The Hiding Place Read Online Free PDF

her back. She wraps her arms around her body and stands her ground.
    ~
    I’m all alone now. I’m watching. The blue flame ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows, sneaking along the fringes of the runner, lighting each strand like touchpaper. A
bright coil of orange turns, widens, presses itself against the polished wood of the chest. It’s so pretty.
    ~
    Martineau bends to pick up the Tin, and over his stooped back my mother sees Alice Jackson at the window opposite. The woman raps twice on the pane, points her finger at my
mother. I want a word with you, she mouths through glass.
    Mary, pleads Martineau, We are friends.
    We’re not – we can’t be. Not now you’re Joe’s flunkey. The door of Number 1 swings open and Alice Jackson steps into the street, retrieving the abandoned tennis
ball from the gutter outside her house. Alice moves towards my mother with a grim fix on her face. My mother ignores her, turns away; she’s trapped now between Martineau and this woman she
doesn’t know. She moves quickly, forgetting me, forgetting me, pacing up the street ahead of Martineau. The man is crouching; he’s trying to make himself smaller. He looks like
he’s dodging the wind.
    Frankie’s taken the money, Tino, she says. The words fall out behind her and are lost. What am I supposed to do?
    Mary knows what she could do. She could go to Joe herself; she could plead. But the thought of him heats her insides like a swarm of wasps. There is another way.
    Alice Jackson stands at our closed front door with her arms folded over her chest. She clutches the tennis ball against her ribs and watches as my mother flings her arms open,
cutting down the alley with the big man at her back. Alice Jackson sniffs something burning on the air. Turns her head to one side, sniffs again.
    ~  ~  ~
    Frankie stirs his coffee with a long metal spoon, leaning his elbow on the bar in The Moonlight like he’s never been away. Salvatore hears what he has to say, but he
can’t look at him, so he scrapes at the enamel stove with a blunt knife. Stars of blackened cheese skid away from his touch. Salvatore holds his tongue until my father has ended his monologue
of woe: then he straightens, launching into the silence.
    Okay, so you lose on a horse. Then what you do? You go home? No. Too sensible for you, eh Frank. Frankie, he don’t want to go home! Frankie want to win, yeah?
    Salvatore talks and scrubs, plunging his hand into the bowl of filmy water, chiselling fiercely with the edge of his blade. Rainbow bubbles cling to the black hairs on his wrist. He stops,
points the knife at the ceiling above his head,
    Joe Medora don’t want to see you – I don’t want to see you, then waves it in front of my father’s eyes.
    Take your face somewhere else. For my father has come to beg. He will beg Salvatore for a loan, and he will beg Joe Medora for extra time with the rent. He stays silent, waits for the storm in
Salvatore to pass, and listens to the rain belting off the pavement outside. The going was too heavy, thinks Frankie, watching a replay of the race in his mind. It’s not monochrome in his
head: the racecourse is green, the horses always chestnut brown, the bobbing jockeys brilliant in Silks. He puts the race away before he catches sight of Court Jester loping home in fifth.
    Frankie puts his hand in his trouser pocket, pulls out the chit from Len the Bookie and slaps it on the counter. He turns the lining inside-out, catching the debris in the palm of his hand and
depositing it neatly in a gritty mound beside the crumpled docket. A half-crown rolls away from the flecks of tobacco and dust.
    Go home, my friend, says Salvatore, hearing the lonely clatter of the coin. He gives the money back to my father and wipes the fluff off the counter with the corner of his apron.
    It was a sure thing, Sal, says Frankie, pocketing the half-crown.
    Sure thing. Sure. Ciao, Frankie.
    Frankie looks steadily at Salvatore, turns and walks slowly away from