Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton Read Free Book Online Page A

much better. He’d not been to his grandfather’s house since the last row between him and Lily sometime around 1936. It was a walk of only a couple of miles. He knew it by heart, by pace, by flagstone—he’d walked over from Maroon Street, Limehouse to Sidney Street in Whitechapel a hundred times without ever knocking on Abner’s door. If he passed Abner in the street, the old man—old? he was fifty-seven—would usually slip him a sixpence, ask after his mother and not listen to the boy’s answer. The gang to which he intermittently belonged had taken on one of the Sidney Street gangs half a dozen times in the last three years and had the shit kicked out of them every time. This time he trod their turf with impunity, escorted by the street’s hard man—Abner Riley, cracksman and burglar.
    The Sidney Street house was three storeys. A narrow blade of a house standing on a plot less than fifteen feet wide. A house, not a flat. A house with some sense of decoration, some substantial, heavyweight Victorian furniture and a sense of being lived in and looked after that his last home had always seemed to lack. A woman lived here. Not a drunken, life-incapable excuse-for-a-woman like his mother, but someone who bothered from time to time. No one had ever mentioned a grandmother. For all he knew, the faeries had brought Lily one day in 1908. Or more likely Abner had stolen her—but then, why would he keep her? No, Abner had a girlfriend. It seemed unlikely, but more plausible than a lodger. Lodgers didn’t go with Abner’s job. Abner had a girlfriend.
    “Odd, we never met, eh kid? Still can’t be our fault, can it? Name’s Merle. Me and yer grandad’s . . . y’know . . .”
    Yes. He knew.
    Her name wasn’t Merle. It was Mary-Ann. When she and Abner had met she had been turning tricks up West and Merle (after Merle Oberon) carried less sense of violated virginity than any combination of names that included “Mary.” The fares preferred fucking a Merle to a Mary.
    The boy had his own room.
    His own room. His own bed. A jug of water and a basin on the stand. A pot to piss in. No more sleeping on roll-out on the kitchen floor. No more pissing in the sink. As he looked up at the moon peeping at him through two centuries of dirt caking the skylight, he found himself quietly grateful to Abner for creating a level of poverty a few fractions higher than his own. Grateful, still suspicious, still scared, still baffled, but also aware of lesson one in a course of which he had no need—but he learnt it all the same—crime pays.
    The funeral was apt. The church itself—St. George’s-in-the-East—as blown to bollocks as any other house not so favoured by God. They’d swept the broken glass aside, made some attempt to shovel out the rubble and held what turned out to be an outdoor/indoor, roofless service in the ruins of Hawksmoor’s vision, followed by a swift burial in the churchyard under a peeping May sun, with the last draught of April tugging at their hair. Abner had no hair, Merle wore one of her many wigs, and Wilderness stood hatless in an ill-fitting blazer and even iller-fitting grey flannel trousers. He’d no idea where either had come from. Abner had simply produced them on the morning of the funeral and said, “Can’t see yer mum orf in rags, now can we?”
    Of Herbert Henry Asquith Holderness, L/Cpl, 5th Batt., The Royal East Kents, there was no sign.
    The wake was an equal absence.
    Most of Lily’s friends had perished in the raid that killed her, and Wilderness had long ago worked out that the only friend an alcoholic has or needs comes in a bottle.
    It was left to the three of them to mourn and blame.
    “I blame meself,” Abner said.
    “Whyzat?” from Merle.
    “I spoilt the kid. Never said no to her. Not from the moment she batted her blue eyes at me. And then when her mum died, it was just ’er an’ me . . . I spoilt her even more.”
    “Yeah, well,” Merle said over her glass of stout.