“We live in strange times when a man needs to shine a shoe for his false leg, don’t we?” said Wilf with a half-smile. “Still, one must keep up appearances. That’s what they tell us, anyway. A strange thing: I’m damned glad to be out of it and yet I feel like I’m shirking my duty, stuck over here. Ended up with a desk job at the War Office, you see. They took my uniform away from me, told me to wear a suit. They’ve no idea what it’s like for men my age out of uniform. The looks we get. A woman came up to me in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, perhaps she didn’t notice my cane. Opened her handbag, and in front of everyone she … she…” He shook his head, his lip curling in a mixture of anger and pain. “Why do they do that?” he muttered. “They don’t understand, any of them.”
Alfie felt uncomfortable being confronted by so much pain and anger. He noticed a split in the brown pupil of the man’s right eye: a birthmark of some sort.
“Do you have any older brothers over there?” asked Wilf after a moment, and Alfie shook his head. “Your dad, then? Sorry, I shouldn’t ask. It’s none of my business, really.”
“How do they look?” asked Alfie, nodding at the young man’s shoes; he was finished at last. He was glad to be finished.
“Spot on. Couldn’t have done better myself.” He took a penny from his pocket and threw it in the center of Alfie’s cap. It made a ringing sound as it bounced off the coins from earlier. “Thank you,” he said, standing up now and reaching for his cane. He opened his mouth to say something else, but he seemed to think better of it and simply walked away without another word, heading toward platform six, disappearing into the heart of the crowd as Alfie watched him for a few moments and then reorganized all his shining equipment on the ground beside him, waiting for his next customer.
* * *
Alfie didn’t eat much for lunch. All that bending over the shoeshine box seemed to kill his appetite a little. The smell of the polish and the fact that the steam from the engines was catching in his throat didn’t help either. But he knew that he wouldn’t be able to work as hard in the afternoon if he didn’t have something, so he managed a small steak-and-kidney pie from the food stall. The pastry was heavy and dry and there was more gravy than meat inside—he was sure there had only been one bite of steak and two gristly pieces of kidney—but it filled him up for now.
Business was slow in the afternoon, and the day had grown colder. A strong breeze was pouring through from the exit on Euston Road and rattling around the platform, forcing the commuters to wrap their coats tighter around themselves. Between two and four o’clock there were never many customers, which meant that Alfie could spend more time on the Island of Despair with Robinson Crusoe, but he knew that the early evening crowds would start pouring through soon, and when they did he might get a customer or two.
A little after half past three, a thin, middle-aged man wearing a brown military uniform that looked as if it had been freshly pressed about ten minutes earlier sat down without a word and placed his right foot on the footrest. Alfie said nothing and simply got to work as the man pulled a document folder from his briefcase and gave his full attention to the thick file in his hands, shaking his head every so often and muttering rude words under his breath. When he said one that was very rude, Alfie sniggered a little and dropped his polish jar. Immediately the man put his folder down and stared at the boy.
“What was that?” he said after a moment.
“Sorry, sir,” said Alfie.
The man shook his head. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “Was I talking to myself again?”
Alfie nodded, and the man laughed. “It’s a habit of mine,” he said. “My wife’s always telling me off about it.” He put the folder aside for a moment and watched as Alfie picked up a cloth and ran it across his left heel. “You’re very good at that,” he said finally. “Been at it awhile, have you?”
“More than a year, sir,” said Alfie.
“Good Lord. How old are you, boy?”
“Nine, sir.”
“Nine years old and already earning a living. It’s like being back in Dickens’s time. Ever read Dickens?”
“No, sir.”
“Ever read anything?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What?”
“Robinson Crusoe.”
“I haven’t read that since I was a boy. Read Oliver Twist. Or Nicholas Nickleby. I promise you’ll enjoy them. I’m reading this new chap, Lawrence, but I don’t think he’d be right for you just yet. Shouldn’t you be in school anyway?”
Alfie looked up but said nothing, and the man simply shrugged his shoulders and looked away. “None of my business, I suppose,” he said. “I have enough to concern myself with as it is without worrying about the well-being of every waif and stray I run into.”
Some of the polish was clogging up the bristles on Alfie’s brush, and he shook it out, rubbing it against the floor to remove the grit, leaving a grimy residue on the tiles beside him. The man didn’t say anything else as Alfie worked but returned to his folders instead, turning the pages quickly, making notes on some of them with an expensive-looking pen, drawing great lines through others. The breeze from the street outside picked up, sending a rush of air through the station, and just as the man turned a page, he lost hold of his folder and all his documents were swept out of his hands, scattering loose pages all around the concourse.
“Oh!” he cried, jumping up, almost kicking Alfie as his right foot lifted off the shoeshine box. “My papers! I can’t lose them. Help me, there’s a good chap. Grab as many as you can before they float away.”
Alfie ran around the station, gathering great handfuls as he went; they were everywhere—over by the tea shop, close to the ticket counter, near the tobacconist’s, next to the newspaper stall. But he grabbed and he grabbed, and before he knew it he had more than forty pages in his hands, and as he looked around, trying to see whether there were any more in sight, his eyes fell on the top page that he was holding.
It was an official-looking document, fancy writing and expensive paper, with the words EAST SUFFOLK & IPSWICH HOSPITAL inscribed across the top and Latin writing underneath, even though no one could speak Latin anymore. Typed underneath were the words:
Returnees—One Page Review
And beneath that, in smaller type, the sentence:
Refer to File 3(b) for full patient assessments.
There were two columns, left and right, listing names and serial numbers, with another number listed after that, which Alfie assumed had something to do with File 3(b). He didn’t mean to read the list of names along the left-hand column—he wasn’t really interested—but the problem was that it was a page filled with words, and for as long as Alfie could remember, whenever he saw pages filled with words he wanted to read them. His eyes glanced across the records and quickly settled on one single entry.
He blinked, uncertain whether he could believe the evidence of his own eyes, almost dropping all the papers that he had collected. And just at that moment, the man from the shoeshine stand stepped forward and plucked all the documents out of his hand.
“That’s all of them, I think,” he said, looking around the station as he piled the pages back inside his folder. “Thanks for your help, boy. How much do I owe you?”