The Mistletoe Bride(53)

And, with that, the memory of my broken sleep slipped back into my mind. The girl who cried in the night. I wondered who and where she was. Why no one did anything to comfort her. Rob thought I was making something out of nothing and I supposed he was right. Sound carries in the small hours, so the fact that there were no children in our block didn’t mean anything. There were plenty of families living nearby. But as I walked back towards Glaisher Street, the oddness of it – the fact that I always heard her at the same time, the fact that Rob hadn’t ever heard her – and nor had any of the neighbours – played on my mind.

The market was now in full swing. Men shouting into microphones, selling toasters, dinner sets and sofas. You want it, they’d got it. I negotiated my way between the two rows of stalls, their red and white plastic awnings rustling and flapping in the wind. There was even someone selling Jesus. Bibles, embroidered pictures with Christ’s face stitched in bright gold thread on shiny black material, a pauper’s Turin Shroud. CDs of gospel music proclaiming the happy day and a man, half preaching, half singing, welcoming in the lost souls. It seemed to be working – the stall was surrounded by women and their shopping trolleys. Just fifty pence per prayer or three for a pound: a bargain.

I ducked to avoid the halal meat hanging out over the pavement and tried not to catch the bulging eye of the red snapper and hake and salt fish in their white crates outside the fishmonger. I looked up, above the bustle of the market, and saw the curve of the Regency houses. The bricks were pale now, faded from their glory days when the docks were thriving and Deptford was a place with prospects. When I looked down, I saw blood leaking from the fish and meat into the gutter.

We hadn’t completely unpacked – and I knew the last thing we needed was any more books – but I couldn’t resist going, just to look, at the second-hand sellers who set up shop outside the Albany. There, the traders flogged their house clearances. A family’s history for sale, wholesale, entire lives sold off to pay for the coffin.

Huge boarded tables took up most of one side of the square, every inch covered with junk. In the middle, a fifty-year-old woman with a suspicious face sat perched on an iron stool, watching the many hands fingering her wares, picking things up, putting things down, checking for damage or brand names. A Barbie with no hair, a pair of horseshoe bookends, brass hooks, pirate videos claiming to be ex-rental. Sold as seen, no guarantees.

Buyer beware.

The scavengers held things up and waited for Dee to catch their eye. She never engaged in conversation, just snapped the price. Quid, one-fifty, six for a quid. No negotiation. Like a ringmaster in a circus, she remained alert to the possibility that the animals circling could turn on her.

There were plenty of adults browsing the Albany plaza, accompanied by bored children who chased each other up and down between the stalls. A pale, thin girl in a long coat, down to the ground, and lace-up boots, was standing alone and ignored by the others.

I headed for one of the traders in the middle of the square. His quality books were displayed in rows on a table, but he’d tipped the rest onto an old red curtain spread on the ground.

‘Ten for a pound, love,’ he said when I got close.

I nodded, though I knew anyway. Last week, I’d picked up a faded leather-bound 1904 edition of Bleak House and a carrier bag full of Agatha Christies, Ngaio Marshes and Gladys Mitchells. I bent down and started to work systematically through the piles, focused and methodical as I moved books from place to place, careful not to hurry. If a book spiked my interest, I checked the pages weren’t stuck together or missing, that bits of food or worse weren’t pressed between its covers. If it got a clean bill of health, I put it with the ‘definites’ or the ‘definite maybes’.

Perhaps there was a better selection than usual, but I went into what Rob called my ‘book trance’. Book after book went on the pile. I was unaware of what was going on around me and of the weather turning. Didn’t notice everyone else heading for cover. I didn’t hear the rumbling in the sky or how the light drizzle had turned to rain, how the awnings pegged over the tables were being snagged and twitched by the wind.

‘It’s about to chuck it down any minute now, love. You done?’

I looked up with a start. ‘I’m sorry, yes. I’ll take these.’

I started to weed out the books I’d put aside.

‘Call it ten. Need to cover this lot up.’

‘That’s kind of you.’

‘That’ll be a quid. Need a bag?’

Rather than getting soaked, I ducked into a table in a café by St Paul’s Church to wait for the rain to pass.