The Hiding Place Read Online Free Page B

his thigh; she hears his whistle wandering on the air.
It’s like watching a stranger. Fran ducks, crabs along the track of dirt near the railing and hides behind the hedge.
    My father doesn’t expect to see her, so he doesn’t: his eyes are fixed straight ahead, conjuring the sleek brown frame of the horse he will gamble on. Just one bet, that’s all.
Court Jester. Two-thirty.
    Frankie strolls past the Bute Street cafes, nodding now and again at a familiar face, or raising his hatted hand in a greeting. This is Frankie’s Patch. Most of the restaurants and cafes
are owned and run by his friends: seamen from the Tramp Trade who came to rest and stopped for good. And my father has also stopped, for now, although like most of the other Maltese, he won’t
settle in the city – he can’t escape the salt-scent of the docks. When he talks about his ship coming in, meaning a winning streak, an odds-on favourite, a dead cert, he also feels,
like glitter in his blood, the day when he will take a folded stash of money and simply disappear.
    This is not that day. This is the day I am burnt.
    ~  ~  ~
    She was sure. She was absolutely certain. But now the money has gone. My mother wrenches the drawer and it slides too quickly, tumbling from her hands on to the floor, and with
it falls the spilling mess of paper, magazines, a brass bell, a broken picture-frame, the abandoned knitting in baby-blue. She claws on her knees through the bills while the Tin sits wide open
beside her. Perhaps she put it somewhere else. She casts her eyes around the room to the fireplace: two framed photographs, my father’s long black comb with its pointed end jutting over the
tiled lip, and in the centre of the mantelpiece, a glazed chalk fawn with a mocking smile. The dull orange Rent book nestles behind it, thin and empty.
    Celesta! she calls, wildly scanning the floor, Have you been in this sideboard?
    Celesta stands over my mother with Luca in her arms and a look of dismay on her face. She drops Luca into the armchair, crouches down on the floor.
    No. It’s Him. Again.
    As if my mother needs telling. Celesta rises to shunt the empty drawer back in its gaping hole. She gathers the heap of papers from the floor and forces them back.
    Use your Men-talitee, my mother sings suddenly, with a bitter laugh. It frightens Celesta, this noise.
    What you gonna do, Mam?
    My mother doesn’t answer directly. She’s listening for the thud of a fist on the door.
    Haven’t a clue, she says, to the ceiling. Not a clue.
    Then to Celesta,
    Take the kids out for us, Cel. Get them out of the way for a bit.
    Celesta leans over to pull Luca’s coat off the chair. She kneels in front of her, pushes one baby hand into the sleeve, pulls the coat around the back, bends Luca’s
arm into the other.
    C’mon, she says to Rose and Marina, Let’s go and find Fran.
    ~
    My mother drags the chair from the back door and sits on it. We both stare into the orange fire. She contemplates the sink, the square table strewn with crusts of bread, the gas
cooker with its beckoning oven: she could put her head in there. Instead, she bends, puts her hands between her knees. There’s an ache in her leg where the falling drawer had caught her. She
stares down at her calf and the rising blue in her flesh.
    ~  ~  ~
    Frankie passes Domino’s Resto, then Tony’s Top Cafe, then the Seamen’s Mission. He passes the barber’s shop with its striped red awning rippling in the
breeze. Next to it is The Moonlight, its new neon sign at a right-angle to the wall. It smells of fresh paint here, and sure enough, on the red door there’s now a glossy silhouette of a woman
in a tight dress and stiletto heels. Frankie doesn’t falter, doesn’t turn his face to the window: he looks straight ahead towards the black square of shadow like an oil-spill under Bute
Street Bridge. Just got time for a soda before meeting Len the Bookie.
    ~  ~  ~
    My sisters go searching for Fran. The