Stay Where You Are and Then Leave (7 page)

“Do you know,” said Georgie, standing in the concourse and looking around at the platforms, staring at the height of the station ceiling and listening to the sound of the conductors' whistles, “I used to think I might like to be a train driver. I tried for a job on the London-to-Edinburgh line, but I didn't get it.”

“Why not?” asked Alfie, looking up at his dad.

“They said I wasn't a good fit,” he replied with a shrug. “Whatever that meant. They're a posh old lot, them train drivers. They think they're better than everyone else on account of how they get to wear a uniform all the time. But they're not.”

“You're going to wear a uniform now too,” said Alfie, and Georgie laughed a little and tousled the boy's hair even though Alfie hadn't meant it as a joke.

“Yes, I expect I am,” he said. “Hold on now—since we're here there's a bit of business I need to take care of.”

They walked over toward the ticket counter, where lots of people were queuing up for tickets, but at the end of the row were three desks lined up on the platform without railings in front of them, each one manned by an officer, leaning over ledgers and making notes alongside some of the entries.

“Afternoon,” said Georgie, lighting up a cigarette and taking a drag from it as he approached the man at the center table, who was about ten years older than he was and had dark-black hair, parted neatly at the side and with so much hair cream in it that his comb had left teeth marks like a freshly plowed field. Alfie heard a wolf whistle and turned around to see Leonard Hopkins, kneeling by his shoeshine box, leering at a girl who turned in surprise and smiled before being dragged away by her mother.

“Can I help you?” said the man behind the desk.

“The name's Georgie Summerfield,” said Georgie. “I was told to come along to organize my transport.”

“You're a new recruit, are you?”

“That's right.”

The man behind the desk nodded but wore a very serious expression on his face. He glanced at the men on either side of him, who exchanged an amused look before shaking their heads and getting back to their ledgers.

“All right then, son,” said the man in the middle. “You're new at all this, so I'll assume that you don't understand the way we do things around here. First things first: take the cigarette out of your mouth and put it out.”

Georgie stared at the man, and Alfie stared at Georgie. Something changed on his dad's face—a sudden realization that life was different now than it had been a few days before. He did what he was told, tossing the cigarette onto the ground and crushing it beneath the heel of his boot. Alfie noticed a slight tremor in his hands as he did so.

“Now stand up straight and look ahead, there's a good fellow. You're not an animal in the jungle. Posture. At all times, posture.”

Georgie adjusted his stance, standing to his full height, shoulders back, eyes looking straight ahead. Beside him, Alfie did the same thing. His head came up to his dad's waist.

“That's better. Now let's try this again, shall we? I think what you meant to say was, ‘Good afternoon, sir.'”

“Yes, sir,” said Georgie.

“Your name again?”

“Georgie Summerfield.”

The sergeant raised an eyebrow and put his pen back on the table, staring at Alfie's dad with an irritated expression on his face.

“Georgie Summerfield,
sir
,” whispered Alfie.

“Georgie Summerfield, sir,” repeated Georgie in a quiet, resigned voice.

The sergeant nodded and leafed through a book, running his finger along a list of names. “Damley Road?” he asked, looking up.

“That's right, sir.”

“You're in luck, Summerfield. You've got a few days yet. Wednesday morning. Eight a.m. transport from Liverpool Street. Aldershot Barracks. Basic training for eight weeks. Bring this with you on the morning”—he handed a ticket across—“and you'll see our lot soon enough on platform four. 14278, that's your number. Don't be late, there's a good chap. We call that desertion.”

“Right you are, sir.”

The sergeant looked at Alfie. “And who's this blighter, then?” he asked.

“That's my boy, sir. Alfie.”

“Proud of your old man, are you, Alfie?” asked the sergeant, but Alfie didn't say anything. “Well, you will be,” he went on, dismissing them both now. “One day.”

“I thought we came to look at the trains,” said Alfie when they were walking home.

“We did,” said Georgie.

“No we didn't,” said Alfie, pulling his hand free of his dad's as they walked along.

*   *   *

Now Alfie was back in King's Cross for the first time since that day. He looked around, remembering where the sergeant had sat, but there were no desks there now, although the location of the ticket counters hadn't changed. There were a lot of soldiers to be seen making their way across the concourse. Some were waiting in small groups beside the tea shop, their rucksacks on the ground beside them. Others were climbing down off trains and looking around for people they recognized. The rhythmic noise of the engines was as bad as ever—
dead-Dad's-dead-Dad's-dead-Dad's-dead
—and Alfie wondered how the people who worked here could bear it.

He noticed one young Tommy standing in the center of a platform with a bag on his back and a deep red scar running down the side of his face. He was about twenty years old, Alfie thought, and had an expression on his face that was difficult to define; it was as if he'd been visited by a ghost but didn't know how to tell anyone in case they locked him up and threw away the key. A moment later, two older people, a man and a woman—his parents, Alfie was certain of it—ran toward him, and when he saw them his rucksack fell off his back and his face collapsed. He looked as if he was about to fall over, but before he could, his mother and father were on either side of him, holding him up, and he was crying on their shoulders, great heavy sobs, as they wrapped him up between their bodies, protecting him from the world, rubbing his hair and whispering in his ears. When they started to walk away, the boy remained between them, and they stood as close as they could without all falling down in a muddle. The father's arm was wrapped around his son's shoulders; the mother's clasped tight around the boy's waist. Alfie watched them for a long time until he decided he shouldn't stare like this, and then he turned away.

He looked around and was pleased to see that there were no other shoeshine boys in King's Cross. Leonard Hopkins was long gone, and no one, it seemed, had come to take his place. He chose a point by a pillar that was equidistant from the ticket counter on his left and the platforms on his right and the tea shop in the corner, and sat down on the ground, opening Mr. Janá
č
ek's box, taking out his brushes, cloths, daubers, and polishes, and closing the lid. He took his cap off his head and placed it upside down on the ground next to him before throwing the loose change from his pocket—three ha'pennies—into it to make it look like he'd already started. And then he looked up and shouted at the top of his voice:

“Shoeshine! Get your shoes shined here!”

*   *   *

Later that day, when he got home, he found Margie having a nap in the front parlor; she looked exhausted. He ran upstairs to his room and put the box in the back of his wardrobe before coming down to the kitchen and washing his hands with carbolic soap. When he was finished he gave them a sniff, but they still smelled of polish so he did it all over again. It wasn't much better, but there was nothing he could do about it; they were as clean as he could get them for now. His back hurt a little from leaning over all day and the muscles in his arms were sore. There might have been a war going on, but there was still a surprising number of people who wanted their shoes to look good.

He looked around and felt his heart sink with what he saw. All the chairs were covered with Mrs. Gawdley-Smith's pillowcases, and the line outside in the yard held her bedsheets and some funny-looking undergarments. Margie would never smell the polish on his hands after all. The place smelled too much like a laundry.

He found his mother's purse in the handbag that was sitting in the corner and took it out, opening the clasp and looking inside. There wasn't much money there. Reaching into his pocket, he took out all his earnings from the day and dropped most of them inside—enough money that she'd be pleased to find it there but not so much that she'd question where it had appeared from—before taking the rest back up to his bedroom, where he hid it in a box at the back of his sock drawer for a rainy day. Then he collapsed on his bed and closed his eyes.

It was still early evening, the sun was shining outside, but Alfie was asleep on top of his bed while Margie was snoring in the broken armchair in front of the fireplace.

It had never been like this before the war began.

 

CHAPTER 5

WHEN THIS LOUSY WAR IS OVER

Alfie started work at eight o'clock in the morning, one of the busiest times of the day at King's Cross. He took up his usual position with a view of the platforms, the ticket counter, and the tea shop, pulled over a seat for his customers, threw his upturned cap on the ground, and looked around for his first shine of the day. While he waited, he took
Robinson Crusoe
from his pocket and picked up where he'd left off the night before. The edges had grown a little scruffy, the paper was a little torn, but the words were all intact.

“Hello, Alfie!”

He looked up to see Mr. Podgett, a local bank manager who got his shoes shined every week, standing before him.

“Hello, Mr. Podgett,” replied Alfie.

“The usual, please,” he said, sitting down and unfolding his newspaper as he placed one foot on the footrest and let out a great sigh of comfort. Alfie took a look at his dark-brown shoes; they were a little dusty at the tips and had suffered a number of scuffs since the previous week. “Cold morning, isn't it? Well, it is almost November, I suppose. Can't expect a heat wave.”

Alfie took out his dusting cloths and wiped Mr. Podgett's left shoe clean before dipping a buffing cloth in the tin of polish and spreading an even coat across the surface of the shoe. Then he picked up the brown horsehair brush and began to run it briskly over the clean area. He quite liked the smell of polish; it reminded him of when he used to run into number six to play with Kalena. Her house always smelled like this.

“Better news today,” said Mr. Podgett as he scanned the headlines. “Looks like things are going our way for a change. Maybe this blasted war will come to an end soon after all. I said to Mrs. Podgett this morning, ‘Mrs. Podgett,' I said, ‘I think it's only going to be a few more months before the end is upon us.' Of course, she claims that I say that all the time and it never comes true, and perhaps she's right, but this time I really believe it.”

Alfie said nothing. He knew from experience that Mr. Podgett preferred to talk and talk without being interrupted. It was better not to speak until he was asked a direct question that required an answer.

“Our son, Billy, is still over there, of course,” he added after a moment. “I've told you about Billy, haven't I? He's somewhere in Belgium with his battalion. Can't say where, of course. All very top secret, hush-hush, and on the QT. He has more than three hundred men under his command, if you can believe it. Of course, he was always very responsible and conscientious, even as a boy. Never gave us a moment's trouble. You're the same, I'd imagine, aren't you, Alfie? A credit to your family.”

“Mum says I'm a proper handful,” said Alfie.

“Well, I'm sure you don't mean to be. But Billy was always well behaved so it's no surprise that he's gone on to earn such responsibility. All right, there was that incident when we went to Cornwall to visit his aunt Harriet and he got into a terrible fight with the Cattermole boy, but that was something and nothing, I always said, and it should never have been allowed to develop into such a fuss. The boy was all right in the end, after all. It wasn't as if he was in hospital for more than a couple of days. And as for that girl, the one who said she'd witnessed it all, well, she was a flighty piece, everyone knew that. There was talk about her—I won't say what kind of talk, Alfie, on account of your young ears, but let's be honest, there's no smoke without fire, is there, and it's hard not to imagine that she was playing one of them off against the other. Ever been to Cornwall, Alfie?”

“No, sir,” said Alfie.

“Beautiful part of the world. Where do you go on your holidays, then? The Lake District? Wales? Somewhere up north?”

Alfie tried not to laugh. Sometimes adults asked the stupidest questions. He'd never been on a holiday in his life. He wasn't even entirely sure what you did on one. Was it the same things you did on any other day, only in a different location? If his family went on holiday, would he be shining shoes on Blackpool Pier? Would Granny Summerfield be looking for a bit of a gossip at Stonehenge? Would Margie be struggling to make ends meet on the Isle of Wight?

“Of course, things worked out quite well for the Cattermole boy in the end,” continued Mr. Podgett, not waiting for an answer. “Harriet told me that he wasn't able to go to the war on account of how his leg never healed correctly afterwards, but I can't imagine that had anything to do with Billy. Might have even done it deliberately to avoid being conscripted. You hear stories like that all the time, don't you? Disgraceful business. I'd have more respect for a conchie than I would for someone like that. No, if you ask me, Billy did the boy a favor, and now look at him! Somewhere in the middle of Europe, leading five hundred men in and out of danger zones, putting the welfare of his country before his own safety. He wrote to his mother recently and said that he hoped the war would never end, that's how much he enjoys the fighting, but I can't imagine he meant it. Everyone wants the war to end. Mrs. Podgett, she burst into tears when she read that letter; she said that it was all our fault that he turned out like he did, but I said, ‘Alice, what are you talking about? Our son has a thousand men under his command and he's proved his worth time and again, leading all those brave men into battle, writing to the parents of every boy who's been killed. Why, he can't even go over the top himself anymore on account of how much writing he has to do.' No, he's a fine boy, Alfie, I'm proud of him, but it says here”—and with that he tapped on the newspaper once again—“it says here that things are looking up and maybe there's an end in sight. That'd be good, wouldn't it? You'd like to see an end to the war, I expect?”