Most probably she’d daydreamed through the whole dull outing, and had seen all of the usual things but paid them no attention, caught up in the lazy stream of her own thoughts, the private drift of make-believe and muddle going on between her dangling plaits, beneath her butterfly-slides, faded pink and brittle like carbolic soap. It seemed to her that the most likely explanation for the blank gap in her recollection was plain absent-mindedness. With chin tucked in her mackintosh’s buttoned collar against dusk’s pervasive chill, Alma surveyed the twinkling slabs that steadily unwound beneath the mesmerising back and forth of her blunt, buckled shoes. Everything before the lamp-lit stretch of paving along which she now found herself walking, with the squeak of Michael’s pram and rhythmic clacking of their mother’s heels, everything prior to this was a mysterious fuzz. In fact, now that she thought about it, Alma couldn’t honestly remember anything at all about the expedition. She struggled to recall a landmark that she’d noticed somewhere along the much-trodden route, perhaps the lit-up sign that jutted out from Kendall’s rainwear shop on Fish Street corner, where the marching K leaned boldly forward against driving wind, cartoon umbrella open and held somehow by the letter’s handless, out-flung arm, but nothing came to mind. The stocky little girl, so solid she seemed almost die-cast, had no memory of holding back the smeary brass and glass weight of the shop’s swing doors so that Doreen could steer the pram into the velvet bustle of the main street glistening outside. Not the one in Gold Street, bottom Woolworth’s, but top Woolworth’s, halfway along Abington Street’s shop-lit incline, with its spearmint green tiled milk-bar, with the giant dial of its weighing machine trimmed a reassuring magnet red where it stood by the wooden staircase at the building’s rear. For my family, for the people of the Boroughs, and for Audrey Vernon, the best piano-accordionist our cracked lanes ever knew.Īlma Warren, five years old, thought that they’d probably been shopping, her, her brother Michael in his pushchair and their mum, Doreen.

Bitter Orange by Marshall Moore