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He doesn’t sleep.
Not really at least.
Whatever rest he does get is stolen in the early hours of morning, usually at dawn, when the soft daylight fades in and exhaustion overwhelms him, striking him down on the chaise-longue in his study.
The sleep is fitful, light, full of shovels and bangs and the sensation of falling.
Then his body jerks in a way that sometimes will grant him the mercy of fueling him with enough adrenaline to wake up properly and get up too, but mostly he is so worn out he falls right back into the dark unrest.
Some nights, when it is bad, he cries and has stopped caring about the shame of that.
Almost.
So fucking tired.
He is alone except for the two ‘orses in the derelict barn adjacent to the house.
The house, which is only in a slightly better condition.
None of the windows have proper seals. The wind and the damp do not have to work very hard to fight their way inside. The doors are even worse.
Not only do they fail to keep out the chill, they also refuse to keep the noise of the forest and the fields out. The ruins of the old church that he can see from the windows, which keep the sunlight from properly entering the rooms on the south-facing side almost all year, and its graveyard complete the picture of a haunted house successfully. Even Tommy himself finds it almost amusing that he should live in a place like this now.
Somewhere between life and death, eh?
At the gates of fucking ‘ell, for all he knows.
If it weren’t for the ‘orses, he’d have gone insane by now, he’s certain of it.
No road leads up to the house, yet he listens to imaginary tires and hooves and boots on the gravel that isn’t there all night.
Gravel surrounded Arrow House.
Fountain.
Chasing Arthur ‘round it on his wedding day-
Fucking Arthur, who went to America with Linda and a very generous sum of money.
Starting a new life, eh?
Like fuck.
Like any of them can.
But he hasn’t heard of ‘im.
Not for over a year now, and even before that it was sporadic.
Ada’s the only one who visits.
Drives her car down the dirt path that leads towards the ‘ouse as far as she can, walks the last stretch over the small hill that keeps the boreen hidden from the building, over the usually damp meadow in her expensive shoes.
He doesn’t lock the door anymore.
Once, he didn’t hear her knocking, because no, there is not doorbell, and she’d thought he was-
Doesn’t matter anyway. Unlocked or locked front door, anyone setting their mind to it could get into the house through one of the shitty windows quickly enough if they really wanted to.
He hadn’t heard her though.
Hadn’t heard the stones she’d thrown against the window of his study.
Only the shrill ring of the telephone had reached him.
She’d had to drive to the next village to find one, so she could call him.
He hears the gravel crunch outside.
The gravel that isn’t fucking there, but he didn’t hear his sister’s knocking.
Sometimes, when he hears footsteps approaching, he tries fooling himself into believing it’ll be the family. It never makes him feel less lonely.
Unsurprisingly, it’s cold in the ‘ouse.
It’s spacious, old, and not up to modern standards by a couple decades and abandoned for at least ten years before he moved in too.
Far too big for one man, who managed to feel lonely as a child even, despite the siblings he’d had to share a bed with.
“Tu sanas vaver sa, Tommy.”
You’ve always been different, his mother used to tell him.
When he’d been a young boy, she’d said it with pride in her eyes. Later on, the words and the fact that he didn’t know what she meant by them anymore had scared him.
He’d take her hand in his then, her cold, bony hand, and try to snap her out of it, make her eyes look at him and not through him.
Sometimes he’d succeeded, more often he had not, and she had slipped through his fingers.
These days, it is him who is always cold.
He can’t get warm anymore, not by putting on more layers than he ever remembers wearing, neither by resorting to the pathetic measure of wandering the dark and drafty hallways at night with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
One night, the light fixtures in the hallway had clinked and the bulbs had simply burst as he had been on one of his wanderings, and with a slightly mad chuckle, even to his own ears it had sounded eerie, he’d spoken to the empty darkness.
“I let me mother win, eh Polly?”
Still can’t get himself to have anyone come and do up the ‘ouse, make it somewhat liveable.
The only thing he’s had put in is the telephone.
Ada had made him, so he couldn’t disappear completely again, he assumes.
She’s the only one to call too.
Every day, more or less, evenings, when she is back home from parliament.
Fills him in on the situation in London.
Politics and kids and bombs and air raid shelters.
Tries to get him to tell her how he is feeling sometimes, but he’s always had a hard time speaking on the telephone. He supposes his monosyllabic answers are precisely what makes her drive out here in person ever so often to check on him.
Check that he isn’t-
“Tommy, you tell me right now- Where are you going?”
He has stopped coming to her with everything, so she has picked up the bucket, ever so stubborn our Ada, and started coming to him. To what’s left of him anyway.
It is a surprise every evening, when the electricity still works, when the lights flicker to life and dip the study, his personal purgatory, in a dim, warm glow.
He’s sure the old wiring is a fire hazard par excellence, but care he does not.
“Completes the ambience of hell’s foyer then, hm treacle? I can see you in front of me, Tommy… yeah, you’re in the shadows, my friend, mh, but the bombs do not care if there is light. They do not need it, right, to find their target. I am telling you, mate, this war… it’s different and also just the fucking same as back then. Just that this time the Germans, yeah, they are already dead and they’re fucking angry about it. So in a way, we’re all waiting in the devil’s anteroom, innit?”
It is not actually true that Ada is the only one who calls.
He has made a call himself.
Once.
Maybe twice.
He’d called Alfie.
Always had a way with words, that man.
Could set a man’s mind on fire with just a few long-winded, at first listen nonsensical sentences for a spark.
For some reason his ramblings usually calm Tommy, as opposed to most other people.
Speaking of fire, the study has a decent fireplace he stacks and lights dutifully most days. It barely warms up the spacious room, but makes it just about tolerable.
When he cannot take it anymore, he wanders to the kitchen to make tea. The room is smaller, so it warms up a little faster.
He spikes his tea with rum most mornings, long forgotten the days, when he used to be sober. He’s got no one to stay sober for now, and the rum helps him keep himself warm.
By midday, he’ll be on the whiskey.
At nightfall, he will make sure to feel for the brown vial in his coat pocket.
Make sure it’s there.
That he is not running out.
Last time Ada came by, she told him he looks like a ghost, and that he should get a housekeeper. He could still afford it, though he has a somewhat limited active income these days. But what good is a housekeeper to him anymore?
A respectable one wouldn’t move into this ruin he calls home anyway.
How long ago is that now?
That Ada visited.
Trouble keeping up with the days.
He stopped reading the papers a long time ago.
Reading is what he does mostly though.
Books.
Nietzsche to Freud. Shakespeare to Blake.
Never in his life had Tommy thought he’d build a substantial library and spend most of his days reading. There’s books he returns to frequently, when his mind won’t let him rest, when his hands tremble and his stomach threatens to expel its meagre content over some danger that isn’t real.
Poetry especially helps.
Keeps him focused, draws him in.
Has even started writing down some things himself.
Memories that threaten to slip from his grasp, when the dark takes everything but the mud and the blood and the noise from Flanders from him.
There’s a book he has read that he will never touch again, though he knows it is superstition at its finest. He had never read All Quiet on the Western Front before Ada had dragged it in, over the threshold of his hideout.
His fortress away from anything that once was Tommy Shelby.
How long ago is that now?
When was she here last?
“Is that what it was like?” she’d asked, thoughtful, and he’d read it in one sitting, up all night, crying over the death of the horses, the sound of it, the fucking noise he can still hear after all these years, because yes-
Yes, that’s what it was like.
On both fucking sides.
Back then at least.
He doesn’t read the papers anymore.
When Ada talks about the war, he tries not to listen.
The fucking hellscape, he’s never escaped from.
That neverending tunnel.
Dark, damp.
Green eyes.
Splash.
Scratch.
Smell of wet timber.
Knife in his sock.
One chance.
No sound.
No sound, but the feeling of slicing into flesh.
Fucking pain.
“S’not my war, Ada. Not this one.”
He’d told her.
Told her only yesterday.
Was it yesterday-
Yesterday Ruby died, and he stabbed the German soldier yesterday, and yesterday Charlie chose Lizzie over him.
I
am
not
a
soldier
anymore.
.
.
.
Feels more awful than usual, waking up.
The sunlight seeping in from the windows, yellow, piercing bright, unforgiving.
The headache is worse too.
Not on the sofa either, on the bloody carpet-
“Tommy! Fuck-”
There’s hands on his shoulders, the side of his face, smoothing his hair back.
“Tommy? Talk to me.”
Can still feel the tremors.
Smell the mud.
Everything hurts.
“If you don’t say something sharpish, brother, I’m calling an ambulance.”
“Gon- ‘e ‘ours.”
“What?”
He should be glad that Ada apparently hasn’t been so sure that the war is also done with him, because here she is. Some sixth sense in her, for all she ignores her Gypsy heritage. He doesn't feel glad about her return though. Not his finest moment, face down on the shaggy carpet, lying in his own sick, coming down from what must’ve been another seizure and too much whisky after the shakes had gotten bad.
When he’d finished the book.
The book he put down only a few hours ago-
A noise escapes him when he feels something slicing into his right palm.
Had it only been yesterday?
Ada’s surprisingly strong, when she is in shock, but he supposes anyone is.
S’just more impressive in a woman really.
She’s somehow managed to sit him up now, his head resting on her shoulder.
Too heavy still.
Only now feeling some life and movement coming back into his right arm.
Left one is going to be useless for a while still.
Ada uses his scarf to brush the brown shards of glass from his hand, carefully plucks out two that have embedded themselves into the skin with her fingers.
“It would be hours until they’d be ‘ere,” he repeats, voice nearly failing him again, though Ada’s question has long been said, and by the look she gives him, he isn’t sure at first, if she remembers asking it in the first place.
“That’s why I don’t like knowing you’re out here on your own, Tommy…”
Turns out she does remember. Well, only one of them has a brain injury, eh?
“There’s no one close by. No one to help you-”
“M’not an old f-fucking man in need of care, Ada. Not like it’s the first time-”
The look she gives him, makes him avert his tired eyes. He avoids mirrors since his hair has turned grey. Cannot bear to catch his reflection and feel startled into thinking of his own father. He’s scared Ada sees him too.
“Why did you never tell me they still happen? I knew you had them at the hospital after… the accident. You almost died a few too many times already, Tom, and every time I come out here, I am worried that I’ll find you-” she stops herself, seemingly reconsidering her approach and understanding that she is not going to have a conversation that goes anywhere with him in this state. “Alright.”
She helps him up and assists him over to the chaise-longue, ungraceful stumble of limbs still stuck in mud. He immediately collapses onto the cushions and feels his eyes close.
There’s nothing he can do about that now, but knowing, feeling that Ada is here is…
Nice.
Reassuring somehow.
Can feel her hand on his arm, smell her expensive perfume, hear her breathing.
His last thought is that he will never touch that book again, and yet he sleeps better than he has in weeks.
She hasn’t left when he wakes up either. Sits in the chair she has dragged over from his desk and watches him with weary eyes.
His right hand rests bandaged on his chest.
When she seems sure enough that he won’t pass out again, she speaks.
“Need to get washed up, brother.”
It’s a stiff walk, legs still strangely numb and tingly, but walk he does. There’s no running water in the house, but there is a well with a hand pump by the barn that he uses to get water. Ada walks him there, clearly trying very hard to not reinforce her earlier words by commenting on the standards of his sad dwelling, or in fact reinforce his limping walk by propping him up once again.
It’s morning, and he has no idea how long he slept. The sun feels warm on his face, though winter is upon them, evident in the white frost coating the grass and trees where the sunbeams do not reach.
He takes off his soiled shirt, feeling goosebumps like pinpricks from the inside out covering his bare arms and back.
Ada looks on in silence, and he does feel watched although he turns his back to her, like an insect under a magnifying glass, pinned, a kid being observed while cleaning itself in the bath after coming in muddy from playing by the cut. He sure remembers mother watching him like that.
Uses his left hand to splash water at his face and neck, keeping the bandage dry.
He thinks she looks at the scar on his shoulder. Where the bullet pierced him in France. Went straight through him, into his shoulder, dug a tunnel through the meat of his torso, leaving his stubborn, beating heart un-fucking-touched and still ripped open his chest as it exited him just below the left collar bone. He had seen bits of himself in the mud in front of him. Bits of flesh.
Freddie had carried him for well over an hour, through narrow trenches, then a field, then a white tent. They’d had to sew the gaping exit wound closed with three branching lines of stitches forming a ‘y’.
Why, eh?
Why is right.
He doesn’t really recall what the scar on his back looks like, except that it is raised and round under his fingertips. He isn’t sure Ada knows Freddie saved his life for the first time that day, so he is surprised and flinches a little too obviously, when she chuckles behind him.
“You used to be covered in freckles, Tom,” she smiles, as he ducks his head around to look at her like a startled animal. “You’re so pasty in the sunlight, it hurts me eyes. Gotta get you to sit outside a little more, eh?”
He doesn’t think he manages a smile.
Never noticed his freckles fading in and out with the seasons, not as a kid or an adult. But Ruby had traced them over his nose and cheeks one Summer’s day, after he’d spent the afternoon out on the horses with her, and she’d asked why he and Charlie got them, but not her, why they got darker in the sun.
How much time has passed?
How long has she been gone for?
Years.
He’s never seen her again after the day he’d wanted to kill himself.
After the doctor.
Moseley.
The fucking-
One of the horses whinnies in the barn.
Tommy splashes ice-cold water at his face, trying desperately to force his broken head to stay in the present.
“Wouldn’t mind going for a ride, you know,” Ada shakes him from his thoughts once more. “Sun’s out, not a single cloud or German bomber in the sky. Are you up for it, Tommy?”
And that stirs something inside of him, a corner of his mouth twitches up.
“D’you reckon you can still ride bareback after all these years, Ada?”
“Well, if you have a spare pair of trousers I can borrow, we can find out…”