The Lost Apothecary(9)
Embarrassed, I nodded and followed him to a group of five or six others. A few of them knelt among the rocks, sifting through pebbles. I stepped closer to my guide and spoke in a hushed voice. “I’m sorry, but I don’t entirely understand what mudlarking is. Are we searching for something?”
He looked at me and chuckled, his belly trembling. “I never did tell you, did I! Well, here’s all you need to know—the Thames runs straight through the city of London, and for a long way, at that. Little remnants of history, all the way back to the Roman era, can be found right here in the mud if you go searching long enough. Long ago, mudlarkers found old coins, rings, pottery, and they’d go on to sell it. That’s what the Victorians wrote about, them poor kids trying to buy bread. But here today, we’re just searching because we love it. You keep what you find, too, that’s our rule. Look, right there,” he said, pointing at my foot. “You’re about standing on a clay pipe.” He leaned over and picked it up. It looked like a narrow stone to me, but Bachelor Alf wore a mile-wide smile. “You’ll find a thousand of these in a day. No big deal, unless it’s your first time. This would have been stuffed with tobacco leaves. See, here, the ridges running up the barrel? I’d date this sometime between 1780 and 1820.” He paused, waiting for my reaction.
I raised my eyebrows and looked closer at the clay pipe, suddenly overcome with the thrill of holding in my hands an object last touched centuries ago. Earlier, Bachelor Alf had said the tide turns over new mysteries each time it advances and recedes. What other old artifacts might be within close reach? I checked my gloves to ensure they were pulled taut around my hands, then knelt down; perhaps I would find a few more clay pipes, or a coin or bent ring, as Bachelor Alf said. Or maybe I could remove my own ring, bend it in half and toss it into the water to join all the other emblems of failed love.
Slowly, I scanned my eyes over the rocks and ran my fingertips across the glistening, rust-colored pebbles. But after a minute of doing this, I frowned; it all looked very much the same. Even if a diamond ring were buried in the silt, I doubted that I would spot it.
“Do you have any tips,” I shouted to Bachelor Alf, “or a shovel, perhaps?” He stood a few meters away, inspecting an egg-shaped thing that one of the others had found.
He laughed. “The Port of London Authority prohibits shovels, unfortunately, or any digging at all. We’re only allowed to search the surface. So it’s a bit like fate if you find something, or at least I like to think so.”
Fate, or a colossal waste of time. But it was the riverbed or a cold, empty king-size bed at the hotel, so I took a few steps forward, closer to the waterline, and knelt down again, waving away a swarm of gnats that hovered at my feet. I scanned my eyes slowly over the pebbles and caught a glimmer of something shiny and reflective. I gasped, ready to call Bachelor Alf over to inspect my find. But as I stepped closer to pull the thin, shiny object toward me, I realized I’d merely grasped the pearlescent, rotting tail of a dead fish.
“Ugh,” I groaned. “Gross.”
Suddenly, there came an excited shriek behind me. I turned to see one of the others—a middle-aged woman bent down low, the tips of her hair almost touching a sandy puddle beneath her—holding up a whitish, sharp-edged rock. She scrubbed furiously at the front of it with her gloved hand and then held it up proudly.
“Ah, a bit of delftware!” Bachelor Alf exclaimed. “Be-auti-ful, too, I might add. Can’t find a blue like that anymore. Cerulean, discovered late eighteenth century. Nowadays, it’s a cheap dye. See there—” He pointed, tracing the pattern for the excited woman. “It appears to be the edge of a canoe, perhaps a dragon boat.”
The woman happily dropped the fragment into a bag and everyone resumed their search.
“Listen here, folks,” Bachelor Alf explained. “The hint is to let your subconscious find the anomaly. Our brains are meant to identify breaks in a pattern. We evolved that way, many millions of years ago. You are not searching for a thing so much as you are searching for an inconsistency of things, or an absence.”
Well, there were a number of things absent for me at the moment, not the least of which was any security or surety about what the rest of my life might entail. Following James’s news, after I’d locked myself in the bathroom, he’d tried to break his way inside where I lay curled up on the bath mat. I begged him to leave me alone; each time I asked, he responded with some plea, a variation of Let me make this up to you or I will spend my life fixing this. All I’d wanted was for him to go away.
I’d called Rose, too, and shared the entire, miserable thing with her. Aghast and with a crying infant in the background, she’d patiently listened as I told her I couldn’t imagine going to London with him the next day to celebrate our anniversary.
“Then don’t go with him,” she said. “Go alone.” Our lives might have looked vastly different at that moment, but in my moment of despair, Rose could clearly see what I could not: I needed to be far, far away from James. I couldn’t bear to be so near his hands, his lips; they stirred my imagination, made my stomach churn yet again. In this way, my impending flight to London had been a life vest thrown overboard. I reached for it eagerly, desperately.
A few hours before the flight, when James saw me packing the last of my clothes into my suitcase, he looked at me and shook his head in silence, visibly broken, while fury ran hot through my sob-wracked, sleep-deprived body.