“Wait,” he said as if he’d suddenly had an idea. “What did the siren sound like?”
“What do you mean, what did it sound like? An air-raid alert. Alf, we must—”
“Where was you when it went?”
“In the corridor outside your—Why?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.
“I’ll wager you ’eard Mrs. Bascombe.”
“Mrs. Bascombe?” What would Mrs. Bascombe be doing here in Whitechapel?
“Our parrot.”
A parrot.
“We taught ’er to do the alert and the all clear,” Alf said proudly. “And HEs. Blooey! Ka-blam!”
“You have a parrot that can imitate an air-raid alert?” Eileen said furiously, thinking, Of course they do. This is the Hodbins. Binnie had told it to do its siren imitation and then led her on a merry chase down the stairs and hid behind the tenement, where she no doubt still was, laughing her head off.
“Mrs. Bascombe sounds just like ’em,” Alf was saying. “ ’Specially the HEs. She scared old Mrs. Rowe so bad she fell down the stairs. You thought it was a real siren,” he said, pointing at her and then doubling up with laughter. “What a good joke! You shoulda seen your face. Wait’ll I tell Binnie!” He started to run off, but Eileen hadn’t spent nine months with them for nothing. She was not leaving without the map. She grabbed Alf’s collar and held on in spite of his wriggling.
“Stop squirming and stand still,” she said. “I want to talk to you. Do you still have the map the vicar gave you?”
“I dunno,” he said. “Why?”
“I need to borrow it.”
“What for?” he said, his eyes narrowing again. “You ain’t one of them fifth columnists, are you?”
“Of course not. I need it to look up something. If you’ll lend it to me, I’ll give you a book.”
Alf snorted. “A book?”
“Yes,” she said, attempting to decide whether she dared let go of him long enough to take it out of her bag. “About chopping people’s heads off.”
He was immediately interested. “Whose ’eads?”
“Anne Boleyn’s. Sir Thomas More’s. Lady Jane Grey’s.” She took the book from her bag.
“Does it got pictures?” he asked, and when she nodded, “Can I see ’em?”
“Not till you bring me the map.”
He thought it over. “No,” he said finally. “What if a Messerschmitt comes over? ’Ow’ll I mark it if I ain’t got—”
“I only need it for a day or two. After they chopped their heads off, they put them up on spikes on London Bridge.”
His face lit up. “Does it got pictures of that?”
“Yes,” she lied.
“All right. Only you got to pay me. Five quid.”
“Five quid?” Eileen said. “Do you know how much money that is? I have no intention—”
Alf shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Very well, Eileen thought. “Where did you get that parrot, Alf?” she asked. “You stole it, didn’t you?”
“No!” he said, outraged. “We never. We found it in the rubble. There’s all sorts of things in the rubble.”
“That’s looting,” Eileen said, “and looting’s a crime.”
“It ain’t looting!” he protested, his hands going defensively to his pockets. “ ’Ow can it be looting if the people what owned it’s dead?”
Which was a good point, but Eileen needed that map, and they’d just taken ten years off her life with that parrot. “It’s still looting in the eyes of the law.”
“Mrs. Bascombe woulda died if we ’adn’t found her. We rescued ’er.”
“That may be, but I’m still going to have to call a constable and tell him you’re keeping a stolen parrot in your rooms.”
He went white as a sheet. “Wait! Don’t!” he pleaded. “You can borrow the map.”
“Thank you,” she began, and he wrenched suddenly free of her grasp, snatched the book out of her hands, and went racing off across the rubble. “Alf, you come back here!” Eileen called after him, but he’d already disappeared.
And so had her chances of getting the map. She would have to admit defeat, go to Charing Cross Road, and hope she could find a map in a travel guide.
She began walking toward Mile End Road, hoping the journey back wouldn’t be as—
“Eileen!” Alf called, running up to her, Binnie at his heels. “You was s’posed to wait,” he said accusingly, and handed Eileen the map.
“You needn’t bring it back,” Binnie said. “You can keep it. He don’t do planespotting no more. Now he collects shrapnel.”
“And UXBs,” Alf said.
Of course, Eileen thought.
“So you needn’t come back,” Binnie finished.
Eileen needn’t have worried about them following her back to Mrs. Rickett’s. On the contrary, they couldn’t wait to be rid of her. Why? What were they up to now? Alf had turned pale when she’d mentioned calling a constable. Had he “collected” a UXB and taken it home? But surely not even Mrs. Hodbin would have let them keep—
“ ’Ad’nt you better be goin’?” Binnie said. “It’s gettin’ late.”
She was right, and whatever mischief they were up to, it was no longer her responsibility. “Yes,” Eileen said. “Thank you for the map, Alf. Goodbye, Binnie.”
“Dolores.”
I’ll almost miss you, Eileen thought. Almost.
“Goodbye, Dolores,” she said and pulled the film magazine from her bag and held it out to Binnie. “Here.”
Binnie clutched it to her chest and ran off, as if she expected Eileen to change her mind and snatch it away from her.
Alf still stood there.
“It’s all right,” Eileen said. “I know you need your map for your planespotting. I’ll bring it back to you.”
“You don’t hafta if you don’t want to. It’s like Binnie said, I don’t need it.”
They definitely did not want her coming around. “I could send it back to you by post,” she suggested.
“That’d be ’eaps better,” he said, looking relieved, but he continued to stand there. “You ain’t gonna tell the constable, are you?”
“Not if you promise me you’ll keep out of the rubble,” she said, with no hope of his actually obeying her. “And that you won’t collect any more UXBs.”
“I only collect little ones.”
“No bombs,” she said firmly.
“I can still collect shrapnel, can’t I?”
“Yes,” she said, “but no watching raids. I want you to promise me you and Binnie will go to a shelter as soon as the sirens go.”
Amazingly, he nodded. “Do you want I should show you where to catch the bus?”
“No, that’s all right. I know the way home.” It’s somewhere on this map, and had to fight the impulse to open the map and look for the name of the airfield then and there, but it was growing late. It would have to wait till she got on the bus.
But the bus was filled to capacity, and ten minutes after Eileen got on, it drove over a piece of shrapnel that Alf hadn’t collected and burst a tire, and she had to walk several streets over to catch another one, which was even more crammed. She had to stand, hanging on to a strap, the entire way, and there were so many barricades and diversions that by the time the bus reached Bank Station, it was so late she was afraid if she went to Townsend Brothers, she’d miss Polly.
Instead, she went to Mrs. Rickett’s and straight up to their room, where she sat down on the bed and opened out the map. It was badly worn and ripped along the folds, and the panel where the index of place-names should have been had been torn off. She’d have to locate the name on the map itself. Alf had marked Xes and dates all over the lower half of it, obscuring the names underneath. Luckily, they were in pencil and could be erased; hopefully, doing that wouldn’t also erase the names underneath. She hoped Alf hadn’t spotted a Messerschmitt over the airfield where Gerald was, or that it wasn’t on one of the torn folds.