by Paul Sussman
After tea, and much to my relief, Miss Wasply went to her bedroom to write letters to her sisters (of whom she had eight, all married off to clergymen the length and breadth of England) and Emily and I were left to our own devices. She introduced me to her dolls – each, for some reason, named after a month of the year – and took me into her parents’ bedroom to show me their giant four-poster bed, which I thought looked like a ship. We did some drawing, spent a while trying to catch a bluebottle that had buzzed in through the window, and then set to work making potions. This was a messy business, involving salt, paint, sugar, talcum powder and several cups of water, and when Miss Wasply eventually returned it was to discover two exceedingly grubby children and a badly stained nursery floor.
‘I said you should never have been invited,’ she hissed, grabbing me by the ear. ‘Just look at all this mess, you filthy boy! Mr Emilie will have something to say about this!’
Which, as it happened, he did, although not at all what Miss Wasply wanted him to say. Far from being upset by our potion making he was, on the contrary, rather pleased with it, patting us both on the head and calling us his ‘young apothecaries’ before suggesting a guided tour around his chemist’s shop.
‘But the nursery,’ objected Miss Wasply. ‘Just look at the state of the nursery!’
‘Yes, yes, well, we can sort that our later,’ huffed Mr Emilie. ‘This is pharmaceuticals, dear lady. And pharmaceuticals must always take precedence.’
And so, to Miss Wasply’s evident torment, and our evident delight, Emily and I spent the rest of the day downstairs in her father’s pharmacy, standing hand in hand whilst he discoursed at great length on the miraculous laxative effect of Dr Brookes’ Cod-Liver Oil, and the extraordinary benefits of Russell’s Anti-Corpulent preparation.
‘The fat just drops off you,’ he trilled. ‘Drops off like a skin.’
He allowed us to pry into some of the rosewood drawers lining the wall behind the counter, to reach the highest of which we had to climb a rickety old ladder, and then took us into his workshop, where he brought out, and enthused over, a Boggett’s Patent Gas Spatula, whatever the hell that might have been. Then it was back out into the shop proper for a look at his set of graduated glass dispensing measures.
‘And this,’ he said at the very end of the tour, leading us to a small, glass-fronted cabinet standing at the far end of the counter, ‘is the poisons cabinet, where all the dangerous things are kept locked up. Do you see how the bottles have special ridged glass? That’s to show their contents might be harmful.’
I pressed my face up against the cabinet, standing on tiptoe to reach it.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing to something on the middle shelf, between a bottle of chloric ether and one of nitric acid. ‘That pill.’
‘Ah!’ said Mr Emilie, smiling. ‘That, young man, is a very dangerous poison pill.’
There was nothing inherently attractive about the pill – The Pill – in the way that there was, say, about the tall glass carboys in the shop window, or the display of shiny silver hairbrushes beneath the glass counter. It was just a small, round, white pill, with a slight nick on its edge and no other defining features. I nonetheless felt myself irresistibly drawn to it.
‘Yes, indeed, very dangerous,’ continued Mr Emilie. ‘Made it myself. One and a half grains of strychnine, one and a half grains of arsenic, half a grain of, um, yes, that’s right, salt of hydrocyanic acid, and half a grain of crushed ipecacuanha root. Know what a grain is? It’s a unit of measurement, about one five-thousandth of a pound. Mix it all together with some syrup of liquid glucose, mould it into shape, and hey presto! Very dangerous. Kill you in seconds, that will!’
I listened intently to this speech, and then turned back to The Pill nestling on its glass dish in the middle of the display cabinet. It seemed to throb somewhat as I looked at it and, although I was probably just imagining things, to emit a very faint humming sound. It really was the most alluring thing I’d ever seen in my life. Apart from Emily, of course.
‘I like that,’ I said.
‘Well, well,’ laughed Mr Emilie, putting his arms around our shoulders. ‘What a pair of young apothecaries you are!’
Later, as I walked home through the park with Mrs Eggs, I recited The Pill’s formula over and over again to myself. By the time we reached White Lodge I had it by heart, and have never forgotten it since.
From that day onwards Emily and I were inseparable. Each morning I would be delivered to Baker Street by Mrs Eggs, or Emily to White Lodge by Miss Wasply, who steadfastly refused to come beyond our front gate as though to do so would be to expose herself to some hopelessly incurable contagion, and the hours would then be whiled away engaged in the sort of pursuits that to adults appear inconsequential but are to children of the very greatest significance.
Encampments would be built out of cushions and old sheets and then defended against hordes of imaginary invaders. Expeditions would be launched to the farthest reaches of our not very big garden, and plays written and then performed in front of Emily’s doll collection, who always gave us a standing ovation for our efforts. We did paintings, and made potions, and rang Emily’s next-door neighbour’s bell before running off to hide in the alley that separated their houses. Sometimes we would watch Mr Emilie in his pharmacy, or my father in his workshop. Always, when the opportunity arose, I would gaze longingly at The Pill.
We were taken to museums, and galleries, and parks, and, once, to St Paul’s Cathedral, where we climbed right up into the vast dome and made our voices echo back and forth inside it. We went to Madame Tussauds, and for picnics in Kew Gardens, and to the Hippodrome to watch the Australian Tree Fellers, who could cut their way through a tree-trunk in under three minutes. And, our favourite trip of all, across Regent’s Park to London Zoo, where we would each pay our 6d entrance fee and spend the day peering at the giraffes, and the reptiles, and the lions, and pleading with Miss Wasply to let us have a go on the giant wrinkly elephant that gave rides to the public.
‘Absolutely not,’ she would snap. ‘Now come away or it’ll tread on you.’
‘I wish it’d tread on you,’ I’d mutter.
‘What was that? What did you say, you frightful boy?’
‘Nothing, Miss Wasply. Just talking to myself!’
‘Huh! Dreadful child!’
In the September of 1906 I was, despite the most violent and lachrymose protests on my part, sent away to continue my education at a small boarding school in Kent. Far from diminishing the intensity of my relationship with Emily, however, this enforced separation only served to augment it, just as some plants, when shut away from the light, will sprout to a far greater height than those left in it. Deprived of each other’s physical presence, we merely resorted to other means of communication, writing to each other at least four times daily, and composing long, ill-rhyming poetic eulogies to friendship, chocolate, Australian tree fellers and other subjects of mutual concern. Where I should have been learning my Latin subjunctives, and times tables, and important dates in British history, my mental energies were instead focused exclusively upon Emily, which largely explains my abysmal school record of the period.
And then in the holidays I’d come home and we’d pick up precisely where we’d left off, as though our days apart had not been real days at all but rather dream ones, from which we awoke to find ourselves once again in each other’s company. The thought has sometimes struck me, indeed, that perhaps my entire life has just been a dream, punctuated by occasional moments of waking when Emily appears to pull me back to the reality of myself.
Thus our friendship – what a risibly small word for such an immeasurably vast experience – grew and developed as the years went by. In 1907 I was taken with the Emilies for a summer holiday in Scotland, exacerbating still further my unpopularity with Miss Wasply by putting a crab in her bed, and in 1909 Emily came down with Mrs Eggs to watch me take part in the school sports day (I was in four races and came last in
all of them). We still made camps and performed plays, although less often as we grew older, and went through a long phase of nurses and patients, in which I would spend entire days mummified in bandages whilst Emily clucked about and tended to my every need. On Sunday, 1st January 1910, the afternoon of my tenth birthday, we stole The Pill. And with that my world was complete.
And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, insanely, after four years of unmitigated bliss, the most wonderful four years of my life, the four years upon which, in a sense, all my other years have been built, my darling Emily was taken from me. And I lay the blame entirely at the feet of that purse-lipped, bug-eyed killjoy of a governess.
But I had, of course, decided to kill Miss Wasply some time before Emily’s departure. It was the start of the Christmas holidays, 1909, and I had gone to bed as usual the night before, tucked up and given a big slobbery kiss by Mrs Eggs, then woken up with the dawn, intent on murder.
‘I’m going to kill her,’ I thought to myself as a robin redbreast chirruped on my windowsill. ‘It’s time to slay the dragon.’
I had always hated Miss Wasply. Had hated her from the moment I first set eyes on her. I hated her giant shovel of a chin, and I hated the way she reprimanded Emily, and I hated the way she took every possible opportunity to demean and hurt and humiliate and undermine me. I hated everything about the woman, to the extent that I even harboured a vague dislike for the chairs she sat on and the cutlery she used and the clothes she wore (which were always grey, and shiny, and very tight-fitting, like a sort of chain-mail).
I hated Miss Wasply, and Miss Wasply, in turn, hated me. I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone either before or since who disliked me with quite the same degree of intensity and spleen that old Waspy Wasply brought to the task. Her eyes smouldered venomously whenever I was nearby, and her body went rigid, and her chest heaved as though she were about to gag. She chided and rebuked and insulted and snapped at me as though my very existence was some sort of personal insult, and although it’s really no excuse for what I did to her, I nonetheless sincerely believe that had I not acted first it could well have been Emily’s governess who murdered me rather than the other way around, such was the depth of her animosity.
‘Vile boy!’ she would hiss at the very least provocation. ‘You’ll come to no good, mark my words! It’ll be a bad end for you.’
And, to be fair, she wasn’t that far wrong.
I toyed with a variety of scenarios to bump her off, such as shooting her, or poisoning her, or stabbing her, or bludgeoning her to death with the giant bible she kept beside her bed, or even kidnapping her, drugging her, stripping her naked, covering her in honey and dumping her on top of a large beehive, the occupants of which would then, if all went according to plan, swarm all over her and sting her to death.
Then, however, I remembered there was a small barrel of gunpowder in the cellar, and decided to do it with that instead.
The gunpowder had been made up by Father some months previously for use in a series of experiments he was conducting about the effects on mice of being sent to the moon attached to large home-made rockets. The resultant ear-shattering bangs and whooshes and terrified mousey squeaks hadn’t been at all to the liking of our neighbours, however, and after an avalanche of complaints the experiments had eventually been abandoned, the few surviving rodents being released into the park, and the half-empty barrel of gunpowder consigned to a lonely corner of the basement. I went down to see if it was still there, which it was, and to check the powder hadn’t got damp, which it hadn’t.
‘Perfect!’ I chuckled to myself, stirring my finger around inside the barrel. ‘Absolutely damned perfect!’
I started that same day by smuggling two small, gunpowder-filled paper bags into Emily’s house, sneaking upstairs late in the afternoon during a game of hide-and-seek and hiding them in the shadows beneath Miss Wasply’s bath (she had her own private bathroom, next door to her bedroom, right at the very top of the house and overlooking the sooty alleyway beneath).
I did the same the following day, and the day after, and for the three days after that, at which point Emily was starting to wonder where this sudden fixation for hide-and-seek had come from. I, meanwhile, had slipped into a sort of homicidal trance. As others around me gorged themselves on Christmas treats, my energies were focused on the exploding of Miss Wasply. It was like being caught up in a carefully choreographed dance, one step leading inexorably onwards to the next, and then the next, and then the next, and so on, and so on. I lost myself in the rhythm of murder. I danced the gunpowder tango. It was all so very obvious and easy. All so engrossing. And all the while, an unsuspecting Miss Wasply was nightly soaping her armpits atop a small but growing mound of high explosive.
After days of feverish preparation I crept up to the bathroom for the last time. Crouching under the bathtub, I pushed one end of a makeshift fuse (string soaked in methylated spirits) into the matchbox, and ran the other up behind a pipe, through a vent in the wall and so downwards into the alley below. Things very nearly fell apart at this final stage, when my intended victim came back upstairs unexpectedly. Fortunately, however, she was so intent on twisting my ear and informing me what a vile, thieving little sneak I was for invading the sanctuary of her private bathroom that she quite failed to notice the thin thread of fuse emerging from the air vent high up in the wall.
‘Gross little boy,’ she spat, dragging me back down the stairs. ‘If you belonged to me I’d give you a jolly good spanking!’
‘Sorry, Miss Wasply,’ I said humbly. ‘I promise I won’t do it again. Really I do.’
I now had a quite brilliant means of disposing of the old boot, yet I held back from lighting the fuse at my first available opportunity. I hadn’t yet told Emily of my murderous intentions, and had a nagging feeling that she wouldn’t approve.
It wasn’t until a week or so later, as the Christmas holidays drew to a close, that I felt I was ready to bring my plans to fruition.
On the night in question I clambered into bed fully clothed, pulling the sheets up to my neck so Mrs Eggs wouldn’t notice I was still dressed when she came to give me my good-night kiss. I pretended to go to sleep. I got up again, crept downstairs, sneaked out of the house and hurried over to Baker Street. I looked left and right and then slipped into the sooty alleyway that ran down the side of Emily’s home. I located my hanging fuse. I pulled out a box of matches. I took a deep breath. Finally, I looked up at the bathroom, where, as I knew she would be, Miss Wasply was splashing around in her bath, just as she did every night at this hour, regular as clockwork. Steam billowed from the window, and I could hear a faint sound of singing.
Onward, Christian soldiers,
Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before.
It crossed my mind that I hadn’t used enough gunpowder – or perhaps too much – but there was no turning back now. Without further ado, like the climax to a particularly vigorous polka, I struck a match and held it to the fuse, standing on tiptoes because its end was swaying two feet above my head. A thin tongue of orange-blue flame swept upwards into the night, hissed through the air vent and disappeared into the bathroom.
Christ, the royal master,
Leads against the foe,
Forward into battle
See his banners—
The last word was drowned out in an ear-splitting boom. The alleyway lit up momentarily in infernal shades of red, a fist of smoke and debris punched out of the bathroom window and, at the same instant, like a cork out of a champagne bottle, Miss Dorothy Wasply’s large iron bathtub, with her still in it, blasted straight through the roof of the house and up into the night sky, rising to a height of some 20 feet above the chimney-pots before coming down with a crash on to the roof of a neighbouring residence.
Such was my short-sightedness then – and, indeed, throughout my life – it never occurred to me to think beyond the thrilling act of murdering Emily’s governess. I th
ought that life could go on as before, that my friendship with Emily would somehow continue unchecked or, at the very least, Emily would write to me. Which of course she didn’t. Every day I expected a letter, but none ever came, and eventually I stopped expecting altogether. In the absence of anything else to take my mind off the pain, I started working very hard at school.
‘Remarkable improvements,’ said my report at the end of the first term after Emily’s departure. ‘Young Phoenix really has become a completely different person.’
There are about 30 inches left at the bottom of this wall, and I shall fill them – scrunching my letters up a little so as to fit them all in – not so much with an anecdote as a brief snapshot of a moment of my past.
The time is June 1919 – 13th June, to be precise. I have just seen my father for the last time, and have left him sitting in his workshop with a colander on his head. I am due to catch a train down to Hampshire, for dinner with Meaty, but have a half-hour or so to kill before I need to be at the station, and therefore decide to take a brief turn around the garden at White Lodge. Somewhere deep within me I suspect it will be the last time I will see it, and I wish to store up some memories to fuel me through my life.
I run my hand along the garden wall – its brickwork buckled and bulging; its beard of ivy now, for the most part, dead – and for old times’ sake climb the plum tree. I poke into the shrubbery where Emily and I used to build camps, and throw stones into the algaed pond. I breathe the air, and kneel down to sniff the grass, and remember all the happy days I’ve spent there.
I do all this, and then turn to go back into the house. As I do so, however, something catches my eye, at the very far end of the garden, half hidden in the long grass that tufts about the foot of the wall. I cross to it, and pull it out. It is an old punctured red ball, with which, evidently, no one has played for a good ten years. I turn it over in my hands a couple of times, and then, calmly, collectedly, without fuss, drop kick it over the wall and into the park beyond. I smile, and then set off to murder Prince Gummy-Molars.