The Apothecary

Chapter 21

The Oil of Mnemosyne



The elevator took us up to daylight, and Jin Lo left the vial of orange smoke by the front door of the bunker so that it poured out into the street. She looked boyish in the khaki overalls, with her long braid up under a hard hat, and she walked purposefully away, carrying her bundle of clothes, as if she were a workman going for help in controlling this strange chemical fire.

A few people came out of houses, staring at the orange smoke rising into the air, but no one stopped Jin Lo, and we were around the corner before we heard shouts coming from the building, and a man’s loud voice asking if anyone had seen a Chinese girl in black. No one had, and Pip and Benjamin and I were still invisible.

A bus came by and stopped, and we climbed aboard. Jin Lo nodded to the driver and walked past him with her armful of clothes.

“You’ve got to pay!” the driver said, but Jin Lo ignored him. The rest of us filed invisibly after her.

There were seven or eight other people on the bus, including a white-haired woman with a curly white dog in her lap. The dog started to bark hysterically as we passed, and she murmured and hugged him close.

“It’s just a Chinaman, my angel, selling clothes,” I heard her say.

The dog kept barking—smelling, I was sure, all four of us.

We found a place near the back of the bus where no one was going to bump into us, and the driver gave up and drove on, flummoxed by the inscrutable Chinaman and late for his route. The old lady got the curly dog to be quiet, but it gazed back over her shoulder, panting.

Jin Lo dumped the pile of clothes beside her and sat down.

“So who are you, exactly?” Benjamin whispered, under the rumbling noise of the bus’s engine. “How do you know my father?”

“Only letters,” Jin Lo said. “I come from China to meet him.”

“Are there lots of girl chemists in China?” I asked. This was 1952, after all.

Jin Lo frowned as if the question had never occurred to her. “I am apprentice, very young, to chemist in Shanghai. I have no other school. When he die, I finish his work, write to colleagues.”

“What was his work?” I asked. “He wasn’t a normal chemist, right? Was he an alchemist?”

Jin Lo shrugged, as if the idea of normality was unimportant. “Everyone work different. Where you last see apothecary?”

“In his shop,” Benjamin said. “He was given a message saying you had been taken, and he would be next, so he hid us in the cellar. Some Germans burst in, and when we came upstairs, my father was gone.”

“Germans—they say what?”

“We don’t know,” Benjamin said. “It was in German.”

Jin Lo frowned. “Why you not speak German?”

“I don’t know,” Benjamin whispered. “I guess because of the war. No one wants to. Do you speak Japanese?”

Something I couldn’t identify passed over her face, and I remembered that parts of China had been occupied by Japan. “Yes,” she said. “When soldiers come, better to know what they say.”

“Oh,” Benjamin said, abashed. “Well, I don’t speak German.”

“You take me to shop,” she said.

The dog up front gave a petulant bark, and the old lady sneaked a look back at the Chinese rag seller. Then her gaze seemed to shift to me, and I looked down at my two visible fingers, which were holding on to a pole. It wasn’t just my fingers anymore, but a whole stretch of my hand and forearm that was visible—actually visible, not just dusted with orange. My other arm was visible in patches, too, and so was part of my left knee.

“Jin Lo!” I whispered. “Stare at that lady with the dog, quick.”

Jin Lo did, glaring so fiercely that the old lady whirled to the front, embarrassed and confused, pulling her dog down into her lap. I grabbed the blue raincoat from the top of the pile and wrapped myself in it, tying it at the waist. It covered me to the knees, and I crouched down on the seat, trying to blend into the pile of clothes.

“You’ll draw attention without a head,” Benjamin whispered.

“Not as much as you’ll draw in a second.”

He looked down at himself and saw that his shoulder patch was growing, down his biceps to the elbow. Half of his smooth, pale chest had appeared: the shadow of a collarbone, a pink nipple, and his belly button, which was a neatly sewn inny. He grabbed the general’s coat and pulled it on.

I looked at Pip, and half of his face was visible, too, spreading across his cheek from his ear. “Aw, all the pockets I could’ve picked,” he whispered. “Another hour and I’d be rich!” He pulled on the spare overalls and rolled up the cuffs on the arms and legs.

By the time we filed off the bus near Regent’s Park and the apothecary’s shop, we were fully visible and fully clothed. The Chinese rag seller seemed to have spawned three non-Chinese teenage children, in strange costumes, all riding for free. The little dog barked wildly at us, vindicated, and the old lady and the bus driver watched us go in disbelief.



We surveyed the door to the apothecary’s shop from across the street. Jin Lo looked around to all the neighbourhood windows that might have a view of the front door. No one seemed to be watching the building, but still I was afraid to go inside. The Germans could come back, or Danby and the British officers.

The door to the shop was unlocked, the latch forced by the Germans, and my heart pounded as Jin Lo pushed it open. We all slipped inside and stood in the dark chaos, listening. Things were overturned and broken, as the intruders had left them. Jin Lo’s soft braid spilled over her shoulder like a snake when she took off her hard hat, and she brushed it away. I imagined she would brush away a real snake with the same disinterested calm.

The shop seemed to be empty, so Benjamin ran upstairs to his flat to get some clothes to replace the general’s overcoat. He brought me a pair of his trousers, a shirt, and a jumper, and I went behind a ransacked shelf to change out of the pale blue raincoat. I liked having trousers on again, even if they were loose and I had to belt them tightly. I had never felt quite right in the pleated skirt.

Jin Lo finished her inspection of the shop. “So—you hear voices,” she said.

“Right,” Benjamin said.

“And you see German with scar.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t see them take apothecary away.”

“No, we were in the cellar.”

“We go down now to see,” she said.

We went back to the office, and Benjamin opened the iron grate that led to the cellar. We all climbed down. We showed Jin Lo and Pip where we’d been hiding against the wall. Jin Lo looked up at the grate.

“So,” she said. “You hear them say, ‘Ha! I got you now, apothecary!’”

Benjamin and I looked at each other.

“No,” I said. “We heard an explosion.”

“What kind? Small? Big?”

“Medium.”

“You see explosion?”

Benjamin thought about it. “No. Also there was a police car’s bell! That’s what made them leave. But the police never came.”

“Sit here,” she said. “Wait.”

She ran up the ladder, and we heard her light footsteps in the shop, and the clinking of jars. Then she climbed back down, with one arm on the ladder, carrying an armful of things in the other, including a mortar and pestle.

She sat cross-legged in front of us and tapped some herbs from three different jars into a stone mortar. With the wooden pestle, she ground the herbs together, then poured clear oil over them and ground up the mixture some more. She dipped her finger in the oil and applied it to my left temple. When I started to draw back, she said, “No! Stay.” Then she dipped her finger again and put a smear of oil on my right temple and on each of my wrists.

“It smells strong,” I said.

She turned to Benjamin and applied the oil the same way: to the sides of his forehead and the insides of his wrists.

“Now,” she said. “You remember more.”

“Can I have some?” Pip asked. “I need to remember things, too!”

“What things?”

“Racing tips! Poker tells!”

She shook her head. “Very dangerous, remember too much,” she said.

She took one of my hands and one of Benjamin’s so that the insides of our wrists pressed against hers. Her arms were wiry and strong.

“You hold, too,” she commanded, nodding at our loose hands.

Benjamin took my wrist, and I took his. It was soft and warm, and I could feel his pulse beating through his skin. The three of us were now sitting in a triangle on the cellar floor, cross-legged and linked at the wrists. Pip sat on the outside, pouting and bored.

“Close eyes now,” Jin Lo said. “Think.”

I closed my eyes and felt the oil on my wrists and my temples. It tingled slightly. I wondered if Benjamin could feel my pulse, too.

“Apothecary says hide,” Jin Lo said. “You go in cellar.”

I felt a little dizzy and disoriented, as if something was happening to the part of my brain that was just behind my eyes, and also to the backs of my eyelids. The present started falling away, and I was vividly in the past. It wasn’t like normal memory, superimposed on the present, able to co-exist with other thoughts and experiences. It was more like an intensely realistic waking dream, of a time and place I’d been before. I remembered the terror of that night in the cellar, and the nervousness about being with Benjamin, this strange boy. I felt his shoulder brushing mine as he tried the locked doorknob. And then I heard voices, too distant to make out, in the front of the shop, and I heard the explosion. Then the German voices were closer.

“Wo ist er?” one of them asked.

“Ich weiss nicht,” another said. “Er ist verschwunden.”

“So?” Jin Lo said, beside me, startling me out of the past.

I opened my eyes and blinked, and tried to imitate the words the Germans had said. Jin Lo listened.

“They don’t see apothecary,” she said. “They say, ‘Where is he?’ Go back. Before.”

I closed my eyes and felt the odd, swooning feeling, and again I was climbing down the cellar stairs with Benjamin in the dark, before the Germans arrived. Just as he brushed my shoulder, I heard a hoarse whisper from above, in English. I hadn’t heard it before, in all the confusion.

“The shelter, Benjamin,” his father whispered. “I’ll be in the shelter.”

Then there were the distant voices, and the explosion, and the sounds of things being knocked over. The German voice asked, “Wo ist er?” again.

I opened my eyes. “Did you hear it?” I asked Benjamin.

“The shelter!” he said.

“Isn’t this it—the cellar?”

“No,” he said. “There’s an old Morrison shelter up there, from the war. My father uses it as a table.”

We scrambled up the ladder, and Benjamin went to a corner of the office. There was a wide, low table there, with an oilcloth covering, and books and papers scattered across it. Benjamin pulled the oilcloth back. The table underneath was actually a giant metal cage, with wire mesh sides and a flat steel top.

Pip whistled. “You had this in your house?” he said. “My mum and da had to fight their way into the Underground.”

“The shelter wouldn’t withstand a direct hit,” Benjamin said. “But it was supposed to keep the walls from crushing you if, you know, one of the V-1s hit your block. My father and I used to get inside and sleep in it at night. He made it like a game.” He paused, and I guessed he was thinking of his mother. “But he isn’t in it now,” he said finally.

“He said he’d be in the shelter,” I said.

“Maybe he was there and he’s gone. Maybe we heard it wrong. Anyway, the Germans would have found him in here.”

I looked around for Jin Lo, and realised she hadn’t come up with us. I went back to the iron grate and looked down, and saw her crouched in the cellar, staring into the darkness with a terrible look in her eyes.

“Jin Lo?” I said.

She recoiled from my voice, looking haunted.

“Are you all right?”

She shook her head and said something I couldn’t understand. I climbed down the ladder and saw that she was trembling. I sat beside her.

“What happened?”

She opened her hands in front of her face and gazed at her wrists. They were shiny with the oil from Benjamin’s arm and mine. The austere strength in her face was gone and replaced by something wild and vulnerable. “Things I do not wish to remember,” she said.

Pip and Benjamin were at the top of the ladder, looking down.

“Is she all right?” Benjamin asked.

“She’s shaking,” I said.

“Soldiers come,” Jin Lo said, in a little girl’s voice. “Japanese army. I am eight years old. They kill everyone. Father, mother, baby brother. They think I am dead. So many guns. At night, everything quiet. I climb out from under body, our neighbour, and I look. Whole city . . .” She stopped, and her narrow shoulders danced and trembled. She pressed her hands into her eyes, as if to block out what she had seen, smearing the oil down her cheeks.

I didn’t know what to say that could help. I put my hand on her shoulder and I could feel how overcome she was. I didn’t know if she’d be able to move.

“Janie,” Benjamin said, after what seemed like a long time. “We can’t stay here. They might come.”

I reached in the pocket of my trousers—Benjamin’s trousers—and found another of the folded handkerchiefs his father must have neatly ironed. I gently pried one of Jin Lo’s hands from her face and wiped the oil off the delicate skin inside her wrist.

“We have to go,” I said. “It’s dangerous for us to stay here.”

I took the other wrist and wiped away the oil, and then I cleaned the tears and oil from her face. She let me do it, as if she were a small child. Her eyes were still spilling tears.

“I’m so sorry about your family,” I said. “And your city.”

She blinked vacantly.

“We need your help,” I said. “The apothecary said he’d be in the Morrison shelter, and we found it, but he isn’t there.”

I thought I could see her eyes slowly returning to the present, from the distant past. I could feel that I was coming into focus.

“Come and look,” I said, and I helped her stand up. She was unsteady on her feet, as if all strength had been drained from her. “Can you get up the ladder?”

“I try,” she said.

I stood behind her, making sure her feet were on the rungs, and Benjamin and Pip helped pull her up when she reached the top. Upstairs, we all stood in front of the Morrison shelter, and Jin Lo crouched to peer through the wire mesh.

“We open,” she said, and together we lifted one of the long side walls of the shelter off its hooks. Jin Lo peered inside again. There was a flat board making a floor in the bottom of the shelter, and I imagined a tiny Benjamin and his father sleeping on it.

“See this,” she said, and she pointed to a cone-shaped pile of white dust on the shelter’s floor. “Japanese call ‘Morijio’. Like Shinto offering. But English say ‘Lot’s wife’—you know this meaning?”

“Is Lot the one who had all the bad luck?” Benjamin asked.

“No, that’s Job,” I said.

“Lot’s wife turned to a pile o’ salt,” Pip said.

I looked at him, surprised. “How do you know that?”

Pip shrugged. “I ’ad to go to church lessons once, for stealing, like. The stories were all right, though.”

“This salt your father,” Jin Lo said.

“What?” Benjamin said.

“You find one glass beaker now,” she said. “Clean.”