The Widow Ginger

by Pip Granger

  Then I heard a terrible, heart-breaking scream, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a skinny black figure scuttle out of the kitchen and launch itself at the Widow’s back. The shock made the American drop me. I heard Mr Rabinowitz wail, ‘Not the children, no! Not the children. Not this time.’ And he hurled himself at the Widow once more like a maddened dog.

  The American crashed on to his back among the broken crockery, with the black, spider-like figure on top of him, banging his head on the floor over and over again and wailing pitifully.

  I looked round to see Auntie Maggie rooted in the doorway to the stairs, staring blankly at the scene before her, mouth set in a large O.

  A pair of gentle arms lifted Mr Rabinowitz off the still and bleeding figure on the lino and deposited him carefully on a chair. ‘Get him a drink of water, Shorty,’ said Luigi. I did as I was told. When I got back with it, Luigi was checking the Widow over to see if he was still alive. He was.

  ‘Call 999, Shorty. Get them to send the coppers quick and to bring an ambulance with them.’ I didn’t need telling twice. I wanted the Widow a long way away from me and quickly.

  I screeched to a halt at the telephone, all too aware that I was a learner. I’d watched others do it, though, so with a shaking hand I picked up the receiver and waited for someone to talk to me. Once the nice lady at the other end had heard about a bleeding Widow and poor Mr Rabinowitz she put me through to the nick and Smiley Riley.

  ‘Sergeant Riley,’ I wailed. ‘I want my dad.’

  Poor Mr Rabinowitz rocked backwards and forwards moaning gently to himself. His black, unblinking eyes stared at some horror a long way away from our cafe and Old Compton Street, and his skinny black arms hugged himself as he rocked. My eyes filled up with tears as I watched him. Not knowing what to do, I found myself patting his thin shoulder gently and whispering, ‘There, there. It will be all right.’

  It didn’t take long for the cafe to be heaving with people. The police arrived swiftly and in force. Sharky, Madame Zelda and Paulette came from next door and just about the whole world’s supply of Campaninis turned up. Uncle Bert, T.C. and Maltese Joe piled in just in time to see the ambulance cart the bloody and still groggy Widow Ginger away. When I saw him lying on that stretcher, between two burly policemen, it struck me that it seemed all wrong that such a neat, slight man could cause so much trouble and fear.

  I noticed the Widow’s shoes as they poked out from beneath the grey blanket. They were all bright and shiny with spit and polish as usual, apart from one toecap that had a splodge of blood smeared on it. I took my hanky out of my pocket, spat on it and very carefully rubbed the smear away.

  Once I was satisfied, I looked up into the cold eyes of the Widow Ginger, and for a long moment it seemed as if there was just the two of us. And then the spell was broken and they took him away.

  37

  We were going home! There was a party atmosphere in the little flat in St Anne’s Court as we all packed our clothes for the short trip back to our gaffs. It was over! We could have our lives back. Then it hit me how much I was going to miss Sugar and Bandy. Sugar was, as usual, comforting.

  ‘Don’t you fret, honey bundles, we’ll come to you for breakfasts at weekends and you can come to us,’ he assured me as I grabbed a bit of lap time and a cuddle. Being a big man, Sugar was good at cuddles, like a large teddy bear.

  Bandy was less cuddly, but just as reassuring, ‘Do you think we could live without our regular doses of Rosie?’ As usual, she didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Of course not, of course not, you daft gel. The pain au chocolat are on us on Saturday morning. Crack of eleven thirty; don’t be late.’

  The Widow Ginger was in hospital for a week, closely guarded by policemen day and night. ‘Better choose non-smokers,’ Bandy said, blowing Passing Cloud smoke rings into the air. ‘We don’t want that deranged fucker to get his hands on any matches.’ I could tell things were getting back to normal because Auntie Maggie tutted and asked Bandy to watch her language. She hadn’t done that for ages. Bandy’s face split into a huge grin, and she winked a long, slow wink at me and laughed like a drain.

  Once it was decided that the Widow was fit enough for prison, he was taken from the hospital to court to be committed for trial. T.C. took me to see him in handcuffs in the dock and to hear the judge telling him that the charges against him were so serious that there would be no bail. Then we stood outside the court to see the Widow bundled into a Black Maria and driven away. Seeing him taken into custody like that did a lot to calm my nerves, as T.C. had hoped it would. I’d had some awful nightmares about the Widow coming back to get us, but they stopped once I’d seen the handcuffs and heard the doors of the Black Maria clang shut behind him.

  Later, a lot later, the Widow Ginger was certified insane and committed to Broadmoor, to be held at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Which, according to T.C., could mean that he would never be allowed out, not until he died and probably not even then.

  Hissing Sid was in big trouble too. It turned out that he had let the Mangy Cow talk him into harbouring the Widow when Kid’s place became too hot for comfort. Not only that, but when T.C., his copper friends, Maltese Joe and Uncle Bert had burst into the little brown flat, Hissing Sid had made it his business to get in the way of a swift arrest. That’s how come the Widow was in a position to crash through the cafe door. The police didn’t like that. They charged him with aiding and abetting and with obstructing the police, and while they were at it they popped him for his dirty books as well.

  ‘Where he’s going,’ Uncle Bert explained, ‘he won’t be in a position to pay his usual backhanders to carry on trading, so they might as well get their Brownie points for ridding Soho of one of its grubbier booksellers. It’s not as if we’re short of ’em.’

  Mrs Robbins took a long time to recover. ‘After all,’ Auntie Maggie told Madame Zelda, Paulette and me, ‘the poor woman’s lost almost everything. Her child, her marriage. It’s really terrible all right.’

  It seemed to comfort both me and Mrs Robbins if we met up regularly. She came to the cafe or we went out to the park or the pictures, or to St Anne’s Churchyard to feed the pigeons. Once we’d got used to the idea that Jenny was gone and was never coming back, we could think about her without breaking our hearts. Well, not as much, anyway. We began to talk about her a lot as time went on. We enjoyed that more and more because it kept her alive for us, in a way. Funny thing, though, she always stayed a little girl in our conversations, as I grew older and she didn’t.

  Once things finally settled down again, Mrs Robbins surprised us all by divorcing Hissing Sid and taking a job with Freddie the Frock and Antony. They said she was fabulous behind their counter, and a real asset to their business. You could have knocked me over with a sequin when they told us what a wonderful eye she had for colour. I thought she only knew about brown. It was lovely to see her surrounded by rainbows and sparkles. She bloomed and went from strength to strength. Freddie and Antony simply adored her and wondered how they had ever managed without her. I think she felt pretty much the same about them.

  Kid and the Mangy Cow were both charged along with Hissing Sid, and like him they did a bit of porridge. We never saw either of them again.

  Poor Luigi missed Betty for ages and was very quiet by his standards. However, he did finally leave home and move into Kid’s old flat. He amazed everybody by being very good at cooking and cleaning up after himself. Mamma kept sending daughters in to give his place a once-over and they kept reporting back that there was no need. Mamma thought it was against nature, but Auntie Maggie thought it was a jolly good thing.

  ‘Everybody should be able to shift for themselves, even men,’ she said firmly and nobody liked to disagree.

  If Bandy hadn’t told us, we would never have known that T.C. wound up in quite serious trouble with his bosses over his dealings with us during those terrifying weeks. She heard from his guvnor that the powers that be took a dim view of his and Sharky’s scheme to ensure th
at Hissing Sid and the Mangy Cow were made to pay maintenance to Mrs Robbins. Their view was even dimmer when it came to his dealings with Maltese Joe and his associates.

  ‘In fact, the swine are positively blind on that subject,’ Bandy told us. ‘Bloody nerve, I say, being one of those “associates” myself.’

  However, the authorities were unable to prove anything, because everybody concerned kept their gobs very firmly shut; T.C. was now considered one of our own. He was warned, though, and his prospects for promotion got very slim.

  Auntie Maggie taxed him about it during a Saturday morning visit a few weeks after the Widow Ginger finally disappeared behind the walls of Broadmoor. ‘Why didn’t you tell us you’d landed in the muck at work?’

  ‘Now what would be the point of that, Maggie, my dear?’ T.C. replied, giving her the full crinkle. ‘You’re in no position to talk them round and, anyway, I’m guilty and we all know it. There’s no point in whining, because given the same circumstances, I’d do it all again.’

  Still, somewhere in the middle of the whole thing, I couldn’t help feeling that somehow T.C.’s trouble was all my fault. If he didn’t think he was my dad, he probably would have stayed on the right side of the law.

  38

  T.C. and I were splashing about at the Oasis. We liked the open air swimming bath much better than Marshall Street when the weather was hot and stuffy. We took it in turns to throw the large beach ball as far as we could, then to race after it through the water. T.C. would tell anyone who would listen that I swam like a seal and would stick out his chest with pride and grin like a loony.

  When we were finally too puffed to play any more we settled down on our towels in the sunshine. Uncle Bert had packed us a picnic of Spam sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs and fairy cakes. We had a flask of orange juice, and a peach each for afters.

  For a while we were too busy munching to say much, but as the drowsy afternoon wore on and we digested our picnic we fell to chatting about this and that. It seemed like the right moment to ask a few questions that had long been troubling me. I took a deep breath.

  ‘T.C.,’ I said, looking down at him as he lay with his eyes closed against the glare of the sun.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘T.C.’ Another pause. I was scared. I wasn’t sure I was going to like the answers I might get. Still, it was time I found out for sure. ‘T.C., are you my dad?’ There, it was out!

  I thought he was asleep, he lay so still and so quiet for so long with my question hanging in the air between us. Then he pushed himself up on one elbow and looked at me with a funny sort of smile on his face. He nodded slowly. ‘Nobody can be absolutely sure, Rosie, but I think I probably am. Do you mind the idea?’

  My heart leaped so hard, I thought it’d choke me. But I was cautious; I had to make sure. ‘Do you mind?’ I asked, hardly daring to breathe.

  His face lit up like a box of fireworks all going off at once. ‘Mind? Of course I don’t mind. I’m as pleased as Punch and as proud as anything, you daft ha’porth, you.’

  I landed on him so hard I knocked him flat, and all the puff went out of him. We rolled around and giggled for a bit and then he lifted me off, held me at arm’s length and looked at me for a long time. ‘But how do you feel about the prospect, poppet? You haven’t told me.’

  This was the tricky bit, but it had to be said. ‘Well. I’m ever so glad, honest, but there is my uncle Bert. I love him like my dad, too, and I could never give him up. Not even for you. Is it all right to love two dads?’

  I swear tears oozed into the crinkles around T.C.’s blue eyes. He took me in his arms and pressed his nose into my curls for so long, I was a bit worried he’d gone to sleep, but then he whispered in my ear. ‘Of course it’s all right to love two dads, as long as one of them is me.’

  THE END