Birmingham, in the weeks following, was unlike Sorcha's small hometown of Ballycloghduff. There was no green, she had immediately noticed on her train ride from London; there was only the hazy darkness of the industrial smokestacks looming high overhead. No wonder everybody was so sour in Birmingham, Sorcha mused to herself one day while wiping down the Garrison's dull bar-top. Unsurprisingly, the light streaming through the window that day was murky as it always was.
There was very little chance of sunlight breaking through the dense clouds of smoke. What Sorcha longed for was the feeling of the warm sun and soft tufts of Irish grass under her feet. She longed for the gentle hills that shone greener, speckled with light. She could get lost in that green. But there was nowhere to get lost in Birmingham. It was all just dark and cobblestoned.
It was Arthur who broke her out of her shades of green. He stood across from where she stared into the stained-glass window opposite the bar. She looked so beautiful when she was deep in thought, Arthur had noticed. It was almost as if sadness suited her.
Today, Arthur was determined to bring the light back into her eyes and pull a smile at the corners of her lips. Tommy's business would have to wait a moment longer. Holding his peaky cap in one hand, the oldest Shelby sheepishly shifted his other hand behind it. He was waiting to get her attention.
"Arthur." A smile tugged at the hairpin curve of her mouth at the sight of him. His name danced between her parted lips like a breeze.
"We got back from the Lees," Arthur gripped his cap tighter and shifted his weight from one leg to the other. Sorcha waited patiently for him to arrive at his point. "We - I got you this," he pulled his hand from behind his cap, eyes glued to the bar-top, and placed a small stalk of pink foxgloves before her. "Zilpha Lee calls 'em fairy-bells. Said they had healing properties."
Sorcha reached out to bring the thimble-like flutes closer to her face. The brightly spotted centers were almost hypnotizing. It reminded her of sea boulders tucked below the Giant's Causeway. Long before the partition, when she was but a small thing, Sorcha remembered looking down from those lofty basalt columns to the jagged rocks peeking through the sea; large stones scattered along the shoreline. Sorcha fancied herself one of them - sea stones and clusters of spots inside a single flower.
Scattered. Lonely. Far from a home.
As a witness to her daydreaming, Arthur admired her. The bruises and scratches had longed healed and disappeared into a distant memory, but the sadness remained precariously balanced on the thin, deep line poised between her eyes.
Madly in love, and hopelessly drowned in the same brand of sadness, Arthur turned towards the side room - Tommy's business couldn't wait any longer.
Sorcha plucked up her eyes and smiled wide for him. "Did Zilpha Lee also tell ya pickin' 'em offends faeries? Will you protect me if they come?"
"Aye," was Arthur's willing response before disappearing into the side room to join his brothers.
As Sorcha fumbled through the shelves and cabinets behind the bar to find anything resembling a vase, the small wooden door into the side room creaked open and Tommy Shelby expectedly looked through it. Before he could liberate his cigarette from his pursed lips to make a request, Sorcha was already reaching one hand up to the triple-distilled Irish whiskey and the other out to pinch three glasses between her fingers.
"Your poison of choice, Sergeant Major," she arranged it all on the shelf between them with a genial flourish.
Still, he said nothing. Tommy's eyes narrowed ever so slightly on her; it was a terrifying sight. Anyone else would have squirmed in their shoes under Thomas Shelby's scrutiny, but Sorcha had seen those same blue eyes drowning in fear in muddy trenches. She stood her ground. In her peripherals, she sensed John and Arthur shift in their seats. All of them were waiting for Tommy to speak.
What felt like an age passed by before Tommy extinguished his cigarette butt into the ashtray between them, instructed her not to leave until he spoke to her, took the whiskey and the glasses, and shut the small door. The Shelby's were careful to exclude Sorcha from their business dealings which, frankly, came as a shock to Polly. No talent was left unexploited by the Peaky Blinders, was her line of thinking.
Sorcha sat behind the silent bar and listened to the wagons rattling just past those stained windows. It was a quarter till ten in the morning but it felt like late afternoon with the unfriendly and constant gloom. Her eyes wandered to the brightest thing in the hall: the foxgloves perched perfectly in a brown bottle. Irish whiskey was the staple at the Garrison and its glass bottles were easy to rinse and reuse. Looking into the center of the flowers, she once again lost herself in the rocky shores on the sea. Her breath slowed and so did her pulse. Calm.
Better to think of the sea than war-ravaged screams, she thought forlornly and shivered at the faint sensations of dead fingers writhing up her dress.
Her breathing hitched. Her pulse quickened.
Please, she pleaded with her mind, please, leave me be. Let me forget. Let me forget. Let me forget.
The dead fingers didn't stop crawling along her skin, emaciated faces wouldn't stop leering behind her eyelids, and the pain wrapped around her once again like a biblical pestilence. She wanted to peel off every layer of her skin to get to the root of the evil that was buried deep inside her. With trembling hands, she helped herself to a Shelby-sized portion of Irish whiskey. Sorcha dared not inhale the amber elixir but, instead, threw her head back to swallow it all in one go.
She was desperate for relief.
A furnace ignited in the pit of her stomach the instant the liquid hit the back of her throat. She nearly coughed but sealed her lips shut - hoping to suppress both the cough and fire she'd set ablaze through her chest. It burned, burned, burned. Sorcha flung out an arm to brace herself against the bar, willing her body not to make a sound. She felt red rising through her cheeks, her ears, and past her eyes.
Red. She escaped the fire for a moment and remembered blood soaking her to the bone. Please. Let me forget. Let me forget. I want to forget.
She poured another glass to throw her head back again. The fire in her chest was stoked and the burning at the back of her throat continued. She forgot the blood and the screams for another moment, but the rotten visages haunted the deep crevices of her mind. Sorcha would have continued down the bottle if the door to the side room hadn't propelled open.
While John wandered out into the street to light a cigarette in the smoky morning light, Arthur's eyes searched for hers. Sorcha still braced herself against the bar, back turned to him, desperately trying to hide her glass in the folds of her skirts. Arthur approached slowly and would have enveloped her in his arms if she had turned to him. But she didn't, and Arthur had business in London to prepare for. He couldn't stay long enough to tell her he loved her. He caught sight of the foxgloves settled in the empty whiskey bottle. That will have to do, Arthur thought.
"Tommy wants ya."
He placed his large hand on her waist in an attempt to coax her around for a parting smile. She didn't turn. Couldn't. If she released her grip on the bar-top for even a moment she'd crash to the ground like a whizz-bang. If he was kind to her right now she would cry, cry, cry. With helpless resignation, Arthur brushed a loose strand of hair from the nape of her neck - his fingertips caressing her skin as he completed the action.
"Drink won't help," he said with a weak voice. "The fire won't last. It fades. Leaves you emptier than you were to start with."
His touch, his words were sobering. Comforting, even. She didn't feel the dead fingers when he touched her - as if they fled at the touch of a good man. Sorcha unclenched her hand from the bar top, blood returning to her white knuckles. She wheeled around to study Arthur's face carefully and put a hand to his cheek. She gave him the smile he waited for.
"I'm glad you're with me, Arthur Shelby."
Sorcha hurried into the side room once Arthur had finally left. He had refused to leave until she had given convincing assurance that she was well. While his presence was a comfort, the pain was still there. Nevertheless, Sorcha slapped on a temporary smile and insisted, "I am well. Go, Arthur. You have business."
When she stood before him, Tommy plucked the cigarette from his lips, sipped his drink, and motioned her to sit. "You lie well through your teeth, nurse. Here," he poured a glass, "commiserate with me."
Sorcha's eyes were barely clear from her last three drinks but she wrapped her hand around the glass as if it would give her warmth like a cup of tea. The furnace in her stomach licked at the space between her ribs. Tommy took another drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out from one side of his mouth, studying her as he did so.
"There was a woman," he leaned back in his seat, finished his cigarette and threw it into an ashtray. "That I loved. She was the barmaid. Handed me poison through the window." He paused for a long moment. "She also listened through the window." Tommy looked at Sorcha but continued on to answer the question she hadn't thought to ask yet. "She's married now in America. She's far away."
Sorcha tried to balance in her seat. It felt like pillows were strapped around her head and everything was muffled. The string of words that left Tommy's mouth somehow made its way to her ears, processed in her brain. She wondered why she heard it all. In an attempt to shake off the burning whiskey, she shut her eyes tight, that deep set line of sadness reappearing between her furrowed brows, and decided to concentrate hard on his words - but none came. It was silent. Sorcha opened her eyes slowly, one after the other, to see Thomas Shelby staring directly at her, She crumbled under his gaze now but didn't show it.
Thomas finally spoke. "My brother says you help keep the anger away. He said," he leaned his body closer to the table situated between them, "all you do is lay on top of him and it all disappears."
Sorcha couldn't tell if he was being accusatory. It couldn't be that easy, he must be thinking.
"It's not that." She slowly continued, "he concentrates. He draws himself back to the moment with me laying on top of him. The weight grounds him. My breathing, the sounds around him, the feel of the sheets. A colonel in the Worcestershire Regiment in Burma told me about it. He said the Indians call it meditation."
"Now, you tell me how opium doesn't work," Tommy scoffed at the idea that mind tricks magically could. "You're barely ten stone, nurse."
Sorcha reached out and caught his hand before Tommy lit another cigarette. Annoyed, but unwilling to oppose the woman who had dug shrapnel out of his back with her fingers, Tommy snapped his cigarette case closed and haphazardly flicked it across the table.
"Kindness," Sorcha said. "You must be kind to yourself."
"And are you kind to yourself, nurse?" Tommy's voice was low and almost mocking. "When you dream of the ghosts of all the men you couldn't save, are you kind to yourself?"
She pursed her lips to keep those awful faces from reappearing in her mind. She didn't want to feel the dead fingers again. Instead, she brought the glass of whiskey to her lips and tilted her head back. This time she didn't bother suppressing the coughs and groans triggered by the liquid. The fire in her stomach was stoked, and she didn't feel a damn thing.
"I don't know how you boys drink this for fun," she attempted to cool the burning at the back of her throat with deep exhales.
Tommy refilled her glass without a word. It was his way of caring for her. To heal from pain and nightmares, you burn it all away...with drink, with brown opium, with a stronghold in London. He reached down to drag her chair closer towards him until their knees touched. In a rare form of affection, Tommy took her hand in his. He remembered again that those same hands pinched bits of shrapnel out from the surface of his skin.
"Whatever you see in your mind, whatever you remember, bury it deep. The evil has buried into our bones. All we can do is bury it deep and forget." He nudged the glass to her and sat back when she emptied it without hesitation. "Now, I need you to do something for me."