The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON) (11 page)

And I did work. I did some reading. I did a little French. I did a few problem sets.

I paused when I noticed it had gotten darker—not dark, but there was a dim quality to the daylight, a low fade made worse by the overcast sky. Three in the afternoon, and already it seemed like dusk. I reviewed what I had accomplished, thumbing through pages read and counting up assignments completed. I had done reasonably well, better than anything I had done in previous weeks, but it wasn’t even in spitting distance of enough.

It dawned on me, perfectly and clearly, that I was going to fail everything. I’d known this. I’d even said it out loud. But I’d never really breathed that fact in. Smelled it. Tasted it.

This
was failure. Doing all you could and yet knowing that it just wasn’t going to cut it.

I shut my door to panic alone.

Why was I here? They’d brought me back, and now what was I supposed to do? I felt like I was faking all of this, like I was playing the part of a student. I had the costume and the props, but I didn’t really belong here. I’d pinned notes on the stupid corkboard backing of my desk, and I’d highlighted things…But it was all so
meaningless.

For about an hour, I had an overwhelming urge to grab my bag, stuff in a few things, and take the next train to Bristol. I could be back on my parents’ couch that night if I got moving. I could admit that I wasn’t ready for this, that the semester was a wash. My parents would be thrilled, I was sure. Not about the semester being a wash—but certainly about having me back where they could keep me safe and sound. It would be so easy to do. The very idea made me warm inside. It was okay to give up. I’d been brave. Everyone would say so.

And yet…even as I opened a dresser drawer and figured out which things I would take with me in this hypothetical scenario, I remembered the problem.

There would still be ghosts.

I would still have a future.

I would still go back to school
eventually.
You can’t curl up on the sofa and deny life forever. Life is always going to be a series of ouch-making moments, and the question was, was I going to go all fetal position, or was I going to woman up? I went into fetal position on the bed to think about this. Fetal position turned out to be very comfortable.

Someone had to help me.

I slithered to the end of the bed and stretched my arm as far as I could to reach around in the top drawer of my desk and find that business card. Jane Quaint. The therapist who had changed Charlotte into the shiny New Charlotte. The one who made her unafraid of school and life. I flicked the card with my nail a few times and rubbed the edge under my chin. I’d had a therapist, and that had been a pointless exercise. A time-suck. A total pain in the ass. But this woman had done some kind of magic with Charlotte, and now Charlotte was fully functional. Maybe she could make me fully functional.

The gloom accumulated outside. God. So dark. So early. My books, so thick. My confusion, so total.

It couldn’t hurt to call.

I would call.

Now. I would call now.

English phones have a double ring that I still found strange and charming, kind of like the chirping croak of a little frog. The call was on its third ring-ring and I was just about to hang up when a surprisingly deep yet clearly female voice answered.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Rory, and—”

“From Wexford?” said the woman.

“Oh. Yeah.”

“I know who you are, dear. A friend of Charlotte’s, yes?”

That might have been stretching things a bit, but I wasn’t going to split hairs.

“Right,” I said.

“Well, I’m very glad you’ve called. I was hoping you would.”

“You were?”

“It was no small thing you went through,” she said. “And from the tone in your voice, it sounds like you aren’t having the best day.”

I cleared my throat. “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

“Why don’t you pop round?”

“What, now?”

“Why not?” she said. “It’s a quiet Sunday around here. Why don’t you pop round, and we’ll have a nice chat?”

I could see, even from this brief exchange, what Charlotte was talking about. Julia was nice, but she was clinical. When you spoke to her, she was clear and firm. You didn’t “pop round” to Julia’s. You had an exact time, to the minute. This Jane sounded more like a friend. She gave me an address in Chelsea, and when I asked her what Tube stop that was, she was dismissive.

“Oh, just get in a taxi, dear. I’ll pay for it when it arrives.”

“What…really?”

“Really. Just come over now. I have some time.”

I regretted making the call already. I had agreed to see this strange woman, and now I really had to go. She was even paying for my ride, which was just…incredibly odd. But health stuff was different in England. Well, I’d done it. I’d called, and now I had to go see this woman. I told myself that doing something was better than having this dithering breakdown.

While I was in the cab, winding across London, it began to pour rain. Chelsea was on the west side of the city, far, far from Wexford. And London is a very sinuous place. I don’t think there is a straight line in the entire metropolitan area. Water ran down the cab windows, so much that I couldn’t even see where we were. I just caught the glint of signs and the red
of buses. By the time the cab stopped, the downpour was so fierce, I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it from the curb to the house. This is why English people do not leave home without umbrellas. I was an idiot.

The cab ride came to thirty-six pounds. That was an incredible amount of money to have to pay for a ride across town, and I felt a twang of panic. I didn’t have that much on me. I’d gotten in this cab on the word of some person on the other end of a phone. I looked at the house, wondering what happened now. The house that was set back from the road and gently guarded by a brick wall with a black iron gate. Through this gate came a woman carrying an industrial-sized umbrella. I presumed this was Jane, as she went right to the front window of the car. As she spoke to the driver and gave him the fare, I heard her voice. This was Jane.

Jane Quaint looked like she was somewhere around sixty. Her hair was a furious orange-red, which stood out in stark contrast to her very pale, very delicate skin. The color couldn’t have been natural—that kind of pulsating orange rarely exists outside of fruit and tropical birds. She had on an outfit that consisted of many wraps and folds and layers of fine gray wool that looped around and around from about five different directions. I couldn’t tell if it was a shawl or a sweater or a dress. It bagged down to the knees, where it seemed to turn into pants. The whole thing was bound together at her right shoulder by a long silver pin in the shape of a twisted arrow.

I opened the door carefully as Jane reached over, making room for me under her umbrella.

“
Wretched
day,” she said. “Come inside. Let’s get ourselves out of this.”

The gate surrounded a small square of brick-paved ground, with a few small potted trees. The house was certainly large by London standards—three stories high, three windows across. It was completely detached, an impressive pile of bricks with a porticoed entryway.

Jane set her umbrella in a stand in the large entry hallway, which was very dark. It was papered in a rich black wallpaper with a recurring fan pattern in metallic gold. All the decorations were generally dark, lots of black with gold accents. I fixed my eye on a life-sized porcelain leopard in the corner, colored silver and black.

“I’m still very fond of the tastes of my youth,” she explained. “I was a bit of a rock-and-roller back then. After that phase was over, I went into psychology. But I kept the decor. I find if you keep things, they tend to come back into style eventually.”

“I like it,” I said.

“That’s very kind. One friend of mine describes it as looking like a Victorian brothel on Mars. I’ve always found that description rather pleasing. Do come through to the kitchen. I think we need a cup of tea.”

The house was very warm, which I appreciated. And the kitchen was warmer still, and huge. This room was not black. Unlike the sharply Deco feel of the hall, this was a cheerful green, with a big farm table and lots of plates on display. Jane busied herself with the kettle, and I sat on a stool and tried to figure out how to deal with the most awkward part of this entire affair. I decided I just had to ask.

“Charlotte said, about paying you—”

“I don’t charge,” she said, cutting me off. “I’m a woman of
independent means, and I do this because it’s my calling. If you can afford to provide a service to society, you should do so. That’s what I think. Now. Tea or coffee?”

“Coffee?”

“Right, then. Oh, and here…”

She indicated the counter by the window, on which there were several plastic containers of what looked like baked goods. Many, many baked goods.

“One of my clients is a baker,” she said. “I don’t accept money, but some people bring things, little presents. She always makes sure I’m fully supplied with baked goods. I hope you’re not one of these girls who doesn’t eat.”

“Oh, I eat.”

“I’m glad to hear it. There’s a reason they call it comfort food. I’m not saying you should eat these sorts of things all the time, but food does provide a bit of comfort. And if you’re having a bad day, a brownie might be just what you need. Give yourself a little kindness and perk up the old blood sugar. Here you go.”

She presented me with a brownie on a beautiful little china plate in a rose and white willow pattern.

“Have a taste of that,” she said. “Angela’s quite good. She uses all kinds of exotic things in her baking, curry powder, tea, chilies, herbs. Things you’d never think should go into baked goods. She’s frightfully clever with that sort of thing. I think she’s going to be on a baking show on television…must remember to look out for that.”

She filled a tray with coffee- and tea-making equipment—proper loose tea for herself, and a fancy single-serve French press for me.

“All right,” she said, picking up the tray. “Come this way. And could you get the door?”

She led me through a set of double doors. Unlike the all-black room, this room was white and silver, absolutely stark. There was a fuzzy white rug, white leather chairs, a white sofa. The walls here were bare except for a few diplomas. I could make out the names of Oxford University and King’s College. At one end of the rug was a gleaming silver ball chair, like a big egg that you could climb inside. A cocoon. A cocoon was precisely what I wanted right now.

“Go ahead,” she said, nodding to the chair. “People love sitting in it.”

She took a seat on the sofa and poured herself a cup of tea.

“Right, then,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I know about you, and you can tell me the rest. I know your name is Aurora, or Rory, and I know you were stalked and stabbed by the Ripper.”

“That’s me,” I said.

“And I imagine people have been asking you a lot about how that makes you feel. I can guess at that—I think it makes you feel not good. But looking at you, you seem to be someone who’s gotten on with things.”

“I do?”

“Well, you returned to your school, where I’ve heard—in the most conversational terms—that you seem to be getting on very well with things. Charlotte thinks very highly of you.”

“She does?”

“Absolutely.”

I took another big bite of the brownie.

“The thing is,” I said, “I’ve had therapy before, and I didn’t really…I don’t really like talking about the attack.”

“Understandable. But I’m sure you know that talking about it is often the way of dealing with it and processing it?”

“I know that. But…I can’t.”

Julia would have latched on to that and dug in, mining her way into my soul. But Jane shrugged, took off her shoes, and tucked her feet under her on the sofa.

“Some people want to talk about what happened to them, to break it down bit by bit. Other people do not. Why don’t we just talk about how things have been going since your return? We can talk about whatever you like. Why did you ring today?”

“I was doing homework and studying,” I said. “And I realized I was dead.”

“Dead might be overstating the case.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

So, I did. I told her about school and having all my assignments in Bristol but never looking at them. I told her how I had piled my books up and how I had kind of felt nothing about them for a while, and then all of a sudden, I felt everything about them. I told her my fears of falling behind and generally not being a part of Wexford. And if I fell behind at school, I would have no place in the world, and how my future seemed so blurry to me right now, like I was driving in heavy rain. I might be on the right path, but more likely I was heading for a wall or into a rushing river.

I told her I was homesick, but had no desire to go home. I told her I was excited about having a boyfriend, but sometimes I didn’t even know why I liked him.

God, I talked a lot. Even for me, I talked a lot. I saw what Charlotte meant by feeling better around Jane—you just felt
like you could say things around her. And she wasn’t checking a clock. She just listened. She didn’t try to get me on any track or on any subject. She only stopped me when I said, “I wish I was normal.”

“Let me say this…” Jane leaned forward and adjusted her long-empty tea cup. “There is no normal. I’ve never met a normal person. The concept is flawed. It implies that there is only one way people are supposed to
be
, and that can’t possibly be true. Human experience is far too varied.”

“But I’ve met normal people,” I said. “I swear I have.”

“You’ve met people who get on well with life, and some of the people who get on with life with the most skill are far from what most people would call
normal
. So I never worry about normal. I
do
find that there are generally two types of people, though—there are people who have seen death up close and people who have not. People who survive, people like us—”