A/N: So, I wanted to slow down for a minute and let Willa and Alfie deal with a few things in this chapter that will become clear. Willa has had certain fears ever since her younger days and now even more with Alfie and his line of business, so I wanted them to properly deal with it. And season 3 does not have much Alfie in it either, so I'm looking to fit in what I can. As always, thank you for all feedback given! I am very grateful for it!
twenty-three
The halls were painted in the same sickly lime-green colour that they had been all those years beforehand when I had lain in the scratchy bedsheets of a cot, when I had watched nurses flit behind opaque curtains like a macabre puppet-show for children, all shadows stretched upward by unseen strings and flung around. The curtains around him were different, hollowed by an orange lamp alongside him which pooled the light around him, made him the shadow which never moved or twitched at all, for he had long since fallen asleep.
He breathed like some wounded animal, his lungs coated in a thin lining that he coughed into bowls placed around him like the ceremonial pieces of a ritual. I held out the bowls for him and watched that blackish phlegm spat from his mouth. I ignored the nurses who asked if I would rather return home and pull off the clothes that I had worn for three nights straight.
I never answered them. I never spoke in all that time there.
I took the cloths and cleaned him, swept those damp rags around his throat and chest. I stilled at patches of red, scaly skin that clotted his sternum and spread outward in sporadic spots all around his ribcage and traced his spine like wings plucked and torn from him.
I asked the nurse for creams like those that we had bought him, because he had trouble with dry skin and little clumps of scab-like wounds which bled and oozed from an odd black spot in the middle of all that redness. The nurse gathered the bowls and glanced over those marks all over him. She turned away from them and took the bowls out into the hall.
I cleaned those trails of blood and placed plasters over those patches which cracked and wept the most; nobody told me otherwise.
ii
Moonlight washed through the windows like the stream of a gentle river, but that silver hue made him look like a corpse and I stood to close the curtains, disturbed by it. I wanted him in our bed, tucked into our blankets with that floral scent that he liked, but he breathed soot and the alcohol they wiped over his skin and his own blood. I took off my scarf and tucked it around him and smiled when he seemed to sink into its folds with a heavy sigh, as if he recognised that it was mine even in his sleep.
I thought he was cold, so I stood and looked for another nurse in those halls which ran onward and onward in scuffed linoleum pathways. I heard tiny gurgles and glanced left into a bedroom where a sleeping woman cradled her new-born in the crook of her arm. He drooled over his scrunched fists and grinned with just his gums.
I went back into his bedroom and settled on the chair with my legs beneath me, curled into its padding. I held his hand, swept my thumb over his knuckles.
iii
I had never felt so alone in all my life.
iv
But soon Franny and Ollie were there, and I could not complain of loneliness. Instead, it was another one of those words that had not yet been formed for something more passionate than love and more bleak than sorrow and it splashed against me while Franny placed flowers upon his bedside, fluffed drooping petals and asked if I liked the colour. I looked at them but saw no colour there and wondered how the moonlight had washed it away even if I had left those dense curtains closed.
Ollie pulled a chair close against the railings of his bed and spoke with him in low hushes. Arrangements were made, and I was arranged along with them, mentioned somewhere before hotels but after calls to empty a safe stashed in a house out in the countryside someplace, someplace where the devil laughed in black rivers.
v
"We'll 'ave to stay in an 'otel, mind," he croaked. "Just for a little while. Ain't safe, where we were, in our 'ouse. But it won't be for too long, yeah?"
vi
Black phlegm stole his speech. I held the bowl, cupped the nape of his neck and felt each tremor that ran through him while he spewed out that sickly-sweet blackness. I nodded. I was limp from it, all that nod-and-smile business. I was limp from it, because all that I could think was that I really hated this life now, really hated that bricks came through our windows and our clothes carried the scent of rum and he had pistols stashed beneath our pillows and I felt a cold sweat whenever I heard thumping footsteps in the hall, convinced that it was another stranger who wanted to kill him and I knew that it was not like this for other couples out there.
vii
I looked at my bracelets and coats and wondered if I would ever have to sell them if he died.
viii
No, I thought, he has made a will for me. He has ensured that if he dies, I will always be comfortable.
ix
And I wanted to take one of those pistols from beneath one of our pillows and place it against my temple at the mere thought of it, all those days spent alone in some great big house without him, with only the jingling pearls on my bracelets for sound, only the rich coats he had bought me around my shoulders for warmth. I dreamt of that pistol there, its cold barrel against the heat of flesh. I dreamt of it over and over.
x
He pulled away from the bowl and fell against his sheets. I held a cup against his lips and let him drink from it, a cold shot of water which soothed his throat.
"Okay, Alf," I told him. "Just for a short while."
xi
My index finger twitched and twitched with each word spoken.
xii
The nurses had seen his surname and I was brought a cot with plump pillows and lavish blankets draped over its skeleton-frame which creaked beneath my weight. I perched on its edge and felt its coiled springs cut into my skin. I had not slept well. I wore heavy stains of purple around my eyes and withered like the flowers upon his bedside did, furled inward and rotted. It seemed that all the while he recovered, that illness spread into me instead, coated my throat in black phlegm and made me tired. I wept in that bedroom whenever he slept, and I held it in whenever he was awake.
He had charmed those nurses with his humour, poked at the doctors so much that they stood around him with these permanent smiles while they peeled away the bandage which coated his right forearm. I had cried from the sight of it, the brief glimpse that I got of that wet, raw flesh was criss-crossed from the gauze pulled away by a nurse. Its bumpy edges were lined in yellowish pus and she assured him that it was a minor reaction that she would soon heal with more creams and medication.
Alfie had made some joke about being an old man, and I could only think, you might never become old because this life will never let you.
xiii
Butcher had faded away. I had never heard anybody talk about him in years, apart from the occasional recollection from Alfie. If his name ever floated from obscurity, then all descriptions of him were layered in a disinterested tone, because he had just been some gangster from Camden Town who had his brains blown out by another gangster, who had his brains blown out by another gangster and another and another until nobody remembered how it started in the first place.
And it was Charlotte who had told me that Butcher had been killed and it was Charlotte who had first used that tone, that tone that meant: he died and we're still alive and so who cares, anyway?
Nobody spoke of him with photographs and nobody spoke of him with letters he had written, like Ada did to let her boy remember his father. I hardly remembered what Butcher had really looked like, anymore. I remembered him like I remembered the local men from Bell Road; in little shreds, sometimes with stubble or drooping brows, but perhaps that had been another man, and perhaps that had been the father from the first level of flats or that other man on the third.
I looked at Alfie and I became terrified that boys like Elijah and Karl might only ever remember him as that gangster who used to own a slice of Camden Town before he had his brains blown out because he was a gangster shot by another gangster, or his home had been bombed while he was still in it or his wife had been shot on the street while she crossed it and even their dog had been a target, because that was how it went for people like that, for gangsters shot by other gangsters – and they died and we're still alive and so who cares, anyway?
And that would be all there was to it.
xiv
And I knew that if he died, this loneliness would be eternal, because it was only us.
xv
There were friends around us, but Ada had Karl while Franny had Ollie and Elijah. She had already talked about another baby wanted between the both of them. Tommy had always been somewhat distant. Johnny rolled between different families around both England and Ireland. I had Cyril and the ketubah and letters from another time; his life would be retold with photographs scattered in-between those little details about him that I would tell people about until my throat became raw from it. But who would want to hear about it, anyway?
Because who other than God –…
xvi
Scuttling along the hall, a nurse told him that Mr Thomas Shelby wished to speak with him, but that the telephone could not be removed from reception. Alfie had hauled himself from the bed, ignored all my warnings to watch his arm, and strolled through the hall with that nurse while I waited in his room. I folded his shirts into a suitcase and placed it with the others that Ollie had brought around earlier – all of our possession squeezed right into those little boxes, prepared to be pulled out and placed anywhere we liked.
I fiddled with the locks and sat on my cot again.
I worried that some gunman might float toward Alfie, having emerged from blackened depths in another hall, only to find him exposed. But he returned a few moments later and stretched across his bed, his hand rested on his stomach, a bright smile on his lips. He told me that Tommy had offered him a safehouse as well as an invitation to a charity that Grace planned to host the following night. But all of that meant a trip to Birmingham.
Alfie had told him, "If I wanted to visit 'ell, Tom, I would 'ave stayed in that burnin' 'ouse, yeah?"
xvii
The nurse cleaned his wounds once more and I watched from behind her. He hardly even winced when she peeled off that first layer once more and the yellowish pus had changed to a softer red, which made the nurse smile and pat his other arm reassuringly. Alfie was not bothered by the burn on his arm. Instead, he looked at it like he looked at all other cuts and jagged scars all over his body; just another mark from another battle, shrugged off and hastily buried beneath bandages and sleeves. The nurse glanced over those patchy ridges of skin beneath his hairline and scratched out the names of softer creams that she recommended for dried skin like that.
Once she left, I took the note and placed it in my pocket, because I knew that he would not buy them for himself. Alfie was always recognised in the Jewish areas and it made him reluctant to buy those creams and pills for himself. He thought that it made him look weaker in front of the Jewish community. So, I would buy all these things for him.
I glanced over the list and mumbled, "I'll get this all for you, Alf. But the Gypsy stuff is better."
"Why do you think I married one?" he replied, grinning toothily at me.
xviii
Tuesday unfolded in bleak greyness. I walked through the halls with him and felt a thudding church-bell cracking against my forehead from the pressure held there. I thought if I coughed, my lungs would slither up in my throat and fall onto the linoleum tiles, flaccid. I was convinced that if he stepped out onto the street and went to the car that waited for us, there would be another stranger out there with more than a brick in his hand, more than a grenade thrown at him. It would be more certain, without a mistake this time. They would make sure they got him, and I felt a prickling in my right arm where I had been shot myself and –…
Because I had been shot, too. I had been shot and burnt and beaten, just like he had been shot and burnt and beaten. It had been like that our whole lives.
And just when had we simply accepted it?
"Willa?"
I had become stationary behind him, forgot that I was supposed to follow when all I could think about in this hall was how it felt as if a clock loomed overhead and counted out each second – I was not sure what was at its end, but it was there all the same.
Or maybe I did know, and I was too scared to admit it.
"You can be afraid, love."
Thrown from my thoughts, I looked at him and saw that he watched me as if he understood it all, every little panicked fear that flit through my brain. I melted beneath him, my eyes filling with tears. It was not meant to be like this for couples only married for barely two-and-a-half years, threatened and followed and watched. I shook my head, scrunched my lips tight together to stem those horrid, racking sobs.
"I'm not afraid for myself, Alfie," I told him solemnly.
"Not 'ere," he said.
His words had been curt and harsh. He held my arm tightly and looked around himself, peering into those same corners, taking in the strangers who rushed around us. Paranoia simmered between us and when he finally looked at me, he saw the hurt which radiated from me, saw the worry and fear held within me. I felt his heaviness just like mine. His lips twitched as if he might speak.
But I was hurt, and I was tired.
So, I pushed around him and repeated, "Not here."
xix
The Ritz had a lobby with a sweeping staircase and a beautiful chandelier dripping golden light overhead, our suitcases quickly swept from our hands by a bellboy. I walked with Alfie along a hallway toward looming doors made of gold trimmings which were pulled open to a massive living-room fit with a fireplace and another chandelier in its centre. I stared at the rich curtains pooled around in lavish beige and glittering gold, its red armchairs dotted around, its bedroom filled with mahogany wardrobes and a massive bed for us.
Alfie crossed the living-room and collapsed onto a sofa, brushing his hands over his face. I sat on his left side and took his arm in mine, leaning against his shoulder. I brushed my thumbs over his knuckles and felt the dried skin there, cracked between his fingers and pooling over his palms in sore patches just like his back. I had never thought that I would ever sit in a place like the Ritz when I was a little girl, never thought that I could pay for it with what little I made from snatching bracelets and necklaces.
But I looked around now and wondered what had ever been so special about it.
The telephone startled us both and I glanced at him worriedly, afraid that somebody had already located us.
Alfie dropped his hands onto his lap and said, "Christ, Willa, if it were the fella what wants to kill me, d'you really think 'e would give us ring 'round first to ask if we was all right with 'im comin' 'round now rather than later to suit us better, eh? It might be Tom or Ollie, they know where we are."
I rolled my eyes at him and shuffled along the sofa to take the telephone from its cradle. I listened to the rush of words which came from the other end, spoken in a feminine voice that came from neither Tom nor Ollie, and a numbness spread from my ankles once I heard what Ada Shelby told me, her words hoarse and stuttering.
She had been in a crowd which soon scattered at the sudden crack of a gun. She turned and watched the fall; the fall of Grace Shelby in the arms of her brother and his fall along with her, though she soon realised that he had fallen so much further than she had fallen once her lips turned blue and her eyes became glassy. Ada had watched Arthur by the staircase with the gunmen beneath him, blood on his knuckles and a wildness in his eyes. She told me about the funeral as if it had been planned already and I dropped the telephone because of it.
Alfie held it to his ear but heard nothing. Ada had already left for the hospital or morgue, someplace.
Because that was where Grace had been brought and that was where Tommy would sit with her until she was brought out to the wet soil and placed there.
There was knowing in Alfie's eyes. He would have known it even if I was not made of trembling hands and wide eyes – glassy eyes – and he still asked, "What was that about, Willa?"
His voice betrayed him; it cracked before he could finish, and I knew that it had not come from soot.
And I saw her with lips turned blue before I answered him.
"Grace Shelby was shot. She died in his arms."
I never had to explain whose arms, for Alfie knew well enough, and a small curse slipped from him once he fell backward against his seat with his eyes blown wide. His hand covered his mouth, drawn along his stubble toward his chest where it lay there, limp from his own shock. I believed in signs and I believed in soil. I knew that it could have been Alfie killed in that house and I knew that it could have been me on that telephone to call Ada.
My index finger twitched again – again and again.
"Fuckin' 'ell. Tom ain't gonna – Tom ain't gonna come back from that," Alfie murmured.
Ada had not spoken about who might have been behind it. I looked at Alfie and wondered if he had known the name of this murderer before Ada had because he knew some of the darker things that Tommy dabbled in, but Alfie was looking at the fireplace still unlit. The curtains behind us had been pulled apart and some pale light washed around his shoulders, cast his face in flickering shadows.
"That could have been you, Alfie," I told him finally.
"Willa," he groaned. "Don't start on this – it ain't the fuckin' same. Grace Shelby were shot and I –…"
"And it is a bullet or a knife or a bomb that makes the difference, is it?" I asked him. "You think that it makes a difference to Tommy? Would it have made a difference to me if you still ended up dead?"
"But I made it out. And I am sittin' with you now."
"And I fear the day when you won't be, Alfie. I already imagine how it will sound when I am called your widow and not your wife, d'you know that?"
He sucked in his cheeks and blew them out as if that had really hurt him. He steeled himself and muttered, "I know you are upset, yeah, and you're shaken from what 'appened at the 'ouse. I understand that, love, but you're runnin' away with these things. Some prick tried to usurp me – ain't the first time, is it?"
"So, we just move into another house until another prick tries to burn that one down, too, and we continue until another prick –…"
"You know," he cut me off, speaking loudly. "You told me that you knew what you were sacrificin'."
I bubbled in anger, scrunched my fists tight and glared at him. "I said that after we talked about children," I spat, "and I said that when we talked about safety. But I never meant that I was willing to sacrifice you, Alfie."
He scoffed and looked away. "Don't be so fuckin' dramatic 'bout it, Willa. I dealt with bigger men than Jack Murphy."
"So, it was him, then?"
"Who else would it 'ave been?"
"Oh, Alfie, come off it. Who else? Could have been Sabini, who was attacked this month himself. Maybe it was whoever went after Tommy and his wife –…"
"Tom is involved in transactions what don't involve me, Willa," Alfie snapped. "And 'e got fucked over it by it."
"He got fucked over? What about Grace, hm?"
"Well, I suppose Grace prob'ly told 'im that she knew what she was fuckin' sacrificin' just before the bullet went in, eh?! Maybe Grace realised that all them nice things 'round 'er were comin' from takin' on men what knew where best to shoot and maybe if she 'ad survived it, she would 'ave grown a fuckin' spine and she would 'ave accepted that this is what comes from a life like this one!"
As if he had slapped me, I sank back against my seat and stared at him, shocked by his words and how he had leaned forward to scream them, his cheeks stained red and veins torn from his throat. I was not afraid of him, but I felt shaky and unwilling to be around him right then. The house and its loss had been minor in comparison, because he and Cyril had made it out. But there was another loss layered beneath it. It was the loss of safety; not mine, for I had given up on that many years before I had even known him, but for his own.
It was the feeling that I once had, when we could close our doors and leave the business behind and I would have felt better knowing he was with me, away from all that – but it had seeped beneath the doors and it had spread across the hall just like the flames had.
"You tell yourself those same words the day that you bury me, Alfie," I told him.
I stood and left him there while I went into the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind me.
xx
I heard that her family had wanted her buried in Ireland. The Shelbys had wanted her closer to Tommy, but Ada said that he had not been around the house much at all. He had taken his favourite horse and left for the black fields, the same fields that he watched that night of his wedding when I had stood in the hall with him. In the bedroom, Alfie listened while I spoke on the telephone. I asked if she wanted me there, but she said she knew I had my own issues in London, and she would return shortly herself. There was no talking to Tommy anymore.
"He's gone someplace where I cannot find him," she said, "even when he's standing right in front of me. Does that even make any sense?"
I looked at Alfie through the slit in the doorway. "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, it does."
xxi
The next morning, I took my purse and turned for the door, but I heard him right behind me. I had the list of creams folded in my hand, its soft crinkles smoothed out beneath my thumb. I held the handle with my other hand and my purse slid along my arm, settling in its crook. I thought of that infant I had seen in the hospital, all wet fists and wet gums.
"Don't go out by yourself, Willa. Let Ollie do it, yeah?"
"And let him be attacked, so that Franny and Elijah might be left without him? No," I muttered. "I'll do it myself. I know this life very well, Alfie."
I stepped into the hall and closed the door behind me, storming along the carpet so sharply that I imagined holes torn out in chunks from each piercing slam of my heel against it. I soon heard cushioned, padded footsteps behind and looked to find Alfie hastily pulling his coat around himself, chasing after me with his usual grumbles.
"You don't need to come with me," I called to him.
"Yeah, well, need to stretch me legs. Tired of them ugly portraits in the room, too." He walked alongside me, purposefully bumping my shoulder with his own and smiling warmly.
I rolled my eyes at him, but my smile betrayed me when he bumped me again and again.
"Stop it, Alfie."
"Make me."
Once we reached the top of the staircase which led into the lobby, I looped his arm with mine. I worried about his hip and these stairs, although he could have taken the elevator. Alfie was too proud for certain things. He liked the show of it, preferred that anybody in the lobby who knew him or had heard his name, looked at him as powerful. I had always looked at him like that, but never quite in the way that he had probably intended. I just marveled at his determination, his tolerance for pain.
His bloody stubbornness.
"We should find some good flowers," I told him. "For Grace. And a card, for Tom."
Alfie hummed as we stepped out into the street. "Don't think Tom will care for cards at the moment. But 'e might appreciate it later."
"D'you think he'll – he'll be all right, Alf? Or is that a stupid thing to ask?"
"'Course it ain't stupid. But Tom ain't ever been 'all right'. If I 'ad to tell ya – I'd say 'e were lucky to 'ave that lad of 'is. Or Tom would 'ave taken one of 'is great big 'orses and went off into the fields by now. 'e wouldn't 'ave come back, either."
I thought, if it had been me, what would Alfie have had left? Only our Cyril and the bakery.
"I want him with us, y'know. Cyril, I mean," I said. "I know they aren't keen on dogs in that hotel –…"
"You want 'im there, so 'e will be there," Alfie replied firmly. "I pay 'em enough for that room, Willa – if you asked for a fuckin' elephant, there ain't a soul in that buildin' what can tell me I can't put one in there."
I laughed and looked up at him in the warm light that spilled between the buildings around us. There was a deep ring of brown around his sockets. I knew that he had not slept well the night beforehand, because we had both thought of Tommy and Grace and that little boy left behind between them.
"Then Cyril better be there by tonight," I grinned at him. "Or I'll throw a proper fit."
"Oh, I ain't never seen you do that before."
I squeezed his arm. "I'll pick out the flowers, you can get the card."
"They didn't order me 'round in the army 'alf as much as you do now."
"Well, you were a Captain. Who bosses them around?" I snorted.
"Willa Solomons does," he grumbled.
xxii
I heard him in the bedroom that night just before I left the bathroom. He sat upon the bedsheets with his Torah spread open before him and he whispered in Hebrew, turning its pages. He held his hands together for just a few seconds before he closed it and rested against the headboard. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a sigh.
Leaning against the doorframe, I asked, "What was that about, Alf?"
He had often translated verses and paragraphs, but he was oddly silent. Then, he said, "It weren't from the book. Just – said what I wanted to say, really. Said that – Well, I 'oped Grace didn't suffer much, y'know, 'cause she already put up with Tommy in her life so she prob'ly 'ad enough sufferin' already. And I 'oped that their kid don't get 'urt by what Tom does."
I softened, smiling gently at him. "And did you pray for Tommy?"
"I don't pray that much for men what are like me," he told me. "Ain't prayed like that since France. We ain't blind in this world, Willa."
"I'm not blind either. I know what you do. I'm part of it."
"Not the same," he said. He looked at the Torah. "Tom understands. Always 'as understood it, just like 'e understands punishment, too."
"Her death is not punishment for him. She can't be reduced to that."
"I never said it was. It came for 'im a long time ago," he said. "And Grace were just part o' it."
I was unsettled by that. I swallowed and muttered, "Go wash up, Alfie. You need to put on those creams."
For once, he did not make any jokes. He stood from the bed and walked around into the bathroom. While he was in there, I prepared the small jars and read each label carefully, plopped them out in order. I was almost finished when there was a sharp knocking at the door. I paused, my heart immediately tapping out that frenzied beat. I stepped toward it with stones rattling around my legs, feeling each pebble thrown around between my bones. I touched the handle and imagined that burning heat which followed the night I had touched the handle at the house, having burnt my hand but not nearly as badly as his arm had been burnt.
I threw it open and felt the splash of relief that came when I saw a familiar uniform. It was an employee of the Ritz with the manager alongside him, his face twisted in annoyance. Stood between them, Cyril slobbered and barrelled forward into my legs, almost knocking me over.
I quickly wrapped my arms around him and kissed his forehead, scratched his ears. Cyril then plodded to the first sofa that he saw and attempted to clamber onto it, accustomed to the way it was in our old house. In his effort, he drooled all over it.
The manager seemed flustered and pale. He said, "Mrs Solomons, it really is against our policy to permit an animal on our premises, however much your husband insisted. I am afraid this can only be temporary, and I really must insist –…"
"Yes, well, I would also insist on allowing your guests a good rest," I replied. "Thank you for bringing him. I promise he won't make too much of a mess. And he usually only chooses one pillow to hump, anyway. So, goodnight."
I closed the door and turned to smile at Cyril.
"Who were that, Willa?" Alfie called from the bedroom.
"Room service with a special delivery," I answered.
Alfie appeared in the doorway, his eyes finding Cyril almost immediately. He grinned and clapped his hands together to get his attention, crouching low despite his bad hip to let the dog run at him. He kissed him just like I had and cooed at him like a mother. I watched him, smirking at the sight of it. Alfie looked at me and hastily cleared his throat, standing up.
"Right, well. Better crack on with them creams an' all."
"Are you sure you don't want another few minutes for cuddling?"
"Cuddlin'? Don't know what you mean." He turned back into the bedroom and Cyril followed loyally.
Alfie had to haul him onto the bed, because the dog had grown even more in the past few months, his fur now made of rolls of chubbiness and his jowls even heavier. He immediately rolled onto his side and wagged his tail. Ollie had evidently fed him well.
"That's it, you big fuckin' mutt, take my side o' the bed like you always do. Wouldn't even think to take Willa's, would ya? 'eaven fuckin' forbid," Alfie grumbled to himself.
Alfie took off his shirt and sat on an armchair in front of me, his trousers soon slid off afterward. I might have made some little joke about his near-nakedness, just to make him smile, but I saw that scab on his chest; it had grown a little darker, almost as if it might peel from his flesh and fall off itself, without any prodding. It had white scales flowered around it, spread outward – the petals of a flower, furled inward and rotted.
I touched him and he drew in breath, but it was not from pain. His eyes watched the fireplace, inhaled its stone. I brushed away his hair and saw the crusted remnants of skin which clotted the curl of his ears, settled between its creases, lumpy and sore.
"Did the doctor examine your skin, Alf?" I asked him.
"Yeah," he mumbled, "said it were a condition with me skin. Prob'ly got it from me family, somewhere along the line, maybe even from me Mum or Dad. But it can be worse for some and better for others. Just depends."
I took the cream and smeared it against his chest, rubbed it gently into those spots which cracked beneath my light touch. I fretted about those other scabs which pooled with blood, even if he only shrugged it off. I was pressing little scraps of tissue around his throat when I saw his smile and paused, looking into his eyes for an answer.
"All they tried to throw at me," he said, "and I still got me wife and me dog right 'ere with me. And I don't feel so bad 'bout losin' the 'ouse when I think like that. Don't worry 'bout me skin or the pain o' these fuckin' creams touchin' it."
"So, you do admit that it hurts?"
"I don't admit nothin'. That's why they never got me in a cell back durin' them days I worked for Butcher at the factory."
"That was a long time ago, Alf," I sighed. "You know that you can tell me if you're hurting. I wouldn't want to hurt you."
"Just 'bout the only person what don't want that, you," he replied lightly. He held my hip with his hand. His skin was warm, and I relished in it, because I had spent so many nights worried about the time when he would be cold, and I would only be able to touch him in a hospital or morgue, someplace.
Because Tommy had touched Grace when she was like that and it felt too real, now.
"I'm scared, Alfie."
"You can be scared," he said. "But you were scared when the Italians came after me too, Willa. And I'm still 'ere."
I watched him from where he sat beneath me, his skin composed of a patchwork of smooth squares then cut with choppy circles of scabs and flaking blotches stained in red. "Do you really want Margate, Alfie?"
His eyes darkened. "'Course I want it, Willa. I work every fuckin' day so we can get there."
"But why not now? Why not take those suitcases and leave London? What's holding us here?"
"There are people what depend on me," he said. "People what got families to feed, what got 'ouses and what need food and –…"
"And those people will still have all that even if we left for Margate or we stayed here, Alfie. Why is that on your shoulders?"
"I made promises. I got responsibilities."
He tried to catch my hands when I stepped away from him. He only just managed to grasp my wrists. I looked at the fireplace and felt coldness despite its crackling heat. I had always wondered it, but I saw it in his eyes, and I felt it in his hands.
"I knew it. I knew it," I whispered. "You don't want it."
He will have you in that house… and one day you will look around at all its furniture and all the riches he gave you along with it and you will wonder how it's still so fucking empty all the time.
Because he might not be there, in that house in Margate. He would be buried in his work with the bakery or he would be buried in the wet soil.
"Three years," he said suddenly.
I looked at him, eyes narrowed. "What?"
"Give me three years, Willa."
"You're bargaining with me like you bargain with your buyers," I hissed. "You want more time, so you can make another excuse – if we're even here in three years. Grace died, Alfie. Do you see any other girl from Bell Road around me? Do you see Esther, Butcher? I'm sure they would have asked for three years more, had they known what was coming for them."
"In three years, I can make sure all them men what work for me now got other options or – or somethin' to fall back on, yeah? 'Cause these people 'round me, Willa, these Jewish fuckin' people – they need me. You can't walk 'round London without some prick tryin' to put them down, tryin' to mock us. I ain't lettin' it be that way. I'm givin' 'em a chance to fight back on their own terms – our terms."
I had not pulled away from him yet. It only encouraged him.
"I gotta make enough that I can do that and I gotta make enough what I can give Ollie to let 'im live comfortably, right, 'cause 'e got Franny and Elijah to take care of, now, don' 'e?" he continued, pleading with me through his eyes. "I ain't lettin' 'im struggle to find work just 'cause people associate 'im with me, don' they? And Willa, if we wanna be in Margate eatin' grapes and sittin' on our arses all day, we gotta 'ave enough in the bank what means we don't need to ever stop doin' that. Money runs out, eventually. I gotta put things into place, is all."
Blood oozed from a scab on his upper-left shoulder and trickled downward.
"Two years," I told him weakly. I felt that clogging pressure in my chest again, felt it stuffed behind my forehead.
"Two years," he repeated, kissing my hands.
I picked up a warm cloth and washed away his blood.
