fall asleep like that, especially when his cam-era was inside. He couldn’t afford to lose it; Jimmy’s camera was his key to the future.
‘I said tickets, sir.’ The inspector’s eyes narrowed to slits.
‘Yes, sorry. Just a minute.’ He dug it out of his pocket and handed it over for punching.
‘Continuing on to Coventry?’
‘Yes, sir.’
With a whiff of regret that he hadn’t, after all, uncovered a fare cheat, the inspector handed back Jimmy’s ticket and rapped his hat before moving along the carriage.
Jimmy took his library book from his haversack but he didn’t read it. He was too het up with memories of Dolly and the day, thoughts of London and the future, to concentrate on Of Mice and Men. He was still a little confused as to what had happened between them. He’d meant to impress her with his news, not make her upset—there was something almost sacrilegious in disappointing a person as spirited and glowing as Doll was—but Jimmy knew he’d done the right thing.
She didn’t want to marry a man with nothing, not really. Doll loved ‘things’: trinkets and pretties and keepsakes to collect. He’d watched her today, and he’d seen her looking at the people in the bathing hut, the girl in the silver dress; he knew that whatever her fantasies about the farmhouse, she longed for excitement and glamour and all the things money could buy. Of course she did. She was beautiful and funny and charming; she was seventeen years old; she lived in a world of lovely people and fine things. Dolly didn’t know what it was to go without, and neither should she. She deserved a man who could offer her the very best of everything, not a lifetime of butcher’s leftovers got on the cheap and a drop of condensed milk in her tea when they couldn’t stretch to sugar. Jimmy was working hard to become that man, and as soon as he did, by God, he was going to marry her and never let her go.
But not until then.
Jimmy knew first-hand what happened to people with nothing who married for love. His mother had disobeyed her wealthy father to marry Jimmy’s dad, and for a time the two of them had been blissfully happy. But it hadn’t lasted. Jimmy could still remember his confusion when he woke up to find his mother gone. ‘Just up and disappeared,’ he’d heard people whispering in the street; and Jimmy had thought of that magic show they’d seen together just the other week. He’d marvelled, picturing his mother disappearing, the warm flesh of her body disintegrating into particles of air before his eyes. If anyone was capable of such magic, Jimmy decided, it was his mother.
As with so many of the great matters of childhood, it was his peers who showed him the light, long before a kindly adult thought to do the same. Little Jimmy Metcalfe got a bolter for a mum; ran off with a rich man, left poor Jim without a crumb. Jimmy brought the rhyme home from the school playground, but his dad had very little to say on the matter; he’d grown thin and tired looking, and had started spending a lot of time by the window, pretending he was waiting on the postman with an important business letter. He just kept patting Jimmy’s hand and saying they’d be all right, that the two of them would muddle through, that they still had each other. It had made Jimmy nervous the way his father kept saying that, as if he were trying to convince himself, and not his son at all.
Jimmy leaned his forehead against the train’s glass window and watched the tracks whizz by beneath him. His father. The old man was the only sticking point in his plans for London. He couldn’t be left alone in Coventry, not these days, but he was sentimental about the house where Jimmy had grown up. Lately, with his mind wandering the way it did, Jimmy sometimes found the old boy setting the table for Jimmy’s mother, or worse, sitting at the window as he’d used to, waiting her to come home.
The train pulled into Waterloo station and Jimmy slung his haversack over his shoulder. He’d find a way. He knew he would. The future stretched ahead, and Jimmy was determined to be equal to it. Holding tightly to his camera, he leapt from the carriage and headed for the underground to catch the train back to Coventry.