Mr. Timothy: A Novel Read Free

that bloody scarf swinging round his knees. Like a deposed king in an ermine robe, I think in my more charitable moments; like a blithering madman, I think other times.
    The comforter was blue in its original incarnation, but years of street living eventually dyed it a pigeon grey. Mother was always offended by the sight of it, and so I had assumed it'd gone the way of other family belongings until I found it again, stopping up a hole in the back of a cupboard. I didn't tell anyone, just stuffed it in my bag and left. Now it lies across a coverlet on the second floor of Mrs. Sharpe's establishment. And it does keep out the cold, I will give it that, even where the threads have pulled away.
    Some things it can't keep out. I find them on my pillow when I wake, little lozenges of memory. My mother's voice, perhaps, calling me down to dinner. Or the dark lily of my brother's body, wafting down the canal. Or things of a more recent vintage.
    One girl in particular--she visits my dreams quite often. No more than ten or eleven, I'd estimate, although guessing her age is difficult because when I saw her, she was lying on her side in an alley off Jermyn Street, stretched out like an artist's model on a chaise. Fully at her ease, I thought, until I drew closer and saw the hands, not flexing as I had imagined but frozen in place-- talons , smeared with blood. And her head had been ratcheted back and...and what else? Grey-blue lips. And grey-brown eyes, staring back down the alley, as though they were following the progress of her recently absconded spirit.
    Two constables stood one on either side of her. Voluble, blithe chaps in swallowtail coats and specially reinforced top hats, waiting for another kind of reinforcement, perhaps, or just passing the time, and preoccupied enough or bored enough to admit company, even if the company was you, silent, bending to study the uncovered form on the ground. Their patter settled like foam on the back of your head.
    --Fancy, though, the neck's clean.

    --Hundred to one it were a pillow.

    --Come, now, Bill, blood on the hands? Fighting a pillow? Don't be daft.

    --Look who's calling who daft.
    You'd seen strangers' bodies before and never once stopped. Why should this one have been different? And why this tender scrutiny? Your eyes lapping up everything, the dingy black stockings (torn and bloodied round the feet), the black woollen folds of the skirt, the shreds of petticoat. The face : white as sugar, and everything on it flung open like the windows on a cuckoo clock, mouth, eyes, even nostrils all dilated as far as they could go.
    And something else, too. A square of skin where the sleeve of her dress had torn away, and through that aperture, the most remarkable sight, strangely accented in the gaslight. Not a tattoo, nothing so mild as that. A brand . The skin not dyed but blistered, seared , like the flanks of a Jersey. And what did you read there? A letter, that was all, an inch and a half in diameter.
    G
    Except there was more. Beneath the upper loop, a pair of eyes had been likewise burnt into the skin. And those eyes had the strange effect of turning the letter into something quite palpably alive.
    A bird of prey, that was your first thought. And yet you might have read anything there: a jack-o'-lantern, a cloud-soaked moon. Nothing else, though, explained the animal intelligence with which this single letter quivered.
    It was two months ago I saw that girl, and I don't think a day has passed but that she hasn't exacted some tribute from me, some revolution of my brain. I don't even need to dream her. All it takes most days is closing my waking eyes, and I see everything again, freshly minted: the two constables, and the alley with its livid purple shadows, and the rumble of a passing dray, and this girl, opaque and anonymous. And I see that , too, the black G with its ravenous eyes and its orifice. And it seems to me the orifice has the power of speech, but only for people with the power