By Karon Alderman

Her brother is in full flow.
“For goodness' sake, Lil, what do you think you are doing? How can you bring shame on us all like this?”
She is forty now and so, she thinks, should be used to her brother’s hectoring ways, his strong belief in his role as head of the family.

She continues to look down into her lap, at the new russet coloured skirt – it feels so rich and heavy after all the wartime rubbish; it feels like quality. And Olga has made such a good job of it, to the latest pattern. Olga, who ran it up on the sly in the workshop, oh she’s a wizard on the machine, even better than Rose, her own sister. Rose would cry under this onslaught. She’d always cried. But Lil never cried.

“He’s a dirty foreigner, Lil, a little Jew boy. He’s not our sort, Lil.”
He doesn’t shout. It sounds worse in that lecturing tone he has.
“You might have to work with people like him – you have to mix with all sorts at work – but not bring it into the family. You should think about Eileen. And us. And what about your husband – have you forgotten him already? You should be faithful to his memory.”
“Mick was born here. He’s not a foreigner.”
She speaks quietly, to her hands, her lap, the russet skirt. And he makes me laugh – oh how we laugh! She doesn’t say it. The scale is weighted and laughter, laughter is as light as air.

“And that car!” He’s off again, “How can he afford that car, that’s what I’d like to know, a Jew from Shoreditch? That car isn’t honestly come by, you mark my words. He’s a spiv, Lil.”

Moisha Pippit, small black Austin, ticket to freedom. Southend on a Sunday! Oh, the luxury of rattling along the Dagenham Road, giggling with Mick in the front while Eileen and the picnic sat in the back.
“He makes me laugh,” she says, quietly, to her plate.
“It’s got to stop,” her brother says, reaching for the bowl of lettuce and smiling at his wife as she enters with the hot teapot, which is swathed in a brightly knitted cosy.
“Call Bub and Eileen in from the garden, Vi.”
Then, turning to Lil, “We’ll say no more for now, Lil, not in front of Eileen.” There is no arguing with him.

Maybe I could stretch to a new hat, Lil thinks, as she sees her mother and her daughter coming through the lean-to, into the dining room, Vi patiently holding the door. A little tiny hat that perches sideways… A new hat always takes Lil’s mind off domestic tragedy and romantic hopelessness. There’s been so much of that. Lil has a lot of hats.

The man in the kitchen is her lover, but she doesn’t call him that as that is too… disgusting and foreign sounding. Her ‘man friend’, she might say, if she talked about him much at all. But she doesn’t.

“Mick, where did you get the money for Moisha Pippit?”
“Well, Lil, gel, if I tell you that if you ask me no questions I will not tell you an untruth, then you’ll get my way of thinking, eh?”
He is sitting on the hard chair at the kitchen table and Eileen is sitting on the other, swinging her skinny legs.
“Lil, gel, I could murder a bacon buttie before we get goin’… you’d do that for yer Uncle Mick, wouldn’t ya, Lil?”
She smiles and goes into the scullery to fetch the bacon in from the cold slab.
“I got some in special… though I know you’re not meant to, Mick.”
She doesn’t care; she just likes to tease him.
“Oh, Lil, me gel, it’s a terrible thing to break the law, Lil, the law of your own chosen people, but then, a bacon buttie – it ’eals the ’eart, Lil… I tell you what, Eileen…” He is smiling, his eyes shining. He has beautiful teeth and a sharp moustache. He looks just like Ronald Colman, Eileen thinks.

Lil turns her back and starts to fry the bacon on a small gas stove. The bacon spits and fights, snapping and exploding, while Lil, brave as a lion tamer, prods it and provokes it, turns it and crisps it. The smell is a sensual snake, writhing around the small kitchen.
“Eileen, you’ve a lucky face, Eileen, the face of someone oo’ll be lucky all ’er life… you pick your Uncle Mick a gee gee. See, come and sit on Uncle Mick’s lap and take a gander in the paper and just pick out a lucky name.”
Lil is buttering thick slices of white loaf.
“Nice lot’a butt’a,” Mick adds, though his stubby, slightly hairy finger continues to trace the names in the racing list. The smell, thinks Eileen, is like heaven. Will there be enough for her?
“Put a bit of the ’ot dribblin’s on as well – I like it when the ’ot fat melts the butt’a… mmm.”
The sandwich is large, white, oozing bacon and butter.
“Mind me ’omberg – paid a bit for that.”
Eileen carefully moves it from the table to the sitting room and runs back – will there be any for her?

Lil is putting together a second sandwich. Eileen sits, hopeful, sniffing eagerly, watching Mick’s moist red mouth rip and tear and masticate.
“An’, Eileen,” he says, through a rich greasy mouthful, “you pick me a winner and I’ll give you a tanner for sweeties.”
Lil laughs, “Don’t spoil her, Mick.”
The kettle is whistling now and Lil briskly makes a pot of tea, before turning back to the sandwich. She swiftly slices it in half and slides each half onto a plate.
“Here you go, Eileen, half each.”
As she savours the rich doughiness of the bread with the cool slippery butter and the hot, salt of the bacon, Eileen thinks it must be awful being Jewish and having to come from Russia and then having Hitler kill all your friends. She wrinkles her nose as she thinks of having to live in that smelly tenement and share a toilet with that old man with the long black finger nails, who smells and all those other people who bang on the door and shout in funny languages, and not have your own nice clean toilet in the little house in the back yard that you didn’t have to share with any one else… and not be meant to eat pork or mussels and whelks either; though Uncle Mick always ate more whelks than anyone at Southend.

“Spirit of flight,” she says. “That’s a nice name for a horse.”
“You an’ me, keep it a secret,” Mick says, touching his nose with a slightly greasy finger.
“Our little…” and he winks.
“Well, Lil, that ’it the spot… mmm, lovely cuppa you make…”
Domestic joy was one of the horses. But no one fancied that one and Mick didn’t back it.

“Where did you get the money, Mick?” Lil asks again as they drive out of London, through the flat lands of Middlesex and Essex, towards the salty tang of the Thames Estuary, the smell of mud and salt, chips and stale beer, to watch the flat grey sea rolling on forever to that grey smudge that was Canvey Island. One day they’d go to Canvey and try and work out why anyone bothered.

He fidgets, puts a finger round the inside of his collar, irritated.
“’Ave I ever told you, Lil,” and, turning his head, “an’ you too, Eileen, ’ave I ever told you abaht the golden bear skin?”
Lil shakes her head, disbelievingly, but Eileen is hooked already, crawls as far forward as she can, so she can hear.
“Well, it’s a story told in many of the workshops, but no one ever knows the real person it ’appened to – oh, it’s always my cousin’s friend, Solly, or my sister in law Esther’s friend’s brother… but you try and trace it and – nothing! No one! But, I tell you, as true as I sit ’ere, driving this car, as true as we’ll go to the Kursaal, as true as the ’airs on my ’ead and that my name is Israel Orovski, this actually ’appened to me. And of course, I never told anyone at all that it was me it ’ad ’appened to as the Orovski’s are a grasping bunch and I’d ’ave been left a broken man with not a penny!

“It was like this. One day I was working very late in the workshops – a li’ull over time, a personal favour to the boss… There’d bin a big shipment of furs in, from Canada, that no one ’ad time to unpack. I carried on, unpacking and unpacking, all alone in the great workshop with all the girls gone ’ome and the sewing machines lined up in idle rows, the gas lamps doin’ that flicker they do and mounds of furs: white and black and glossy brown, some still with paws and li’ull face masks, still attached.

“I was abaht to stop as it was late and yet I ’adn’t finished – oh there was ’eaps of furs to sort! I picked up the last one for the night: A beau’iful, dark brown bear fur. Make a fabulous coat, like the great Russian furs my father used to talk of, and, as I shook it out the fur just rippled like it was still alive and I run me ’ands down it ’cos it was like a live, beau’iful thing that fur was and as I runned me ’ands down it, I felt a funny li’ull lump that shouldn’t never ’ave bin there and I was puzzled. And I was curious. And I carried it over to one of them flickering gas lamps and I looked a bit closer and blow me if there wasn’t a funny li’ull fur pocket, sewn in on the edge. Well, I took out me knife and I cut through the stitching and eh, Lil, Eileen, guess what I found?”

Eileen is on the floor of the car, as close to the driver’s seat as she can get, on tenterhooks. Lil is looking out of the window, half annoyed yet still listening. “The cheek of it,” she keeps saying, in her head, “the bare-faced lies he tells.” But she is smiling, smiling and watching her smile, floating in the window glass as they eat up the miles.
“It was a bag of nuggets of solid gold, out of the gold rivers of Alaska!” he continues dramatically, and Eileen gasps.
“And that’s ’ow I got the money what I bought Moisha Pippit wiv!” he finishes triumphantly.

And now, Lil thinks, the story is told and that is the truth of where the money for Moisha Pippit came from. That is the way it will always be.
And then he laughs and Lil laughs and he leans over and picks up Lil’s hand and kisses it.
“Mmm,” he says, smiling, “You smell of bacon, Lil; lovely bacon. Hey, Eileen, shall I take you in the Kursaal? D’you wanna go on the ’orses, or shall we go on the roller coaster? Shall I take you both for a ride?”

© Karon Alderman

The Golden Fur was first published in The Journal, 8 October 2011