Of Things Gone Astray

by Janina Matthewson

  They were walking down her street and she knew that she was talking almost as loudly as the shouty girls across the road, but she didn’t care.

  ‘Well,’ said Anthony when they got to her house. ‘I guess I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Nope, you’re coming upstairs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pfft,’ said Delia. ‘Come the fuck on.’

  She opened the door and walked upstairs without checking whether he was following.

  ‘Right,’ she said, forty-seven seconds later as he closed her bedroom door. She kicked off her shoes and pulled off her dress.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Anthony.

  ‘You’re jealous.’ She unhooked her bra. ‘Of all the strange artists who get to see me naked. It’s stupid, and you shouldn’t be, but you are.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Bullshit, dickhead.’

  He said nothing. She pulled down her knickers and kicked them away.

  ‘Anyway, so now you can draw me if you want. You draw.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘I draw buildings.’

  ‘Yes, that don’t exist. But that’s for work. This is for leisure, no?’

  She stood in front of him, arms akimbo. ‘This pose isn’t my best work, to be honest, but you’re not paying me, so that’s what you get.’

  ‘Um,’ said Anthony.

  ‘Fine, you don’t have to draw me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You should do something though. With me, I mean.’

  ‘Right.’

  Delia waited a moment. ‘Anytime.’

  ‘It’s just a bit weird, isn’t it? You’re already naked.’

  ‘Well, I’m not getting dressed again just so you can make a move.’

  ‘Right. Fair enough.’

  He took a couple of steps forward. He put his hands on her shoulders, then moved them to her face, then back to her shoulders. He leaned forward and kissed her. After that, things moved a lot faster. Suspiciously fast.

  ‘Oh hell,’ said Delia as Anthony knocked over her lamp trying to get his jeans off. ‘This is, isn’t it, since she, your, this is the first time you’ve, oh hell.’

  ‘Shit. I should have said.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t, you just shouldn’t have made it so bloody obvious. I really would have preferred not to know. Ah well. Let’s carry on, shall we?’

  ‘Did I break the lamp, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Delia crawled backwards onto the bed and dragged Anthony with her. He seemed to be spending a lot of time around her face. ‘I’ve got boobs, you know,’ she said.

  ‘Right. They’re lovely, by the way.’

  Once he’d dived below the shoulder line Anthony seemed to find his stride a bit better. She hadn’t really thought they’d get to this point, or at least not so quickly, but it was a lot more fun than hiking around London’s forgotten suburbs. Anthony was clumsy, and clearly out of practice, but as he pushed into her, his enthusiasm made up for it.

  He certainly seemed happy by the end. He sighed happily as he lay back on the bed and pulled her to his chest. They lay still for a long time.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said after a bit. ‘I was almost asleep for a moment there.’

  ‘Well it’s probably a good idea for you to get some rest before you have to scale my fire escape so my mum doesn’t find out I’m no longer pure.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Joke, loser.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Actually, you should probably go home soon, no? Jake’s still a little young to have the house to himself overnight, isn’t he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘What do you mean? Jake. Your son. Jake.’

  Suddenly Anthony looked pale.

  ‘Oh god,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t – I’m sorry.’

  ‘What?’ asked Delia. ‘It’s OK. Of course you can’t stay over. It’s fine.’

  ‘No, I just –’ He’d started getting dressed and he wasn’t looking at her. ‘Um, I’ll see you later, OK?’

  Delia watched him go, feeling unnerved. Then she slowly started rearranging the bedding into a more sleep-appropriate format. Probably he’d just been worried at being out so late with Jake on his own. She curled up tight and went to sleep.

  Robert.

  ‘ROB,’ HIS MARA SAID TO him when he walked in the door one night after going for a drink with a friend he’d neither seen, nor wanted to see, since he was at university.

  ‘Yeah, hon?’ he said.

  ‘Can you do me a favour, please?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I know it’s hard, but I really think you should try. Can you please stop looking for your job? Can you please let it go? Please stop beating yourself up like this.’

  Robert was silent. He took off his jacket and hung it up.

  The Notebook.

  ITEM: NOTEBOOK

  Place found: London Zoo Lost and Found.

  The notebook was once the most important possession of a fourteen-year-old boy. He kept the notebook in his back pocket. He’d had it for eight months and in it he wrote down things he saw. Sometimes they were brief, single phrases to capture a fleeting moment. Sometimes they were a couple of pages long, and these were usually people. With people, he liked to put down as much detail as possible. He had no plan for the notebook, it was just something he liked to do.

  He lost it when he was lying around in Regents Park with a girl. With the girl – as a girl always is when you’re fourteen. She was pretty and she blinked at him and for two hours he forgot to check his back pocket as obsessively as usual. At the end of the two hours, he was in line for movie tickets with his friends and the notebook had been picked up by the last person to be described in it. The girl.

  She was scared by how closely he’d described her and offended by his mention of her freckles and her slightly crooked nose and she tore those pages to pieces before throwing the whole notebook away.

  Robert.

  ROBERT FELT A LITTLE LIKE he was addicted. Like he was going through withdrawal. In all his unoccupied moments he would find his mind drifting towards the tube station, descending into the bowels of London’s public transport, trundling through tunnels and stations and emerging into the heart of the city to wander along streets he knew so well, until it arrived at the point that had so suddenly become so inexplicably alien to him. When his mind went there alone it arrived at nothing, at a white space void of memory. He wondered at this; he could picture the street as it used to be and as it was now easily enough, but somehow both were lost by the end of his mental journey. Every time he got there, to that blankness, he grew panicked and desperate. He forgot, in his distance, which was the reality and which the memory, and on his worst days, began almost to believe in the void.

  He had promised Mara he wouldn’t go back. He knew she wouldn’t ask again, and it was because he knew this that he was so determined. And yet, surely just checking once more would be better. Just making sure one more time would do more good than harm, wouldn’t it? It would be better than not knowing. Not that he didn’t know, but double-checking was always wise.

  He began to wonder if there was a time he could make a trip in without upsetting anyone. He was sure it would be better, it would stop him being so moody, it would mean he could move on. He’d be able to concentrate more on teaching Bonny, he’d be better to Mara. Going to look for his work again would be a solution, not a problem.

  But he had promised. She had begged him and he had promised.

  He stayed quiet about it, but he kept thinking. Every day it crossed his mind more often.

  Mrs Featherby.

  MRS FEATHERBY HAD NOT HEARD from Bruno, the builder who had seemed so nice, in more than two weeks. She was growing used to the gentle rippling of her plastic wall, but she was not quite able to accustom herself to the feeling that her entire life was on show to all who walked by.

  Indeed, this open style of living
had caused a development that Mrs Featherby was not fully prepared for. She was to have a visitor.

  It was a Sunday afternoon and she was expecting Small Girl Bonny for tea. She had spoken to the child, or rather the child had spoken to her, almost every day, but this was her first formal visit. Mrs Featherby had worried for a time about what was suitable to feed a tiny girl, but in the end she decided to stick with what she knew. She had a strict policy of always having a cake or loaf on hand for these kinds of social occasions, although fortunately she’d seldom needed to use them.

  Small Girl Bonny, as Mrs Featherby was referring to her in order to differentiate between her and a rather large woman named Bonny she’d known forty-odd years earlier, was due to show up at 3.53pm. The two of them had had a serious discussion on the topic of time, and mutually agreed. It suited both Mrs Featherby’s conviction that three was too early and five too late, and Bonny’s passion for palindromes. She didn’t know they were palindromes, despite Mrs Featherby’s earnest attempt to explain, she just thought they were funny.

  Mrs Featherby was placing small sandwiches on a plate when she heard a small voice pronounce a hesitant hello from the garden. She pursed her lips. Despite not having had a front door for several weeks now, she could not get used to people hailing her in this fashion. She knew she couldn’t really ask for a more appropriate announcement, especially from a child, but it remained galling nonetheless.

  ‘Hello Small Girl Bonny,’ she said to the outline of a child on her sitting-room wall. ‘Would you like to come in?’

  ‘Um, what’s the time, please?’ said the outline.

  ‘Currently it is 3.49pm.’

  ‘Oh. OK. I’ll have to wait then.’

  ‘It’s quite all right, you can come in now,’ said Mrs Featherby.

  The childish silhouette stood still for a moment. ‘Um,’ it began. ‘Maybe not. Maybe I’ll wait.’

  ‘Well, if that’s what you’d prefer.’

  ‘Can you please just tell me when it’s the right time?’

  ‘Certainly I can,’ said Mrs Featherby. She returned to the plate of sandwiches, placing them on a tray with the teapot and cups. She carried them through to the sitting room and then seated herself quietly to wait out the final minute.

  As soon as the clock ticked over to 3.53pm exactly, she crossed to the small figure outlined in the plastic.

  ‘Is that you, Small Girl Bonny?’ she said to it. ‘What impeccable timing you have. Won’t you come in?’

  She pulled back the opening that was serving for a door and for the first time saw her tiny neighbour in sharp relief.

  Her beam transformed to an uncertain grimace as she stared into the depths of the sitting room and up at Mrs Featherby.

  Mrs Featherby put out her hand to be shaken.

  ‘How do you do, Small Girl Bonny,’ she said.

  ‘Um, good,’ she replied, blinking.

  ‘How excellent to hear. If you’d like to take a seat over on the sofa, I shall pour you some tea.’

  ‘OK.’ Small Girl Bonny strode across the room in an unexpectedly decisive manner and perched herself on Mrs Featherby’s brocade sofa. Mrs Featherby sat opposite her and poured them each a cup of tea, adding a slice of lemon to her own and plenty of milk to Bonny’s.

  They sipped in silence.

  ‘My mum says I shouldn’t bother you so much. She says I should leave you alone because you are so sad.’

  ‘Why does your mother think I’m sad?’ asked Mrs Featherby, startled.

  ‘Because. Can I have a sandwich?’

  ‘Certainly you may have a sandwich.’ She put a few on a plate for Bonny and placed it carefully on the table in front of her. ‘What does your father think about you coming here?’

  ‘He said to not break anything.’

  ‘I see your father is a practical man.’

  ‘He’s a wizard.’

  ‘Of course he is.’

  Mrs Featherby picked out a sandwich for herself. She took a small bite and chewed carefully.

  ‘So you don’t think I’m sad, Small Girl Bonny?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. You’re not crying. Are you sad?’

  Mrs Featherby thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know either,’ she said.

  ‘Why do you live here all alone and no one ever comes to visit you and you never go to visit anyone and you are here all alone?’

  Mrs Featherby thought for another moment.

  ‘Would you like a slice of cake?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mrs Featherby cut off two slices of cake and placed one on Small Girl Bonny’s plate. The other she set down in front of herself.

  ‘You want to know why I’m alone?’ she asked.

  ‘All right,’ said the girl, through a mouthful of cake.

  ‘Well,’ began Mrs Featherby, ‘I suppose that for a very long time I wasn’t really allowed to make friends. And then after a while I was again, but I’d forgotten how to do it.’

  ‘Why weren’t you allowed to make friends?’

  ‘It was part of my job for a while.’

  ‘It was your job to not have friends?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  Small Girl Bonny chewed. She crammed the rest of the cake into her mouth and chewed some more.

  ‘What was your job?’ she asked.

  Mrs Featherby regarded her guest carefully for a moment.

  ‘Now,’ she said, leaning forwards. ‘I can tell you, Small Girl Bonny, but I have to know that I can trust you first.’

  ‘OK,’ said the child.

  ‘So you can’t tell your mother or your father or your friends.’

  ‘OK.’ Small Girl Bonny rubbed her nose, smearing jam across her cheek.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Featherby, who was feeling more like Wendy than she had in years, ‘I used to be a spy.’

  ‘A spy?’

  ‘A spy.’

  ‘Like James Bond?’

  ‘What do you know about James Bond?’

  ‘He wears a suit all the time and drinks mint tea. My dad told me a story about him. There was a king who could turn things to gold but he did it to a real live girl, which wasn’t very nice because then the girl stopped being a real live girl and started being a real dead girl.’

  ‘Ah. That classic tale.’

  ‘Were you famous?’ said the girl, her eyes suddenly wide.

  ‘Well, spies can’t really be famous, Small Girl Bonny. They have to be secret. No one can know who they are, you see, which is why having friends is difficult for them.’

  ‘Oh.’ Bonny seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘Why did you stop being a spy?’

  ‘You don’t exactly stop being a spy, actually, not officially. But it’s been many years since I’ve been given an assignment, so I don’t think I’m really needed anymore.’

  ‘Was it evil spies that took the front of your house away?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But how do you know?’ Small Girl Bonny looked serious.

  ‘Because there aren’t really any evil spies. There are spies who work for different countries, countries that disagree about things and want to know what each other are doing in case one of the things they disagree about makes them want to fight each other.’

  ‘Oh. How do you become a spy?’

  ‘It’s different for everyone, I imagine, but this is how I became one. I was nineteen and my parents had both died suddenly, within weeks of each other, and I had to get a job. So I started working in a bookshop, and two men, who hadn’t come in together, started talking. One of them asked the other if he liked Hard Times, which is a book you should read one day. The other man said, ‘Yes, I like it enormously. I read it for the first time when I was seventeen and I read it again last year,’ which is a perfectly normal thing to say, except that it wasn’t true. He was lying, and I knew he was lying. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did. After the first man had left the second man came up to buy a newspaper and I asked him why he�
�d lied about reading Hard Times. He asked how I knew he was lying and I said I just knew.’

  Small Girl Bonny was sitting on her hands and swinging her legs as she gazed silently at Wendy Featherby.

  ‘A week or two later the second man came back and he asked about all sorts of different people who had been into the shop and whether or not they’d lied to me. Now I’d noticed quite a few people saying stupid things that weren’t true to me, things that there were no reason to lie about, so naturally I remembered them. But I also remembered all the people he asked about who hadn’t lied, and he was very impressed with that.’

  ‘So he asked you if you wanted to be a spy?’ asked Small Girl Bonny.

  ‘He did. And I said no, and he asked again, and I wasn’t really enjoying the bookshop so much, so I said yes.’

  ‘So, if I want to be a spy I should get a job in a bookshop?’

  ‘Perhaps you want to think about it for a few years before you decide you want to be a spy.’

  ‘Well, OK,’ said the girl. ‘Will you tell me stories about it?’

  ‘Maybe one day,’ Mrs Featherby said, rising and putting the crumb-laden plates back on the tray. ‘I think you’ve heard quite enough for now.’