William Monk 17 - Acceptable Loss

blankets.
    He picked up a biscuit and nibbled it, watching her. His eyes were wide and dark in the low lamplight, waiting for her to say something.
    “I don’t like being awake at this time of the night,” she said, biting her lip a little. “I’m not really hungry; it just feels nice to eat something. Have the milk if you want it.”
    “I’ll take ’alf,” he said. Food was precious; he was always fair about it.
    She smiled. “Good enough,” she agreed, picking up a biscuit herself so he would feel comfortable eating.
    He reached for the glass, holding it with both hands. He drank some, then looked at it to measure his share, drank a little more, then handed it to her. He sat very upright in the bed, his hair tousled and a rim of white on his upper lip.
    She wanted to hold him, but she knew better. He might have wanted it too, but he would never have allowed such an admission. Itwould mean he was dependent, and he could not afford that. He had lived in the docks, scavenging for pieces of coal off the barges, brass screws, and other small valuable objects that had fallen off boats into the Thames mud. The low tide allowed boys like him—mudlarks—to survive. He had a mother somewhere, but perhaps she had too many younger children, and neither the time nor room to care for him. Or maybe she had a new husband who did not want another man’s son in the house. Boys like himself had been his friends, sharing food, warmth, and one another’s pain, comrades in survival.
    “Have another biscuit,” Hester offered.
    “I’ve ’ad two,” he pointed out. “That was ’alf.”
    “Yes, I know. I took more than I wanted,” she replied. “I thought I was hungry, but now I’m just awake.”
    He looked at her carefully, deciding if she meant it, then took the last biscuit and ate it in three mouthfuls.
    She smiled at him, and after a moment he smiled back.
    “Are you sleepy?” she asked.
    “No …”
    “Nor am I.” She hitched herself up a little so she could sit on the bed with her head against the headboard beside him, but still keeping a distance away. “Sometimes when I’m awake I read, but I haven’t got a good book at the moment. The newspaper’s full of all sorts of things I don’t really want to know.”
    “Like wot?” he asked, twisting round so he was facing her a little more, settling in for a conversation.
    She listed off a few social events she remembered, adding where they had been held and who had attended. Neither of them cared, but it was something to say. Presently she wandered off the subject and remembered past events, describing clothes and food, then behavior, wit, flirting, disasters, anything to keep him entertained. She even recalled the chaotic remembrance service where her friend Rose had been hopelessly and unintentionally drunk; she had climbed onto the stage and seized the violin from the very earnest young lady who had been playing it, and had then given her own rendition of several current music hall songs, growing bawdier with each.
    Scuff giggled, trying to picture it in his mind. “Were it terrible?” he asked.
    “Ghastly,” Hester affirmed with relish. “She told them all the truth of what a fearful person the dead man had been, and why they had really come. It was awful then, but I laugh every time I think of it now.”
    “She were yer friend.” He said the word slowly, tasting its value.
    “Yes,” she agreed.
    “D’yer ’elp ’er?”
    “As much as I could.”
    “Fig were my friend,” he said very quietly. “I din’t ’elp ’im. Nor the other neither.”
    “I know.” She felt the lump, hard and painful, in her throat. Fig was one of the boys Jericho Phillips had murdered. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
    “Yer can’t ’elp it,” he said reasonably. “Yer did yer best. No one can stop it.” He moved an inch or two closer to her. “Tell me some more about Rose and the others.”
    She had seen survivor’s guilt before. In her nursing in the Crimea she had heard soldiers cry out from the same nightmares and had seen them waken with the same shocked and helpless eyes, staring at the comfort around them, and feeling the horror inside.
    She tried to think of something else to say to Scuff, happy things, anything to take away his memory of his own lost friends, adding a little more until she looked at him and saw his eyes closing. She lowered her voice, and then lowered it even more. He was so close to her now that he was touching her.