Read The Hiding Place for Free Online Page A

firemen, they loop
wet tea-towels round their faces and salvage what they can. They haul the skeletons of our chairs into the yard, where the black legs snap like matchsticks and splinter on the flags. Then the boys
are back for the table, then the steaming fold of carpet crumbling softly in their grip. Finally, they bring out the scorched chest and dump it in the yard.
    Martineau reaches into it and lifts an edge of blanket, still soft and pink, but the piece pulls away like a cobweb in his hand. His chin is black with smuts: he feels an ache in his throat. He
carries the fragment in his bunched fist, moves past the women and towards my mother. A man in a blue overall shakes his head at her and points his spanner at the house.
    And the gas was off. You sure? She’s not sure of anything. She holds the empty Tin to her breast, her fingernails clawed beneath the rim, and clicks the lid; open-shut, open-shut. The
women pat her on the shoulder on the way back to their homes, as if by touching her they’re warding off bad luck. Martineau watches the ritual, feels a light tap on his own sleeve, and looks
around. The woman beside him is tall and blonde, and through the noise of the children, the women, the firemen, the police, she is quietly asking him something. Martineau registers her green eyes,
and that she’s wearing the most extraordinary coat – white fur covered with dark splotches. For a moment he thinks it is spattered with cinders.
    What? He looks at her hard.
    I said , What’s her name? She points at my mother.
    Mary, says Martineau.
    Righto. Well, Mary’s probably going to want some night things – for the hospital – when you can get in. She assesses the house, the situation,
    And where’s that husband of hers? He’ll need to be told. Martineau puts his head down in shame for Frankie, notes the golden straps of the woman’s sandal biting across the
bridge of her foot, and her toenails, lustrous coral shells under her nylons, and the way this same leg jiggles up and down on the spot as she speaks. She’s so close, he can smell her
lipstick. He takes it all in.
    Are you a neighbour? he asks.
    Eva Amil, she says, and with a quick jerk of her head, We’re at Number 14.
    She smiles at him and waits. Martineau waits too: he can’t remember if she’s asked him another question.
    So – will you tell her husband then? Eva speaks very slowly through her smile. Do you know where he’ll be?
    I’ll find him, says Martineau. Eva lifts Luca from Celesta’s arms, hooking her on to her own shoulder, and prises the Tin from my mother. She hands it to Martineau as he edges past.
Eva’s free arm circles my mother’s waist.
    Mary, isn’t it? Come on, love, let’s get in. The women climb into the back of the ambulance.
    ~  ~  ~
    Joe’s cigar burns neglected in the ashtray; his cut-glass whisky sits untouched on the blotter. Such richness! thinks Frankie, swallowing at the sight of the liquor. He
studies the action of Joe’s careful writing: it bothers him, and for half a second he doesn’t know why. Then he sees it: on the little finger of his right hand Joe is wearing a ruby
ring. The jewel sparkles in its setting. Recognizing it makes the sweat prick in Frankie’s armpits: he clenches, unclenches his fists. His father’s ring on Joe’s finger! He
won’t look at it. He’ll shut his eyes.
    But Frankie can’t not look at the film running in his head. He remembers how they met. A Friday in February 1947 – no – 1948, when he was barely twenty.
    ~
    Frankie has never been so cold in his life. It’s not the feeling you get on board ship, when the squall punches your face, stabs at your teeth, when your whole head is a
sharp pain. That’s proper cold, melted into nothing by the heat of work and the next day’s sunshine. Nor is what he feels anything like home, where winters are short and February not so
cruel. Frankie thinks of Sliema, of the sandy lane winding up to his village, with the sky