The Lost Souls' Reunion by Suzanne Power Page B

began clearing it.
    â€˜Here, Myrna,’ Fanny popped a lavender sweet in her mouth. ‘You about for a while?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she spoke in a voice that was not loud and everyone heard.
    Myrna took my hand and the world was in hers. Her skin had something past warmth and beyond cold. She led me to the table Sergio had cleared and I spent all day, and many after that watching her.
    That was how I came to be known to all the women of Sergio’s Café. There were women who worked behind closed doors, there were street women and show women and then there was Carmen, who worked where no one worked. I went with her to the café each day and one or other of the women took care of me. Mostly Myrna.
    The women of Soho, our increasingly bright Soho, no longer secretive but with its uses and skills displayed on garish signs that spoke of now and not tomorrow, all knew of Myrna.
    Where Myrna came from no one knew. They once tried to deport her and could not, because she had no home place, no placeable accent, no relatives. She had shed all dutiful ties and links with the past. Her choices were always her choices and she could see no other way of living.
    Some of the oldest colleagues and acquaintances of hers – women who had worked in the gentlemen’s clubs of the twenties and some even before that, said she had always been there and had always been alone.
    What she did to survive was what they did. She went with the men. But they got nothing of her. She went with them in such a way as would make a man continue to want her for the rest of his days. They would spend a night with her and in the morning it was as if they had never been there. It made them come again, a wanting in them.
    The old women of Soho remembered Myrna young. She arrived with nothing but a grey dress and shoes that were held together with two rounds of string and a small miracle. She wore nothing but grey all her life.
    By the time Constance Trapwell and Carmel Moriarty had found their way to that world, Myrna’s working days were long over. But she continued to live among her own. Sergio’s was where she spent her afternoons and nights. In Sergio’s Café I watched her and I learned from her and I never knew all of her, even, in times to come, when she told me all she knew of herself. She could never tell me all she was. The details of her life do not explain the mystery. By her ways Myrna told me all she did not say was all she did not know.
    Sergio’s was where the women of Soho came to discuss the business of their days and nights and to do so without fear. Sergio was that rare thing – a silent Italian who could not cook. He made up for it with warmth, comfort and plenty of tea, coffee, sandwiches and pastries. They were my food for six years.
    From Sergio I learned the value of silence. When I learned to talk I also learned to stop talking, because I heard the world better then. I did not look at people, but I watched their every move.
    *   *   *
    When I close my eyes now I can see the café. I smell the cheap scent and cigarettes of the working women. I see them check themselves in the mirror over the counter as they leave and come in, a mirror that had lost its silvering over the years as the women lost their brightness, rubbed out by hard-edged lives. I hear the high chatter and low confidences. I see the dark-wood tables scraped with names and longing and the chairs with tatty cushions in bright brocade curtain material, sewn by Sergio’s long-gone wife. She had been the one to cook and make the place into a proper restaurant. He had been lost when she had left.
    Sergio threw out what threatened, but he would never throw out anything his wife had made in case she came back through the door, which tinkled as it opened and shut.
    I see Sergio, always with a cloth in his hand, cleaning in the way that men do – without seeing the dirt. He cleaned slowly and with thought in his eyes.