there after I had found the girls dead in the flat, after I saw seen blue corpses made of porcelain.
She smiled. "Alfie called. He said that if I came 'round and had a look at you, he would let Ollie take this Friday off – wants to take me to the pictures, he does. Awful romantic, my Ollie."
I stared at her. She had said 'my Ollie' with the same dreamy whisper that I had often said 'my Alfie' and I heard the soppiness in it, all of a sudden. "Ollie? Our Ollie?"
Francine was very beautiful. I had not thought about it much, the first time that we had met. I had been distracted by what had happened in the flat. I had hardly even comprehended much beyond pushing one foot in front of the other, then. I looked at her now and wondered how I had missed it. We were nothing alike, because her hair had been tamed, her lips painted in the lightest shade of red, her skin pale and not at all marked. I was made of black tangles and black eyes; darker than coal, my eyes. Gypsy eyes, Esther had called them, and the kohl made them blacker, black like the bogs in winter.
"Your Ollie," she nodded, and her cheeks had become a lovely rosy shade. "I had been wanting him to ask me for so long, you know. He tried, that night at the flat – he told me a long time after it that he had wanted to do it, but he had lost the courage once we stepped outside the flat. Only took him another few years to find it again!"
"Are you a nurse?" I asked.
"Sort of," she shrugged. "Started with my brothers, I did. Stitched them up after fights – not easy for the Jewish lads out there, is it? Well, any lad tried to say anything about the Jews, my brothers stood right up and went for them."
"Alfie's like that, too," I said proudly.
"Oh, I know. Stitched him up once or twice too. Started charging somewhere along the line, you know. Needed to put food on the table somehow. Lord knows my brothers weren't about to pay for it. I only take care of Jewish folk, though. Make my rounds whenever people need me, charge them less than a – a real nurse might charge, y'know."
"You must be good if Alfie trusts you."
"Alfie doesn't trust me," she replied lightly. "Doesn't trust anyone. Trusts you, I assume. Maybe even Ollie. But others, he tolerates – out of necessity, he lets me be here."
"Then I'm grateful you came," I told her.
"I brought you something which might help settle your fevers," she nodded. "Made from a recipe that my grandmother used for my grandfather after he hurt his leg in an accident – Jewish secrets and all, can't be telling you what's in it, but I do hope you can trust me more than Alfie does."
"Not even a little bit," I said, smiling at her. "I tolerate."
She laughed, but soon her eyes gleamed in a distant thoughtfulness. "From what I have heard, Willa, you've tolerated more than enough these past few years, haven't you?"
I felt sickly-sweet blackness spread across my tongue. I shrugged my shoulders and made some flaccid sound with lips which tingled and vibrated as if insects sat beneath the skin and burrowed there.
Francine was quiet. She smoothed the bandages beneath her fingertips. I found her to be much more gentle than the nurse before her. I noticed that Alfie had left us alone; perhaps he did trust, sometimes, in certain people. I looked at Francine and had the sense that she was one of those special few alongside myself and Ollie. Otherwise, he would be sat in here, watching her like he had watched that nurse.
I had warmed to her. I was not sure of the reason for it. I felt at ease around her, because I had become familiar with the ways of women, found comfort in that female bond – and it was like that because I had been with women all my life, temporarily placed between boy-cousins and Johnny alike. I had been formed by the hands of women, been shaped by them, understood them like I had never been able to understand men before – because me, to me, had only ever been coppers and governors and wardens and judges and executioners. Otherwise, I used to think like that about most men until I met Alfie.
I used to think that God had spent longer on women.
Sometimes, I looked at women like Francine and Elsie and Charlotte, and I wondered if I still thought that.
"Alfie tells me you can sew brilliantly, Willa," Francine continued. "Tells anybody with ears, he does. Tells them more than once, too. You know, I'm meeting with some friends this weekend – a friend called Ruth has a little night in her house, almost every Friday. Nothing special, mind. We just drink a few pots of good tea and have a nice natter between us."
I scoffed. "Did Alfie ask you to do this, hm? Felt sorry for me, is that it?"
She cut off a strip of plaster and went very still. She swallowed and said, "You know, the night before I came to the flat to fix your hand, I found out that my brother had died in France. Never had enough to bury him. Can you believe that? The height of that lad, the size of him – and there was nothing of him left to bury after the bombs got him. I never could get my head around that."
"You still came to the flat, even after that?" I asked.
She shrugged. "Ollie told me what had happened to you and I thought that perhaps I could do for you what I was never able to do for my brother. I had stitched him up enough times in his life. Just never realised that once he put on that uniform and went to France, the stitches might not reach him."
I looked away from her, unsure of how to compose myself.
She drew in a shuddered breath. "Well, what difference does that make to you, eh? But the world can be a lonely place if no one feels even a little bit sorry for you, you know. Better that than no one cares for you at all."
I understood what she meant, and that maybe this little meeting with her friends had helped her more than I had first thought. So, I licked my lips and shrugged. "I suppose I'll consider it, Francine."
"Franny," she said. "The girls call me Franny – as well as other choice names if I take all the biscuits during those little meetings."
"Should I bring a tin of my own, if I come along?"
"No," she replied. "Rachel brings them. Her only contribution, those biscuits. She sure as fuck can't offer anything in the way of conversation, you'd get more talking to a brick than you would talking to her – awful bitch, too. She'd be livid if you brought biscuits."
I blinked at her, surprised by her words. Then I caught her smirk and smiled myself. "I used to rob for a living – I can take the biscuits without her ever knowing it, clean off the plate before she gets a chance to even talk at all."
"Finally, a girl who understands me," Franny grinned wickedly, unphased. I figured Ollie had told her, or she had already known about that flat on Bell Road beforehand. "Could you rob a statue?"
"Depends how big it is."
Franny pursed her lips. "Got it as a gift from Rachel for my birthday. I'm sure she did it as a joke. Big gaudy thing, this statue. A horse. When have I ever shown an interest in horses? I'm sure she did it to piss me off. At least if I said it was robbed, she might not hold it against me."
"I'm a little worse for wear and out of practice," I replied. "But I like the challenge."
Franny smiled at me. "I knew Alfie had picked a good'un."
iv
Shuffling from the backseat, I stepped into puddles and mud. I heard Alfie slip out on the other side, heard his boots squelch until he came around the side of the car and reached me, stretching out his hand. I gripped it, hauling myself out with a grunt at the discomfort of each step toward that courtyard.
Blackened clouds clotted the heavens overhead while Alfie brought us beneath the arch. I looked upward at it and remembered how its metal had glinted in the dim light as I fell backward from the impact of the first bullet. I half-turned as if I might scramble into that backseat and urge the young lad in front to press against the pedal and spare me the trauma of all this – and Alfie had loosened his hold as if he might let me, too.
I pushed forward. I looked at the wooden doors where Ollie stood. I watched him, found it easier once I recalled that night in front of the flat when Ollie had stood before me and called me toward him. He called me now and said, "Willa, got some orders for you already. Your shirts were badly missed."
"Just the shirts?" I asked. "What about me, eh?"
"Suppose the dogs missed you," Ollie shrugged, his lips lifting into a grin. "Been sniffing around the barrels, they have."
"'e don't mean it," Alfie muttered. "'ad one of the lads feed them ones what come into the yard."
"Now we got all the strays," Ollie grumbled.
"Yeah, that's 'ow we got you, weren't it, Ollie?" Alfie replied. "Fuckin' stray, sniffin' 'round me yard, eh, lookin' for scraps…and I fed ya, didn' I? Now I can't get fuckin' rid of ya…"
v
Settling into my old chair, I pulled little spools of thread between my fingertips and pulled tight, tight enough that my flesh turned purple and became numb. I stared into nothingness while I did it and thought of Charlotte in that flat on Fetter Road, alone. I thought of all the men that used her. I thought of how she could not tell me about it; men had reached for her like Yaxley had reached for me in the pantry. Another jar, chosen because it was wanted just that once. I had bathed Charlotte. I had clothed her, fed her. But she had not come to me, in the end.
I stood from the table. I had not made a single shirt. I wanted to find Alfie. I was not sure what I really wanted from him, but I knew that I wanted to see him. I wanted to feed the dogs with him, I told myself. That was it.
Droplets sputtered from a pipe in the workroom of the bakery and soaked the tiles beneath the barrels in brown sludge. I walked slowly. I had not thought about where to look for him. I walked toward the staircase and glanced at the door at the end of the hall just before the stairs. It held bags of flour and sugar, rarely brought out. I had been drawn toward it by the sound of thumping. I saw its wooden frame tremble.
I saw sickly-sweet blackness seep outward onto the tiles and blend with those brown pools.
The door sprung open and out strode a lad. I had often seen him lift sacks from trucks.
In the narrow slit of light which came from behind him, I saw a body curled inward on itself. I tasted the sting of copper in the air. I saw the flash of a baton lifted and then brought down swiftly, cracked against bone –…And that bleeding face peered out at me, opened it lips to speak, but a river of blood spilled out and splashed the tiles. His socket had been crushed inward. It was the only way that I could describe the horrendous way in which his skull seemed dented at the brow, pushed inward. I saw strips of skin dangle from his face and I thought of those gooey strips of skin pulled from me, before.
The boy who had just left the room glanced up from where he wiped his hands against his apron. I understood, then, that I had made that apron. I had made every inch of it. His eyes met mine and he stopped walking. The droplets continued to plop against the puddles and the earth spun around us. I saw the bobble of his throat in a swallow. He tried not to look at me anymore, and moved forward to rush around me, out into the courtyard.
I turned to watch him and found Alfie there behind me.
He had his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched forward. He chewed at his mouth from the inside. I saw it in the scrunch of his jaw. Then he walked forward. And he walked around me, beyond me. He went toward that room at the end of the hall and opened it. He stepped into it, closed it behind him.
The cries and screams stopped. The thumping did not. The puddle of blood grew larger and reached my boots. I never stepped away from it. I let it soak into the soles.
vi
Alfie looked at me, his eyes flashing in a sudden splash of orange light from outside the car. It was pouring, out there, but we sat in our little cocoon, away from all that. I saw figures slip around the car, crossing the road, couples with arms linked and babes in prams. I saw the lad that Alfie hired to drive this car and it made me think about how I had never been in a car like this before, so sleek and so posh, paid for with all those envelopes that had been brought to Alfie, brought in trembling hands, spines bent in reverence toward him.
Spoken into the warmth which fuzzed between us, he said, "'e was the one who shot ya. I made 'im swallow a bullet – made 'im swallow three. Brought what was left o' 'im to the Italians. Dropped 'im outside Sabini's own street."
I looked out at the orange orbs from the windows of houses dotted around ours and thought of that old carousel from the fairground, before the war. I leaned my forehead against the coldness of the glass and felt the dampness there. Softly, I told him, "We should get a dog, Alfie. A great big one, too, not the small yapping kind – not that I don't like them, but I always loved those big dogs on Bell Road with drooping muzzles, always drooling. Reminds me of you on the couch every night."
"Cheeky fuckin' minx," he huffed. "What made you want a dog, anyway? Ain't it enough that we feed 'alf the fuckin' population o' dogs in this city, eh, always humpin' and bringin' us more pups. Fuckin' 'ell…"
"Ollie mentioned them in the yard," I replied, shrugging my shoulders. Really, it had come from that dream in which I had watched a dog clean the blackened mush from the pantry. I was not sure what it meant, if it meant anything at all, but dreams were sacred things for Gypsies, I knew. "I think it would be nice, to have a dog sleep at the end of the bed. Safer, too."
"On the fuckin' bed? When you already take all me fuckin' blankets off me in the night, leave me fuckin' shiverin' in just me bleedin' socks?"
I grinned at him. I knew Alfie well enough to know that, for all his jokes, he was already planning where he might find a dog with a drooping muzzle, always drooling. I reached for his arm and looped it around mine. I told him that it might make me feel safer, which was a little cruel on my part because it only poked at the soft spot in Alfie for me, but then I had not told him a lie. I really thought the dog might make me feel better.
Through the downpour, a blue figure approached the window of the car and I breathed very slowly. I wondered if it was Sabini or another corpse with porcelain eyelids out there in the cold, its stiff limbs breaking to lift a gun toward us.
Only the door opened, and Ollie said, "I opened the front door for you, Alfie. Had the lads check inside, too. All clear."
So, it was like that now.
In the mornings, we stirred from sleep and dressed ourselves, a gun slipped into its holster for him, pocketknives tucked into those familiar slits in my skirts for me. There was always a car waiting for us, anywhere that we went. Alfie had it checked for bombs almost hourly. He had lads check the streets, had lads walk alongside us to the car. Outside the bakery, too, there had been lads – all with Jewish families, always known by Alfie. Still, he never trusted. He tolerated. In the evenings, those same lads repeated that routine, hounded the streets and checked the house, stood outside it at night.
It was like that now.
But there had been a carousel, once.
vii
Colourful houses filled Benson Avenue with neat gardens all around. I stepped out of the car and made sure to pull the bag out with me, stepping toward Franny whose arms opened to reach for me. I was stiff while she hugged me and smiled tightly at her. Behind her, I saw a sallow woman with dark hair like mine, pinned beneath a delicate scrap of cloth.
She welcomed me into her house and brought me into this front-room and I was handed a teacup – little plate and all, with a wafer plopped alongside it. I noticed that some of the women had glanced out at that car sat out front with two lads leaning against it, caps dipped low. I knew that none of their husbands had insisted on protection for some little tea-party between women. I had no husband, I told myself. Alfie had not talked to Johnny. There was tradition to think about. Hierarchy. Things that had to be followed.
I was still against coming to the house, despite it all. I thought it was bizarre and weak and feeble to want to sit in a room on a Friday evening, having spun out countless shirts while sat in the office with Alfie across from me, his glasses slipping low on the bridge of his nose while he leafed through papers. I thought it was bizarre and weak and feeble to want to sit here with women I had never met all because I liked Franny, and it did not matter that all the women were Jewish and I was not, nor did it matter that they all knew each other and I was the odd one out, nor did any of it matter, really. The hands which had formed me, shaped me, had fallen away and I could not feel their touch anymore.
So, bizarre, weak and feeble it was, perhaps, to want the presence of women around me because I had lost all the others who had ever loved me.
I had seen her grave, that morning. He had brought me there. Alfie had shown me Charlotte there, beneath all that mud and soil. And I cried for her like I had cried the night before it, the morning before it, all those days and times before it. I felt the pain of knowing that Charlotte had probably never felt those emotions that floated out there, unpronounced, because life had gone too fast for her to be able to feel it, to latch onto it.
"Willa?"
I jolted from thoughts of worms and crows in the wet fields, the sinking of mud beneath boots and the drizzle which soaked through my coat. I saw that Franny was watching me – all the women were watching me, and I followed the tilt of her chin toward the bag in my hands, the bag that I had long forgotten about.
"Well, did you bring a gift?" Franny asked.
I nodded and reached into the bag, gripping the tin of biscuits which slopped around. I pulled it out, dropped it onto the small table in front of all the women and watched their eyes flick cautiously toward one woman in particular; Rachel, I assumed, who looked down at the tin of biscuits and then looked at Franny with her jaw held in a tight grind, lips pressed into a line.
I looked into Franny's eyes and said, "Thought they'd be a conversation starter, you know. In case my conversation is dry as a fucking brick."
Her lips stretched into that wide, wicked smile, which crinkled the skin just beneath her eyes. I smiled right back at her and thought that perhaps it was not so bad to be bizarre and weak and feeble, for a little while; the world would be a lonely place, otherwise.
