Page 24 of Mine before Dawn
“Oh dear,” she muttered. “This is getting serious. The look on his face, girlie. Next thing you know, he will be pissing a circle around ya.”
***
For the entire trip home that night, Asha did not say a single word.
She remained silent on the bus. There were none of those shy side-glances he had come to anticipate. No, now her mouth was set in a tight line.
James sat behind her in silence, broad shoulders taking up too much room in the narrow seat while the boy slept against her chest, one small fist curled in her coat. He had grown in the last few months and it was becoming a struggle for her to carry him and his bag.
He watched the tense line of her shoulders, the rigid way she stared ahead and he suppressed a frustrated sigh.
He thought they had been getting closer.
She no longer flinched when he touched her hand. She accepted the books now. Sometimes he even caught her watching for him when she stepped outside the pub at night.
And then he had gone and lost his temper. When he had seen that boy look at what was his, he saw red.
He had lost control and now he would have to backtrack.
The bus rattled through the sleeping town before finally hissing to a stop near her street. James automatically stood and paid the tickets before she could argue.
She did not thank him, but neither did she protest.
Outside, the cool air smelled faintly of rain and coal smoke.
The familiar walk stretched ahead of them, narrow streets silvered beneath weak lamplight. Her shoes squeaked softly against the pavement while his heavier footsteps followed several paces behind.
The boy slept through it all.
When they reached the building, James noticed movement upstairs immediately. A twitch of curtains. The landlady was watching.
The old bat probably timed his arrivals.
He snorted to himself.
Asha climbed the steps slowly, shifting the child awkwardly in her arms. James could see the strain in it now—the exhaustion drooping her shoulders after fourteen-hour days.
He turned slightly, preparing to leave as he always did.
“Wait.”
Startled by this break in their routine, it took him a moment to realise she was talking to him. She only stood there silently beneath the dim hallway light, waiting for his mind to catch up.
Then she gestured awkwardly toward the sleeping boy.
“Can you carry him up for me?”
Chapter 9
Just a month ago, the boy had been quiet all afternoon. Once he got home, he had announced, “I think I need to sleep in another bed, Mummy. I am not a baby anymore.”
And so, the next day, they had managed to find a second-hand mattress from a neighbour and one of Patrick's boys who was back for a holiday had lugged it up the stairs into the tiny closet room and brushed aside her thanks with a flushed face. They had put up his drawings on the wall and she had moved a small second-hand cupboard into the corner for his books and toys. There was barely any room but the boy seemed happy. It had taken two weeks of him turning up to snuggle under her covers before he started sleeping the whole night on his own. And now, she watched James carefully set him down on his mattress and unlace his shoes. He took up the entire room and Asha hastened to say, “Here, let me do it.”
She told herself she would send him away after she had settled the boy in his bed. She had told herself many such things over the past months.
She could hear James's movements in the narrow hallway, sensing that particular stillness of him—that quality he had of seeming like an immovable mountain. She could feel his eyes on her back as she tucked the blanket around the boy's shoulders. She smoothed the dark curls from his damp forehead and squatted there on the cold floor longer than she needed to in the dim glow of the light streaming through the small window.
Go and thank him and send him home.
