Cruel World - Thomas Shelby

In the half light

There was a window to the left of me; the sky was dark cloudy, though I could hardly make it out for the seemingly endless rows of terraced houses, and I spent, what felt like, a very large amount of time trying to figure out which blobs in the sky were cloud, and which ones were actually sky. I couldn't help my ears pricking every time a noise was made – a creak of the floor, the quiet whispers downstairs.

I had been snuck upstairs, per my request, adamant to avoid questions or help. My body had never felt larger. The usual occupant of the bed I had been lying in was unknown to me, and I felt myself stretch out to all corners of the room, slink through the cracks in the door and go roll down the stairs with how aware of my presence I was. I hated to admit that I thought Tommy had an intimidating family, and walking into their home, a stranger, with almost blue hands and dripping hair, felt too humiliating – to vulnerable -, so I opted to sneak through the window. It was an embarrassing climb, my limbs were almost frozen stiff, but, thankfully, was witnessed by no one; however, I had to walk back down the whole street, to get to the back alley to reach the window I had been instructed to hide in. I think his whole family knew I was residing in their house, but no one seemed to really care, and I was left to assume that sneaking girls in was a regular occurrence. At one point, Thomas knocked on the door to give me a change of clothes, the conversation that followed was so short, I wondered if he was really ever there. If this whole night was a dream, a hallucination. But, nonetheless, the thin trousers and blouse he left me with felt real to the touch.

I closed my eyes – squeezed them shut so tightly it hurt – and the confusing darkness of the sky was gone, the overwhelmingly indistinctive houses outside the window disappeared. The whole room disappeared, and the space I felt I was taking up, abruptly paused its descent downstairs, and snapped back behind my eyes.

When I relaxed my strained eyelids, I did not open them fully. Instead, I lay on my side, curling into a small ball, as small as I could make myself. I felt the tiny pin pricks from the points of my tears itch down my cheeks, but that was all they were, tiny needles, and much like the dark-haired boy earlier, they had left so soon that I didn't believe they had ever existed. Only leaving ghostly paths in their absence. My mind found something to concentrate on, besides the black of my eyelids, at the thought of Thomas Shelby. I reluctantly admitted my gratefulness for him to myself, whilst lying on his bed (what I assumed was his bed, at least, I doubted he would've kicked one of his many siblings out of their bed). It didn't seem to matter that he jumped into a canal after me though. as soon as the morning came, I thought, I would leave, and he would be forgotten.

The morning couldn't come soon enough though, so I opened my eyes. The clock opposite the bed read three in the morning, and quickly I concluded that it was late enough for me to leave. I felt utterly exhausted, and the action of getting up from my curled position was easier said than done. Yet, after a series of quiet slips and crashes, I had found myself around the back of the Shelby home. Before evacuating the home, I took the long, black coat that had been given to me earlier, deciding that walking in the cold would be worse than trying to be polite and giving it back. My tumble down the building had been, somehow, less graceful than the climb up, and, yet again, I was grateful that no one could see me.

Slowly, I made my way back to the main street, and started walking home. My legs burned, and I could practically hear their sizzling cries and pleas to stop walking, but I was my mother's daughter. I didn't back down from a fight, I had no mercy and started walking twice the speed.

I would sink into the darkness of a shadow, and feel myself entrapped by it, slowly losing vision and determination, before walking back into the unstable, flickering glow of a streetlamp and finding my bearing again. There didn't seem to be anyone awake, which differed immensely to the stories I was told growing up. Ones about scary men and begging whores. I hadn't walked far, but, still, it felt impossible for anyone to break the glassy cold of the night.