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asked her to, time and again, because she had wanted to remodel the cloth into a skirt and waistcoat, the same skirt and waistcoat that now hung from her curtain rail.
    Next to her bed was a wooden orange crate she’d begged from the market and covered with a tablecloth the Ronconis had discarded because it had one too many cigarette burns. She had darned the burns and used the cloth to conceal her underclothes and jumpers. Two pictures were pinned to the faded blue paper that covered the walls.
    One was of her and Ronnie. The photograph had been taken in the café by Bruno the cook just before he had left Wales for Italy. The other had been cut from an illustrated magazine: a highly coloured portrait of an idyllic rural summer scene complete with lurid yellow sun, improbably blue sky, white-tipped mountain peaks and greener grass on the lower slopes of the hills than she had ever seen on the slag heaps of Wales.
    She had cut it out before Maud Powell had come between her and Ronnie, because she had associated the scene with Italy the land of Ronnie’s birth.
    She stretched out her hand intending to tear down both pictures, but another pain came. Aching at first, it soon honed itself into a sharp, agonising point. Without bothering to undress she crawled into bed, leaving the quilt and coat on top of the blanket. She closed her eyes and tried to conjure images of a blissful world where young girls were allowed to have stomach cramps without everyone assuming they were pregnant. And where Ronnie waited for her just over the horizon with open arms, a smile on his face and no Maud Powell at his side.
    But no matter how she concentrated she failed to picture him. His features blurred into indistinct shadows, replaced by the grinning, lecherous face of Bobby Thomas.
    Boxing Day found Charlie Raschenko confused and disorientated. It was a Wednesday, a market day only marginally less important than Saturday, yet it would have been ridiculous for him to have opened up his stall because most of his customers had bought enough meat on Christmas Eve to see them through to the following Friday; and those who hadn’t, wouldn’t have any money left from Christmas to spend anyway.
    He’d whiled away the morning hunched in his overcoat watching his fellow lodger William play rugby in the park, and trying to stem his irritation with Alma Moore for creating a scene outside the YMCA. He usually succeeded in containing his emotions, priding himself on never feeling very much of anything. Anger, irritation, displeasure, or happiness –especially happiness, because that sooner or later gave rise to memories bitter experience had taught him inevitably led to pain. No, it was better to live life as it came. One day at a time.
    Still trying to forget Alma’s outburst he’d returned to Graig Avenue with William and Eddie Powell for a midday dinner of Christmas leftover ‘fry-up’. Afterwards he tried to spend the holiday the way he usually spent Sundays; and as he never attended chapel –much to his landlady’s disgust –that meant passing the hours playing chess and reading.
    But this Boxing Day was different to a Sunday, when everything in the town except the Italian cafés was closed.
    Before the dishes were cleared from the table, William and Eddie disappeared to a special showing of Song of Freedom featuring Paul Robeson, in the White Palace. And Diana Powell, William’s sister, wasn’t around; she was working at her job in the sweet shop in High Street. It would have been madness for her boss to have closed it with all the Christmas pennies burning holes in small children’s pockets.
    Charlie’s only consolation was that his landlord Evan Powell, who ‘called’ the streets on a rag and bone cart, was at a loose end too. It was his landlady, Elizabeth Powell’s habit to sit in the icy front parlour reading the Bible after she had cleared and washed the Sunday dishes, and she took advantage of the extra holiday to do the same.