The Hiding Place (23 page)

The Bash Street Kids and no mistake, she says, bending double in the middle of the pavement. Lizzie Preece doesn’t think it’s funny.

The Agency won’t use these, she says, We’ll never place them!

The Agency, goes Eva, Now would that be the Adoption Agency?

Not in front of the girls, Mrs Amil, whispers Lizzie Preece. But that’s the point; they are in front of us. We can hear every word.

~  ~  ~

Martineau thinks he can avoid it. He doesn’t have to go back. What he saw was a scuffle, that’s all. But Salvatore has been haunting him all week.

Is not all, my friend, he admonishes, deep in Martineau’s dreams. Determined not to sleep, Martineau visits Eva, sitting up with her in the early hours, drinking coffee. When she tells him
to go home and get some rest, he leaves her. Goes to Domino’s Resto, where the talk is of Frankie and Sal and what they might be doing with all that money. The clientele from The Moonlight
rub shoulders with Domino’s regulars, favourite seats are argued over, the girls fight over their patch, until a night or two passes and things begin to calm down. Len the Bookie, his
audience doubled, holds court.

What price on Malta? he shouts, licking the nib of his pencil. His little notebook is open on his lap, filled with numbers and coded initials. The men around him shake their heads and laugh.

Ten-to-One, he tries again, It’s a fair price, boys, a likely venue.

It bloody isn’t, yells Domino from behind the bar, What if Joe don’t find them?

What if he does? shouts the man next to Len, What odds have you got on a concrete overcoat?

And they laugh again. Len stands on his chair, crouching slightly to avoid the low lamp swinging above his head. He looks across the heads below him, shiny as beetles from
Vitalis and Lacquer.

Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, a bit of hush! You at the back there, get sat down.

Len licks his pencil again as he waits for the laughter to subside.

Next bet, Ladies and Gentlemen – The Moonlight! No arson, no Acts of God. Barring that, any odds?

A woman at the table below hands him up his whisky and soda. He raises it to the crowd.

What about a new restaurant? he says, his eyes wide in mock innocence. Domino jabs his finger in the air,

Or a betting shop, he shouts, getting his own back on Len. The crowd roars again with laughter.

Put a sock in it, you. Come on now, fellas, he’ll need a front. What’ll it be – Massage parlour, sex shop? Something nice and respectable!

Martineau cannot bear it. Two more whiskies, and he’s on the road and heading for the docks. Drowning the voice in his head with the radio on loud.

You make me feel so young, you make me feel so spring has sprung!

And there’s Salvatore, skating his duster across the counter as he polishes, peering at his own reflection in the brass. Smiling into it.

And every time I see you grin, I’m such a happy individual! Dancing the tray of empties back up to the counter.

Martineau flings open the car door and runs. He passes the loading bays, their mechanical arms like giant beaks against the sky; the grain store with its carpet of white powder and its musted
smell of rats. He stops short at the dry dock. Martineau edges towards it as if he’s drawn on a string. He disappears against the black silhouette of the prow, rests briefly on the mooring
before he finds the courage to look down. Blackness, a harness, a cradle laden with tins of paint. No Salvatore rising out of the caked mud. Nothing.

~

Mr and Mrs O’Brien want me, but they don’t want Rose or Luca; Mr and Mrs Edwards are happy to foster Rose and Luca, they’ll even consider Fran if she ever gets
let out – but they won’t have me. They’d rather have a pyromaniac in the family than be seen with a damaged child.

We do want to keep you all together, says Lizzie Preece, But in the short term, girls, you’ll be split up. Just ’til your mum gets better. I’m sorry about it.

Can’t we stay here? asks Luca.

Luca loves it; no school, no one to tell her off when she jumps all over the furniture. The Test Card’s on all day, and when Eva looks after us, we have chips from the
Chip Shop. She’s not like Carlotta – she never forces us to have a bath. Or pray.

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness, is it? Who’d
want
to be next to God! she says, dipping the flannel in the washing-up bowl, Give me the dirty old Devil any day!

But when Carlotta comes and Eva has to leave us, she always says GodBless before she kisses us goodbye.

Carlotta spends the nights here, lying in the Box Room with the door open, just like my father used to. Sometimes I can hear her talking to herself; it’s like she’s having a
conversation. I’m awake a lot too; it’s hard to get to sleep. Luca and me roll together into the dip in the bed, then she kicks or punches me and I have to cling on to the edge to stop
myself from drifting off and rolling in again. I don’t really mind if we get split up. I just miss my mother. And Fran. And I’ll miss Eva too.

~  ~  ~

You’re looking so much better, Mary, says Lizzie Preece to my mother, You remember Dolores, don’t you?

My mother gives her a look. Of course I do, it says, What do you take me for? But she doesn’t speak, she just puts her arms round me and squeezes me until my ribs hurt.
It’s nice.

You’ll want a bit of time together, says Lizzie, I’ll leave you be.

Can I take her for a walk? asks my mother. Her face is bright and shiny, and she smells different, but she’s definitely my mother. So why ask Lizzie Preece?

Lizzie considers. She takes a little breath in, then says,

Yes, I don’t see how it could hurt. Just round the gardens, mind?

And my mother takes me by the hand and leads me out of sight.

~  ~  ~

Carlotta has stripped all the beds, the sheets have been put through the mangle and are blowing on the line, and now she’s scrubbing the front doorstep. Della Riley leans
against the wall, a look of disbelief on her face. No one scrubs the doorsteps round here any more.

Dowlais’ll ruin that in a flash, she says, clicking her fingers with grim satisfaction.

Alice Jackson crosses the road to have a word.

Terrible, Della!

is the first thing she says. Carlotta sits back on her haunches and looks up at them.

Those poor kiddies, Alice continues, What have they done with them – in care, is it?

Families will have them, says Carlotta, leaning a red hand on the wall and hauling herself up off the mat, Families all over.

She makes a waving motion.

Can’t you see to them? Della raises her eyebrows, Only, you’re bound to do a better job than that mother, aren’t you?

I’m not allowed, says Carlotta, repeating the words that she’s heard over and over, I am a woman on her own.

She raises the bucket and tips it so that the grey water dashes all over the pavement. Alice Jackson has to jump clear. The women fall silent, Della and Alice smiling at each
other over Carlotta’s bent back. She takes up the broom and sweeps the suds into the gutter.

Will they sell this place? asks Alice.

Carlotta shrugs, watches the bubbles fizz along the cracks in the pavement.

They keep it for Mary, she says, For when she is better.

She lifts the bucket and turns to go inside.

Excuse now, she says, I finished here.

The two women cover their mouths with their hands.

Gonna scrub your step then, Alice? asks Della.

Oh aye, says Alice Jackson sardonically, I does it every morning, don’t I?

~  ~  ~

We’re walking along the railway line, my mother and me. I’m wearing my new brown clothes underneath my new brown Mackintosh. I’m going to the
O’Briens’ this afternoon.

It’s starting to rain, Dol, my mother says, holding her hands out to the sky, But we don’t mind, do we?

We trudge along the gravel in single file. It rains harder, the water runs in a curve around the rim of my plastic hood and splashes on and off my collar. My mother is silent,
bent in front of me. I don’t know where we’re going and something about the way she is walking won’t let me ask her. I try to match my gravel steps with hers. We crunch like this
for a long while, so long that the rain becomes more important than it was, and it’s leaking in at the neck where my hood is fastened. I’ve turned my ankle twice on rough stones. The
railway lines twist in the distance.

Look, she says at last, bending down. She lifts a piece of stone from the ground and turns it in her hand.

Flint, she says, excited, You can start a fire with flint.

Why? I ask. As soon as the word is out, I know I’ve asked the wrong question. It should have been ‘how’, which would let her tell me practical things. But my question is, for
what reason, why would we want to start a fire? She holds out the flint for me to look at, swivelling it so it shines and then doesn’t. Her nails are all chipped.

Broken, she says, Broken in two.

She bends again, crouching, and I can see beyond her, to the rain in sheets and the blackberry bushes shuddering in the wind. She lays her head down sideways on the track.
People choose to die this way, but I don’t know this yet, at five years old. I know about dinosaurs and pop music and harvest festival, and about the Virgin Mary and how Christ suffered for
us, but I don’t know about suicide or what the weight of a passenger train can do to the bones in the skull. She smiles up at me from the track, and her hair slicks across her cheek like pond
grass. She rises, flays the water from her face with her hand.

No trains coming, she says.

~

We run across the track towards a blackberry bush. My mother surveys it with her eyes, up and down, and lifts the bottom branches with a stick. Underneath, the berries are rich
and black, they peel off from the stem in liquid blobs, dissolving to the touch. She holds them out to me in her stained palm: they taste of water.

This is our last day.

waiting 2

The house is still here, and the bedroom we shared is just as it was: two sash windows facing out on to the street; a built-in corner cupboard; a glass-topped dresser with its
triptych mirror. There’s a black run across the floorboards where feet have walked from door to window and back again. The wallpaper must have come later; its repeating pattern of stylized
blooms look like onions sliced in half or, in a certain light, like the pale bud of my fist. I perch on the end of the big double bed – an ordinary size now – and feel the cold iron of
the frame bite through my jeans, my skin, my bones. Under the window sits the chest. I wait for my eyes to adjust, for the outline of the wood to separate from wall and shadow and become itself;
long, low, oblong. It belonged to my father, and now it will be mine: I’m claiming it back. I will take what I can. Darkness has come down. While the waiting happens, I go through it all
again.

I was put in this chest, when I was newborn.

~  ~  ~

I set off at Wednesday lunchtime with the letter from the social services telling me my mother had died. I put a change of clothes in my holdall, and two pages torn from the
library’s phonebook listing all the Gaucis in Cardiff. The funeral was arranged for Friday morning. I knew nothing and I wanted time. In my head I lined up my sisters in front of me, ageing
them, dealing them families, playing out their lives. Celesta, Marina, Rose, Fran, Luca – slippery as a set of new cards. We never kept in touch: I don’t know whose idea it was. By the
time I started at my new school, I had become an only child. My friends had brothers and sisters; I had dreams – Luca and Rose tormenting me; Celesta, cool and distant, whose face I could
never quite see. I would wake up feeling bandaged, hot, smothered. Gradually, the nightmares crept away, leaving only Fran as I remembered her, standing in the dawn light with her shoulders
hunched, folding her blankets in silence.

The others in the pack were distant too – my father, Salvatore, Joe Medora. Knave, Joker and King. I last saw my father on the night of Celesta’s wedding. I could only be certain of
one thing: I would never see my mother again.

~

Cardiff glowed beneath a painful light. A bank of clouds boiled up orange in the lowering sun, and there was the saturated clarity of air after rain. I was unprepared for such
colour. It used to be a place of grey; a dull pearl sheen, leaden buildings, the stink of the Dowlais like charcoal on the wind. There were pin-sharp moments – trips to the pierhead to watch
a ship come in, once to the circus, too often to the hospital – and tingling tram rides in the night to Carlotta’s house, sitting in a stunned row and watching my mother argue over the
fares. There were people my mother had to avoid, the hiding places in arcades and alleyways where she would look down at me with her finger pressed to her lips. Still and close, we waited until the
threat had passed. All the rest was under the gauze of time.

But now the city was busy, set and full of purpose. At the front of the taxi queue, a woman pushed me out of the way. I stood on the pavement, waiting for some recognition of
what she’d done to me, as if my grown-up self had come unstuck and fled back to Nottingham and safety.

Never get a cab if you stands there! Come yer, love!

A mini-cab driver, poaching for business, shouted at me from across the road. He wore a tartan cap and a white vest two sizes too small, a motif of a cowboy boot emblazoned
across the front. Under the thin cotton, a mass of curly chest-hair lay flattened like the stuffing from an old sofa. Frowning and smiling at the same time, he sat me in the back of the car.

Where you takin’ me? he joked.

I told him where I wanted to go.

Are you sure? It’s all been brought down, that bit.

My mother still lives there, I said.

He consulted on his radio.

We’ll get as close as we can, he said.

We stop-started through the traffic, edging the length of St Mary’s Street. Spying a gap, he turned a half-circle into an empty stretch of wide new road. From the window I
could see fresh black tar, vivid white markings, a ribbon of traffic cones wending into the distance. Saplings had been planted on the embankment, shivering in the evening light. The driver pointed
out the sights through his window,