Free The Bells of Bow by Gilda O'Neill

the tables for ’em. They’ll see me all right for a drink or two.’
    With her hair set in pins ready for the morning, and with her dad and sister both out, Babs couldn’t think what to do next. She didn’t feel like reading any more of the paper and there was nothing on the wireless worth listening to. The house was still and silent.
    She flopped down on the bed and lay listening to the sounds coming from the street below. Even though it would soon be dark there was still the happy laughter and shouting of children playing outside, making the most of the warm, late summer evening, while their mothers sat on their stone window ledges or on chairs they had fetched from their kitchens, exchanging the news and gossip of the day. The lively noises coming from outside made the silence inside the house seem even more depressing. Half-heartedly she levered herself up onto her elbows, deciding whether she could summon up the energy to get dressed again and go down to join her neighbours; but she couldn’t be bothered. She couldn’t even be bothered to turn on the lamp. She just flopped back down onto the pillows, pulled the eiderdown over her legs and lay there in the gradually darkening room trying to remember when she had last been entirely alone.
    Her thoughts wandered and soon nagging worries about what Evie was getting herself into with Albie Denham crept back into her mind. But, Babs kept reminding herself, why should
she
be bothered what Evie was up to? She’d gone through all that earlier and look at the trouble it had caused. And Evie was seventeen after all, Babs tried to reason to herself, definitely not a kid. She could look after herself.
    Still Babs couldn’t sleep. No matter how she tried to convince herself otherwise, she finally had to admit that it wasn’t only the idea of Evie getting involved with a crook that bothered her – after all, there were plenty in the East End who got by in all sorts of ways. No, what she really didn’t like, what she really hated, was the idea of being without her twin. The gnawing pain deep inside her felt as though half of her very being had been ripped away. It had always been her and Evie together, the Bell twins, that was how it was.
    Her thoughts drifted and she remembered how she and Evie had shared the back bedroom and then, on the very night their mother had left them, how they had moved into the front. A terrible sadness came over her as she heard the sound of their parents’ rowing filling her head and her dad begging her mum to stay.
    She stared up at the ceiling, not moving as tears trickled down her cheeks and ran down into her ears. Would she be like Georgie? Would she fall apart if Evie left her?
    She must have eventually dropped off to sleep, because the next thing she knew was being woken by the sound of sparrows squabbling in the gutter outside the bedroom window and the sky bright with sunshine. She blinked the sleep away from her eyes and reached for the alarm clock on the side. Nearly half past seven – she’d forgotten to wind it.
    She threw back the eiderdown and swung her legs onto the chilly, lino-covered floor.
    ‘Get a move on, Eve,’ she said automatically. Turning to look over her shoulder to her sister’s side of the bed, she added her usual brisk words of encouragement, ‘Come on, we’re gonna be late if yer—’
    The words froze on her lips. Evie wasn’t there.

4
    Lou, a freckle-faced, pink-cheeked young woman of about eighteen, looked up at the calendar on the factory wall. ‘First of September.’ She sounded relieved as she shouted the date to Babs over the sounds of the workshop. ‘Thank gawd it’s Friday at last,’ she added as she whizzed a strip of folded floral material under the foot of her sewing machine and then tossed the resulting sleeve onto a growing pile by the side of her chair, ready for another machinist to fix to the blouses. ‘I wish we could get a bit more of this piecework, Babs.’ She snapped the foot