The cab ride came to thirty-six pounds. That was an incredible amount of money to have to pay for a ride across town, and I felt a twang of panic. I didn’t have that much on me. I’d gotten in this cab on the word of some person on the other end of a phone. I looked at the house, wondering what happened now. The house that was set back from the road and gently guarded by a brick wall with a black iron gate. Through this gate came a woman carrying an industrial-sized umbrella. I presumed this was Jane, as she went right to the front window of the car. As she spoke to the driver and gave him the fare, I heard her voice. This was Jane.
Jane Quaint looked like she was somewhere around sixty. Her hair was a furious orange-red, which stood out in stark contrast to her very pale, very delicate skin. The color couldn’t have been natural—that kind of pulsating orange rarely exists outside of fruit and tropical birds. She had on an outfit that consisted of many wraps and folds and layers of fine gray wool that looped around and around from about five different directions. I couldn’t tell if it was a shawl or a sweater or a dress. It bagged down to the knees, where it seemed to turn into pants. The whole thing was bound together at her right shoulder by a long silver pin in the shape of a twisted arrow.
I opened the door carefully as Jane reached over, making room for me under her umbrella.
“Wretched day,” she said. “Come inside. Let’s get ourselves out of this.”
The gate surrounded a small square of brick-paved ground, with a few small potted trees. The house was certainly large by London standards—three stories high, three windows across. It was completely detached, an impressive pile of bricks with a porticoed entryway.
Jane set her umbrella in a stand in the large entry hallway, which was very dark. It was papered in a rich black wallpaper with a recurring fan pattern in metallic gold. All the decorations were generally dark, lots of black with gold accents. I fixed my eye on a life-sized porcelain leopard in the corner, colored silver and black.
“I’m still very fond of the tastes of my youth,” she explained. “I was a bit of a rock-and-roller back then. After that phase was over, I went into psychology. But I kept the decor. I find if you keep things, they tend to come back into style eventually.”
“I like it,” I said.
“That’s very kind. One friend of mine describes it as looking like a Victorian brothel on Mars. I’ve always found that description rather pleasing. Do come through to the kitchen. I think we need a cup of tea.”
The house was very warm, which I appreciated. And the kitchen was warmer still, and huge. This room was not black. Unlike the sharply Deco feel of the hall, this was a cheerful green, with a big farm table and lots of plates on display. Jane busied herself with the kettle, and I sat on a stool and tried to figure out how to deal with the most awkward part of this entire affair. I decided I just had to ask.
“Charlotte said, about paying you—”
“I don’t charge,” she said, cutting me off. “I’m a woman of independent means, and I do this because it’s my calling. If you can afford to provide a service to society, you should do so. That’s what I think. Now. Tea or coffee?”
“Coffee?”
“Right, then. Oh, and here…”
She indicated the counter by the window, on which there were several plastic containers of what looked like baked goods. Many, many baked goods.
“One of my clients is a baker,” she said. “I don’t accept money, but some people bring things, little presents. She always makes sure I’m fully supplied with baked goods. I hope you’re not one of these girls who doesn’t eat.”
“Oh, I eat.”
“I’m glad to hear it. There’s a reason they call it comfort food. I’m not saying you should eat these sorts of things all the time, but food does provide a bit of comfort. And if you’re having a bad day, a brownie might be just what you need. Give yourself a little kindness and perk up the old blood sugar. Here you go.”
She presented me with a brownie on a beautiful little china plate in a rose and white willow pattern.
“Have a taste of that,” she said. “Angela’s quite good. She uses all kinds of exotic things in her baking, curry powder, tea, chilies, herbs. Things you’d never think should go into baked goods. She’s frightfully clever with that sort of thing. I think she’s going to be on a baking show on television…must remember to look out for that.”
She filled a tray with coffee- and tea-making equipment—proper loose tea for herself, and a fancy single-serve French press for me.
“All right,” she said, picking up the tray. “Come this way. And could you get the door?”
She led me through a set of double doors. Unlike the all-black room, this room was white and silver, absolutely stark. There was a fuzzy white rug, white leather chairs, a white sofa. The walls here were bare except for a few diplomas. I could make out the names of Oxford University and King’s College. At one end of the rug was a gleaming silver ball chair, like a big egg that you could climb inside. A cocoon. A cocoon was precisely what I wanted right now.
“Go ahead,” she said, nodding to the chair. “People love sitting in it.”
She took a seat on the sofa and poured herself a cup of tea.
“Right, then,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I know about you, and you can tell me the rest. I know your name is Aurora, or Rory, and I know you were stalked and stabbed by the Ripper.”
“That’s me,” I said.
“And I imagine people have been asking you a lot about how that makes you feel. I can guess at that—I think it makes you feel not good. But looking at you, you seem to be someone who’s gotten on with things.”
“I do?”
“Well, you returned to your school, where I’ve heard—in the most conversational terms—that you seem to be getting on very well with things. Charlotte thinks very highly of you.”
“She does?”
“Absolutely.”
I took another big bite of the brownie.
“The thing is,” I said, “I’ve had therapy before, and I didn’t really…I don’t really like talking about the attack.”
“Understandable. But I’m sure you know that talking about it is often the way of dealing with it and processing it?”
“I know that. But…I can’t.”
Julia would have latched on to that and dug in, mining her way into my soul. But Jane shrugged, took off her shoes, and tucked her feet under her on the sofa.
“Some people want to talk about what happened to them, to break it down bit by bit. Other people do not. Why don’t we just talk about how things have been going since your return? We can talk about whatever you like. Why did you ring today?”
“I was doing homework and studying,” I said. “And I realized I was dead.”
“Dead might be overstating the case.”
“Not really,” I said.
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
So, I did. I told her about school and having all my assignments in Bristol but never looking at them. I told her how I had piled my books up and how I had kind of felt nothing about them for a while, and then all of a sudden, I felt everything about them. I told her my fears of falling behind and generally not being a part of Wexford. And if I fell behind at school, I would have no place in the world, and how my future seemed so blurry to me right now, like I was driving in heavy rain. I might be on the right path, but more likely I was heading for a wall or into a rushing river.
I told her I was homesick, but had no desire to go home. I told her I was excited about having a boyfriend, but sometimes I didn’t even know why I liked him.
God, I talked a lot. Even for me, I talked a lot. I saw what Charlotte meant by feeling better around Jane—you just felt like you could say things around her. And she wasn’t checking a clock. She just listened. She didn’t try to get me on any track or on any subject. She only stopped me when I said, “I wish I was normal.”
“Let me say this…” Jane leaned forward and adju
sted her long-empty tea cup. “There is no normal. I’ve never met a normal person. The concept is flawed. It implies that there is only one way people are supposed to be, and that can’t possibly be true. Human experience is far too varied.”
“But I’ve met normal people,” I said. “I swear I have.”
“You’ve met people who get on well with life, and some of the people who get on with life with the most skill are far from what most people would call normal. So I never worry about normal. I do find that there are generally two types of people, though—there are people who have seen death up close and people who have not. People who survive, people like us—”
“Like us?”
“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “I’m like you. I’ve gotten close to death as well. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I do what I do. Because I know.”
She settled herself back in the sofa a bit and adjusted the folds of her complicated outfit.
“Where I grew up, in Yorkshire, there was a man who lived down the road from us who ran a television repair shop. I never liked him. I always felt like he was looking at me strangely when I walked past. I never actually thought there was something wrong with him, just that I didn’t like the feeling I got when he looked at me. One night, around this time of year, it was late, and I was walking back from a friend’s house. I took a shortcut across a bit of field. That sort of thing never worried me. Nothing bad happened in our village. Then I realized I wasn’t alone. He was walking behind me. I asked him what he was doing. He said he’d seen me and followed because he wanted to make sure I got home safely. And I think I knew then. I think I knew that if someone follows you at a few paces, you’re in trouble. It’s our animal instinct. When I heard him speed up, I ran. There were woods on the edge of the field, and I went for those. He overtook me.
“I’ll tell you, he didn’t expect me to fight like I did. There was a thick bit of downed tree branch on the ground, and I picked it up and gave him a right old thumping. I’ll never forget it, because the moon was so bright that night, and I was beating a man with a tree branch, using a strength I didn’t even know I had. I almost had him, too. But he managed to get the branch away from me. I ran and started screaming. The other houses were fairly far, but I think my scream must have carried over those fields. It certainly gave the sheep a start.”
Time was moving very strangely. My absorption in her story was total. It was like I was there. I knew what it was like to run across that field in the moonlight.
“Oh, he hit me good,” she said. “Knocked me right on the back of the head. I was quite dazed. I think he was in a panic by then, because he was swearing and panting for breath. He dragged me across the field, through the mud and the dung, then he gave me another good whack and rolled me into the small pond there, the one the animals drank from. It was only a few feet deep, but that was deep enough. I was unconscious for a few moments, I think, but some part of me said, ‘Stay awake.’ And I did. I fought, and I stayed awake. I was a good swimmer, and I could do a dead man’s float, so that’s what I did. I made him think I was dead. He ran off in terror, and I pulled myself out of that water and fell on the grass, and I looked up at the sky…and everything was different. After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things other people didn’t know. Do you know this feeling?”
I could only nod. There was a gentle throbbing in my mind—I needed to get back. It was getting late.
“I should really go,” I said. “I…I feel better now.”
“I’m glad,” she said.
Jane walked me to the door. The rain had slowed to a light drizzle, and the sky was dark and bright. The streetlights glimmered and refracted the light. London was beautiful, it really was. And it smelled so clean after the rain.
“I’d like to speak again,” she said. “I have a policy. Once I’ve taken someone on as a client, I make myself available. You can always come here if you’re having a bad day.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I mean it. I hope to see you again. Take a cab back.”
She put two twenty-pound notes in my hand.
“I can’t,” I said. “You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to, Rory. I want to.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Let me tell you one more thing. After the night of my attack, I was never the same, but in a good way. I left home. I came to London. I did the things I dreamed of doing. I met rock stars. I met wonderful people. I’ve had a wonderful life. And all because on that night, in that field, I saw something very powerful. I felt something very powerful. I survived. And so did you. What most people will never tell you, or might never understand, is that what happened to us can have a very positive effect. It can make us strong.”
A strange thing happened as I walked away from Jane’s house—I was finally thinking clearly. I could see what Charlotte meant. Jane knew how to fix people. Now that I’d talked through some of my issues, I’d blown the dust and garbage out of my brain and I could think for once. I could smell the rain, heavy with iron. The cold woke me, but it didn’t sting. My breath puffed out in front of me in a great white plume, and I laughed. It was like I was breathing ghosts. I wasn’t in the land of long highways and big box stores and humid, endless summers. I was in London, a city of stone and rain and magic. I understood, for instance, why they liked red so much. The red buses, telephone booths, and postboxes were a violent shock against the grays of the sky and stone. Red was blood and beating hearts.
And I was strong.
10
THE NEXT MORNING WAS THE WETTEST I HAD EVER SEEN IN my life, and I’ve been through a few hurricanes. I don’t know if there is actually more rain here in England, or if it was just that the rain seemed to be so deliberately annoying. Every drop hit the window with a peevish “Am I bothering you? Does this make you cold and wet? Oh, sorry.” The square was now a mud pool, and the cobblestones were slick, so I almost killed myself about six times just getting to class.
My first class was further maths. Further maths had gone further into some incomprehensible zone of mathyness. From there, French, where I discovered that my class had started reading a novel. A novel. In French. Not only hadn’t I started the novel—I didn’t have the novel. So I sat there while everyone else went through a book I didn’t own. Gaenor sat next to me and shared her copy, but this wasn’t much help. I hadn’t read the story so far, and I couldn’t translate fast enough without a dictionary. I sometimes drift a bit in class on the best of days, but today I was tired, it was raining, and people were reading something I didn’t understand. The words oozed together on the page, and the rhythm of the rain beat in my head. The room was so warm…
I woke when Gaenor nudged her elbow into my side. She actually nailed me right in scar territory, and I think she realized that, because she clapped a hand over her mouth. It was fine—it didn’t hurt me. Our teacher was looking directly at us. She had to have seen. I rubbed at my mouth and tried to act like that had never happened. Maybe my eyes had never closed.
Who was I kidding? I’d been out.
“Feeling all right?” Madame Loos asked at the end of class.
“I had to…um, painkiller,” I said. “I had to take one. I’m sorry.”
I was such a liar. It was disturbing how quickly it came. But painkiller was the magic word. I got a terse nod, and nothing more was said. No one was going to ask stabby girl about her painkillers.
Then I went to English literature and had the same experience all over again. I was so far behind in all the reading, I couldn’t get any of the references. I thumbed through the anthology that was our main textbook and counted how many pages I seemed to be behind. It looked to be about 150 pages. There was only one solution: I would have to read. I would have to read and read and read until my eyes w
ent dry. Because reading essays and poetry written in 1770 is not quite the same as blowing your way through a novel written in the last few years. It requires more concentration, more stopping to figure out what they’re talking about.
So I nervously doodled a picture of a horse farting a rainbow and tried to look deep in thought. I was going to have to start drinking a lot more coffee. All day, every day.
What was strange, though, was that I really did feel better about my general situation. Jane had done something. The facts had not changed, but my feelings toward them were more positive. So I was tired and behind. Big deal. I had survived. I was getting on with things. I would take my laptop and drink coffee and embed things into my brain. Coffee was supposed to make you smart. And I had the afternoon to work. You could do a lot in an afternoon if you put your mind to it.
I walked down Artillery Lane on my way to get the coffee. I paused by the Royal Gunpowder and looked at the various tributes that had been left to the dead man. There were bottles, but there were also notes and some dead and dying flowers mixed in with a few fresh ones. Just inside the window, facing out to the street, was a photograph of a man. He looked middle-aged, big and friendly, with a very red face. There was an unlit votive candle next to the picture. On the brick wall, just under the window, someone had written in what looked like black Sharpie JUSTICE FOR CHARLIE.
The rain picked up a bit, and I hurried along so my computer wouldn’t get wet. It was in my bag, and I was under an umbrella, but I always get paranoid about things like that. Once I was safely in the coffee shop with a large cup in front of me, I logged on to their Wi-Fi and decided to look up some articles about what happened at the Royal Gunpowder. There were plenty of these to choose from.
The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON) Page 9