Like A Charm

ACTS OF CORPORAL CHARITY by Jane Haddam

Later, John Robert Mortimer would remember that it had all happened by accident, and because it had happened by accident, it couldn't possibly be his fault. God only knows that he hadn't intended to be in England, ever. When he was growing up, sitting by himself at a long table in the cafeteria at lunch, sitting in the back of one classroom or another so that no teacher would even think of calling on him, the only travelling he had ever imagined himself doing was to Florida or Los Angeles. He was a child of northern New England. Cold was his heritage. Sometimes he thought the only thing he could count on in life was snow.

This morning, standing on an unfamiliar street still mostly empty at the start of work-day traffic, he was not only cold but tired. Last night had been worse than hideous. Whatever had given him the idea that he could make a life teaching English to adolescents? Whatever had given him the idea that he could function on less than three hours' sleep? But no, he'd never had that idea. He'd known as soon as he'd seen the time on his bedside clock that he was going to have a horrible day. It wouldn't even matter that this was his one day 'off. There was no 'off, not really. To be 'off, he'd have to be home in New Hampshire, barricaded into his faculty apartment by books and a wall of noise, the 'Emperor' Concerto pumping through his headset, the ringers on all the phones made mute. Today he was not so much off as in hiding. He hated the idea of going back to the hotel.

'You'll have some time to yourself while you're there,' Mr Cadwallader had told him when he'd been assigned as a chaperone for the Senior trip. 'You'll have a day to yourself in the city. The only concern we have is that our students should be protected at all times.'

Protected, my ass, John Robert had thought at the time, and he hadn't changed his mind. He was more in need of being protected from his students than his students were in need of being protected from London. That's what happened when you had to deal with kids who had no concept of the value of money - or of the fact that it was limited, for most people. That was a problem he hadn't considered when he'd signed on to teach at Meredith Academy. He'd thought that between his college, which had been both famous and infamously expensive, and his childhood, which had taken place in one of the most excruciatingly 'normal' towns in all of the North-east, he'd perfected the song and dance a poor boy had to do to survive among people much richer than himself. He'd been wrong about that, too.

'Look,' Lisa Hardwick had said the night before, hanging on to the door to his room as if she intended to swing on it, 'we found this. We thought you'd like it.'

'Found it where?' he'd asked, taking the slip of paper from her hand without looking at it. He was trying not to look at Lisa herself, or at her friend Marianne, who followed her around like gum stuck to a shoe. They were dressed in this year's version of cool, as far as cool was permitted within the dress code. They both had stockings on, and skirts that fell modestly to their knees. The problem was that the skirts had slits in them, cut high on their legs to the very edges of their underwear, and they wore necklines that plunged towards their navels and hugged everything too tightly to be ignored. They weren't wearing bras, either. They never did. With all that skin on display, it didn't matter that Lisa was pug-nosed and thick waisted, or that Marianne had a line of pimples along her jaw that were rough and red from handling. Hormones were hormones. He wanted to reach out and pinch Lisa's nipples until they bled.

'We found it in a phone booth,' Lisa said. Then she looked at Marianne, and they both burst out laughing.

A moment later they were gone, trailing beer fumes he should have recognized as soon as they'd appeared in the hall. He could hear them in the stairwell, stumbling and giggling. He looked down at the scrap of paper. It had a fringe of phone numbers at the bottom. They'd taken down somebody's posted advertisement. Whoever it was would get no answer now. He turned the paper over and over in his hands. Are you a naughty boy? it said, in bright red letters. The rest of it was not so bright, and for a moment he didn't understand what he was seeing. Mistress Pamela knows what you are. You need discipline. Come up to my office and take your punishment – now.

He let the paper fall to the floor. Could they really have found that in a phone booth? He bent down and picked it up. The last thing he needed was for somebody to find it directly outside his door. He went back into his room and locked himself in. He sat down on the edge of the bed and wondered what Mistress Pamela looked like. To make it really work, she'd have to be a middle-aged woman who wore the kind of button-to-the-neck dress they sold at home in J. C. Penney's, and those shoes that nobody wore anymore, the thick ones with the ties. Better yet, she'd have to be really fat, the way his foster mother had been fat, enormous, so that she could only fit into shifts and knee-high stockings that were always rolling down. It was very close in this room, very hot. The hotel must have turned up the heat after they'd all complained. He had sweat on his forehead and on the palms of his hands. He was finding it very hard to breathe.

He went into the bathroom and turned on the shower as hard as he could make it. That wasn't very hard. There didn't seem to be any decent water pressure in the entire city of London. He put his head under the water and left it there until the wet seeped down his neck and chest and soaked through his white button-down shirt and ratty thin tie. He'd bought the tie in a knock-off place in Boston. He'd bought the shirt at Sears. His foster mother had ended up in a pool of blood at the bottom of the long driveway that led to her house, stabbed forty-six times by a man she thought she was going to sell cordwood to. He could still hear the sound of the knife going in and coming out, the thud and the suck, thud and suck, thud and suck, over and over again, like the metronome on the piano in the music room at school.

He went back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed again. It was cold instead of hot. His head hurt. He took Mistress Pamela's advertisement and set fire to it with his green Bic lighter. He let it curl into his hand until the last moment. Then he dropped it into the empty tin of Myntz he'd brought all the way from the airport in New York. Thud and suck was a sound lots of things made. It was the sound sex made. It was probably the sound Mistress Pamela made when she did whatever she did to the men who called her number. He found he couldn't imagine what she did without imagining other things, and the other things he was imagining were all wrong. He wondered if she let men reverse the roles if they paid her enough to do it.

'You'll have a day to yourself in the city,' Mr Cadwallader had said, and it was true. He had this day, the day before they were due to go home. He could walk around as much as he wanted. He had no obligations but to be back at the hotel first thing tomorrow morning, to help supervise the packing up and getting to the airport. Lisa and Marianne would sit together at the back of the plane and giggle all the way to New York. The other teachers would huddle together towards the front and try to pretend they didn't know what the students were getting up to. All in all, both England and American Airlines would be left with the impression that the students of Meredith Academy were spoiled brats with no consideration for anybody but themselves. It was true.

Mistress Pamela could do a job on you, John Robert thought, meaning Lisa, or Marianne, or even himself, or nobody at all. Thud and suck. Thud and suck. It was the sound of the waves going in and out on the New Hampshire shore.

There were crowds on the street now. John Robert was being pushed against the buildings and their windows, odd windows, not what he was used to. He looked at the people going by and thought they were no different from the people he saw in Boston, or Nashua. He inched along the pavement, looking at things that didn't interest him: newspapers, candy, small grocery items called garlic pickle and Marmite and mushy peas. He wished he knew where he was, in what part of the city. That way, he would know what to think of the women who were passing him. They didn't attract him. Most of them were too old. All of them were too hard. He could feel their hardness when they brushed against him, and they always did.

The bracelet was in the window of an antique shop when he saw it, and it stopped him dead. It had been years since he'd seen a charm bracelet. They were so out of style in the States, he never came across them anymore. This one was gold, not silver like the ones his foster sisters had owned before their mother died and he had been moved back to the children's shelter. Theirs had probably not really been silver, either - silver plate, maybe, if they were lucky - and they had worn them on their ankles instead of their wrists. His foster mother had worn no jewellery at all, but like his sisters she had always had her hair 'done', blonded to the point of surreality, teased high over the top of her head, as if she had to anchor a Vegas headdress and wanted to make sure there was enough to keep it from falling off. Mistress Pamela hadn't worn any jewellery that he'd recognized when he'd gone to see her the night before. She'd barely worn any clothes. It wasn't any good, the way these women went about it. It was much too obvious that they were playing a game. He'd had a picture of her stuck in his mind, stuck so firmly that he had been unable to erase the number from his memory even by burning it, but when he'd gone up to the flat at the top of that long narrow flight of stairs, she'd been nothing at all like he had pictured her.

'If you want to make sure to get what you want,' one of the other teachers at Meredith had said, 'go to New York. They have them every which way in New York. You can get them made to order.'

John Robert didn't want to get one made to order. He wasn't in the habit of visiting prostitutes. He wasn't in the habit of indulging himself in any way. If he wanted to indulge himself, he could always take up the offer Lisa Hardwick was making him. Maybe she'd be willing to make a party of it and invite in Marianne.

The bracelet had a lot of charms on it: a monkey, a tiger, a tiny key. There was even a miniature Fabergé egg. His foster sisters always chose charms for good luck, as if having a heart-shaped charm with their boyfriend's initials on it would call forth a proposal of marriage. There was a heart-shaped charm here, but he couldn't see initials on it. There was a pair of dice. They would have liked that one. He wondered what had happened to them after their mother died. Thud and suck. Thud and suck. He went into the shop and looked around.

Mistress Pamela had turned out to be a small woman trying to make up for her lack of stature by wearing very high heels. Her hair had been dyed red but very thin. Her voice had been high and stressed. The only truly impressive thing about her had been her fingernails, and he had told her how much he appreciated them: grown long and filed sharp, painted red with flecks of gold glitter in them, so that they winked in the light. It was about money, that was the problem. It was always about money, and he needed it to be about something else. She had had her instruments laid out on a table: a hairbrush, a tawse, a paddle, a cane. She'd had a cigarette going in a blue plastic ashtray on top of a heating grate. He could feel the whack and grate against the bare skin of his ass as the paddle came down, over and over again, the air whistling through its holes, the edges of her nails scratching him every time her hand made contact with his skin. He could feel the sting, still, under his clothes. All his muscles hurt. There were no women like his foster mother here in England, not that he had seen. Englishwomen did not seem to put on that kind of weight.

The woman at the counter in the back of the antique shop was not fat at all. She was compact and middle-aged, her grey hair pulled back tightly at the nape of her neck.

'Is there something I can do for you?' she said. 'Is there something you've come to sell?'

John Robert wondered who this woman was. Did she own the shop or just work here? Did antique shops in England always have saleswomen who could speak so precisely, as if delivering lines from a textbook exercise on educated speech? He looked back at the window.

'There's a charm bracelet,' he said.

'That's right.' She came around her counter and to the front. The back of the window was open, covered only with a cloth, which was supposed to provide a background for the things that were offered for sale. She reached through the slit in the cloth and came back with the bracelet.

'It really is gold, this one,' she said. 'You don't get that very often in a place like this. Antique, too, some of it.'

'Some of what?'

'Some of the charms,' she said. She held the bracelet out on the palm of her hand. 'That steam engine is old, I think. And the bear. Nineteenth century. You have to wonder who would have brought it here.'

'You don't remember who did?'

'I wasn't the one who took it in,' she said. 'It's well past its date for sale. People bring things here and leave them. I don't know why. I've always wondered if this one belonged to somebody's mother.'

'It could take a lot more charms,' John Robert said.

'I even have charms,' the woman said. 'Those we get, all the time. Little bits of gold. People think it's valuable, gold.'

'Isn't it?'

'Sometimes. But little bits are little bits. You're not going to get rich with a charm the size of a thumbnail. Do you mean to give that to your sweetheart? I have those other charms, if you want to put some on. I've got them right behind the counter.'

'I was thinking of a souvenir,' John Robert said. 'Something special to bring home from England. We're only here for a week.'

'From America,' the woman said.

'From America.'

'I've got an American charm, too,' the woman said. 'A dollar sign, in gold. But that wouldn't do as a souvenir from England, would it?'

They were at the counter now. John Robert couldn't remember how they had gotten there. He shouldn't try to operate on too little sleep. The woman reached under the counter and came up with a tray. It was full of gold, not only charms, but bangle bracelets, earrings, rings, studs that might have gone through someone's nose, or someone's penis. In Mistress Pamela's room the wallpaper had begun to peel in strips off the walls and the single window hadn't shut properly. Every time the cane came down on him, he had cried out. He knew when he began to bleed because he could feel the slickness dripping on to the tops of his thighs. He thought somebody would hear them. He imagined the street below them filled with undercover police, all of them holding tape recorders. His body began to buck and rise against the table she had forced him to bend over. His arms pulled against the wrist restraints. His legs strained against the ropes that secured him to the table legs, pulling him wide. The cane came down again and again, again and again, and he was shrieking long before he began to find release. He thought about Lisa and Marianne and his foster mother and his foster sisters and the long line of women down the years, old and young, young and old, it didn't matter. He was spurting out on to the carpet and the wall. Mistress Pamela was getting back to business.

The woman flicked through the bits of gold in the tray and came up with the dollar sign. 'See?' she said. 'A dollar sign. An American must have brought it. Or somebody who thought they could buy a charm and it would make them rich.'

'I knew people who did that,' John Robert said.

'We all know people who do that,' the woman said. Her hands were soft and lined. The nails were short and clean and without paint. She put the dollar sign down on the counter by itself. 'I can put it on for you, if you like,' she said. 'It's not hard to do. You only need a soldering iron. I have one.'

'Could you do that?'

'Of course I could. I offered. It's not people like you we get in here most of the time. I didn't realize it, when I bought the business.'

'Realize what?'

'How sad the people are,' the woman said. 'It's just that, you know, that was the shock, taking this on. You see them every day, in the street, and you don't notice it. You don't think of it. But you have to think of it in here.'

'Acts of corporal charity,' John Robert said.

'I'm sorry?' the woman said.

'I was thinking of it,' John Robert said. 'That word, corporal. You only hear it used one of two ways. Corporal punishment. Acts of corporal charity. I've always thought they were much the same thing.'

'Do you want me to put the dollar sign on the bracelet?' the woman said. 'Maybe your sweetheart will think you're trying to bring her good luck.'

Mistress Pamela's nails were fake. She broke one during their session, and as he stood in the middle of her room putting his clothes back on she fixed it with a kit she kept in the table drawer.

'That's a souvenir to take home from a holiday in England,' she'd told him.

That was true. He was going to have the marks on his ass for a long time. He was going to have the embarrassment, too, the way he felt standing naked in the middle of her room with blood running down the back of his legs.

'I'll just go and put this on then,' the woman in the shop said. 'I don't care what kind of charity it is. There isn't much in the way of charity anymore. Not round here. People are sad. There's sadness everywhere.'

The woman in the shop did not look sad. She walked away into the back and the lights glinted on the gold in her hand.

He was late getting to the plane in the morning. He was supposed to go on the bus with the rest of them, but he wasn't back in time to get the bus, and the only way they knew to leave without him was because he had remembered the number of one of the other teachers' cellphones.

'I'll be at Heathrow,' he'd said, giving as little as possible in explanation. It wasn't their business, anyway, and he wasn't holding anybody up. His free day had been the last. The rest of them expected to be on duty now, right up to the end. He wouldn't have gone back to the hotel at all except for the fact that he had to get his clothes, and he needed his flight bag to pack away the charm bracelet.

'You have to be at the airport at least an hour before we're supposed to leave,' Carla Massey had said - it was her cellphone, the least sympathetic of the teachers on the trip - and then she'd hung up on him, as if she thought he didn't know what was necessary for travelling these days. He was standing in a phone booth on a windy street he didn't recognize. He still had no idea where he was. He shifted the parcel in his hands and looked at the advertisements taped to the sides of the cubicle. He'd been looking forward to the tall red boxes he'd seen on Doctor Who, but this phone booth was nothing like that. It might as well have been a booth in Boston or New York.

He had the charm bracelet in the pocket of his shirt. It was bulky and awkward there. Bits and pieces of the charms stabbed at him. He moved it around for comfort and went out on the street to find a cab. The parcel felt warm to the touch, as if body heat did not dissipate after death.

'A sticker,' his foster mother had called him when the social workers asked. The social workers came once a month to sit in the plastic chairs at his foster mother's metal kitchen table. They looked at the cheerful yellow curtains and the samplers she bought at craft fairs: If home is where the heart is, I live at Nieman Marcus; My dust bunnies bring Easter eggs; I fight poverty, I work. They took notes on yellow legal pads with plastic pens printed with the words 'Department of Children and Families'. They tried not to look at his foster mother's size, or at the dogs coming in and out of the pet door with the mud of the yard all over them, or at the smoke curling up from the tip of her cigarette. 'He sticks to things,' his foster mother would say, putting the cigarette out in an ashtray overflowing with butts and pale pink wads of chewing gum.

Back at the hotel room, he sat down on the edge of his bed one more time and put the parcel on the bedside table. He went into the shower and washed for the first time in nearly two days. He put his dirty clothes in his suitcase among the clean ones, not really caring, one way or the other, if the clean ones would be ruined or stained. There was no blood on his clothes. There had been blood on him the night his foster mother was murdered, because he'd gone slipping and sliding in it (thud and suck) when he knelt down to turn her over on the drive. She had been chewing gum when she died. When he nudged her, the gum fell out of her mouth. When he looked up to find the moon, the sky was covered with clouds. Once, in the student centre, Lisa Hardwick had grabbed his crotch and squeezed, and he had never been able to tell anybody about it. You couldn't tell people that kind of thing. You could get brought up on charges of sexual harassment.

'It's not so common to find men who like it real,' Mistress Pamela had said as he was reaching for his clothes when the session was over. 'They want to play at it, that's what. They don't want pain. You do.'

'I do what?'

'Like pain,' she'd said.

He got clean underwear and a clean shirt and a pair of jeans out of the same suitcase he'd put his dirty clothes in. He put his loafers on without bothering to look for socks. He found the charm bracelet where he'd left it on the bed. The gold dollar sign was shinier than the other charms. He'd noticed it before. That made sense, somehow. Money was always more fascinating than any of the things it could buy. He wondered who would want to buy a zoo full of miniature animals, especially a snake. He wondered what the dice were for. His foster sisters had bought charms for special occasions as well as for luck. They'd had their nails done at a salon in a strip mall just outside of Keene, carved up like topiaries, studded with glass crystals and multifaceted beads.

'He never lets you know what he's thinking,' his foster mother had said – but she'd had that one wrong. The truth was, he wasn't thinking anything, most of the time. His head was like an enormous sea shell broadcasting the sound of the ocean. Thud and suck. Thud and suck. Everything drifted. Everything was the same.

'It would look better with more charms,' the woman in the antique shop had said, fastening the bracelet round her wrist to model it for him. 'I've never worn charm bracelets myself. I've never understood them.'

He reached forward and raised her arm into the light.

'Charms are supposed to mean something,' the woman said.

He took the parcel off the table and unwrapped it. He'd been careful to cut the hands off up over the wrists. It was easier that way. Wrist bones were impossible to saw through. He had tried. Fingers lacked what he needed: definition, maybe, or just a place to put the bracelet. He always left them with bracelets. He always bought them something before he let them go.

'It's beautiful,' his foster mother had said, that night in the kitchen, before she'd walked down to the end of the drive to talk to the man who wanted cordwood. 'Turquoise plastic. I don't think I've ever seen a bracelet made of turquoise plastic'

'I've got a bracelet in turquoise plastic,' one of his foster sisters had said. 'I bet he stole it from my room.'

Down at the end of the drive there was a wooden gate and a big mailbox, big enough to put packages in. His foster mother hated to go down to the post office with those little yellow call slips to pick up whatever she'd had mailed to her from catalogues. She liked to order special edition plates with pictures of angel-children painted on them that she could prop up on little stands in a display case in the living room. She liked people to admire her collections.

'It's beautiful,' she'd told him again, ignoring her daughter, which she usually did. Then she got up and started down the drive to the gate and her appointment. If he'd waited another month or two before he killed her, it would have been maple season and she would have been boiling syrup on the stove.

'I never saw anybody come before just from the pain,' Mistress Pamela had said, straightening the instruments on her table. 'I never saw anybody as young as you before, either. It's old guys I get, most of the time. Sour old men all shrivelled up and waiting to die. You have to wonder what they've done they think they need to be punished for.'

'It won't look right until it has a few more charms,' the woman in the shop said. 'Not to me.' Then she took the bracelet off and laid it on the counter.

He had meant to buy the charm bracelet for Miss Pamela, but when he had seen it on the arm of the woman in the shop he hadn't been able to imagine it anywhere else. He'd bought another bracelet later, a tin and copper one in a souvenir shop in Leicester Square, with the outline of Tower Bridge engraved on it. He found that one in the pocket of his soiled pants and put it down on the bed next to the charm bracelet. Then he picked them both up and put them away in his flight bag. This was not the first time he had brought a hand back from Europe. He'd done it only last year, after the German trip. The trick was to know what they were looking for, and to keep all things made of metal in their own separate place.

The hands lay in plastic sandwich bags he'd brought from the States. He'd had no idea if they sold plastic sandwich bags in London, and he still didn't know. Miss Pamela's hand was curled in on itself, the nails long and glittery, bare of the rings she'd been wearing the night before. He had had to take off the rings, because they could have tripped a metal alarm. The old woman's hand had never had any rings on it, and its fingernails were as plain as ever. She wouldn't waste her money getting bits of plastic and glass drilled into them. His jeans were loose and fluid - 'relaxed fit', they were called, meaning they were made to be worn by men who were growing fat. He was not, but he liked the looseness in the legs. He put the bag with Miss Pamela's hand in it down the inside leg on the right and pinned it there. He put the bag with the old woman's hand in it down the inside leg on the left and did the same. He was careful to keep the fingers pointing upwards so that the tips under the plastic brushed against his balls. He liked the feel of the plastic-covered palms pressing against his inner thighs. He would take Miss Pamela's hand out of its bag in the bathroom on the plane and put the bangle with Tower Bridge round the wrist. He would leave it under the tissues in the wall dispenser so that nobody would find it until the plane was being readied for take-off down the line. By then, he would be in a cab in Manhattan, leaving the other one.

'Listen,' Lisa Hardwick had said to him, that day she'd grabbed his crotch in the Student Centre. 'Don't kid me. You always think with your dick.'

Maybe he would sit next to Lisa Hardwick on the plane, in one of those three-across arrangements, with Marianne parked between them. He would take the old woman's hand off his thigh in the bathroom at JFK and put the bracelet on it. He would put the hand and the bracelet in the pocket of his jacket, so that he'd be ready with it when it came time to leave it in the cab. The bracelets always came off. They fell into sewer grates and on to tables. They fell down the cracks in couches. He had left the one from Germany in a drawer in a hotel room on 1- 95 in New Jersey, next to a Gideon Bible, and although the story had made the papers the very next day, there had been nothing said about a sterling silver bangle bracelet with clusters of daisies round the edges.

He zipped up his pants and reached for the one clean shirt he had left. He put a plain blue crew-necked sweater over the shirt. He put his hands between his legs and felt their hands there. If he pressed against them hard enough, they felt alive.

Thud and suck, he thought, piling his suitcases up in front of the door to the hotel room. When he'd started, he'd meant to take their hearts, but he always went on too long. Thud and suck, thud and suck, thud and suck. The knife went in and out and up and down and back again, with its own rhythm, like a dance he'd learned to do and could only do again by rote.

'You think with your dick,' Lisa Hardwick had said, and John Robert Mortimer thought that was true.