Wake: A Novel by Anna Hope

could spit.
    She shoots a quick look over to Robin, but he is deep in conversation with a redheaded man in front of him. Something the other man has said has made him laugh.
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Yates,” she says, turning back. “Now, if you’ll—”
    “How many kids you got at home, then?”
    “That’s none of your—”
    “Five,” he says. “I’ve got five.” He coughs, then leans forward, lowering his voice. “You haven’t got any, have you?”
    She says nothing.
    “Spinster, aren’t you? I’ll bet you’re dry as a bone down there.”
    Whatever sympathy she may have had is long gone. She imagines hitting him, or stabbing him in his hand with her pen.
    “I bet you love this, don’t you? Up there on your high horse.”
    “Of course I do,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “Do you want to know why?”
    “Why?”
    She leans forward again. “Because I’m a sadist.”
    He opens his mouth, then closes it again. “Bitch,” he swears, under his breath, standing up, his chair legs scraping against the floor.
    “That’s right, Mr. Yates. I’m a sadistic bitch.”
    Then she reaches out a hand and, without looking up, puts the pink slip on the pile to be filed.
    “Next!”

----
    Thick bars of morning light stripe Hettie’s bed, touching the faces on the pictures above her, tacked in a careful arrangement on the wall: Vernon and Irene Castle in the middle of a fox-trot, Theda Bara, and, in a still from
Broken Blossoms,
Lillian Gish. Beside them are the Dixies, in a photo cut from the paper just before they left London: Billy Jones, Larry Shields, Emile Christian, Tony Spargo, and Nick LaRocca, brandishing his trumpet like a lethal weapon.
    They all look happy this morning, grinning in the unexpected sun.
    In the room behind her she can hear Fred getting ready to go out. Her mother has already gone to work, long before the light. Once Fred has gone the house will be hers for a few blessed hours till she has to leave for the Palais at twelve. She’ll boil some water and have her bath. First, though, she wants to lie here, in this lovely bit of sun, and think about the man from Dalton’s:
Ed.
    She closes her eyes and tries to conjure him. The smell of him. The way he danced. The way he talked, as though everything were a game:
Two minutes constitutes a lurk.
    No one has ever talked to her like that.
    Behind her head Fred’s wardrobe opens with a judder she can feel through the wall. Hettie snaps her eyes back open, defeated. She can’t concentrate on anything good with her brother rooting around in there.
    Fred woke her up again last night. It was just a few short shouts this time, and then he must have woken himself, because everything went quiet after that.
    Clothes hangers clatter as he takes his jacket out. He gets dressed every morning and goes out, even though he hasn’t anywhere to go. Hasn’t got a job. Not since coming home from France, two years ago in December, just after their father died. For weeks after his demob, he didn’t leave the house; he just sat there, in their father’s armchair in the parlor. She would come back from work at Woolworth’s and he would still be in the same position as when she had left. Often, the dim light and something about the way he sat made her think it
was
her dad, come back from the dead. It gave her the creeps. But Fred just stayed there, hour after hour, as if that old armchair might tell him where to get a job.
    That was when she had to start handing over half her wages. And there was Fred, just sitting there, doing nothing about it at all.
    He wasn’t like that before. You couldn’t shut him up. He was annoying. He took up room. He would spread his bicycle bits all over the kitchen table and tease her about her dance classes and her film cards. He worked at the lamp factory down at Brook Green with their dad. They both used to set off together in the morning on their bicycles.
Peas in a pod
. Sometimes after work he would go to the pub and