22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [78]
The town stays frozen for weeks and then the thaws come, causing the river to flood and the canals to fill with surging brown waters. In the centre of town, the buses and trams start running again, people walk the streets in wellingtons and sou’westers and the schools are all open.
On a bright morning, after taking Aurek to school, Silvana walks through the backstreets of Ipswich. She passes by the Methodist church with its bleak yellow-brick front and sees a small passageway she has not been down before. She enters it, running her fingertips against narrow moss-lined brick walls, marvelling at the darkness that gathers at her feet like blackened leaves.
The passageway comes out into a cobbled street full of garages and repair shops. Cars, lorries, vans and coaches are parked in an orderless jumble, blocking the road. She makes her way through them, and at the end of it she finds a yard. A painted sign hangs over the wooden doors: Harry Goldberg & Son. Rag & Bone & Scrap Metal Merchants. The man who sold her the shoes. She is curious, drawn to the place.
The next day she bakes gingerbread. Half of it she puts on the kitchen table for Aurek and Janusz. The other half she wraps in a tea towel and takes to the rag-and-bone man. He remembers her. He pushes the gingerbread into his mouth and smiles, showing sticky teeth and receding gums.
‘Have a look around. I’ve got everything here, antiques an’ all. I have dealers coming down from London to look over my stock. My father ran this place before me. He used to buy bones an’ all. Boiled ’em up right here.’
‘Bones?’
‘Rag and bone. That’s what we dealt in. We sold bones for fertilizer. No money in it now. Have a look around.’
The stables are full of clothes and bric-a-brac. Dining-room chairs are piled to the ceiling of one stall. Bales of damp-smelling linen fill another. Dozens of cats, sleeping in among the linen, wake at Silvana’s approach and watch her with sharp eyes. She looks into dark stalls filled with carpets and silk parachutes, beds and blanket boxes. For the first time since coming to England, she feels a moment of recognition. She is surely part of this jetsam of human life.
The following week, Silvana bakes more gingerbread for the rag-and-bone man. He has a sweet tooth and, she suspects, nobody in his life to feed it. The simple exchange of cake for time to wander through his barns and stables pleases her.
‘It’s my birthday,’ she tells him, encouraged by the obvious pleasure with which he greets her. ‘Today.’
It is probably not the kind of thing you say to a stranger, but Silvana wants to tell somebody. Janusz went off this morning without a mention of it. Not that it matters. She is twenty-eight years old. Too old for cakes and singsongs.
‘Well then, you just help yourself,’ the man tells her. ‘Happy birthday, miss. You go on and take what you want. Most of the clothes go to charity in any case. I sort them and they get sent off to people who need them. Foreigners mainly. Poor beggars who’ve got nothing.’
For a moment she thinks he is insulting her. But then she stares at his hooded eyes and sallow face and realizes she sees him in the same way, as just another lonely foreigner who has nothing.
Silvana helps him sort the clothes. Bedlinen and cotton for rags. Musty-smelling coats in one pile; men’s clothes in another; women’s and children’s in a third. She thinks of the refugee camp, the long lines of people who came and went and disappeared just like she did onto trains and buses and boats heading for other countries. The clothes they were all given must have started their journey in places like this. Sorting clothes with the rag-and-bone man is like moving among lost people, and they are the kind she knows best.
Silvana opens a hessian sack filled with blouses and imagines the women who once wore them. The stains and cloudy marks on bed sheets are a registry of births and marriages and deaths. Sweat rings on collars make her sigh. She puts her hands in sleeves and traces the roughened seams of stitching pulled open by bodies that must have, day