IN BAD FAITH | peaky blinders | T.S

TWENTY THREE

SMALL HEATH, BIRMINGHAM. 1921.
23.

A chill ran beneath his skin. Tommy flexed his legs and rolled from the bed.

He moved toward the window, body still stiff from the cold. Early spring had begun its descent over the city, thin rays of sun falling from the sky like mist. Slick icy winds leached through brick walls and settled between the bones of those hiding inside. When he wasn't paying attention, the blue of the sky reminded him of her.

Tommy lit a cigarette and bought it to his lips. It was too early for everybody else to be alive, soft clouds webbing themselves across the horizon to bring dawn. Now more than ever, this was the only time he could breathe properly. The quiet shrouded his mind, gentle silence filling his ears as though he had been dunked underwater. All he could hear was the crackle of the hot paper between his fingers. He could hear his own heart beating in his chest. The loud breathing of the woman in his bed. The clock, sat at his bedside behind him. Tick. Tick. Tick. Then a moment's pause; a missed beat in the continuum of time. The earth slowing for just an instant, half of a heart beat, giving him a second to fill his mind with her.

"I have to stay," she had whispered. "I have to stay for Bessie."

Every single second since the moment he'd left her had been filled with distractions to make him forget. Because that's all he needed to do. He had to forget how she felt beside him, how she tasted on his lips, how she made him feel when she looked at him, into him. He had to forget what he had done to her. How he had broken her family. He needed to forget the way her face crumpled and her eyes shattered and her body collapsed into his arms at the sight of her sister's body, the feeling that pulsed in his rib-cage like he wasn't allowed to breathe. In the three weeks that had passed without knowing where she was or what she was doing, Tommy had decided he would not permit the ache of guilt in his chest. He would refuse the mud in his brain a place to stay. He would be Tommy, the normal Tommy, who wasn't permanently wracked with guilt until his chest hurt, who didn't care about anyone or anything outside of his family. He would be the Tommy that they needed.

"What time is it?" a voice called from the corner of the room.

He took a drag of his cigarette, not turning from the window. "Time you left."

Lizzie moved in silence. She dressed and left the bedroom without Tommy sparing a glance in her direction.

Tommy took a deep breath, fogging the glass in front of him. He didn't like closing his eyes because the darkness was a canvas for his mind to torture him.

The drinking and the smoking and the countless whores could steal his attention for days at a time but as soon as Tommy felt linen at the nape of his neck and the familiar pull of exhaustion in his bones, she came to him. It was the same nightmare each time: it clutched at his lungs and flung him from the bed and whenever Tommy rose from the floor with a bruised head and a throat hoarse from screaming, he couldn't recognise his reflection in the mirror at his bedside.

It started always at the beginning of an endless tunnel, the reach of its shadow's infinite. He could hear the ragged breaths of his comrades behind him, hot on the skin beneath his ears, and yet whenever he tried to turn and see them his body froze. They breathed faster and faster, as though they were suffocating — desperate for air, they coughed and growled and snarled like monsters. Tommy tried to visualise their faces: Arthur, John, Freddie, Danny Whizzbang. They were his friends, he told himself, his comrades in the same hell as him. They wouldn't hurt him.

Arthur. John. Freddie. Danny Whizzbang.

He was moving forward, somehow, deeper into the darkness, as though the men at his back were pushing him, forcing him closer to the end. The ground rumbled above him. Sweat stung at his face. Something clawed at his neck.