Ashley had no idea what to expect when she reached number 723, certainly not that it wouldn't be there.
An alleyway crossed Clerkenwell Rise, on one side of it was number 721, on the other 725. Ashley stood in the middle of the street scratching her head. She looked on the other side of the street, but all of the numbers were even. She wandered down the narrow alleyway, thinking that perhaps number 723 was actually a gate in the back alley and not on Clerkenwell Rise at all, but it wasn't.
She tried the door of number 725.
It was locked.
She fished the ivory business card out of her patchwork satchel to make sure she'd read it right, despite the fact that she had checked it maybe one hundred times across the day.
723. No mistake.
When she looked up from the card she noticed a line of crows perched on the gutter of a shop across the street. They were bigger than any crow she'd seen before. Huge things. She suppressed a shudder and turned to look back at the puzzle of the missing building, wondering if perhaps it had been re-numbered or something since Aunt Elspeth was last here? Was that possible? Did things like that happen? Or could there be an entirely different Clerkenwell Rise in the city?
An old woman, weighted down with straining plastic bags filled with cat food and cornflakes shuffled towards her. Steel grey hair poked out from beneath her headscarf. Ashley stepped in front of her, causing the old woman to immediately try and side-step her, but before she could Ashley said, "Excuse me, I think I'm lost."
"Either you are or you aren't," the old woman said, setting her bags down. Even when she straightened up she barely came up to Ashley's chin.
"Well, I guess I am. I'm looking for number 723, but I can't seem to find it. That's number 721," she said, pointing to the end terrace on the other side of the narrow alleyway, "and this is number 725."
"Lots of places round here that ain't here anymore and ain't been here for more than sixty years, dearie. They burned down during the Blitz. Could be one of them?"
"Oh." Ashley said, not really sure what to say to that. "I guess I'm not lost after all, then. Erm. Thanks."
The old woman hefted her bags and shuffled on, leaving Ashley standing in the middle of the street to contemplate the house that wasn't there. She'd always known Aunt Elspeth was a bit 'special' but surely she wouldn't send her on a wild goose chase to a house that hadn't existed for decades? That wasn't special, that was just mean.
Ashley put the card back in her satchel. As she did, her fingers brushed against the four leaf clovered head of the key, and as she turned her head to look back at the incredibly long walk down the hill to the bus stop, grateful that it was downhill at least, she caught sight of a building she could have sworn wasn't there just a moment before. She couldn't understand how she had missed it. It was a narrow house in the middle of the alleyway with tall coffin-like windows and a door that hung lopsidedly on a single hinge.
The number 723 was painted on the small transom window above the broken door.
The words Clerkenwell Savings Bank had been painted in flaked and faded gold paint in an arc across the two windows. At least that's what she assumed the words had been. It took her a moment to puzzle it out because all that remained, even in the ghostly version of the old window were the letters: erk well Sa ings Ba k.
Without thinking about what she was actually doing, Ashley walked up to the broken door, clutching the key in her fist. She looked around, making sure no one was watching, and then pushed it open and stepped inside.
The interior was dark, but she could just about make out the contours of the landscape within. It was a mess. Even in heavy shadow it looked as though the place had been ransacked by looters, and light would have only served to show just how much damage had happened here. It looked as though a bomb had hit it. Maybe it had, sixty years ago, Ashley thought crazily.
"Hello?" she called out. "Is there anybody there?" Ashley shivered, dread creeping down the ladder of her spine one bone at a time. She really didn't want to hear anyone calling back.
The place gave her the creeps.
Thankfully, no one answered her.
"I'm coming in," she said, not sure who exactly she was talking to. The old timbers creaked and groaned. She took it as permission to enter.
Five steps in, the first thing she realised was that she was going to need a lot more light if she was going to see properly.
After a few moments of fumbling around in her satchel she fished out her mobile phone, and started to use it like a torch.
She played the small arc of light across the dusty contours of the bombed-out office.
There were tables on their sides, chairs with broken legs, and an old-fashioned counter. This was where the tellers would have sat. There was no window now. The glass was in millions of shards strewn across the floor. She ground it under her feet as she walked through the debris. It wasn't just the glass from the teller's window. There were bits of broken light bulbs and parts of what had probably been a metal chandelier once upon a time, all fused together on the floor and surrounded by the charred paper of paying in slips and withdrawal slips, pages torn out of the ledgers that recorded all of the transactions in the Clerkenwell Savings Bank, strips of melted iron railings and other decorations. Nothing had survived the blast intact.
What remained was more like an old-fashioned hotel reception than a modern bank. There was a very definite demarcation between the part of the room where the customers were welcome and the proper banking area where they most definitely weren't. Back when the bank had been doing a roaring business the only way back there would have been through a locked door. Now, with the glass gone, she only had to climb over the counter top.
She could see a second door behind the counter that led down to the vault.
Even with the phone-torch to light the way she felt like she was playing a game of Blind Man's Bluff stumbling about awkwardly with her arms stretched out to stop her from walking face first into a wall.
She stubbed her foot on a chair she hadn't seen.
Aunt Elspeth obviously had a warped sense of humour, to say the least.
Ashley hopped up onto the teller's counter, scootched around and swung her legs over.
Box 111 was going to be with all of the other safety deposit boxes down in the vault.
"There she goes, on her own in the dark, doooooomed," Ashley said, her voice full of false bravado as she tried the brass handle on the vault door. It was something her mum always said when they watched stupid horror movies. The victims would always wander off into the middle of nowhere, where it was pitch black and they were all alone, and the killer would pick them off. It was funny when her mum said it. It didn't feel quite so funny now. The word doomed echoed around the bank far too creepily for Ashley's liking.
The handle turned. The door wasn't locked.
There was a narrow flight of stairs that led down into pitch black.
There was a small white light switch on the wall beside the door. "Here goes nothing," Ashley said. It made her feel a little better to hear her own voice. Not a lot, admittedly. At the bottom of the stairs a bare bulb flickered and crackled, and for a moment looked like it was going to pop before it turned on.
Ashley slipped her phone back into her pocket and walked down the stairs, taking them very slowly in case any of the boards had rotted through in the years the place had been abandoned. Each and every one of them groaned desperately beneath her as she descended.
The air smelled older down here, fusty and full of dust.
There was a door at the bottom of the stairs. Like the door at the top it was open. She opened it and walked through. A narrow passage opened onto a room that was divided in two by a metal-mesh grille. On the other side of the grille there was the big steel capstan wheel lock of the vault itself, while on this side the was a long table in the middle of the room and row upon row of safety deposit boxes set into the walls around it. Half of them had been pried open or sprung open under the pressu
re of the explosion that had destroyed the place way back when. The wooden faceplates covering the boxes themselves were chipped and battered and bore scorch marks and other signs of bomb-blast damage. All, she saw, save for one.
The number painted on that box was 111.
Ashley realised she was still clutching the key.
She crossed the room, going up to the box that was, she guessed, hers now.
She placed her hand flat on the wooden cover, not sure what she expected to feel, if anything. There was nothing miraculous about it save for the fact that it was there at all.
She put it into the lock and turned it.
There was an almost inaudible snick as the small hasp clicked open.
Curious as to what Aunt Elspeth had left her, Ashley opened the door.
Inside there was the box itself, which seemed to be some sort of metal drawer that went deep into the wall. She grasped the handle and started to pull it out, but the box had been in there so long the metal had started to oxidise and in the process begun to fuse with the whole wall of boxes that encased it.
Having come this far, Ashley wasn't about to be defeated by a box.
She pulled and strained and pushed and bullied the box so much she thought for a moment that the handle was going to break off in her hand. It seemed to go on and on, impossibly deep into the wall. And then, with one mighty pull, she heaved the safety deposit box free.
She staggered back beneath its surprising weight.
Free of the wall it was so heavy she almost dropped it.
Ashley barely managed to carry it the short distance to the table and set it down.
This was it, the moment of truth.
In a moment she'd know exactly what her crazy old aunt had left her.
There was no lock on the box, just a lid that was hinged so it would fold back.
Ashley opened it.
There were four things inside, none of them even remotely what she might have imaged she'd find. The first thing she took out, the largest of the four, was a black and white striped umbrella. The handle was kind of cool. It made the umbrella look something like a Japanese sword, a Katana, but it was still just an umbrella. She set it down on the table, confused and a little disappointed, to be honest.
The second thing she took out of the box was a delicate silver locket on a chain. She popped open the clasp and looked inside. There were two tiny portraits in there, a man and a woman, painted, not photographs. She didn't recognise either of the people, not that she had expected to. Ashley closed the locket and then fastened the chain around her neck, and slipped the locket inside her school blouse. It felt icy cold against her skin.
The third thing out of the box, by far the most peculiar of the contents were a pair of bronze and leather aviator's goggles which looked like something one of the Wright Brothers might have worn back at Kitty Hawk. Like the umbrella they were kind of cool. Definitely a little quirky, and Ashley was a fan of quirky. She could use them.
The final thing in the box was a leather-bound book stuffed full with more pages than its bulging spine could hold. It looked very, very old, and was held closed by a leather tie that was wrapped around a stud on the front cover.
Ashley opened the book and thumbed through the pages.
They were all blank.
She tied the cover closed and put the empty book into her patchwork satchel, and buckled it shut.
She slipped the goggles over her head, letting them hang around her neck like a necklace, and picked up the umbrella. It felt good in her right hand. Natural. She pretended to fence with it, skipping across the dusty floor, cutting and thrusting at her own shadow, then grinned, feeling a little foolish even though no one could see her.
So this was it, the sum total of Aunt Elspeth's dying gifts.
She didn't know what to think about it all, apart from that, all things considered, it was a bit of an anti-climax, really.
On her way out, she caught sight of her reflection, and the goggles around her neck and realised she'd seen a pair just like them, being worn in exactly the same manner by the juggler.
First busses, then goggles, today was full of déjà vu.
EIGHT
The Journal
"You're quite mad, you know that, babe?" Mel said early that evening as they looked at the unfinished mural she'd been painting on her bedroom wall.
"Barking," Ashley nodded in agreement.
The dustsheet was still bunched up on the floor beneath the imaginary world with its seven weird moons.
They sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor.
"I can't believe you took down Gorgeous Georgie and replaced his smiling face with…. Erm… well I'm not sure what that is, really." Gorgeous Georgie, as Mel had christened him, was one of her mum's clients, and Mel had a bit of a thing for him. It couldn't be because she liked his music. Dying cats sounded better. But he had that carefully constructed angelic butter-wouldn't-melt image that completely conflicted with the look in his eyes. He smouldered in front of the camera. And Mel Harvey was just shallow enough to think that made him perfect. At least for today. Tomorrow there'd be someone else who burned just a little bit brighter and her affections would be transferred accordingly. The joy of being a hormonal teen.
She threw a cushion at Ashley.
Ashley ducked it easily and it hit the bed behind her. She grabbed it, plumped it theatrically and sat on it.
"And speaking of sex on legs, which we weren't," Mel said, derailing the conversation with her usual grace. "Did you see the hunk of smouldering Emo man meat hanging around outside school gates tonight? Hummunah hummunah. Talk about a rebel who could be my cause."
"You're obsessed."
"I prefer to think of it as being passionate."
"I think the term's voyeur."
"Hardly. More of an admirer of the male form."
"Pervert?"
"Connoisseur."
"Buff?"
"He certainly was," Mel grinned.
"Very good. So, anyway, spill. Tell me all about Mister Gorgeous."
"Oh you know the sort, all Captain Jack with shoulder length black hair and melt your knickers off smouldering good looks. He was put on this earth to brood."
"Not breed?"
"That too. Trust me, Ash. Just sniffing him was enough to kickstart my biological clock into overdrive. It's still ticking thirty to the dozen and I haven't seen him in hours."
"You sniffed him?" Ashley laughed. "Sniffed? Well that sounds positively yummy," Ashley wasn't convinced. When it came to boys, Mel and her were usually at opposite ends of the dating spectrum—in that Mel did and Ashley didn't. Yet. Yet was the most powerful word in the English language. She hadn't kissed anyone. Yet. She hadn't danced through Paris in the rain. Yet. She hadn't lived La Dolce Vita and splashed in the Trevi Fountain in Rome, or stood on the prow of a ship with a lover's arms wrapped around her and cried, "I'm queen of the world!" or walked into a gin joint in Casablanca. She had, however, watched a lot of old black and white movies with her mum, and they rather coloured her perceptions of what true love was meant to be like. What the word 'yet' meant was that she would, and that it was only a matter of time. She liked thinking like that. It was just a little less hopeless and pathetic than she generally felt. But only a little less.
But Mel dived into the dating pool with both feet and happily regaled her with stories of bad chat-up lines, bad dates and bad breath, and was more than happy to laugh about the idiots yawning to try and hide the fact they were putting an arm around her, or trying to be all sophisticated by offering to take her for a Big Mac like she should be grateful or something. And on and on it went. Secretly Ashley suspected she was making at least half of it up, but she enjoyed the stories too much to call her on it.
Her mum was working late.
Some gig or other over in Shepherd's Bush, so she wouldn't be back until after she was asleep, and her dad hadn't made it home yet, despite promising to. He never seemed to be home these days. It wa
s one business trip after another. This week he was in Madrid. Last week it was Leon. It was all to do with some sort of deal he was brokering with a major oil company. All very hush hush. It was always like that when there were billions of dollars on the line. Her dad always made a joke out of it: accountant by day, International Man of Mystery by night? He would have made the perfect spy if he wasn't quite so…boring. But of course that would have been the best cover of all, wouldn't it? Not that Daniel Hawthorne was a spy, of course. But there were days when Ashley wished her dad were just a little bit more exciting.
There was a knock on the bedroom door, startling her out of that particular rabbit hole of thoughts. It was the cook with their supper.
She bustled into the room, fussing about the mess. "Girls! It looks like a bomb's hit in here!" though her Eastern European accent made it sound more like she'd swallowed a wasp with all of the z's in there. Best getting it tidied up before your mother gets home."
"Yes, Paget," Ashley promised, knowing she wouldn't. That was one of the perks of knowing she wouldn't be home until gone midnight—her room could stay messy. It wouldn't last of course. While she was at school tomorrow the cleaner would come in and tidy everything up.
"Smells good," Mel said, tucking in to a plate of… well Ashley wasn't exactly sure what it was. Paget liked to experiment with food from her homeland, which more often than not meant some sort of lamb stew with dumplings, or potatoes, or beef and ale sausages or what she jokingly called 'brown food'. Anything brown Paget could cook. Throw in some colour and it got a little trickier.
"What is it?" Ashley asked, suspiciously at the food on the tray. She poked at the soupy brown broth with a spoon.
"Goulash," the cook told her.
"Bless you," Mel said, earning her a dirty look from the old woman.
"You are a very funny girl," Paget said, straight-faced. "This will be good for when you grow fat on my cooking. Boys like funny girls." She winked and Ashley burst out laughing, much to Mel's embarrassment.
"In your country, maybe," Mel muttered under her breath, which raised a smile from the old cook. She left them alone to eat, but Mel had lost her appetite.
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