Free Umbrella by Will Self

of Barnes Common on that ripping day when Bert played truant and took her with him over to the Surrey Side – ’ Ow we caught it! – Singaht, girl, singaht! His watch is cold against her cheek, his leather fingers twist her chin. – Singaht! Singaht! She quavers . . . A penny won’t urtyer, A ha’penny won’t braykyer, A farving won’t putyer in ve work’uss . . . and Sam Death exults: Ahh, gerron! She’s a precious little goose, ain’t she, Arnold? She must avvit. He pulls the other man to him by the lip of his satchel, then sifts through the pouch, selecting, then tossing one coin after the other into the opening of Audrey’s grotto. – There’s a penny anna ha’penny anna farving – an yer know what, girlie, it won’t break me never, coz I’m the fellow az once divvied up a shilling – a whole shilling, mind – to set wiv the Tichborne claimant over at Leadenhall Market. Did I ever tellya that, Arnold . . . Did I not? And the two men are up the front steps and into the house, from where Audrey hears her father calling mockingly, Mary Jane, you’ll av some fine gal-an-tine for Mister Collins, willyer not?
    Scant light from Waldemar Avenue’s newly planted lamps casts the shadow of the balustrade into iron Bedlam bars that fall across the two beds and clash with the bars of Olive’s cot. Violet has kicked the coverlet away – her skinny legs lash about beef to the heels. Spring-heeled Arnold is poised on the window ledge and Audrey thinks: I’ll never ever sleep, I’ll never ever sleep . . . that she’ll go mad with not sleeping, mad with the pissmist from the potty in her nostrils, mad from the counting up of her two pennies, her ha’penny and her farthing, then dividing this sum into eleven farthings, then adding them together again. Coins on the blackboard, coins on the slates, fingers in the inkwells, Two-times-six-is-twelve, three-times-six-is-ay-teen, four-times-six-is-twenny-four , an entire classroom of Audreys and Stans in their drab clothes and their cracked boots, their plaintive treble voices plaiting, then unravelling into two sound-streams that flow out through girls and boys into afternoon streets to twine once more – dirty boys’ hands grabbing pigtails to straitjacket the girls in the booby-hatch , until someone comes to release them, D’you wanter claht in ve jaw! Coz you never did touch my ed, so there . . . the Wiggins boys dancing round her – then little Stan caught as well and flung in there with her, howling, his shirt torn. — No wonder we called the game Bedlam, thinks Audrey, a big girl of fourteen now, walking back from Shorrold’s Road Baths on a Saturday afternoon and seeing a load of kids mafficking. We called it that – not that we knew what Bedlam was. It had been mixed up in Audrey’s six-year-old mind with the Cyprian Orphanage and the Gunnersbury Isolation Hospital – places to which children were removed , leaving a hurting gap behind for days or weeks that soon enough their siblings grew into. She turns the corner into the Fulham Road thinking that cherry blossom is frogspawn in the pond-green sky, and looking forward to the slow stroll past Anderson’s Tea Rooms, savouring the cakes surrounded by fancies, until she sees her father with his foot up on a shoeblack’s box and wishes she hadn’t — because nowadays Audrey believes that if she sees him he can spy her at once . He has become a stage magician , the smoke from the seegar stuck in ’ is face lime-lit green an’ fleein’ to reveal . . . Arnold Collins. Go which way you will, you will run up against them , and it makes it worse that, as her father swaps feet, Collins doffs his hat and says: She’s gainin’ flesh, guv’nor, an’ it ain’t all rare meat neevah. Sam grunts, Well, why shouldn’t she? She’s not some bantin’ flapper! Now, Or-dree, I’ve a co-mission that Mister Collins ’ere az hentrusted me wiv –. He breaks off to snap at the boots: Givvit some elbow-grease,