The Apothecary Page 0,96
when this bloke Timothy comes up and gives me half a crown out o’ the blue. You should join.”
“I’m not very good at chess.”
“Perfect!” Pip said. “Then we’ll play for money.”
Again I felt a little electrical charge in my brain, as if my synapses were trying to tell me something, but I didn’t know what it was.
“There was this Russian bloke who was president of the chess club, they say,” Pip went on. “But he moved to America, so now I’m president. I think I’ll move to America one day. You’re from there, right? Is it grand?”
I said it was—but that London was, too.
When Sarah found out my parents were writing a TV show about Robin Hood, she wanted to go see the studio, so I took Pip and her to Riverton after school, on the train.
My parents were just happy to see I was making friends— any friends—but Olivia Wolff fell in love with Pip, with his enormous eyes and his acrobat’s grace. “Where did you find him?” she said.
Olivia took a cab that night to the East End to see Pip’s parents, who didn’t have a telephone, so she could cast him as the youngest member of the Merry Men. Pip loved the job and the money and the attention. When the show aired, people started recognising him in the street, and I thought it must have been the first time in Sarah’s life that she didn’t get all the attention of people walking by, just for being beautiful. I guessed it would be good for her, if she could stand it.
I joined chess club, and Pip was a patient teacher. He showed me how to think three or four moves ahead instead of leaping headlong into the moment. Slowly I became a passable opponent.
Sergei Shiskin, the club’s ex-president, sent a short letter from Sarasota, Florida, with a blurry photograph of a man with a beard and a woman in a headscarf standing on a pretty beach with two teenage children: a tall, solidly built boy and a pale, fragile-looking girl. It was hard to see their faces, but they seemed to be smiling, squinting in the Florida sunlight. The letter said Sergei was fine and liked his new school. At the end, it said, PS Tell Janie and Benjamin I said thank you, please. I don’t have the address.
“Does he mean me?” I asked Timothy, the spotty boy who had given me the letter to read.
“Sure,” Timothy said. “You’re Janie.”
“But I don’t know him.”
“Course you do! You were on the science team together!”
“What science team? There is no science team.”
Eventually our friends got used to the irritating amnesia. It was just a thing about Pip and me, like the fact that I was from California and Pip was from the East End: We’d both lost the same three weeks of our lives.
Some British agents in suits came to question my family, but we had nothing to tell them. They asked about Mr Danby, and I said I thought he’d been the Latin teacher at my school, but I had never met him, and now we had Miss Walsh. They also asked about an apothecary named Marcus Burrows and his son, Benjamin, who was my age. We knew there was a boarded-up apothecary shop around the corner, but that was all.
The Cold War carried on, and the Americans and the Soviets kept working on their nuclear weapons. There were rumours that England was about to stage a test in Australia. We still had bomb drills at school, but when the loud alarm bell went off and people started climbing under tables and desks, I didn’t feel afraid—though of course I didn’t know why.
Exactly a year after I returned to St Beden’s, I got a package in the mail, with no return address and with a strange postmark that I didn’t recognise. I took it into my room and tore off the brown paper. Inside was a small red diary.
I opened the book and recognised my own handwriting, but I didn’t remember writing the words. I flipped through the pages, reading a February entry about how furious I was at my stupid parents for dragging me to London. Then I read one about my miserable first day at St Beden’s, and how the only good part was meeting a boy named Benjamin Burrows who wanted to be a spy. One entry was interrupted when Benjamin climbed the tree outside my bedroom, because his father was missing and he had