Bloodsport ; tommy shelby

𝒆𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒆𝒆𝒏 - the grandmother

Three knocks at her door woke Iris from her desperate few hours of sleep.

"Good morning, Miss Ripley," Anya, the young, hard-faced midwife said as she strolled into the room. "Or should I say afternoon?"

"Please, just another few moments," Iris mumbled. "I haven't slept a wink."

"On the contrary, ma'am, you've slept twelve hours," the girl said dryly.

"What do you want?" Iris groaned, forcing herself upright in bed. She looked over into her daughter's cot, where her Willow was fast asleep.

"You need to leave," Anya explained. "I can't keep hiding you up here, the girls are getting suspicious."

"What?" Iris came to her senses. "But I have nowhere to go."

"I know, and I'm sorry," the woman said. "I really am, but this home is for unwed mothers who aren't fit to keep their own children. I agreed to let you wait until you gave birth, but it's been months now."

"Two months," Iris said. "You could have given me some warning."

"I have. Several times, actually." Anya said. "But you don't need to worry too much, your lodgings are taken care of."

Iris raised an eyebrow. "By who?"

"There's a woman here to see you," Anya said. "By the name of Yelena... Loveridge?"

Iris' blood ran cold.

"Hello Katerina," a woman's voice spoke at the door. Her accent was the same as always. Birmingham, tinged with the all too familiar edge of Russian.

Iris pursed her lips. "Hello mother."

♞

"Katerina, come back," her mother said, struggling to keep up with her daughter as they got out onto the street. "You have nowhere else to go."

"I'm not going anywhere with you," Iris said through gritted teeth as she cradled her swaddled daughter close to her chest.

Her mother rolled her eyes. "Typical. You would rather starve yourself and your daughter on the streets to prove a point."

"I'll find an inn," Iris insisted.

"You will not raise my grandchild in a brewery," her mother grimaced. "Just come with me and we can talk."

"Talk?" Iris scoffed, feeling tears prick at her eyes. She looked up at the sky, forcing herself not to cry. It was infuriating how the hormones from her pregnancy had been affecting her recently – for the first time in her life, everything made Iris emotional. "I have nothing to say to you, Mother."

Yelena sighed, her face unmoving. "Are you really going to let your daughter freeze on the streets out of spite?"

"Don't act like you didn't do the same," the girl said coldly. "Excuse me if I don't want you anywhere near my child."

Yelena pursed her lips, staying quiet for a long moment as she scanned her daughter's face. "I have a house in Whitechapel with a room for you and the baby," she said. "You can stay until you find somewhere else to live, and then I'll be out of your life. If that's what you want."

Iris sighed, looking at her daughter's wide blue eyes. Swallowing the lump of pride that had risen in her throat, she nodded. "Fine."

♞

"How did you find me, then?" Iris asked her mother as she breastfed Willow at the small kitchen table in her mother's shabby Whitechapel home.

"I have friends in the refuge you were hiding out in," she said, pouring two cups of tea over by the sink with her back turned. "I used to carry a photo of you in my purse, and one of the girls recognised you."

Iris gulped. She and her mother had never had a particularly emotional relationship, which made moments like these all the more awkward. "How long have you been in London?"

"Since all that trouble with the Kiselyovs," her mother said. "Your sister thought it best if we left town."

Iris kept her mouth shut, ignoring the pang of anger that stung her heart.

"Who is the child's father?" Yelena asked as she brought the tea over to the table.

"Nobody you'd know," Iris said, looking away so as to not give away the pain in her eyes.

"He left you, didn't he," her mother sighed, kissing her teeth. "Мудак."

Iris shook her head. "I left him," she said, gritting her teeth as a sudden wave of anger rising in her heart. She looked back at her mother coldly. "Ivan found me."

Yelena said nothing. Iris scanned her face, waiting for some flicker of regret, a hint of guilt in her eyes, but saw nothing. Her mother was unreadable, as ever.

"Hence the name, I suppose?" her mother asked. "Iris... Ripley."

Iris sighed, silently cursing the child inside that still wanted to feel some kind of warmth from her mother. She had given up on Yelena's maternal instincts when she had been abandoned in Ivan's clutches at the age of nineteen.

"I need to sleep," she said suddenly, gently lifting Willow as she buttoned up her dress with one hand. "Where is my room?"

Yelena looked her in the eyes for a moment and sighed. "Upstairs on the left."

Iris nodded, lifting up the baby as she headed for the stairs.

The room was small, smaller than the one she'd stayed in at the refuge, but big enough for a single bed and a cot by the window. There was a small wood-burning stove in the corner, and above it hung a small framed photograph on the peeling floral wallpaper. Iris stepped closer, still holding Willow close to her chest.

Iris inhaled, feeling tears sting at her eyes as she realised what the photo was. Her father, by the barge on the canal that she and her siblings had spent the first few years of their life living on. He was smiling, his leg up on the barge as he balanced a three year old Iris and her older sister Lara on his knee. Her brothers, Freddie, Luke and Felix sat on top of the barge, their scruffy legs swinging off. Her mother, young and beautiful with long, blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, stood by her husband's side with a smile, her hand cupping her heavily pregnant stomach.

She sighed, letting a tear trickle down her cheek. "Look Willow," she said, turning the child so that she could see the photograph. "There's your Granddad Frankie."

There was a creak at the door and Iris turned. Her mother stood, her eyes glossed over with tears, and a sad smile on her face.