Chapter Text
Two days later he’s at Polly’s house, trying to focus on what she’s saying but thinking, still, about the half a bowl of matzo ball soup he’d eaten at Alfie’s. For some reason, his mind keeps flashing to images, fractured and in rapid succession, of all the people he’s killed and maimed in all his years as a Blinder.
“Have you seen Michael?” she asks.
The scent of chicken broth invades his senses like a squadron of enemy troops. He doesn’t want to eat, he doesn’t want to want anything—
Billy Kimber’s blood, which he found in thousands of microscopic droplets, like a spring mist of rain, all over his white shirt—
“Are you going to help me move the opium or not?”
Alfie looks up from the pot of soup he’s reheating. “Are you going to eat this soup, mate?”
“Tommy?”
“Oh— no, not recently. “
“He seems worried about you.” She says, pretending to take an interest in straightening the table settings.
“You know, I reckon there are other men who’ve got what you’ve got. Wanting to starve to death— must feel like they’re back in France.”
“If I eat this soup, will you stop trying to be a psychoanalyst and go back to being a gin runner?”
“I thought my intellectual musings, as it were, would be of use to you, but if you insist.”
“Fancy that,” Tommy says with the same perfunctory conversational tone.
Ripping his cap off his head, fumbling for the razor blade in the lining. Vincente Changretta strapped to a chair, stiff with terror—
Raising the spoon to his lips. Broth is barely food, he reasoned with himself. Still, the feeling of having something inside him where he’d gotten so used to nothingness was terrifying. But he was so hungry—
“He wanted to know if you’d been to a doctor.”
“He wanted to know that, did he?”
“He thought you were dying. Brain cancer or something like that. Erratic behavior, losing your balance. And you’re losing weight like mad, of course.”
That peculiar scent that hangs in the air, hot and metallic, after a gun is shot. Trying to remember the name of the Irishman he’d shot— what, five years ago now? Longer? Back when his biggest concern was Inspector Campbell. Christ—
“Good, innit?” Alfie asks, grinning like a schoolboy as Tommy gingerly sips broth.
Horrible, he thinks. Wonderful. Both—
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I didn’t need a doctor to know what’s wrong with you. The sickness is the same it’s always been: the war. In France, and at home. It’s inside you now.”
A war in his mind. Sounded accurate enough.
“You think I’m going mad, Aunt Pol?”
“No, you’re still entirely yourself. There’s just… less of you than there was before.”
He wonders if she can tell how little of him is here right now, and how much of him is still hovering, ghost-like, around a table in Margate, suddenly relearning what it means to feel guilt.
“Do you remember Greta Jurossi’s cousin? Pretty girl called Christina?” She asks.
“Not very well. She died of tuberculosis when we were young.”
“Is that what I told you it was? Well. Suppose it’s never too late for the truth. She was pregnant, and she lost the child. A little bit after, she just... stopped eating. She wasn’t a part of this world anymore, Thomas. Some part of her soul… fled. And she couldn’t hang on to the world of the living much longer.”
“I thought you said you knew how to cook.”
“I’ve put it on the stove, haven’t I?”
Alfie’s expression is so earnest, and Tommy surprises himself by laughing.
Tommy never thought much about how he looked— women seemed to be attracted to him, but whether that was because he was handsome or because he was dangerous was difficult to discern.
Grace had said he was handsome, called him “Blue Eyes” on nights when he would stay up late drinking, and she would sing to him.
Alfie Solomons wasn’t, technically speaking, good-looking, but Tommy likes looking at his face. Certainly more than he likes looking at his own.
“Tommy!”
“Yeah, Pol?”
“Where are you?”
Verdun. A tunnel. The kitchen of a Jewish gin distiller. In a ballroom, watching Grace bleed out. Holding my son. In a minefield in a mirror in a war in my mind—
“I’ve got a lot to think about. Haven’t gotten enough sleep.” He pulls a cigarette from his case, waving a hand dismissively. He pulls out his lighter, but it takes him four or five tries to get the flint to strike. Shaky hands.
“If Michael is thinking about my health, it’s only because he thinks I’m weak enough to sweep aside and take my place.”
“Is it so hard to believe people care for you, Thomas?”