Ha'penny by Jo Walton Page B

Fatso.”
    I’ve always hated that name. “No,” I said. “Are you drunk, Siddy?” There was something about the way she was speaking that made me wonder.
    “Drunk, that’s a good one. Haven’t touched a drop.”
    “Still saving your pennies for the DW?”
    She laughed, though it was a very old joke. When she was five or six, and I was about ten, at the time of the General Strike, we’d all been in London so Pappa could drive a bus. Uncle Tom had taken us all to Gunters and offered us cakes, and little Siddy, who had been reading a harrowing account of the miners’ conditions in the Manchester Guardian, had said she’d rather have the money to give to the dear workers. The dear workers, quickly abbreviated to DW, became a standing joke. “You don’t know how true. But come and meet me, Vile, do. Meet me at the Empire, Leicester Square, in an hour.”
    “No!” I said, horrified. “Look, Sid, I am rather busy, I have a part to learn. You can’t just expect—”
    “Ginns,” she interrupted. “Ginns, Fats.”
    It’s strange how reluctant I am to set down that word and explain my response to it. My family are noted for being eccentric. They’re not necessarily people I’d choose to know, if I had a choice. But when you’re the third of six sisters born in eleven years, when you all live together for a long time, growing up, there are shared things that just do mean something. There are jokes, like Siddy and the DW, there are names, there are memories, and naturally there are words that have a private meaning. We fought a lot, growing up. We had feuds, we had friendships, we had rivalry. “Ginns,” simply enough, is short for “Now begins,” which is from a piece of ghastly poetry we all had to learn. What it means though is that something is absolutely urgent, a truce must be declared, ranks closed and help given. None of us ever abused ginns, not even the littlest ones. Although I hadn’t so much as heard the word in the twelve years since I’d left home, my response to it was immediate.
    “I’ll be there,” I said, and put the phone down.
    Mollie came in from her audition as I was putting my belted beige raincoat on. “How did it go?” I asked.
    She groaned and ran her fingers through her hair, pulling off her scarf. “Where are you off to?”
    “As a matter of fact, I’m going to have a cup of coffee with my sister Cressida.”
    Mollie stopped dead, theatrically, and raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
    “No,” I said, frankly. “But why do you ask?”
    “Your sisters always unsettle you,” she said. “I think it has to do with the terrible way you were all brought up with nobody but each other and all the things you had to go through. In a dozen years away from them, you’ve turned out a lot more like a reasonable person, but where they’re concerned it’s as if you’re instantly ten years old again and they’ve shut you in the barn overnight.”
    I shuddered. Mollie was the only person I’d ever told about that. “Whether she unsettles me or not, I think I have to go,” I said.
    “If you’re sure,” Mollie said. “There’s no obligation. You’re grown up now. You could stay at home. I’m going to make some cocoa.”
    It wasn’t “ginns” in itself that made me drag myself away from cocoa and Mollie and our cozy flat and take myself down to the tube. It was the tone I now thought I’d heard in Siddy’s voice all through the conversation, the tone that in itself meant ginns. She wasn’t getting in touch with me idly, she really needed me. What I should have worked out from that was that the best thing to do would be to disappear, to take the tube the other way, to King’s Cross, where I could get a night train to Scotland and never be seen again. Not being gifted with foresight, I went dutifully down to Leicester Square Underground station, and then walked up out into the square itself, towards the huge cinema there that they called the