It makes them both sad—Wendy especially, I can tell—that he’s forgotten me. “He forgets things sometimes, see?” she’d say with a grimace, as though that makes it sting less. That I’m either forgettable or raised by lunatics.
They are, at least, profiteering lunatics. Wendy wrote and illustrated all her stories into a great big one; you’ve probably read it. She wrote it under a man’s name because it’s a man’s world. More so then than now, maybe.
The sexual revolution is upon us (or so they tell us), but I’m not vastly interested in sex as it is. I’m interested in intelligence and the pursuit of it.
I like geology. That’s strange, my friend told me. It’s a weird thing to like. But I like this planet. I’m happy to be on it, happy to be grounded by it. It’s beautiful here, so why wouldn’t I be? I don’t need a silly star with mermaids on it. I’ve got this one, with all its strange and peculiar variants of life busting out all over. Manatees and hummingbirds and fireflies. What a world.
Another thing on this planet that I love? Cambridge. And I got in. I start in the autumn. I made Wendy lie on tables in the library with me while no one was looking and breathe in the wisdom of those who’d gone before me, and I felt for the billionth time in my life a great urgency to learn absolutely everything I can, to know it all. Sometimes Mary says she can see it on me, ageing me, all the knowledge I try to get growing me up, but then Wendy’s always said it’s strange how love can undo you. Time unravels in its presence, she says. It pierces the veil of our understanding.
It’s not an overly spectacular night. Quite regular, actually.
Brisk, even.
The air’s cool, our street in our little corner of Chelsea by the park is, as usual, blissfully quiet, and the sky is all clear, peppered with stars that, upon closer inspection, were perhaps unusually bright.?
And it is on this night of no great or particular significance that my story really begins.
You know how you grow accustomed to the sounds of your own home?
With the exception of my time away from school, I’ve lived at number 14 all my life. It’s the house my mother grew up in, and hers—the Darling home?—three generations. I know the sounds of my house in the depths of me—blood memories, maybe. Embedded in my DNA.
I suppose it’s important to pause here and let you know that there was a constant and unspoken battle that raged within the walls of my bedroom: one of windows up and windows down.
The unlatching I could deal with. As I mentioned before, at my grandmothers’ insistence, my bedroom windows were always unlatched,§ despite exponentially rising crime in this city. And who was I to argue with them? They wanted to see me mauled to death by a gang of youths who scaled the wall of a Chelsea home looking for an easy window to open and climb through for drug money? That’s fine. My death could be their burden to bear. Less fine by me, however, was the flagrant invitation for trouble by leaving said window flung wide open.
“He mightn’t know to come in otherwise,” Wendy would say.
“Then he’s not very bright,” I’d tell her, and she’d roll her eyes.
“Well…” Mary would interrupt. “He can hardly go around opening the windows of everyone around town, can he? He’d be charged with a home invasion.”
“And perhaps he should be!” I’d tell them in insolence.
“Daphne!” Wendy would sigh before opening it again.
I mentioned before that it was brisk and oddly so for the time of year. Every night since I’d returned home from the library, I’d close my windows, fearful I’d catch my death if I didn’t, but without fail, every night, one of my grandmothers would creep in and open them back up again, almost as though it were a nervous tic they had. We’d argue about it in the mornings, but secretly, I’d grown accustomed to the breeze on my face, and on the occasional nights they themselves fell asleep before they had a chance to open it, I found myself having a considerably worse sleep because I liked how the cold gave me an excuse to sleep with something heavy on me.
It’s rather late on this brisk, starry, quite regular evening, around midnight or perhaps just a smidge before. I’m asleep when I hear my window open.
I’m a light sleeper. I always have been.
I smile at the sound of the window pulling up as it always does. I wonder which grandmother it is, those sweet pests. I’d know in a minute because I know their sounds too. Wendy always steps on the same floorboard that creaks, and Mary, no matter how many times we’ve played this game, her walking cane hits the door on the way out.
I wait, brows up, listening for my clue so I can complain to the right one in the morning about them minding their own business and how they’d rather me have pneumonia than risk their imaginary boyfriend seeing a closed window.
But I hear none.
No floorboard creaks.
No cane hits.
I wait.
They’ve opened my window all my life. I know the sound of my window opening, so I know for certain that it is open…that and I can feel the breeze I wait for.
I bolt upright, and it takes only a second for my eyes to adjust, but even before they do, I can make out a figure standing there.
Tall. Broad. A man.
In a split second, I think “Shit! It’s finally happened! The youths and the drug money!” However, I decide I won’t take my imminent death lying down, so I smack on the lamp that’s next to me and sit up as quickly and tall as I can.
“Who are you?” I ask him quickly, sharply. I hope he doesn’t catch my nervous breathing.
His face screws up. “You don’t know who I am?”
And that is when I notice his face.
Golden hair. Interesting eyes that stick out on his face, but I can’t tell the colour from here. He’s just in a pair of faded, ragged olive linen trousers that tie at the front. Shirtless.
Distractingly so, if I’m honest.
You don’t see a lot of shirtless men around London, I suppose is the thing. And it’s barely summer anymore, and there aren’t beaches here anyway, and who’s swimming in the Thames, and I’m just staring at his chest, dazed, mouth a little ajar. His skin is so tan that he looks dirty. I tilt my head because maybe that is literally just dirt? His feet are definitely dirty.
Though, admittedly, quite large.
I look up again at his face.
Heavy brow, head tilted as he watches me, eyes dancing over me, and possibly, if I were to dissect the moment, he might look as confused as I do.
I jump out of bed and glare over at him, and I’m not scared anymore, though perhaps maybe I should have been? Maybe, in retrospect, one day I will be.
Instead, I raise my eyebrows to his question.
“Am I supposed to?”
“Yes.” He scowls. “Bit embarrassing for you that you don’t.”
I fold my arms delicately over my chest.
“Is it not perhaps more embarrassing for you that you’ve broken into my bedroom expecting to be known and yet you are not?”
He gets a look in his eye. “You must know who I am a bit, or else why aren’t you afraid?”
“I could be incredibly brave,” I tell him, nose in the air.