He pressed his hands to his temples again and gave a low cry of pain, like an animal caught in a trap, and Alfie turned on his heel, running toward the tobacconist’s shop. This would take away the pain, he was sure it would. There was someone in front of him, taking forever to count out his coins, and he looked back to make sure that his father was still in the seat, but the early-evening crowds had started to gather and he couldn’t see through them.
“Ten cigarettes,” said Alfie, throwing his coins on the counter when it was finally his turn.
“What kind?” asked the man behind the counter.
“Any kind! It doesn’t matter. The cheapest ones.”
The man nodded and reached behind him, opening a drawer and taking an empty box from one of the shelves and counting them out. A train conductor’s whistle blew, a shrill sound, before he shouted that the train to Liverpool was about to depart from platform three, the platform closest to Alfie’s shoeshine stand.
“Quickly, please!” cried Alfie, looking around, and there he was again—a figure breaking through the crowd. Someone Alfie knew, but gone too quickly for him to recognize. He looked around; confusion everywhere. Noise. Movement.
“More haste, less speed,” said the tobacconist. “I don’t want to count out the wrong number, do I?”
People were running toward the train now, and there was the sound of the steam engine whistling through its funnel. He could see the conductor heading over, a long row of open doors before him.
“Ten cigarettes,” said the tobacconist. “Thru’pence please.”
Bang!
The first of the doors on the Liverpool train being slammed.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“You’re a farthing short,” said the man, and Alfie let out a cry of despair as he reached into his pocket and found a single farthing at the bottom of it. “Here,” he said, grabbing the packet and throwing the coin across the counter.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
He ran through the crowd, almost tumbling over as he tried to force his way between them to return to his father.
“All aboard!”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Watch where you’re going, boy!”
“Sorry.”
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Finally he broke through. He was back in his usual spot and breathed a sigh of relief. He bent over, a stitch in his side, relieved to see that the chair in front of the shoeshine box was still occupied. When he stood up straight again, he reached out and handed the packet across.
“Cigarettes?” asked Mr. Podgett, the man from the bank. “Thank you, but I’m a pipe man. Is this a new service, then? A shoeshine and a free cigarette? Very enterprising of you, young man, but I’m not sure it’s a very good idea. It’ll eat into your profits.”
Alfie stared at him, his eyes opening wide as he turned, staring around the station. He couldn’t see his father anywhere. He was gone.
He’d stayed where he was.
And then left.
CHAPTER 13
THERE’S A LONG, LONG TRAIL A-WINDING
Alfie ran through the front door of number twelve and collapsed on the bottom stair with his head in his hands. He thought about everything that had happened that day and couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been. He should never have taken Georgie out of the hospital—of course he shouldn’t! How could he have been so stupid? But he had only ever wanted to help his dad, to bring him home to his family. And now he had lost him. What would he do if he was never found again?
He heard voices in the parlor and looked up in hope. Perhaps Georgie had found his way back again? He jumped up and ran inside to find Margie sitting on the broken armchair in front of the fireplace talking to someone on the sofa. He spun around, hoping that he would see his father sitting there—but no, it was Granny Summerfield.
“Alfie,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? You have a guilty expression, and I can’t bear a boy with a guilty expression.”
He looked at his mother, who narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. “You do look pale,” said Margie. “And your eyes are red. Have you been crying?”
Alfie shook his head. As it happened, he hadn’t been crying, but he had been sitting with his head in his hands, so that might have accounted for the redness.
“No,” he said.
“Where have you been?” asked Granny Summerfield, leaning forward and taking off her spectacles. “You have the look of a boy who’s been up to no good.”
“I haven’t done anything!” he shouted, raising his voice in a way that he had never done in front of his grandmother before.
“Alfie!” said Margie.
“What?” he asked, staring at her before throwing his arms up in the air. “I’m going to my room,” he added, running into the hallway, charging upstairs and into his bedroom, where he slammed the door shut behind him and flung himself on the bed as he thought through the events of the last couple of hours.
Georgie had gone missing when he’d been at the tobacconist’s stall, and Alfie guessed that it was the sound of all the train doors slamming that had disturbed him. He had already reacted badly to them. And then there had been the way he talked—so strangely, and with sentences that didn’t fit together correctly. He remembered what Dr. Ridgewell had said to him about shell shock: how some of the soldiers who came back from the front looked as if there was nothing wrong with them physically, but inside, in their heads, they were very ill. That was how so many of the men at the East Suffolk had seemed to him. Even the amputees and the burn victims and the men with their arms in slings or their legs in harnesses had stared into the distance or rocked back and forth or sat crying, apparently hurting more than anyone he had ever seen, even more than he had hurt the day Charlie Slipton from number twenty-one threw a stone at him in the street for no reason whatsoever.
He must have run out of the station, Alfie reasoned, when the train doors were slamming. He must have panicked. But where would he go? He might have boarded a train, gone anywhere, and at some point in the journey the conductor would ask for his ticket, he wouldn’t have one, and he’d be thrown off at the next stop. And what would happen then? A man wearing only pajamas under an old pair of trousers and a jacket. How would he ever find his way home again?
There was a rat-a-tat-tat on the front door, and Alfie jumped up. He heard the parlor door opening and Margie marching out into the hall as voices drifted up the stairs, slipped under the doorway and into his room. He stepped out onto the landing and listened.
“Bill,” said Margie.
“Sorry to disturb you, Margie old girl,” said Old Bill Hemperton. “This is probably something and nothing, but I thought I should come and tell you about it.”
“Come into the parlor,” she said. “Granny Summerfield is here too.”
And with that they disappeared into the front room and closed the door behind them and Alfie couldn’t hear them anymore. He stood there, biting his lip, uncertain whether or not he should go downstairs. There was only one thing that Old Bill could have been calling in to say; the same thing he’d called over for earlier.
For a moment Alfie wondered whether he should pack a bag with some clothes, his shoeshine box, the money he had left in his sock drawer, and his copy of Robinson Crusoe and make a run for it. He could get back to King’s Cross and take a train somewhere, anywhere, start a new life. What did he need apart from his shoeshine box, after all? That’s a good honest way to make a living, as Georgie had said.