The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  IN THE SCHOOL LIBRARY, Sophie headed straight for the city directories, the outlines of a plan taking shape in her mind.

  The others would never believe what she said about IRYLNS. Telling them that she’d actually been there with Great-aunt Tabitha wouldn’t make any difference—it would just make her sound like a silly, self-important girl boasting about her influential relations.

  But what if Sophie went back to IRYLNS, sneaked in illicitly, and took pictures of the abuse? Then she could show the photographs to Jean and Priscilla and persuade them to change their minds. Sophie might still risk prison or worse, but she felt she couldn’t not do it. She put out of her head the thought that in another few months, it might be not just Jean and Priscilla but Sophie herself who would need to be saved.

  She’d no hope of getting into IRYLNS through the front door. They took security seriously there. But IRYLNS stood alongside research institutes where doctors actually saw patients. She could steal into one of those and find a way to slip out the back, reach the garden behind IRYLNS, and get into the building that way instead.

  The city council compiled a really useful directory that listed every Edinburgh street and its occupants, so that one could easily find, say, the names of every householder in Heriot Row, or the professor’s neighbors in back of the school tennis courts.

  Sophie flipped to the entry for Buccleugh Place and made a list of names and telephone numbers on the flyleaf of her history textbook.

  It was never easy to find a telephone at school. Girls were not supposed to telephone home without permission, so they had no regular access to one. Where could she find a telephone, and when would she be able to use it?

  Just then the librarian appeared and Sophie slammed the directory shut and blushed. At least there was nothing racy about what she had been reading, not like that mortifying time she’d been caught returning an overdue copy of Mesmeric Love.

  “Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to look,” said the librarian, smiling at her. “I wonder if I could prevail on you to man the helm, though, while I run down to the refectory for a cup of coffee?”

  “Of course,” said Sophie, who’d had a holiday job in the library the summer before. “Is there anything you’d like me to do while I’m here?”

  “Well, you could go through the file and check for overdue books,” said the librarian. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  Sophie took her place behind the desk, sorted out the cards for the overdue books, and wrote out the notices. All the while, the telephone squatted like an alluring toad at the back of the office.

  She wished she’d asked the librarian for permission to make a few calls. Surely she wouldn’t have said no, and then Sophie wouldn’t feel such a heel for taking advantage. It might be days before she got another shot at a telephone, though, and by the weekend all the doctors’ offices would be closed, so the phone at Great-aunt Tabitha’s wouldn’t do her any good. Anyway, she was contemplating breaking into a top-secret government facility. It was ridiculous having scruples about making a telephone call without permission.

  A minute later Sophie had the receiver in her hand and was asking the operator to put through a call. She let the phone ring for ages at the Osteopathic Consultancy and then at the Clinic for Research into Disorders of the Thyroid, but nobody answered. Well, it was only just after eight o’clock. Most offices didn’t open until nine or even half past.

  She put through a third call, fearing that she’d need to find another telephone later on in the day—the librarian would be back at any moment—when she was startled by a young woman’s voice.

  “Braid Institute for Neurohypnosis,” said the telephone receptionist. “How can I help you?”

  “You come very highly recommended by a friend,” Sophie said, trying to sound adult, “and I wonder whether you might squeeze me in for an appointment.”

  She was proud of having used the word squeeze; it seemed like the kind of thing a woman in her thirties might say.

  “We’re terribly busy just now,” said the receptionist, sounding genuinely sorry. “That is,” she added in a brighter voice, “unless you’d be able to come in at very short notice.”

  Very short notice was exactly what Sophie wanted. She said as much, then listened to the girl on the other end of the line flip through the clinic appointment book.

  “We’ve got a cancellation tomorrow afternoon—that’s Thursday the seventh—at four thirty. Would you be able to take it?”

  Sophie felt like doing a celebratory dance right there in the office. Why, it couldn’t have been better if she’d picked the time herself!

  The receptionist sounded delighted when Sophie accepted the slot.

  “You’ll not regret it,” she told Sophie confidentially. “Our Mr. Braid’s a remarkable man, quite remarkable. And don’t forget your national insurance card, all right, hen?”

  Sophie replaced the receiver in its cradle with relief. She’d have no trouble getting to that appointment—she’d go along with the others to tennis practice, pop in to say good-bye to Mikael (she ignored the feeling of her stomach turning inside out), and then take the tram down to the university. Since her appointment fell near the end of the day, it shouldn’t be hard to arrange to be somehow left behind when the building closed. The Braid Institute stood right next door to IRYLNS, and she could easily climb over the wall in the garden and go on from there.

  Shortly after three o’clock the following afternoon, Sophie wriggled through the gap in the wall into the professor’s back garden. Mikael knelt by one of the flower beds, a heap of weeds at his side.

  Beside him, the professor’s handsome Great Dane lay sprawled on the warm flagstones of the garden path, too lazy to do anything more than raise his head and greet Sophie with mournful eyes. It was ridiculous how sad that dog could look, she thought, leaning to scratch the ridges of his harlequin brow.

  “Sophie!” said Mikael, scrambling to his feet and wiping his hands on his trousers. “I was afraid I might not see you before I left.”

  His brisk, careless manner rubbed Sophie the wrong way.

  “I can’t stay long,” she said, hating how stiff she sounded. She had Nan’s camera in her pocket with fresh film in it—Nan could refuse Sophie nothing now (a haunted generosity of which Sophie had promised herself not to take advantage). “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment near the university at half past four, and I mustn’t be late.”

  Mikael gave her a sharp look.

  “Anything I should know about?” he said.

  She avoided meeting his eyes—oh, why did she have to be in such turmoil? “No, nothing,” she said, “just an ordinary appointment.”

  Mikael frowned.

  “Then why are you skiving off from tennis practice? Wouldn’t your school usually send you to the doctor with a teacher, or something like that?”

  Sophie had forgotten Mikael’s quickness.

  “All right,” she said, “it’s not just an ordinary appointment, but I’ve promised not to say anything about it.”

  “Why can’t you trust me, Sophie?” Mikael said. He sounded angry, and it turned Sophie’s heart stony.

  “I do trust you,” she said, patting the dog’s mastodon skull. “But sometimes the fewer people who know something, the better.”

  Why did she have such a strong impulse to punish Mikael just now, and how did it come about that not telling him things seemed the best way to do it?

  Mikael looked hurt, then pensive.

  “It’s almost as if you want me to be angry with you,” he said.

  They went through into the house. The professor was out, but Mrs. Lundberg stepped out of the kitchen to give Sophie a kiss, throwing up her hands in despair when she realized that Mikael actually intended to wear his filthy gardening trousers outside in the street.

  “Back shortly, Aunt Solvej,” he said. “Sophie’s not stopping for tea; she’s got a doctor’s appointment. I ban you from lifting even a finger in the garden while I’m
gone—I’ll have plenty of time to finish the weeding before tea.”

  At the tram stop in Canongate, they checked the timetable. Sophie had just missed a tram, and it would be ten minutes before the next one.

  She and Mikael looked at each other, neither quite knowing what to say.

  “Don’t worry, Sophie,” Mikael said. “You’ll work it all out. Look, can I buy you an ice cream?”

  The unexpected niceness of the suggestion caught Sophie off guard. Mikael smiled back at her, and some of the tension between them fell away.

  “So what about that ice cream?” Mikael said, pointing to the small shop on the other side of the road.

  “I’m not really hungry,” Sophie said, realizing with dismay that she could hardly bear the thought of Mikael leaving.

  “But it’s Luca’s! You can always eat an ice cream from Luca’s, can’t you?” Mikael said.

  It was true that Luca’s ice cream, manufactured in Musselburgh and sold in shops and kiosks all over Edinburgh, was smoother and whiter and colder and creamier than anything you could imagine, like something the twelve dancing princesses might have eaten out of crystal goblets at their nightly balls.

  So Mikael bought two ice cream cornets and they sat and licked them on the bench at the tram stop, Sophie trying hard not to jump up every minute to look out for the tram.

  “Sophie?” Mikael said.

  “What?”

  “I really want you to come with me to Denmark.”

  Sophie had prepared herself to greet such an observation with indifference, but she felt a deep stab of regret that she couldn’t shuck off her responsibilities and go with Mikael to København. Adults would laugh at the idea of a schoolgirl having responsibilities, but they’d forgotten what life at this age was really like.

  Tears welled up in her eyes and she shook her head with great vehemence instead of answering Mikael in words. Oh, if only she hadn’t realized she was in love with him! She couldn’t shake the feeling of Mikael making this offer out of something like pity. She would be damned if she’d accept an invitation chiefly motivated by pity. Better to stay and risk the consequences.

  “I know what you’ll say,” Mikael went on, ignoring Sophie’s psychic plea for him to shut up. “Your exams. Your great-aunt. Your school friends. The minister of public safety. The Brothers of the Northern Liberties.”

  As he ticked each item off on his fingers, Sophie painfully regretted not having told him anything about IRYLNS, in some ways the most clear and present danger of all. If he knew about that, he’d insist on her coming with him. If only she could tell him!

  She clamped her lips tightly shut.

  “You can change your mind, you know, Sophie,” Mikael said. “Changing your mind isn’t a bad thing. You’re free to decide you’re not responsible for the whole world. My mother will take you in, no question, and there’s a good English-language high school that’s even on the right tram route. I can’t imagine your great-aunt would kick up much of a fuss, not if she thought you really wanted it. I don’t know—I can’t explain, exactly—but something in you just isn’t thriving in Edinburgh.”

  With great relief, Sophie saw the tram come around the corner. She surprised herself by flinging her arms around Mikael. Then she pushed him away and got in line to board.

  But Mikael’s hand rested again on her arm, the stickiness of the ice cream attaching his fingers lightly to her skin.

  “Won’t you go now?” she cried out.

  “Sophie, my ship’s the Gustavus Adolphus, sailing on Saturday at nineteen hundred hours—that’s seven o’clock in the evening—from pier sixteen at Leith. Will you remember that? Just in case something blows up between now and then—”

  Sophie winced.

  “No, not literally, you idiot. Figuratively. If something goes terribly wrong and you decide things have changed—that it’s too dangerous to stay here and you’ll come with me after all—you can still change your mind, as long as you reach the ship in time. Don’t worry about the visa. There are ways of getting around it. My brother will help you if you need it. Oh, Sophie, just be careful, won’t you?”

  “You, too, Mikael,” she said. “Do take care!”

  The driver had stopped. If she didn’t hurry, she’d never make the appointment on time.

  She tore herself away from Mikael and up the steps into the tram.

  THIRTY-SIX

  IT TOOK HARDLY ANY time at all to get to Hume Close. Sophie crossed the road and walked into Buccleugh Place with a good fifteen minutes to spare, feeling terribly exposed as she walked past Adam Smith College.

  The receptionist inside the Braid Institute took her national insurance card and showed her where to wait. The hall outside the waiting room had an exit at the back into the garden, a heavy door with panels of frosted glass. If Sophie could just nerve herself up, it wouldn’t be hard to open and shut the front door as a decoy, so that it sounded as though she’d gone, and then race down the hall and let herself out the back door into the garden. And hope she didn’t find herself trapped there, she added to herself, though there was almost always some way out of a garden.

  Just thinking about sneaking around was making her pulse race so fast she was practically hyperventilating. To calm herself down, Sophie picked up a sample of the waiting-room literature, an odd-looking pamphlet called How to Magnetize.

  It was not long before Mr. Braid appeared in the waiting room, his face humorous and weather-beaten, an attractive contrast to the impeccably polished attire of his navy pin-striped suit and gleaming dress shoes. He shook Sophie’s hand; if he felt the sticky remnants of the ice cream, he was too polite to show it.

  Inside the consulting room, they established that Sophie had come to see if he could do anything about her limp.

  “In ordinary life,” said the specialist, “mind and body work together in tandem, with no clear ascendancy of the one over the other. In the trance state, the mind’s power over the body emerges in its full force. Under these conditions, the mind is sometimes able to cure the body of ailments as diverse as gallstones, ulcers, varicose veins, even broken limbs.”

  Broken limbs! How absurd. Sophie stifled the desire to laugh.

  “The magnetic trance makes sense of a host of otherwise inexplicable phenomena,” Mr. Braid continued, gesturing enthusiastically in the air. “Surely it’s only an illusion that humans have a finite and self-contained center of consciousness or will—I would venture to say that there is no such thing as a coherent self.”

  Sophie was pretty sure that she had a coherent self, and she thought Mr. Braid was probably sure he had a coherent self as well, but she schooled her expression so that he wouldn’t be able to tell she disagreed with him.

  “I am quite sure that we all possess a second self,” the doctor continued, “a self that lives an independent mental life and has ways of acquiring knowledge off limits to our everyday self.”

  Sophie’s second self wanted to laugh, but she didn’t give in to the impulse. Some of the most powerful theories of the twentieth century had elicited laughter, after all, and often from people who should have known better. Think of how many jokes one heard about Wittgenstein’s Uncertainty Principle, silly jokes whose punch lines stupidly made fun of the Austrian physicist’s incendiary hypothesis that one could know either the position or the velocity of a subatomic particle but never both at once.

  “Well, then, Miss Hunter,” said the doctor, “the order of the day will be to obtain from your second self an account of the accident that led to your limping.”

  “But I was a very small child,” Sophie protested. “I don’t remember anything about it.”

  “Your mind contains reservoirs of knowledge to which your conscious self lacks access,” said Mr. Braid, settling into his chair and rubbing his hands together in a gesture that might have been sinister if he hadn’t seemed so transparently well intentioned. “We won’t be able to do anything about the limp until we have learned as much as possible of its e
tiology, both physical and psychological.”

  Then, when Sophie continued to look skeptical: “Trust me, Miss Hunter. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and I still see new things every day, things that fill me with awe and gratitude that I am able to pursue this work. We’ll try a spot of automatic writing first. I’ll hypnotize you and then ask you to lay out whatever you can remember about the accident and your body’s own awareness of the physical damage that remains. Afterward you won’t remember anything that’s happened—”

  Sophie hoped this wouldn’t be the case….

  “—and I will keep the statement back from you until the end of your course of treatment, in case the knowledge should prove traumatic for your conscious self in these early stages of our working together.”

  What wouldn’t Sophie’s conscious self be able to face? She prided herself on her pragmatism and willingness to face facts.

  “How long is the usual course of treatment?” she asked the doctor.

  “It varies from case to case,” Braid said, “but twelve weeks wouldn’t be at all out of the ordinary. On your way out, ask Miss Tiptree to schedule your next appointment.”

  “Shall we begin?” said Sophie, unable to stop herself from looking at her watch. Twenty to five. Not bad. If she left it too much later, there’d be nothing to see next door but girls spooning mush into their mouths at supper.

  “Let me explain exactly what I’m about to do,” said the doctor. “In the early days, the mesmerist put his client into the trance state by means of an extraordinarily showy set of passes in the air. Do you know the sort of thing I mean?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Sophie.

  “It’s not nearly as flashy as the comic-book version, of course, but I will use my hands to help you pass into the mesmeric trance—”

  Sophie was suddenly much more nervous than she’d imagined about the prospect of being hypnotized. What if, when the doctor hypnotized her, she revealed to him her plan to infiltrate IRYLNS by way of Mr. Braid’s back garden?

  “—and then I’ll ask you a series of questions, to which you will write your answers with the pencil and paper I provide. I have found,” the doctor added as an afterthought, “that patients are less disturbed by the idea that their second self can communicate by means of writing than by the idea of another speaker borrowing the vocal machinery.”