22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [98]
‘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.