The Bells of Bow by Gilda O'Neill

plate towards him and stuck a fork into the crisp, dark brown skin of a sausage, making it spurt a jet of hot fat across the table. He raised the sausage to his lips and blew on the hot meat. ‘He must owe me mum nearly a hundred quid, that Reider. Drinking and gambling can be very dear hobbies.’
    ‘What, even on a doctor’s wages?’ Chas asked, his mouth full of black pudding.
    ‘Specially on a good wage – more to lose, yer see. And if he knows what’s good for him he wants to start thinking about getting some of that money back that he owes me mum. Yer know how she gets.’ Albie chewed reflectively on the piece of sausage. ‘Not bad,’ he said, cutting through one of his eggs, releasing a thick pool of dark yellow yolk. ‘It’s different me and the old man having our little dip,’ he continued. ‘But she don’t appreciate no strangers taking liberties.’
    Chas laughed, a cold, dry sound that rumbled in his throat.
    Albie didn’t join in, he had a hurt look on his face as he put down his knife and fork. He raised his hand and snapped his fingers to attract Paulo who was hovering anxiously by the counter. ‘No fried bread.’ Albie’s expression might have been one of disappointment but his simple statement sounded menacing enough to send Paulo rushing back to the kitchen.
    ‘Mum, I’ve got the takings,’ Albie shouted along the passage as he stepped inside the street door of the Denhams’ house in Bow Common Lane.
    Even though everyone in the area knew that Queenie kept all her money indoors – like most moneylenders she had no time for banks and had no intention of bothering herself with things like tax – nobody would dare go through the ever open front door without being invited in, not when she had an old man like Bernie and definitely not with a son like Albie around the place.
    ‘Yer’ll have to wait a minute if yer want yer breakfast,’ she yelled back at him from the front parlour. ‘I’m in here just seeing to this. Trying to make sense of all these bleed’n bits of paper.’
    ‘It’s all right, Mum. I’ve had some already.’ Albie went into the dingy parlour. The small room was made to seem even tinier by its clutter. There was not a space that didn’t have a dust-covered ornament, a vase of drooping, dead flowers or a pile of unidentifiable clothes which could have been dirty or were maybe waiting in their crumpled heaps to be ironed into more recognisable shapes. Albie lifted a toppling pile of papers from the greasy seat of an overstuffed armchair that stood by the table at which his mother was working, and sat down. He puffed out his handsome cheeks and patted his middle contentedly. ‘Right full up, I am.’
    ‘Aw yeah. And where’d you have that then? Round some silly tart’s house while her old man’s away at sea, I suppose.’ Queenie looked up and smiled proudly at her son, her face folding into deep, thickly powdered creases. She had bright crimson circles of rouge on her cheeks that matched her painted lips, and black, pencilled eyebrows which rose into extravagant arches high above her actual brow line. With her startlingly unnatural orange curly hair and the material of her vivid floral frock stretched tight across her bosom, Queenie bore more than a passing resemblance to a pantomime dame. ‘Yer a lad with the girls,’ she beamed at her son. ‘New one every week. Just like yer old man,’ she added fondly and then went back to trying to make sense of the accounts over which, she knew, her husband and son bamboozled her.
    ‘If yer must know, I had me breakfast in a cafe. But I have got meself a new girl.’
    ‘Oh yeah? So who’s this one?’ Queenie frowned at yet another indecipherable pencilled note from the pile in front of her, then shrugged and stabbed it down hard onto an already overspilling spike.
    ‘Right looker she is. Blonde. Very tasty.’
    ‘After me dough, I suppose, like all the rest of ’em.’
    ‘Leave off, Mum. Even if I was boracic