Page 21 of Razors & Ruin

This is a cleaned-up version of the truth. Toward the end, I burned through a lot of blood-and-vomit-soaked linen. Harry would retch and curse, howling for God or a medic to either come to his aid or fuck themselves to high heaven.

I swore up and down that someone was on the way, or they’d been by while he slept, but by the time his blue tongue lolled from his mouth for the last time, he hadn’t seen a doctor in four months. I had to pay one more time for the cart to collect him, but no one showed any interest.

As far as was ever said, Harry Lovett died of gout and a bad temperament, leaving poor Mrs. Lovett with a struggling business. So where that bastard Wetherby got the gall to walkinto my shop and blurt out the inconvenient truth, I'll never know.

“Who knows, love.” Sweeney stops at the turn onto Tower Bridge. “Maybe you just look like the type.”

I didn’t realize I’d been musing aloud, and I’m not sure when I started speaking, but it doesn’t matter. Sweeney’s eyes are bright in the lamplight, and his attention feels like the sun on my face.

The bridge is deserted, as well as it might be on a night like this. People are outside the alehouse on the other side, but we’d be invisible to them even if we were three feet away. I can only make them out because of the brightness of the pub’s open door.

Sweeney holds the sack open and looks inside. A sweet smell emerges; congealed blood and the beginnings of putrefaction. I know it well because my whole shop fucking smells like that, and all the lye and elbow grease in the world will never get it up from between my flagstones.

“Any parting missive for our girl here?” Sweeney asks.

I remember my mother’s pious utterances over the sunken heads of graying newborns, dressed in their funeral finery. Some shit she could summon up under those most trying and personal circumstances.

“Oh lawd,” I say, affecting Mama’s atrocious East End inflection. “Lawd above. Make beside you a place fo’ this po’ child o’ yours, that she may live in your gloooorrry, furrever’ n’ evver. Wiv’ ‘oly Mary’s grace in ‘er, Lawd, Amen.”

Sweeney roars with laughter. Emboldened, I spit into the bag, my saliva running over Marianne’s pallid cheek.

“Never mind,” I say, “Fuck yourself, you little tramp. All in all, it’s not been your day, has it?”

Sweeney shrugs as he tosses the sack into the water. “Depends how you look at it. She’s dead, which means she’s off the hook.”

We look at each other and dissolve into laughter again.

What a time to be alive.

The bag containing Marianne’s hands bobs away after her head, and both soon vanish, caught in the undertow. They will wash up somewhere, of course, nibbled beyond recognition by swimming critters.

Our levity doesn’t last; the city’s concrete sky bears down, crushing, impenetrable. Sweeney’s hands grip the rail beside mine, and I flex my smallest finger so I can stroke his, but he does not respond.

Once again, he is as gray and stony as a New World idol, a statue representing an unrestrained and mystical element.

I fear him still, but it makes me feel alive. My slow blood surges through me for the first time in my life. With Sweeney back with me in this faded, filthy town, all I see is color.

He seeks Johanna, and I believe I know why. He looks for something he dares not hope to find, not within, but without.

Does he not understand that to touch his daughter’s life would be to sully it with all he is and can only ever be?

I’m afraid of him. But, more so, I’m afraidforhim.

Break through, Nellie. Bring him back.

“I could use a drink,” I say, nudging him. “And believe it or not—I’m hungry.”

12

Sweeney

The alehouse is everything Nellie’s place isn’t.

Bright, jolly, and, crucially, busy. The patrons pack out every table, quaffing from tankards and oilskins of wine as they tear into skillets of pig’s trotters, bubble-and-squeak, and the ubiquitous meat pies.

“From the scent, I suspect there’s real meat in those,” Nellie says as we slide onto the end of a bunch. “And look at the clientele. Whoever runs the place charges enough to bring better than the great unwashed through the doors.”

I slide my eyes over the room and see she’s right. Laughing and braying are the diners from the other side; our betters, as they would have it.

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