Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [39]
‘What have you got for us to eat?’ Britto said, almost as soon as he was inside the door. ‘Me and Jim in famishin’, ain’t we, mate?’ He was a stocky, dogged man with bad teeth and steady eyes and too much suffusion of blood in his face. The abruptness of his speech she knew for a sign of failure – they had been looking for casual work on the docks.
‘Me and Jim is famishin’,’ she repeated, with a sudden strident mimicry that astonished them. ‘Me and Jim is a pair o’ pisspots.’ She would have liked to go on longer in this oblique, ironical vein, but rage got the better of her. Her voice rose and shrilled. ‘Proud on yerselves, are you? Think you are men? Where is the rest of it?’
The smile left Britto’s face. He looked uncertain for a moment, then angry. ‘Where is what?’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The money what you have kept back for yer fambly. The penny-worth o’ juniper-juice what you have brought home for yer wife.’
‘We didn’t find nothin’,’ Britto said sullenly. He glanced at the silent man beside him but found no support there, in the tanned face, the serious, reckless eyes.
‘No good looking at him. You’d do better to look at them.’ She motioned violently towards the mattress in the corner, and at once, frightened by the gesture or by the prospect of blows to follow, the white-faced little boy and girl began gasping and crying.
‘You trollop, stow your noise. I ain’t got nothin’ to give you.’ Anger at being obliged to state the fact thickened his voice. He took two steps towards her. ‘You loud bitch,’ he said. ‘You better mum your dubber.’
‘My arse.’ She felt rage and fear together. He was not less likely to strike her with the other man there. ‘Where’d you get the drink then? Think I can’t smell it on you?’
‘We went up town,’ Deakin said, in his light, dispassionate voice. ‘We were holding horses’ heads for some gentry. They gave us threepence between us an’ we drank it.’ He paused briefly, then in the same tone said, ‘I’ll be leaving tomorrow – early morning.’
He was taken by surprise himself at the announcement – he had intervened only to avert a row. But the main decisions of his life had been like this, recognitions of some truth, something self-evident, that had to be acted on. ‘Devon,’ he said. ‘That’s where I am going.’
‘Well, there’s a piece o’ news,’ Jane said. ‘More’n two weeks you been here, takin’ up space.’ Once in that time, when she had been drinking alone, Deakin had come back in the afternoon and they had lain together on Deakin’s pallet and coupled without tenderness and she had clutched at his hard body and felt the welts of old floggings on his narrow back. ‘Then you go waltzing off,’ she said, ‘without so much as a kiss my bum.’ Her rage was rising again, directed now at Deakin’s uncluttered life. Casually, just like that, he could walk away, disappear – and the money with him, she thought suddenly: within half a minute of his leaving the price on him would be lost to them for ever …
‘You leave him alone,’ Britto said. ‘He has got the right to go when he likes.’
But she could tell that Britto hadn’t known either. ‘Don’t you talk about rights,’ she said. ‘What is it to me that you was shipmates? Very fine, ain’t it? He’s run from a navy ship, you tell him he can stay here. You does the favour, I gets the extra work.’ The idea expanded steadily in her mind while she was talking. It might be as much as three pounds that Deakin was worth. For twopence a day and keep she could get a girl to mind the little ones. She could buy a grinder, get scraps from the butcher, make sausages and sell them in the street. There was profit in sausages. Perhaps they could save the baby …
‘Little place called Sheepwash,’ Deakin said. ‘That’s where I am going.’
‘No one is askin’ where yer goin’.’