Ghostwalk Read Free Page B

rooms with painted plaster walls, bright red, yellow, green, grey, and deep blue, some patterned to imitate panels of marble, a tiled roof, mortar floors, glass windows, under-floor heating built on blocks of imported chalk. It was probably the last house on the edge of the settlement, marking the boundary between civilisation and the marshlands.
    Every cut in the ground elder root is a failure; every cut will make a redoubling of effort necessary. That’s how I came to understand Isaac Newton’s fear of sin, I think, and how embroiled Mr. F. became in Newton’s name, and how neither of them could stop what they had started, and, finally, how I have come to see the way the consequences of their seventeenth-century acts twisted and turned their way to us, underground and overground, splitting and redoubling. Organic and botanical.
    My story, both of my stories, the police tapes in the Parkside station and the typed account I wrote for Patricia Dibb, began with Elizabeth Vogelsang’s funeral.
    Now, Cameron Brown, I am starting to tell it again so that I can make you a thread for your labyrinth. Yes, I am putting the seventeenth century back into the picture. I hope you can hear me.

Two
    O n the day of Elizabeth’s funeral I’d been in a hurry, as usual, and once I reached the motorway I couldn’t quite remember if I had pulled the flat door closed. It was too late to go back. Could I call my neighbour and get her to check? Gripping the wheel with one hand, I pulled out my phonebook with the other to see if I still had Greta’s number listed there, but then swerved too closely towards the central reservation. Stop rushing. One thing at a time. Just pay attention. And don’t lose your way. Head directly north with the sea behind you up the M23, over the massy chalk of the south downs to the open eye of the M25; trace a line around its rim anticlockwise, crossing under the Thames through the Dartford Tunnel and then north to the top of the circle, then north again up the M11 and into the flatlands of East Anglia. Drop into Cambridge from the north, then find the Leper Chapel from the ring road on the east side.
    To compensate for my lack of a mental compass, Kit had taught me to turn directions into a painting or a drawing, a charcoal line stretching across white paper. Lack of direction? Now, don’t put that down to me being a woman. If being male and female can be reduced to a set of stereotypes, you know I have more male instincts than female ones. Perhaps it’s the writing. Writers, apparently, often have a diminished sense of direction: too many maps—time maps, road maps, character maps—all laid one on top of another, like the stories of a building. It gets to be difficult to separate them out.
    I shouldn’t have been late. It wasn’t as if I went to funerals very often. That morning I’d taken ages to get out of the flat, unable to decide whether to wear black or not, so I’d pulled on black clothes and then dark blue ones and pulled them all off again until they had piled up on the bedroom floor. Christmas, Easter, weddings, and funerals. I hated all those sentimental empty rituals made stiff and unyielding by rules and protocols. Elizabeth wouldn’t have cared what any of us wore. She refused to go to funerals.
    Elizabeth Vogelsang—what kinds of things had she cared about? Misused semi-colons; mistakes in dates; poor logic; “dodgy reasoning”; mixed metaphors; the Leper Chapel on the Newmarket Road. Oh, and smells. Elizabeth always noticed smells. She could smell if you were getting sick. She’d said something to me once two years or so ago when we’d met in the University Library tearooms. That day I watched the shadow of your remembered mouth pass over hers as she talked. Her mouth. Your mouth. Mother and son. “Lydia, are you feeling quite well?” she’d asked, stirring her tea and refusing to meet my eye. “It’s just you are giving off a particular kind of smell…not an unpleasant