The Hiding Place (5 page)

Martineau reaches into it and lifts an edge of blanket, still soft and pink, but the piece pulls away like a cobweb in his hand. His chin is black with smuts: he feels an ache in his throat. He
carries the fragment in his bunched fist, moves past the women and towards my mother. A man in a blue overall shakes his head at her and points his spanner at the house.

And the gas was off. You sure? She’s not sure of anything. She holds the empty Tin to her breast, her fingernails clawed beneath the rim, and clicks the lid; open-shut, open-shut. The
women pat her on the shoulder on the way back to their homes, as if by touching her they’re warding off bad luck. Martineau watches the ritual, feels a light tap on his own sleeve, and looks
around. The woman beside him is tall and blonde, and through the noise of the children, the women, the firemen, the police, she is quietly asking him something. Martineau registers her green eyes,
and that she’s wearing the most extraordinary coat – white fur covered with dark splotches. For a moment he thinks it is spattered with cinders.

What? He looks at her hard.

I
said
, What’s her name? She points at my mother.

Mary, says Martineau.

Righto. Well, Mary’s probably going to want some night things – for the hospital – when you can get in. She assesses the house, the situation,

And where’s that husband of hers? He’ll need to be told. Martineau puts his head down in shame for Frankie, notes the golden straps of the woman’s sandal biting across the
bridge of her foot, and her toenails, lustrous coral shells under her nylons, and the way this same leg jiggles up and down on the spot as she speaks. She’s so close, he can smell her
lipstick. He takes it all in.

Are you a neighbour? he asks.

Eva Amil, she says, and with a quick jerk of her head, We’re at Number 14.

She smiles at him and waits. Martineau waits too: he can’t remember if she’s asked him another question.

So – will you tell her husband then? Eva speaks very slowly through her smile. Do you know where he’ll be?

I’ll find him, says Martineau. Eva lifts Luca from Celesta’s arms, hooking her on to her own shoulder, and prises the Tin from my mother. She hands it to Martineau as he edges past.
Eva’s free arm circles my mother’s waist.

Mary, isn’t it? Come on, love, let’s get in. The women climb into the back of the ambulance.

~  ~  ~

Joe’s cigar burns neglected in the ashtray; his cut-glass whisky sits untouched on the blotter. Such richness! thinks Frankie, swallowing at the sight of the liquor. He
studies the action of Joe’s careful writing: it bothers him, and for half a second he doesn’t know why. Then he sees it: on the little finger of his right hand Joe is wearing a ruby
ring. The jewel sparkles in its setting. Recognizing it makes the sweat prick in Frankie’s armpits: he clenches, unclenches his fists. His father’s ring on Joe’s finger! He
won’t look at it. He’ll shut his eyes.

But Frankie can’t not look at the film running in his head. He remembers how they met. A Friday in February 1947 – no – 1948, when he was barely twenty.

~

Frankie has never been so cold in his life. It’s not the feeling you get on board ship, when the squall punches your face, stabs at your teeth, when your whole head is a
sharp pain. That’s proper cold, melted into nothing by the heat of work and the next day’s sunshine. Nor is what he feels anything like home, where winters are short and February not so
cruel. Frankie thinks of Sliema, of the sandy lane winding up to his village, with the sky a soft grey and the rain so fine it’s hardly felt at all.

This cold is a slow ache; it makes your skin sore, it makes you want to crouch double. And it’s been with him right from the start – it crept up as the
Callisto
docked in
Tiger Bay, and snuck like a thief into his bones. Now it’s here with him in the basement room he has rented, coating the walls with frozen sweat, clinging to his clothes in a spray of bright
droplets. Frankie’s two days in Cardiff have been spent below ground. The snow on the road outside is terrifying. He has never seen such a thing before; he thinks the sky has fallen. Frankie
hasn’t been able to muster the courage to walk into the city. His chest hurts. He sits at the table below the whited window, smokes, pours coffee from the little pan he stole from his
grandmother’s kitchen, and watches the legs of passers-by as they pick their way along the street. The men move purposefully, the wide fabric of their trousers pinned to their legs in the
gale. Frankie is more interested in the women – the teetering slip and skid of heels, followed by a high-pitched shriek, has him craning up at the pavement outside. All he can make out
through the stiff weeds where the railings used to be are the mottled shins of a girl sliding away fast.

The whole city seems fast to him. On Tuesday he left his ship, and today, Friday, he has a home and a new life. No one cares who he is or where he’s come from, and no one wants to know his
business. This should please Frankie, who escaped the slow turn of his farming life for the glamour of the sea: who hated the constant mewling of his grandmother, the coins in her pocket clanking
her to church three, four times a day (as if she might miss a miracle, or, in her absence, find that Faith had left the country). In the end, Frankie left instead. His last sight was of Carmel, his
little sister, waving madly from the harbour, and behind her, Sliema rippling in a hot mist.

~

Frankie knew what to do when he came into port: register, find a place to stay, then cut another passage on the sea. And despite the air like needles up his nose and the wind
full of shrapnel, he was excited. He squinted up at the tallest buildings, and down the wide streets to the alleyways off them teeming with people; saw steam from the opened door of a bakery like a
giant’s breath out; stood amazed at the procession of silent cars gliding through the snow.

At the door of the Seamen’s Mission he joined the line of sailors and saw a familiar face – a Greek stoker from his own ship. Frankie raised his eyebrows in greeting, but the man was
busy in talk and looked through him. He cast around for anyone else he might know, listened hard for the sound of his own language; it was a mostly silent queue. The men stood clutching their
kit-bags and suitcases, or blowing on their hands until they were safely through the door.

When it was his turn, he was questioned, his papers were scrutinized, and he was told to sign a sheet. Without raising his head, the man at the desk put his thick finger on a line.

Francisco Gauci? Sign there. Frankie picked up the pen, his hand puce, and scrawled a numb X. The man finally looked up.

Let’s see if it matches, he said, unfurling Frankie’s papers one more time. A younger man at the next desk glanced over, sniggered.

It’s the Genuine Article, alright. Maltese are you? Frankie understood this last bit. Nodded gratefully.

You’ll want to see Carlo Cross, then. He’ll fix you up. Not related are you, by any chance?

Another snort from the next desk. Frankie didn’t understand the joke, but knew it was at his expense.

And don’t forget to report to the police, said the man. And seeing Frankie’s worried face, softened.

Just routine, son. Your first visit to Wales, is it? and Frankie, who knew enough of what was being asked, nodded again and said,

Yes, first time in England.

At last the man smiled at him.

As he turned to leave, a small fat figure barred his way and spoke to him. In the rattle of his words, Frankie recognized the tell-tale rhythm of Sicilian-Maltese, and the signs he
couldn’t hear but simply knew: that emphatic jerking of the head, and the hand gestures – first two kissing beaks, now cupped together in a fleshy round. Carlo Cross, the fat man, had a
room for him if he wanted. Frankie wanted.

~

And Carlo brought him here, gave him a chit to sign – another frantic X – for the purchase of the furniture and the rental of the room. He threw Frankie a long iron
key for the back door, and told him, in English-Maltese, the rules:

No women in here, capisce, my friend? Leh tifla! Issamma – listen. You know English? No women. Cash only to me. Capisce?

with those hands doing the bird and nest, then moving fast when Frankie handed over the roll of strange notes. Carlo peeled some off, returned the rest, and left Frankie to
himself.

It wasn’t what he expected. He had imagined a boarding-house full of other seamen, nights of drinking and smoking and playing cards. In the morning (in the sunshine that seemed to exist
only in Frankie’s head), he would walk out with his new friends – his
habib
– and find the bars he’s heard of, take coffee, eat cake. He hasn’t chosen Cardiff
by accident: he’s heard there’s a great clan of Maltese here, with more arriving every day. There is money to be made at sea, he’s been told, and this is the place to spend
it.

Tiger Bay – the Valletta of Britain! his crew-mate had laughingly told him as the ship dropped anchor. And it was supposed to be a
warm
port.

~

The memory makes Frankie jolt. The coldest winter, ever. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Ilya grins suddenly, amused by the sight of my father’s
discomfort. They both know that Joe Medora could make him stand there all day. It is a battle which Frankie can’t win; he must stay calm. He sets his eyes on the past.

~

Frankie sat beneath the window, dabbed at his nose with his handkerchief, studied his new home. The ceiling sloped down steeply in one corner, with a bed wedged in the gap
below. The first night, he couldn’t sleep for the traipse of feet on the stairs above his head, so close to his ear they seemed to be stumbling over his face.

There is another bunk he could use, shoved against the wall in the narrow space between the front door and the back. But the front door has a gaping mouth for a letterbox, and Frankie shudders
at the way the through-draught frets the edges of the pillow: he would rather lie down in the corner with the noise. And in time, he will learn to ignore the din of men who call so late on the
women in the flat above. He will learn to slide sideways from his bed in the mornings, and not bang his head.

Frankie doesn’t ponder the fact of the beds, he assumes that one of them is intended as a makeshift couch. He has put his cardboard suitcase on it, has hung his clothes in the tilting
wardrobe, and placed his shoes, newly polished, under his bed. He thinks he is the only tenant here.

Yesterday, shuddering with cold, he walked out and found a corner shop, pointed at a sack of coal and coasted it back, gliding and skidding, to his door. He carried the coal in handfuls through
the scullery and piled them up in the grate, put newspaper on top, added some broken bits of a crate he’d found in the yard, then lit a blaze and watched it die. He started again from
scratch, properly, and after an hour Frankie sat in the warmth, loving it: holding his hands out and letting the heat shine through them, toasting his left side, then his right. The room shrank to
a bag of fog. Steam breathed off the walls; the ice on the inside of the window melted to a long pool on the sill, then poured suddenly onto the floor. Frankie gave up and opened the window a crack
to let in some air. Now it won’t shut tight again.

This morning someone banged on the front door. Frankie didn’t have any friends to call on him, and he only had the key to the back door. By the time he had scrambled down the alley and
round to the front of the house, whoever it was had gone, leaving a neat set of footprints, down the steps then up again, which Frankie measured with his own: the caller was a small man.

Now he dips into his suitcase. He’s looking for something to staunch the snow that’s fluttering steadily in through the letter box. Frankie finds the leather pouch where he has
stored his keepsakes, and removes them one by one: the pink immortelle that Carmel put into his hand when he told her he was leaving; a pair of painted wooden dice; and a portrait of his mother.
Frankie stole the photograph on the night before he left, creeping past his grandmother’s bed and lifting it from the shrine she had built to her daughter. He was tempted to take the other
things: the plain black mantilla his mother had worn to church, the leather-bound Communion Book, the rosary. He decided on the spot, in the darkened alcove next to his grandmother’s snoring
body, that he was done with all that stuff.

Not for the first time he thinks of his Nana, her grief at finding him gone. He hadn’t dared to look at these things on board ship for fear they would be stolen, so now Frankie gets a
shock: there is a twist of patterned lacework crushed into the bottom of the pouch that wasn’t there before – his Nana’s handkerchief. Frankie pulls at it, and a dart of
brightness spins out of the lace and through the air. It beats a peal on the concrete floor, skirts an arc to the front door, and twirls down in a hoop of light: red-gold, red-gold, then red and
gold as it slows. The door scrapes open. A small, handsome man bends and picks up the ring which Frankie has only just found and nearly lost. He slips it over the first knuckle of his forefinger:
holds it out into the space between them. Frankie looks into the stranger’s eyes, raises his own hand, and pulls on the other man’s finger. For a long, long second they remain this
way.

Nice ring, says Joe Medora finally.

Was my Papa’s, says Frankie, feeling right at home. He tugs gently at the ring, frees it, slips it on his own left hand. He smiles at his new friend.

~

Habib
, thinks Frankie, my very good friend. And how typical that Joe should have had the key to the
front
door. Carlo Cross! When Frankie realized that he was
meant to share the room, he renamed him Carlo Double-Cross. But he was secretly pleased. Joe would be company: they would get along fine.

Did he speak out loud? He opens his eyes, blinks up at the portrait of Persimmon. It looks just like any other horse, like Court Jester, even. He remembers why he’s here: why this room
isn’t his, why the cafe downstairs isn’t his, why the ring . . . it makes his body twitch. He could really do with sitting down. He can look at Medora, but not – no way – at
the ring Joe is wearing. Frankie stares now at Medora’s face, cut into light and dark under the spell of round tungsten – so sharply, Frankie can just make out the black dot of a
piercing in Joe’s left ear. He reaches up, checks his own earlobe between finger and thumb, and goes back down the twelve knotted years of knowing him.