The sun was shining when I woke up, which went a good way to lifting my spirits from their depths of the previous night, despite the fact that I was freezing cold and couldn’t feel my feet. Mitch had laid claim to the vast majority of the blankets over the course of the night, and looked thoroughly comfortable, borrowed so deep beneath them that the only thing that could be clearly seen was his hair, sticking out from the top of the blanket as if trying to make a bid for freedom.
Slowly, with devious caution, I slid my feet back under the blanket and beneath the hem of his shirt.
“Kipling Philby,” he muttered, jerking forward, “so help me, but if you ever touch me with those cold feet again, they won’t be able to find enough of you to identify your body.” He didn’t open his eyes at all, but I could see a grin fighting to make its presence known.
“Let’s go to Portobello Road Market.”
He pulled his arm to his face, and hazarded a one-eyed squint at the watch he had forgotten to remove last night.
“It’s…seven fucking thirty. What?”
“You. Me. Portobello Road.”
“Why?”
“Books.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
“Come on! I want to get there before the crazies descend.”
“Oh trust me,” he threw the blankets off his shoulders and finally turned over enough for me to see his face, creased and wrinkled with sofa-marks, “once you get there, there will be plenty enough crazy for everyone. Make me coffee. I’ll be back soon.”
When he clumped up the stairs a bit later, he was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt beneath an engulfing green cardigan that covered his hands completely. I froze in the act of handing him a mug of coffee and considered the elbow patches on the sleeves, which in themselves were large enough to cover most of his forearms.
“Umm…”
“It was my Uncle Samuel’s. One word and I swear…”
I giggled and set the coffee on the table. Mitch swooped down on it like an ungainly green buzzard.
“So last night’s little literary-fest wasn’t enough for you?” He took a hesitant sip and quickly pulled his head back, rubbing ruefully at his upper lip.
“Not a chance,” I replied, stirring in sugar meditatively. “I made this list last night of all the similarities in the stories and I think there’s more going on here than just shell-shock?”
“You mean the girl with the eyes?”
“You caught that, too?”
“How could you not?”
I made a non-verbal sound of agreement into my cup.
“I wonder if he really—“ Mitch’s comment was cut short by my mobile waking up and jittering spastically across the dining room table.
“Hello?” I said, catching it just before it crashed to the floor and flipping it open with my thumb.
“Kipling?” The voice was muffled by the several other shouts on its end of the line.
“Toni! How are you?” I kept my own voice cheerful while making a face of frustrated anguish for Mitch’s benefit.
Antonia and her husband, Eric, owned the house in which I was currently squatting. They were lovely people, but seemed to have a professional talent for calling at exactly the wrong time and proposing inopportune visits to collect their mail, let Eric make nice with his London-based colleagues, and generally make sure I hadn’t yet allowed the house to erupt into flames.
“Quite well, thank you. And you?”
“Oh, things here are fine.”
“Ah, good. Listen, Kipling,” I braced myself for the inevitable, “we’re in the car and I thought it would be nice to come down and check in on things. Would that be alright with you?”
“Of course,” I said, banging my head silently against the table, as Mitch smothered a chuckle in the expanse of his sweater.
“Hi Kipling!!” Came a fearsomely high screech, followed by a few grunts and a scratching noise. Then Toni’s patient reminder to her two kids in the backseat that they could be evacuated at any time to find their way home, should their continued presence prove too trying.
“Sorry about that, Kipling.”
“It’s ok. Tell Ned and Lily I can’t wait to see them, too.”
Ned was ten years old and introduced me to his friends as his ‘rental sister’. Lily was twelve and a phenomenal artist and already far too cool for the likes of me. I am unashamed to admit that I bought my way into her good graces by letting her wear my mascara and eye shadow to the movies, to see a film that required a guardian for anyone under thirteen. Since then, I have not only been upgraded to “cool”, I even got invited to her birthday party in Kent in the spring.
The message was conveyed, to another round of squeals and thumps, before Toni came back.
“Right, well, we’re on the road now, so—perhaps an three quarters of an hour or so?”
Which meant about an hour and a half. I was never in what time zone Toni operated, but it must be really quite fun.
“Great,” I said, looking at Mitch. “Would you like me to have anything ready for you.” He nodded forcefully.
“Oh, you don’t have to! That would be lovely!” Ah, the fatal challenge of contradictions.
“Great,” I said again. “It’ll be a pleasure.”
We bantered for a bit, during which I watched the minute hand on the clock on the wall spin faster and faster. When Toni was done telling me about the trees they were passing and cows grazing on the field, I was down to one hour and ten minutes.
“You blinking liar,” Mitch said flatly when I finally closed the phone.
“What?”
“It’ll be a pleasure’. What, pray tell, are you going to whip up? A nice bowl of Frosties? Some apples and yogurt? Because I think that’s the extent of your pantry, Friend-O.”
“Shit.” He was right, of course. Flingpot has consumed the last of my groceries. I eyed the clock again and sighed.
“We’ll have to hit the Farmer’s Market,” I said, more to myself than to Mitch. “And I’m sure Sergey’s open by now. I’ll get some bread and something fattening and call it a day.”
“What is this ‘we’ all about?”
“Do you want to eat today?”
“Not if the little people are going to be here.” He grimaced. “I don’t do the little people.”
“Excellent,” I said, trying very hard not to laugh. “I’ll just tell them you’re my imaginary friend.”
“Works for me.”
And, thus liberated from a day of book-buying, Mitch stood, swung his arms until his sweater released his hands, and headed back home. Before descending the basement steps, he turned and nearly slammed my head with the door.
“Umm…oops. Anyway, bring those stories to Sergey. See what he says.”
“Good idea.” I said, stopping the mad whirlwind of cleaning and clearing.
“But take a shower first, ok?”
“Wherever would I be without you?” I replied dryly and ran upstairs to the bathroom.
Stoke Newington holds this tiny little farmer’s market every Saturday morning in the local school’s recess yard. It means that Church Street is nearly impassible by car until about 2pm, but there aren’t too many other places where you can see whole fish on ice next to a table of homemade gooseberry jam next to buckets of dirt-covered, moony mushrooms, next to the cupcake lady, who sells baby cupcakes for 75p, next to the enormous cheese wheel, next to the Cajun guy who sings while brewing coffee, who works beside the curmudgeonly Irish baker, who stands behind a table heaped with enough bread to make it hard to see his head over the crusty mountain.
Twenty minutes after Mitch’s departure, I was ducking through the gates of the William Patton school, politely taking a leaflet from a short women with enormous dreadlocks bundled on top of her head, admonishing me to abstain from buying produce from some foreign country that was doing something not-nice to some other foreign nation. I shoved the leaflet in my bag, where it met its friends from weeks past, and buzzed the circle of breads and veggies, deciding to skip on the aquatic life, since I had neither the time to cook it nor the inclination to kill us all with salmonella.
Once I had enough to make a passable vegetable and cheese dish, I zipped down toward the Green, sidestepping slower pedestrians and nearly colliding with a young blonde with a baby carriage as I rounded the corner.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, not stopping long enough to give the words any meaning.
Sergey was leaning against the door frame of the shop, absorbing the thinning sunlight, a dough-flecked copy of The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in his hands. He looked up at the sound of my rustling bags, and a brilliant smile broke out across his face.
“My Kipling! I have missed you!”
An older man walking past on the opposite side of the street looked over warily—a true Londoner, I thought fleetingly. Frightened of any loud noises or real emotion.
“Hello Sergey,” I panted, setting my bags just inside the shop and shrugging off my sweater.
“How are you, my friend, how are you?”
“I’m ok—in a bit of a rush today,” I explained Toni and Erik’s unexpected incursion into my weekend.
“I see, I see.” He nodded, as if contemplating the fate of nations, rather than my culinary crisis. “You will need Blini. To wrap them. Yes. Definitely.”
“I am in your hands.” He chuckled and began wrapping a stack of whisper-thin pancakes in crackling brown paper.
“Have you brought me anything?” When he raised his eyebrow at me, I noticed it was coated with flour.
“Sort of,” I yanked the photocopies from my bag, where they had wrapped themselves adoringly around a zucchini. “It’s not a book, but a friend of mine gave this to me.” I put the papers on the counter and realized the list was still in the margin, devil horns and all. Sergey followed my eyes and scrutinized my artistic renderings.
“You have been giving this much thought, yes?”
I nodded. “I don’t know what to make of him yet. You let me know what you think, alright?”
“Absolutely.” He over-enunciated all the syllables with guttural relish. “I love a good mystery.”
I thanked him profusely and buzzed home. A quick check of my watch as I opened the door showed I had exactly twenty-five minutes left.
Mitch was sitting at my kitchen table, rubbing resin on his violin bow.
“If I help you cook, can I have some later?”
“Do you really need to ask?” I dumped the contents of the bags on the table as he snatched his bow out of the field of fire.
“I’ll chop. Turn the oven on.”
“You turn it on. I’m afraid of it.”
“He picked up an eggplant and eyed me warily.
“You what?”
“It growls at me!”
“It’s a convection oven! That’s the fan!”
“It wants to eat me.”
“Oh for mercy’s sake…” He crossed the kitchen in two steps and flicked a few switched and the oven roared to life
“Have I mentioned that I absolutely adore you?”
“Yup. Just now. I heard you.” He threw a dishrag at me that landed on my shoulder. “Wash your face. How did you get flour on you?”
We made it. Barely, but we made it. Just as I was taking the baked veggies and cheese out of the oven—which Mitch had turned off before scurrying off home—the door banged open and the hallway was filled with happy screeches.
“Children, children,” Erik was chiding. “Kipling is going to think that we have a rodent problem!”
“Kipling!” Ned launched himself at my hip nearly sent the pan flying.
“Hey, you!” I grinned. It was nice to be missed. “What’s up?”
“Mum said we could go to Victoria Park this afternoon—wanna come?”
“Definitely.”
Lily sauntered in and plopped down into a chair. “What smells good?”
“Veggies and cheese. And blinis to wrap them. Want some?”
“Oh my God, yes. I’m starving. I didn’t get any breakfast because Ned ate the last of the eggs this morning.”
“But if you were up earlier, you could have—“
“I was tired. I was sleeping in. That’s what you do on weekends. Not go on some big expedi—nice shoes, Kip.”
“Thanks.” I set plates before both of them. “Dig in.”
And thus the day progressed. We ate, then Erik and Toni went over the house, ostensibly to retrieve various books and scarves and sneakers, but I was fairly sure they were looking for scorch marks, or Satanic ritualistic markings carved into the railings, or drunken Hobos napping in the bathtub. As ever, I passed inspection, and we spent a fairly pleasant afternoon in Victoria Park, marred only slightly by a dog who tried to remove Ned’s shoe while we were sitting under a tree, eliciting a storm of hysteria and by a butterfly that landed on Toni’s bag, which necessitated a detailed, half-hour lecture on lepidoptery. That and the consistent requests for tag and hide and seek and catch the grasshopper that I couldn’t, in good conscience, refuse. Seeing as how I was the cool one, and all.
I spent the time sitting in the shade of a chestnut tree and wondering about Barnaby Rutledge and watching people stroll or jog or amble past, examining each face for a pair of eyes that could be as arresting as the ones he’d described.
They took off again about five, and as soon as they were out of sight, I flopped on the couch, savoring the return of silence. Silence that was broken about three minutes later when there was a resounding bang on the floor beneath my feet and the cellar door opened to the sound of a violin, faintly playing the Hallelujah Chorus.
“I completely agree,” I smiled. “There’s plenty in the fridge. Go nuts.”
I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of cutlery on porcelain and the patient beeping of the microwave. Then there was the smell of melting cheese and the weight of another body on the couch beside me. I opened one eye and watched Mitch digging into his enormous plate with relish.
“You know,” he said between mouthfuls, “I was thinking.”
“Really? Well done.”
“Hush, you.” He put a folded-up blini in the hand that was lying in my lap and I found the energy to bring it to my mouth. “Anyway,” swallowed and sat back, “you know that Lost Angel story you brought home last week?”
“Yeah?”
“What was she listening for?”
“What?” I sat forward, something in my brain clicking very loudly into place.
“There was a line that—“
“I know, I know, wait a second.” I knelt down and started rummaging under the couch, where I’d thrown everything that would fit during my morning cleaning fit. The copies of the Rutledge manuscript were jammed under an unidentified show, but I managed to get it out relatively undamaged.
“Here…” I flipped the pages until I came to the line, “De-dah, de-dah, circles of the damned, words held no power over her, de-dah de-dah, umm….right. ‘The song had been made in the secret darkness of the night, and carried in it the spice of spring rain and the lonely chill of autumn winds. It was a song to hold her and keep her as no words ever could, as he would never be able to himself. And so he cast his spell in song, trapping her soul in his melody’…and then… she goes around the ward and, let’s see….’in her head played endlessly the promise of paradise and the lost wonder of eternity ‘”.
“Yikes. Right.” Mitch mumbled and swallowed. “And how about the mountain man?”
“I gave the copies to Sergey, but…”
I looked up to see Mitch nodding, a very serious expression on his face.
“It’s the same song, isn’t it?”
He nodded even more emphatically. “It’s got to be. I mean, it’s the same girl, isn’t it?”
“You think so, too?”
“Well,” he slid his empty plate to the side and started plucking fitfully at the strings on his violin, “if it’s not the same girl in each story, each girl in each story has to be based on one girl. Does that make sense?”
“Totally.” My mind was firing like an engine, racing ahead of this one clue to make a thousand more connections. But without more evidence, without any more stories, it was just consuming itself.
“I wonder who she was,” Mitch asked his violin. It gave a little chirp in response.
I stared at the photocopy in my lap, at the little note in Rutledge’s quick, sharp hand, and remembered.
“Whoever she was, he never found her.” Mitch’s hands stopped moving, but he didn’t look up. “The biography in Damien’s copies,” my voice sounded oddly far away, “said he died without family.” Died? I thought nervously.
“Alone.” Mitch whispered.
It was one of those words that didn’t need any answer.
