Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“You get on with your life,” he said. “You go back to school.”

I tapped my fingers against the car window.

“You’re saying if there was something out there, something bad, like the Ripper, no one would force me to go after it.”

“The Ripper is gone. Newman is gone.”

“But something like that.”

“It’s very unlikely that there would be something like that, but yes. That’s what I’m saying.”

“But Thorpe would,” I said. “He’d make me.”

“Forget about Thorpe. He’s seen what he needed to see.”

“He didn’t see anything,” I pointed out.

“He saw your reaction. That wasn’t faked. He knew that. Anyway, Thorpe is my problem, not yours. Whatever’s happened to you…it’s up to you how you use it. It has to be your decision.”

“Thorpe could make your life miserable.”

“You’re suggesting my life isn’t already miserable,” he said, with a slightly too weak effort at a smile. I think he was making a joke. It was very hard to tell with Stephen.

We were almost back to Wexford when we stopped at a red light just outside of a pub that was still doing Ripper specials—Bloody Marys (“Jack’s drink of choice”) were two for one. It was all a joke now. People had been murdered, but it didn’t matter. It was just Jack the Ripper, and he was dead now, so it was funny to have Bloody Marys and have your picture taken lying on the ground of the crime scene.

“So,” I said, “all the Ripper stuff. How did that work?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did they keep it all quiet?”

“It wasn’t that difficult,” he said. “No one saw what actually happened, except for us. Only you saw how it all ended.”

“How did they explain the bathroom being smashed up?”

“The assumed a fight went on—a struggle. The attacker must have broken the mirrors and the window.”

“But they said the police chased him,” I said. “They pulled a body out of the water.”

“That was all staged,” he said. “Some cars were sent to chase a potential subject.”

“And the body?”

“A John Doe from the mortuary. They assigned it a name and an identity. It was all done very high up. Most of the people involved thought they were part of an actual chase.”

“But what if people try to write about him?”

“That was all taken care of,” Stephen said. “The story is that he was just a loner—someone who lived on the street. No neighbors. No living relatives. No one to interview. Just a very unfortunate person with a mental condition.”

“And all of the CCTV footage that had no one in it?”

“The footage was all fake. That was proven.”

“No it wasn’t,” I said.

“Well,” Stephen said. “It’s fake now.”

“What about the crack in the floor?” I asked.

“What?”

“How did they explain that? I mean, you can break a window or a mirror in a fight, but you can’t crack a tile floor, can you?”

“You’re telling me that crack wasn’t there before?”

“No,” I said. “It happened that night. It was a big explosion.”

“Well,” he said, “we’re just very lucky you survived.”

We had reached Wexford. He stopped the car at the far end of the cobblestone road.

“I’ll be able to see you all the way to the door from here,” he said. “It should be open. We unlocked the building and had someone stationed there to make sure no one got in until it was secure again. I’ll be here until you get inside.”

It felt like we should have a more meaningful good-bye than that, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d already hugged him once tonight.

“Sure,” I said, unfastening my seat belt. “Right. Okay. So, I’ll see you around, or?”

“You can always reach me,” he said. “If you need me.”

“Right. Okay. So…”

I walked up the road alone. The door opened, just as promised, and I looked back down the lane and raised my hand as a final good-bye. I couldn’t really see him—the road was too dark at the end where the car was parked. But it was still there. I could see the headlights, two glowing eyes pointed at me, waiting for me to get to safety.

7

“RIGHT,” MARK SAID, SWITCHING THE LIGHTS OUT IN ART history the next morning, “let’s get started. John Constable, English Romantic painter, lived from 1776 until 1837…”

Art history was a long class—three hours, with two ten-minute breaks that were really more like fifteen minutes, but still. Long. I wrote down the names of paintings and stared at the slides, but my mind was completely elsewhere. It was on the platform at Charing Cross. It was in the car with Stephen and at the flat with Callum and Boo.

I’d felt something last night, aside from nausea. Something real. Something…exciting? Something that made me feel complete again. Plus, Jerome was pressing his leg against mine—not hard. But it was there. John Constable, English Romantic painter, didn’t stand a chance. (Also, for the record, if someone is called a Romantic, it should mean some sexy times, I think. Instead, what it really means is people in puffy shirts who probably had a lot of real-life sexytimes, but produced almost exclusively pictures of hillsides or people in dramatic poses, like pretending to be Ophelia dead in a swamp. I definitely call shenanigans on this.)

We emerged, three hours later, our brains swollen with images of sky and damp and moping. Once we got outside, Jerome swayed side to side a bit, like he was standing on a teetering top.

“What?” I said.

“What were you going to do today?”

“Work,” I said. “I guess…work. Because I’m kind of behind.”

“I have things this afternoon as well, but I was thinking…we could go out? Properly? On a date. Tonight?”

“A date?” I repeated.

I’d never been on a real date. I’d ended up going places with people—guy people—but it was always kind of, well…kind of crap. “Dates” seemed to be something that existed in movies or television shows or a more domesticated past where you were wooed in high school and got married upon graduation and immediately gave birth to ten children. They were not something for people like me. But here I was, quasi-boyfriend saying he wanted to take me on an actual date, and I was just staring at him impassively, like a horse watching a mime pretending to walk against the wind.

“Yes,” I said. “Date. Yes.”

“Okay,” Jerome said. “Good. So, maybe, instead of dinner? We’ll go out?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Would you like to go to dinner, or to a film?”

“Sure.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Whichever.”

“Okay, well, we can figure it out.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay.”

We shuffled apart, nodding.

I was going on a date, a date, a date. I repeated the word in my head as I pressed my finger on the keypad, as I tripped up the steps of Hawthorne. The word beat in time to the creaking of the wood. A date, a date…I shoved open the first fire door and breathed in that strange, clinical carpety smell that lived only between the fire doors…open second fire door…a date. A date with my man. My boy. My guy. Boyfriend? Whatever. My future activity had a word, and that word was date.

Jazza was out, so I had the room to myself. I sat at my desk and looked at my pile of books. I listened to the radiators hiss and clank lightly. I heard people coming back to the hall, doors opening and closing, bits of conversation. All the familiar Wexford noises and smells, and this new one…date.

I was interrupted in my reverie by a knock at the door. I called for the person to come in, and Charlotte appeared and drifted in. I guess this was the first weird thing, because Charlotte did not drift. Charlotte moved from place to place decisively, like a high-speed train. She walked to class with purpose. She walked to dinner with purpose. She walked to the bathroom with purpose and brushed her teeth with purpose and ran her hands through her hair with purpose.