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 at low tide. Remnants of previous centuries lie scattered at their feet. The river meanders here, and where once the sugar ships were welcomed at Stepney Marsh, the river bends around a community that survived the Blitz, where wages have risen and almost everyone who works at the docks and factories can afford a television and a car. Not even Clovis can look across the Thames and fail to be astounded by the power of time.
Jonesy’s sandals have left ghost prints on the Old Stairs where he once waited to greet his straw-headed sailor at the end of a voyage. Rafe holds a Chinese urn filled with his ashes. He lifts the lid and scatters a portion of Jonesy into the lapping water. Willa adds an armful of bright pink peonies. Finn almost drops the urn when he sees a small piece of bone protruding from the top of the remaining ashes. Tossing a portion, bone fragments and all, he then offers it to Clovis.
Reluctant, and with an awkward distaste, Clovis empties the last portion. But Jonesy will not go so easily. The breath of the Thames works against her, lifting Jonesy’s dust and billowing it back into his mistress’s face and hair. It enters her mouth. She spits and rages, while straggling peonies trap her feet. Black-headed gulls swoop down beside Clovis to fight over a fish carcass, their conversation quarrelsome and loud. She is trapped by dead things.
‘I need a drink,’ she shouts, retreating to the stairs.
‘Just a minute,’ Finn says to her.
‘It stinks here and I’m cold,’ she says, but she stops and turns back.
‘We’ll catch up with you.’ Finn motions for Rafe and Willa to go on ahead.
‘I’m sure you told us that you knew exactly how many phials we had. I remember how specific you were,’ Finn says.
Clovis shrugs. ‘I must have missed one. He obviously hid one from me.’
‘That day, when you collected them from us, you were satisfied that every delivery was accounted for.’
‘As I said, I must have miscalculated. Let’s go.’
Unspoken suspicions trill in the dank air. The tide washes in fast. With each great, slosh of brown water, the mud grows thicker. Clovis is quick to climb the slimy stairs.
No. She is not so careless, Finn thinks. His feet broker small agreements with the stones of the foreshore as the remains take flight on the Thames, the parentations of Jonesy Ling concluded.