Wrong Turn - I Find Myself Alone

by Zoe Jasmine

  “Saints be praised,” said Mac. “Jenkins lives.”

  “You went to see him?” said Winnie.

  “No, I just guess he lives. He was afraid it was John too.”

  “Whatever was here,” said Winnie, “is gone. This is just some old trashy cloth.” She dropped it on the floor. It was not running with lice, nor especially greasy or smoky. Just dusty, dry, and old; a worker's smock, maybe, hung on a nook in there and bricked up. Maybe by accident. Maybe it wasn't what had been intended for that cavity. Maybe the body put in there—for the space was deep enough for a human corpse—had been taken out earlier.

  But the room was void of any spirit but those limited shades of Mac, Winnie, and Allegra. That meant, once again, that John Comestor was still missing, someplace else.

  “We'll owe you fine ladies something as day laborers, for helping the job progress,” said Mac.

  He pointed at the rubbled wall. Then he fell over and passed out. “Shit, he's punctured the canvas, John'll kill me,” said Winnie, tugging the painting out from under Mac's chin before he vomited on it. There was no rip in the canvas, though. Old Scrooge/Rudge staggered away from his nightmare without regard to the indignity of being collapsed upon.

  The genie uncorked was no genie, just an attractive illusion. The cryptic hammering was a loose board in a fake flue, the slashed cross on the computer courtesy of an emotional persistence of vision. The retracting nails no doubt just some other accident, as yet undiagnosed. The world shrugged itself smaller again, dying a little further.

  How could you know anything for sure? The madmen and mystics of North London, hunting for significance, studied the pattern of browned oak leaves adhering to the wet pavements on Church Row. Unmask the world, rid it of theories and movements and dogmas, and what's left is something near to instinct, imagination's old curmudgeonly grandsire.

  Probable-Possible, my black hen,

  She lays eggs in the Relative When.

  She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now

  Because she's unable to Postulate How.

  What stood between Winnie and the world was someone much like herself, though indistinct, and likely to remain so if Winnie couldn't see her better. But Wendy Pritzke, like most apparitions, dissolved into vagueness when more closely examined. So if, in middle age, Winnie had thought she might be due some more certain notion of how the world was arranged, she was disappointed. When she learned to take her own pulse she found she was registering Wendy Pritzke's instead.

  Should Wendy jettison old-hat Jack the Ripper? Was the loss of a genuine ghost in Rudge House some sort of motion to dismiss the idea of an exhumed spirit of a fiend?

  But the world couldn't map anything but itself, and sometimes not even that.

  No one answered the phone at John's office. It was the weekend.

  As quickly as they had united forces over a common perceived threat, Winnie and Allegra recoiled from each other, back to their natural state of antipathy and theatrical caution. Neither of them were inclined to press charges against Mac, since that might embroil Colum Jenkins in depositions, and who knew if he was either willing or up to such a thing: Winnie's phone inquiries to the Royal Free Hospital about the status of Jenkins's health had resulted in remarks neither clear nor useful. Though perhaps this was the institutional tone taken by anyone laboring under the auspices of the NHS. Winnie had no way of knowing.

  Winnie got a fellow in to repair the damage to John's door, and restore the locks.

  She sorted John's mail, pretending not to be looking for a letter addressed to her as she did it.

  Gill, John's staffer, seemed to be on permanent sick leave or something. The several other office temps were ill-informed, rude, or lazy; they offered no clue as to John's whereabouts.

  Winnie went round to Allegra's with a parcel of treats from Louis' Patisserie. She could see by the look on her face that Allegra was ashamed at having betrayed some fear. Allegra did not ask her in to sample the pastries. Am I offended? Winnie asked herself as she left, though the question inevitably contorted itself to mean: Would Wendy Pritzke be offended in an instance such as this? What does it say about her if she would? If she wouldn't?

  At the height of the November storm every starkly improbable thing had seemed possible, especially with Winnie gripped in the early stages of realization that John was missing without explanation. Several days later, with Mac disappeared into the downscale depths of Kilburn High Road and Jenkins still in hospital, Winnie Rudge moved cautiously about the sunny, vacant flat, tidying up the detritus, restoring the place to a minimum level of comfort while she should care to stay, and began to concentrate, at last, on the reason she'd come to London. To tell the story of Wendy Pritzke. Well, to find it first, and then to tell it if it proved worth telling.

  She ran into Britt over the racks of Cadburys at the Hampstead Food Hall.

  “Still no word from John?” he asked brightly.

  “Oh, is that so?” she answered, with a more fluting inquisitive upturn than his, and she shrugged as if to say, Well, there's not much more I can add if he's chosen to keep it all secret from you . And how satisfying that was, turning away before he could invent the next move.

  London had emerged, blinking, from the tempers and vapors of Hurricane Gretl, such as they'd been, and the bricks of damp Hampstead steamed as if with tropical aspirations. The pavements dried, the winds stilled for once, even on the Heath; the sun came out like a sissy on the playground once the bully's gone home for lunch. Unseasonable warmth. Some of the cafés dared to open their windows to the street again. Police did double-time ticketing, to make up for lost revenue during the storm days.

  Mrs. Maddingly on the front steps. “He's gone missing, he has.”

  “Who has?”

  “Chutney.”

  “Oh, dear”—with shameful brightness—“well, he'll turn up, or there'll be others.”

  “Of course there'll be others, but by then it'll be another me to feed them! And the other me could hardly be expected to recognize Chutney when he comes home from his tomcatting.”

  “Stick with your pills, you'll pull through.”

  “Pull through what?”

  Winnie didn't answer.

  “And your tomcat? Back yet?” asked Mrs. Maddingly.

  Wendy, Wendy. Winnie went back to particulars, doodling on the margin of a paper napkin at a coffee shop down in West End Lane. What did she know about Wendy? The name itself, she remembered, was an invention of J. M. Barrie's; the popularity of Peter Pan had launched the name into common usage. Wendy Darling followed the rude hero to Neverland. But once there, she settled, she nested. She brooded over the Lost Boys and demanded they be led back to London.

  Did any of this feed into her secret mental picture of Wendy Pritzke? It might not, but she had to turn over the pieces to see if something glinted.

  She walked the old haunts, thinking, waiting for a glimmer. One lunchtime she decided to take a look in the churchyard of Hampstead Parish Church and see if she could find the tombstone of the Llewelyn Davies family, the sons of which had been the Lost Boys who inspired J. M. Barrie to invent Peter Pan games, and then to write the stories down. Armed with a mimeographed map from the church vestibule, she went poking about the old section of the churchyard, noting without interest the grave of Ozias Rudge, its simple stone frugally engraved only with the names and dates: 1775–1851.

  Laden with red berries, limbs of yew had been torn off by the storm, and been brought down atop the split covers of old tombs, giving the appearance of having cracked the lids.

  Unable to follow the map, she wandered aimlessly, closed in from Hampstead traffic by the greened-brick walls. In the deepest part of the graveyard she came upon five sleeping bags laid out on boughs used as mattresses. Plastic sacks from a department store: Argos: Brighter Shopping . Discarded rubbish from packaged meals. A group of indigents dossing down there, though at noontime gone for the day. In the economic revival of Tony Blair's tenure, h
ad the bums and street people to go more deeply underground?

  A good woman of the church emerged from a side door and scowled helpfully at Winnie. “I am useless at following this map, I can't make out any of the coordinates,” said Winnie.

  “You're looking in the wrong place. This is the map of the graveyard extension across the road,” said the woman in an aggrieved tone.

  “How stupid we Americans are, I more than most,” Winnie said, more snippily than was her custom. But across the road, all fell into place. The Llewelyn Davies family was almost in the corner. On the stone memorializing the father, she read, “What is to come we know not but we know that what has been was good.” She looked down to find the details of Peter who, as she recalled, wasn't quite Peter Pan, but who could fail to be interested? His stone was a kind of postscript below his parents'. On the black granite slab she read:

  Peter

  Soldier M.C. & Publisher

  whose ashes lie here

  “Et in Arcadia Ego”

  So many ways to be a lost boy.

  Or Wendy, concentrate on her. A lost girl, at least lost to her author, so far.

  And where the hell, by the way, was John?

  She continued along Church Row. It wouldn't look like working to the IRS, but it was her professional tic. She wandered and watched, let things emerge and detach, seeing what stuck. She imagined Wendy peering down onto the countertops in the bright kitchens below street level. A plastic bottle of Fairy liquid soap, a blue and white bowl with bloated Cheerios in milk, a crust of bread for a teething child. The tired mother and the tiresome babe apparently having fled from the domestic scene, the room seemed more vacant, for the sunlight on milk beaded on the counter, than even John's apartment had.

  It was a day, up and down Hampstead High Street, for the elderly to be out collecting with handheld green plastic drums. The old ones shook the coins in their cups like rattles. Ashamed at her gibe at the churchwoman, Winnie stopped and pushed a ten-quid note she could hardly spare into the slit on top. The cause was Amnesty International.

  It was all of a piece, but what did it make?

  She paused at a stall, thinking to buy flowers to cheer herself up. A handful of daffodils, some freesia flown in from the Continent or maybe Africa. The beefy clerk, shivering cheerily, said, “Out of acetate, luv, newsprint'll do, I daresay.”

  She lapped it up, the “luv,” and smiled. It felt like the first smile since she'd arrived.

  At home, the flowers looked rangier and more frost damaged than she'd noticed. They didn't enliven the place, just made it seem more funereal.

  The newspaper was the Times, a health page. A photo on the top right leaped out at her. It looked like a small witch being burned at a stake. The headlines read “Eyes at Risk from Fireworks,” and the story was about casualties expected on Bonfire Night—November fifth, coming up.

  But the way the Guy Fawkes figure reared back!—the flames jumping out of brambles, the sparks caught on the photographic plate as dashes and hyphens against newsprint's grimy blackness. Winnie looked. Wendy looked. How hugely powerful the image, though why, to an American eye, Winnie couldn't say.

  Yesterday upon the stair

  I met a man who wasn't there.

  He wasn't there again today.

  I wish to hell he'd go away.

  When she had managed to buy and successfully install a new phone cord, Winnie rang Rasia McIntyre.

  “Oh, yes, you,” said Rasia. “No, in fact, I admit: I have put my ear to the chimney stack more than once a day, and never again heard that distant drumming, or was it like waves?—except that once I thought I heard a cat.”

  Winnie laughed. “Chutney is now bricked up inside some chimney on some other floor! Well, let him get himself out. I'm through with the ghostbusting business. I'm calling to make good on an offer of tea or something, if you can lose the kids someplace so we can talk.”

  “The children are at their grandmother's in Balham, and I'm hideously busy,” said Rasia. “Deadlines and all that. Couldn't possibly make it anytime in the next twenty minutes. How's half eleven? And let's just walk; I need the exercise.”

  They met by the newsstand at the Hampstead Tube station. Rasia's neck was ringed with a cherry-red scarf. A heavy shoulder bag, maybe carrying a laptop, dragged down her shoulder. She had twenty-first-century-here-we-come written all over her.

  “The client called; I've a bit of work to deliver in town on my way to pick up the children. It'll mean lugging this satchel, so a long healthy walk is out. Let's have our teas and chat, and then I'll skive off.”

  They settled at the cramped tables of the Coffee Cup Café a few doors down from Waterstone's. The waitress, Italian, sulked at them for ordering tea without even toast. “Did you bring it?” said Rasia.

  Winnie pulled it out. In the low light of the café the thing looked even more moldery than it had at John's. But there was no odor, neither dung nor earth nor soil of any sort, which seemed odd. Only, if you put your nostrils right to it, a faint reek of applewood smoke or some such sweet fragrance, across a distance of how many years?

  “Maybe a century of airing has expunged the barnyard smell; it certainly has a barnyard look,” said Rasia, “and a very coarse weave. Done by a handmade loom? It can't be very old or the threads surely would have rotted.”

  “It must be at least as old as that brickwork,” said Winnie, “and while I'm no expert, the faux chimney stack looked like it wasn't done yesterday.”

  Rasia puckered her mouth, a kind of facial shrug. “Doesn't do anything for me. You were expecting perhaps a holographic image from the Great Beyond? Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, help me?”

  “I was expecting either the body of my missing cousin John, or—” But no, it was Wendy Pritzke who had been happily anticipating the corpse of Jack the Ripper.

  Rasia lifted up the cloth. In her hands it looked bigger, like a horse blanket of some sort; it had seemed more like a worker's apron when Winnie held it. “There's no sign that a hem of pearls has been ripped out, no secret lining holding the last will and testament of anyone rich and generous,” said Rasia, “so as far as your storytelling needs go, I think you've been digging in barren soil here.”

  “Oh, well.” Winnie folded it up. “I didn't expect you suddenly to have a vision or anything. You're far too modern and capable for that.”

  “Oh, my family has been mystical since ages. But I've been westernized and incapacitated. The only visions I have are my bad dreams. Of Quentin loving me, rejecting me, my being angry at him, my cheating on him, anything to get his attention, even in the afterlife.”

  “Which you don't believe in.”

  “Right. But one can't fall back on one's knee-jerk skepticism when one is trapped in a dream.”

  “The suspension of disbelief . . . How do you by-step your own ambushing memories?”

  “By waking up. Sometimes with a shiver, sometimes a shout, sometimes a lump in my throat. Always to the mercy of the kids, who are better than pharmaceuticals at inducing calm, even when they're noisy and hateful. They say, Hey, it's me, it's my life, and Mummy, you have only a walk-on role, but you better do it right or you're sacked. And I have no recourse but to behave.”

  “You sound like a bit player in your own life.” Which was, of course, how Winnie felt in hers, most of the time, only whoever was supposed to do the star turn was stuck in a dressing room somewhere. “By-stepping memories of Quentin through raising his kids, that's a tall order.”

  “I try to forget. I fail. I don't have any imagination, really; I can't think of another man, another life; I can't get that far. When I do have a moment—like now—I think of what I know and miss. Poor Quen, with his confused smile, his little habits. You know about habits: first they seem endearing gestures and then they become maddening tics and finally they settle at being what makes a person there . What made Quentin McIntyre Quen to me. I'd rather forget him, but as I say, I've a concrete mind better suited to solving software pro
blems than imagining any life for myself other than the one in which I'm a widow. No imagination, my teachers used to say back in Kampala.”

  “A real liability, that,” said Winnie.

  “We used to play poltergeist baby with Tariq,” said Rasia after a while. “I would grab Tariq by the ankles when he was lying on his back on our big bed. Quen would loom overhead like a thundercloud, saying, ‘Oh, my sweet little baby, I think I'll give him a big kiss.' Then he'd lean down, aiming his lips at his forehead, and just before he'd make contact, I would drag the baby away, along the sheets, so that Quen was just kissing the air. Tariq squealed with glee. I think of it sometimes, especially with Fiona, who never knew—”

  She caught her breath.

  “I think of it sometimes now, and imagine that Quen is the poltergeist father, leaning down to kiss his baby, only none of us here can tell it's happening.”

  “Oh, let's go,” said Winnie, “let's go, let's get out of here.” They left the Italian waitress more tip than she deserved.

  “Sorry about that,” said Rasia, “you bring it out of me, why is that? I'll be good. Anyway, a change. I've had a great idea. Let's take this old bit of sacking into a place I know near Farringdon, a tearoom where a kind of dyspeptic clairvoyant named Ritzi reads tea leaves. Let's find out what old gypsy Ritzi can pick up. It'll amuse us. I'm sorry for blubbing all the time. We'll laugh.” She tugged Winnie up the hill toward the Hampstead Tube station.

  “Your meeting?”

  “Not far from there. I'll go on and deliver my goods and keep on and get the kids in Balham by half two. Do come, Ritzi is a twitch and then some. There's the lift alarm beeping— Two singles to Farringdon,” she said to the cage, thrusting a ten-pound note under the bars, “hurry.”

  They rattled through the dark, past the vertebrae of buried foundations, past unmarked tombs, nests of rats, conduits of wires, sewers and buried streams, the whole obscured process of the present chewing ruinously on the past.

  “But you have no imagination,” said Winnie, “how can you stomach the notion of a seer?”