in yet.’ She unwrapped her florentine and took a bite. ‘Sa nice bit of biscuit-making, kiddo. Yummie. See you later.’
She turned and walked slowly to the door, and he watched her bottom as she went, guiltily because he had just been looking at the bruise on her face. She turned at the door and gave him a look that might have been playful. But it wasn’t quite pulled off and, framed in the doorway, she looked like someone about to wade out to sea.
He turned away from the look, heard the shop bell ring signalling that she was gone and saw that his mother was watching her go from behind the fly strips of the kitchen. For a moment he felt like he’d been caught out doing something he shouldn’t, but her focus was all on the woman in blue who sashayed down the street. His mother held on to a fly strip, wound it round her finger and unwound it. Her face was pale and tight, her hair wet from the bath.
Eventually a letter came and his mother paused before reading it. Her face darkened, or perhaps a shadow passed over the sun. She leant on one hip, then the other. ‘Your father misses you and he misses walnut and coffee cake with morning tea. He is looking forward to seeing how you have grown. The jungle is hot. He says sorry for not writing sooner. He has been busy. With the war.’
The words came carefully and slowly like his handwriting was difficult to read. She got up and left the room, gripping the letter in her fist. Over the next two days he watched its path, saw it read and reread, while he wiped down the counters in the kitchen, saw it folded and opened and folded again, her nails sharpening the fold in its middle. It was placed between the pages of a book, shut inside a drawer, put in the bin, taken out and put back in a different book. When she took charge at the front of the shop for half an hour he took it from between the pages of Moby Dick and unfolded it.
Mayhew is dead.
They slit his throat.
North is missing. Just upped and went into the jungle.
If either side find him now, he’s dead.
It can’t be stood this jungle. It’s full of scratches.
R
Leon put the letter back in the book and the book back on the shelf. He felt the toothache cold of a shadow at his back, heard a snuffle, but when he turned round it was only his mother standing in the doorway looking at him. She held the wooden spatula that they used to pick up the cakes at the front of the counter. It dangled like a broken arm. Her face was old, all the years she’d been alive seemed to have come on all at once, just that second. She gave him a smile, dull as watered-down milk, then walked to the front door and turned the sign to closed, locked the door. She took off her apron as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom and left it lying over the banister. He waited, his fingertips still holding the taste of the letter. Then he followed her up, found the door to her bedroom open and his mother a lump under the covers. He climbed in too and they stared at the ceiling together.
‘Your father is an only child.’ She smiled, ran a finger along her eyebrows. ‘Like you.’
He raised his head to look at her. The bun of her hair meant that her head was tilted at an odd angle, that there was space underneath her neck. He wanted to fill the space with something soft.
‘I had four brothers. Harold, David, Thomas and Charlie.’ She spoke the names like they were precious things, noises that weren’t often sounded. She raised her hand and put it over her face. ‘Then there was my mother, my father. My aunt and uncles. My sister and her children. We weren’t even proper Jews – just the children of Jews. We never really went to temple, only on the big occasions. But still.’ He felt the windows darkening, closed his eyes and his skin burnt hot where it lay close to hers. The thing was at the door again, but she didn’t seem to hear it. The smell of the room was different, like ashes, like hot dry sand.
‘I was smuggled out early. Just me, the girl. Your father the