13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson

  Ginny wasn’t hungry, but she felt the need to participate. She had no idea what to order, though.

  “I guess I’ll have what you’re having,” she said to Keith.

  “If you had what we’re having, you’d die,” Keith said. “Try the mild curry.”

  She decided not to challenge him on that one.

  Keith ordered a whole list of foods, and soon their table was covered in bread baskets full of big flat things that they called papadams. There was a selection of vividly colored chutneys with large pieces of hot pepper floating in them, and beers. As soon as she saw the spread, Ginny understood. Keith was giving David a tragedy meal. She did the same thing with Miriam when she broke up with Paul last summer, except that her version involved a half gallon of Breyers, a box of Little Debbie snack cakes, and a six-pack of blue raspberry soda. Guys would never be satisfied with that kind of comfort. If they were going to have a tragedy meal, they had to make sure there was a painful, masculine component to it.

  Keith was talking a mile a minute. He started by telling a story about how he and his “mate Iggy” liked to show up at girls’ houses with their trousers on fire. (A trick, he explained in detail, that involved spraying the pants with an aerosol, like Lysol, then lighting the fumes, which then created fiery clouds just on the surface of the pants, which could be put out, provided you dropped to the ground at the right moment, which they usually did.)

  The curries came out, and the steam coming off Keith and David’s plates caused Ginny’s eyes to water and sting. David poked at his and listened to Keith talk with a dull, unchanging expression. His phone rang. He looked at the number and his eyes widened.

  “Don’t,” Keith said, stabbing at David’s cell phone with his curry-stained fork.

  David looked pained.

  “Have to,” he said, snatching it up. “Be right back.”

  “So,” Keith said when David had gone. “Let’s review. Last night you mysteriously give me one hundred and forty-two pounds and then run out. And tonight you show up in front of my house as my flatmate suffers an emotional collapse. I was just wondering what it all means.”

  Before she could answer, the waiter sprang at his chance to brush some crumbs from David’s chair. He had been hanging around their table like a vulture, waiting for them to eat the last papadam crumb so he could take away the basket. He eyed the last piece sadly, as if it was the barrier between him and eternal happiness. Ginny grabbed it and shoved it in her mouth. The man looked relieved and took the basket but immediately returned to stare mournfully at their water glasses. And then David came back in and dropped heavily into his chair. The waiter immediately pounced on him, offering another beer. He nodded tiredly. Keith turned his glance from Ginny to David.

  “Well?”

  “Just some stuff she wants back,” he said.

  Nothing was said until the waiter came back a moment later with another enormous bottle of beer. David tipped it back and chugged in several large gulping motions, drinking a good third of it in one go.

  The phone call and the beer loosened David. He was usually polite, but now he was morphing into someone else. He launched into a list of all the things that he had long despised about Fiona and that he had apparently noticed but kept inside.

  And of course he would have another beer.

  At first, this catharsis seemed good. David seemed to be coming back to reality. But then he began leering at a woman at another table who was clearly annoyed that he was talking too loudly. He chomped away at his curry and became louder and louder.

  “He’s guttered,” Keith said. “Time to go.”

  Keith asked the ever-available waiter for the bill and threw down some crumpled bills. They seemed to be the same ones she had just given him the night before. She could practically recognize her own grip marks.

  “I’ll go get the car,” he said. “Stay here with him, all right?”

  David looked around and, seeing that Keith was gone, got up and stumbled for the door. Ginny followed him. David was waiting on the sidewalk, looking down the street as if lost.

  Ginny hung nervously by the door.

  “People don’t change,” he said. “You just sort of have to take them like they are. Know what I mean?”

  “I guess,” Ginny said uncertainly.

  “Could you go and get me an ice cream?” he asked, nodding at a shop next to them with a large ice cream display. “I want an ice cream.”

  Getting up had caused David to lose a lot of steam. Besides, ice cream at a time like this was something she could understand. She went into the shop and picked out a rich-looking chocolate-covered bar. When she came back outside, however, he was gone.

  She was still standing there, holding the rapidly melting ice cream, when Keith pulled up.

  “He did a runner?” he asked.

  Ginny nodded.

  “I’ll drive this way,” he said. “You check the other way. Meet me back right here.”

  There were an amazing number of people on Brick Lane that night, mostly groups of guys in suits. She spotted David a few stores up, staring at the menu for another restaurant. When he saw Ginny, he started running again, and Ginny had no choice but to go right after him. Excessive alcohol apparently brought out the evil imp in David. Whenever Ginny would fall behind, he would stop and stand there, grinning. When she was close enough to see his smile, he would start off again.

  To her relief, Keith’s car turned the corner. Keith was almost on him when David turned and ran back the other way, toward Ginny. There was no way for Keith to turn around, so he had to keep going. It was up to Ginny to keep after him.

  David led her all around the area, through residential streets, through streets with closed-up sari and cloth shops. They went deeper and deeper into less welcoming streets. She was breathing hard, and the curry was killing her stomach, but she stayed on him. After about ten minutes, she accepted the fact that David wasn’t going to give up the game. She was going to have to play dirty. She let out a scream, then collapsed to the sidewalk, clutching at her leg. David turned again, but this time, even in his haze, he knew something was wrong. He hesitated but, seeing that Ginny was going no farther, stayed where he was.

  He didn’t even see Keith run up behind him and tackle him. He pressed David to the sidewalk and sat on his back.

  “Very nice with the leg,” Keith said, heaving for breath. “Cor…who knew he could run?”

  Within a few moments of being held still, David slipped into a passive, near-unconscious state. Keith pulled him up and walked him to the car. Ginny scrambled into the backseat so that David could be carefully set in the front.

  “He’s going to honk in my car,” Keith said sadly as they pulled away. “And I just cleaned it.”

  Ginny looked around at the collection of bags and garbage around her on the tiny backseat.

  “You did?”

  “Well, I put all that stuff back there.”

  Ginny reached up and shifted a rapidly sliding David into an upright position.

  “I’m taking him to my place. Let him sleep it off there. I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll take you home.”

  David made it to the sidewalk in front of Richard’s house before Keith’s prediction came to pass. As soon as they stopped, he opened the door and unleashed his worst. When he had recovered, Keith and Ginny walked him up and down the street a few times until the spell seemed over, then brought him back and leaned him against the gate.

  “He’ll be all right,” Keith said, nodding. “He needed that. Clears the head.”

  David was slowly slipping down the gate. Keith grabbed him by the arm and propped him back up.

  “Better go,” he said. “That was good, what you did with your leg. Very good. Fast, too. You’re not totally mad.”

  “Um…”

  “Yes?”

  “Earlier…”

  “Yes?”

  “I was coming to ask you if you wanted to go to Scotland with me,” she said quick
ly. “I have to go to Edinburgh, and since you said…”

  “What are you going there for?”

  “I’m just…going.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  David lunged forward and fell against the hood of Keith’s car. Keith stepped over. It looked like he was reaching for David, but at the last moment, he turned, took Ginny’s face in his hands, and kissed her. It wasn’t a tender, slow, “your lips are like delicate flower petals” kiss. More like a “thank-you” kiss. Or even a “good game!” kiss.

  “Might as well,” he said. “Show’s not until ten tomorrow night. Kings Cross Station. Tomorrow morning. Eight thirty. In front of Virgin Rail.”

  Before she could even react, Keith had grabbed David and stuffed him into the car; he gave her a quick salute before driving away. Ginny stood there for several minutes, unable to move. She put her fingers lightly on her mouth, as if to hold the sensation there.

  She didn’t even notice right away that a small animal had come out from behind a nearby car and was slowly making its way toward the trash can she was standing near. She flipped through some old files in her mind, trying to come up with what this thing might be, and after a few seconds decided that—impossible as it seemed—it was a fox. She had only ever seen foxes in illustrations in a book of collected fairy tales. This thing looked like those pictures: it had a long snout, a small nose, red fur, and a shy, thief-like gait. It pawed closer to her, tilting its head curiously, as if asking her if she had plans on going through that trash can first.

  “No,” she said aloud, and then immediately wondered why she was talking to what was probably a fox—a fox that could very well be rabid and preparing to leap for her throat. Strangely, she had no fear.

  The fox seemed to understand her answer and gracefully jumped up to the rim of the trash and dropped down inside. The big plastic bin rattled as he explored its contents. Ginny felt herself filled with a weird, swelling affection for the fox. It had seen her kiss. It was unafraid of her. It was hunting. It was hungry.

  “Hope you find something good,” she said quietly, then turned to go inside.

  The Master and the Hairdresser

  The ride to Scotland took four and a half hours, most of which Keith spent dead asleep with his head against the window, a comic book (“it’s a graphic monthly”) clutched in the grip of his fingerless leather gloves. He woke with a snort and jerk of the head just as the train was pulling into Edinburgh.

  “Waverly Station?” he asked, blinking slowly. “Right. Out, or we’ll end up in Aberdeen.”

  They came out of the station (which looked pretty much like the station they’d just left) and walked up a long flight of steps to street level. They were on a street full of large department stores. But unlike London, which felt low and compact and overstuffed, Edinburgh felt wide and open. The sky stretched wide and blue above them, and when Ginny turned around, she saw that the city seemed to be on a hundred different levels. It scooped and dipped. Over to her right, sitting high on a great jutting piece of rock like a pedestal, was a castle.

  Keith took a deep breath and banged on his chest.

  “All right,” he said. “Who’s this you’ve got to go see?”

  “A friend of my aunt’s. Some painter. I have a map to her house….”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  He took the letter out of Ginny’s hands before she could say a word.

  “Mari Adams?” he asked. “I know this name.”

  “She’s supposed to be kind of famous,” Ginny said, almost as an apology.

  “Oh.” He studied the directions some more and frowned. “She lives in Leith, on the other side of the city. Right. You’ll never find this. We’d better go together. Let me just stop into the Fringe office, and then we’ll go.”

  “You don’t have to…”

  “I’m telling you, you will get lost. And I can’t have that. Come on.”

  He was right. There was no way she could have found her way to Mari’s on her own. Keith could barely work out the bus map to get to her corner of the city, and it took both of them to puzzle out the exact location of her house. She lived along a large body of water that Keith identified as being something called the Firth of Forth.

  Since they were so far from where they started, Keith couldn’t just turn around and go back, so he took it upon himself to come along with Ginny right up to Mari’s door. There was an intricate pattern painted all around the door frame—gold salamanders, a fox, birds, flowers. The door knocker was a giant woman’s head with a large nose ring. Ginny banged this once, then retreated down a few steps.

  A moment later, a girl swung open the door. She wore red denim overalls with magnetic toy alphabet pieces sewn onto them with thick, obvious stitches. Also, she wore no shirt—she’d just clipped the overalls up as high as they could go. Her scowling face was crowned by a head of hair that had been bleached to a crisp white. It was short and jagged on top and long and braided in the back—a mullet-dread crossbreed.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Um…hi.”

  “Yeah.”

  It was going well so far.

  “My aunt stayed here,” Ginny said, trying not to stare at any one aspect of the girl’s appearance for too long. “Her name was Peg? Margaret? Margaret Bannister?”

  An unresponsive stare. Ginny noticed that the girl’s eyebrows were almost as deeply chocolate brown as her own.

  “I’m supposed to come here,” Ginny said, waving around the blue envelope as if it were a visa allowing her access to the houses of total strangers. One of the strong summer winds came along and snapped the thin paper around, almost taking it from Ginny’s hand.

  “Yeah, all right.” The girl had a hard Scottish brogue. “Hold on.”

  She shut the door in their faces.

  “Friendly,” Keith said. “You have to give her that.”

  “Would you shut up?” Ginny heard herself saying.

  “Feisty.”

  “I’m nervous.”

  “Can’t see why,” he said, innocently examining the drawings around the door. “Seems perfectly normal.”

  Five minutes later, the door opened again.

  “Mari’s working,” she said. “But she says you’re tae come in.”

  The girl left the door hanging open, which they took as a sign that they were supposed to follow.

  They were in a very old house, certainly. There were large fireplaces in each of the rooms with little piles of ash sitting under the grates. There was the lingering hint of burned wood in the air, even though Ginny suspected that the ashes were weeks old. The floors were all bare, with the occasionally furry white rug tossed here and there, with no apparent logic. Every room was painted differently: powder blue in one room, maroon in the next, bright spring onion green in the hall. The windowsills and edging around the floor were all egg-yolk yellow. The only piece of furniture in the first few rooms was a massive, ornate cherrywood table with a marble top and a big mirror. It was covered in little toys: chattering teeth, tops, little cars, a boxing nun puppet, and a windup Godzilla.

  But everywhere—everywhere—there were paintings. Massive paintings of women, mostly. Women with sprawling masses of hair with all kinds of things coming out of it, women juggling stars. Floating women, women sneaking through black forests, women surrounded by bright shimmering gold. Paintings so large that the walls could each only accommodate one or two.

  The girl continued to lead them back, then up three flights along a rickety wooden staircase that was lined with even more paintings. At the top, they reached a doorway that had been painted a bright metallic gold.

  “Here,” the girl said, turning and heading back downstairs.

  Ginny and Keith stared at the big gold door.

  “Who are we visiting again?” he asked. “God?”

  In answer, the door swung open.

  Ginny wouldn’t have guessed that the girl at the door could have lost the “Unusual a
nd Imposing Appearance Award” so quickly, but Mari beat her by a mile. She had to be sixty, at least. Ginny could see it in her face. She had a massive crown of long, teased-out jet black hair cut through with orange highlights. She was wearing clothes that were just a bit too small and tight for her plump frame—a vertical-striped boatneck shirt and jeans with a black belt covered in heavy studs. It gripped her belly unflatteringly, yet somehow she carried it off. Her eyes were completely surrounded by heavy circles of black eyeliner. There were what looked like three identical freckles along each of her cheekbones, right under her eyes. As Ginny stepped into the room, she could see that they were small blue tattoos of stars. She wore flat gold sandals, and Ginny could see that there were also tattoos on her feet, words printed in tiny purple scrawl. When she reached out to clasp Ginny by the face and give her a kiss on each cheek, Ginny saw similar messages on her hands.

  “You’re Peg’s niece?” Mari asked, breaking the embrace.

  Ginny nodded.

  “And you are?” This was to Keith.

  “Her hairdresser,” he said. “She won’t go anywhere without me.”

  Mari patted his cheek and smiled.

  “I like you,” she said. “Would you like a chocolate?”

  She padded over to her sunny worktable and produced a large bucket of miniature candy bars. Ginny shook her head, but Keith took a small handful.

  “I’ll get Chloe to bring us some tea,” she said.

  A few minutes later, Chloe (maybe the last name in the world Ginny would have attached to the red overalls girl—she was more of a “Hank”) came up with a ceramic tray with a brown teapot, a dish of sugar, and a small jug of cream. The tray was also littered with even more miniature chocolate bars. As Mari reached for these, she noticed that Keith’s gaze was lingering on the words imprinted on her hands.