Free New and Collected Stories by Alan; Sillitoe Page B

she cook your dinners?’
    She obliged him with another answer. ‘Not until night.’
    â€˜What about your father?’ he went on.
    â€˜He’s dead,’ said the smaller girl, her mouth filled with food, daring to speak outright for the first time. Her sister looked at her with disapproval, making it plain that she had said the wrong thing and that she should only speak under guidance.
    â€˜Are you going to school then this afternoon?’ Ernest resumed.
    â€˜Yes,’ the spokesman said.
    He smiled at her continued hard control. ‘And what’s your name then?’
    â€˜Alma,’ she told him, ‘and hers is Joan.’ She indicated the smaller girl with a slight nod of the head.
    â€˜Are you often hungry?’
    She stopped eating and glanced at him, uncertain how to answer. ‘No, not much,’ she told him non-committally, busily eating a second pastry.
    â€˜But you were today?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she said, casting away diplomacy like the crumpled cake-paper she let fall to the floor.
    He said nothing for a few moments, sitting with knuckles pressed to his lips. ‘Well look’ – he began suddenly talking again – ‘I come in here every day for my dinner, just about half past twelve, and if ever you’re feeling hungry, come down and see me.’
    They agreed to this, accepted sixpence for their bus fares home, thanked him very much, and said good-bye.
    During the following weeks they came to see him almost every day. Sometimes, when he had little money, he filled his empty stomach with a cup of tea while Alma and Joan satisfied themselves on five shillings’ worth of more solid food. But he was happy and gained immense satisfaction from seeing them bending hungrily over eggs, bacon and pastries, and he was so smoothed at last into a fine feeling of having something to live for that he hardly remembered the lonely days when his only hope of being able to talk to someone was by going into a public house to get drunk. He was happy now because he had his ‘little girls’ to look after, as he came to call them.
    He began spending all his money to buy them presents, so that he was often in debt at his lodgings. He still did not buy any clothes, for whereas in the past his money had been swilled away on beer, now it was spent on presents and food for the girls, and he went on wearing the same old dirty mackintosh and was still without a collar to his shirt; even his cap was no longer clean.
    Every day, straight out of school, Alma and Joan ran to catch a bus for the town centre and, a few minutes later, smiling and out of breath, walked into the café where Ernest was waiting. As days and weeks passed, and as Alma noticed how much Ernest depended on them for company, how happy he was to see them, and how obviously miserable when they did not come for a day – which was rare now – she began to demand more and more presents, more food, more money, but only in a particularly naïve and childish way, so that Ernest, in his oblivious contentment, did not notice it.
    But certain customers of the café who came in every day could not help but see how the girls asked him to buy them this and that, and how he always gave in with a nature too good to be decently true, and without the least sign of realizing what was really happening. He would never dream to question their demands, for to him, these two girls whom he looked upon almost as his own daughters, were the only people he had to love.
    Ernest, about to begin eating, noticed two smartly dressed men sitting at a table a few yards away. They had sat in the same place the previous day, and also the day before that, but he thought no more about it because Joan and Alma came in and walked quickly across to his table.
    â€˜Hello, Uncle Ernest!’ they said brightly. ‘What can we have for dinner?’ Alma looked across at the chalk-written list on the wall to read what