I stop abruptly, but I can see her around the next turn. A girl huddled into the wall, long, dark hair forming a curtain over her face.
“Hello? Are . . . are you OK?” Of course she’s not OK. The girl doesn’t move so I gently clear my throat to try again. “Do you need help?”
She lifts her head. Ribbons of red streak down her face, a wide, hollow space pouring tears of blood into her hands.
I’m not sure which one of us starts to scream.
I hover my thumb over the screen. Just one click and that’s it, boat booked. I could be back home in less than twenty-four hours.
“Niamh?” A kind voice interrupts my thoughts. “Are you OK, dear?” Ruth walks over to me, leaning heavily on her cane, its rubber tip dragging across the floor. I sigh and put down my phone, almost grateful for the interruption. My thoughts are as tangled as one of those big balls of rubber bands – a mess of a million colours and different directions, each one piling on top of the last.
“I guess.” I don’t bother to smile. I haven’t got the energy. I can imagine how awful I must look after another sleepless night, but I don’t care. My hair is scragged back into a rough ponytail, and I shoved on the first clothes I found in my bag. I pick at the ragged hem at the knee of my jeans, worrying the fraying edges and making the rip wider.
Ruth lowers herself into the chair across the table and leans forwards. “There is a counselling service here, you know. After everything you’ve been through this week, it might be helpful to talk to someone.”
“Yeah.” I keep my voice vague. I really don’t see how talking to a stranger is going to help me. How could they understand any of this?
Ruth seems to read my mind. “Or you could chat to me?” she says gently.
I glance at her beneath my bare lashes. “Really?”
“Of course.” She taps my phone screen. “If you decide to stay, that is.”
The boat booking page is still up on the screen. I let out a deep breath. “I can’t decide. My parents . . . well, they’re worried. Because those girls were attacked.” I don’t mention that they don’t actually know about Tasha; Derek agreed to keep that one quiet.
“And you don’t want to go?”
I chew at my bottom lip. “I dunno. I think I want to stay.”
Ruth smiles at me, her eyes crinkling up. “I get where they’re coming from, trust me. I have a daughter your age, you know. I’m keeping tabs on her too, believe me. But. . .” She sighs. “But I also know she has her own dreams, has to make her own mistakes.”
“I don’t know if they understand that,” I say.
“Maybe you do need to be careful right now,” says Ruth. “For your sake and theirs.”
I frown. “How do you mean?”
“Two girls were attacked. You need to be sensible. Don’t go out after dark, not too much anyway. Walk with a friend, check in with me every now and then. Tell your parents you’re doing all of that. Reassure them, for goodness’ sake.” She pushes herself up from the table with a groan. “Oof, achy bones.” She smiles. “Now, don’t you have a lecture to be going to?”
I check my watch. She’s right; the lecture starts in ten minutes and I still haven’t decided what to do. She reads my thoughts again.
“The boat won’t be full in an hour, lovely, if that’s still what you want to do.” She nods at the door. “Go. Learn. Worry about this afterwards.”
My eyelids have never been this heavy, not even after the early mornings on Granny’s farm. The lecturer’s voice is a blur, each monotone word indistinguishable from the last. I pinch the skin under my arm in an effort to wake up, but the dark, stuffy room is fogging up my brain. I desperately try to concentrate on what he’s saying. I need some information if I’m going to write this essay.
“Then we have the more traditional puppet shows of the Victorian era. You will of course know Punch and Judy. . .”
Pictures flicker past on the large screen but my mind is busy wandering back to last night and my eyes start to lose focus. The girl had to go for surgery. She lost her eye. A shiver crawls over my shoulder blades as I recall the scraping sound of metal on metal in the dark tube station, the gust of hot air that enveloped me on the escalator. I straighten my back and push myself up in the seat, desperately trying to think of something, anything, else.
“This character is known in various guises, such as the Devil or, in one period of Victorian history, as a character named Spring Heeled Jack. This ne’er-do-well could have been an exaggerated urban myth, or maybe a deeply disturbed figure responsible for brutal attacks on women in London. Either way, he grasped the public imagination and so the Devil became Spring Heeled Jack for a while.” The lecturer continues and I shake myself awake. Scholarship, Niamh. Words. Essay. If I’m going to write the flaming thing at all.
I pick up my pen to take notes. My wrist brushes against the edge of my notebook and I’m back on the Southbank, Tommy’s lips whispering against my skin. If I go home, I leave everything behind, including any chance I have with him.
Suddenly I have laser focus.
“That leads us nicely to Penny Dreadfuls and their influence on theatre in Victorian London.” Paper rustles all around me as everyone reaches for the handout I’d pretty much forgotten about. I flip the first page. “These contained a whole host of characters you may be familiar with and some you may not: Frankenstein’s Monster, Jekyll and Hyde, and, of course, Spring Heeled Jack.”
A hand goes up somewhere towards the front.
