Originally published in Handwritten & Co, an Asian Literary Journal
The bell tinkles, the base of the door scrapes. I need to fix that. I’ll baste it with salted butter, for that homely smell and warm-stomach sensation. Yes, why not? No customer of mine should suffer when they come here. They should feel… relief.
Before they walk through my door they have already wrestled with their bitter choice for days, sometimes weeks. My job is to loosen their fingers so their fists open like willing buds, their trinkets fall neatly onto the counter (covered with a layer of felt so they make no upsetting clatter) and before they know it, their empty hand is filled with pennies or shillings, occasionally a crown or sovereign. A fraction of the trinket’s worth.
They leave in peace. They think they will come back and for a short while they are full of ripe hope. But they never return unless they have more to pawn. And I make no exceptions, unlike my father in the back. He almost had us in the ditch with his softness and sentiments. Our stomachs more hungry than those of our clients.
That’s why I am rich. I purchase fashionable clothes, sit with the gentry at fine restaurants, pretend to be one of them at the theatre. I have even bought myself an officer’s commission. For when the day comes and I am forced to leave for the war, I have no intention of dying on the front in Flanders. Glorious yes, but is it not even more glorious to live?
I straighten my silk tie, the colour of pink diamonds, run the comb through my hair and prepare my smile. The one that says I am an open book, look at my blank pages, nothing to hide.
My father coughs his mucus-filled lungs, and my smile nearly slips. I must fix him too. Half a bottle of whisky should do it. Can’t be doing business with a dying man in the back.
I smell you before I see you. I resist putting a handkerchief to my nose. It is essential you assume I am completely at ease. You smell of ammonia and theatre greasepaint, your nose runs with a bloody smear. And I immediately guess what you are and why you are here. You are an actress. Aspiring, because I haven’t seen yet your face in the posters on Drury Lane, or on the stage. You do a good job of pretending to be a woman but are clearly a teenage girl. You are desperate, but hide the fact well.
You cross the floor towards me, removing your broad-brimmed hat, a burgundy felt saucer with a pheasant feather that’s too fat. You lift your face to mine, and although your stench now engulfs me, I step forward as I always do. You are not pretty, you are angular, your hair is done up with a faded green ribbon that goes nicely with the dirty Titian but clashes with your hat. Your eyebrows are too thick, the copper rouge on your cheeks and lips too brash. But there’s a confidence in the way you set your jaw, sway your hips as you cross the floor, despite your skeletal rack.
You are an addict and even though any London pawnbroker knows that addicts make the best customers because their desperation is acute, I can’t help wishing the counter was broader and taller. Cocaine addicts have obsessions which are uncontrolled. Desire gone wrong. That is an affliction I don’t want to catch.
What desire do you crave, I wonder. To be a household name? Is that why you take the cocaine? To give you the edge? So many of the ambitious girls do. The less-good ballet dancers use it to stay thin. But you haven’t made it yet, have you? I wonder if you will, or has the drug already taken you?
I bring out my special coin, flip it and put on my handsome grin, as I do for all the interesting girls. In this one aspect it’s worth a gamble to lose a client or gain double.
I toss. The coin lands on the back of my hand. I cover it, slap, and wink.
‘Heads or tails?’
At this point, most boring girls leave. Instinct uproots the most dim-witted ones. But not you.
You do not leave. You bring out an Egyptian perfume bottle (they’re worth quite a lot, and I’m surprised you haven’t already sold it to feed your habit).
‘My luck.’ You wink and dab the glass stopper on the inside of your wrist, sniff it. What a deliciously unusual thing you are. You are still interesting and we are already three minutes in.
You pull your shoulders back, loosen your stole to reveal your naked neck, and answer, ‘Heads, always heads.’
Are you trying to charm me?
My father coughs in the back, ruining the moment. I turn to scowl at him, my hand slips, the coin shifts. But I’m not worried.
I peel my hand away for us both to see. I don’t need to look at it to know what it will be. But when I do my smile slips, and I am unable to bring it back.
A laugh escapes you. A merry laugh that suggests there is still something bright and unsullied inside you that the drug hasn’t eaten yet. And I find myself saying for the first time ever to a girl, ‘You win’ and not being sorry, and picking up the coin and examining it and still feeling its fraudulent single-sided weighting, and muttering, ‘How is that?’
‘I know I win,’ you say. ‘What’s my prize?’
I lean my elbows on the counter, cup my face in my hands and look straight into your hoping eyes. ‘What were you going to pawn?’ I ask.
You bring out a wedding band and for a curious moment I’m disappointed, fearing it’s yours, but then remember you’re likely too young to be married. You hold it between finger and thumb, propping your wrist on the countertop, pressing down hard to hide the tremor in your hand. That’s the cocaine talking. Oh, I know girls like you.
‘A gold ring,’ you say.
I won’t ask where you got it. I snatch the ring from your fingers, not caring if my skin touches yours. I put a loupe to my eye, examine the ring for hallmarks. I shake my head. ‘It’s nickel-plated. Not worth much.’
There’s a glint in your right eye. A quiver at the edge of your lip, almost masked. My satisfaction returns.
‘Enough for a couple of days of cocaine at best,’ I say. There, I’ve caught you. You’ll give me anything now. Job done. But you don’t flinch.
‘So, for my prize give me double.’ You cock your head, grin.
You’re a good actress, I’ll give you that. Perhaps there’s potential in you yet.
‘Why not?’ I find myself saying, something else I’ve never said before. ‘Then you’ll keep coming back, more cocaine requires more things to pawn.’ There, I’ve been honest. That’s unusual for me too. The things you make me do.
You nod, stiff with the reality of our deal. I reach into the till, stop. Cocaine addicts as desperate as you don’t last long. What if you walk out that door, smoke too much powder or inject too much into your veins and can’t come back? There are a hundred girls I could have instead. But for some reason I now want you. I check my watch. You have held my interest for a full ten minutes. This is also new. My hand comes out of the till empty.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ll give you something better.’
I like a challenge. And I’ve never had one like this before. Why not, I think, do some godly deed before I leave for the war? Perhaps God will look kindly on me then. There is a secret place under the cellar floor. An old priest hole that I used to hide in as a child, until I got stuck once. I don’t go down there any more.
‘I’ll make you a deal.’
‘What deal?’ you say, and step back.
‘Give me your ring.’ I slide it onto my little finger, even as you reach for it.
‘And I will rid you of your cocaine habit.’
‘I need it for the stage.’ Your voice bites, you bare your rotten teeth.
‘Everyone does it. There are new girls every minute.’ Your foot jigs. You glance over your shoulder. Perhaps you are looking for your next fix.
‘So I’ll teach you to control it.’
‘It’s not out of control.’
‘Isn’t it?’
You tap your fingernail on the counter.
‘Please.’ There’s an innocent breathiness in your tone.
Oh you’re good. What if the remaining unsullied part of you could be revealed? The talent cleaned and polished? And when you are healed and adore me and ascend to glory on that stage of yours you can send letters to me at the front. I will boast about you to my fellow soldiers.
They won’t look down on me then for being a pawnbroker’s son. Not with a girl like that.
Like a god I will save you, and like a god I will remake you.
Sweat slides down your lip.
‘I’ll make you my girl,’ I say.
The day you stop screaming under lock and key, the day you turn quiet and are sweet and tempting again like honey, I climb down the ladder with a pitcher of boiled water.
I wash you, then lie next to you in the candlelight. Your body no longer stinks, your eyes are bright, your skin no longer scabbed but smooth.
‘I’m going to take you to the Garrick Club,’ I say. ‘I’m going to buy you a new dress.’
You cling to me. ‘Such a gift,’ you say, tears ruining your clean face. ‘My bottle of luck always brings me the drug, but this time it gave me you.’
You clutch that perfume bottle in your fist. When you eat, when you sleep, make love. It is like a childhood doll. I shake my head. What a foolish thing you are to believe luck can be put in a bottle.
The Club has antique Chippendale chairs, polished oak floors softened by priceless Persian rugs. Portraits in gilded frames grace the wine-red walls, shelves of rare books line the reading rooms. Beautiful things that are ruined by too much cigar smoke and careless dancing to ragtime, trumpet and piano.
The members are gentry with an artistic bent, famous directors, playwrights, maestros of the opera and the ballet, everyone who’s anyone in theatreland who holds sway. This is where an actor can make their name, they say, with people of class and reputation whose names are written in playbills and influential papers.
My name doesn’t grace those pages. But some of these men have their names written in my ledgers. And that is why I am here. Even the rich have vices that grow so big they are driven to my kind. No item in my vault that one of these men has pawned in desperate times does not just represent money, it represents a favour. Some larger, some smaller, and favours are life. And I am spending these favours on you like they have no end. You have weakened me.
You wear your dress shockingly low, your newly fleshy chest spilling from the pink velvet, demanding the attentive eyes of the men. You swill your glass of golden cognac, haul on your cigarette. You have insisted on expensive Gitanes and I have acquiesced. In the gas light, the silverware and glasses glisten so much they look wet, reflecting your flesh.
You slip away not long after we arrive. I find you in the corridor injecting yourself. I grab you by the wrist. ‘Where did you get that? I said to wait!’ The syringe topples empty from your vein, smashes on the floor. But too late.
‘It was my bottle of luck.’ You wrench away. ‘A chorus girl left it in the dressing room today and now it’s mine.’
‘You make your own luck,’ I say, and drag you back with me to the bar. ‘There are people here I want you to meet.’ You kiss me then, your lips moist on my left ear.
‘Watch,’ you whisper. ‘You’re going to love what I can do with this new stuff.’
As soon as we re-enter you pull away and climb onto a chair in the centre of the room.
‘Requests please!’ you announce. ‘For a one-woman show. Name your favourite femmes fatales, rogues, comic heroes.’ A hush falls about the room.
You shine like a Maharajah’s ruby in a sea of onyx tailcoats. And I realise that no one can resist you. The cries come thick and fast.
‘Ophelia.’ You feign drowning.
‘Lady Macbeth.’ You feign scrubbing blood from your hands.
‘Hamlet.’ You grab a man’s head and speak to his skull to roars of laughter.
You do an impression of our prime minister, the King, Emmeline Pankhurst.
More laughter, pummelling my ears with your triumph. I pass you more cognac to fuel you, furnish the men with whisky, champagne, cigars to buy their attention. But I don’t need to.
You shuffle your face like a deck of cards, altering expression, stance, voice: Cleopatra, Desdemona, Bottom, Puck. You are extraordinary. The audience of gentlemen presses closer, applauds, cheers, showers you with compliments. Their female guests are nudged, retreat. Their society charms are insipid compared with your chameleon wit.
James Daunt of Wyndham’s Theatre gives you a nod, his card, and asks if you can come to auditions tomorrow at four. Adam Bryant of the Duchess comes next, the men from the Gillian, the Criterion, the Piccadilly, the Phoenix. And I watch you, my creation, perform.
Perhaps the perfume does bring you luck. And if I had such a thing, what would I do?
A hand claps me on the shoulder. ‘Who are you?’
I lie without hesitation. ‘Sir Francis Allenby.’ Allenby is one of my military customers, a gentleman often abroad, never in the gossip pages.
‘You’re wearing the wrong collar.’
The man reaches out, flicks my wing collar, sneers at my attire. I bat his hand away, step back, bump into another man behind. Wine splashes down his front, scarlet cloth with gold braid. An officer in dress. My heart thumps.
‘For heaven’s sake, man.’ The officer grunts. ‘Allenby did you say? Where’s your uniform?’
‘And he’s wearing the wrong colour tie,’ says the gent. ‘And the wrong waistcoat.’
‘You’re not an army man,’ says the officer.
‘Nor a gent. Have you written anything, or been on the stage?’
‘How did you get in here?’
Answers, usually so quick to slip off my tongue, evade me. I glance at a greying man leaning over a pretty maid by the servant’s door.
‘Sir James,’ I call, and move towards him. I’m his guest, on condition I don’t reveal what I am. He’s heavily in debt. He needs me.
The men follow me, the tip of one’s shoe clips my heel.
‘I said, who are you?’ The gent again, louder now.
‘Sir James,’ I call. Too loud for the Club, despite the boisterous singing, guffaws, cheers, debates. Members turn.
‘Who let you in?’ the officer says.
Five steps away, Sir James looks up. The expression on his face changes from titillated to taut. I falter.
‘Sir—’
Sir James takes the maid by the arm, slips through the door.
‘You don’t belong,’ the officer shouts behind me.
A familiar feeling claws its way to the surface. Threatens to crumple my beautifully composed face. I’ve heard those words before.
They threw stones at me back then. I was six, too short, too slow, they caught me, stuffed the stones down my throat, up my nose. Blocking air, forcing me to swallow, choke.
For a moment I can taste those stones again in my mouth. I couldn’t breathe then, and I can’t breathe now. The choking life of a pawnbroker’s son being shoved down my throat. They hate you but they need you, want to kill the thing they need the most.
The gent grabs my jacket, pulls me back. ‘But don’t leave before we’ve had our fun.’
I’m hoisted above the crowd like a sack, hands holding legs, armpits, stretching me, swinging me. The gas lamp spins overhead. Like the sun in my eyes that day, light blinding, stones stuffing.
‘Over here!’ a woman calls. ‘Bring him to me my friends. I will be your Salomé!’
Applause. But it’s your voice. So I close my eyes. The spinning stops, the taste of stones disappears. The scent of you nears, and your prettily crafted laughter that cheats the heart, just like the tinkling bell of my shop.
They present me like a trophy. Stand me up, brush me down, straighten my jacket. Someone combs my hair. Another kicks me so I stagger forward and collapse to my knees at your feet. I have no ready-made expression for this. So I make no expression at all. I did the same when I was six and I was thrown choking and naked in the ditch. If I do not react, perhaps they will think there is no more fun to be had.
I look up at you, as a supplicant who has given you everything. Will you now take the last piece? Ask for my head upon a platter to prove your fame? Any man here will have you after tonight. Sponsor you, clothe you in finery, care for you as a rich man might. The directors circle you like diamond chips round an emerald ring.
You have no need of me any more, do you?
‘I need someone’s head,’ you say. ‘Isn’t that what Salomé said? But the question is, whose head deserves it best?’
Murmurs, half-laughs. They’re all looking at you now and you look to each gentleman, waiter, admirer, fop, butler, jealous wife in turn. I quake inside my expressionless self. How did a slum girl like you bring this crowd to heel, have my life in her hands in just half a night?
You put your fingers to your chin in mock thought. ‘Hmmm…’ Take a dab of your perfume, wink at me, then sniff it. The crowd laughs, thinking it’s part of the joke. Then you point. The crowd grows silent.
For a moment I think you’re pointing straight at me. All thought flees. But your gaze slides past my ear to the gent still holding my arm, standing just behind.
‘This man on his knees before me,’ you say to him, ‘knows the value of everything and its value to anyone. I’ll wager that makes him the most dangerous man here and yet the most valuable one to know… And you want to throw him out?’
How clever you are.
‘Let’s put it to the vote,’ you say to the crowd. ‘He goes, or his accuser.’ You raise your hand. ‘I vote for the accuser.’
Others follow, more, the whole room. The gent digs his fingers into my arm, releases me. ‘You’ll pay for this,’ he says, and pushes past me to the exit, face puce, head down, to claps, jeers.
Whoever else was on his side is on mine now. I’m hauled back up, slapped on the back, my hand is shaken by gentlemen with silver-topped canes, monocles and letters before their names, men who grace the pages of Vanity Fair.
In this moment you have made me a king. Everyone wants to know my name. This is the moment of which I have always dreamed. Perhaps that perfume did give you luck to sway the crowd.
But I know one thing. You are no longer a working-class girl with dreams bigger than your eyes, your body shackled to cocaine. You are a queen on this chess board, and more powerful than me.
When I sleep I have a terrible dream. You strip me of my dinner clothes and burn me alive on the battle fields of Flanders.
In the morning, 15 October, 1914, I receive a telegram. My request to purchase an officer commission has been denied by special order of Colonel Francis Allenby, head of the Officer Review Board. I am to report for duty that very night. And I am reminded your bottle of luck does not stretch to me.
Your breath is soft and fetid from our last meal. The strands of your sweat-matted hair stick fast to your temple. Your cravings and tremors have begun all over again, my weeks of work undone in just one night.
I rise as quietly as I can, cover my nose. Your fermented scent mixes with the sewer air that seeps from the grille in the floor. I lift the sheets of our makeshift bed, step out, replace them.
Thud. I suppress a cry as my skull scrapes against the low beams of the priest hole. But you do not wake. I breathe again, drawing air into my mouth in creeping increments.
At the bottom of your reticule is your chipped rose-coloured bottle. I fold it into my palm, pick up my clothes, my shoes and crouch over the half-melted candle. I snuff the flame between forefinger and thumb, grimace at the spike of heat. I reach up with my sore fingertips, feel for the inner latch, press it, and very slowly drag the trapdoor back. Clack. The door sticks at an angle in the runnels. I look down, hold my breath. Even though our surroundings are entirely black, I fear the noise will wake you.
I pull harder. Still stuck. I try again. Still stuck. It happened to me once before as a child, and I screamed, terrified of being buried alive, until my father got me out. I shake my head in astonishment at my predicament. I cannot shout for my father to come and help, for it will wake you up. And in any case, he is too infirm and we are too far underground; he will not hear. No one will hear. I try again and again.
I stop, slump, breathing heavily. Perhaps this is my punishment.
I clutch the perfume bottle in my palm, still as cold as when I picked it up, strangely un-warmed by my touch. Its chill permeates me. I was saving it for the trials to come, the only return on investment I can think of that justifies its theft. But what use will it be if you wake? I won’t be able to take it then. I remove the stopper, curse. Put it back. What am I doing? I don’t believe in fairy stories. This isn’t a bottle of luck, it’s make-believe.
But I’m scared of the war and death, and so I take the stopper out again, hardly believing myself, and dab the smallest drop of liquid on my wrist. It feels icy, smooth, like a reptile’s touch. I sniff and cough in shock because it smells just like you. I replace the stopper and wait, my fist to my mouth.
One minute, two.
How long should it take? What if it doesn’t choose this moment to give me luck but another? And when will that moment be?
I count. Calm myself. But that’s as long as I can resist. Still clutching the pink bottle, I reach up with both hands and as I am about to try the trapdoor again, I remember my clothes and shove them through. And that’s what does it. The bundle knocks a box. It falls onto the door, nudging it unstuck. And the door slides open as if spread with my salted butter.
I haul myself up out of the priest hole, slide the door back. Click, shut. But I don’t lock you in this time. When you wake and find me gone, you will leave. But I suspect you will not grieve. You will become a star, for now the world is at your feet.
I step around the strong boxes, climb the ladder out of the cellar, close the door. And don’t look back.
***
Metal rain, boiling air. Rattles, church bells, cylinders whistling. Bromide chlorine gas incoming. Run!
I reach for my gas mask. Lost. Find one on the man who’s fallen next to me. The mud grabs me. I trip, fall, just as shrapnel flies across my back. Fire scorches the mud that covers my skin. But the clay protects me. While the faces of others melt away, melt away, Colonel Allenby’s first born and the fisherman’s son. Their skin runs.
I save their bodies, half ruined, still alive. I drag them across the mud sea. Lucky bloody Frank they call me. I am a hero. Even to Colonel Allenby.
And all because of your perfume bottle, concealed on my body. Two drops a day. I sniff, when the troops’ minds are adrift with morphine, gin and rum. For the day I lose this bottle is the day my life is done.
I vow to give it back to you, I whisper one lonely night. But not until this Hell is undone.
***
My medals clink, Colonel Allenby’s letter of commendation crinkles in my hand, the tiny perfume bottle sits light in my trouser pocket. I try not to think of you as I stride up Charing Cross Road past the Garrick to Wyndham’s. Eyes down, past theatre posters and ticket booths. Don’t look up, don’t look up. I look up. Your name is not in a single one. I walk from street to street in the West End: St Martin’s, Shaftsbury, Drury Lane.
You are nowhere. I buy a paper for tuppence, scan the theatre pages. As You Were, Buzz Buzz, Officer’s Mess, Shanghai. A new play from J. M. Barrie called A Well-Remembered Voice. And I think of your voice and the last words you whispered, ‘I love you.’ But you have disappeared, and you should be everywhere. I try to fling you from my mind, but a jealous thought blossoms like a stained pearl. Perhaps you are married to a rich man, one that doesn’t want you on the stage. No, you‘d never do that. So where are you?
Finally, I turn down my own street of Cecil Court. Stop. Walk forward. Stare. My father’s shop is empty. The windows bare of watches, necklaces, trinkets old and new.
The sounds of hammering, saws emanate from the open door.
I hurry in. ‘What’s this?’
‘Old man died.’
‘But I—’
‘Shop sold.’
I catch hold of the carpenter’s bench. The labourers’ words beat against my ears but I hear nothing. The light spins, and the taste of stones is in my mouth. This shop was to be my future. A new start, a fine jeweller’s, gentlemen clients, the kind of rich men I saved at the front.
I take a breath. I stride past the painters, the plasterers.
‘Hey,’ one says. But I’m well dressed, my medals clink. So they nod with respect, don’t ask questions, assume I’m a gent.
I clatter down the stairs to the cellar. But the strong boxes and safes are no more, the wealth that I’d hidden, saved, year after year. All gone.
And the stone floor is gone. It has been replaced by a new concrete skin. Our time together erased.
My shaking hand reaches for the perfume bottle in my pocket. So much of it used up in the trenches since I first took it. I pull the stopper out, almost drop the vial, clench it, dab a little on my wrist and sniff. The smell of you. I linger over it. The liquid evaporating into air with each precious second. I stopper the bottle.
I wait for something to happen.
Minutes.
Nothing.
A nausea fills me. The brick-dust air stifles me.
‘Can I help you, Sir?’ A plasterer approaches, doffs his cap.
‘There… there were boxes, a safe here.’ I point to the walls.
‘Everything sold, Sir.’
‘And there was a room down there.’ I point to my feet. Suddenly wishing I could see the priest hole just one last time, wondering if it still smells of you.
He looks at me blankly. ‘That’s just a floor, Sir. Put the new surface down last week.’
A flat-ended builder’s hammer leans against the wall. I consider striking both him and the floor. I curl my fingers round the perfume bottle in my pocket. I must trust, be patient. It sometimes works this way.
I turn about, barge out of the building to shaking heads, mutters. A signwriter draws in crimson above the door. Cinema Amore, it says. My mouth twists. There isn’t love here any more.
An hour. Wandering the streets. Nothing.
Three days pass without a sign. Luck has never eluded me for so long.
There is a doubt in the core of my bones. Has the perfume turned?
I pace the pavements, unable to sleep. I check my perfume bottle by the hour. Is the liquid still clear, has it been polluted and no longer works?
Exasperated, terrified, on the fourth day I accept my defeat and walk into Garrard on Bond Street, the world’s finest, oldest jeweller’s, and present my letter to Mr Garrard himself. The interview is short. I identify every gem and cut he places before me and correctly price them all, but that is not luck. I knew what I was doing long before the war. The simpleton sales job is mine within the hour.
But I can’t stop thinking about that concrete floor. I ask after you. In the theatres, cafes and bars, for weeks. Then the answer finally comes.
‘Gascoigne’s sister? Disappeared.’
‘When, how long?’
‘Years.’
‘What?’
‘15th of October, 1914. Easy to remember.’
I nod. ‘It was the day we went to war.’
And that’s when I realise where you are.
And what the perfume has done.
It has hidden your dead body by luck, and my crime along with it.
You too were trapped under that sticking door in the floor. But you had no perfume to shift it.
***
I am old now.
And yet you are forever young.
And the only wisdom I have learnt is that my perfume is never done.
A bell rings. Frantic, jangle. In my dreams I think it is the bell of my father’s old shop.
‘Fire!’ someone shouts. ‘Fire!’ A distant explosion.
I jerk awake, cry out, and for a moment think I am back in Passchendaele. I push myself out of the chair. The building shudders. I cry out again, wobble, take my stick, shuffle to the door of my room, not caring about a jumper or slippers.
Residents stir, nurses and orderlies run in their rubber-soled shoes. Squeak, squeak. Wheelchairs rumble. Drips are attached to withered arms.
I hover at the doorway, stick in hand. I need to pee. I don’t want the indignity of peeing in my pyjamas but I don’t want to be left alone in the dark. I don’t like the dark. Because that’s where you are.
‘What’s happening?’ I ask the nurse.
‘The map shop’s on fire.’
‘The whole street is going to catch.’
‘Come on Frank!’
A male orderly pulls my arm, stretching my sagged skin.
‘Wait.’ I shuffle to my desk, my back to him so he cannot see, grab the Garrard Gems guide, open it to the hole I cut inside and lift out my perfume bottle.
It is the only thing I need. My palm wraps round it, sticks to it, tacky with spilled orange squash from the afternoon. I need to take my evening sniff, but I don’t want the orderly to see.
The cobbled ground of Cecil Court is orange with reflected flame and ankle-deep in water.
The other residents of the veterans’ home are huddled between nurses as they are ushered to the safety of Charing Cross Road, gossiping as they go.
‘Gas leak.’
‘Exploded the entire shop.’
‘Burst the mains.’
‘Foundations cracked.’
No one and everyone seems to know.
Water gurgles up from the manhole covers, from basement windows, even Cinema Amore down the street. Dark water sluices under its front door. My old front door. The street fills with human waste. Like the trenches in the war. The sewers have cracked. The foundations have cracked. They’re going to find your body. They’ll ask questions. It will get traced back to me. London’s most famous jeweller, war hero, brought down by scandal. And all because someone forgot to turn the gas stove off after a cup of tea.
Urine slips down my leg. I look to my father’s old shop once more. I haven’t thought of that concrete floor for years. But I’ve thought of you. Tortured myself with thoughts of your hidden bones, your skeleton curled, knees drawn up to the chin. Cold, hungry, thirsty, alone in the dark under a stuck trapdoor. How many times have I lain awake at night wishing I had left the trap door open, wondering how long it took for you to die? Whether you cursed me and wished for me to die too. But I can’t die, can I? Luck seems to see to that. And yet I cannot stop taking the perfume. I am its slave now. I must take that sniff, I must not wait.
Another rumble, cracks form in the ground. Shouts. Firefighters run past. Workers stumble out of a manhole a few feet away. Brick dust in their hair, arm in arm they stagger towards St Martin’s Lane.
‘Come on, Frank!’ one of the nurses calls.
I walk towards the manhole.
‘Frank!’
I nudge the guard rail aside with my cane, bend down and manoeuvre my stiff limbs over the hole, and climb down the ladder to the sewers below.
‘What’s he doing?’ faint shouts above me.
‘The old sewer’s collapsing!’
But I am already down under the street, where they are too scared to follow. I am in the sewer under my father’s old home, taking my sniff of luck.
Another distant explosion, the sewer rumbles. I put my hands over my head. I wail like a babe. The masonry falls.
In the silence, I reach up once more to what remains of the sewer ceiling, try to push the grille open. The last desperate action of my arthritic hands, the inflamed joints in my thumbs having long ago rendered them rubber-like appendages. But the grille to the priest-hole is nailed shut and the rust hasn’t eaten the metal enough. I cannot get to you.
At least the waters are receding from around my legs. Seeping through the wall of broken rock that now imprisons me. My soaked pyjamas stick to my body like the cling film they cover my tray-food in. I hobble to the mountain of rubble and attempt to move the rock that looks the loosest.
It doesn’t shift. I remove my pyjama top, shimmy it into the space between the block and its neighbour. I pull on the fabric, leaning my frail weight back as far as the length allows. The fabric rips. My clever tool is broken. Even my clothes have betrayed me.
I clutch the chipped pink bottle in my fingers. I need more luck. But these claws have grown old and cold. The bottle wobbles as I lift the stopper out. The bottle slips, I cry out, it falls. Splash, crack, onto the sewer floor.
The perfume runs out into the water. Its last scent unused, absorbed.
The first tears in years slip down the ravines of my face. All my luck is gone.
I sit down in the wet. My skeleton curled, knees drawn up to my chin.
Buried down here it is cold. As tombs should be. I put my head in my hands. The taste of stones fills my mouth.
I am trapped, and I know it.
Down here.
Below you.
If I could, I would reach up and hold your hand.
But I can’t get to you. Can’t touch your body one last time, claim it as mine.
Come morning, if I shout, one of the emergency workers will hear. I’ll get out then. They’ll wonder why I came down here. I’ll claim old-age madness. Isn’t it dementia they call it now?
Maybe I’ll get away with it, when they find your body.
I rub myself with my hands.
Yes, I’ll get away with it. What was I thinking, anyway, panicking like that? Your skeleton’s been decaying in that priest hole for nigh on fifty-five years, it’ll be unrecognisable. I shiver uncontrollably. Only a few hours now.
They’ll find me, won’t they?