Nameless (2 page)

Dad and Charlie drank together, and held more or less the same views: that God helped those who helped themselves, and that the powers that be had never done them any favours – so they lived by their own rules and to hell with anyone else’s.

Her other brother Joe was twenty-three, and he was different to Ted and Charlie. Big, quiet, strong as a bull. He had none of Charlie’s fire and aggression. None of Dad’s bone-deep belligerence.

Today when Dad and Charlie came back from the church it was obvious they’d stopped off at the pub on the way home. Their rolling gait and their loud-mouthed utterances made Ruby step very carefully around the place. She made the tea, keeping her head down.

She wished they’d stop going to the bloody church. Even more, she wished they wouldn’t visit Mum’s grave afterwards. It seemed like something Ted Darke felt he was dutybound to do, but it depressed him; then he would stop at the Rag and Staff and get plastered. And come home and cuff Joe, big as he was, round the ear, and then lay into Ruby.

Ruby, most of all.

And of course she deserved it.

Didn’t she?

After all, it was through her birth that Ted Darke had lost his wife Alicia, and his children their mother. He said so often enough, mostly while he rained blows down upon his daughter’s cringing head.

‘Why did the good Lord inflict you on me?’ he’d wheeze, hobbling on his bad foot. ‘God curse you!’

Ruby had asked once if she could go and visit the grave too. Dad had reacted with fury.

‘You don’t go near there, you bitch!’ he’d yelled, and slapped her.

Because he was right, wasn’t he? It
was
all her fault.

If she hadn’t been born, her mother wouldn’t have been lost.

She never asked again.

‘Little black
cow
,’ he spat at her.

Then he’d get tearful and ramble on, addressing Ruby sometimes and at others his dead wife. ‘Why’d you do it, girl, eh? My lovely Alicia. You loved me once, I know you did . . .’

Not even Joe, big amiable Joe, dared intervene. And Charlie just sat there and sneered.

Sometimes Ruby stood in front of the mould-spotted mirror in her bedroom and repeated her father’s words back to herself.

Little black cow.

But she wasn’t black. Not really. The mirror told her that she was the colour of pale milky coffee, and her features weren’t like those of what everyone around the East End of London called
coloured folk,
the ones who were fresh off the boat from warmer climes. Were those people mad? Given the choice, she’d have stopped in Jamaica – stuff this place. What with Hitler raining bombs down on their heads every night and the English weather, it was weird to consider that some people actually came here by choice.

No, she wasn’t black. Her reflection told her that her nose was straight and almost delicate. Her lips were full, her eyes were dark but glowing with warm chestnut flecks. Her hair was wavy, but not tightly curled. She
wasn’t
black. Not
full
black, anyway. In fact, she had heard really black people passing in the street, pointing her out, whispering she was ‘high yellow’ – whatever that meant. She was tall and well proportioned. She was
attractive.
But no one ever told her so. To her family, to all the people who lived around here, she was a curiosity; a misfit. The whites looked down on her, and the few blacks she’d come across eyed her with suspicion.

She wanted to shout back at her father, but the habits of the beaten and abused were too deeply instilled in her. So she took the beatings, the endless beatings, suffered the bruises – always on the body, rarely on the face; he wasn’t a complete drunken fool, even though he behaved like one.

And she deserved it. Didn’t she?

Because she was half-caste.
And
she’d killed her mother by being born to her. She wasn’t the same colour as Charlie and Joe. Not at all. They were white as pints of milk, both of them. She tried to work it all out, to make sense of it. But she couldn’t.

There were no pictures of their mother anywhere in the house, not a single one. No one would explain to Ruby why she was dark and the rest of her family was pale-skinned. Not even Joe, who never treated her badly, who was out in the yard, in the privy when
it
happened. No one would say they had different mothers, or that the mother who had given birth to two handsome white boys had later indulged in some sort of dalliance that had resulted in a tar-brush ‘mixture’ like Ruby.

‘Cross between a bull bitch and a window shutter,’ her dad said of her, eyeing her with disgust.

But he’d kept her. Put a roof over her head, seen that she was fed and clothed.

Yeah, because I’m his burden,
thought Ruby.
I’m the cross he has to bear, to make himself look good among those holier-than-thou old farts down the church.

The whole thing boiling and fulminating in her mind, she kept her head down as always. Quiet, timid little Ruby. Tomorrow she would be in Dad’s corner shop, helping out like she always did. Charlie and Joe never helped in the shop. She knew damned well they should have been signed up and over in France by now, doing their bit for King and country, but they weren’t.

‘It’s the land of the greased palm,’ Charlie would say with a grin. ‘Pay a wedge and people soon look the other way.’

It seemed to be true. Charlie and Joe and the gang of hoodlums who had trailed around after them ever since school stripped lead and iron from emergency homes. They stole hurricane lamps used in the blackout to mark obstructions. They insinuated themselves into workplaces and then pilfered food and cigarettes from the canteens and sold them on to hotels at a profit.

Dad was unbothered by all this ungodly activity going on right under his nose. Charlie could do no wrong in Dad’s eyes. But Ruby always felt uneasy at what Charlie and his gang got up to – it was always Charlie who was the instigator, never Joe – but you didn’t snitch, you never did that. You couldn’t grass up your family, not even if you despised them. It just wasn’t done.

So Charlie, Joe and their boys ducked and dived, dodged around streets looting bombed-out buildings and flogging the proceeds far and wide. While she, the hated one, worked her arse off in Dad’s corner shop, weighing out rations to moaning housewives.

She poured the tea – and then it happened.

The pot dripped from the spout. It always did, it was an old enamel pot and heavy; her arm trembled when she had to lift it. The scalding liquid fell on her father’s leg, staining his best suit trousers, burning through to his skin.

‘You stupid
bitch!
’ He shot up off his seat, swatting at the wet place, his whole face suffused with redness as temper grabbed hold of him.

‘Sorry! Sorry, Dad,’ Ruby said hurriedly, putting the pot down. ‘I’ll get a cloth . . .’

‘You’ve burned me, you silly mare,’ he roared.

‘Sorry! I’m sorry, Dad, really,’ Ruby gabbled.

‘You fucking well
will
be,’ he said, pulling his belt from around his waist. Despite his bad foot, he could move horrifyingly fast. He lunged forward and whacked the strip of leather around her bare legs.

‘No!’ Ruby screamed. All the time she was aware of Charlie sitting there, grinning. Finding it funny that his sister was being beaten. Tears of humiliation and pain started to course down her cheeks. ‘No!’

The belt was drawn back and whipped around her arms. The buckle caught her, tearing her flesh.

‘What’s going . . .’ asked Joe, coming through from the privy, buttoning his fly. He saw what was happening and turned on his heel. He went back out into the yard. Ruby would always remember that.

The belt struck again, again, again.

Ruby cringed, saying,
Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to do it,
and still the belt kept lashing her. The pain was awful, and blood was spattering down on her Sunday-best dress, the cornflower-blue one she loved so much. It would be ruined.

‘Stupid little
whore
,’ spat Ted, and then he was gone, lurching away from her, reeling out into the pantry to get to the sink and get the stain out of his trousers before it set.

In the sitting room, the only sound was Ruby sobbing.

Charlie stood up.

‘Ah, shut yer yap,’ he said, and slapped her, hard, across the face.

2

If Sunday had been bad, Monday was even worse. Ruby’s arm was painfully sore when she dressed for work next day. She’d got the stain out of her favourite dress; that was the main thing. She couldn’t ask Dad for a new one. Do
that,
and she’d get another hiding.

After she had made the breakfast and cleaned up the house, her and Dad walked around the corner to the family shop, her dad limping and using his stick today because his ulcerated foot was playing him up.

He’d had surgery for an ingrown toenail two years ago, and somehow it had gone wrong. Now he wore a slipper on his right foot, with the middle slit open to accommodate the swelling, and Ruby had to change the putrid dressings on it every couple of days. As they walked, she hoped that it hurt him a lot – as much as he’d hurt her.

The new emerald-green sign Dad had installed just a couple of weeks ago was there above the door.
Darke & Sons
was picked out in luxurious Gothic gold lettering
.

Joe and even Charlie had laughed to see it.

‘Jesus, Dad! A fucking bomb could gut the place any day,’ Charlie chuckled.

‘Sod Hitler,’ grumbled Ted, affronted that his grand gesture had met not with praise but derision. ‘You have to have confidence in this world, son. Believe that one day things’ll get better.’

But Ruby couldn’t even raise a smile. Charlie took the Lord’s name in vain and never got a single word said back to him from Dad. And that damned sign:
Darke & Sons.
Not Darke and daughter. It was her, his daughter, who worked all hours in the bloody shop; the boys weren’t expected to. They didn’t show the slightest interest in its running. And she didn’t believe that things would get better – what was Dad talking about? This was her life: the beatings, the feeling that she didn’t measure up, that she would always disappoint and fail to fit in, fail to be what was expected of her.

‘Caught one over in Brooke Road last night,’ said her father as they walked.

Ruby shuddered. The sun was out, but the mention of the bombing raids that seemed to go on every night now made her feel chilled. Last night they’d had to hurry down into the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden when the siren sounded. The all-clear had come after an hour or so, and they had returned to their beds.

But this morning there was the scent of fire in the air, the smell of destruction. A pall of smoke lingered in the streets, mingling with threads of London smog. Ruby hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after last night’s raid; she’d lain awake listening to the fire engines racing around, imagining people blown apart, crushed, killed. The Darkes had survived, but some had not been so fortunate.

As they crossed the road to the corner shop, they could see all the way down to Brooke Road.

‘Oh God,’ said Ruby, staring.

Smack!

Ruby recoiled. Ted had cuffed her hard around the ear.

‘You
don’t
take the Lord’s name in vain,’ he snarled.

‘Sorry, Dad, sorry,’ she said, her head ringing from the force of the blow.

But her eyes were fastened on the scene down there. There were still-smouldering fires from the incendiary bombs. There was a crater where once a house had been. Rubble was piled up – chairs, fragments of beds, bricks with scraps of gaily coloured wallpaper still clinging on, drawers, broken bookshelves.

People were picking over the remains. An ambulance driver wearing a tin hat with a white-painted A on the front was pulling something out of a tangle of cables and dirt. It was a young woman’s body, mangled and bloodstained. Two watching women, older women, set up a wailing and shrieking as they saw the body emerge.

‘What the—’ said her father suddenly.

Ruby jumped, flinching. She froze to the pavement.
What had she done?

But her father wasn’t raising his fist. He was running forward with his faltering gait, heading for the shop.

Ruby’s heart was thwacking hard against her chest wall. For an instant, she’d been not only sick to see such horrors, but terrified. Anything made her jump, she was such a coward. A loud noise. The bombs falling. A dog barking, a sudden movement, a sudden sound.
Anything.

Dad was limping full speed to the door of the shop and now she ran after him. The door was hanging open. She could see the wood had splintered away from the lock. Ted Darke fell inside and so did Ruby. He stopped dead in the centre of his small empire, and Ruby only just managed to avoid cannoning into his back and getting another thick ear for her trouble.

Ted was staring around. Sacks of flour had been kicked all over the floor. All the containers and bags of loose tea were gone. The two precious hams, which had hung so enticingly at the back of the shop above the till, were missing. So was the till itself. Piles of eggs had been upturned and smashed, making a sticky mess all over the floor. Most of the stock had been taken, but some of it had just been vandalized.

On the far wall someone had smeared in black paint: SHOULD HAVE PAID UP.

‘What . . . ?’ Ruby stared at the message. She looked at her father. ‘What does that mean –
Should have paid up
? What for? Who to?’

Ted was breathing hard, red-faced. He turned, nearly knocking her flat as he went back outside the shop. Bill Harris, the insurance clerk who rented the flat over the shop from Ted, was coming out of the side door on his way to work. Ted caught his arm.

‘D’you know anything about this?’ he demanded.

Bill looked first annoyed and then scared. Ted was a big man, intimidating despite his disability. He looked furious, as if about to inflict damage. The little clerk’s eyes flickered to the smashed door, the wrecked interior.