‘Vhat a boy he is!’ she said. ‘So one ain’t enough?’
It wasn’t the sort of answer he wanted. But then he hadn’t known what sort of answer he wanted when he asked the question. In fact he hadn’t really understood the question. It had grown out of a disturbing sense that he’d unwittingly caused his mother’s illness by being two people, one at home and another at school, and that perhaps it wasn’t right to be two different people, and he ought to do something about it. Now he was more confused than ever. Scowling, he turned his mind to a more practical problem and a more possible solution. ‘I could get a job soon,’ he said. ‘In the Lane, maybe. That vould help her get a place in the Buildin’s, vhat you think?’
‘Just a little older you get, bubeleh,’ she said. ‘At six years old you don’t vork yet. Now you sleep like a good boy.’ And she bit off her thread in such a sharp determined way he knew he had to obey.
But as it turned out, he got a job a great deal sooner than either of them had imagined possible.
He stayed with Aunty Dumpling for more than ten days. It was the second Shabbas before he went home. To find his mother up and about, wearing her red shawl and presiding over the Shabbas meal, with the candles lit, breaking the Shabbas bread and dipping it in the salt, all exactly the same as always. Back to normal. But when his father returned from the synagogue and said his customary prayer in her honour, ‘Strength and honour are her clothing; her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her,’ the tears David shed were as much relief as thanksgiving. Whatever else he did, he must never run the risk of making his mother ill again.
All through the long dusty summer holiday he looked after her, restricting the time he spent out in the streets with his new friends and running errands for her, even when it meant returning the heavy coats, glad that it was his arms that were aching and not hers. Yom Kippur wasn’t until September, which was ages away, and although he knew he would make a special effort to make amends then, he still felt that he’d committed such a dangerous unkindness that it ought to be put right straight away. The fact that she could be ill, and ill so suddenly, made her doubly precious to him. Until this summer, she had spent her time fussing and petting him, now in his six-year-old way, he was fussing and petting her.
But then September came and he had to go back to school again. ‘You vill be careful, von’t you, Mama,’ he said to her solemnly as he left the house on that first morning.
‘Vhat a boy he is!’ she said lovingly. ‘Mind you cross the road careful, eh, bubeleh.’
‘I’m in the second class now, Mama,’ he said, proudly and to show her she had no need to worry. He was quite looking forward to it. No more Killer for a start, and everybody said Miss Andrews was much nicer.
Which she was, being a quiet, slow, careful woman, who gentled them when they were in a rush of panic or bad temper, and took them quietly through their chores, praising them whenever she could. Ruby Miller, who’d grown quite a bit taller and very much fatter during the holidays, said she was ‘a bit of all right!’ And David, copying the tone and style of her quick easy English, was soon saying exactly the same thing. He was learning school English quite rapidly now, and feeling very pleased with himself. Yes, it was true, the second year was better than the first.
Even the fact that his hero had gone up into the big boys and wasn’t in the playground any more was only slightly upsetting. He would see him in the streets and, in any case, it wouldn’t be long before he was up in the big boys himself. Even now, he wasn’t entirely forgotten. From time to time there would be a scrabbling of feet against the wall that divided the big boys from the girls and the infants. Alfie’s bold tomcat face would appear over the top, grinning at him. ‘Chuck us our ball back, kid!’
But then, just when he’d decided that life at school could actually be quite pleasant, Ellie Murphy arrived.
It was a dank miserable morning, and his mother had insisted that he wear two coats to protect his chest, so he was late getting into the classroom because he’d taken rather longer than the others to struggle out of the top one and hang it on his peg. And there, standing in the gangway as though she owned it, and just where he ought to have been, was a filthy girl, dirtier and more dishevelled than anyone he’d ever seen. Her hair was all tangles and looked dusty like an old coconut mat, and there was a bruise above her left cheekbone and a scab at the corner of her mouth. She wore a long sack-coloured skirt full of holes and a black velvet jacket which had once been very fine but was now frayed at every seam, the cuffs and collar gaping like wounds to reveal a discoloured half-inch of stiffener. Her boots were several sizes too large for her, and grey with dust, and from where he stood he could see her dirty feet through the cracks. Yet she stood proudly, her chin in the air, as though she was important and special, and when she looked across at him he saw that her eyes were a quite startling blue, like the sky that had suddenly appeared in Flower and Dean Street that day when the walls were demolished, a clear, beautiful, unexpected, clean colour. He disliked her at once, recoiling from her in revulsion and annoyance.
‘Ah, there you are, David,’ Miss Andrews said, smiling her vague smile at him. ‘Now we’re all here …’ She turned her vagueness towards the dirty girl. ‘You can sit in the seat next to Ruby, dear. She’ll take care of you.’ Then it was Ruby’s turn. ‘Her name’s Ellie, and I’ve given her the peg next to yours. If you’ll just take her down and show her where to hang her hat …’
It was a dirty hat too, a flat black straw, trailing a tangled bush of ostrich feathers. Ruby wrinkled her nose, but led the way cheerfully enough, grinning at her friends. But David sat down without a word, scowling and not looking at either of them. He had a seat beside the gangway because he was well-behaved and worked hard and had a ticket for attendance. He knew that because Miss Andrews had told him. And now his hard-earned position was going to be spoilt by a horrible girl.
He prepared himself for the start of the day, still scowling, checking that his slate was clean, and his slate pencil in place, easing his precious slice of prune cake out of his pocket and placing it carefully on the shelf in his desk ready for playtime. It was Aunty Dumpling’s special cake and a rare treat. And as always it sustained him through the drone of Tables and the monotony of Arithmetic.
He was waiting at Miss Andrews’ desk to have his sums marked when the bell rang for playtime. His mouth began to water at the first clang and he looked up brightly, hoping she’d hurry up and collect in the books.
She caught the glance and responded to it. ‘Um … yes … Pile your books on the table like good children … Hymie. you’ll collect everyone else’s, won’t you?’
David was back at his desk within seconds, already savouring the taste of prune cake, his mouth moist with anticipation. And the cake was gone! He couldn’t believe it. He knew he’d put it on the shelf. He remembered doing it. All wrapped up in its greaseproof paper, nice and neat, in the corner where he always put it. Could it have fallen on the floor? No. Or in the desk? No. There was no sign of it anywhere, only the dark grease stain on the shelf. And the line was waiting for him. Baffled and hungry and disappointed he marched into the playground.
Fortunately Hymie started calling in the minute they got out of the door, and that took his mind off it a bit, even though his stomach was aching for the food that had been denied it. ‘Bags I dip,’ he offered, because being busy was the best treatment for hunger. He’d just learned a new dip from Hymie and wanted to try it.
One two three,
Mother caught a flea,
Put it in the tea pot
An’ made a cup a’ tea.
The flea jumped out
And bit Mother’s snout,
Along came Father
Wiv ’is shirt ’angin’ out.
The circle was close and warm against the mist, leaning in towards his dipping hand and smelling of fried onions and herrings and burnt bones and coal, nice homely acceptable smells. The new girl
was almost forgotten. He decided he’d look for the cake again when he got to the classroom. It must have slipped down somewhere in the desk. That was it.
It was a furious game and occupied the entire playground, spinning them off into every direction like paper chips in a kaleidoscope. Soon both his bootlaces had come undone and he had to call ‘fainites’ to fasten them again. He knelt beside the steps where there was less likelihood of being knocked over and tied a double knot firmly, concentrating hard. As his fingers tugged the laces he caught a glimpse of a black velvet sleeve and looked up, and there was the awful girl, sitting on the top step, eating something from a piece of greaseproof paper. There was something so surreptitious about her movements that he knew at once that she was eating his cake.
‘Vhat you got there?’ he asked roughly.
‘Nothink.’
‘Let’s ’ave a look-see.’
‘Shan’t.’
But he didn’t need to look any closer. He could see the filling. ‘You got my cake.’
‘No I ain’t,’ she said, and as he climbed the step towards her she crammed the remains of the cake into her mouth all at once, so that her cheeks were puffed with it and her blue eyes bolting.
‘You’ve ate my cake!’ he said, enraged.
‘Should a’ looked after it, then,’ she said with her mouth full. He could see the rich crumbs mounded on her tongue.
‘You pinched it,’ he said, scowling at her.
‘No I never, see. Found it on the floor. You must ’a dropped it.’
He hadn’t. He knew he hadn’t. But she looked so sure of herself, not a bit guilty, and her blue eyes so clear, that she made him doubt.
‘Vell …’ he said. ‘Vell …
‘You’re it!’ Hymie yelled, jumping onto the step and thump ing him in the middle of the back. So the game swept him away.
From then on he kept any titbit he brought to school safely in his pocket, no matter how greasy it was. And he tried to keep well out of Ellie’s way. She had nicked his cake, and he didn’t intend to give her the chance to nick another. But she was always there somehow, tagging along on the edge of Alfie’s gang, of worming her way into the best games even though she must have known she wasn’t wanted.
Within a week they were calling her Smelly Ellie Murphy behind her back, but quite loud enough for her to hear. Poor clothes, patched and darned and faded, were the norm and acceptable at Deal Street School but velvet and ostrich feathers were very definitely not. But even that didn’t put her off. Horrid girl!
The months went by and his mother wasn’t ill again, the lessons might be boring but they were easy enough, and suddenly it was summer again, his last summer in the Infants.
There were more errands to run in the summer because food went off so quickly in hot weather and because there was a little more money in the house now that the tailoring trade was busy making clothes for the Season. So he found himself out in the streets more often than he was indoors, running to the dairy in Bell Lane with a little jug to see if Bessie had been milked, or to Jacob the Butcher’s in Ruth House or to Mr Cohen’s in Thrawl Street with a little dish in his hand for a ha’p’orth of jam or a salt herring. But best of all was a trip down the Lane for a bargain at one of the stalls.
David liked the Lane. You could buy anything you wanted there if you had the money. And it was all on display at his eye level: kosher meat, labelled in Yiddish, or chicken, hung by their scaly yellow legs, their dead eyes bulging; or fish in abundance, slippery herring from Fanny Marks, white dabs and dappled plaice, eels writhing in the barrel; or fruit and vegetables piled high on their green shelves, oranges glossy beside earth-streaked potatoes, apples reflecting the naphtha flares from the high polish of their green and red globes, bananas folded against one another in long curved swathes. There was rich cake at Monickendam’s, if you could afford it, and bagels hooped through a stick and bread of every colour, from palest yellow to black rye; there were mounds of soap like yellow wax, sacks of coal and boxes full of lacy gas mantles, quiet and clean and unused; there were secondhand clothes hanging from every wall as though they’d been executed, wafting their pungent smell of dirt and sweat with the breeze of every movement below them; there were boots and shoes, scuffed and patched and polished, coils of lace and fluttering ribbons, chipped cups and saucers, pails full of broken eggs, cooking oil like golden water in a vast green vat, even wigs and hairpieces, forlorn on their wooden stands. Anything at all. So much colour, and so much noise, with the stall holders calling their wares in a mixture of English and Yiddish, and such a close warm smell with all those people crushed up against one another in the spaces between the stalls and the shops. You couldn’t see the top of the buildings or the pavement for the crush of all those bodies. It was like being in a huge warm bath, only better because this water was brightly coloured and got warmer the longer you stayed in it.
Sometimes he would wander down to Wentworth Street even when he hadn’t any errands, just for the pleasure of seeing the sights. And one afternoon in July he saw a sight he didn’t expect.
He was loitering beside Flossie Silverman’s stall, watching her as she hung belts and braces from the side rail, when a quick surreptitious movement flicked across his line of vision between the dangling colours. It was a small dark hand passing rapidly over the heap of oranges on the next stall. Flick and an orange was gone, hidden in the hand, passed under a dirty pinafore. Then another flick, and an apple was filtched. It was so bold and so quick it took his breath away. He looked up the arm to the face above the hand and saw that the thief was Ellie Murphy.
There was a sweep of thick eyelashes and her blue eyes looked boldly at him for a fraction of a second, recognizing and warning. Then she was gone, skimming off into the crowds, quick as a flea. So she was a thief. He’d always known it. What should he do? He knew you never told your parents anything that happened in the playground, but this was different. This was in the open, in the Lane.
While he was dithering, a hand seized him by the shoulder. He was so alarmed, he jumped. It was Alfie Miller.
‘How d’yer fancy a job, kid?’ he said, grinning his tomcat grin.
David forgot all about Ellie at once. A job! Wasn’t that just what he wanted? A job and the chance to earn money and get Mama a place in the Buildings. ‘Yes!’ he said, breathless with surprise and pleasure. ‘Very much I vould like!’
‘Whatcher think?’ Alfie said, turning to the man who was standing beside him. ‘’E’s a good kid. Straight. Aintcher?’
David nodded his head to show how straight he was, while the man considered him, his thick eyebrows drawn together, and his lips pursed. ‘Looks the part, I’ll grant yer,’ he said. ‘Reckon ’e’s fly, do yer?’
‘Fly? Do me a favour! Quick as greased lightnin’ ’e is. Aintcher?’
‘’Ow old are yer?’
‘Seven,’ David said hopefully. Was that old enough?
‘’E don’t look it,’ the man said to Alfie.
‘More’s the better,’ Alfie said. And the man drew his eyebrows together again and looked at David for a long disquieting time. ‘Come on, Crusher,’ Alfie said. ‘’E’s as innercent as a babe newborn. Look at ’im, I ask yer! Yer won’t get better’n that.’
‘Yer on!’ the man said, nodding at Alfie, and touching his bowler hat with a thick forefinger. ‘Tell ’im what’s what. Sunday free o’clock.’ And he was gone, his dark coat one of the many shifting and crowding between the stalls.
Alfie took David by the arm and walked him off companionably along the Lane. ‘It’s like this ’ere, Davey,’ he said. ‘Nah an’ then my uncle cops a bit of a bargain. Some geyser in the trade. Up the ware’ouse. Done ’im a good turn oncest, so ’e sez. So ’e puts a bargain ’is way nah an’ then, ’f’yer take my meanin’.’
‘Yes,’ David said, feeling honoured to be told so much and wondering what his job was going to be.
‘On’y trouble is,’ Alfie said, looking very serious about it, ‘’s
’too good a bargain this time. Tha’s the on’y trouble. ’E’s got these rings, see, real gold rings like yer see in the jewellers. Sell fer ’alf a sov there they would, on’y ’is mate reckons ’e’s ter sell ’em in the Lane fer a tanner a time.’
It was a bargain. David’s brown eyes were quite round with the wonder of it.
‘Tried ter sell ’em last week, ’e did,’ Alfie went on, ‘an’ watcher think?’
‘What?’
‘No takers! Never sold one. They all fought it was a con, I reckon. Well, yer don’t sell gold rings fer a tanner, now do yer? Not every day a’ the week. An’ no one wants ter be the first ter buy, case it’s a con. Stands ter reason. Like in school. No one wants ter be first, so you all keep quiet. Well, you know that, dontcher Davey? So ’e’s got a job on, you can see that cantcher.’
Oh he could, he could.
‘So what we want you ter do is this. Stand in the crowd, as if you was interested like, an’ when he offers fer the fird time, call out, “I’ll ’ave one!” We’ll give yer the tanner. Then we got our first sale, an’ they can all see what a bargain you’ve got, an’ everythink’ll be hunky-dory. Whatcher say? Give yer the tanner if yer do it right.’
Sixpence! It was a fortune! ‘I do it,’ he promised, and was rewarded by the broadest tomcat grin he’d ever seen on his hero’s face.
‘Good kid!’ Alfie said. ‘See yer Sunday. Free o’clock. Wentworf Buildin’s. You won’t regret it.’
David was so excited he ran all the way home. A job! A real job! He was going to earn money like the big boys and girls. What a help he’d be! And this was just the start. Soon they could afford the rent in the Buildin’s. Mama need never be ill again.
Chapter Five
Sunday was a lovely day, pleasantly warm and with just sufficient breeze blowing up from the river to stir the stale air in the chasms between the tenements. The sky was cobalt blue, as David noticed the minute he stepped out into Fashion Street, because it was such a strong satisfying colour it made him lift his eyes to look at it. And the clouds were lovely too, fragile, changing shapes, curled and white like drifting goose feathers.
A Time to Love Page 6
