✓ | GOLDEN LIAR ↠ Thomas Shelby.

37.

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN.

               LONDON WAS FULL OF smoke and shit, Tommy had once told her, but what he had failed to mention was that every single city in this wretched country just so happened to be full of the same disgusting clouds of grey, dirty smog. Coventry had been, she realised, but she had hardly noticed that when they went there. . . call it love, call it blindness, call it plain old idiocy, but  Felicity hadn't seemed to catch sight of the dusty bricks and all that had surrounded them.

She saw the grime that covered Birmingham now, though. The towering steel buildings and the factories that had taken to demolishing old playgrounds. . . playgrounds where the innocents had ran and laughed and kicked rocks at one another, insistent on causing all the trouble in the world when they didn't have to pay for it, not really. Her eyes fell on the puddles of brown water and the rainbows of grease that littered them, with shadows of the houses around her being bounced about just as much as the airless football was being passed around by the group of ragtag boys on the corner of Watery Lane. She saw it all: from the metaphorical corruption to the more physical version of it, as wolf―whistles were followed by indignant cries, or shouts were followed by angry curses. 

Felicity remembered the year before, when she'd heard the horrors of the Peaky Blinders and had listened in on the old wives' tales of the stains splattering the pub walls, and how no one was ever sure if that was simply ochre beer droplets from a broken bottle, or simply blood that had darkened to a rusty shade over time. And, as a result of these stories and of the ones that her father had told her, all of those years before, Felicity could remember sticking to her side of Small Heath, of Watery Lane. The side where she lived in naivety; clouds of hope―filled ignorance.  

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               Felicity came to the conclusion that she had to tell him, she had to make him hear the words that she had been rambling on about in her mind, in order to make him see everything in their true light. And sure, whilst she had already stated to herself that she would never, ever expect his forgiveness, she at least hoped that this would settle things even a little bit; that the clouded sea of guilt and tension between them might get washed away and the silt would fall to a standstill. Tension she could deal with, guilt and anger. . . she could not. 

So, as she finished her shift at the Garrison and went to lock up the place for the night, Felicity made sure to run over everything in her mind once more, trying to ensure that when the time came for her tumbling confession, she wouldn't forget anything. 

She couldn't go until she'd tidied everything away though, especially as the week's beginning had come with yet another bar brawl due to the rising annoyance of those workers that were still raging for a strike. Harry had already taken the shattered bar stool out to the tip at the back, so all that was left to do now was to sweep up the unsettled, flyaway dust and grime that had been upthrown, leaving the gallery looking even more unkempt than usual. Felicity, with one eye sweeping over to the clock and sighing at the sight of it only being a half hour past midnight, began the final chores of the night: stacking chipped glasses in one hand, sweeping the tables with the other and kicking the chairs underneath them with the toe of her boot at the same time. They were tedious jobs, but jobs nevertheless, and they kept her mind occupied for at least a short while before she had to trek the streets back to Watery Lane.

"Goodbye, Piccadilly," she soon found herself singing beneath her breath. 

"Farewell, Leicester Square. . ."

"It's a long, long way to Tipperary ― but my heart's right there."

Sweeter than a songbird, she had been told. The innocence of a child and the voice of one too, younger Felicity might have never guessed that she'd be spending her nights in the gallery of the Garrison pub, sweeping its floorboards whilst she awaited the dread and guilt to fill her later when she attempted to set everything right later on.