Clovis was wrong about one thing. Someone did want to settle down with him once. One of the thousands who live in secrecy with success: Stanley. So ordinary and forgettable, but he was the most adoring and kindest man to ever cross Jonesy’s path. They had saved their pennies to rent a flat, a permanent love nest to use upon his return, even though Stanley knew he would die when he was called up and almost chopped off his leg to avoid it. He was found washed up on a Danish beach. Jonesy eventually learned the where and when of Jutland.
‘I am not completely tragic, Clovis. My kind is not all doomed.’ He speaks only to her fragrant vestige.
Jonesy rolls the phial on the seat of the wooden chair with his carving, calloused fingers.
He loves them all. Even his wicked mistress, he still loves her – and hates her. But he cannot change who he is. So he will never be able to keep his family safe. Everything else she said is true. The law won’t change. Neither will the potency of the hate and the violence.
The room is still full of Clovis, her essence, her last glance so pointed with meaning as she turned and left him alone to make a decision.
Jonesy clasps the phial. Thinking of his grandmother now, he lifts the top. The dragon chases the flaming pearl of wisdom and truth – one of the Eight Treasures. ‘To be peaceful within oneself, Yun, is the flaming pearl.’
Jonesy drinks the liquid. His hair fans on his pillow like a raven’s wing and he waits for peace. His body convulses for several seconds. He is gone.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Willa stands in Jonesy’s empty room, where his odour lingers, or is it just the memory of his scent. She is unsure. There, the vacant spot where his funny sandals should be. And there, scratch marks from his wooden box, when he scraped it across the floorboards’ patina.
She imagines him sitting here shortly after they moved to Bermondsey, when he whispered a confidence. At the time she thought how burdened he must be, carrying his weighty secret. His eyebrows had arched with relief when he searched her large eyes and found them smiling with acceptance. She was embarrassed that she hadn’t figured it out sooner. His painfully polite refusals of her timid touches were finally explained. She too felt relief when she stopped blaming herself for not being desirable enough for his libido.
A soft knock on the door and Rafe opens it a crack.
‘Willa?’
He wants to go to her, to hold her, but her boundaries with him are clear. Sometimes she makes him feel so lonely.
‘I’m okay.’
Sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’m going now.’
She nods.
Now, alone in the house, her grief scares her. She closes Jonesy’s door softly, as if his spirit sleeps there still.
In her room, strings of lucky acorns dangle from a nail head that juts out from an exposed beam. She rips them off the nail and crushes them with her heel; the stubborn, hardest ones enrage her.
She lifts the lid of a small, wooden box packed with miniature dented tin hands – to ward off the evil eye – and spills them onto the floor. Her heel comes down and she stomps until they are broken, the fingers splayed and distorted. Glass beads she once wrapped around Rafe’s neck for protection, she smashes to smithereens.
‘You do not do your job,’ she accuses them.
Her arm sweeps over the windowsill knocking the rabbits’ feet, the tiny horseshoe amulets and the shells and pebbles to the floor. The magic bones of toads and frogs she crushes with her fists. On she goes until she destroys every token, every charm she has ever owned. All but the jade cicada, litter her room.
The bolts of fabric standing in the corner anger her. The clothes and fabric rationing has been lifted, but the beautiful lace, the heavily floral and bright cloth that blazon her room do nothing to lift her.
In the days following, she continues to pat the doorknob in her newly bare room, her fingertips tap the empty windowsill and she counts ceaselessly. But these routines and patterns begin to agitate her. When her hands are this itchy she wants harder work. Clean. I need to clean.
Downstairs in Finn’s annex, Willa attacks the dust covering the eccentric collection of furniture with one of her old cotton chemises. Her mind wanders to the other night, when they brought Jonesy home so battered and bruised. How long had he had the phial? Wouldn’t he have told her? How was he able to leave his bed to retrieve it? She supposes he could have kept it hidden under his mattress. She puts her back into dusting the slats of a roll-top desk.
Clovis. Perspiring from the work and her suspicion, she pauses. No, she thinks, Clovis would never … And yet, here is one amongst them, an immortal who is dead.
She leans against a table upon which rests two volumes. Odd ones these. A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson, 1775. She randomly opens one of the hefty volumes.
Mortal. 1. Subject to death; doomed sometime to die.
‘Unbelievable,’ she says.
Willa closes her eyes, opens the book to another page and points her finger.
Parentation. Something done or said in honour of the dead.
Her scream, high and hysterical lands on Finn when he steps into the annex.
‘Willa?’
She turns to him, wild-eyed, with the dictionary in her hands, still open to Parentation.
‘He wasn’t supposed to die. Please Finn, we have to do something for Jonesy … to honour him.’
They are silent on the journey east to Wapping, a quartet in black. Willa is scorched with Jonesy’s absence, felt more acutely confined as she is in their single-car cortege in the east London traffic.
Finn parks near the Town of Ramsgate pub. Along the side of the old building they walk the tight, ancient passage to the precarious, dilapidated Wapping Old Stairs.
The seagulls scavenge on the foreshore
