“I know. Otherwise you would’ve plastered it all over the wall in Vauxhall, right?”
So he had made the connection between Lenny’s paintings and himself. “Are you pissed off with me?”
“No, I just don’t get what it means to you, or the business.”
Lenny snorted softly. “That’s why it means everything, because you have no idea how much you mean to the people around you.”
Nero let his shirt drop and returned to his cave beneath the bus. “Do you want to know what happened to my finger?”
“Is it relevant?”
“I’d imagine so.”
“You can tell me . . . if you want to.” Lenny’s hand hovered over Nero’s ankle, but he curled it into a fist and pressed it against his lips. For a long moment, it appeared that Nero was done with the conversation, but then his heavy sigh broke the weighted silence.
“My mum came back after my dad died. She got a flat in Tower Hamlets and took me to live with her.”
It hadn’t occurred to Lenny that Nero’s mother had been absent in his life until that point, but instinct told him that interrupting Nero could end this before it had truly got started. He settled for letting his hand have its way, and squeezed Nero’s calf. “What happened next?”
“Nothing, for a while. I don’t remember much about life with her until after primary school. Then my mum got a job at the pub down the road and started bringing men home.”
“Men? You mean like, um, punters?”
It was Nero’s turn to snort. “No, she wasn’t hooking.”
“She got a boyfriend?”
“Yeah, Malcom. We moved in with him a few months later. He had one of those old houses in Hackney: huge rooms, high ceilings . . . a cellar. I liked running up and down the corridors, hearing the old floorboards echo.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Does it? Well it wasn’t. Turned out my mum’s Prince Charming was a bastard. And he didn’t like ten-year-old me telling him so.”
“Ten-year-old you sounds fierce.”
“Not really. Just gobby, and it got me in trouble with Malcom. Nothing I couldn’t handle at first, a few clips round the ear here and there, but then my mum started leaving me with him when she went to work.”
“Did Malcom have a job?”
“Never. Fuckin’ dole scrounger, weren’t he? That’s why he moved my mum in—to give him extra money for the bookies.”
Lenny had a horrible feeling he knew, in part at least, where Nero’s tale was going. “Was he a drinker?”
“Yeah, he was all the stereotypes, but he got worse after I turned twelve. I can’t remember why . . . but I remember him tying me up in the cellar every night when my mum went to work.”
“That’s awful.”
Nero grunted as he wrestled with a metal pipe. “It weren’t fun. I can still smell that place if I don’t keep my mind busy.”
“Is that what you dream about?”
“Sometimes.”
There’s more. Nero didn’t need to say it. “How often did your mum work?”
“Three nights a week—Tuesday, Friday, Sunday. Funny thing is, if she’d worked all week it would’ve stopped sooner. My school was already suspicious when it all went tits up.”
Tits up for who? Lenny didn’t ask. Nero’s style of storytelling was beyond frustrating, but he was getting there . . . slowly. Lenny picked a hole in his jeans as Nero continued.
