What's the Matter with Mary Jane? Read online

  What’s the Matter with Mary Jane?

  Another Postmodern Mystery, by the Numbers

  An Epitome Apartments Mystery by

  Candas Jane Dorsey

  Contents

  Epigraph

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  She’s crying with all her might and main,

  And she won’t eat her dinner — rice pudding again —

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  I’ve promised her dolls and a daisy-chain,

  And a book about animals — all in vain —

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain;

  But, look at her, now she’s beginning again! —

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  I’ve promised her sweets and a ride in the train,

  And I’ve begged her to stop for a bit and explain —

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  She’s perfectly well and she hasn’t a pain,

  And it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again! —

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  Rice Pudding (“What is the Matter with Mary Jane?”)

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  “To be forgiven from beyond the grave could be important if that was the only quarter from which forgiveness could come, which, for many of us . . . might well be the case.”

  Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain, p. 33

  Fore ðæm nedfere nænig wiorðe

  ðonc snottora ðon him ðearf siæ

  to ymbhycgenne ær his hinionge

  hwæt his gastæ godes oððe yfles

  æfter deað dæge doemed wiorðe.1

  “Bede’s Death Song” attributed to Bede the Venerable (Bæ¯da or Be¯da; 672/673 – 26 May 735)

  1 Loosely speaking: “Awaiting death, it’s smart to ask ourselves, before it’s too late, whether our life has been lived for good or evil, and how we will be judged on [or after] our death-day.”

  What is the matter with Mary Jane?

  She’s crying with all her might and main,

  1. Once upon a time when the world was young . . .

  During our second year of university, Priscilla Jane Gill’s cat Micah died, and she had him taxidermied.

  We all thought this was gross, but she said he was the truest being she’d met up to that point. She said that when she was with Micah she had been able to tune in to a special place, in touch with a purity to which she could only aspire, and that reaching for such purity gave her life a through-line of calm. She wanted to recall that clarity every day, and she thought she would do so when she looked at his effigy, posed in a lifelike facsimile of his favourite “meatloaf” lounging position.

  In those days, this sort of explanation made sense.

  Besides, Priscilla was a folklore major, and they were all a bit like that anyway.

  I think all of us saw Priscilla a little like she saw Micah — when he was alive, of course. To us, she was a symbol of a time out of time, a pure zone between childhood and real life where we could dream of a perfection for which we would not even remember to try once we’d put our college days behind us. But Pris didn’t distinguish between college life and reality, and that set her apart.

  Maybe she was an early adopter of adulthood, or maybe she was a pure idealist. Either would have made her a wonder to us. We loved her evolved nature. She was an exotic, but she was our exotic, and long after we graduated, her image stayed with us, delicately posed in our history, perfect and without entropy, like a saint, or like Micah.

  We got used to Micah’s Ghost, as we called him, after a while, and some of us also were able to take Pris for granted now and again — until she breezed out of our lives on graduation day, weaboutaring not much of anything under her graduation gown, and became one of our memories of university life, preserved in the amber of time — which is to say, idealised and mostly forgotten.

  None of us had seen her since, but any time any of us encountered each other, sometime in the conversation we were bound to mention Pris, and smile, and shake our heads at our inability to match her grace and aestheticism.

  The woman at my door that cold October day was tall, ascetic, and stylish, with a grey brush-cut and the hollow perfect cheekbones of a clothing retailer’s anorexic display figure. When I opened my door, she was looking away down the corridor, and I saw her strong raptor profile with a mysterious thrill of buried familiarity.

  “I thought I heard — someone — never mind,” the woman said, turned her gaze back to me, and smiled. Then I truly recognised her, that crooked supermodel smile with the trickster underlay.

  “Priscilla Jane,” I said with that tone of satisfied arrival with which we greet the inevitable return of unfinished business.

  2. “Come in out of the cornstarch and dry your mukluks by the cellophane . . .”

  “Yes,” she said. We stood for a moment, waiting.

  “You look so different; it took me a moment,” I said.

  “You look just the same. I knew you right away when you went by —”

  “?” I made that all-purpose noise-with-moue I’ve perfected in years of living with my cat Bunnywit.

  “I followed you from that store down the —” She showed me where with a sharp gesture with her head. Snow particles silvered the air around her head. She often failed to finish her sentences in those days too.

  “Great!” I said. “I’m glad you took the trouble. Come in!”

  She looked again toward the stairway and said to it, as she dreamily edged into my hallway, “I was coming anyway but it helped to see you before you saw me. Since . . . well, I haven’t been too . . . I’ve been . . . hmm, convalescing.”

  “Tea?” I held out a hand to take her snowy scarf, and she carefully folded her gloves into the pocket of her pea jacket before shaking the snowflakes from its shoulders and handing it to me. She ruffled her hair for more haloing droplets.

  “You’re supposed to wear that hat, not keep it in your pocket,” I said. I led the way to the kitchen, Bunnywit following us with his usual disdainful curiosity, ready to make her his as soon as she slowed down enough that he didn’t have to exert himself.

  “Herbal,” she said. “I’m trying to cut down on caffeine and sugar. Not sure it helps, but it can’t hurt.”

  “Cancer?”

  “No. And it isn’t anorexia either. Make the tea.”

  “Fuck the tea. What’s wrong? Anything I can — ?” Talk about seventy-five seconds’ worth of cut-to-the-chase. I bit my tongue, but it was too late.

  “Of course. Why do you think I looked you up after almost two decades? Make the tea.” She sat down at the kitchen table in one of the sturdy oak chairs and leaned over to stroke Bun.

  “Don’t remind me how old I am, Pris.”

  “I’m older,” she said. She was. It had been one contributor to her charisma.

  “I’m feeling a goose walking over my grave. What are you doing here, and why do you look like death warmed over?”

  “Because I very nearly was dead,” she said. “I’ve spent the l
ast year recovering from an attack.”

  “A physical attack?”

  “Oh, yes, it was very physical.”

  “Who did it?”

  “A guy.”

  “Is that why you were looking over your shoulder? They didn’t catch him?”

  “He’s in jail. No-one follows me now — I don’t think. I’m just paranoid. They say he followed me for months, learned my routine. Then when he jumped me, it was somewhere no-one could interrupt. I was stabbed seventeen times and my throat was slashed. And he broke my jaw and cheekbone. Did an after-knife kickfest.”

  A seriously committed attack, in both senses of the words. I busied myself readying the teapot and left the silence there. She filled it.

  “Nobody knows why. I didn’t recognise him. They say he’s a nutbar, but he was found fit to stand trial. I have nightmares and I wear too many clothes. That part doesn’t matter, the clothes, but I thought I’d get it over with.”

  Coming back to sit and wait for the kettle to boil, I looked her up and down. If possible, she was even more beautiful than she had been, though her beauty was a whole lot spookier for having added a shadowy echo of those too-thin mass-media clichés who throng the red carpets at award ceremonies.

  3. That was then, and this is now

  “I had such a crush on you twenty years ago,” I said. “Well, we all did, but most of the women wouldn’t admit it.”

  I didn’t say that today she almost terrified me. Or that I wasn’t necessarily delighted that she’d reached back into a place I kept in Dreamtime and brought that place into the present as if we’d never parted. Outside science fiction novels, I don’t like time travel.

  So: “Hmph,” I said. “It’s like Then is Now. Weird. I don’t like time travel.”

  “So eloquent!” she mocked. “I’ll tell you what it really is. In your head, you’ve kept talking to me all these years. So I show up, we have twenty-some years of friendship instead of a few years of old history.”

  “And you? Have you been talking to me for twenty years too?”

  “I didn’t have to,” she said. “I knew we’d meet again. I always knew. I just . . . didn’t know when.”

  “Why didn’t you look me up, then?” The kettle whined and I got up. Bunnywit was still twining around her legs, which meant he wasn’t trying to trip me as usual.

  She glanced up at me sideways with that same Farmer-Pang mischievousness that had glinted out at us sometimes. Now it was sharp and clear and wicked. “Why didn’t you, me?”

  I laughed. “You were always in Kathmandu or Timbuktu or Mogadishu — my budget didn’t run to exotic destinations.” Until recently, and even then, not much, due to other decisions I will talk about in due time.

  “You followed my career, though.”

  “Hard to avoid it. I have all your books, by the way. By the time you were back in the country, I wouldn’t have dreamt of imposing on you.”

  She guffawed. Really. “Don’t be a bloody fool!”

  “Life moves,” I said, grinning to try to lessen the sting. “I figured it’d moved too far. Like continental drift.”

  “Platypuses.” She nodded. “Platypussies?” She leaned down and picked up Bunnywit. “Come here, platypussy.”

  4. Micah’s Ghost

  “Be careful, he bi—” I started, then watched Bun reach his front paws out and literally hug her, snuggling his head into the crook of her neck under her elegant right ear. (Her left ear was just as elegant, but he picked the right one.)

  “I’ll be damned. He never does that!” Even to me, most of the time.

  “He smells Micah.”

  “You still have Micah?” Maybe I raised my voice a little. There was a catch in Bun’s purr, and Pris shook her head.

  “I forgot how transparent you are. I recall how Micah’s continuing presence —”

  “Gave me the creeps,” I said flatly.

  “Actually, I meant a different incarnation of Micah — a living one. I use the name over and over. This one is Five. I do keep a scrap of the original Micah’s fur in my spirit bag.”

  “You still wear that thing?”

  “Different incarnation of that too.” She reached under her sweater’s cowl neck and pulled at a leather thong until she had fished out a small red kid-leather bag. “Its great-great-great-grandchild by now. I make a new one every few years.”

  Bun purred even louder and reached out for the bag. She easily deterred him and poured him onto the floor, where he adopted the undignified gopher pose he usually uses only for salmon and craned his neck to keep the bag in sight.

  “Shoo,” she murmured confidentially, just to him. He dropped to a sit, washed half his face once, then quietly walked off to the living room, still purring, the little duck-tail that Manxes have twitching back and forth on his sashaying butt.

  Pris dropped the bag back inside her sweater neckline and shook her head slightly. The motion was just like a preening cat.

  “You are still one spooky soul, Priscilla Jane Gill.”

  She smiled again, looking at me comfortably and directly. I began to think I’d been craving the sight of that smile for twenty years.

  I didn’t want to sleep with her, exactly. It’s actually pretty easy to find people to sleep with. No, I wanted her back in my life in the same way that in dreams I see my brother, who died when I was young, and want him to stay when he shows up.

  As if my life might have been different all this time, in some special way, if she had stayed in it, and if she stayed in it now, her staying would retroactively make that difference real.

  Schrödinger’s roommate.

  5. Schrödinger’s college reunion

  I’m not a starfucker. It wasn’t because she’d become famous. I’m a fan of Leonard Cohen songs, but I didn’t want her to bring me tea and oranges all the way from China — or even, as in Mick Berzensky’s song, “fish in a dish / from the old corner store” from which she’d followed me. But I’d always liked her a lot, and she fit into my kitchen easily. She reminded me that I’d been a better person once and that she’d liked me too.

  “I didn’t miss many of them, but I missed you,” she said. “Not a craving, but you know, I’d be in a street somewhere, someplace I’d never been, and I’d see something I wanted to share with someone, or I’d want to talk with someone right that minute — and sometimes it was you. Those were nice moments.”

  I leaned back against the counter with the empty teacups in my hands.

  “Yeah.” I wasn’t sure my tone was on the right side of sarcasm. “I liked ’em too.”

  “I know,” she said. “I can hear myself. What a wanker, eh? All that nostalgia wasn’t enough to bring me to you. It took fear, and seventeen knife scars — eighteen, really, but one was just a nick — and an article in the newspaper.”

  “Oh, that.” A few months earlier, I’d been momentarily notorious for helping enquire into the murder of a street sex worker who was the granddaughter of a friend of mine. The situation had become worse before it was solved, and I had some scars myself to prove it.

  “Yes, that,” she said. “I want you to do the same for me. I want to — hire you? I have money.”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed aloud. Partly in disappointment, I must say, and partly from annoyance, but humour still came out on top.

  She stared down her patrician nose at me as well as she could, given that she was sitting down and I was still bringing tea paraphernalia to the table. To help her with that, I sat down and assembled the cups and saucers.

  “I have some money now,” I said. “Money, I don’t need.” She kept glaring, so I went on, “You’re cute when you’re acting on privilege.”

  6. The Peace of Utrecht

  I poured the tea. She breathed through her nose a couple of times, then rel
axed slightly.

  “I need help. Specialised help. Am I paranoid or am I really being followed? Why did someone who presented as a crazed fan but who isn’t crazy and hadn’t read my books attack me? I see his fucking face in my dreams. I’m fucking sick of expecting to see him for real. I came to ask you to help me. Whatever it takes.”

  “Time for my speech, which won’t be eloquent,” I said acerbically. “I got into that shit by accident, and I’m not getting any younger. Friends come and go. My most recent lover just ran away with the circus and maybe I won’t see her again. That’s okay, I’m happy for her, but between that and recovering from a few broken bones and a lot of soft tissue injuries, I’m feeling a little vulnerable. Mortal. I’m sure you can understand that.”

  “You sound like we’re negotiating a fucking treaty. This isn’t the UN. What will it take?”

  “That’s not the point. It’s also not the point that today I was sitting here thinking about old friendships and old ties and how to renew them. Today is just because I was hungry and depressed for a long time, and I’ve lost the knack of having a life.”

  “Then it’s an opportunity.”

  “Ha. Fuck that Newspeak. For one thing, you weren’t on the renew-ties list. For another thing, I just got over being beaten to within an inch of my life — the matter is still before the courts, as they say — and you turn up out of the blue and suggest I investigate your mortal danger. You think you have any favours to call in? After all this time?”

  “I don’t have favours to . . . that’s not what . . . Listen. I just think that if anyone in the world will get it, it’s —”

  “Bullshit. An opportunity. Sure.”

  She sighed. “Yeah. Okay. Fine. Forget it.” But she showed no interest in moving. She reached out and picked up her Japanware teacup, sipped the hot jasmine tea, and then she did a small, curious thing. She licked her lips afterward as if the tea were the best thing she’d tasted in a long time. It was that little unconscious moment that got me. I’m pretty sure it was unconscious.