Herring Girl

by Debbie Taylor

  ‘You what?’ This isn’t what Paul’s expecting at all.

  ‘I feel I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Too right.’

  ‘Look, can I come in for a sec? I promise I won’t keep you long.’

  Somehow he’s in through the door before Paul can stop him, and is parking his bum on the sofa, cosy as you like.

  ‘Hey, this looks a good spread,’ he comments, helping himself to a prawn cracker. ‘You don’t mind, do you? I haven’t stopped since breakfast.’

  Paul feels a bit of a prat, with the TV on and the cartons all open, like he’s been caught pigging out in his pyjamas. ‘Help yourself,’ he says. ‘I’ll never get through it all. I always order too much.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind.’ Ian picks up Paul’s fork and digs into the chow mein. ‘Hey this is great. Thanks, mate. You’ve saved my life.’

  ‘Do you want a beer?’ Paul finds himself asking as he walks through to the kitchen for another fork. ‘There’s more cans in the fridge. Do you need a glass?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks, great,’ says the Ian bloke, swigging from Paul’s tin of Stella. ‘Is it OK if I slosh some soy on the rice?’ he asks, and reaches for the Kikkoman.

  ‘Ben’s in his room,’ Paul says, sitting down and forking into the special fried.

  ‘Good,’ says Ian with his mouth full. ‘It’s probably better that he doesn’t hear this.’

  ‘Hear what? What’s all this about?’

  ‘Sorry, mate. You know how it is when you’re really hungry? Low blood sugar and all that. I’ll be human again in a minute.’

  They tuck in in silence for a while, while Clarkson rabbits on about the Fantasy Car of the Year, a Ferrari 430 Scuderia.

  ‘They cost an arm and a leg, those fucking things,’ Ian comments, scooping up a slurp of sweet and sour with a prawn cracker and cramming it into his mouth. ‘And where do you find a mechanic when it goes wrong? Right. Yes, where was I?’

  ‘Something about Dr Charlton.’ Paul’s trying to hang on to his indignation, but all this chummy eating is taking the wind out of his sails.

  ‘Yes. Right. Sorry. Bear with me a sec. I want to show you something.’

  He wipes his hands on a piece kitchen roll and pulls a North Tyneside A‒Z out of his backpack. One of the North Shields pages is marked with a yellow Post-it. ‘Right, this red blob marks the house in Seymour Street where Lord Jim of the Jungle lived in 1967. And this other red blob is where a little girl called Mary Charlton lived at the same time. Not a million miles away, right?’

  Paul shrugs, wondering where the bloke’s going with this.

  ‘Now little Mary had a child-minder in the summer of 1967, and that child-minder turns out to have been Lord Jim’s housekeeper, the lovely Miss Edith Turnbull – a lady you might remember from your brief sojourn on the good doctor’s sofa the other day.’

  ‘The silly old trout? Fucking hell!’ Paul has to admit that’s a weird coincidence.

  The Ian bloke looks pleased. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’

  ‘So? Why should I be interested in this?’

  Ian crunches up some more prawn crackers. ‘Because, my friend, this means that Dr Mary Charlton might actually be pulling the wool over our eyes.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Ian wipes his hands again and pulls one of those old-fashioned cardboard-bound notebooks out of the backpack. ‘It’s all in here, mate,’ he says, slapping the notebook on the table. ‘The personal diary of Miss Edith Lillian Turnbull aged, oh, I don’t know, sixty-five and three-quarters, give or take.’ He jabs his fork into the chow mein and slurps up a massive dripping mouthful. ‘Look, do you mind turning the sound down on the telly?’ he says. ‘I can’t hear myself think.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Paul, a bit shamefaced, burrowing down between the leather cushions for the remote. He’d forgotten that posh people have a thing about talking with the TV on.

  ‘OK, here’s what I think’s been happening,’ says Ian. ‘I think that this whole mystery has been cooked up by Dr Charlton from information she saw, or read, or overheard, about a missing herring girl called Annie, when she was being looked after by Miss Turnbull forty years ago. And it’s been reignited, catalysed, whatever, by Ben turning up and telling her about his secret friend, who was also – coincidentally – called Annie.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’ Paul drains his glass and pops another can.

  ‘Hang on,’ says Ian, raising his fork like the conductor of some orchestra. ‘I haven’t finished. I’ve been looking into a few of these cases of reincarnation and there’s been quite a lot of research – as you might expect – by people trying to prove or disprove the phenomenon. Well, in some of the cases they’ve investigated, the child who’s supposedly been reincarnated turns out to have had access to information about the person they claim to have been in a past life.

  ‘So there was this really famous case back in 1952 of an American woman – Virginia Tighe – who was hypnotized by a man called Morey Bernstein. What is it with American names? Anyway, under hypnosis, this Virginia woman started jabbering away in a broad Irish accent and said her name was Bridey Murphy, who was born in Cork in 1798, then married and moved to Belfast, where she died in 1864.

  ‘Bernstein was convinced he’d stumbled on a case of reincarnation, because Virginia was born in the Midwest, had been brought up by her Norwegian uncle in Colorado, and had never been out of the country. Yet there she was nattering on about the minutiae of life in nineteenth-century Ireland.

  ‘Well, it turned out that before she went to live with her uncle at the age of three, baby Virginia lived with her natural parents, who were both – you guessed it – part Irish. What’s more, an Irish immigrant called Bridey Murphy Corkell lived across the road from her uncle’s parents’ house in Chicago, which the family visited when Virginia was a kid.’

  Paul’s beginning to catch on. ‘So, she made up all this stuff about Bridey Murphy from things she’d picked up as a nipper?’

  ‘All totally innocent, of course.’

  ‘And you’re saying that this is what happened with the doc too, right? When she was a bairn.’

  ‘Got it in one. I think that Mary must have overheard Miss Turnbull talking about Lord Jim to one of her cronies, and sneaked a read of her diary. Maybe she even met the great man himself one day, and asked him about his long-lost sister. Who knows? The point is, she had every opportunity: she lived practically round the corner and was seeing Miss Turnbull almost every day that summer.’

  ‘What does the doc say about all this?’

  ‘Claims she never saw any diary and never went to the house. But I reckon that little Mary realized that there was a bit of a mystery about what happened to this Annie. So she let her childish imagination run riot until she’d created a whole drama about knives and boyfriends.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain how she got all that stuff about Lord Jim into my head, though. Christ, I can still see him sitting in that wheelchair.’ Paul shudders.

  ‘That could have been simple hypnotic suggestion. All she had to do was get you to, in quotes, “remember” what she’d read in the diaries as a kid, about the amputations and the Jungle and so on. It’s all in there,’ he says, flicking through the closely written pages. ‘You can check for yourself if you like.’ He picks up a spare rib and rips a length of sticky meat off it with his teeth. ‘Who knows, she might even have seen the poor old queen, being wheeled through the streets in all his finery after the op. That’s not a sight you’d forget in a hurry!’

  He drops the stripped rib onto the table, then picks up another and rips into it. ‘She did exactly the same thing with me,’ he remarks with his mouth full. ‘That’s how I know how you feel. It was after you stormed out, and she was talking about how she needed to track down someone else close to Annie – like her mother, for example. So I volunteer, like a muppet, and find myself living through the last agonizing minutes of Dory Milburn’s post-partum haemorrhage.’<
br />
  ‘And you reckon it was the doc who put that into your head too.’

  ‘How else would it get there? But this time the information must have come from all that research she’s been doing at the library. You should see what it’s like up there, Paul. She’s got that librarian at her beck and call, getting out maps and photos, checking out all the old census data. She’d researched Dory’s cause of death just days before she hypnotized me.

  ‘Anyway I got all excited – I mean, it all seems so fucking real, doesn’t it, when you’re under? And I mentioned it to an expert in the field – someone who’s been advising me about the programme – and she practically chewed my ear off. Didn’t I think it was suspicious that I just happened to, in quotes, “remember” being Annie’s mother barely an hour after saying how useful it would be for the film? Once she’d pointed it out, it seemed so obvious. Tell you the truth, I felt rather embarrassed. So I went off and started asking a few questions about Mary’s childhood.’

  ‘I still don’t see how the doc can make you remember things that didn’t happen.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying these things didn’t happen. The historical record proves that at least some of them did. All I’m saying is maybe they didn’t happen to you and me in a previous fucking life.’ He takes another swig of Stella. ‘Hypnotic suggestion’s a very powerful phenomenon, Paul. In fact you don’t even have to be hypnotized for someone to plant an idea in your mind. You must have seen those magic shows on the telly, where a punter draws a picture and seals it in an envelope and Derren Brown or whoever knows exactly what they’ve drawn?’

  Yes, Paul nods. He’s seen them – bloody uncanny.

  ‘So you know it’s all done with suggestion. At some time earlier in the show he’ll have planted the idea for the picture in the punter’s mind – and lo and behold that’s exactly what gets drawn.’

  ‘So you think the doc’s been doing something like that with me?’

  ‘How else would you come up with all that crazy stuff about Lord Jim of the Jungle?’

  ‘So can’t you do something? She can’t be allowed to get away with this. Put it in the film without her knowing, like they do with those Rogue Trader programmes. I don’t know, get hold of some old photos of the doc as a nipper with the old trout to prove the link; show the bits of the diary where she’s mentioned.’

  ‘I’m not sure we need to go that far,’ Ian says. ‘All we need to do is carry on filming with Ben, but investigate Mary at the same time to see whether she might have been putting all those ideas into his head. Then we’ll wheel on some experts to explain what I’ve just told you.’

  ‘And put an end to all this reincarnation nonsense once and for all.’ Paul can see how it would work.

  ‘Assuming that’s what’s happening – yes, that’s the general idea.’

  ‘Sounds all right to me,’ says Paul.

  ‘So you’re OK with Ben being back in the film?’ says Ian, getting out his Blackberry and making a note.

  ‘Sure. I’ll get back on that couch again myself too, if it will help.’

  Ian looks up in surprise. ‘Seriously? That would be bloody brilliant, mate. The doc’s itching to get you regressed to when Lord Jim was a young man.’

  ‘Anything to expose her game and stop her ruining any more lives.’

  ‘That’s a deal then.’

  They clink glasses.

  ‘Do you think she’s doing it on purpose?’ Paul asks.

  ‘That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it? Mary’s work is very important to her, so she’d have a strong motive for fabricating support for her theories. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s aware of what she’s doing. Everything we’ve been talking about could have been going on at an unconscious level.’

  ‘What, so she wants to believe in reincarnation so much she’s put those things into our heads to convince herself too? Talk about weird.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Clever Hans?’

  Paul shakes his head and pops another can. Now what?

  ‘OK, Clever Hans was a famous German horse who could do arithmetic. His owner used to hold up a problem on a card and Hans would paw the ground with his front hoof until he’d counted up to the correct number for the answer. For years he had everyone convinced – and made his owner a tidy packet on the show circuit. Until some sharp-eyed observer noticed that people watching the show would sort of tense their bodies as the correct number approached, then relax almost imperceptibly when it was reached. Well it turns out the horse had noticed that too, and that’s what he was responding to.’

  ‘Still pretty clever for a horse,’ comments Paul.

  ‘The point is, neither the owner nor the audience was aware of how they were influencing the horse.’

  ‘So the doc might be doing it without realizing.’

  ‘It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Look, thanks for all this. That beer really hit the spot.’

  ‘Do you fancy another?’ says Paul getting up.

  ‘Cheers, mate. But not a word to Ben, right? We don’t want him spilling the beans to the doc before the film’s finished.’

  ‌Chapter Forty-Nine

  …Am I talking to Annie? Good, now I’m going to take you back to the summer of 1898. Do you remember that day? It’s windy and your skirt’s blowing around your ankles. You’re walking along the top bank, looking out to sea for the Osprey, and when you see her, you decide you’re going to surprise Sam by meeting him as he steps off the boat. So you run down the steps to the quayside, but there’s something wrong. Tell me again what happens.

  1898

  There’s Da’s boat coming in, and all the others are pushing apart to make space for her. And it’s that quiet, all the shouting’s stopped. Lads all round are shushing each other, like they’re in church. So I’m ransacking the deck with my eyes, to find out what’s happened, and there’s Jimmy’s hoying the warp ashore to tie up; and Da’s at the tiller, and Tom’s reefing the mainsail.

  Sam must be below, I’m guessing, for I can’t see him up top; or maybe he’s down in the hold filling crans.

  Why are the older lads not helping him? Why are they just standing about on the deck? Why’s nobody fired up the capstan to haul the crans ashore?

  I push closer, and see Jimmy’s face, which is set as a stone; and Da’s, which is shattered as I’ve ever seen it, like he’s never slept for a fortnight. And Da must feel my eyes on him for he’s looking up, and reaching out a hand – for all that he’s a half furlong away still – and passes the tiller to Tom, and clambers over the cluttered deck towards the quay.

  Next thing I know, his big hand’s on my shoulder and he’s leading me away and telling me to be strong, for there’s been an accident and Sam’s gone overboard.

  But he’s wrong! Sam’s just gone below to get his sea-bag, I’m sure of it. Or he’ll be cranning herring in the hold. So I’m shaking Da off and running back to the quay, and pushing past the gawping crowds that have gathered, and hitching my skirt to climb onto the Osprey and find him myself.

  Now folk are shouting and Jimmy’s grabbed me, but I’ve fought him off, for I need to get to the hatch to look inside, but Tom’s pinned me from behind – and right in front of me, barring the way, is his da, Big John Hall. And my heart stops dead to see him, for there’s tears streaming down his face.

  If he’d been shouting like the rest, trying to stop me, I’d have fought on. But tears? Oh sweet Jesus, Big John Hall crying? Why’s he crying?

  Now somehow I’m back on the quayside, sitting on a stool someone’s fetched from somewhere, God knows, and looking at a broken herring between the toes of my boots, that’s been stood on, then dried out, and pecked at by seagulls, and will soon be nowt but white bones, flat as a nit comb.

  Jimmy’s putting a ditty box in my lap and says it’s Sam’s. I try to open it, but it’s locked. There’s a wee key on a bit string in Sam’s pocket; I felt it when he was warming my hand that time. I reme
mber thinking, here’s the key for his ditty box. I remember fingering it, marvelling how warm it was.

  I shake the box, and hear the mumble and tattle of his few things, and I can’t even think what they might be, I’ve known him such a short time. Sweeties, maybes? A bit soap, a bit money? A photo of his mam on her wedding day?

  And here’s Da squatting down beside me, and he’s saying that crotchboots are heavy as rocks, so Sam would have sunk in a moment; and the water’s that cold, even in summer, it knocks the breath out of a body. ‘So it were quick,’ he’s saying. And I’m saying, ‘You don’t know.’ And he’s saying, ‘Oh, Annie, pet. I’m so sorry. He was a grand lad.’

  So now I’m looking up at them all, at all the crew standing round, and asking didn’t anybody see anything, hear anything? And Tom’s telling how he got up to take a piss, and found the boat bucking in a heavy sea, and the tiller loose and the boom swinging and no one on deck.

  ‘Did you check in the water?’ I ask, and I know I must have asked it afore, but I never liked the answer, so I have to ask again, and again, until someone says something different.

  ‘We held the lamps over the water,’ says Jimmy, in a slow voice that says he’s told me this already. ‘But we couldn’t see him. So we shouted, then we listened. But it was pitch black, Annie, and the sea was so wild. What with the planks creaking and the sails flapping, even if he was shouting we’d never have heard him.’

  ‘But he wasn’t shouting, pet,’ says Da softly. ‘By that time he was long gone.’

  ‘But he can swim!’ I’m saying. ‘All the lads from the Wellesley can swim. He could be out there right now—’

  ‘We found his oily jacket,’ says Da. ‘One of the other crews hooked it out of the water.’

  ‘He must’ve taken it off so’s he could float better.’ I can see him flailing in the black water, shrugging it off, then taking a breath and reaching under to yank off his crotchboots. I can hear him yelling for help—