by Andy Maslen
“It is time to face her. I will be with you.”
54
Oxford Road, Putney, 6th March 2009
Stella blinked in the sunlight. The day was unseasonably warm and Putney smelled as if spring were finally here. The London Plane trees were in bud and a few daffodils peeped out of window boxes or the postcard-sized patches of earth people in this part of southwest London called front gardens.
I know this road, she thought.
She turned to look up and down the street. More or less identical terrace houses of late Victorian vintage, brick-built with painted concrete window ledges and lintels. Front doors in bright yellows, blues, greens and blacks, ornamented with brass, chrome and brushed aluminium letter boxes, knobs, keyholes and knockers.
Halfway between where she stood and the northern end of the road stood a squat red cylinder. A pillar-box-red cylinder. A pillar box. With a domed top, scalloped around its edge like a pie-crust.
No. Not here. Please, not here.
The street was quiet, although here and there a lone pedestrian walked home, swinging a carrier bag from Marks & Spencer, or a smart leather briefcase. Plenty of professional people lived in Oxford Road. The only ones who could afford to these days. Doctors, accountants, executives.
Lawyers.
Human-rights lawyers.
Richard Drinkwater was a human-rights lawyer.
Or he had been until the side of his head met that pretty, red pie-crust doing thirty miles per hour.
After that, Richard Drinkwater wasn’t anything except dead. Nor was his baby daughter, who burned to death strapped into the car seat her doting parents had bought to keep her safe.
Stella heard the screech of tyres and spun round. Nobody else seemed to have heard the noise. The roar of flames and the soft whoomp of an exploding petrol tank seemed not to bother the homeward-bound city workers.
The road was empty of traffic. No smashed and burning 1974 Fiat Mirafiori. No Bentley Mulsanne with a bruised flank, painted in Viola Del Diavolo and careening down the street before swinging wildly round the corner.
With a coordinated slam that echoed inside Stella’s head, all the workers shut themselves in behind their gaily-painted front doors.
No. Not all the workers. One remained outside. She stood in the middle of the street, between the two pavements, just ten feet away. She spread her hand wide and grinned horribly at Stella.
“Miss me, did you, babe?” she called out. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? One final throw of the dice to decide who gets to go home with the body and who gets to FUCK OFF into the ether?”
Stella felt a rage banking up inside her. She clenched her fists and found that her right was curled around her little helper. The leather tube of pound coins had come in so useful in the past. Now it would again.
“Why here?” she yelled at Other Stella.
“Why do you think? This is where I was born.”
Blinking back tears, Stella spoke in a low voice.
“No. This is where she died. Where my Lola died.”
Other Stella laughed, then raised her bunched fists to her screwed up eyes and twisted them in a grotesque parody of grief, as a child would do.
“Oh, boo hoo. Get over it!” She adopted a weepy, actressy voice. “They killed my baby. Oh, my little baby is dead.” Then she snarled. “Listen, you whiny bitch, we got them. Just Collier to go and then it’s like I said. Open season on everyone who ever shared a meal, a car or a bed with them. The streets are going to run red by the time I’m through with them, but for fuck’s sake, Stel, move on! OK, they shouldn’t have killed Richard and Lola, but the more I think about it, PPM were doing a good job. Killing rapists, paedophiles, lawyered-up gangsters. You couldn’t see justice done, so they did. You said it yourself a million times. ‘The fucking jury got it wrong.’ Maybe it’s time we took justice back where it belongs. On the streets.”
Stella stood there, open-mouthed, trying to process what she had just heard. The blood was roaring in her ears like a tide.
She marched out into the road and grabbed Other Stella by the throat with her left hand and smashed the little helper into her face.
And Other Stella laughed, wiping the blood from her broken nose. With a shake of her head, like a cat flicking milk from its whiskers, she undid the damage. The nose was straight again, the blood gone.
Other Stella bared her teeth, and Stella noticed she’d lost an incisor. She stretched her hands out, fingers curled like talons. Stella reached out and pulled them hard, so that the skin parted company with the muscles, tendons and bones beneath.
Seizing Stella by the left arm with one of the bloody claws, she pulled her close until their faces were just a couple of inches apart.
“This is the bit where you say, ‘you win.’”
Then she pushed her right hand against Stella’s chest, over the heart.
With a lurching sensation, Stella felt Other Stella’s hand begin to move through her breast, and the muscle beneath, in towards her ribcage. Instinctively she knew she mustn’t let Other Stella’s questing fingers reach her heart. She tried to push away but Other Stella’s grip was like a pair of Metropolitan Police handcuffs.
“No!” she grunted. Then she screamed it to with full force: “NO!”
And in her head, she heard George Painted-Turtle’s voice.
— Show her you have the power. Not her. The maji-manidoo has no power before a superior being. Imagine a totem pole. Old Stella is at the bottom. The maji-manidoo sits above her. But you. You are New Stella. You sit at the top, above them both. You are in charge. Act now. Banish her.
Stella summoned up her dearest, sweetest memories of the brief months she shared with Richard and Lola: picnics, late-night nursery rhymes when Lola wouldn’t go down, cuddles and tickling games, bedtime stories and splashy baths when everyone got soaked. With a scream, she reared back, knocking Other Stella’s clutching hand aside. Then she punched hard, against her chest.
(the fist slid through the flesh)
“You,” she screamed,
(and broke through the ribs)
“Aren’t”
(and squeezed the pulsating heart)
“REAL!”
Feeling the stuttering pump twitching in her grip, she jerked her fist free in a welter of blood. In front of her, Other Stella rocked back on her heels. Stella held the quivering heart out and crushed it into a red mess between her fingers.
Other Stella’s mouth opened wide in an O. Her skin lost its colour. Light from the far side of the street began showing through her features. The red hole in her chest widened and ribbons of blood streamed away into the air above her head. Her whole body was translucent, now, and if she was screaming, Stella couldn’t hear it.
She stepped back and watched as Other Stella lost her edges, and the red hole expanded wider and wider until, with a tearing sound, she vanished.
Stella looked down at her right hand. It was still clenched. She willed herself to relax the cramping muscles and unfold her fingers. Her hand was empty. The blood was gone.
Around her, people were chatting with their neighbours as they returned from work, bending to stroke a neighbourhood cat, or stooping to smell flowers in a window box beside their shiny front door.
She heard George’s voice again.
— She is gone.
— What if she comes back?
— She will not come back. You confronted the maji-manidoo face to face. You did not do this before.
Stella wondered how he could be so sure. She turned and walked back to the pavement. Wondered how she would get home to West Hampstead and her new house in Ulysses Road. Oh, but Jason is selling it for me. I have nowhere to live. I have—
55
Alone Again
— To wake up. I have to wake up!
“I have to wake up,” she gasped, scrambling to sit up.
The sudden change in altitude swamped her with nausea and vertigo and she leaned on both palms until t
he lurching in her guts settled down into a more manageable queasiness.
Beside her, George sat, cross-legged, as before. He took her chin softly between thumb and forefinger and tilted her face up to his. Staring into her eyes he muttered something to himself in Ojibway. Then he smiled.
“You are back among the living. Your maji-manidoo is gone. You did well.”
Stella blinked back tears.
“How can you be sure? It felt real but how can a single magic mushroom, sorry, ozha—?”
“Ozhaawashko-aniibiish.”
“Ozhaawashko-aniibiish,” she stumbled over the Ojibway words, but persevered, “trip do away with, with,” she tapped her temple, “all of that?”
George took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet then settled her into the rocking chair. He knelt in front of her.
“There are two answers. If you are a sceptic, you want the gichi-mookomaan answer. Which, before you ask, I know from talking to Ken. And Google. There is plenty of evidence that psychedelic drugs like mescaline and psilocybin can help treat PTSD and other mental health disorders. Also, when you have to share your mind with a second version of you, there is a line of thinking called perceptual control theory. Basically, for you, Other Stella was above you in a hierarchy of control systems.”
“And so in my vision, when you talked about the totem pole, that was giving me a higher position still?”
“Exactly.”
“But tell, me, how could you speak to me in my vision? You weren’t, I mean, actually there in my head with me, were you?”
George shook his head.
“No. Not in the way you mean, anyway. But I took the drug with you and breathed the air of the burnt sage with you. I felt my way into your mind when I was telling you the story of the first shaman. I gave you suggestions then that would help you when you met her.”
“You said that was the explanation for white people. Sceptics. What about the other explanation? For believers?”
George sat back and smiled.
“For that you would need to belong to the Lac La Croix. By birth. Or by marriage. So unless you are thinking of proposing to Ken, who is single, by the way, you will have to content yourself with the first explanation.”
Stella smiled.
“In that case, can I ask another question?”
“Yes.”
“Please can we go and get something to eat? I’m starving.”
The following day, Stella woke at seven, feeling refreshed and so clear-headed it was as if she’d come off a month-long detox. George had returned her watch, phone and the ID documents she wore round her middle in a money belt. They sat, in a neat heap, at the foot of the bed. An hour later, after finding George at the town hall, and thanking him, again, for treating her, she was sitting next to Ken in his truck. They’d arranged to drive into Lac La Croix, where Stella would settle her bill for the room with Maureen, collect her rucksack and buy a pair of walking boots and a warmer jacket, then return with Ken to the reservation.
By 2.00 p.m., she was standing on a rough plank jetty that poked out into the lake like a long wooden tongue. Moored to one of the wooden poles was a clinker-built rowing boat with a black outboard motor bolted to its transom. Ken was sitting at the back. She handed her rucksack, which bulged with the extra clothes, down to Ken, then took his hand and stepped into the boat, sitting on one of the two highly polished thwarts. Once she was secure, she unshouldered her daysack, which contained a couple of bottles of water, some energy bars, the rest of the US dollars, the Model .38 and the remaining ammunition.
The trip across the lake took an hour. Ken was mostly silent, only speaking to point out natural phenomena. A trout, jumping free of the sparklingly clear lake water in a flash of silvery-pink, before splashing back. A sea eagle, soaring above them then swooping down in a power dive, talons outstretched, and regaining the air with a threshing silver fish clamped tight beneath it.
On the far side, the American side, he jumped out into water that reached mid-calf and pulled the boat into shore with the painter. He signalled for Stella to sit still while he tied the rope round a sapling then held his hand out for Stella. She shouldered her rucksack and grabbed her daysack with one hand before taking Ken’s hand and stepping onto American soil.
“We have an hour’s walk,” Ken said. “My cousin will meet us in Voyageurs National Park. She’ll take you on from there.”
“Cousin?”
“Judith Fairbrother. She’s a full-blood Chippewa of the Red Lake Band.”
The forest floor was springy underfoot with leaf mould and pine needles. Around them, insects buzzed and chittered, and Stella had to slap away mosquitos. After fifty-five minutes they emerged into a clearing fringed with birch and oak. On the far side, a dirt road curved away through thicker forest. Fresh-cut logs had been stacked in a long wall six feet high. As they walked past it, Stella caught the smell of sap from the cut ends of the logs, bright orange against the dull greenish-brown of the bark. A distant mechanical noise broke the silence. It sounded like a bike engine. It was getting closer. Ken turned to her.
“That will be Judith. I told her to meet us here at three.”
Stella checked her watch: 2.55 p.m.
With a roar, a big quad-bike burst into the clearing. The racket startled a covey of pheasants, which clattered out of a birch tree cackling in alarm, their red eye patches like splotches of blood.
The rider brought the quad to a stop in front of them. She was smiling at Ken.
“Hey, cousin. How are you?” she asked, smoothing a long plait of dark-brown hair through her fingers.
“I’m good. Good. How are you?”
“Yeah, good, too. This your friend?”
“Stella, this is my cousin, Judith Fairbrother.”
The woman dismounted, her long limbs graceful in comparison to the squat, mechanical look of the quad bike. She came to Stella, hand outstretched, the megawatt smile flashing white teeth against her reddish-brown skin.
“Hey, Stella. Pleased to meet you.”
“You, too. Thanks for coming to help me out.”
Judith shrugged.
“You’re a friend of Ken’s. That’s all I need to know. Now, let’s get your stuff stowed and we’ll take off.” She turned to Ken. “I’ll see you soon. We need a proper catch-up.”
He nodded.
Stella turned to him, arms wide.
“Hug,” she said. A demand, not a question.
He complied and she held him tight for a few seconds before releasing him. She looked up into his eyes.
“Thank you. For everything.”
He nodded. Emotions seemed to make him even more taciturn than normal.
“You have my cell number. Do what you have to do in Chicago, then call me. We’ll get you out the same way we got you in.”
She nodded and patted her pocket.
Five minutes later, Stella’s bags were secure beneath a black nylon cargo net, and she was sitting behind Judith, hands gripping the grab handles by her thighs. She let go with her right to stretch out towards Ken. He took it briefly then let go and turned to walk back through the trees to his boat.
Judith twisted round.
“You all set?”
“Yup. Let’s go.”
Judith started the quad bike and motored round in a sedate circle before opening the throttle and powering away from the clearing, taking Stella a step closer to her target.
56
Welcoming Party
Not used to London’s geography, still less that of its outer lying boroughs, Callie offered a silent prayer to whichever egghead had invented satnav. The final, well-modulated announcement signalled the end of her journey southwest out of central London towards Richmond this busy Saturday morning.
“You have reached your destination.”
“Indeed I have, you toffee-nosed English cow,” she said.
‘Your destination’ was an imposing Victorian red brick house, of which only the top floor w
as visible behind a tall laurel hedge. Access was barred by a pair of wooden gates. Callie climbed out and pressed the button on the intercom. She’d called ahead, so after she’d given her name, Jason Drinkwater’s metallic voice squawked an ‘OK’ and the gates swung open on silent hinges.
The gravel crunched and popped beneath the tyres of Callie’s pool car as she eased it through the gates and up the drive. She parked next to a black BMW M5 and a bright-yellow Audi TT convertible. Nice to see southern estate agents make as much as their Scottish counterparts, she thought to herself, then chided herself for displaying, even internally, that streak of enviousness her mother disapproved of. If you want what other people have, Calpurnia, she used to say, then stop complaining, get up off your bottom and work for it.
She walked up to the front door, which was painted a beautiful shade of pale blue, like a bird’s egg, and rang the doorbell. Within seconds, the door opened. The man who’d answered was good looking, in a conventional sort of way, she thought, summing him up with a practised, detective’s eye. He wore an expensive-looking sweater above his jeans and leather boat shoes.
“You must be Detective Superintendent McDonald,” he said, holding out his hand. “Come in.”
She shook his hand, warm, dry, as she’d expected.
“Please, call me Callie.”
“OK, well you should call me Jason. Come on, I’ll introduce you to Elle.”
Elle Drinkwater was sitting in a carver chair at one end of a long, scrubbed-pine table in the kitchen, breastfeeding a tiny baby. She smiled at Callie and Callie thought she’d never seen anyone who looked more contented.
“Hello. I’m Elle. Sorry I can’t get up but…” she gestured with her free hand at the baby, “Madam just decided she was hungry again.”
Callie smiled back.
“Nice to meet you, Elle. I’m Callie. And who’s this?”
