by Tanith Lee
“Was,” I said.
His face grew solemn and respectful. “Was,” he echoed. “Poor old cow.”
OK
To straighten this out a bit.
Mrs Jones was often in the bar of The Black Sheep. Sometimes dressed as a guy from the 1700s, (probably around 1760-70, from the type of clothing Josh, and others, described.) Or she came in more rarely as a city guy, in a suit, or casual wear at weekends. He, the last one, was more deliberate—“Never more than one double vodka, or a pint.” The 1700s guy, who spoke in a flowery manner, (elsewhere someone else also commented on his speech being—“Like Shakespeare—or Samuel Pepys”), this character was a drinker. Only in a very funny way. One glass of wine and a jug of tap water, and then keep filling up the wine glass, as the wine shrank, with the, water, and keep drinking. The same with the beer, though the single coffee was usually unwatered. A cheap date, then. Posie, who I later interviewed, remarked that the old woman-dressed-as-a-man seemed to get ‘really high’ on the watered drinks, “Like they’re jugs of wine, or ale.” Ale was what Mrs Jones, in the person of Mr Shakespeare-Pepys, called the beer. But it wasn’t in fact the real ale the pub also serves.
After the pub, I tried the Co-op in Wellington Road. I tried other shops before and got varied answers, though more of the gossip-speculation type I’ve mentioned. But in the Co-op I met Nancy Carrington, who said she has no objection to my citing her by name.
“I’ve often seen her, poor old thing. I had a granny like that, a bit ga-ga. Not so cracked though as—Mrs Jones did you say? As Mrs Jones.”
Nancy is a nice-looking fifties-ish. (She doesn’t mind my saying that either.) A calm person.
“She never caused any trouble. But she really did act in the weirdest way. For a start, she was often dressed like a girl in her teens or twenties, jeans, T-shirts, and her hair all down. Mind you, she was thin enough to wear that sort of thing. And she had really good hair, or it would have been if she’d had it decently shaped and cut. Yes, very long hair. Mostly grey, but with some brown tones still left in it. And she must have been at least seventy. Again, like my gran—she still had colour in her hair till she died. She was eighty-six. I’m sorry poor old Mrs Jones died so young—well, it is, isn’t it, nowadays, seventy-four. She looked, well, too strong. The way she used to slink around the aisles sometimes. Sometimes she was crouching, and hiding—or thinking she was—behind the shelving. That showed she was pretty agile. Now and then she’d sort of teeter along parts of the floor as though half of it wasn’t there and there was a great big chasm either side. But she managed it all right. Most of us, except a kid, couldn’t, we’d probably have fallen over. Keeley was scared of her. Keeley always wanted to call the police. I said, ‘they’ve got better things to do, Keeley. Leave her alone, she won’t hurt you.’ Everyone to start with thought she’d steal. I’m afraid that includes me. Shop-lift, you know. But she never did. She always paid cash. And that was odd too. I mean, when she paid you, she kind of wasn’t there. She never said a word—it wasn’t she was being rude. It was as if… her mind was wandering and she didn’t see you, or know what she was doing. It’s a good thing we’re on the level here. We don’t cheat customers. Other places—well.”
Nancy confirmed that Mrs Jones also appeared at the shop as Herself. She wore then one of two or three knee-length straight skirts and flat shoes, a jumper or blouse and coat. On warmer days sometimes the coat was replaced by a cardigan. Her hair was up in what Nancy, unlike Josh, termed a French Roll. At these times Mrs Jones saw you. She said Please and Thank you, and sometimes asked where something or other was.
The other visitation was the man with short hair, dressed casual-smart, if rather outdatedly. He always spoke too, would even have a brief chat with you about the weather, if you mentioned it, or the latest media-reported crisis. “She used to drop her voice right down for him. But it never works, does it, I mean unless someone really trains their voice. Men don’t sound like women, women don’t, like men. They just sound wrong. Poor old thing,” she added sadly. Nancy looked sad too. Thinking of her grandmother once more, perhaps, and what age and life, (never forget life’s part in the destruction), do to us all.
Later on, there, I received a real eye-opener too, from the stroppily timorous Keeley, a nasty little fat-mouthed Bitch2 who sprang out on me as I was, subsequent to interviewing Nancy, rooting in the freezer for some ice cream.
“‘Ere,” quoth Keeley, “Yor the one wot’s asking all them questions about that old bag, ent yer?”
I confessed I was.
“Well I seen her on the train up London—more’n once.”
“What happened?” I legitimately asked.
“Nuffin happened!” she squawked, as if I’d suggested either she had molested Mrs Jones or vice versa. “She gives me the squeams.” (Did she mean qualms? Screams? Squeamishness?) “Moment she gets in I move up the carriage. But I gets a look at her. Jeez what a dringe.” (I think she said ‘dringe’, whatever that is.) “Like she’s done up like a right slag, about fourteen. Shorty skirt right up here…” Keeley erroneously indicated her waist, “and hold-ups—stockings, you know, and it’s all reds and goldy bits and all this long black ’air wiv beads in it, and high heels—and all this eye-stuff—thick as a—what are them bear things?”
“…Pandas?” I guessed.
“Panters, yeah,” agreed Keeley, with hatred. “And this lip gloss. Pink. Errr,” breathed Keeley, allowing me to see the grey chewed chewing-gum in her mouth. “Oughter be in jail, them like her. Or in the loony bin.”
“Why?” I asked her, quite reasonably.
“Yor weird you are,” said Keeley.
I suppose she’s right. But aren’t we all.
“Just tell me,” I said, “before you go, how did she act, I mean what did she do, when you saw her on the train?”
“Nuffin. Just sit there, with her legs crossed an’ you could see her black panties. She had black fingernails anall. Everyone was, like, killing theirselves.”
“What a shame they never managed it.” But no. I didn’t say that.
OK
Nancy however later on added two extra incidents. It—they—had, she said, happened only about a month—was it?—before Mrs Jones had been found, dead of natural causes and old age, in her house behind the canal.
“Those times, you see, she didn’t come in alone. First she was being the young woman in the T-shirt and jeans, with her hair down. And she had someone with her, a younger woman I’d say it was.”
“Do you mean there was someone actually with her?”
“Oh no. Only in her mind. This person was invisible to any of the rest of us. What did she call her? Nicky, I think it was. Mrs Jones was telling this woman how to get through the store, which was apparently—as I’d always seen she found it—very structurally dangerous. And where this Nicky could find things. Except the cigarettes, for example, which of course are kept up by the lottery and the magazines. But Mrs Jones actually directed Nicky somewhere over by the paper goods. But it seemed to work all right. I suppose it would, wouldn’t it? And this is the other thing I forgot to mention. Around the same time—or I think it was—was the snow down? I can’t quite… never mind. The—man-with-short-hair version came in, I mean Mrs Jones as this man, yes? And that one time he—I find I have to say he—talked to us, but also he was talking to three other—well—non-existent people, two men and a woman. I can remember he called her Auntie Vanessa. And that time, very unusually for him, I mean Mrs Jones, the man took a trolley, and he put in a big bottle of vodka and four bottles of wine and some mixers—oh and some salad, which as a rule neither he nor Mrs Jones—if you get me—seemed very keen on. And Liz was on the checkout and she said to him, ‘Are you having a party?’ And Mrs Jones said, in this different voice—I mean not her own or the silly deep voice for the man, but a sort of older, more playful sort of a voice, ‘Oh, that’s for the dog’. And Liz and I laughed. And that,” she added, and suddenly her nice brown eye
s filled with tears, “was the last time I ever saw her—or any of her—well, her other selves. I am sorry,” Nancy said. “Poor thing. Did she die alone?”
“I heard so,” I said. But I thought, God knows. Who else was in there with her? Mickie—Nicky? Some other old friends? Auntie Vanessa? The dog?
OK OK
After the local ones, and because I hadn’t yet been able to meet up with Dimble3, (Dimble being the charity worker who helped clear the house, and who was willing to talk to me providing everything to do with him is kept private, and also on the agreement that I make a charitable donation of three hundred GBP), I decided to pick up on the London sites.
There are far less clues to these, of course. Only The Red Stag—or The Stag and Star, its real name—seems to exist in fully concrete form.
But when I got there, quite a lot of the regulars recollected Mr Shakespeare-Pepys, as the reader among them called him.
Reg, (who doesn’t mind my referring to him as Reg, “Only no second name, please. The wifelet wouldn’t stand for it”), was or had been, ‘quite fascinated’ by the contemporary old woman, who had clearly been possessed by a virile, youngish chap from the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Century.
“An actor, one gathered. Once or twice at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Currently strutting the boards at The Obelisk in—where was it, Sandy? Yes, that’s it. Stampwell Street, off Cartwheel Lane. I don’t think you’ll find that, young sir,” Reg added to me. “Some of us have gone and looked, you see. Neither the various Geographias nor word of mouth seem to offer up proof of its existence.”
“Invented, then?”
“Product of an insane but eloquent mind,” pronounced Reg. “I said, didn’t I, he called this pub The Red Stag?”
Reg told me that Thessris—he thought this was what the actor’s name was supposed to be—seemed to see all of them in The Stag, though Reg doubted Mr T saw them as they were. “He’d have a joke with us, and with me often, as I rather liked it. I mean, I valued the way he—yes, of course, she spoke. Liked the twists he-she put on the English language. No doubt not at all authentic for the scholars, but balls to them. It had a ring to it. Some of the words and phrases—God knows if anyone ever spoke like that back then—but, yes, a ring. What was that one we liked, Sandy? Oh, yes. Merry-dig. Fuck, you see? And I must say, young sir, he seemed to be having a merry-dig with plenty, and of both genders. Young men, lovely women. He was in love with an actress. Priscilla, I think it was. No, that’s not it. Near enough. Priscilla Peck. Oh, yes, he had it bad for her. But lots of others, he didn’t go short. No, no idea if your Mrs Jones was a les. After all, Mr T had men too. Three of them at least I heard him talking to in here. No, obviously not, no one else could see them. I wouldn’t have minded seeing a couple of the girls. His Priscilla. And that other one—Mistress Temple? Something like that.”
‘Sandy’—not his name, nor to be quoted—didn’t give me any information, Only nodded, or occasionally confirmed something, and smiled over the drinks I bought them both.
Reg though said he could only say he thought he’d seen the other incarnation, the bloke in the suit. Kept himself to himself, if it was the right one, had a quick single drink, or brooded over a sandwich, then left.
“She was limber for an old bird, wasn’t she?” Reg added, with approval. “What was she? Sixties? But neither of the alter-egos was her age. Certainly not Mr T. She moved like a young man. Yes, and like a male too. Shame her voice let her down. And the clothes, of course. Looked, shall I say, merry-digging bloody silly in them. But. You say she died? That’s a shame. We’ll miss her. She ought to get a proper mention somewhere. Entertaining the masses, eh, Sandy?”
I told them that was the idea, when I wrote the article. We all shook hands as I left.
After The Stag, though, as they had forewarned me, I mostly drew a blank.
What anyway had I to go on? These relatively amorphous landmarks—the office or firm or work place apparently not too far from The Stag. The Leaning Tower, with its perhaps uncountable storeys, and blue or red or green lasers pulsing from the roof—which seemed it might be up New Cross way—but God knew.
Some things had been easy to translate. The Sprint must be the station and/or the train—if a futuristic and very fast and brilliant model. The Park, Little Common, the Forest, the waste ground or rough pastures—these were all the same area, which was the built-on land across the roofed-over canal. Back in the ‘70s, I mean the 1970s, they were simple open ground. What used to be called Green Space. And Wales, obviously, was—Wales. Brighton and Lewisham were Brighton. And Lewisham.
I tried quite hard, even so, to prise out anything that might have been the inspiration for Mrs Jones’s multiple fantasies. I thought at one juncture The Gherkin might have triggered The Leaning Tower, though it fitted only in its leaning. Or I tried the Parnassus Showrooms, where Mrs Jones’s husband had worked some thirty odd years before. Was this the workplace of the short-haired city guy? No way on earth.
As for Stampwell Street and Cartwheel Lane. Let’s not go there. By which I mean nobody can go there. They don’t exist.
I did try Stanwell Road, up against Heathrow. But it seemed a long shot, and so it was. I won’t assert Mrs Jones could not have imagined herself at a theatre there in 1760/70, even with the giant roaring power of modern aviation thundering by above. But it seemed an unnecessary leap of her faith to pit her gift, (and so I must call it, I think), against so much of the contemporary contrary.
By sheer chance, (is there such a thing?), only two weeks ago, long after I had already become immersed in this research, I met a couple from Brighton who, without a hint from me, mentioned a ‘Stark staring old hag’ dressed up as a male business type, who regularly used to turn up at the station, get a cab, and go sailing off into Brighton town—now—city.
It tends to seem to be where she thought she—or he—had to go; they set off, went there, and only came back mission, at least mentally, accomplished.
I have to believe then, Mrs Jones did a lot of her imagined life-work in reality, if nearly always seeing and thinking it, presumably, something else. But she must have used her powerful imaginative muscles extra hard too. For example, did she sit in The Stag and fully imagine her times on stage, her hours with her lovers? Or she went into London and dreamed, while trailing round the pubs or cafes or streets, that she danced in the top of a big and leaning tower, with rooms for sex and a bar on every floor.
OK
Yes.
OK
How then did I get started on all this? And aside from that, and the testimony of the people I’ve interviewed, what proof have I got?
I never saw, let alone met, this madwoman Dawn. That was her first name. Dawn Jones.
It began when my initial contact, D.C.W., was put my way, by my then-editor, whose name I’m not going to give.4
I’ve no doubt he is a very good and conscientious dentist, Mr W. But clearly what he had encountered in—no, I think I will sit on the dates—had both unnerved and intrigued him. He it was who carried out the first investigation, reading various reports and books, and consulting with those in his own line of work, and elsewhere.
It had been a routine extraction of a back tooth. Dawn Jones had been his patient only a month or two when this became necessary for her. However she told him at once that her only previous extraction, despite local anaesthetic, had been so ‘agonising’ (her word) that she wanted total anaesthesia. This, of course, can normally be an option. And despite the fact she was over seventy, her general health seemed fine, and he thought that pain and nervousness might be more risky than a knock-out.
All went well, and the tooth was in fact swiftly removed. It was as they were staunching the blood that, despite all attempts to keep her quiet, Dawn Jones began to speak—as Woods put it without apology, in tongues.
The first sentences he got, and this in a woman’s quiet, and—as he said—quite reasonable voice, were these: “I kill people. What do you do?�
�
Things happen in dentistry that can be quite startling. You need a cool head and a steady hand. He and his assistant frowned at each other. Each later admitted they knew they hadn’t misheard.
“Just keep still, Mrs Jones. It’s all going well. Not long now.”
But she spoke again, and the otherwise full set of grown teeth, still missing only two, almost bit him.
“The birds tell me. Then I hunt. I always know which one’s for me. Three days ago it was a drunk in the car park of the burnt-out cinema. Not the best I’ve ever had. But not bad.”
Woods admitted he had to paraphrase, but insisted this was the gist of what she said.
He said softly to his assistant, “They do this, sometimes. It isn’t real.”
“Sounded real enough to me, Mr Woods.”
They got the bleeding staunched. The flow calmed quite quickly, as it sometimes does with the old.
But Dawn Jones was still talking.
She spoke in different voices. All female, but two of them very bizarre, apparently meaning to be male, and sounding male enough in inflexion, apart from actual vocal timbre and depth. One male was some sort of office worker from inner London. “He complained about having to call on an aunt in Brighton.” The other was—‘he’ stressed—an actor, and ‘his’ mistress was giving ‘him’ a run around, from the sound of it, but there was another young lady—and ‘his’ language, ornamental from the start, turned very fruity, so the assistant began to snigger and giggle and Mr Woods, a clean-living man, grew rather offended.