“Found something? What would that be, I wonder.”
Charlie took out the book and held it up to her.
“The pages are empty,” he said.
She laid aside her clacking needles and took up the book. “You said you found it? Where?”
“Down an alley. I was taking a shortcut to school,” he added quickly. As a rule, his grandmother did not care for him being in alleyways.
She flipped through the pages. “What are you going to do with it?”
Charlie shrugged. “Could sell it. Folks want paper.”
“So, you don’t want to keep it, then?”
He scrunched up his bony face. “Keep it? What for?”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Hang on a tick, your schoolwork requires no writing?”
Charlie had been ready for that one. “They give us copy books, Gran. You got to use theirs, see?”
She looked at him frowning. “Oh, I see, yes, indeed I do.” She handed the book back and picked up her knitting once more.
“I’m all knackered, Gran, goin’ to bed,” he announced with a yawn.
She immediately looked at the small windup clock on the mantel that matched the one in her bedroom, and then glanced in surprise at her grandson. She put a hand to his forehead. “You feeling poorly, Charlie? You do look a bit peaky, luv.”
“Just tired. Tired in the head. Mathe-matics,” he added with feigned fatigue.
And with this final lie of the night he went to his cupboard and lay down in his small box after closing the door so that it was very dark. His fingers skimmed the edges of the book. He hadn’t a pencil or a pen, though he might be able to pinch one. Yet what would be the point of writing things in it? He set the book on the floor and deliberately faced away from it.
He would sell the book. Paper was useless to him. But coins weren’t. As he had told Molly Wakefield, they could come in quite handy. And with that thought he focused fully on the girl. Charlie had been out trying to pinch some useful things when he had run into her.
Like a hunter who expanded his range when game became scarce, one had to go to the part of the city that crowned kings and queens to get the good stuff. Chelsea was a long trip for him from Bethnal Green, but he had perched on the back of a late-night lorry, hopping off when it slowed to make a turn when he neared his destination. That had led him to Molly’s street, and yet he had ultimately come home mostly empty-handed. A lock had been too difficult, a window a bit too high, a pair of suspicious eyes a tad too watchful.
As he drifted off to sleep the rain started to bucket down. In the receding mists of consciousness, he thought that at least the Germans wouldn’t bomb them in such poor weather.
Charlie always prayed for the worst possible inclemency. Nothing terrified him and the rest of London more than a clear, windless night.
Lonzo & Eddie
The kiss on his forehead told Charlie that Gran was off to work. A couple hours later he blinked himself awake and slowly sat up. As usual, he had slept in his clothes for the added warmth. He rose, washed his face at the tap, tamped down his hair, and ate his breakfast and the contents of his lunch tin for his first meal with no idea or prospects for his second. Later, he set off with the book tucked into his coat pocket.
He had no more reached the next street over when he heard the gleeful voice.
“Why, ’tis Charlie Matters, ain’it?”
Charlie turned to see the two boys heading his way.
Lonzo Rossi was a half foot taller than Charlie and nearly three years older. His face was long and narrow, but his nose was wide and short and held a pair of aggressive nostrils.
It was Lonzo who had spoken. He was always the first to speak of the pair.
Eddie Gray was shorter than the lanky Charlie, though he was much the same age as Lonzo. Charlie suspected that Eddie was tougher than his larger friend by half again.
Eddie also had the more interesting face: thick eyebrows and long, upturned lashes, deep-set brooding eyes, and a grim mouth. Eddie never said much, but one tended to listen when he did venture to speak.
Charlie got along fine with Eddie.
No one really got along with Lonzo.
“’aven’t seen you since you went lookin’ for shoes,” continued a smiling Lonzo as the pair came to a stop in front of Charlie.
Both were dressed as he was: hand-me-down pants, shirt, coat, cap, and shoes that were always too small. Yet while his gran kept Charlie reasonably clean — she required that he take a hot bath each Saturday night and regularly clipped his fingernails — no one in Lonzo’s or Eddie’s lives had ever seemed to do the same for them.
They, too, had been orphaned. Lonzo had eventually been heaved from his third family and Eddie his fourth. It wasn’t necessarily anything they did, Charlie knew. It was called war nerve. As boys got older and ate more and required fresh clothing as arms and legs grew, it got to be beyond the pocketbooks of most. They were then chucked out in favor of the legal offspring.
Both boys now lived in a burned-out shell of a building, hunting and scraping for what they needed to survive. And while doing so they had to stay one delicate step ahead of both the bobbies on the beat and the orphanage folks. The latter would dearly love to catch the pair both for the government pence and also for the perceived good deed of taking hooligans off the streets.
Lonzo gazed down at Charlie’s small slipshod shoes, his wide grin displaying nearly all of his irregularly placed and yellowed teeth.
“Well?” said Lonzo, as Eddie hovered next to him, his intense eyes threatening to swallow Charlie whole. “See you got them same shoes on your feet. So, what gives, eh?”
“I got the money,” said Charlie.
“Liar,” bellowed Lonzo. “And we know that door was double-locked and them windows barred, right, Eddie? See, Eddie already tried his pick on the second lock and it ain’t budged. And Eddie’s way better at pickin’ locks than you are. Right, Eddie?”
Smiling, he nudged Eddie’s arm, but his partner just kept peering at Charlie.
“I got the money,” said Charlie stubbornly. “And bought this with it.”
He held up the journal.
“You spent shillin’s on that,” Lonzo barked. “Are you daft or—”
Eddie interrupted. “What’s it a book of?”
Lonzo snatched it from Charlie’s grasp and flipped through the blank pages before tossing it back.
“Why there ain’t a single word in it.” He added spitefully, “You’re barkin’, you are. Does your gran know you wasted money on nothin’, you prat?”
Charlie put the book in his pocket and started to walk on until Lonzo halted him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Where you think you’re goin’?”
“I got business to tend to.”
Lonzo snorted. “What business you got?”
“I’m goin’ to sell the book, that’s what,” Charlie replied.
Lonzo looked at him incredulously. “Who would pay for a book with nothin’ in it?” he said derisively.
Eddie answered. “For the paper. People need paper.”
Charlie nodded, while Lonzo suddenly looked interested.
Eddie said, “How much you think you can get for it?”
Charlie shrugged. “Hopin’ for maybe a quid.”
“A quid!” exclaimed Lonzo. “For that?”
“I gotta go,” said Charlie. When he glimpsed a certain look in Lonzo’s eyes that Charlie had seen before, he took off running.
“Oi,” cried out Lonzo. “We want a word with you. We knows you’re lyin’ ’bout—”
They started to run after him.
“You come back here,” screamed Lonzo. “We knows what you really done that night—”
Charlie heard nothing else because with his long legs he was exceptionally fast, even in bad shoes, and he had turned a corner and fled down the pavement. He entered an alley that was a shortcut to the next street, and looked back, but they had given up the chase.
Okay, now to business.