A/N: sooo...i am taking quite a risk by starting a story when the show hasn't finished yet. but look, having an irish character is a big deal for me on my favourite show - and a damn good actor plays him, so much so that i think he does a great job with the accent imo. so, some things to address before i post.
obviously i gotta play around with history and i couldn't tell you if in the 1950s italian families would ever hire irish but hey, story has to happen somehow. someone out there would know american history/culture then in more detail. in addition the irish language would be in decline around this period too but rabbi at least understands it due to that first episode with his father.
this chapter is my little introduction and i dont plan on the story being terribly long in terms of chapters either. but some backstory gets in and we'll expand on it and more rabbi! always wanting more rabbi. again such a risk by posting this before we find out what happens to him...and if he turns out...to be the bad guy in any way...well...hahah...let's go! please enjoy and i hope you're all safe out there!
abhaile
then
Rain had pooled in the potholes that dotted the dirt-road and turned the soil to sludge. From the kitchen, I watched Lynch slip through the gap in our cobbled walls where a gate should have been, his tall frame wandering toward the door. He shrugged his cap from his head and smoothing his black hair before he tapped thrice. I brought him into the house and put bread on the table for him, placed milk and cloth alongside the plate for him, too.
It had been a month since he had last been here and Lynch asked if I had read that novel which had been in my hands the last time that I had seen him, before he had handed my father a letter and left through the woodlands behind the house, across the creak. It had not been much of a novel at all and rather described the birds which could be found in the woodlands where Lynch himself had walked. I could tell the call of a wren and thrush and sparrow. I could tell what darting flash of faint yellow meant siskin or warbler; my father had taught me their calls and said there was something in powerful in knowing what nature was telling us through birdsong.
In the cottage, there was little space.
From where I sat with Lynch in the kitchen, I could hear the sound of water splashed and understood that my father was washing his face, pulling up his suspenders, preparing himself. Lynch tore chunks from the bread and rolled each strip into a ball, plopping it in his mouth and chewing, his jaw clicking. He spoke politely to me and I remembered nothing that he said apart from asking about that novel that had not been a novel after all.
I sat across from him and felt blood slosh against my eardrums, because there was no letter in his hand, this time around.
Stepping into the doorway, my father somehow seemed different. It was something drawn out in the long, hollow slant of his cheeks. He looked about the world like it wearied him and he clucked his tongue to summon me. I slid from my chair and walked across the room to him, which was nothing more than four short strides.
He tilted his head toward the bedroom where James slept between fitful, shuddering rasps, his face contorted, his lips mouthing words unheard. There was a small stool alongside his bed where my mother often sat. But she, too, went into the kitchen and settled beside my father to speak with Lynch and it was already bad, no letter in his hand, blood sloshing against my eardrums, James rasping and mouthing and shuddering.
Carefully, I shuffled the stool against the door and left it ajar, leaned toward it, listening. I glanced at James, whose skin had marbled beneath the greyish light cast between the hills beyond the house. The wooden frame of his bed creaked against the cobbled ground coated in sawdust and hay; the heady scent smothered me, bundled me in its sudden familiarity, so that I never wanted a house without sawdust and hay speckled across its flooring.
Through the narrow slit of the door, I heard Lynch speak in his droning manner, dragging out his words so slowly. "How's the boy?"
"The Englishman sent you up that hill without even a cart to bring you through the mud," my father said. "But up the hill you came for him, anyway. Does it not choke you, Martin, his boot pressed on your throat?"
"None of that, Michael." Lynch cleared his throat. His chair ground against the tiles. "Mr. Abbott has been patient with ye. Allowed another month. What more can ye ask of him?"
"No work to be had, out here, nothin' but farmland and when the soil brings you nothin' but rot for a harvest, nothin' can be done. Nowhere but in Dublin can work be found. The boy needs to stay here. Tell your Englishman to come talk to me himself. He sends ye out, his lackeys, while he stays snug in his own manor."
"Abbott lives in no manor," Lynch replied steadily. "Lives in a house, all right, and a grand one, too. There are new things goin' on in the world than what you would know from livin' in this village, too. D'you resent me for goin' out and findin' somethin' better than farmin' when the weather spoils the crop? Times are changin'; I change with 'em."
"No shame in this work –…"
"No shame in mine either. Only shame if you make it shameful." There was a scratch, a sudden flicker of orange from between the black slit in the doorway. Lynch had lit himself a cigarette and its sizzling yellow end wavered in the inkiness of the doorway, so that I could follow its tip and find his mouth in all that shadowy fear bubbling up between the tiles within the kitchen, turning it black and sour in there. "Look, we've known each other years. Haven't we? But you knew when you first took this cottage that you'd never own it. It belongs to Abbott. All he wants is you to pay for it, for what you owe. We all have to pay what's owed."
"I toil on that land." Something that I had never heard from my father before was that faint quiver that made him seem childlike; nothing about my father had ever been childlike. "I take myself out at dawn every day and I toil on that land – animals fed because of me, fields ploughed because of me, crops turned because of me, all of it because of me. You're tellin' me that Abbott can throw me off what's always been mine? My father toiled here before me, his father before him –…"
"Doesn't matter what your father did, matters less what his father did before him," Lynch said. "Because here you are, today, in this room with me, and you owe your dues the same way I owe mine and every man livin' in this world owes his. I'll be goin' back to Abbott tonight. He'll want ye out by the end of the week. I'm sorry."
"Your father worked with mine." There was a pause. "He had the same soil on his hands that sticks to your boots, now. Soil that he made into somethin' solid, somethin' for his family. Somethin' that can't be taken."
"I already told you. I won't be tellin' you again. It's not me wantin' to kick ye out of the house, Michael. It's nothin' personal. Nothin' to do either with our fathers, our mothers. It's what's happenin' here and now, between us. You're not hearin' me. Men like you never hear me."
Scraping against the tiles, my father's chair let out the scream which seemed muted and trapped in his own throat. I scooted my stool forward and saw my father through the doorway, his face foreign in its drained pallor, the sockets lined in purple and his mouth coiled viciously. He breathed through flecks of spittle and stood from the table. He cut through the kitchen and into the garden through the back-door.
Lynch blew a ring of smoke. He nodded at my mother, who had not risen from her chair and who seemed unaware of him; her lips mouthed words, unheard. I trailed out from the bedroom, following behind Lynch who ducked his head beneath the rounded front-door of the cottage. His boots stuck against the mud, his grey cap caught whitish speckles of mist that fluttered downward from bleached clouds, their fluffed edges blending into the hills, so that there was no telling them apart from one another.
He was halfway down the winding mud-path that had formed in the wispy tufts of grass around our cottage, not yet swallowed in the onslaught of mud. Our cottage was angled on a slope that would take him down along a dirt-road, toward the old village with its cobbled houses like ours, its meagre church, its two shops; one of which was shuttered and had been for almost a decade. He was almost at the gap where a gate should have been, tipping his cap low against the drizzling rain.
Behind me, there was a wet clap of boots against tiles and the crash of furniture thrown aside. I heard calls from my mother, frantic swells of sound from her throat now open and pushing out those horrid screams, slapping madly at my father whose silhouette cut through the bleaker tones of the cottage and emerged on the threshold. He held a rifle and cocked it at Lynch.
He called out his name and his hoarse shout shivered down the garden to reach Lynch.
Lynch lifted his head and stared up across the muddy field that made our front-garden and saw me, stood in the mud, beside the doorway. Then his eyes drifted to the doorway itself. His death was held within that barrel and it forced his hand to his belt, ripping out a pistol of his own that shone in one dulled glint of silver.
My father thundered toward him, slipping in the mud and I slipped with him, running after him, reaching out to knock the rifle sideways, the rifle meant for shooting rabbits and not men. I was batting at him, pleading with him, not at all aware of what came from my mouth but saying it all the same and the soil swelled around my shoes to hold me in place, the soil that had belonged to him and his father before that and his father before that and his –…
There was a brutish cracking sound in my eardrum. There was a separation of white clouds and white hills.
Both men dropped against the mud; two blunt thumps against the ground and it was finished.
now
Framed alongside the bookshelves was a painting of the Virgin Mary. Her pale eyes were cast downward toward the ashtrays that littered the table, which itself was hidden behind sprawling papers and towering stacks of books. The room was stuffy, smothered in the sunlight that had become trapped between the windowpanes, the sheer curtains draped atop one another in dense folds. Clouds of smoke rolled toward me from the puckered lips of the Italian on my right, his tall frame slouched in his chair with legs crossed, one polished leather shoe bobbing while he hummed to himself.
Behind us sat another Italian who leafed through a newspaper and made small noises of disapproval, the paper crinkling loudly in his hands, unaware of how much it irked the Italian with the cigarette between his lips so that his humming quietened and he half-turned in his chair to glare. He spat at him in Italian, a harsh roll of words that made the man with the newspaper sheepishly fold it and plop it beside him.
Sinking back into his chair, the Italian with the cigarette glanced at me. "Irish, right?"
"Yes."
The room fell into that strange muteness again. I blew out my cheeks and looked at the clock overhead the bookshelves. It ticked toward three-thirty. I had been here for forty minutes.
The seconds cracked against my skull. I wanted nothing more than to step out onto that porch of theirs, even with all those Italian men standing around, cradling cigarettes of their own. I wanted nothing more than to gulp down that brittle cold air that came from the first touch of winter in Missouri.
I found myself staring at that painting of the Virgin Mary again, a blank film washing over my eyes. I remembered the phone-call that I had gotten a week ago from Nell, standing in my nightgown and a flimsy robe with the phone cradled against my ear to hear her. Nell said she had made it to Ohio and had begun working for a family called Moreno – Italian, she said, and there are plenty more of 'em, too, 'specially in your neck of the woods.
She had heard about a family in Kansas City that wanted one, too; their last housekeeper, a German girl, had gotten knocked up by an Italian who then denied even knowing her. She was given a suitcase in one hand and a ticket to the next town in the other. Nell had taken her bed that same night. It went like that in America, or so Nell liked to tell me.
Americans have gotten so used to this newfound habit of buyin' whatever they want, whenever they want, Nell said, that they've started doin' the same thing with the people who work for them. Out with the old, in with the new.
I just happened to be brand-spanking new and more than willing to fill the bed of any girl who came before me.
"The Fadda family don't want to take in a black housekeeper," she told me. "And they sure as Hell don't want Poles or Slovaks – if you even suggest it, they'll spit on the ground. But they'll take Irish, not because they like us all that much but because we don't ask for much and we fear God even more than they do."
Then came heavy footsteps in the hall and the Italian ground his cigarette into the closest ashtray, smoothing down his shirt soon afterward and standing from his chair. I forgot all about Nell and her little speech about what Italians did and did not like, because the first Italian stood and the other Italian did the same and I jolted upward like a shock had crackled through me, setting me alight.
I felt stupid and small and more aware of myself at the entrance of Donatello Fadda whose broad figure was smothered in a rich coat and the brim of his hat drew dark shadows across his face, shrouding his expression from me. He was not a particularly tall man, but he held himself like one.
Behind him were the other Italian men who had crowded around the porch and watched me earlier, trailing up the garden with what seemed like lead in my shoes to make each step sluggish and awkward. I needed the housekeeping job and that had been the sole reason that I had pushed myself forward despite the numbness in my legs slowing me down.
In my flat, I had nothing but a handful of canned peaches in the cupboard and a packet of stale biscuits alongside them. There was no heat from the radiators either, radiators which had not been bled in months and which made an awful racket that frightened me enough to think they might simply explode if I pushed them too hard.
Once Donatella Fadda was safely in the room, the men disappeared down the hall and the door was drawn shut.
"Mr Fadda," I said politely.
He shrugged off his coat, tore off his hat. "What is your name?"
"Ava McCarthy." I noticed the Italian beside me shift and bob his shoe again. I added a quick, "Sir."
"McCarthy," he repeated, his thick accent clicking hardest against the second syllable. "You are Catholic?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you attend church?"
"Every Sunday."
Donatello Fadda strode around the large mahogany table and slid into his seat. The two Italian men followed suit and I realised that I was still standing and quickly lowered myself onto my chair, perched at its edge, prepared to bolt if he ordered me from his house. Yet he seemed rather calm and not at all like I had imagined while taking those two buses and walking three blocks to reach this neighbourhood.
"Irish," he said. "Catholic. Can you cook?"
"Yes, sir."
Donatello made a wet grumble in his throat that sounded pleased and clapped his hands together. He stood from his chair and it rolled wildly without his weight. I half-rose from my seat, until I noted the Italian man still slumped in his chair, unmoving apart from the bob of his shoe. I dropped back down, flushed pink all over again, hoping I had not looked too stupid in front of Donatello Fadda. He held his hands behind his back and stared at the sheer curtains before his eyes flit to the Italian nearest to the sofa.
"Adriano, find Rabbi. Bring him here." Donatello Fadda looked at me. "We have Irish in the house, already."
Pulling the lapels of his expensive suit together and buttoning them, Adriano stood from his seat and left the room, softly drawing the door shut behind him. The room settled into its cocoon of muffled sound again, like its walls had been stuffed and padded to block out all sound within the house. Donatello had drooping bags under his eyes, eyes that took me in rather thoughtfully as he turned away from the window and returned to his seat. I tried not to seem too surprised that he had said they had someone Irish here. I had imagined myself to be first.
"If you want the room, it is yours," he said. "If you want the job, it is yours."
I felt my mouth turn slack and dry. He had hardly asked me anything significant. Yet his face was serious, there was no sign that he was messing me around. I would have lodgings – a room, my room. Excitement bubbled in my stomach.
I said, "Thank you, Mr Fadda."
"It will be my wife who instructs you," he continued breezily. "I run the business. She runs the house. So it goes."
From the hall there were fresh footsteps and nobody stood this time around for the man who wandered into the room as if he had not remembered what his reason was for being there in the first place. He held himself in a strange manner, too. He was swallowed by his tattered off-green coat that frayed around its pockets and lining. He wore a threadbare hat atop his dark hair that parted on either side of his temples. He kept his boots unpolished, their maroon colour dulled by dirt and scuffmarks.
If he had unfurled those tight shoulders, he would have stood taller than any man in that room.
"Rabbi, Ava McCarthy." Donatello Fadda waved his hand generally toward me, around me, beyond me. "She will be housekeeper. She take the room beside yours. You show it to her and then you drive her home."
He added something in Italian, tilting his head between us. I was even more surprised that Rabbi nodded; the Irishman could speak Italian.
Rabbi reached for the handle of the door and already I felt myself dismissed to his care, my hands clasping the purse that I had brought with me. Donatello Fadda had turned his squeaking leather chair to his left, stretching out one meaty hand toward his telephone. The other Italians lit their cigarettes and leaned back.
I had anticipated being led around the house like had often happened with other jobs, shown which cupboards held what and where should be swept and then I would be told that my wages would be docked if I missed this spot or that in particular. Donatello Fadda had not talked about wages. He had not talked about what went where.
I considered opening that mouth of mine and asking these questions myself, but I felt eyes pricking at me and saw that Rabbi was staring me down, almost warning me that my time in this room had ended and it was best to take what I had gotten. I was not sure what about him had told me that, but I stood from my seat and went toward him, purse in hand, dress still ironed and clean.
Rabbi pulled open the door and stood aside for me to walk ahead of him.
Outside, in the hall, he tugged his collar around him and sank behind it for comfort, stuffing his hands into his pockets and slinking alongside me. He had a hunch in his posture that forced himself down, looking always at the ground. From the kitchen, there was the sound of chatter and clutter and I wondered where the wife of this family might have been if not in there, because she was supposed to be the one bossing me around, like Fadda had said.
Yet there was only Rabbi here for me.
He motioned toward a staircase and went ahead of me this time, the rustle of his coat the sole sound which followed us into the furthest parts of the house, past the bedrooms with doors half-opened, showing lush wooden beams and bedposts and drapes. Rabbi turned on his heel and took another staircase that narrowed at its summit onto one square patch of carpet that was too small for me to stand beside him. There was a door on the left and the right and another in-between them. While I waited on the staircase below him, he opened the door to his right and stepped inside, leaving enough space for me to follow him.
"My room," he said, tilting his head at the door across from mine. "And the bathroom is between us. Never use the ones downstairs. If somethin' breaks in your room or that bathroom, you tell me an' I'll fix it."
His voice was grizzly and hoarse from disuse. I stood in the threshold of the room and stared around at its bright, airy lightness with pinewood floorboards, its triangular windows angled to draw in cold-white sunlight. I wandered that room with the distinct sense that I had gotten lucky and that I would never have landed a job like this without Nell being the housekeeper for that Moreno family in Cleveland.
I leaned against the windowsill. The windows overlooked the back-garden of the house, where the trees grew thick along the fences and blocked the neighbouring houses from sight, the red-brick walls spotted through the trembling branches being the only sign that there even were other houses in this posh neighbourhood. The grass was damp and wet; it stuck to the leather shoes that all these men seemed so fond of wearing.
"Do they stand out there all day?"
Rabbi lifted his head from where he had been looking at the ground. "And night," he said.
He had sidled toward the doorway, like he wanted to slip out and disappear while my back was turned. I had not known it until I turned from the window to look at him. He held his hat between his hands and plopped it back onto his dark crop of hair the moment that he saw I was watching him. I wondered if he was Jewish and figured it would not be so surprising if he was. Already Rabbi had shown himself to be a man of many surprises.
I wondered, too, if he had always been in this place, because he seemed to contort himself between the gaps in its furniture like he had often hidden in their shadows. He seemed to look for blind-spots where he might not be noticed. I wondered if he was not also one of those men who walked around the garden at night with grass upon his shoes.
"D'you like the room?"
His question had been sudden and posed awkwardly, like he had wanted to fill up the space between us in that room, the largest room that I had ever known even if it was tucked up in the attic.
"If I tell you what I really think, you'll laugh," I said.
He moved his hands in his pockets as if he held them out at me. "Not one for laughin', me."
I twisted the strap of my purse and smiled at him. "I lived in a tiny flat with my mother for years. So, if they had given me a closet in this house, I think I'd have been happy enough with it. But this is –…"
"Better than a closet."
He finished for me, speaking in that calm, flat manner of his that had become familiar in the few minutes that I had known him.
"Much better," I said, smile widening.
His shoulders rose and fell rather limply. "Come on, then. Supposed to take you home, Ms. McCarthy."
"Call me Ava." I turned to look at him properly. "Is that really your name? Rabbi?"
"Nickname."
I felt his awkwardness like it was my own, now. "So, can I ask what your real name is, then?"
For one brief moment, his eyes roamed past me and looked out those looming windows toward the garden below. I worried that I had offended him, though it was hard to tell. His brows were not furrowed, his mouth not held in a scowl. He seemed neither upset nor happy. He was simply there, in the room, with me, in the same way that its curtains were, in the same way that its wardrobe and bedside table were in the room, with me.
He finally drew his eyes to me again. "Doesn't matter."
x
There were still those Italian men stood around the doorway. Lumpish clouds of smoke from their cigarettes mingled with the crisp air that scorched my cheeks and made me draw my scarf tight around my throat. One Italian man called out something to Rabbi and the others tittered. I slowed, unsure if Rabbi would pause for a conversation, but he strode forward and gently grasped the arm of my coat to bring me along with him, something that I had not expected from him since he seemed so adverse to touch and closeness, even if it was accidental. I followed him along the driveway toward a plum-coloured car. He opened the passenger side for me and waited until I had gotten inside to slam it shut, then strode around to his own side.
"Was it bad?"
He fished around his pockets for keys and glanced at me. "What d'you mean?"
"What he said. The Italian fella. Did he say somethin' bad?"
"No. Made a joke, is all."
I saw through his light, bland tone. "But you're not one for laughin'."
"No," he said. "I'm not."
He pulled out from the driveway and not once did he glance in his mirrors at the house that dwindled from sight behind us.
x
The streets were still slick and wet from drizzle that had fallen not a few hours earlier. The car rolled damply to a halt at the traffic-lights and we sat together, quiet and unsure of each other. I had only met Irish girls around this town. My landlord was an Englishman and I loathed him. He left radiators broken, left mould fester in fuzzy blue-black patches along the windowsill, left mice in the floorboards to scuttle back and forth at night. I had not slept well with those mice scratching at the wood beneath my bed. I imagined there was no such noise in a house like what the Faddas owned.
I leaned my head against the rest and smiled to myself, warmed by the soft orange streetlights that bathed the car in brief flashes. I watched the lovers and loners wandering the streets, arms linked, arms hung low against their sides, mouths open, mouths closed.
America was so much faster than anywhere else I had ever known and I was certain that there was some difference in the soil that pushed strangers forward, had them swept up in such a hurry all the time. I liked the hum of the engine in this car and thought about all those girls in my town, those girls who used to hope that they might someday sit in a car like this one.
"I remember the first time I saw a car," I told him suddenly.
I had a giddiness in my stomach; that was what had made me speak and maybe he knew it and allowed it for that reason. I felt delirious because he had been so kind and the job was mine and the room was mine and all the bad things that I had fretted about for the past few months melted and fled into the cold of the night through the opening of his rolled-down window.
"The first time I saw a car," I went on, "I was standin' on a dirt road and these great big yellow eyes started comin' toward me, between the trees. I thought it was somethin' alive until my brother told me. Wasn't even old enough to know better."
Rabbi tapped a mindless rhythm against the wheel. "When did you get off the boat?"
"Got off the boat two months ago," I told him. "How about you? Where are you from?"
"American," he said. "Not Irish. Never came from nowhere."
This stirred me from my dreamlike world and I lifted my head to look at him. He broadened his vowels like an American but almost everything else about him was Irish. If he had been lined up against a wall of Englishmen and Frenchmen and all other kinds of men, I would have plucked him out for an Irishman without a doubt. There was something in him that marked him for it. I challenged him and spoke in Irish – something to tease him, bring out what he wanted so much to smother.
"If you will not tell me what those other Italians said, then maybe you will tell me what Mr Fadda said to you in that room after he introduced me to you."
Rabbi had a habit of ticking his jaw. His tongue poked at his cheek. He ran it then along his teeth. "T'would be better for you not to understand," he said finally. "Does no harm to you for not knowin' it. Keep to yourself and you'll be grand. Do the job you're given and no-one will bother you. No-one will bother you anyway."
I sank against my seat. "Okay."
"Call him Don Fadda. None of that Mr Fadda or the like. Don is what they call him, so Don is what you'll call him," he continued. "Keep to yourself. I mean it. Better off on your own."
"Is that how you survived here so long – stayin' by yourself?"
Slowing in front of some traffic-lights, his face was hidden in a shroud of blue from a gap between passing streetlights. It drew out the lines of his forehead, the little furrows around his mouth. It was hard to tell his age, hard to tell anything, he kept himself so wound tight that he furled in on himself. His brows were drawn heavy to his eyes, veiling them in a faint shadow that let him decide when to show himself and when not – it seemed he had decided not, then, in that moment of blue between streetlights.
"Sorry, Rabbi," I said. "I wasn't thinkin'. If I offended you – …"
"How'd you get to the house?"
Surprised by the change in subject, I stumbled on my words. "T-Took two buses and then walked the rest. Why?"
His eyes skimmed the street, the mirrors that showed cars parked behind us, the dials on the radio. Anything but me. "D'you want a lift tomorrow mornin'?"
"Really? Would it not be puttin' you out?"
"No," he said flatly. "Got suitcases, don't you?"
"Just one. Hardly had enough to warrant two."
"I'll be 'round for seven."
Pulling into a spot in front of the block of flats where I lived, he sat motionless for a moment and considered the building, tipping his head down to look at its tallest row without the roof of the car in his way. I gathered my purse and tucked the tip of my scarf between the flaps of my coat, preparing myself for the brittle wind that had begun lapping at the car the later into the evening that it had gotten.
The cold in America was different from cold in Ireland; our cold was soft and wet, a damp muggy cold from the humidity. Yet the cold here in America felt much sharper and nipped at the skin like an animal spurned to bite at each gust. I reached out and held the handle of the door, prepared to push it open until I paused, considering something I had forgotten.
"Can I ask you one last thing, Rabbi?" He nodded and I asked, "D'you know of any Catholic churches in this part of town? I told Don Fadda that I attended every Sunday. I did in Ireland, but I'd hoped I might wiggle out of it here. But he asked and I told him – well, I told him that I did and so now I have to."
"They'll take you to their church," he replied. "So it doesn't matter what church you had or don't have. You go with them, now, wherever they want you."
"No gettin' out of it, then."
"No gettin' out of it," he repeated.
Watching him in the dimly-lit front of the car, his pale face shown only in the headlights of the cars rumbling past, I suspected that I had been talking about mass but he had meant something else entirely.
"Seven," he reminded me. "Don't be late. Mrs Fadda won't forgive it."
"Thank you, Rabbi."
I smiled and shoved the door open, nudging it wider with my hip before slipping out into the night. I turned to shut the door behind me and watched him roll up his windows. I stood away while he pulled out into the street. The plum-coloured car trundled forward and disappeared around a corner, his silhouette bleak and faint in front.
x
There was a leak in the hall that brought trickles down from the floorboards in cool, pale shadows. I peeled off my scarf and trudged upstairs, the creaking steps echoing into the quiet of the flats. There were some Greek families on the first floor and Germans staying on the second but I had hardly seen any of them. I stuck my key in its lock and rattled it three times before the door shuddered open. I went into the bathroom and took a few moments to right myself, undoing the braid that held my curly hair together and feeling lighter for it.
The bedroom had an uncomfortable brittleness to it, without the radiator to heat it. I ate a handful of biscuits in my bed, uncaring of crumbs and messes. I would have another room, in the morning. I would pack my suitcase before I slept; it would not take long with the little that I had in my wardrobe. I wished that I could have called Nell to tell her how it had gone but Woolridge would never let me use his phone.
I lay against my pillow and stared at the ceiling, listening to the distant chatter and shouts from other flats. I liked to imagine it how dollhouses looked, with each square room slotted against another, our little bodies moving around within our wallpapered surroundings and passing between rooms. I fell asleep like that, picturing the wallpapered room which would be mine, the bathroom alongside it, and Rabbi in the room across the hall.
x
In the night, I awoke and felt the shifting weight of someone in the bed alongside me; rasping, mouthing, shuddering. There a brutish crack. I jolted from the bed, looked for the shine of dulled silver and then, seeing it had not yet come for me, fell back against my bed with a thump, the sheets seeming to swell around me and hold me there.
x