A/N: this chapter took me such a long time and it shows because it's longer than most lmao i hope you guys are happy with the choice that i ultimately made about how alfie approaches tommy in season 2 and how it relates to sabini. i made that choice for a few reasons that should be clear in later chapters, but i obviously won't say it now because it would spoil it. maybe i would answer privately but it would remain vague because i don't see the point of just spoiling everything lol.
anyway thanks for all feedback! :)
twenty
Pinkish warmth streamed into the flat in ribbons, shredded by the curtains. I lifted those bloodshot eyes of mine with eyelashes still coated in honey so that all the world had become blurred by it, smudged in golden hues that reflected against the furniture of this old flat and stirred the spiders in their drooping cobwebs from sleep, thin limbs threading silken threads in the corners. I had been cracked from porcelain, like a shell that had been broken open.
From its coldness, I was born anew with the heady taste of rum slick on my tongue. It slurred all my words and made my mouth slack. I sounded like Daisy had when I spoke aloud to myself, bending for clothes left in sloppy piles, plucking at my blouse and looking around for my old boots. I had never bothered with a new pair. I walked in the boots that had been mine since I was a girl; a little girl in stockings, starched apron and bonnet.
Ada stepped into the doorway and cut out all that pinkish warmth behind her, clothed in a heavy coat of beige, lined in rich fur fanned outward as if it was her own, some fierce creature whose face did not contain that same meanness, because she softened when she looked at me. She held my arms, settled me back against that bathtub. Its prickling coldness swept up my thighs and into the marrow that made me, pushed back into that old shell which closed around me.
I had only temporary moments of rebirth, snatched back into old bodies trapped in the wet soil. It seemed that Gypsies never died just once in this life, but suffered many deaths, over and over – this was just another death that had swept over me.
Ada kicked aside those bottles of rum and found a cloth which she dipped beneath a gushing tap, lifting my arms and washing beneath them, around my collarbone and over my face. She took powder from her purse, smoothed a brush against my cheeks and dabbed lipstick against my lips like that girl had done in the bathroom of The Diamond. She left the bathroom, shuffled around the hall for some time and returned with clothes in her arms, fresh and soft in a floral scent that wafted over me.
I felt it in my nostrils, swirled around until it tickled some part of my throat and I leaned forward to vomit into the toilet while she stood behind me. She waited patiently, perched on the bathtub herself, slim legs crossed.
Once I finished, she dressed me with a sharpness about her movements. My arms lifted automatically for her, chin turned up toward the ceiling so that she could button the high collar of the blouse which had been borrowed from her own wardrobe, bending to tighten the laces of my boots and tug at my slipping tights. Then, she straightened herself out and stood so close that our chests bumped together, and she said, "In the days after my Freddie was arrested, I sat in my bedroom and starved myself because I thought death was a better thing than to be without him."
"And now?"
"I die a new death every morning as soon as my eyes open and I remember that Freddie was not arrested," she told me, "but rather taken by pestilence before his great revolution could take place – before he could have told our son Karl about his own life rather than have it explained to the boy through photographs and old letters – rather than have him made through second-hand memories and tales from our youth, which seemed it would never end, at the time."
I looked away from that burning sadness which swirled in the blueness of her stare and thought that she very much resembled Tommy because she was all narrow angles and shrewdness. She touched my cheek so gently, her own chin raised high against the rising tide of blue that lapped at us from beneath, some great ocean which filled this bathroom and crushed us in its strength.
"Tommy never lets himself rest," she continued. "Have you ever noticed that? Never, because if he does, he looks toward bottles coloured brown and he smokes more than he should, stuffs his lungs in all that smoke so that he cannot possibly breathe anything more – not pain, not remorse. Did the rum do that for you, Willa? Did it fill you so that all the rest of it had to be washed out and swept away?"
I shook my head and swallowed the painful stone which sat in my throat, plopped downward into my stomach. "When I was younger," I whispered, afraid that the spiders might overhear, "I did some things for Esther that put me in a bad place – I saw one of those things from my bad place last night."
She watched me knowingly. "And did it kill you, this bad thing?"
"It felt as if I went further than I would in death," I replied distantly, "because there is only black after death – I don't believe in colour, after that. It felt like it killed me."
"So, you opened your eyes and you died you first death of the day," she said, "and you will die many more of them for the rest of it, whenever you think of that bad thing from your bad place."
"And then?" I asked. I gripped her hands in mine, held them like I had often held Alfie's.
"And then you will keep walking," she answered. "Because your world is not yet made of black and there are still many colours to look at it until then, anyway."
She smoothed away the hairs which fell against my forehead and she pulled me into her arms, stroking at the nape of my neck as if she cradled her son more than her cousin. I fell against her in all my numbness which thawed in her hold and I told her, "I'm afraid that I will never have children with Alfie, Ada."
I had said it aloud when never before had it left my lips with more than dust around to hear it. But Ada had heard it and her arms were tight around mine. "I called him this morning," she said, her tone filled with typical straight-forwardness, "called him before the sun had risen and told him that you were alive. He was very quiet for a while. I knew he was still there, on the other end. I heard him breathe like he had not breathed in hours and I had allowed him the first shred of air into his lungs."
I felt her untangle us and arrange my limbs for me, hold my arms against my sides when they seemed to flop uselessly without her.
"And I told him that I would not tell him where you were even if he sent all his men in London after me," she smiled, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, "and he said that he would never have sent them 'round for me anyway, because you would only string him up afterward. I heard it in his voice, Willa. I heard what I used to hear when I spoke with my Freddie. What I hear in myself now when I speak to my Karl."
"What did you hear?" I croaked.
"Love," she answered simply. "Love and worry and affection and devotion – the things that make those little deaths hurt a little less than they do right in that moment when they first come to you. You might have children, or you might not have them. I cannot tell you what the future holds, not when there are Gypsies out there who could tell you for a pound or more. But there is another option for you."
I looked into her eyes and saw that familiar flash of Tommy in their depths.
"You take the love that you have with him," she stated bluntly, "and let it be enough for you, before he becomes someone that you can only tell people about through photographs and old letters."
ii
The house was quiet, all its curtains drawn. I stepped into the hall and felt the crunch of glittering shards beneath my boots from frames thrown against the wallpaper, strips peeling from the impact, along with the wooden coat-stand cracked and squeaking against the floorboards once pushed aside. Pushing further into the hall, I heard the shriek of the radio which remained on that station somewhere in-between all the others, grinding out harsh crackles and frantic spikes of sound from voices barely captured. I went there first to switch it off, then turned for the staircase. It creaked against my boots, like the floorboards had creaked in that old flat for Ada.
In our bedroom, amidst the rubble of his sheer fury made from the print of his boot crushed into the door of the wardrobe and books plucked of pages, I found him fixing the buttons of his shirt in front of the mirror, also broken. He fiddled with his cuffs and I saw his knuckles were formed from shredded skin and pools of blood dried against his calloused skin. He turned around, his movements brisk and formal.
With that same detached remoteness in his tone, he said, "Sabini reached out – wants a chat."
He approached and hovered alongside me, his mouth twisted toward my throat as if he might just bite down and wound, but he had already had enough hurt for the night. He never looked at me but pressed his lips coldly against my cheek and hissed, "I want you to go into that bathroom while I'm gone, yeah, and wash that fuckin' scent o' rum off your skin, and then I want you to go to fuckin' sleep for a while, 'cause you look a right mess – the sight o' ya, Willa, does nothin' but fuckin' embarrass me right now."
I felt each syllable spoken like the slash of a knife against my skin, brutal and bubbling fresh with blood. I looked around at all those shattered pieces of furniture and counted myself among them, which made me shrivel against the swell of tears which spilled over, tears that he normally would have wiped away. He heard the sniffle that I tried to contain, my shaky hand raised to hold against my nose in shame, but he soon marched around me and toward the hall. I winced at the sound of his footsteps halting there in the threshold, because I knew that he had not finished, that he was so bitter in his feelings toward me that he wanted more slashes, wanted more blood.
He balanced on that threshold between the outside world and ours, and said, "You know what Ollie asked me last night? Asked me why I ain't never married you after all this time we been 'ere together. I can look at you now and tell 'im exactly why I ain't never asked."
There it was: another death, but not the first of this day, for that had come much earlier. I blinked against its sudden blackness and opened my eyes once again to find colour, the redness of his cheeks left flushed from his rage and the brown shades of the floorboards beneath us and the crisp white of the curtains billowing in a faint breeze from the street and I was still there after this bad thing, added to the long list of all other bad things that had come for me before I had even reached this age of twenty-nine or something more.
I dared whisper, "I never turned you away when you were blue, Alfie, when you wanted to be alone with your r-radio –…"
Rushing violently back into the bedroom, his sudden movement startled me, and I stumbled away from him, frightened. He clapped his hands against my arms and contained me there. I knew that it had been the mention of that radio that rattled him, because it had never been mentioned between us – and there had been a long history of things left unmentioned between us, ever since those first days when we had walked together around Ivor Square, and those things had festered and they had become deepened sores in our wounds already infected.
So, here we stood, simply picking at them, pulling scabs, peeking beneath to see which one of us bled the most.
Snarling against my ear, he said, "If I have ever been fuckin' blue – then it's 'cause I 'ave seen men shot down in fields and I 'ave seen 'em get blown to fuckin' pieces so suddenly that I couldn't even tell who was Jack and who was John – who was me friend and who was me enemy – all the fuckin' same when their legs and arms and all parts what didn't get blown away are thrown together, innit?"
I still tasted rum, I still saw silken cobwebs spun and woven before me, still felt the remnants of that porcelain shell around me. I was trembling and I felt his hands sinking into my flesh.
"And y'know, that's 'ow I look at your Tommy and this fuckin' mess with Sabini – could be me friend, could be me enemy, and it don't make a fuckin' difference to me. Y'know what I'll do? I'll work with Sabini if 'e offers me somethin' better."
"You would work with the man who shot me?"
His eyes were deranged, his pupils blown wide. I looked at him and thought of Arthur. "I already told ya, I would do what it fuckin' takes to get to Margate. I told ya that. Don't make me out to be the fuckin' liar between the pair o' us, hm, 'cause you got that well-fuckin'-covered, Willa."
"Margate," I repeated. "You would do it for Margate, would you?"
He turned toward the door once more, smoothing out the creases in his jacket. "Yeah, I fuckin' would."
"And would you like it there, alone?" I asked slowly.
He paused, his body motionless but his head somewhat turned in my direction. Very hoarsely, he whispered, "What did you just fuckin' say?"
"Would you live there in that big house that we dreamed about," I asked him, "if I was not there with you? Because I could not be with a man who thought that I was nothing more than an embarrassment to him, Alfie, not with a man who thought that it was better to work with the man who almost killed her rather than marry her, who thinks she is lower than him for her blood."
He laughed, a bitter and cruel sound. "I think that, do I? Well, why don't you tell me then, what made you so fuckin' blue, eh? What was it, babe, eh? Wantin' another puppy or a new sewin'-machine? Feelin' down 'cause Esther ain't 'round to beat the blue out o' ya? Charlotte, too –…"
I tried to look at the floorboards, so flushed with tension and spite that I wanted only to push from him and rush off to the bathroom, but he grabbed my chin and twisted me painfully to look at him. Alfie smiled, stretching the corners of his mouth wide in mockery.
"Don't," I pleaded tearfully. "Don't talk about Charlotte, Alfie, don't you dare –…"
"Precious Charlotte, eh," he crooned. "Let's all 'ave a little sob for old Charlotte, eh? Let's throw in another for all them other girls from that fuckin' kip on Bell Road while we're at it, 'cause we can't forget 'em, can we? Not Willa, anyway – she ain't been given enough to make 'er 'appy. All 'cause of some fuckin' sprog –…"
"Why can't you ever call him what he is? Why is it always sprog and never baby?"
"Because I look at 'im, right, and I think 'bout all them things what we'll never 'ave," he roared at me, "and I know what you fuckin' want, Willa – don't think I'm fuckin' blind to it, but didn't you ever think that maybe it was just as fuckin' 'ard for me to 'old 'im, yeah? To think 'bout what my son could 'ave been like. Nah. You're the only one what 'urt from it. You don't think 'bout nothin' else, 'cause you're too busy chuggin' fuckin' rum to wonder. But I'll tell ya what I reckon – I reckon that maybe we ain't supposed to 'ave one 'cause we'd only ever ruin it – sprog, child, baby, whatever you wanna call it, we'd fuckin' ruin it."
I stared at him, unaware of how close he had gotten and how his hands still gripped me until they loosened, and he pulled himself away from me, still frothing and foaming at the mouth. He had scented blood and he was picking even harder, scraping at me, hollowing me out the best that he could.
"Esther never fuckin' loved you," he told me, "and Johnny fuckin' Dogs don't neither, 'cause it was obviously a whole lot easier for 'im to leave you 'ere than bring you back to Ireland all them years ago. And you know what else, darlin'?"
He leaned close again, his lips almost brushing mine.
"I'm startin' to see 'is fuckin' reasonin'."
I had never stood so perfectly still in all my life while all my innards floated away from me into some great unknown, out from my lips left parted, occasionally caught on the dried-out patches of my mouth, dry like cotton.
I turned from him and we separated – that was the only way to say it, because he went one way and I went another and still it never seemed far enough that his words might be softened, because I had never heard signs of that supposed love in him then; never love, never worry, never affection, never devotion. I heard hatred and bitterness and annoyance and perhaps that last one hurt most of all. I had annoyed him, bothered him. I embarrassed him.
And it turned out that I bled the most, after all.
iii
I sat in that porcelain bathtub in our bathroom and scrubbed at skin which was not mine, for he had peeled it all off and laid me bare before him and I still could not clean between tendons and lift muscle to wash out all that sickly-sweet blackness that had been there for such a long time. I wanted to pluck off this mask which had been placed on my face in my ninth summer, but I could never catch it around its rim with my fingernails, so that I only scratched myself. I stood from lukewarm water and let myself step on glass just to know if that porcelain shell had really cracked at all or if I had simply dreamt it.
And it hurt, but even shards of glass embedded in bare flesh was not enough, for the blood soon slowed while the wounds from his words stung ever sharper.
iv
I dreamt of that sensation of being afloat from the rum; adrift in a great big sea, washed away in whitish curls of froth and foam, outward and outward in those gentle waves, away from the sharp edges of his words and the spiteful glower in his eyes when he looked at me. He had spoken about Sabini only because that was my punishment, now. Alfie had never wanted the Gypsies here. He had barely tolerated it and had always looked at Tommy as something temporary in his path, soon to be blown aside, washed away like chalk in the rain. He would sooner shake hands with the man who had put a bullet in me rather than share pacts with Gypsies.
So, what had he ever wanted from me?
I looked around at the furniture around me as if I had not noticed it before – but I had, and it had only barely struck a chord in my tired state. I looked around at the lampshade that he had crushed beneath his boot and the petals ripped from flowers, vases smashed against the wall, the drawer cracked. I settled in its wreckage, settled on the floor, undressed.
I thought of rum and things afloat.
Between those gentle waves rippling in a great big sea, I thought of how it must have been when he had come home last night and felt the coldness of the house, his own porcelain shell, and how it must have been to step through each room and know that I was not there. He had told me about a dream like that once, in which he had opened doors, closed doors, walked between rooms that all blended into one, because he could not find me. I had made that real for him. I had woven his dream from silken threads.
He had surely thought that I was dead.
I remembered the night that I thought the Italians had killed him, before Kelly Lee had knocked on my door and spoken of paper rings in Bonny Glen. I had wailed, clawed at the floorboards, tore myself open at the thought of him buried alone in the soil without me there to hold him, because it had only ever been us in these last few years – all the others had seen that blackness and stayed there, but he had moved with me toward better things and he had done all of that for us.
It had never been Gypsy or Jew in that little us whispered between ourselves; it had meant Alfie and Willa.
Sabini had almost slaughtered me in that courtyard in front of the bakery.
How much did I matter to Alfie if he could still shake that hand stained in my own blood?
I had breathed the blue scent of the hospitals for weeks and perhaps that was how it laid itself in my marrow, all that blueness, but Alfie had been there, wiping drool and yellowish stains and peeling off bandages coated in thickened crust from dried blood and he had slept alongside me through nights made feverish from an infection.
Now he wanted an end to it all, an end that still meant Margate.
Because Tommy was not in Margate and Sabini was not in Margate. Alfie looked at them both in front of him and he only saw the limbs of maybe-Jack and maybe-John and he went with whomever could push him further toward Margate; all the fuckin' same.
I wanted the rum, too, because it would have warmed the agony which came after he had spoken about Johnny – it hurt more than Alfie had said it, because I loved Alfie more than I loved anybody on this earth. He had said it because he knew that it would hurt me. He said it because he knew that it would tear me apart.
So, I had really hurt him.
He never would have said those things if I had not hurt him first. I had let him suffer in that dreamlike world, opening doors and closing doors, passing through the rooms until there was nowhere left for him to search and he had to understand that I was not there, anymore. I remembered that night when I had held Alfie, his body composed of blue and black and purple bruises, his ribcage barely lifted from the pain of each breath drawn out, after those Italians had almost killed him.
He had almost been killed and I had almost been killed, too. He had been keeping score and that score led him to sit with Sabini and balance the scales that had long since been tipping against us.
And what did I ever do for him? How much did he matter to me if I refused this alliance with the Italians, this alliance which meant Margate might come sooner for us, that dream of Margate which had been wilting between us for a while?
It was wilting only because I did not think that Alfie truly wanted it yet. He had this war with the Italians, and he was still raking in more than he ever had; his wealth was at its height, his power over the Jewish community unquestioned, and most of all, he enjoyed this little game more than he liked to admit.
I had acknowledged that a long time ago. But I knew that he had not done that yet.
The only thing that I had not acknowledged was exactly what he had said: how hard it had been for him to hold that baby and know that we might never hold our own, how rough it had been after I had been shot for him, how much it hurt him that I had lied and spent last night sipping on the kind of alcohol that I had never touched before, how he knew that if I had not called Ada, then he might have thought it was the Italians who had taken me and killed me for a lot longer than he had.
And maybe he knew just by looking at me that I probably would have tried to drink that same rum again, even then.
So, what had he ever wanted from me?
I saw that dent in the wardrobe and crawled toward it on hands and knees already splintered, but that had come from here or it had come from the flat in which I had drank myself into a stupor, thought that the spiders had danced for me and then danced myself, that old Gypsy Girl kind of dance until I had tired myself out and I had slept it off to the tune of coins tinkling against that cap held out in the hopes that passing strangers might feel pity for the savage and the crippled girls stood alongside her; Ruth and Daisy, my old friends.
I glimpsed the fold of paper at the bottom of our broken wardrobe, its shelves caved inward from his wild and frenzied assault that must have come after he had realised that I was not in the house. I saw the letters that I had written for him tucked in that box he kept them in, half-spilled onto the floorboards. I plucked them from shards of glass and smoothed them out. I read the words of that old Willa who had written to him about the dogs that she had seen that morning and asked if France was as nippy as England had been the past few weeks and if he wanted a blanket because she had heard that it really was that nippy. She had sent it to him anyway.
She had been made of stronger things, that Willa.
I miss you very much, Alfie, she had written, and the dogs miss you to. May be you can get a dog when you are bak from Frans. I am really proud of you for being Capten. I can make a speshul poket on the shirt that I send for you – for the medal.
I almost laughed at those mistakes in spelling, the funny dip of my handwriting toward the bottom and how I had so carefully folded it into the envelope for him. I had tried to be funny, tried to make him smile even over there. I was more than touched that he had not torn them up after seeing how badly I had written them back then, especially when I had gotten so much better and hardly ever made mistakes anymore. But he said that they meant something to him, that they had kept him sane in the trenches.
He said that it meant I had been with him all that time.
I knew what he wanted from me. Ada had named them all, those things that he had wanted from me, the things that she had heard in his voice.
I stood from the floorboards, brushed those shards of glass and plucked the first dress that I saw from the wardrobe, a dress made of deep purple and pulled tight at the waist. I usually wore black dresses that were loose and comfortable, because that was how I had always dressed. I chose the clothes that best let me climb walls and leap over fences if coppers chased me – not those flowing dresses which often snagged on wooden splinters or caught on stray wires.
I cleaned my face of its reddened pallor and layered myself in more powder, coloured my lips in the lightest shade of red and swept my curly hair back from my shoulders with a clip holding it in place, although some strands sprung outward. I touched those lines on my skin and felt proud of them, because I was twenty-nine or something more and I had made it further than most girls of Gypsy blood who had been made to dance like that, all those years ago, by a woman who had never known our world and never even loved it.
By a woman who had never loved me, either.
But he had always been soft on me; he had always loved me.
v
Crowding the courtyard of the bakery had been a handful of Italian men stood with cigarettes and liquor pulled from beneath the flaps of their expensive vests, casting wary glances at the Jewish men on the other side. I passed them all and felt those eyes follow me in confusion, especially on the Jewish side, and it sparked a sudden rush of tension once an Italian man stepped forward and blocked me, arms swept wide so that he formed a physical barrier – then his hands touched my shoulders and I heard the cocking of guns behind me from the Jewish men, the entire yard descending into a stand-off once the Italians lifted their own weapons in response.
I raised my own hand very slowly, my eyes boring into his own before I called out, "Take it easy, lads."
The Italian licked his cigarette from one side of his mouth and rolled it toward the other end, then said, "I want to check you for weapons."
I nodded. I had not anticipated it, but I understood that it looked suspicious, because Sabini was in a basement with his own enemy about an alliance and I had appeared halfway through it, perhaps brandishing a weapon and shooting that weasel straight through his skull. I could not tell this man that it never crossed my mind, either, but I let him pat around my waist and down my thighs, scrunching my eyes tight against the horrible sensation of it.
He lifted my arms and turned my right wrist toward him, looking at that burn from a cigarette – he had not looked for it, but rather looked as if he knew exactly where it was. He rolled his own cigarette again, and drawled, "It healed nicely."
I snatched my wrist from him, slowly realising that he was the same man who had burnt it in the first place. I had not recalled his face. There had been too much pain and blood and soil for that. I would know it from that moment onward, because he smiled and his teeth were yellowed, his moustache weak and greasy. I would remember him.
"Mrs Solomons?"
I heard that familiar voice and turned, unaware of how badly my hands trembled until I used them to push out the folds of my dress. I saw that Caleb stood behind me, his cropped hair dampened by the drizzle and his brown eyes blinking between myself and the Italian. It dawned on me that the boy had stepped forward from that line of Jewish men and approached despite the danger of it, his slim body half-turned as if he was still not sure that he should have done it at all.
"Mrs Solomons, I can take you downstairs," he said.
The Italian clicked his tongue behind me. "Gotta check him, too."
Caleb lifted his arms and allowed his pistol to be taken, plopped on a barrel alongside the doorway before he motioned for me to follow him. I was a little surprised by the formality of this meeting and I knew the reason for it once he reached the basement. I breathed the thickness of the tension and heard the shouts behind that door, heard raised voices blooming ever louder.
"Mr Solomons never told us that you were coming, Mrs Solomons," Caleb mumbled. "He went in there with Mr Sabini a while ago. Are you sure that you want to go in there, too?"
"You know, Caleb," I muttered, peeling off my coat, "a good friend of mine once told me that it doesn't matter who the beatings come from as long as you can get something out of it."
He almost dropped my coat once I threw it to him, his eyes wide. He scrambled to catch the hem of my coat and fold it properly, but he was so bewildered that the sleeves flopped from his hands. "I'm afraid I don't quite understand, Mrs Solomons –…"
"I'm about to take that beating," I told him. "And didn't I tell you that you could call me Willa?"
I pushed my hands against those large wooden doors and prepared myself for the onslaught, both from Sabini and Alfie. I stepped into the room and closed the doors behind me. I only closed them to cut away from the sudden silence that engulfed the room, its large space ballooning in an even heavier form of tension than before. I walked toward the table in its centre as if it had always been planned that I was meant to be there. I sat on the right of Alfie and felt his fury bubble anew. He breathed out, just once.
It was enough to smother it.
"'Bout time, Willa," he announced cheerfully. He had always been adaptable, pretending that he had expected me all along. Even Ollie leaned forward from his spot, his eyebrows scrunched, before he sat back and seemed to have accepted that Alfie had simply never informed him of my impending arrival.
Beneath the table, his hand found mine and held it, smoothing his thumb across my knuckles.
I was thrown by Alfie holding my hand at all, but looked upward at Sabini and understood it right away, because I had last seen Sabini in that bar before a copper had kicked me around an alleyway and kissed me, called me kitten, beat me so badly that my tooth had fallen out in the car afterward and I had passed out from the pain of it. I tasted that copper sting whenever I looked at Sabini.
He smiled, curling those pale lips against his gums because he could taste it, too.
"Willa Solomons!" he cried out. "What a pleasant surprise. You never mentioned, Alfie, that your lovely wife would be joining us."
Alfie smoothed over that jab about the lack of a marriage between us. I had caught it, though, seen it in the flinch of his shoulders soon rolled out in a pretence of a shrug. It had stung him. He cleared his throat and held his arms out, shrugging his shoulders again. "Willa was busy, weren't she? Weren't ya, love?"
"Very busy," I repeated. "My apologies, Mr Sabini. I had really been looking forward to meeting with you again."
"Yes, well," he simpered, "it is perfect timing for me to present my apologies to you. Just perfect, isn't it?"
He turned to his right and nodded to the battered man who sat alongside him and watched us all with his lips turned upward in a permanent display of utter contempt and disgust for us all. Sabini tapped his arm once, then tapped it a lot more forcefully and the man jolted, shifting his swollen sockets toward Sabini and reluctantly grumbling, "Perfect."
"I am so very sorry for what happened after our meeting in The Chestnut Bar. I reprimanded that policeman for his crude actions."
"Water under the bridge, Mr Sabini," I smiled. "How was his lip after all that nonsense then?"
Sabini stuck his tongue between his teeth and bit down hard for just a moment. "He had to receive some treatment. Stitches, you know. Left him with a very prominent scar."
"Well, you never know what you get when you wind me up."
Alfie squeezed my hand in warning, clearing his throat once more to draw the attention back to him. "Your apologies are appreciated. Willa, darlin', you'll be glad to 'ear that the border between the Jews and the Italians 'as gone back to Farrington Road, innit?"
Sabini sucked his teeth, almost as if he wanted to muffle a snarl at the thought of it. "Yes, well, Farrington Road and Camden Road – …"
Speaking over him quite loudly, Alfie rambled, "A very diplomatic and kind offerin' on the part of our Italian comrades 'ere, to allow that border to be amended –…"
"That is old, old history between our people, a history that we can discuss later," Sabini wheedled.
"A border which I find to be very pertinent, very significant, very relevant – I'm thinkin' o' all the synonyms, me, and which –…"
"Because there are other things to be discussed that are far more –…"
"I remember walkin' down there when I was a lad, yeah, and that road was for the Jews –…"
Sabini slammed his fist against the table and held his jaw so tightly that it looked like the string of a bow which had been plucked, vibrating from a violent tremor. "Because what we need to discuss are the fucking Gypsies, Alfie! You remember what we said about them?"
Alfie sucked in his cheeks and blew them out, looking around the room as if terribly bored. "I do, as a matter o' fact, hm."
"War against the Gypsies," Sabini stated.
I let my hand fall slack from Alfie's grip, landing limply between my thighs. I had expected it. It had been the whole purpose of sitting here and accepting that Alfie had made his choices for us, but it never settled well in my bones like I had hoped that it might.
Sabini looked into my eyes and lifted those hideous lips into that caricature of a smile, tapping his tongue against the back of his teeth. I watched each roll of that pink blubber and thought of how Arthur had slit open the cheek of that waiter. I wished he was here now. I wished I could put a knife in his hand and ask him to do the same thing to Sabini.
But Arthur was not here, and this was my beating to take for the Gypsies.
vi
Settling into my old seat at the sewing-machine, I pulled a loose thread between my fingertips and squeezed hard, letting my fingertips become numb and purple so that it hurt to touch them with my other hand. Alfie reclined in his chair across from me and held his hands over his face, clasped together in some butchered form of prayer. He had sent Ollie off and left Caleb to wait at the car for us but had done little else since then, other than sit in this chair and shroud his face from me. I knew that it was now well past midnight and I saw the pale slivers of bluish light beyond the windowpanes. He scrubbed at his skin and finally pulled his hands away.
"I don't want you in the bakery anymore."
It ripped through me, that statement. Somehow, I stayed upright against the rush of stabbing pain in my chest. "Okay, Alf."
He hummed, satisfied. "You can make shirts at the 'ouse."
I almost tore through my cheek with my teeth. "All right."
"And you will take Cyril out if 'e needs to piss tonight."
I rolled my eyes. "Fine."
"And when Tommy comes down tomorrow night to see me 'bout my deal with Sabini, you can put a smile on that fuckin' mug o' yours or the man'll think we do nothin' but fight."
I snapped the thread between my fingertips and felt the pressure loosen, looking at him with eyebrows raised. "What?"
Alfie snorted and kicked his legs onto the table. "I been doin' it all the time, takin' that fuckin' dog out, and 'e pisses like a fuckin' race-'orse. Your cousin would know all about that, eh? Might buy an 'orse. Think it'd scare Ollie."
I was breathing quite slowly, afraid to believe him. "Tommy. I meant Tommy, Alfie. What d'you mean?"
"Hm? Oh, yeah, 'e called me up recently, told me that 'e would be willin' to sell me a good portion o' 'is business if I let Sabini believe I was crossin' the Gypsies. More than what Sabini was willin' to part with, eh, cheap fuckin' wop that 'e is."
I stood from my chair and moved around the table to come close to him, worried that he might push me away, but he only dropped his boots from the table and held his arms open. I fell against him, stunned when he stroked my hair and nuzzled my neck, seeming just as relieved to hold me as I was to be held by him. I felt the well of tears and sniffled.
This time, he wiped the tears away.
"Alfie, I am so sorry," I whispered.
"I never meant what I said, Willa," he replied softly. He cupped my cheeks and made me look directly into his eyes. "Not one fuckin' word. Not 'bout Johnny, not 'bout Charlotte – none o' that. I only wanted – I just – I know that it 'urt ya, seein' the – the baby. Ollie and Franny's baby. But darlin' – it might 'appen someday for us. And we won't give 'im some fuckin' name like Oliver Junior, like our Ollie was plannin', eh? We would name 'im somethin' much stronger."
"Well, you named Cyril, so I don't have much hope for your choices," I sniffled, grinning at him.
"Cheeky fuckin' – you weren't complainin' when I first said it!"
"I had to be nice to you, you got me a dog. But Ollie thought it sounded a little pompous."
"Pompous? Ollie said that? Well, I'm surrounded by fuckin' traitors, me," Alfie grumbled, but his lips turned upward into a smile and he traced my cheekbones with his fingers.
I sank onto the floorboards in front of his legs, overwhelmed because Alfie seemed to have forgiven me, even more relieved that he had planned against Sabini too – but most of all I was still distraught because I knew that I had to tell him what had really happened at The Diamond. He had sensed it, his fingers slowing at my lips and pulling the lower one down, like he wanted to force the words to flood from me.
"It was hard to see the baby," I explained gently. "You're right, Alf. But last night, I was – I was just – if I had known in advance then maybe I could have prepared for it, but it just happened outside the bathrooms –…"
He straightened in his seat and leaned forward, eyes locked on mine.
"I saw William Yaxley," I told him. "And it killed me."
Because that had been another death from another day; seeing Alfie crumple there in front of me was one more, piled upon all the others.
He fell backward as if he had been struck, the breath taken from him. I pushed onto my knees and held his arms, frightened by that unfocused sheen in his eyes as if he ran through every moment in the restaurant but could not understand how Yaxley had sat anywhere close to him and Alfie had not known it. But there was no reason to know it, because Yaxley had been placed in our past, far behind us, in that part of me still made of stockings and starched aprons and a bonnet; sometime after paper-rings but somewhere before letters from the war.
"I can find 'im," Alfie whispered. "I'll do it for you, love. I'll choke 'im with my bare 'ands. Then you can rest better, sweet'eart, yeah? 'Cause you'll know 'e ain't there and you'll know that you don't need fuckin' rum to make you feel better 'cause I'll 'ave done it me-self, yeah –…"
He rambled like he had rambled in front of Sabini, but his words became more frantic and violent. I held his cheeks like he had held mine and shushed him, kissed his forehead and his lips and tried to muffle the sounds that hurt me.
"You'll feel safe," he told me. "I'll make you feel safe, Willa."
I felt his tears blend against my own once I touched his cheeks against mine, my hands trembling from the pain in his voice. "I do feel safe, Alf."
"No, no – I failed ya, you couldn't even fuckin' tell me, I let you down like the first time 'round –…"
I was confused by his words, caressing his hair and letting him rest against my chest. "Alfie, I didn't tell you because – because I was not myself after I saw him. I wanted to be far from that place and I didn't want Yaxley to take over the house like he took over the old flat on Bell Road and he took over the factory back then."
I inhaled sharply, blinking through the blistering prick of tears that kept falling no matter how much I tried to steady my breathing.
"I wasn't thinking right. Because he looked at me and he didn't even recognise me, Alfie. He didn't – it was like he didn't even remember it," I croaked, "and that hurt more than anything because – because it means that he did it more than once, doesn't it? He must have done it so many times and I was the lucky one who got away before it – and I couldn't cope with it. I know it isn't France, Alfie, I know it's not the same and I shouldn't cry over it – the girls used to tell me that I was dramatic because there weren't even any bruises from it, like it never happened, but it did –…"
He cupped the nape of my neck. "You don't ever listen to that, Willa. It 'appened and it don't mean a fuckin' thing if there weren't any bruises – and it don't matter what 'appened in France, neither. I said that 'cause I was angry with ya, I was – I was scared. I was fuckin' terrified. I ain't never been the sort o' man what don't know what to do. They made me Captain 'cause I can think on me feet. But in that 'ouse, I stood there and I didn't know what to do. Couldn't even think to lift the phone and call Ollie. Couldn't even think at all."
I looked into his eyes, my own heart thumping.
He shrugged his shoulders. "I thought you was fuckin' dead and I wanted to be there with ya if you was."
"Don't say that," I pleaded, "don't ever say things like that, Alfie."
But I had said the same thing the night that the Italians had taken him.
"You told me once that I should 'ave found me-self a good Jewish girl," he said softly. "But I ain't never wanted nobody in this world except for you, Willa. And Ollie did ask me why I ain't married ya. And I weren't – I weren't embarrassed. Another stupid fuckin' thing that I said 'cause I wanted to see you 'urt the way that I did. I told 'im that I wanted it. I always wanted it. I just been –…"
I felt his hands trail toward mine. His touch was kind and warm.
"After you were shot, your uncle came to the 'ospital. We stood in the 'all, yeah, and I 'eard them nurses movin' you 'round and I wanted to be with ya – but your uncle, 'e turns to me and 'e says, 'you put my girl in there, and even if she survives it, you will put 'er there again and again until you kill 'er.' 'e told me that you would wake up one day and realise that I ain't never done nothin' but trapped you with me, like Esther trapped ya."
I bit hard on my own lip to hold it in, that scream which boiled in my throat and burned me in its wrath.
Alfie drew in a deep breath and added, "'e said that when 'e looks at me 'ands, 'e sees dirt. 'e says that all the Gypsies can see it when they look at me. But I didn't understand what 'e meant."
I heard the words of Kelly Lee and a shiver rippled through me, making me look away from Alfie and shake out my limbs from the coldness of it. I smiled weakly at him and said, "We can prove them wrong, Alfie. We're stronger together, aren't we?"
He nodded, childlike in his movements. "And Willa?"
"Yes, sweetheart?"
"I don't want you out the bakery," he said. "I was only windin' you up, darlin'."
I let out a laugh. "That's good, because I have no intention of getting out of bed when Cyril needs the toilet tonight."
He smiled, intertwining our fingers. "I knew that was pushin' it. But I need to ask somethin' of you now."
Surprised by the severity of his eyes once he lifted them to look at me, I stilled beneath his stare and felt a hard lump in my throat form. He released my hand and it prompted me to call his name. "Alfie?"
"You don't disappear on me again. You don't ruin yourself with rum," he pleaded. "You don't fuckin' disappear on me like that, ever again –…" – he had become agitated, his fist hit the table – "you promise me now in this office in this bakery that belongs to us, 'cause I ain't goin' through that again, yeah, I ain't fuckin' doin' it –…"
His leg bounced, his fist hit the table again and again.
"And this is the last night that you'll be Willa Sykes."
I stared at him, my eyes sore and tired from tears. "What?"
"Tomorrow," he stated. "We marry tomorrow, and we do just that – we prove 'em all fuckin' wrong."
