you find?’ She looked properly. ‘What have you done with Jem?’
‘I … don’t know.’ He was quiet for a second, because he wanted to say, just let me keep it for another five minutes, but it wasn’t his.
‘Missouri.’ It had a rattle to it, like she was shaking a tax box at him.
He explained as much as he understood. It left him hollowed out. He felt like that man from the story who, because he couldn’t pay in coins, had to pay with an equal measure of flesh flensed off his chest.
‘That’s it?’ she said at last. ‘You left him there.’
He nodded.
Downstairs somewhere, doors clattered open and voices drifted up the stairs. They must have just opened the bar for dinner. Very different to that grand house on Jermyn Street, this, but of course the English banks had collapsed. They had no money now.
Agatha smoothed down her skirt, tipping herself towards the light while she made sure there was nothing on it. Since he could remember, she had worn white, or patterned white, but the navy women now were dyeing their dresses dark blue, like officers’ jackets. She put her wedding ring in the top drawer, and locked it. When she came back around the desk, she slapped him so hard he fell onto his hands and knees.
‘Get out,’ was all she said.
50
London, 1903
The frost fair glittered. Around the stalls, electric lights that ran on an elderly generator loud enough to hear, over the hiss of chestnuts on hotplates and the plinking song that came from the bicycling fortune teller’s music box. Joe and Kite had made a couple of circuits through it while Kite told the story.
They walked while Joe tried to think what to say, which took a long time. It was all true, he could feel that; he had recognised it while Kite was saying it. Once or twice he could have joined in but didn’t, because his voice had gone somewhere else.
The Clock Tower sang out midnight, and then so did St Paul’s and all the carillons of other bells along the river. He stared at Parliament. He could remember it in ruins.
It was like trying to remember a dream. It all ran together in a blur of sounds and engines. When he looked back towards the cathedral, he had a vivid memory of printed signs saying when confession was available and Mary with an electric halo, but he couldn’t have said when it had been, or what he had done before or after. Beside him, Kite was quiet, and different, because he wasn’t just a beaten-up sailor any more; knowing what he had looked like before the burn scars made them a translucent mask over someone who was still handsome.
The cold was rising off the ice. He could feel it getting under his sleeves and the hem of his coat, so he stopped to buy some of the chestnuts, which were covered in hot sugar, and gave them to Kite to hold. Kite bumped his shoulder against Joe’s to say thank you.
‘You came to make sure I had a family, didn’t you?’ Joe said. ‘Not kicking about by myself above a shoe shop or something.’
Kite didn’t say yes or no, or what he would have done if there had been a lonely shoe shop. ‘I came to say goodbye. The gate is being bricked up, there will be no way through in a fortnight’s time.’
Joe looked away and over the ice. Kite offered him the chestnuts. ‘Thanks. Do I seem the same, in any …?’
Kite nodded. ‘I think you’re the same thing in three different lights.’
‘But we’re not talking about morning and evening light, are we,’ Joe said, because although he couldn’t remember anything specific that Kite had said to him in the past, he had a good idea of the shape of his conversation. ‘It’s more along the lines of ultraviolet, infrared and visible, isn’t it. And don’t say you don’t know what the electromagnetic spectrum is, it’s impossible to sit in a room with me in any iteration of myself and not get onto it at some point.’
‘Yes I know, because my sister had to rescue me once from Someone’s X-ray experiments. What sort of lunatic makes a fluoroscope in the shed?’
Joe sort of laughed and choked at the same time. He couldn’t tell if he remembered, or if he could just imagine it well.
‘Was it hard this time?’ Kite asked after a while.