22 Britannia Road (29 page)

‘There are witches in forests. Even here.
Rusalkas
. They’re the spirits of murdered girls who sit in the branches of trees and call men to their death.’

Peter is impressed, he can tell. Aurek pulls a face, grinning.

‘They rip boys’ eyes out.’

Peter laughs. ‘Liar!’

He stubs his cigarette out, grinding it under his shoe.

‘You going up there?’

Aurek nods. He’s going to go up and get a rook’s egg. Easy as that. He’ll take it home for the enemy. A present for him. He’s pleased with this idea. Proud of it.

He spits on his hands, accepts the leg-up Peter offers him, grabs a branch and pulls himself up. He is small and lithe and his hands and feet find tiny ledges and places to grip. It’s a terrific feeling being up a tree, far away from everybody, swinging through the branches like Tarzan of the jungle. Aurek stops halfway up and looks down.

‘You all right?’ calls Peter from below.

Aurek waves back at him. Above him, the nest is huge, a big mess of broken sticks and branches fashioned into a globe, a dirty sun caught in the tree.

He pulls himself up to it and the two rooks swoop over him, beating their wings in his face, chattering angrily. Aurek swings his body away from the tree as far as he dares, but the birds won’t leave him alone. He loses his footing for a moment and bangs against the rough bark of the tree, hitting his nose hard. Tears spring to his eyes. He
touches his mouth and brings his hand away, slicked red. His nose is bleeding.

His legs feel weak and he loses his grip, snatching at branches. His right leg is hooked over a branch and it anchors him. He grabs a branch and pulls himself up again. The birds circle him, pecking at the air. Aurek closes his eyes and clings to the tree, the beating of wings loud in his ears.

‘Aurek!’ Peter calls. ‘Don’t let go!’

Aurek can hear him yelling but his fingers are slipping and the birds keep flying at him. He tucks his face down, the tree bark grazing his cheek, and tries to hold on even as he knows he is going to fall.

‘Mama!’ he yells. ‘Mama!’ His stomach turns in on itself. Everything is out of his reach. His legs kick and jerk, swimming in the air. One sandal slips off and he thinks he is already falling. The other shakes loose. He looks down, sees himself dead on the ground below, a bundle of bones and bright bruises, a fledgling fallen from its nest.

Silvana is up on her stockinged feet, running towards Peter, grabbing him by the shoulders. Peter points to the top of the tree, the birds circling and squawking. Aurek swings back and forth in the branches, one arm holding on, the other trying to protect his head. He must be about twenty feet up. She couldn’t catch him from that height. There is nothing to spread out on the hard ground to save him when he falls. And he will fall. She has always known the world is a place that demands justice and that some day Aurek would be taken from her. This is her punishment. This is the day she loses the boy.

‘Hold on,’ Tony says, coming up behind Silvana. He picks up a stone and aims it at the birds.

Silvana grabs his hand. ‘No! You might hit Aurek.’

‘But we’ve got to get the birds away from him.’

‘No stones! Help me get up the tree. Aurek? I’m coming.’ Silvana hitches up her skirts and reaches out for the lowest branch of the tree.

‘Don’t be crazy, you can’t climb up there.’

Tony tries to pull her away, but Silvana brings her elbow back sharply into his stomach. She scrambles into the lower branches of the tree. Tony tries again to grab her but she kicks him away and pulls herself up higher, out of his reach.

She climbs quickly without care, desperate to reach the boy. Her stockings rip as she clambers inexpertly in the branches, the rough bark scraping her thighs. Twigs catch in her hair. A branch whips into her eye, blinding her with pain. She feels as if her eyelid has been cut and her cheek is wet with tears. Still she climbs, and all the time the only image in her head is of the child falling. It will not happen. She cannot lose her son. Not this time.

Her hands search out branches, and she feels the weight of her body burning the muscles in her arms as she tries to get higher. She peers at the air in front of her.

‘Aurek? Aurek, don’t move.’

She wedges herself into a cleft and forces her one good eye to stay open. She can make out the form of Aurek above her. She takes a deep breath and forces her voice to sound calm.

‘Just hold on. I’m getting there. Don’t let go. You understand? Don’t let go.’

Her legs are trembling now, her knees slipping. She could fall herself.

She moves slowly until she can brace her back against another branch and hold herself in its grip.

‘Wait, I can get nearer. Just don’t let go.’

And he lets go.

Aurek has jumped. He has let go, trusted the air around him and jumped towards her. He is falling, his hair drifting in the breeze of his own movement, his face triumphant above her, arms stretched like wings. She reaches out, sure she will not catch him, and he grabs a branch, swinging inwards towards the tree, landing on top of her, his forehead smashing into her cheekbone.

‘Aurek,’ she says, over and over, as stars flash behind her eyes and pain shoots through her temples. She wants to laugh with relief.

‘
Ja jestem tutaj
,’ says Aurek, clinging to her. ‘I’m here, Mama. I flew. Did you see? I flew.’

In the flat above the pet shop, Silvana sits on a leather sofa with a blanket round her knees, a glass of whisky cradled in her hands. The boys are in Peter’s bedroom. Tony kneels in front of her, a bowl of
hot water beside him, a pad of cotton wool in one hand, a bottle of gentian violet in the other. He has a concerned look on his face, like a mother at her wits’ end with a wayward child.

‘He could have died,’ she says to him. She wants to explain, to tell him what she is so afraid of. ‘If he’d fallen, he could have died …’

‘But he didn’t,’ says Tony. ‘Now look, drink that whisky. We’ll see to these cuts and then I’ll take you home.’

He pours the violet concoction into the hot water and dips cotton wool in it, squeezing it out. He lifts the blanket slightly and touches her leg.

‘Take your stockings off.’ He nods at her. ‘Go on. They’re ripped to shreds. I’ll get you some more. New stockings are two a penny if you know where to find them. And I do. Let’s get these ones off first. We have to clean those cuts.’

She undoes first her left stocking and then the right, her hands feeling for garter straps under the blanket, peeling both stockings down to her knees.

‘Two a penny,’ she says. ‘That means something is common, doesn’t it?’

‘Sort of. Cheap, or easy to get hold of.’

She is aware of his hands on her knees, easing her stockings down to her ankles and over her feet. The soft pleasure of his attention. His fingers shape her ankles and travel gently up her leg, wiping her grazes clean with cotton wool. She watches the top of his head as he works. He doesn’t look up at her.

‘Children were two a penny in Poland during the war,’ she says. ‘Orphans everywhere. They had no one. I think about them. They won’t leave me alone.’

Tony rubs pink ointment into her cuts, his fingers touching then stopping as he asks if it hurts, if he should continue. He doesn’t look up and begins to pick splinters out of her feet.

‘Keep talking,’ he says. ‘Keep talking.’

Silvana wonders whether he is capable of tending to all her wounds, not just the cuts and bruises but the deep ones that don’t show, the ones that hurt the most and never heal. He finishes ministering to her feet and lifts the blanket, telling her, his voice as soft
and liquid as honey, that he is going to wash the grit out of the gash above her knee. She sees her thigh, its pale skin already turning blue and mottled around the cut, his hands tracing the shape of the bruises as they appear.

‘I heard of one village,’ she says, ‘where the houses were destroyed by bombing. Six hundred children were orphaned. Six hundred in one small village.’ She can feel tears running down her cheeks. ‘Those orphans were two a penny, like you say. I don’t know what happened to those children.’

Tony looks up at her. He places both his hands on her upper thighs, his fingers kneading her flesh.

‘Tell me. Tell me about them.’

‘Their mothers didn’t mean to leave them,’ she says. She can feel her lip trembling and she swallows back tears. ‘I know that. No mother means to lose a child. And if you found a child who had nobody … surely the right thing to do is to keep it? I mean, if a child needed a mother …’

‘A child?’

Silvana leans towards him, their heads touching.

‘What is it?’ he asks. ‘What is it you’re so afraid of?’

‘Aurek’s not my son,’ she breathes. ‘My son is dead. I left him and he died.’

He pulls her closer, his hands sweeping around her waist. She lifts her lips to his. It’s a kind of oblivion, this kiss. Her eyes are tight shut, his mouth is pressing and urgent. He holds her so tight, she can hardly breathe. And she doesn’t want to. She wants him to crush her. To take her last breath for himself.

With a heated needle, Aurek makes two tiny holes in each end of a moorhen egg. Beside him, Peter is playing with matches, lighting one after the other. There is a softly sulphurous smell in the room.

They are not talking because when Aurek and his mother came down from the tree, Peter told Aurek his mother was mad and Aurek threw Peter’s rucksack in the pond and then hit him in the stomach.

Aurek puts the egg on a tray with three others he has prepared in the same way.

‘Stop making that noise,’ says Peter.

Aurek looks up. So Peter is talking to him now.

‘That chirping sound. You sound like a bird.’

Aurek kicks at Peter and then dodges away from him, holding his tray of eggs up high.

‘Get away. Don’t touch me. They’ll break,’ he warns.

‘What are you going to do with them?’

‘I’m going to show my mum.’

Peter stands at the doorway to his bedroom.

‘You can’t. My dad said we had to stay here.’

Aurek holds the tray tightly in his hands, and Peter bunches his fists.

‘My dad said we had to stay in here. You can’t leave until I say so.’

Aurek can see Peter is serious, but still, he wants to see his mother.

‘All right,’ he says, holding out the tray. ‘You keep the eggs if I can go out there.’

Peter takes the tray.

‘OK. And I get to show them the eggs, right?’

They cross the landing and Aurek opens the living-room door for Peter, who carries the tray in front of him, walking slowly, as if he is balancing a bowl of water in his hands. Aurek trails behind him.

His mother is crying. At least he thinks she is. She is sitting on the sofa with a blanket on her knees and Tony is kneeling in front of her. He can’t quite see her face because she is looking down at her hands. Aurek wants to climb in her lap and comfort her, but as he thinks of it, Tony leans forward, wraps his arms around Silvana and kisses her.

Aurek gives a yelp of pain. ‘Mama! No!’

‘Dad!’ Peter yells, dropping the tray of eggs. ‘Dad, what’re you doing!’

The two of them pull apart. Silvana’s face is white, her mouth is open and her eye, a mass of purple bruising, has already swelled. What has she done? She looks like a terrible ghost. A
rusalka
, a dead woman with eyes that could rip your heart out.

‘Aurek?’ she calls, throwing off the blankets she is wrapped in, standing up, grabbing her stockings off the floor. ‘Sweetheart, don’t look like that …’

‘Don’t worry, boys.’ Tony strides towards them, arms out, a huge shape obstructing Aurek’s view of his mother. ‘Peter, you should have stayed in your bedroom like I asked. Aurek, come here …’

Aurek backs away. Tony mustn’t touch him. He has to get away. He thinks of flights of starlings shifting in the sky, the mass of them blocking out the light. He sees crows circling, black branches and treetops. Lost. He is lost. He opens his mouth and his birdsong escapes, the chattering of magpies, pheasants, the strangled call of rooks.

He pushes past Peter, runs through the flat, throws open the back door and charges down the fire escape, footsteps ringing out a metallic alarm. But where can he go? He is all alone. Home. It’s all he can think of. Back to the safety of 22 Britannia Road. Back to the enemy. Back to his father.

Silvana

Silvana was airing the bedding in Marysia’s room when she found her secrets. She shoved the straw mattress to one side and there, on the wooden base, was a photograph of a German soldier. A man in uniform with a smooth, round face. He had long-lashed eyes that were soft-looking, too pretty really, for a man. His mouth was tight set and unsmiling. Next to the photo was Silvana’s book on film stars wrapped in cotton. Her quilted bag was there as well. Marysia must have found them in the forest. But did she find them after the old man had rescued Silvana, or had she picked them up while Silvana and Aurek lay dying? Either way, she had kept them and hidden them.

There wasn’t much in the room. The bed, a wooden chair. An oval hand mirror. A metal trunk in one corner. Silvana lifted its lid and peered inside. It contained some dresses and hats and several pairs of black silk stockings. Silvana found a richly embroidered headscarf. Birds and flowers criss-crossing a red paisley print. She put her book back in her bag and tied the headscarf over her head. Marysia had stolen Silvana’s belongings and now she would take something of hers.

She was about to step out onto the front porch, ready to confront Marysia in the yard, when she heard the sound of a vehicle driving over the uneven farm track. A canvas-covered truck was coming towards the cottage. It stopped under the big chestnut tree and a German soldier got out. Silvana turned to see the old woman, Ela, standing behind her.

Ela’s face tightened. ‘The man outside mustn’t see you. He’ll think we’re hiding you. You stay out of sight until he’s gone.’

‘Is he her lover?’ Silvana hadn’t meant to ask. The sight of a German soldier had frightened her more than she realized. She had to know who he was.