The Camden Tales

51 - Cats and Dogs

-=₪ November 1932 ₪=-

The Mansion / Margate / 7.42pm

Tommy stood alone on the balcony and looked out into the night. He couldn't deny it seemed peaceful as the nearby waves lapped calmly at the sandy shore below, and the vastness of the horizon made his eyes feel more open than was usual. But the blackness of it, the emptiness of it, felt like a void which unnerved him. It made him unsure if someone or something was looking back at him.

"She's delirious, but in bed now. She looks to have been using this evening, I thought you were watching her. Did you see her using, Mr Shelby?" asked Ishmael entering the drawing room.

"Tommy." he replied, turning on the balcony and making his way back into the room.

Ishmael, after giving Tommy a prolonged look of annoyance, marched across the room and out onto the balcony where he unhooked the doors from the outside walls and closed them, blocking out the cold sea air.

"Did you see her using, Mr Shelby?" Ishmael repeated while pulling the huge, thick curtains across the doors.

Tommy looked up at the dull, tassel edged curtains as they screeched across the brass rail, they had to be ten foot high at least.

"Malka doesn't make a lot of sense, does she?" Tommy asked, pulling a silver cigarette tin from his inner suit pocket.

Removing a cigarette, he rubbed it back and forth along his lips and then snapped the case closed and returned it to his pocket.

"No. She never really has though, not to anyone other than Alfie." Ishmael replied watching Tommy light his cigarette, "So, without him she is... lonely don't quite do it justice. Cut-off, maybe, adrift, she can't communicate with us, she just gets angry."

Tommy sat down in Malka's chair and flicked ash into the ashtray on her end table. However, being right-handed he found it awkward to lean across to the left side in order to achieve it.

"How is my sister getting the opium, Mr Shelby?" Ishmael asked.

"How would I know?" Tommy dismissed without looking up.

"Because I do know she gets it from what you import through Ireland!"

Tommy didn't know this, it never occurred to him that her drug problem was fuelled by his own opium supply chain. Ishmael noticed Tommy's eyes begin to dart around the rug in rapid thought.

"I don't know how it comes into the house." Ishmael continued, "I check everything that comes, everyone that comes and goes, but she still continues, and she is worse than ever. She slips further and further, and I don't know what to do anymore.

"We've tried everything we can think of, but she is determined to wait for him to come back and in the meantime, she is killing herself. I can't stay with her constantly, I have a business and a family of my own, I'm desperate Mr Shelby. I've made her a prisoner in her own home because she has no interest in getting better, but they need her, I need her, her son needs her."

"Who sends her the Shelby gin?" Tommy asked once the emotional speech was over.

"I thought you did."