The Apothecary Page 0,51

through his skin. The three of us were now sitting in a triangle on the cellar floor, cross-legged and linked at the wrists. Pip sat on the outside, pouting and bored.

“Close eyes now,” Jin Lo said. “Think.”

I closed my eyes and felt the oil on my wrists and my temples. It tingled slightly. I wondered if Benjamin could feel my pulse, too.

“Apothecary says hide,” Jin Lo said. “You go in cellar.”

I felt a little dizzy and disoriented, as if something was happening to the part of my brain that was just behind my eyes, and also to the backs of my eyelids. The present started falling away, and I was vividly in the past. It wasn’t like normal memory, superimposed on the present, able to co-exist with other thoughts and experiences. It was more like an intensely realistic waking dream, of a time and place I’d been before. I remembered the terror of that night in the cellar, and the nervousness about being with Benjamin, this strange boy. I felt his shoulder brushing mine as he tried the locked doorknob. And then I heard voices, too distant to make out, in the front of the shop, and I heard the explosion. Then the German voices were closer.

“Wo ist er?” one of them asked.

“Ich weiss nicht,” another said. “Er ist verschwunden.”

“So?” Jin Lo said, beside me, startling me out of the past.

I opened my eyes and blinked, and tried to imitate the words the Germans had said. Jin Lo listened.

“They don’t see apothecary,” she said. “They say, ‘Where is he?’ Go back. Before.”

I closed my eyes and felt the odd, swooning feeling, and again I was climbing down the cellar stairs with Benjamin in the dark, before the Germans arrived. Just as he brushed my shoulder, I heard a hoarse whisper from above, in English. I hadn’t heard it before, in all the confusion.

“The shelter, Benjamin,” his father whispered. “I’ll be in the shelter.”

Then there were the distant voices, and the explosion, and the sounds of things being knocked over. The German voice asked, “Wo ist er?” again.

I opened my eyes. “Did you hear it?” I asked Benjamin.

“The shelter!” he said.

“Isn’t this it—the cellar?”

“No,” he said. “There’s an old Morrison shelter up there, from the war. My father uses it as a table.”

We scrambled up the ladder, and Benjamin went to a corner of the office. There was a wide, low table there, with an oilcloth covering, and books and papers scattered across it. Benjamin pulled the oilcloth back. The table underneath was actually a giant metal cage, with wire mesh sides and a flat steel top.

Pip whistled. “You had this in your house?” he said. “My mum and da had to fight their way into the Underground.”

“The shelter wouldn’t withstand a direct hit,” Benjamin said. “But it was supposed to keep the walls from crushing you if, you know, one of the V-1s hit your block. My father and I used to get inside and sleep in it at night. He made it like a game.” He paused, and I guessed he was thinking of his mother. “But he isn’t in it now,” he said finally.

“He said he’d be in the shelter,” I said.

“Maybe he was there and he’s gone. Maybe we heard it wrong. Anyway, the Germans would have found him in here.”

I looked around for Jin Lo, and realised she hadn’t come up with us. I went back to the iron grate and looked down, and saw her crouched in the cellar, staring into the darkness with a terrible look in her eyes.

“Jin Lo?” I said.

She recoiled from my voice, looking haunted.

“Are you all right?”

She shook her head and said something I couldn’t understand. I climbed down the ladder and saw that she was trembling. I sat beside her.

“What happened?”

She opened her hands in front of her face and gazed at her wrists. They were shiny with the oil from Benjamin’s arm and mine. The austere strength in her face was gone and replaced by something wild and vulnerable. “Things I do not wish to remember,” she said.

Pip and Benjamin were at the top of the ladder, looking down.

“Is she all right?” Benjamin asked.

“She’s shaking,” I said.

“Soldiers come,” Jin Lo said, in a little girl’s voice. “Japanese army. I am eight years old. They kill everyone. Father, mother, baby brother. They think I am dead. So many guns. At night, everything quiet. I climb out from under body, our neighbour, and I look. Whole city . . .”