There was a queue at the stall, and whilst they waited for their turn, Jean said to Katie, ‘You’ll be looking forward to going to the Grafton tonight with your friend.’
‘I’m not sure that I am really,’ Katie admitted. ‘It’s kind of her to ask me, but I’m not much of a dancer.’
‘You’ll enjoy it once you’re there,’ Jean assured her firmly, stepping up to the counter for her turn to be served.
‘I appreciate what you’ve bin telling the twins about it not being all that glamorous going on the stage, Katie,’ said Jean, once they had finished their shopping and they were on the way home, carrying the turkey between them.
‘Well, it’s the truth otherwise I wouldn’t say it, but I can understand that they can’t see that. It’s like I said to them, all the audience sees is the sparkle from the sequins, they don’t see all the darning and patching in the cheap fabric that’s underneath.’
They exchanged understanding looks.
Emily hadn’t seen the boy for the last two days. The last time he had had a nasty bruise on his face and he had looked thinner and dirtier than ever. She’d got more than enough to do as it was, without coming down here and hanging around a back alley with a packet of sandwiches and a flask of hot soup.
Hot water was what that boy wanted, and plenty of it, along with a generous lathering of soap. Not that it was up to her to fuss over him. The boy meant nothing to her. He wasn’t her responsibility, after all. But somehow she couldn’t stop worrying about him.
She wasn’t going to admit to herself that she was disappointed because he wasn’t there, and the sandwiches that she put out earlier were, or that she’d woken up in the night thinking about him, wondering where he slept and if he had a proper bed, or even a proper home. That was daft doing that, and no mistake. Why should she care about some dirty boy? She didn’t.
She was only coming down here because it gave her an excuse to keep an eye on Con, and that new piece he’d taken up with.
The boy wasn’t going to come now. The late December afternoon had turned into winter darkness and it was cold, with a thin mean wind whining up the alleyway and making her shiver, despite her padding of fat and her warm coat.
She bent down to pick up the sandwiches. She couldn’t leave them here. They’d have rats coming after them. A thin whisper of sound from the bins against the wall caught her attention. Emily frowned and listened, but she couldn’t hear anything. It must have been the wind. She picked up the sandwiches and turned away. There, she’d heard it again. She turned back, and reached into her bag for the torch she carried for the blackout, switching it on and pointing its beam towards the bins.
It was his legs she saw first, bare to the knee and mottled red and purple with cold, and so thin she could see his bones. She hurried towards the bins, her heart pounding so heavily she felt breathless.
He was curled up between the bins, looking more dead than alive, his face all bruised and his lip cut, with dried blood on it. What had happened to him? Had he been set on by some bigger, heavier boys? He looked as though he was too weak to move. Emily wanted to pick him up, take him home with her and look after him properly, but instead she sat down beside him in the alleyway and unscrewed the Thermos, pouring out some soup.
It was her own home-made nourishing broth, made from a chicken carcass and vegetables. He was so weak that she had to hold the Thermos cup to his mouth so that he could drink, and take it away from him as well when he tried to drink too much too quickly.
‘You’ll be sick if you take it too fast,’ she warned him. ‘And I’d like to know who’s been knocking you around as well, because I’d have a few words to say to them. Now you can have a bit more. Gently, there’s no need to drink it so fast, like you’ve got no manners. No one’s going to take it from you, not whilst I’m here, so you take your time and then you can start on these sandwiches, and this time you and me are going to have a bit of a talk, because you can’t go on like this. It will be the death of you, and me too with all the worrying about you I’ve been doing. I’ve got a good mind to take you home with me, where I can keep an eye on you, and see that you get looked after properly.’
The boy hadn’t said a word, but he was listening to her and taking in everything she was saying, Emily knew that.
‘Of course, if you’ve got folk of your own and a home of your own then it’s them that you should be with.’
Silence.
‘And if you’re one of those boys that’s got himself into trouble …’
Now there was a reaction. Not just his hands but his whole body was trembling, and Emily suspected that he would have got up and run from her if he’d been strong enough.
It was well after half-past five, the matinée was long over, and the queues would already be forming at the front of the theatre for the evening’s first house. It wasn’t unknown for the actors and members of the chorus to slip out through the stage door for a bit of fresh air between shows –and sometimes something rather less innocent than a breath of air, as she had good cause to know, since Con wasn’t above slipping out for a bit of a kiss and a cuddle with his latest girl if he thought he could get away with it. The last thing Emily wanted was to get caught sitting here on the ground with the boy. Con would laugh his head off at her and then no doubt tell her that she wasn’t to have anything more to do with the boy, citing as his reason for this veto a concern for her safety she knew perfectly well he did not feel. It would suit Con very well indeed, she suspected, if she were to suffer the kind of accident that would lead to him becoming a widower. Not that he would actively do anything to achieve that status for himself. Con was too lazy for that, and besides, Emily thought, sometimes he wasn’t above using her existence to get rid of a girl once he had grown bored with her. Wives had their uses in some ways.
At best, though, he’d probably chase the boy off and then she’d never see him again, and Emily knew that, daft though it was, she would miss him. Was that really what she was reduced to? Being afraid of missing a boy who hadn’t so much as said a word to her and only wanted her because of the food she gave him?
So what was new? After all, she already had a husband who only stayed married to her because of her money.
She ought to leave.
‘I’ll come in the morning tomorrow,’ she told the boy, ‘about ten o’clock – oh, and take this and go and buy yourself some warm socks and gloves and a scarf.’
The two half-crowns she pushed towards him gleamed briefly before he reached for them.
Emily never knew what it was that made her turn round once she had got to the end of the alleyway. It wasn’t any kind of sound – there hadn’t been one. Perhaps it had been some need within her to take a last look at the boy; whatever it was she was glad she had obeyed it when she saw the two heavily built youths who had crept out of the shadows behind her back.
One of them was pinning the boy against the wall whilst the other went through his pockets.
‘Come on, where are they? We saw the money she give you,’ she heard the heavier of the boys demanding.
When the boy made no response the youth holding him shook him roughly. ‘Need yer memory giving a bit of a shake, do yer? Well, Artie here don’t mind doing that, do yer, Artie?’
There was the soft but sickening sound of a bunched fist meeting vulnerable flesh and then a burst of cruel laughter.
‘Aaw, look at that, he’s crying. Hurt, did it? Well, that’ll learn you then, won’t it, ’cos there’s plenty more where that come from. Now give us them half-a-crowns.’
Emily had heard enough.