The Hiding Place (2 page)

~

At first, convinced that it would tempt the passers-by, Salvatore made stews and bread and almond cakes dusted with sugar. He wedged the red door open with a bar stool, wafting
the smell of baking out into the street with his tea-towel. He wrote a sign,
DELICIOUS FOOD
, in a careful hand, and tied it with parcel string around the rusted frame of the
awning outside. But Mack the Knife spilt out on to the pavement, upsetting the barber shop owner next door, the sign ran in the rain, and soon Salvatore brought the stool back to the bar. The
pigeons in the yard grew fat on unbought food.

Never mind, said my mother. It takes time.

Now he cooks for the sailors, who want egg and chips or bacon in starchy white rolls, and the cafe is busy. Sailors bring in girls, and girls attract trade. Salvatore fries everything in the
flat black pan on the stove, his thinning hair stuck to his head with steam. The combed strands come unglued throughout the day, falling one by one in lank array over his left ear. He pretends to
be a widower so that the night girls will pity him. In fact he is married to Carlotta, who is respectable, and will not enter The Port of Call, our cafe. Or as Carlotta calls it in her broken
English, That Den-o-Sin.

~

Salvatore loves my mother and my father and my sisters. He is part of the family. And he will love me too, when I am born. Until then, he has to make do with Luca, who shrieks
from her high chair the moment my mother’s back is turned. Salvatore watches from a safe distance as Luca’s arms jolt up and down in an urgent plea to be lifted. He would free her, but
he daren’t. The last time he did, she ran like a river to the end of the cafe and caught her head on the edge of a table. She stared at it, astonished, while her forehead bulged and split.
The knock held her silent for two days, so silent, my mother thought she was damaged: it was the only time Luca was quiet.

Now when my mother has to go out, she traps Luca in The Pit with soft toys to keep her happy for the five minutes she thinks she will be away. Luca throws them at the furthest wall, screaming
like a bomb.

In search of my father, my mother is blunt and shaming. She no longer has the time to be discreet.

Have you seen Frankie? Len the Bookie? In The Bute, are they? Righto.

She tracks down her husband, to the arcade, the coffee house, the back room of the pub. When she finds him, she is vocal. My father complains.

This is business, Mary. Keep out of it.

The other men look down and grin into their shirts. And when my father does return, my mother points to Luca’s head.

That’s down to you, that is.

Sufficiently shamed, or just tired of losing, Frankie starts a clean sheet. He stops betting; he has finished with it for good. But when my mother tells him about me (at six
months the evidence is mounting), he takes the money he’s accumulated through
not
gambling and opens a card school in the top room of the cafe. He wins, and wins. And suddenly I am
luck personified.

We’ll call him Fortuno, he says, rubbing my mother’s stomach as if she’s harbouring the Golden Egg. My mother has other ideas.

~  ~  ~

In the top room, all four chairs are occupied. There is a haze of cheroots, a sweat of onions, the stink of eggs in oil. My father has staked everything on the winning of the
game. Away in the infirmary, I’m wailing at the midwife as Frankie decides to Twist. My mother is straining with the labour of prayer. Over and over.

Oh God, let it be a boy.

When the midwife pulls me out, she conceals me. I am shunted from scales to blanket to anteroom. She closes the door on my mother.

If you have to tell her anything, tell her it’s a boy, says the midwife to the nurse.

Salvatore’s wife Carlotta, waiting in the corridor with her big black handbag poised on the bulge of her stomach, catches just this one phrase – tell her it’s a boy – and
makes a phone-call to the cafe.

Salvatore is watching the card game from the doorway upstairs, peeping through the curtain of beads which hangs from the lintel. They cascade from his shoulders like Madonna tears. He
doesn’t hear the telephone; his mind is in anguish for the game he’s not allowed to play. His eyes are fixed on the Brylcreem glint which crowns my father’s head.
Salvatore’s right hand rests stiff across his heart, his left holds a spatula, which oozes slow drips on to the red linoleum floor. He should be downstairs making greasy meals for the thin
night girls, but Salvatore cannot concentrate on bacon and eggs when his business is at stake.

~

Salvatore likes his partner Frankie, even though he’s lazy and not always dependable, and he adores the night girls downstairs. The young ones perch on the stools, their
bouffant heads nodding in time to the music on the gramophone; they are stiff-lacquered, clean-scented. The older ones smile, now and then flinging an arm across the booths to display their latest
Solitaires. Or they sit in silence. They draw their wet fingers round the rim of their glasses, in an effort to make the last rum last.

Rita, Sophia, Gina. Salvatore recites the girls’ names in his sing-song voice. These women are really Irene and Lizzie and Pat. They close around the green metal ashtrays, depressing the
buttons with their jewelled hands, watching the debris swirl into the hidden bowl below. When they do leave, the imprints of their bored thighs remain a while upon the shiny leatherette. They never
say thank you and they never look back. Salvatore always forgives them. He wipes his hands down the breast of his apron, and sings through the night, while Frankie gambles in the room above his
head.

~

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.

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.