The Hiding Place Page 2

  ~

  Tonight, Salvatore wants to watch. Here we have my father, the giant Martineau, Ilya the Pole, and crooked Joe Medora. This pack of men is busy.

  Sal . . . telephone, says Joe, not looking up.

  Salvatore rolls reluctantly downstairs.

  Joe Medora wears a slouch hat, a silk scarf anchored at the neck, a Savile Row suit. He’s an archetypal villain who makes sure he looks the part. He angles his cigar into the side of his lipless mouth, staring over his Hand. He’s seen all the films; no gesture is wasted. He is patient.

  It’s my father’s move. Jack of Hearts, Five of Clubs, Four – winking – Diamonds.

  It’s a boy! cries Salvatore, beating back upstairs. Bambino, Frankie!

  And my father, who is Frankie Bambina to his friends, poor unlucky Frank to have so many daughters, Twists in reckless joy, and loses the cafe, the shoebox under the floorboards full with big money, his own father’s ruby ring, and my mother’s white lace gown, to Joe Medora.

  At least I have a son, he thinks, as he rolls the ring across the worn green felt.

  ~ ~ ~

  My father stands above my cot with a clenched fist and a stiff smile. He rubs his left hand along the lining of his pocket, feeling the absence of his father’s ring and the nakedness of losing.

  At the end of the ward, Salvatore’s face appears in the porthole of the swing door. Carlotta’s face fills the other, and for a moment they stare separately at the rows and rows of beds and cots. Carlotta lets out a shout, Mary! Frankie!, and sweeps towards my parents. Salvatore raises his hand in salute, but takes his time, pausing to exchange greetings with the other mothers.

  A fine baby, Missus!

  What a beauty! Boy or girl?

  Twins? How lucky!

  There aren’t enough babies in the ward for Salvatore, perhaps not in the world. He bends over each one with his big smile and his hands clasped at his back.

  Carlotta spreads herself on the chair next to my mother’s bed and rummages deep into her bag. She makes small talk, not trusting herself to mention me, or the cafe, or the future. My father stabs his teeth with a broken matchstick he’s found in the other pocket of his trousers, and sucks air, and says nothing. No one looks at me. Then Salvatore approaches the foot of my mother’s bed and opens his arms wide to embrace my father. Both men lean into each other, quietly choking. Carlotta produces a dented red box from her bag, prises off the lid, and offers my mother a chocolate.

  Please have one, Mary. They’re your favourites.

  Mary is in a state of mute blankness. A girl baby, yet again. In her head, she wonders what to call me – she’s exhausted her list of Saints’ names on the boys she never bore, and is sick of all the arias in the names her girls have got. Dolores drifts up in miserable smoke.

  Salvatore rests a hand upon my mother’s arm and gazes into my cot. The pink matinee jacket is fastened too tight around my neck; it reeks of mothballs. Wearing his best suit for the visit (which is also the one he wears to funerals), Salvatore smells the same as me. He lands great kisses on my forehead and holds me up for inspection, cajoling my mother.

  See, Mary! So pretty!

  My mother fixes on the flaking paint of the radiator, and wishes we would all go away. Frankie, too, has had enough of Cooing and Aahing. He puts his hand on Salvatore’s chest and shunts him back down the ward. He presses so hard, Salvatore feels the buttons of his shirt indent his skin.

  Mary is in shock, my father tells them. Better leave her alone.

  This is nothing compared to the shock she’ll get when she finds out she’s homeless, and her wedding dress adorns a bottle-blonde from Llanelli.

  ~ ~ ~

  I am a week old when everything changes. My parents move into a run-down house at one end of a winding street. The other end is dead, sealed by a high wall spun with barbed wire. Joe Medora owns our new house, and our old cafe. The rent increases on a whim: when Joe gambles on a loser, it goes up. But it can go up when he bets on a winner, too.

  My father is put in the Box Room: it is a cell. Celesta and Marina and Rose have the back bedroom. One window overlooks the road, where Rose leans out to spit on unsuspecting heads. Marina springs up and down on her bed, tearing off the wallpaper in long strips, while Celesta puts her fingers in her ears, reads The Book of Common Ailments, and convinces herself that she is dying.

  The front bedroom becomes Our Room, my mother and Fran and Luca and me. Fran has the bed in the corner, and Luca has exclusive rights over my mother, who puts me in the chest. When she’s convinced that I’ll survive the night, I’m allowed to share the bed.

  ~

  Carlotta is recruited in these difficult times, apparently to look after us children. She’s really here to make sure my mother is a Good Wife who doesn’t desert her fallen-on-hard-times husband: my mother might at any second run away with, say, the Coalman. This is prescient, but not in the way Carlotta thinks.

  For now, Salvatore still works at the cafe, renamed The Moonlight Club in sputtering neon, and he leaves his friend Frankie alone. But he thinks about us, he worries about me, and he asks Carlotta every night for a report.

  Getting big now, Carlotta says, stretching her arms out like a fisherman to show how I’m growing.

  Salvatore is not entirely convinced, and once a week he sends Carlotta with a parcel of food, stolen from his shifts at The Moonlight. He feels he is entitled; after all, he’s still a partner in the business. Except these days, working with Joe Medora, he feels more like a slave.

  While my mother takes to her bed and stares at the ceiling, Carlotta cooks up a steam in the little kitchen. She makes baked pasta with blackened edges, solid slabs of home-made bread. Everything she provides is sharp and hard, as if to counteract the softness of her body and the thick roll of her voice. My mother thinks of little, but she listens. She hears the sticky cough of the woman in her kitchen, and imagines Carlotta dipping her feelers in the cooking pot, testing the saltiness of the ham.

  It is about this time that I am burnt.

  two

  They’re defying gravity.

  Nebuchadnezzar, King of the Jews, Bought his Wife a Pair of Shoes . . .

  Celesta’s hands are plaiting air: the tennis balls skim her palms, fly, beat on the red brick; hand, brick, hand, brick. She is concentrating. If Celesta could only take her eyes off the arc she is weaving, she would see Rose upended in a handstand: her scuffed shoes pressed flat against the wall, her fat legs splayed, her black hair hanging like pondweed from beneath the bell of her skirt. Marina’s eyes flit from Rose to Celesta and back again, carefully studying the moves. She won’t try anything yet: she’ll examine every angle first.

  Through tartan wool, Rose sees the world the wrong way up. The houses on the street fall out of the sky; a dog trots blithely along the grey cloud of pavement.

  Look at me! Celesta! Look!

  Celesta twirls and claps and catches; the balls hang in the air just long enough for a spin to the left. She ignores Rose and her blood-rush face.

  Rose rights herself, squints at the grit embedded in her palms, spits on both hands and wipes them on her skirt. She inches along the wall, feeling the vibration of each bounce through the brick, and stops. Rose is intent for one minute, then suddenly snatches at a mid-flight ball, interrupting the pattern of hand, air, brick. The ball flies into the gutter. Celesta is patient. She retrieves it, inspects it, and resumes her game.

  You, are, a Pain-in-the-Neck, she says, in rhythm.

  ~

  They all ignore Luca: she is tethered to the pram. The harness is blue and has a lamb frolicking on the front, which Luca has drenched with dribble. Two metal hooks clip on to two rusted rings at either side of the hood. She pulls at the rings, and yells, and smears her face with her sticky fist. Fran has been told to watch her; but Fran has gone Walkabout. She’s got a box of England’s Glory in her pocket. Inside are three pink-headed matches. She’s heading for The Square.

  We live at Number 2
Hodge’s Row. Between Number 9 and Number 11 is an alleyway which leads on to a hopeless patch of asphalt called Loudoun Place, but which everyone calls The Square. Fran goes there a lot, sidling along the alleyway until she reaches open space. The Square is a rectangle of nothing. There used to be swings and a see-saw, but now all that’s left is an iron climbing frame and a strip of battered grass. Fran explores. She likes it: better than wiping snot from Luca’s nose; better than sitting on the low kerb and watching Celesta play that impossible game: better than waiting for Rose to find an excuse to hit her.

  There are treasures here, stashed along the edge of The Square where scrub grass ends and gravel begins. Fran studies the ground minutely, her boots marking a careful path between the dog-shit, broken bottles, coils of rusted wire, fluttering chip-papers. The asphalt shimmers with shards of glass; green, blood-brown, clear as ice. She collects the best shapes and places them carefully in the pocket of her gymslip. Today, Fran has the matches. She strikes one and holds it to her face. A rush of phosphorous stings her nose. Crouching now, she strikes another. Fran loves this sweet, burning scent. She licks the sandpaper edge of the matchbox. A tang of spent fire.

  Under her bed, Fran keeps a red oblong box. It used to have chocolates in it, and smells like Christmas when she prises off the lid. But now the plastic tray holds all her jewels from the Square: jagged slips of sapphire; worn lumps of emerald; a single marble with a twisted turquoise eye. To mark my arrival, she has begun a secret collection which she stows in a cigar box my father has given her. Not glass this time, but an assortment of cigarette stubs she picks up, when no one is looking, from the pavement outside our house. Tipped or untipped, flaky grey, or smooth menthol white. Some are crushed flat with the weight of a heel, others are perfectly round and lipstick-smeared. Fran holds each butt to her nose before she hides it away.

  ~

  I’m stuck in the house with my mother: at one month old, I’m sickly and I must be kept warm. My mother brings the chest down from the bedroom and puts me in it, smothers me in layer after layer of mothballed blankets. She drags a bucket of coal from the outhouse to the kitchen, bumping it against her knee until she gets to the hearth, where she pauses for breath. She bends down, rattles at the grate; it looks like an age since a fire was lit in the kitchen: the ash which should be smooth and fine is clogged with stray hairs, clots of dust. Turning the strips of newspaper neatly in her hands, she thinks: Joe’s man will call for the rent today, that kindling’s a bit damp, bet the chimney needs sweeping. The chest scrapes across the tiles as she pulls it, pulls me in it, nearer to the hearth; two long thin scars, like a tram track, will remain to show what she did. My mother puts me at an angle in front of the fire: the sight of the flames will amuse me.

  She turns to the table, hacks at a loaf of bread and sings in her sharp, tense voice,

  Don’t you know, Little Fool, you Ne-ver can Win

  Use your Men-talitee, Wake up to Re-alitee . . .

  ~

  Upstairs, my father is making music too, whistling through his teeth as he pulls a tie off the rail in the wardrobe, catching sight of himself in the mirror as the wardrobe door widens. He looks Lucky. Today, Frankie’s choice is a black tie with a thin seam of gold running through it. He sweeps the length between finger and thumb, smooth and cool as water, then ducks his head, flips the tie around his neck, folds back the stiff white collar of his shirt. He pauses in front of the mirror, pushes the door open to get a better view. It annoys him, this glass; flecked and tarnished with oily orange patches beneath the surface – even in close-up, he can’t get a clear reflection. Frankie pauses. He hears my mother downstairs, shouting from the front door.

  Celesta! Kids! Dinnertime! My father pulls on the jacket of his suit, casually stretches out his left arm, then his right, turning the exposed cuffs over the sleeves. A pair of gold cufflinks, embossed with the rising sun, is now the only jewellery he owns. He lifts them from the polished surface of his dressing-table, chinks them in his palm for a second, and then puts them back. He doesn’t feel that lucky. He takes his hat from the bed-post, pads downstairs, avoids my mother’s eyes. She weaves between the children in the kitchen as he makes for the living room mirror.

  I won’t tell you again, wash those hands. Will you see Carlotta today, Frankie? Leave that. Eat your dinner. Frankie? Frankie, mouths my father as he steps up to the glass. Frankie, he goes, flipping one end of the tie into a smart loop, taking up the slack, adjusting the knot, nice and tight.

  Do you hear me? shouts my mother.

  He’s going out, says Celesta, straddling kitchen and living room doorway and staring at my father. They share the same black eyes, hard as steel, and a stubborn squareness in their faces. Celesta holds a plate of sandwiches high in the air, out of reach of Rose and Marina. My father grins at her in the mirror. She grins back, then suddenly retreats into the kitchen as the clamour rises behind her.

  Wash your hands first, Celesta yells, slapping at Rose and Marina as they snatch at the bread. And again, Mam, tell them to wash their hands.

  Wash their hands, says my mother automatically. It’s getting very hot in this kitchen, what with the fire and the heat of my mother’s bad mood. She wedges the back door open with a chair, sending a blurt of wind racing through the house. The flames in the fireplace swoon in the draught. A door slams upstairs.

  My mother mixes up a bowl of something grey for Luca, rapidly beating milk into powder. Her fury travels down the spoon and into Luca’s dinner. I am breast-fed: I get rage straight from the source. My mother’s also angry with herself: she needs Carlotta to visit with one of Salvatore’s parcels; some corned-beef pie maybe, or a bit of roast chicken. Her words are thrown to anyone who will catch them.

  Never thought I’d want to set eyes on her fat face again, she says, thinking of Carlotta as she forces Luca into her high-chair. Celesta laughs, thinks it’s a shocking thing to say about your kid, even if it’s true.

  And where’s Fran? asks my mother, an afterthought.

  ~

  My father moves from the mirror to the sideboard, stops his breath as he pulls open the drawer. His eyes stay on the doorway, watching the shadows on the kitchen wall while his hand slides over bills and chits and a soft bundle of knitting. All promises forgotten now, Frankie thinks only of the Race. His fingers trip along the stitches, the sharp point of the needle, and down to the cool metal surface of the Biscuit Tin. Then his hand inside, and the unmistakeable greasy slip of money beneath his touch. Frankie feels the edges of the notes – not much, enough – catches them up fast and folds them over, straight into his pocket. It takes five seconds. With his tongue hot on his lip, he pushes the drawer back into place, and starts up his whistling again.

  Do you hear me, Frankie? Will you see Carlotta? My mother appears at the doorway with one hand on her hip, waving a spoon in the other.

  And where do you think you’re going? She has noticed his smart suit. And the hat.

  Frank?

  An accusation.

  Out, he says.

  ~ ~ ~

  There are eighteen cafes on Bute Street, and my father doesn’t own any of them. Not any more; not since me. My parents argue about whose fault it is. She blames him, he blames me, and I can’t blame anyone yet. But I will. I’ll lay it all at Joe Medora’s door, when I’m ready.

  Except Joe Medora has so many doors. He owns nearly everything round here: two boarding-houses on the Terrace, and our home, of course; and four cafes on Bute Street – the latest being The Moonlight.

  My mother has to pass the cafe every day. She’s got herself a job at the bakery next to the timber-yard. It’s a factory more than a bakery, churning out hundreds of thick white loaves which my mother drags from the ovens with a long metal pallet. She does the nightshift, so whether she’s setting off for work or coming home at dawn, she can’t pass The Moonlight without noticing that the lights are on and there are people inside. Sometimes, not often, she can smell cooking, and she gets a yearn
ing for one of Salvatore’s almond tarts. She hears music too, a lonely voice in the early hours; but mostly she hears the jangle of money rolling over and over in Joe Medora’s pocket. She spits a dry curse at the window as she passes.

  ~

  My father takes the same route now, cutting over the street, down the alley, and across The Square. Fran sees his shape approaching from around the broken fence, his head cocked to one side in the sunshine, and she hides from him. For a second she wonders if he’s come to march her back home for dinner, but Fran senses that there’s something different about him today. She sees how his hair catches the light, a slice of pure silver dancing on the black, and the hat in his hand beating lightly against his thigh; she hears his whistle wandering on the air. It’s like watching a stranger. Fran ducks, crabs along the track of dirt near the railing and hides behind the hedge.

  My father doesn’t expect to see her, so he doesn’t: his eyes are fixed straight ahead, conjuring the sleek brown frame of the horse he will gamble on. Just one bet, that’s all. Court Jester. Two-thirty.

  Frankie strolls past the Bute Street cafes, nodding now and again at a familiar face, or raising his hatted hand in a greeting. This is Frankie’s Patch. Most of the restaurants and cafes are owned and run by his friends: seamen from the Tramp Trade who came to rest and stopped for good. And my father has also stopped, for now, although like most of the other Maltese, he won’t settle in the city – he can’t escape the salt-scent of the docks. When he talks about his ship coming in, meaning a winning streak, an odds-on favourite, a dead cert, he also feels, like glitter in his blood, the day when he will take a folded stash of money and simply disappear.