by Nina Allan
I felt more emotional than I thought I would, I have to admit that. As the taxi drove past St. Ninian’s I had to look away.
I’d never been on an Intercity train before, can you imagine? I sat back in my seat, watching the fields and rivers and villages fly past the windows and wondering if I would ever in my life see these places again. I took out Helen’s letter, just to look at it, the London postmark on the corner of the envelope, the blue writing on the white paper inside. I’d read it so many times the paper was beginning to fall apart along its folds.
Paddington Station was busy, much busier than I was used to. I felt myself picked up by the crowd, swept along towards the ticket barriers with my single suitcase like a visitor who had just arrived from the planet Mars. I fumbled my ticket into the slot and passed through to the other side. I didn’t see Helen at first, and for a moment I wondered if I had made a mistake – arrived at the wrong station somehow, or simply imagined it all. Just as I was starting to panic she appeared from out of the crowd and grabbed my arm.
“There you are,” she said. “I was waiting on the wrong side of the station. The Penzance train normally arrives on to Platform 3.”
She put both her arms around me then, rocking me from side to side as if in mild astonishment that I was there at all.
“This is great, isn’t it? Two mad, bad ladies, out on the town?” She punched my shoulder gently, then smiled. “I’m glad you made it out. Do you think you’ll be OK to get on the tube?”
I said of course I would, and I was, though I felt very nervous. That was a month ago, and I’m getting used to it now, though I avoid it during the rush hour if I can.
I’m going to apply for a reader pass at the British Library, because I’m hoping I can gain access to information about Ewa Chaplin from when she first came to London. I also want to find out where her unpublished story manuscripts are being held – I know they exist. I’m even thinking I might try learning Polish, so I could read them in the original. The new library in Peckham is a good place to work in the meantime. It’s modern, and full of light, and different from anything I might have imagined before I arrived. I have the money my father left me, so I’m all right for now, but I want to get a job soon, anyway. I’d like to work in a library, or maybe a bookshop. Anywhere but a hospital!
I have such plans, Andrew. Helen keeps telling me I shouldn’t get ahead of myself, that there’s plenty of time, but I feel I’ve wasted enough time already. Do you understand?
I am sorry it’s been a while since my last letter but so much has been happening. I would love for us to meet again, and soon. Helen says I must get a mobile, but I’m putting that off for as long as I can because I really don’t like them. Give me a call on the landline, and we can arrange a time.
Thinking of you, always,
Bramber
13.
MY MOBILE WAS ABOUT to die on me. Luckily Clarence answered after only three rings.
“I can hardly hear you,” she said.
“It’s this phone,” I said. “The signal’s awful.”
She groaned, and asked me when I was going to cave in and get a proper smartphone. I imagined her in her kitchen, sitting crosswise on one of the high stools, swinging her long legs back and forth under the breakfast bar. I thought of the way she always played with the telephone cord as she talked, twisting the coils around her fingers like a spring.
I have seen paintings in the Prado and in the Louvre that remind me of her: oils by Goya and Velazquez of Spanish queens.
I could hear the chatter of the radio, an arts show panel game, and somewhere in the background the sound of Jane, practicing the piano.
“Do you want to come round?” Clarence was saying.
“I should get back to the flat first, dump my stuff.”
“Wait by the Praed Street entrance,” Clarence said. “I’ll come and pick you up in the van.”
I was home. The station concourse heaved and throbbed about me, a microcosm of the city I had come to call my own. The whole of London tugged at my sleeve, urging me onward: So she said you were a king, so what? They say the streets of this town are paved with gold and you know what rot that is. Unless it’s drunks’ piss you’re talking about.
The vast glass arch of the station’s roof thrummed headily with the sound of falling rain: thrash thrash, like kids chucking gravel. The summer was over.
I smelled the smell of London’s streets, ancient and immutable, slick with gray water. And I had work to do: dolls to create and letters to write, a kingdom to rule. There would be changes, of course. Telling Clarence how I felt about Bramber, for a start, telling her properly. I had hidden my real self away for far too long. Hiding is a form of deception, and deception always hurts people, in the end.
I had the strangest feeling, as if the city I had left behind on my journey west was in one world, and the city I was now returning to was in another.
I smiled. Edwin again, all his talk of ghost trains and parallel universes. Whatever universe he had found to live in, I wished him well. I could afford to be magnanimous. I was a king, after all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A different version of “The Elephant Girl” originally appeared in Shadows and Tall Trees 3, edited by Michael Kelly for Undertow Press (2012) and a different version of “The Upstairs Window” was originally published in Interzone 230, edited by Andy Cox and Andrew Hedgecock for TTA Press (2011).
Huge thanks to my editor, Judith Gurewich, and the team at Other Press for bringing Andrew to America, and to my amazing agent Anna Webber of United Agents for her sage advice and staunch support for me and for this book. Thanks are also due to the many friends and talented colleagues whose conversation, crisis management and comradeship provide constant inspiration, including and in no particular order Matt Hill, Helen Marshall, Vince Haig, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Paul Kincaid, Anne Charnock, Garry Charnock, Emma Swift, Carole Johnstone, Priya Sharma, John Clute, Judith Clute, Megan AM, Elizabeth Hand, Douglas Thompson, Cleaver Patterson, Cath Trechman, Ella Chappell, Mike Harrison, Cath Phillips, Phil Maloney, David Rix, Rob Shearman, Colin Murray, Lisa Tuttle, Sam Thompson, Neil Williamson and Maureen Weller. A special mention to Angela Luxford, who started the whole thing. Thanks and love to my mother, Monica Allan, for always being there, and to my partner, Christopher Priest, for being the best.
NINA ALLAN is a short-story writer as well as a novelist. Her previous fiction has won several prizes, including the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel, the Novella Award, and the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire for Best Translated Work. She lives and works in Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, Scotland. The Dollmaker is her third novel.
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