Dr. Marinus was the first Chinese person I ever met, apart from the ones at the Thousand Autumns Restaurant, where me and Brendan were sometimes sent for takeaways if Mam was too tired to cook. Dr. Marinus spoke in posh, perfect English, quite softly, so you had to pay close attention to catch everything. He was short and skinny but sort of filled the room anyway. First he asked ’bout school and my family and stuff, then moved on to my voices. Mam was all, “My daughter’s not crazy, if that’s what you’re implying — it’s just concussion.” Dr. Marinus told Mam that he agreed, I wasn’t remotely crazy, but the brain could be an illogical place. To help him rule out a tumor, she had to let me answer his questions on my own. So I told him about the Radio People and Susan Hillage and Miss Constantin. Mam went all jittery again but Dr. Marinus assured her that auditory hallucinations—“daymares”—were not uncommon in girls my age. He told me that Susan Hillage’s accident was a big coincidence, and that coincidences even of this size were happening to people all over the world, right now; my turn had come, that was all. Mam asked if there was any medicine to stop these daymares, and I remember Dr. Marinus saying that, before we went down that route, he’d like to try a simpler technique from “the Old Country.” It worked like acupuncture, he said, but it didn’t use needles. He got Mam to squeeze a point on my middle finger — he marked it with a Biro — then touched a place on my forehead, in the middle, with his thumb. Like an artist putting on a dab of paint. My eyes shut …
… and the Radio People were gone. Not just quiet, but gone-gone. Mam knew from my face what’d happened, and she was as shocked and relieved as me. She was all, “Is that it? No wires, no pills?” Dr. Marinus said, Yes, that ought to do the job.
I asked if Miss Constantin’d gone forever, too.
The doctor said, Yes, for the foreseeable future.
The End. We left, I grew up, and neither the Radio People nor Miss Constantin ever came back. I saw a few documentaries and stuff about how the mind plays tricks on you, and now I know that Miss Constantin was just a sort of imaginary friend — like Sharon’s Bunny Bunny Boing Boing — gone haywire. Susan Hillage’s accident was just a massive coincidence, like Dr. Marinus’d told me. She didn’t die, but moved to Ramsgate, though some people’d say it’s the same difference. Dr. Marinus did some sort of hypnotism thing on me, like those cassettes you can buy to stop yourself smoking. Mam stopped saying “Chink” from that day on, and even today she’s down like a ton of bricks on anyone who does. “It’s ‘Chinese’ not ‘Chink,’ ” she tells them, “and they’re the best doctors in the National Health.”
MY WATCH SAYS it’s one o’clock. Far behind me, stick-men are fishing in the shallows off Shornemead Fort. Up ahead’s a gravel pit, with a big cone of stone and a conveyor belt feeding a barge. I can see Cliffe Fort, too, with windows like empty eye sockets. Old Mr. Sharkey says it used to house antiaircraft batteries in the war, and when people in Gravesend heard the big guns, they knew they had sixty seconds — tops — to get into their air-raid shelters under the stairs or down the garden. Wish a bomb’d fall on a certain house in Peacock Street, right now. Bet they’re scoffing pizza for lunch — Vinny lives on pizza ’cause he can’t be arsed to cook. Bet they’re laughing about me. I wonder if Stella stayed over last night. You just fall in love with each other, I thought, and that’s all there is to it. Stupid. Stupid! I kick a stone but it’s not a stone, it’s a little outcrop of rock that mashes my toe. Pain draws a jagged line up to my brain. And now my eyes are hot and watering — where’s all the water coming from, f’Chrissakes? The only water I’ve drunk today is when I cleaned my teeth and the milk on my Weetabix. My tongue’s like that oasis stuff they use for flower arranging. My duffel bag’s rubbing a sore patch on my shoulder. My heart’s a clubbed baby seal. My stomach must be empty, but I’m too miserable to feel it yet. I’m not turning round and going home, though. No bloody way.
BY THREE O’CLOCK, my whole head’s parched, not just my mouth. I’ve never walked so far in my life, I reckon. There’s no sign of a shop or even a house where I can ask for a glass of water. Then I notice a small woman fishing off the end of a jetty thing, like she’s sort of sketched into the corner where nobody’ll spot her. She’s a long stone-throw away, but I see her fill a cup from a flask. I’d never normally do this but I’m so thirsty that I walk down the embankment and along the jetty up to her, clomping my feet on the old wooden planks so as not to scare her. “ ’Scuse me, but could you spare a drop of water? Please?”
She doesn’t even look round. “Cold tea do you?” Her croaky voice sounds from somewhere hot.
“That’d be great, thanks. I’m not fussy.”
“Help yourself, then, if you’re not fussy.”
So I fill the cup, not thinking about germs or anything. It’s not normal tea but it’s the most refreshing thing I’ve ever drunk, and I let the liquid swoosh all round my mouth. Now I look at her properly for the first time. Sort of elephanty eyes in a wrinkled old face, with short gray hair, a grubby safari shirt, and a leathery wide-brimmed hat that looks a hundred years old. “Good?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It was. Tastes like grass.”
“Green tea. Lucky you’re not fussy.”
I ask, “Since when’s tea been green?”
“Since bushes made their leaves that color.”
There’s a splish of a fish. I see where it was, but not where it is. “Caught much today?”
A pause. “Five perch. One trout. A slow afternoon.”
I don’t see a bucket or anything. “Where are they?”
A bee lands on the brim of her hat. “I let them go.”
“If you don’t want the fish, why do you catch them?”
A few seconds pass. “For the quality of the conversation.”
I look around: the footpath, a brambly field, a scrubby wood, and a choked-up track. She must be taking the piss. “There’s nobody here.”
The bee’s happy where it is, even when the woman stirs herself to reel in the line. I stand off to one side as she checks the bait’s still secure on the hook. Drips of water splash the thirsty planks of the jetty. The river slurps at the shore and sloshes round the wooden pillar things. Still seated, and with an expert flick of the wrist, the old woman sends the lead weight loopy-looping away, the reel makes its zithery noise, and the weight lands in the water where it was before. Circles float outwards. Dead calm …
Then she does something really weird. She takes out a stick of chalk from her pocket and writes on a plank by her foot, MY. On the next plank along she writes, LONG. Then on the next plank, it’s the word NAME. Then the old woman puts the chalk away and goes back to her fishing.
I wait for her to explain, but she doesn’t. “What’s all that about?”
“What’s what about?”
“What you just wrote.”
“They’re instructions.”
“Instructions for who?”
“For someone many years from now.”
“But it’s chalk. It’ll wash off.”
“From the jetty, yes. Not from your memory.”
Okay, so she’s mad as a sack of ferrets. Only I don’t tell her so ’cause I’d like more of that green tea.
“Finish the tea, if you want,” she says. “You won’t find a shop until you and the boy arrive at Allhallows-on-Sea …”