The Chemistry of Tears

Catherine

THAT NIGHT I SLEPT with the window wide open but there was no freshness, only the warm and weary air of this unexpected century. Near morning I had a looping puzzle dream in which Cruickshank’s engine reproduced itself and it was my job to match and screw together the golden strands of DNA.

In the morning there was blood on my pillow, but Amanda’s scratch was not so very bad. In any case, I had been “cut a lot of slack,” and it would not be either gracious or politic for me to seek her dismissal. I would be an adult. I would no longer expect to be exempt from the rules. I would return my notebooks, although I would insist that their access be restricted. For even Crofty would understand that it would not be helpful for Amanda to enter the realms of Mysterium Tremendum. None of us needed creatures from outer space just now.

In the meantime I set all ten books neatly in the middle of the kitchen table. On top of this I placed a single sheet of paper addressed to Eric Croft. Why I did this is still unclear, perhaps some sort of premonition that I was never coming back, although that makes no sense—I was about to do nothing more drastic than visit Bowling Green Lane. I was born around the corner, after all.

Did I believe Thigpen’s workshop was still in Bowling Green Lane? I had a very clear picture of the deep high space all the way through to Northampton Road, the steel and brass leviathan gleaming beneath a dirty London sky.

It was very easy to reach on the underground. Lambeth North, Baker Street, Farringdon. Why not? What harm? What could be worse than what I had already discovered, that my childhood home had been turned into an X-rated video store?

As I left the house I discovered a strange car parked with its rusted nose angled steeply down from the footpath to my neighbours’ door. Of course the Upstairs were on holiday again, but this particular car, which had once been very upper-upper, was now very down and old and grey and chalky with a running board and corroded mud guards. I imagined I saw a body stretched across the back seat. Dead, I thought. Then the body moved, and that was worse. Then there were two, I was certain, moving like moles inside a blanket.

It would be embarrassing to call the police, so I double-locked my door and hurried away down Kennington Road. I thought, I should have written down the registration number.

Outside Lambeth North station the newspaper placards read: TIDE OF FEAR. There was a colour picture of the Gulf of Mexico, a dense black centre with a rim of rusty red surrounded by a coral blue.

The train pushed a wall of hot air before it. I boarded. The scratch on my face was noted, in that particularly British way which contains not a skerrick of sympathy. I changed to the Central Line. I arrived at Farringdon to discover it was disembowelled—temporary ramps and lanes and hoardings and lots more TIDE OF FEAR.

Outside, Farringdon Road was a construction site. Lorries, minivans, motorbikes and newspapers floating like gulls above a garbage dump.

I strode north, holding my breath. I turned right into Bowling Green Lane, past the pub (the Bowler) and now I was inside Henry Brandling’s puzzle. I felt my mobile phone vibrating against my hip and there was 40 Bowling Green Lane: FINSBURY BUSINESS CENTRE. Of course it was Clerkenwell not Finsbury but there it stood, built a century after Sumper visited the same address.

Who would have anticipated feeling so let down? I had spent so much time maintaining a rational sense of doubt that I had had no notion of how much I wanted the machine. I wanted Cruickshank and his silver ladies but Thigpen’s had been bombed, rebuilt, become decrepit in its turn. This was our inheritance: a vast dull postwar building with depressing offices for rent.

From Bowling Green Lane I called Security to ask if Amanda had swiped her card this morning.

She had not.

The trains were slow and stinking. It was almost two claustrophobic hours before I reached the Annexe where I discovered a large expensive envelope addressed to me in Amanda’s hand.

“Dear Miss Gehrig, I am awfully sorry. I am so ashamed. You are the person I admire most in all the world.”

Inside I found the little portrait she had made of me, excised neatly from its book. My first thought was, she knows I coveted it. My second was, she is inside the building.

I emailed Eric to say I was “reading at home.”

The tube was more infuriating than before. I did not arrive back at Lambeth North until after noon. The old grey car was gone. Nonetheless I double-locked the door behind me.

I found Henry’s notebooks violated, scattered across the kitchen table. Beside them was the cube. It looked quite normal for a moment. Then I saw the sawdust and knew she had attacked that too. There was no electric drill in evidence but my clever assistant (who else could it have been?) had made a quarter-inch hole straight through the middle of Carl’s wonder. There had been no need. I could have told her. I could have taught her to weigh it in her hand and know that it was solid oak.