The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON)

by Johnson, Maureen

  “You’re back early,” she said, her voice wavering a bit.

  I sat on the edge of my bed and faced her. Jazza was too compulsively honest to keep up any façade.

  “Did you talk to Jerome?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Are things okay?”

  “I wasn’t cheating.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “But he did.”

  I could see her choosing her words carefully—plucking each one delicately out of the lexicon in her head, as if she were picking up tubes full of explosive chemicals.

  “I don’t know what he thought,” she said. “But he was concerned. And confused. And…I think you’ve been coping with this, and no one knows what that’s been like for you and we all respect that and…it’s…it’s hard to know? What you’re thinking? But I told him to just talk to you and…”

  “We broke up.”

  A widening of the eyes.

  “Oh…but…no! But…nothing was…”

  “I just can’t do this right now.”

  “Oh.”

  A more final oh. An oh that sounded understanding. She got off her bed and came and sat next to me on mine.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “That’s all anyone has asked me for weeks.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry…I…”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I really am. I might even be too fine. I should be upset, but I’m not. I’m just…nothing. I just did it. I had to.”

  All of that was true. I didn’t really know why I had done it—why I had just broken up with the only actual boyfriend I’d ever had. But I just knew I had to.

  The radiator clanged and whistled, and Jazza and I sat there, both staring down at the floor. She was my friend, but she was Jerome’s friend before she knew me.

  “Do you hate me?” I asked.

  “Do you know what I think?” she replied.

  “Smarter and better things than me?”

  “I think…we should go next door and see if Gaenor and Angela have any plonk.”

  “Plonk?”

  “Wine. And I have chocolate. I say we wrap ourselves in our duvets and drink wine and eat chocolate.”

  I started to shake my head—I didn’t want anyone to be nice to me—but Jazza was not taking any of that. She pulled me upright, yanked the cover from my bed, and wrapped it around my shoulders.

  “This is not me asking,” she said. “This is me telling you.”

  17

  THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE TO THE SOUND OF CHURCH bells. London is full of them, old bells in old stone towers, calling out through the gray December gloom. They continued to ring and vibrate in my head, each percussive blow bringing thoughts of nausea. I’d had one and a half mugs of the warm and cheap red wine Gaenor kept in the bottom of her closet, really not that much, but the effect was still seeping over me. My mouth felt like an acre of cotton field, and there was a vague and unspecified ache crawling up and down from my stomach to my head.

  I liked it. I liked waking up like this. I’d had a good night. Everyone had rallied around me—Gaenor and Angela and Jazza. Eloise had come in and told us about all the French guys she’d dumped. No one seemed to think I was a monster—though I was sure Jazza was going to check on Jerome immediately and make sure he was okay. She was already awake, bundled in her robe, a cup of tea in her hand and the German book back in front of her face.

  “Morning,” she said. “Breakfast? I’ve been up for hours now and I’m starving.”

  Hours? A look at my watch (and the bong of the bells) told me it was only nine in the morning. She was making up for the time she’d lost on me last night.

  Breakfast, of course, meant facing my now ex-boyfriend. It was going to be an issue, this eating business. I sat with Jerome and Jazza and Andrew. How would I ever eat again?

  “Not for me,” I said. “I think I’ll stay here and die.”

  “Ill?”

  “A little. I’ll be fine. You go.”

  So Jazza got herself together and left, and I thought about the word ex-boyfriend.

  How was this going to be, seeing him everywhere? What the hell had I done? A quick flush of terrible feelings came over me—guilt, sadness, shame—they were all in there. I shook them off. This morning I would find some money—I had to have a few pounds left—and get a muffin and a coffee for myself. I would deal.

  I shabbily dressed myself in already worn sweatpants and a T-shirt, brushed my hair with my fingers, and rubbed some terrible crud from my eyes, then I scuffed down the steps. As I reached the bottom, Charlotte came out of Claudia’s office.

  “Oh,” she said. “Here she is now. Rory? Claudia needs to see you.”

  “What for?” I mouthed.

  Charlotte smiled a bit stiffly and gave a little shrug. I stepped around her and into the office.

  “Please close the door,” Claudia said. “I’ll be just a moment.”

  She was typing away on her computer and didn’t look up. Her office was icy cold and kind of dark. She had all the lights off except her desk lamp, and only a small electric heater by her desk. I huddled in the chair, pulling my fleece down over my hands.

  “Aurora.” She swung around to face me, and the effect was a bit disturbing, like I had been called into the office of the evil supervillain. “Tell me about how this week has gone for you.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s been good, I think.”

  I was expecting that she would say something rote in return. “Good” or “glad to hear it” or “let’s arm wrestle in celebration, for I am very strong.” But she didn’t. The high, red flush on her cheeks seemed a bit higher and redder than normal, and the cold crept up my sleeves and down my neck.

  “Aurora,” she said again. (It’s never good when someone uses your name twice at the start of a conversation.) “I am aware…”

  She let her open-ended awareness hang in the air for a moment.

  “I am aware…you were a bit behind when you returned.”

  “Well,” I said, “I did what I could. You know. I was…”

  “Of course.”

  She adjusted something in the top drawer of her desk that must have prevented it from closing all the way and gave it a firm push.

  “You have handled this situation very bravely. But there are some concerns. It’s become fairly evident that you are falling behind academically, possibly to the point where you cannot catch up to the place you need to be.”

  She opened a folder on her desk, and I saw it contained my history pre-exam.

  “I wasn’t really ready for that one,” I said.

  “These are quite basic questions, and much of this was material you covered before your departure…though of course I understand that there were stressors then as well. But there are other things. I have reports of you using your phone in class, of sleeping in class, and even, just yesterday, of missing class.”

  Okay, so maybe they did track you at Wexford.

  “And I do understand that these circumstances you are in are not normal,” Claudia went on. “But you should know that anyone else would have already been disciplined for this. Anyone else at your level of progress would already be gone.”

  “The class I missed,” I said. “I was at therapy. That’s where I was.”

  “You had therapy? You haven’t been to the sanatorium.”

  “With an outside person. Charlotte gave me her name.”

  That was possibly a misstep. If Claudia called Charlotte, Charlotte would give her Jane’s name and number, and if Claudia called Jane, she would soon discover that I was a big fat liar. The lies, the problems, they seriously never ended.

  “If you are going for treatment, we need to be informed—certainly if that means you won’t be in class.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought it was okay for me to go.”

  Claudia pursed her lips and looked down at the desk drawer again. The room suddenly seemed very dark, and the orangey light from her desk
lamp throbbed in my vision.

  “Having you come back was an experiment,” she said. “We’ve had a week to assess where you are. And I have to be honest, Aurora…I don’t think it’s quite fair to you to have you continue at Wexford. Perhaps this isn’t the best place for you to regain your footing. Before you go through the stress and strain of exams, I want you to think carefully. I think you should consider departing early.”

  What was happening? This couldn’t be what I thought it was. Because it sounded like I was being kicked out.

  “Departing early?” I said.

  “The exam process is quite arduous, and it was always a worry. There is no shame in any of this. You are not to blame for the events that led up to this moment. However, I don’t see how you can recover academically, certainly not enough to participate in the exams. If you wish, you may remain for the exams. I am trying…”

  And she was clearly trying. I didn’t think this was comfortable for her at all. For all her meatiness and love of hockey violence, I never got the feeling that Claudia was an unkind person.

  “I’m trying to give you the best way out. Go home for the holidays. Be with your family. Make a fresh start in the new year.”

  “But not here,” I said.

  “I think it’s unlikely, Aurora.”

  I would not cry in Claudia’s office. No. I would not. I looked up, because sometimes you can dry up your eyes that way, but all I saw were mounted hockey sticks. Hockey sticks are not calming.

  “Have you talked to my parents?” I managed to ask.

  “Not yet, no. And to be clear, this is not a punishment. This is just something very unfortunate, and I truly want what’s best for you. If you really feel you can handle the exams, then by all means, stay on and take them. But if you don’t…and there’s no shame…”

  Funny there being no shame, because all I felt at the moment was shame. Shame is like melting. You can actually feel your muscles sag and drop, as if your body is preparing you to crawl, or possibly ooze, to the nearest exit.

  “Think it over and let me know what you would like to do,” she said. “I don’t want to make this harder on you than it already is. How about we speak again tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “Sure.”

  I pushed back my chair, and it scraped loudly on the floor and wrinkled the oriental rug. In the lobby, I paused by the pigeonholes and listened to some screaming laughter from the common room. Someone dropped something in one of the rooms overhead, and it made a loud thunk on the ceiling. Hawthorne was full of life.

  I climbed the stairs slowly, past the dozen or so framed and all slightly crooked photographs that lined the entire stairway. Sports day photos and team photos and class photos. I would not be a part of this place. My image wouldn’t hang on the wall. Once the talk of the school, I’d quickly be forgotten, like Alistair, who died in his bed. The Ripper news wasn’t even the biggest story in London anymore. That was over. A political scandal had taken its place.

  I stopped in between the fire doors on the second floor and stared at my hall through the glass window. Today was Sunday. We had “reading days” through Monday, which just meant study days. Then the exams were Tuesday and Wednesday. I wasn’t going to get anything accomplished today, and tomorrow wasn’t looking so great either. Exams on Tuesday, and then Tuesday night to scrape up whatever remnants of my brain were left and try to mold them back into a brainlike shape for the next two exams.

  I stood there in the two feet of vestibule, the one that always stank so sharply of industrial carpeting. I probably would have stayed there all day, except that there were loud footsteps and Charlotte threw open the door behind me.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  That was all it took. I just started crying. Proper, full-on crying. I flowed like some kind of industrial hose. Charlotte instantly put an arm around me and walked me down to her room, pushing my face into her shoulder and her masses of red hair.

  Charlotte had a single, much smaller than my room. But the smallness also made it feel more snug, and probably a lot warmer. Unlike me, she didn’t store her partially worn clothes on the back of a desk chair. I had seen her room from the hallway many times, but never from the inside. On the wall where the door was, the entire thing, floor to ceiling, was a collage. We were allowed to Blu-Tack things to our walls. She had a carefully curated selection of tear-outs from fashion magazines of models reading books, posing with books, or generally standing near or approaching books. Glamour and brains, all glossy, all perfectly arranged on the wall. It must have taken her a long time to put them up, to make sure they lined up just right, neat and square to the edges of the wall.

  It took me by such surprise that I stopped crying. I’m not sure why it came as such a shock to see that Charlotte had decorated her wall in this way.

  “I’m failing,” I said, wiping my nose with the sleeve of my fleece. There was a large floppy cushion on her floor, all ready to receive my butt, so I took advantage of it. “I missed too much. I’m too behind. Claudia said I could stay and take the exams, but there’s kind of no point…”

  To her credit, Charlotte didn’t argue this. Nor did she try the Jazza way, telling me things would be fine when they clearly would not be fine.

  “Have you discussed some other arrangement?” she asked. “Maybe you can take the exams at another time?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “They’re sure I’m not going to catch up, not this year. And she’s right. I’m not going to catch up.”

  “So you’re going back to Bristol.”

  “I guess?”

  “And go to school there?”

  That’s what my parents said before I returned to Wexford in this little experiment. That was before the experiment totally failed, and my parents were about to be told that this whole year was basically a bust. God only knew what would happen now.

  I leaned back against the radiator and banged my head against it gently. It was much too hot to be leaning against, but better burning hot than cold. I didn’t really care if it seared my back. I looked from picture to picture on her wall, my eyes twitching a bit as they took in the information. Books and brains. Successful girls.

  I was not a successful girl.

  “Jane,” she said, handing me a box of tissues. “I think you should go talk to Jane. Today. Right now.”

  “There’s nothing she can do,” I said. “This is all academic stuff—”

  “No,” Charlotte said firmly. “She can help. And I know she’d see you.”

  There was a look to Charlotte—a bit of an evangelical glow. Jane was the magic problem solver as far as she was concerned. It must have been nice to have that kind of faith in therapy, or problems that could actually be solved.

  “Jane’s dealt with all kinds of people in crisis. Loads of people who have been expelled. I know she could help. Let me phone her. Please.”

  Charlotte made the call. I could tell from her end of the conversation that Jane was fine with me coming over.

  This was one of those moments when I was excruciatingly aware that I was not at home. At home, I had friends at the other end of a phone, friends who were close by. I had friends here, but they were friends I’d been lying to almost as long as I’d known them. I’d had a boyfriend up until last night. He’d probably be glad this had happened…

  No. He wouldn’t. That was worse.

  I had Stephen. I could call Stephen.

  Except my being kicked out destroyed everything. All his work. The squad. Me gone from Wexford meant no terminus, no squad, nothing. How had so much come to rest on me? Me, the one who, given the opportunity, would wake up at three P.M. every afternoon and eat Cheez Whiz twice a day. I was not the kind of person on which the fate of police organizations should rest.

  I just wanted to go back to bed and wake up when I was twenty-five.

  “She says to come right over,” Charlotte confirmed as she hung up. “I told her the basics. And don’t worry. I won’t tell a
nyone. Not a word.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’ll figure this out,” Charlotte said. “It’s going to be fine, no matter what happens.”

  Of course, Charlotte had a very limited knowledge of things that could happen.

  18

  JANE’S VIVID RED HAIR WAS ONE OF THE BRIGHTEST THINGS on the street. She was wearing an extraordinary dress—one with long flat shoulder pieces that raised up at the tips. The dress was both boxy, baggy, and form fitting and was made of an African-inspired print in orange and black and yellow.

  “Cup of tea,” she said, ushering me inside. “And a little something sweet.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t want anything.”

  “I have to insist. I don’t problem solve on an empty stomach. Let’s perk up your blood sugar a bit. You’ve had a shock. You look peaky.”

  It was very dim in the hallway. I caught just the tiniest glint of the strange silvery leopard over in the corner and the fans of gold on the wallpaper. She drew me deeper into the house, past the staircase, to the kitchen. The kitchen had a bit more light pouring in from the garden windows—not that there was much light to be had.

  “Very interesting ones today,” she said, pushing forward a container of baked goods. “This is an Earl Grey shortbread, and this brownie is made with orange and chili. Eat it. You’ll feel better.”

  Jane’s practical and positive manner was infectious. I did as I was told. I plucked out a brownie and ate it in three bites, crumbs falling from my mouth onto the counter. She nodded in satisfaction and went about filling the kettle and setting it to boil.

  “Now,” she said, “Charlotte told me the basics. What were you told, exactly?”

  I recounted the conversation with Claudia, and Jane listened soberly.

  “You could take the exams,” she said.

  “I could. But I have more or less no chance of passing.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  The kettle clicked off, and she filled the teapot and set out the mugs and milk and sugar.

  “Let me ask you something,” she said. “And I want you to really think about this question. Tell me truly. Why did you come back? ”