The Castaway: Chapter 6

It all seemed strange. Were people desperate to keep the pocket-watch—or to be rid of it? The girl had clutched it as though it mattered, yet she gambled it away. Was it addiction to the game—or desperation to escape?

And Frankie’s friend—did he even want to keep it?

Myles had cheated, that was how he won it. Yet tonight he had cheated and lost. How could he have lost if Detweiler had been dealing foul?

I tried to wipe the thoughts from my mind and turned to my writing.

Do not be disappointed in me for retreating to paper. Paper is the only terrain where I have ever beaten back a tide.

In my way, I considered myself a writer, though I worked in the library. That was why I had wed Myles: he was suitably outside society, and in love with risk enough to adore a writer for a wife.

I wrote books and poems and short stories under the name A. Page. I submitted them to journals and papers and rarely succeeded, but when I did—and even when I did not—I was happy. It thrilled me to imagine someone reading my stories, looking inside my head, glimpsing my secrets.

I used to bleed my deepest desires onto paper, not always knowing where they came from. They ran like rivers of ink through London and through me—golden veins of glittering black, swirling through the mist and smog of the metropolis.

Girls waited for men on dark corners under street lamps. Men played their cards. And we waited for them. Though I supposed I needn’t—I could have gone with Myles, if I wished.

The red skyline pierced the night. As a girl, only streets from here, I had loved to watch the sun set and the dawn rise, for then the world seemed most real.

The street sleepers were still there, under the sickle moon. People walked to church. The cabarets opened or closed, the girls went home. The card clubs began to hum, a hive of bees eager for honey—or wasps poised to sting.

Once, the literary world had consumed me. But I think I unweaved the rainbow when I learned that everything I wrote was only a reflection of myself. Nothing was ever truly new. That unsettled me. In my youth I imagined invention—but it was all a mirror, and I did not always like what my writings revealed.

Still, I wrote in my wakings, the fruits of my dreams. Where lay my goals? What was my voice? I lived in an age of doubt, questioning everything, enduring the silence of unanswered questions while pretending they meant nothing, though they meant everything.

And sometimes there was silence—perfect, weightless silence—when the story had not yet decided what it was.

And the pocket-watch still ticked.

You want me to throw it into the river. Of course you do. So did I. We will both learn why we didn’t.

I did not know why it was here, or what it wanted. I did not know who Mr Detweiler was, or why he haunted London. Detweiler was not an English name. Yet Anastasia Page was hardly English either. Nor was Myles Chancewell, if one were to be critical.

I doubted it was his true name. Myles knew little of his family, and so did I.

When I met him, he told me I seemed to come from another world. I told him of my childhood dreams—of the place between sleep and wake, where there was a veil of water. It was so real I could touch it. In that waking dream, I reached out a pale hand and felt the trickle of cold over my skin. It was like a vertical river of glass through my mind. I usually arrived there at night.

That was why I struggled in the dark. Not that the tide was terrifying, but it was so very quiet. And in a mind as busy as mine, one can be too quiet.

It rained outside again, breaking my thoughts. The rain always reminded me of the tide in my dreams. I feared what lay beyond it. A lady once told me that beyond it was my mother.

The rain fell, and thoughts flew away on raven’s wings.

Painted Anastasia looked at me again. She was pretty, with the same little black spot on her cheek as I had. I sometimes painted it into a heart, or a star, or a moon. And so we had Anastasia—and Painted Anastasia. Me and her, alike.

I could not work out how she had arrived, or what she meant. Perhaps it was irony: an artist’s trick. I often posed for art. Perhaps the Fool was a forgotten artist I had once sat for, returning to surprise me. Someone from my past, though it made little sense.

It was Myles who knew people. As a gambler, he played everyone in the metropolis. He sat at all kinds of tables.

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