by Zoe Jasmine
The phone rang, and she was on it in a flash. She picked up the receiver and snapped, “ Marley, Marley, Marley,it's all right; there must have been a short. We're having a storm here. I tripped it myself. No need to send a squad car.”
No sound on the other end.
“Is that Ironcorp? Ironcorp Security? Are you on speakerphone? Pick up the handset, damn it.”
Silence, then the connection broke. Unmusically a dial tone sawed.
She held the phone in her hand an instant longer, but away from her. Then the shrill triad and the condescending message: “If you'd like to make a call . . .”
“I'd like you to shut up and get out of my life,” she said to the recorded voice, and replaced the receiver with a bang.
Almost immediately the phone rang again. She looked left and right—what if an intruder had been breaking into the house through the basement just as she was letting herself in the front door? What if she wasn't alone in here?
She picked up the receiver and held it out, waiting to hear a voice. No one spoke, but there was a hiss again.
“John?” she said. “Is that you?”
Another pause, then a voice. “Could that be Winifred Rudge?”
“Well, is this Ironcorp Security or not?”
“It's Adrian Spencer-Moscou, Adrian Moscou, on lunch break at Forever Families. Feeling guilty about blowing the whistle on you. Look, I'm really sorry and I hate myself and for punishment I'm—”
“Everything is fine. Did you just call and hang up? You're tying up my line and the police will show up at my door if I don't hang up immediately.” This she did.
Then she waited for the call from Ironcorp Security, or for the Boston police to swing by and check out the suspected breach of her household defenses. Neither of which, in half an hour, had happened. Storm or no storm, someone should at least call, thought Winnie. What am I paying thirty-eight bucks a month for if the system doesn't work? I could be facedown in a thickening glue of my own blood by now, and who would care?
But it took her some time—a noisy cup of tea, slammed cabinet doors, egregious and theatrical cursing—to get up the nerve to go upstairs. In fact, who would care if she got herself murdered or maimed?
To avoid answering that question, she kept on packing. She ordered the taxi for the early morning trip to Logan Airport. Dragged a basket of laundry into the musty basement and put on an underwear load with a little bleach. It looked to be a long afternoon.
She couldn't get it out of her mind that something was there in the house with her, though each room seemed to be filled only with her empty life.
Who would you choose to be haunted by, if you could choose?
Of course there's someone else in this house, she said to herself: it's that pesky Wendy Pritzke again. Wendy and her story. Would it become another exercise in Gothic excess, born of the grimier side of Winnie's sensibility? She could do milk-chocolate children's books on the one hand, arsenic-laced bourbon foreboding on the other. How easily Neverland is corrupted into the deserted island of Lord of the Flies . How quickly Tinkerbell regresses to being one of the flies pestering the gouged eye sockets of the pig that the lost boys butcher.
Who was Wendy Pritzke? Winnie couldn't quite tell until the book had begun itself. She had details and conundrums, but no amount of random detail could add up to a convincing life. Rather, she believed that it took a convincing life to confer meaning and significance to random details. And she didn't know much about Wendy's life, at this point.
But Winnie doubted that Wendy Pritzke was going to linger in England; Wendy Pritzke was probably lighting out to Mitteleuropa, London being only a pit stop on her trip. Wendy Pritzke heading for somewhere darker than anyplace accessible to the Circle Line. Wendy Pritzke's departure for Romania from Heathrow Terminal Two. Her bad flight over the Channel, the coastal flats of France, the sharp shadowed pockets of Alpine valleys . . .
Don't spend your time on Wendy today, Winnie lectured herself. You're not ready yet, you haven't even left Boston. But a new book took hold as it would and in its own time, and little governing it. When Winnie went down to move over the wash, she carried the portable phone with her in case Ironcorp Security ever got around to responding to the alarm. She also brought a notebook to catch a few sentences or twists of plot, or brief revelations of character if they occurred to her while she fiddled with the lint trap. All she could scrawl, over and over, was Wendy, Wendy: Peter Pan's unromantic friend, his stand-in mother, as if there were something to learn from that.
Since her taxi was ordered for 5A.M ., she got ready for bed early, flumping a hot-water bottle under the coverlet and appreciating the jelly glass with its half inch of McClelland's single malt. She knew that John, expecting an update of her travel plans, would have turned off his ringer and switched on his machine, so she dialed his number without fear of waking him at four in the morning.
But the phone only jangled and jangled, the familiar double ring of British Telecom. The machine didn't pick up.
Heaving herself into bed at last, she turned to set the alarm on the digital clock radio. The gelid blue numerals pulsed.
00:00
00:00
00:00
They were spelling OOOO, OOOO at her, she thought. Odd. So there had been a power cut with the storm; that was probably why the alarm had gone off. But even if the clock lost track of the hour, it usually began to count the minutes again from the moment the power was restored.
00:00
00:00
She fiddled with the back of the clock. She couldn't get it to work. Its innards must have been fried. She had to get up and hunt for a travel alarm. She found one, and checked its battery to make sure the thing wasn't dead. She had no neighbors with whom she was chummy enough to ask for help, no friends left to call even at the respectable hour of 9P.M . So she was glad that the small plastic clock still ticked its time and pipped its alarm responsibly.
But she settled against the pillow knowing that a bad night's sleep was ahead. She was unsettled by everything today, from the accident on the JFK Expressway to the broken alarm. That storm had swept in bad cess. A power outage is a simple thing, but thinking about the emasculation of time:
00:00
00:00
Well, it gave her a clammy feeling in her throat.
Throughout the night, the house shuddered, the furnace gasping emphysematously, the windows bucking in their casings. A shade flapped up suddenly in the study under the eaves. Peter Pan breaking in? She turned away from the noise, not alarmed. Who says he stayed sweet and nonviolent? After all, his mother had closed the window against him. Why wouldn't he come back and slay her? He never grew up, he was lost and still unclaimed, so by these modern days he'd have learned something about kids and guns, in schoolyards and high school cafeterias and railroad tracks. He'd know how to do it.
But she surprised herself by sleeping soundly, only waking a few minutes before the alarm at 4:15A.M . She felt unperturbed and not even very tired. Already mentally shifting over to Greenwich mean time, she hoped.
She finished packing and brought her suitcases to the door. A scrap of paper she must have missed in clearing up the mail on the floor yesterday, a circular. She picked it up and glanced at it before dumping it in the wastebasket. She'd seen its sort a dozen times: a flimsy white card printed in blue ink, posted to “Resident” at 4 Huxtable Street. Mailbox Values asks: Have You Seen Us? Two photos printed beneath, one of a Hawaiian girl with eyes set close and outturned, another of a blond toothy woman in her fifties. Have you seen us? “Over ninety-five children featured have been safely recovered.” Call 1-800-THE-LOST.
She crumpled it up before throwing it out. Then she stood in the window bay so the taxi driver wouldn't honk at that hour. The rain looked snowish again, the street a black hollow, the precipitation white and silver against it. Well-lit city streets at night, especially when empty, look like movie sets. Down Huxtable Street she imagined a small tribe of costumed
children, trick-or-treating in the eternal dark. A patient, voiceless throng of ghosts, suited up with rubber masks of Frankensteins and Ronald Reagans, plastic faces of aliens and witches, hobo char. They waited before her house. They did not ring the bell. In their midst the taxi pulled up and stood there, its bumblebee yellow realer than they. She set the burglar alarm. She locked up her house. She didn't know when she'd see the Huxtable Street house again, but she hoped when she came back the story of Wendy Pritzke would be far enough along on paper that it would no longer be haunting her.
She was hunting for a story that was but wasn't the story of Wendy Pritzke.
It was the first time she'd flown to England on a day flight. The flight attendants looked casual, as if this were a busman's holiday for them, and the departure lounge was nearly empty. Winnie half expected to be waved down the jetway without having her ticket or passport checked. The woman who checked her in, a tall lippy redhead whose badge said FRETTA, was yawning even as she made announcements over the PA system.
“This is close to upsetting,” said Winnie. “Why is no one flying today? Is the weather worse than I thought?”
“It's a new route. People are still getting used to it,” said Fretta.
“I fly to England all the time. I've never seen a departure lounge so tomblike. Do you find passengers freaking out when it gets like this?”
“Oh, someone's always freaking out. We're not very busy today, but there are a few more people to check in behind you. Have a nice flight.”
“If the flight is so empty, may I be upgraded without cost to business class?”
“So sorry.” Fretta scanned the lounge for another passenger to check in, and cracked her knuckles.
Winnie found her seat—31K—and, feeling chastised, postponed searching for a better spot. There was hardly anyone in this section of the cabin. Not a squawling baby, not a pair of retirees chattering, no businessmen tap-tapping on their personal computers. Fretta didn't even bother with a tray when she brought Winnie a plastic glass of orange juice. “Here,” she said, as if handing a sippie cup to a toddler.
Winnie shucked her shoes and donned the complimentary sanitary socks. She tortured herself into her assigned seat, feeling crowded even while alone. The rain on the runway made slices of colored light out of Charlestown or Winthrop or whatever town that was across the finger of black harbor. A pretty sight, but distant, and Winnie had scarcely nudged a Robert Louis Stevenson into her mind
The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea
when plain rain had shifted once again to slow unnerving snow.
She'd forgotten to order a minicab to meet her at Heathrow. Damn. She might flag down Fretta and find out if the international phone was available, but the hostess was off somewhere, probably yakking with one of her girlfriends or offering the pilots No Doz. Winnie slumped her head against the window, half asleep, aware of how the folded blanket was liable to slip off.
Her first and most important destination was Rudge House in Weatherall Walk, that quiet cul-de-sac on Holly Bush Hill at the very crown of Hampstead. The Rudge family home was recent by English standards, its original rooms dating to the early nineteenth century. Yesterday, really. But in the 1930s the house had been partitioned, and by the time her generation came along to inherit something, the only part left in family hands was the top-floor flat. It might have been Winnie's flat, had her father not died so young, had her father's sister not married a widower with a child, John Comestor. Winnie loved the house and wished her stepcousin John could afford to buy the whole thing back, piece by piece, but he couldn't, and it would be senseless of her to get involved. Nice enough that she had a place to stay, that he put up with his peripatetic faux relative. Especially since the house should have been hers.
From her frequent visits and occasional short-term residencies, Winnie possessed a mental map of modern London. It revolved around Rudge House, just ten minutes from the drafty Heath. Her personal London included libraries, theaters, museums, parks, and a few homes whose memory she treasured for having been the setting of bedroom adventures.
She also had her own more immutable London, an older city of the mind, the one that she had been forming from the age of eight. As for so many Americans it was a literary London. But she didn't care for overheated Bloomsbury. She'd never signposted her internal London for Dickensian inns, nor for the salons of Pope and Boswell. Even the universal allure of Shakespearian England and the Puritan London of Pepys and Milton had not stuck all that much. Winnie's firmest London was a template of childhood reading.
She could see it in her mind. It seethed with that vitality particular to stories. The swallow in her bird's-eye view circled about in haphazard fashion, admiring her ur-London. It included Primrose Hill, where the Twilight Barking of One Hundred and One Dalmatians started. Here was a street in Chelsea called Cherry Tree Lane, along whose sidewalks the perennial English nanny-goddess Mary Poppins hustled her charges. Here was Paddington Station, in whose airy concourse a bear called Paddington had been lost, then found. Here was Kensington Gardens, Rackham's bleak version, with sprites and root goblins just out of sight, and Peter Pan, the original lost and abandoned child, a baby dressed in oak leaves, still crouching there even when thousands of mourners were depositing floral bouquets at the death of Princess Diana.
London was a trove of the magic of childhood, for anyone who had read as obsessively as Winnie had done before the age of twelve. Pull back just a bit, and more of England became implicated: a bit of river out toward Oxford, on which a rat and a mole were busy messing about in a boat. Peter Rabbit stealing under some stile in the Lake District. Somewhere on this island, was it in Kent, the Hundred Aker Wood, with those figures who have yet to learn that sawdusty toys die deaths as certainly as children do. The irrepressible Camelot, always bursting forth out of some hummock or other. Robin Hood in his green jerkin, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, and just underneath it all, places only slightly less England, the dreary improbabilities of Alice's Wonderland, the bosky dells of the theocracy of Narnia, the wind-tortured screes and wastes of Middle-earth.
The memory of the power of this early reading was part of what had prompted her to write for children. The person who would become a lifelong reader should stumble upon very rich stuff first, early, and often. It lived within, a most agreeable kind of haunting.
And magic England was endlessly reinvented, modern masters like Philip Pullman and Sylvia Waugh and J. K. Rowling piling it on with their daemons and their Mennyms and their Muggles. All those books with side-by-side worlds, forever springing leaks into one another.
The only Dickens that had ever really appealed to Winnie Rudge was A Christmas Carol . Partly the family legend, to be sure, but also it was the Dickens story most like a children's book. The door knocker as Marley's face! What did Scrooge deserve, if he hadn't shaped up? To be left out of life, beyond the locked windows of the nursery like Peter Pan, or worse—
00:00
00:00
She startled herself awake. The security alarm going off again? No. It was the airplane window; it was streaked with sudsy blood. She wrenched her neck, catapulting away, across the aisle. Or perhaps she had screamed. Fretta the flight attendant poked her head from the galley. “Everything all right, I hope?” she said brightly.
Winnie pointed to the window.
“Oh, that. Ground crew de-icing the plane. A warm substance called glycol or something.”
Pink, medical, watery. Winnie stood up and said, “I hope the restrooms are usable?”
“Oh, yes. We're not cleared for takeoff in this weather, so make yourself comfy.”
She stumbled to the toilet. She wanted the anonymity of takeoff. She wanted another London for a template, not one in which the promises of childhood lived on so adroitly to mock. She sat on the plastic seat and thought about it. Kenneth Grahame wrote abo
ut the idylls of childhood in Dream Days and The Wind in the Willows, and his son Alistair's death on a railroad track was probably suicide. One of the original Lost Boys for whom James Barrie had invented Peter Pan had also killed himself. Christopher Milne, the Christopher Robin of his father's tales, whinged in print up until his death. The curse of childhood fancy.
She pushed the lever. Power flush. The two neat ends of the toilet rolls, side by side, flapped their white paper hands at her in the powerful disruption of air, as if waving her back to her seat. This airplane is jinxed, she thought. “The Haunted Loo.” Just my luck.
She dozed fitfully again during takeoff, and only woke when a lukewarm breakfast thing was slung at her by Fretta, who seemed now to resent that the plane was required to carry any passengers at all. Winnie tore at the shrink-wrapped breakfast cheese and managed to spill the indifferent coffee. Later, walking about the cabin to wake herself up and shake the bad feelings down, she stopped to peer out a window in one of the emergency doors. Perhaps the flight was already halfway there, accelerated by Hurricane Gretl. Nothing to see but the anonymity of clouds.
Nothing to see but blue. No islands or boats, no smaller aircraft veering away beneath them. Just three or four thin layers of cloud, unraveling like freshly laundered shrouds between her triple-socked feet and the seamless blue floor of the sea.
Standing still at 550 miles an hour.
Her London would be a way stop, and so she didn't bother to map it in the mind. There were a few friends to see, some last-minute purchases to make. She had Jack the Ripper on her mind, and wanted to look about Whitechapel and Aldgate, in the event there was a book in it for her. With her tendency to cheery morbidity she had fastened on a lane to the north of Whitechapel High Street, a loop of passage called Thrawl Street. None of the nine murdered women had been found there, but it was a central point around which several of the murders could be arrayed. Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Annie Chapman, and Mary Kelly. Anyway, the words Thrawl Street appealed to her.
