The Baby and Fly Pie

by Melvin Burgess

  ‘He told me …’ began Sham. ‘We ring up, we make an appointment …’

  ‘He’s not rich, is he, Sham?’ said Jane, nodding at the dead man. Sham shrugged. He was prepared to risk anything for that money.

  ‘He told me how. We keep the baby until we get the money, you see,’ explained Sham urgently. ‘If they try anything’ – he shrugged and made a gesture at his throat – ‘the baby gets it.’

  We all turned to look at the baby. She was sitting up in the cardboard box playing with the tape. When she tried to put it in her mouth and found she couldn’t she lost her temper. She flung herself back, grunting and jerking.

  Jane stared at Sham. He shrugged again, a little, careless gesture. ‘We don’t have to really do it,’ he said. ‘We can just say.’

  ‘Even if we did get away with it, we’d be hunted down afterwards,’ insisted Jane. ‘Three kids with all that money … How long do you think we’d keep it? If you spend a tenner on fish and chips Mother knows about it and she wants to know where you got it. Look …’

  She leaned forward and stared into Sham’s face. Her eyes were so bright and she was shaking. She wanted it her way so badly she was shaking with it. I didn’t join in, I just watched. I’d never seen her like this before.

  ‘Do you know what making good means?’ she asked. We looked at each other. Everybody knows what making good means.

  ‘Making good,’ said Jane. She had to stop and swallow before she went on, she was so choked up. ‘Listen: there’ll be a reward.’

  Sham had been staring at her as if she had three heads but now he began to understand. He began to shake his head.

  ‘A legal reward. See? We’re going to make good. We’re going to do it right. We’re going to bring the parents back their poor little lost baby. We’re the good guys. We’re going to look after that baby – it’s going to be our little baby, our little sister, while we have it. And we’re going to do it together and we’re going to trust one another, like the man said. We’re the good guys.’

  She held out her hand and touched the baby on the cheek. Sham stared at her hand and shook his head.

  ‘Making good,’ she said. ‘Not being greedy. Not being dirty. Doing someone a good turn and being rewarded for it.’

  Sham looked at me out of the corner of his eye to see what I thought about it.

  ‘That’s what the man said,’ I said haltingly.

  ‘But that was just a trick!’ cried Sham. ‘You know that don’t you, Fly?’ He was desperate. He needed us and he knew it but Jane was throwing it all away. ‘How much do you think they’ll give to rubbish kids?’ He stared at her, willing her to understand. ‘No one gives anything unless they have to,’ he explained.

  Jane shook her head. ‘We don’t have to be like that. It’s a chance, see? We can make it out of here the right way – so we stay out. We don’t have to take the Tip with us. Do you see?’ she pleaded with me.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I was embarrassed.

  ‘It won’t be enough,’ urged Sham. ‘Seventeen million is enough for everyone, but a reward … They don’t have to give us anything.’

  ‘We’ll just have to trust them.’

  Sham stared. ‘Seventeen million pounds,’ he said, as if it was a spell. He really couldn’t believe she was going to throw it away. He sat there shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no …’

  But she had strength, my sister. She wanted that chance so badly, more than anyone she wanted that chance. But I really believe that if all that seventeen million was there by our sides Jane would have chucked it into the wind – just to keep herself clean.

  But Sham was in agony. ‘Fly Pie,’ he groaned. ‘Make her see sense – she’s your sister …’

  I wanted to be on her side. Maybe a few years back, when I was small … But now – I mean, I was impressed by the way she was handling it. I was impressed by what she said. But there was Sham watching us and I knew that the world wasn’t like that. All that talk about people giving things away – that was just pie in the sky. I was thinking about the money. There was a wallet, and the wallet was full of dreams …

  I couldn’t look at her. I was just doing a job, my voice said. I was earning money – £1,000 to get my sister to that man to doctor him up. All I wanted to do was take my money round to Luke and get him to buy me out. I’d already made good, I said. What Sham and Jane did was their business. I wanted my money, now. And then I wanted to get out.

  Sham kept interrupting – that the man was dead and everything had changed.

  Jane said, ‘Give me the money, Sham.’

  ‘He’s not getting that!’ exclaimed Sham.

  Jane held out her hand. ‘Trust me,’ she said.

  Sham snorted. He was almost laughing. Who did she think she was? He had the money, he had nothing to gain. And yet – it was a funny thing – he did trust her. We all trusted Jane. She was all wrong, she thought you could make good just by keeping your nose clean. But she didn’t lie and she didn’t steal and if she said you could trust her you knew you could.

  Sham dug in his pocket and took out the wallet. He weighed it in his hand, then handed it over to her. I was amazed. I think he was, too. Maybe he was curious to see what she was going to do.

  Jane took the money out of its leather wrap and started counting – one hundred, two hundred, three hundred … By the time she got to one thousand there was barely any left. I picked it up and looked in the little flaps in the sides and everywhere, but there couldn’t have been more than a hundred left. It wasn’t that Sham had helped himself. The pile in front of me was as big as it had ever been. I’d thought there were thousands and thousands of pounds there.

  ‘But I thought …’

  ‘Take your money, Fly Pie,’ said my sister. I looked at her. She never called me Fly Pie. Then I shrugged. I started stuffing the money in my trousers.

  ‘Hey, what you doing?’ demanded Sham starting forward. But Jane held his arm.

  ‘You know,’ she mused, ‘it’ll be pretty difficult for Sham and me to find the baby’s parents now you’ve got all the money. But a deal’s a deal. Take it and go, Fly Pie.’

  I didn’t go. I stared sulkily at her.

  ‘One thing,’ she said. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘Look at me, Fly Pie. Am I a pretty girl? Would you say I’m pretty?’

  I didn’t want to look. I didn’t need to. My sister’s pretty enough.

  She flicked at the hem of her little dress with her fingers. ‘What’s a girl like me doing on the street at that time of night dressed up like this?’ she asked me. She was looking steadily at me. Now I managed to look back at her. She had lipstick on. I’d not noticed that before. And make-up. And those pretty clothes. My sister never wore clothes like that. She hated that sort of thing. Anyway, it wasn’t allowed – Mother never let her girls wear make-up and they certainly never had clothes like that.

  I knew suddenly then. She’d been sold on.

  ‘She’s a prossie,’ said Sham.

  Jane flinched. She watched me.

  ‘But Mother said you wouldn’t …’

  Jane shook her head. ‘Mother says,’ she jeered. She stared at me until I dropped my eyes – as if it was me who’d done those shameful things.

  ‘Mother says Jane Shelly’ll get a good job,’ she said. ‘Mother says Fly Pie is going to be a baker’s boy. Mother says …’

  She was a good girl. She’d kept herself decent, not like the other girls, who did things with whoever wanted them. She was proud. She worked harder than anyone. You could trust her. She’d earned her chance, not like the rest of us.

  Those things don’t matter. She was the same as everyone and now she was selling herself to old men for a few quid a go because being young and pretty was all she had after all. She’d been hanging about by the speakers at the street fair to make it difficult for them to pick her up. We’d run out of the fair at the back in case her pimp caught her. Jane wasn’t going to marry a good man with a job, or get
work in a nice clean little shop any more. She was going to stand out at night and do it in doorways, and get beaten up every night she didn’t bring back enough money. Someone had paid money for her and now he owned her, and everything she had was his.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I took the money out and gave it to her. I only did it because I felt sorry for her.

  Jane gave me an odd glance – grateful and hateful at the same time. I couldn’t meet her eye. It wasn’t her fault, but I’d been proud of her before that. But she’d done what she wanted. She’d turned everything right round in a circle and she was still herself. She scooped up the money and held it out to Sham. ‘You’re our treasurer,’ she told him shakily. ‘You look after the money for all of us.’ She did that to show him that she’d be fair all the way, right down to giving Sham Shelly money, which no one in their right mind would do.

  ‘Okay,’ said Sham. He reached out but she pulled it back.

  ‘We do it my way. Okay?’

  Sham pursed his lips. He’d made a mistake giving her the money after all. ‘If there’s a reward,’ he said. ‘If not …’ He shrugged.

  ‘There will be,’ said Jane. ‘Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ said Sham.

  She held out the money again. He leaned forward, his hand gliding down and putting the money in his pocket. ‘I’ll be treasurer, I’ll look after it – for us all.’

  5

  NOW WE MADE plans – real plans. Jane did, anyway. We had to get away from the Tip. We planned to hide in Santy, the squatter city on the other side of the dump. There were always new people turning up there, people coming to a better life – so they thought. Once we’d found a place to stay we could start thinking about getting the reward. It wasn’t going to be easy. We couldn’t go to the police – they’d just take the baby and claim the reward themselves. We had to find out who the parents were, and how to get in touch with them and work out some sort of way of getting the baby to them.

  We had all that to come. Right now we had to wait. They’d be looking for us already … Mother Shelly’s Big Boys. We belonged to Mother Shelly and she didn’t like her property to go missing. The man who’d bought Jane would have been in touch with her by now and she wouldn’t like that, either. It didn’t do her prices any good to have girls she sold on running off. She’d have Shiner and Duck and the others scouring the Tip and the shops and the cinemas and TV stands and amusement arcades, and she’d keep at it half the night if she had to. We’d have to wait until three or four in the morning to be safe.

  It was bad in there with the dead man. You couldn’t stop feeling that he was suddenly going to sit up and say something. It was his baby, after all. In the end Jane wrapped him up in boxes like a sort of coffin and she said a little prayer over him. The next day or so when the bulldozers came, they’d find him. Someone would put two and two together.

  Jane talked and talked. She went on and on. She wanted us to see it her way. As she talked, she got more and more certain about it.

  She said we had to behave like proper people. People didn’t judge you by what you did, she said – they judged you by what you were inside. We just had to be like that enough and the good would come without us even trying.

  I’d heard it all before. What good had it done her? But she kept on and on and I listened until it really began to seem that hers was the right way and that all the hard things I’d learned and seen were nothing.

  But then I’d see Sham sitting there. He didn’t argue. He just sat and watched with his big eyes and never said a word. He needed us because he couldn’t look after the baby on his own all the time, but that didn’t change anything. He’d gone along with it because he had to. I knew Sham. He was waiting for his chance. Jane was going to trust him as much as she trusted me but I knew that all he wanted to be was a big crook, the bigger the better, and get money and respect out of people whether they wanted to give it or not.

  At last Jane lay down and closed her eyes I could smell perfume on her. It was too dark to see by then but I remembered that skimpy little dress with her legs and shoulders bare and her face made up, and it didn’t seem like my sister lying there. She lay down like some big strange animal trying to get to sleep. I thought of what had happened to her and I was humiliated. We all knew she wasn’t fit for that sort of thing. Mother Shelly knew it. She’d been sold as a prossie and now she was another person.

  I went up and tickled her hand. She squeezed it back. ‘We’re on our way, Davey,’ she said.

  ‘We’re going to get out,’ I whispered. I was embarrassed to cuddle her with Sham sitting just a few feet away but I lay down next to her. I tried to ignore him and wriggled close, as if I could turn her back into a kid the way it used to be. But nothing was going to be the same again.

  So far we’d been lucky but things were moving. The weather was changing. It was spitting in gusts when dark fell, but later on the wind blew up. You could hear the cardboard boxes banging about the yard and rolling around on top of us. The noise got louder and louder. It was frightening. You wouldn’t believe the noises the wind could make when it had all those boxes to play with. It was crashing and booming and banging and whistling and shrieking. We crouched down like mice. The whole heap was shaking, the noise was tremendous. And suddenly the boxes blew away above us. Everything went flying off into the darkness and we were hanging on to the ground, trying to get out of the way.

  I could see the dead man coming out of his cardboard as if he were alive. Sham snatched the baby and we all went haring along, diving and ducking the flying boxes, towards the old garages at the edge of the yard.

  We tried to stay there but the boxes kept blowing in so we made another run and got to a derelict little building that still had doors. We slammed the door behind us but the boxes were still making the most enormous noise. The baby hated it; she was jerking and trying to scream but of course she couldn’t because of the tape on her mouth. Jane took it off and tried to feed her, but the baby just gargled on the milk and howled, so we made her put some more tape on.

  ‘The Big Boys won’t be out in this,’ Jane insisted.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Sham. He was right. Mother looked after her Big Boys but they had to do everything she said.

  We tried to settle down but it was impossible. Sham kept crawling out to see his watch by the flashes of moonlight but the time crawled by. Things got a bit better when the baby took another bottle and went to sleep. The wind was still big, but not so big. We began to relax again.

  We should have known better. Trouble comes whether you expect it or not. With all the noise there could have been anything outside. As it was, it was Shiner.

  He knew we were there, he must have been looking in through the window. He just kicked the door open and there he was.

  ‘I knew you’d be round here somewhere,’ he said grimly. ‘You’re for it, you little bastards.’ Then he saw the baby and stopped in his tracks.

  ‘Man! What’s that?’ he yelped.

  I have to hand it to Sham. I’d never have dared but he didn’t waste a second. He’s only a nipper but he dived straight in and got round Shiner’s legs. The Big Boy waved his arms and toppled and hit the ground with a crack. He was up quick enough though. He was twice as big as any of us and he kicked Sham off him halfway across the room. Then Jane was there clawing at his face and before I knew it, I was on his back, pulling his hair and grabbing his neck.

  It was terrifying. Shiner was sixteen, big and vicious. You couldn’t hurt him, all you could do was wrap yourself round him and hope someone else was doing the business. Jane was hugging his neck from the front, I was hugging his neck from the back. We were both up off the ground and he was staggering to and fro pulling at our arms saying, ‘Get off, get off, will yer?’ He sounded surprised.

  Then Sham got hold of a piece of wood and started cracking at his shins with it. Shiner couldn’t see a thing because of Jane round his neck, and he began stepping and dancing about like a bear trying to kick i
ts boots off. He kept gargling where we squeezed his neck and yelling, ‘Watch it, watch it!’ whenever he could snatch a breath.

  Then he lost his temper and fell over. Sham started whacking him with the stick and missing and getting me and Jane instead because he was thrashing about so much. There was a really nasty moment when Shiner got mad. He got back on his feet and he was swinging at us and we were flying off and bouncing off the walls. But we got dirty. There were feet and sticks and stones everywhere and Shiner hit the ground. That was the end of it. Sham got wrapped round his feet, I had his arm halfway up his back and Jane was banging away on his head with a bit of wood as hard as she could.

  ‘Okay, okay, stop it, stop it!’ Shiner screamed.

  Jane carried on. He couldn’t move a muscle but she didn’t seem to notice. She just went on, bang, bang, bang! as hard as she could.

  There was a pause while we stared at her.

  ‘Jane!’ Sham yelled. She stared at him.

  ‘Get those sacks and tear ’em up,’ he ordered. There was a heap of sacks in the corner we’d been trying to sleep on. Shiner didn’t dare move a muscle after what she’d done, but we had a hell of a job tearing them up. Still, we managed to wrap his feet up and wrap a few more around his body and arms. Then we found some nylon rope and the three of us tied him up and wrapped the rope round and round until he looked like some sort of party game.

  We stood around panting. We were amazed at what we’d done. When Sham snorted I jumped, I was so nervous. He was laughing! I glared at him but then I saw what he meant. Here was the great Shiner wrapped up from head to foot so he couldn’t move a finger and glaring at us over the top of his rope. There was a big knot on top of his head and he looked like nothing more than a great, big rabbit. That was funny, but pretty soon we were scared again. I could see his eyes bright in the pale light from the little lamps in the yard. There was wet glistening in his hair where Jane had hit him with the stick.