The Apothecary (19 page)
He dropped his hand. “Amazing how long the pill has lasted,” he said. “But it’s only a matter of time before it wears off. I’ll be back.”
He left the room, and we heard the door lock behind him. The prisoner’s manner immediately changed, and she coughed and put a hand on her throat, then turned to where I was standing.
“Why you here?” she demanded hoarsely.
Pip already had his unfolded paper clip out, and was working on the lock.
“You can talk!” Benjamin said.
“Of course I talk.”
“Do you know my father, Marcus Burrows?”
The woman paused, as if unsure whether to trust us, then nodded. “Where is he?”
“We don’t know,” Benjamin said. “We thought he was in here.”
“You’re the chemist!” I said, remembering Shiskin’s note, and the gardener. I wondered if they had known she was a woman. “You’re Jin Lo!”
“How long have you been able to talk?” Benjamin asked her.
“Whole time. They think I have pill. So I pretend.”
“Can you make yourself invisible?” I asked. It was a long shot, but she
was
a chemist. It seemed worth asking.
She shook her head, her braid snaking on her shoulder.
“The door’s unlocked,” Pip announced.
Jin Lo frowned. “This is not trap?”
“You think it’s the kind of trap the British military’s likely to lay on?” Benjamin said. “Three invisible kids?”
“We just need some way of hiding you,” I said.
Jin Lo seemed to consider the problem, then untucked her shirt and removed several tiny glass vials from the sewn-up fold of the shirt’s hem, pressing them out of the slot in the fabric one at a time. She chose two, and stuffed the others in her pocket. One of the vials contained something orange, and one was a clear liquid.
“Smoke flare,” she said. “To signal plane. Will fill all of bunker.”
She poured the clear liquid into the orange vial, sealed it with her thumb, and shook it up. When she took her thumb away, a thick orange smoke started to pour out of the vial. In a few seconds it had filled the room. I held my breath so I wouldn’t cough.
“Open door,” she said, and Pip did.
There was no guard in the hall when we looked out— just Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret and Winston Churchill gazing at us from the wall. Jin Lo held up the vial, and the orange smoke filled the hall, obscuring the pictures. I’d never seen so much smoke pour out of such a small container. It surrounded us as we started silently down the corridor.
We were almost to the telephone switchboard, with the smoke billowing out behind us, when Pip whispered, “Look!”
He held out his arm, and I saw him do it, because there was a dusting of orange on his invisible skin. I could see his head, too, as if cast in orange mist. The smoke was clinging to us, and we were becoming visible, as orange ghosts. I looked down at myself and saw my hands and forearms, nearly transparent but outlined in smoke dust. I crossed my orange arms over my naked chest. The dusting had started at the top, where the smoke was thickest. I could see Benjamin’s head and shoulders, too.
“We have to get clothes!” I whispered.
We were outside the general’s office, where we’d heard Danby talking, and I peeked in. No one was inside. A long black wool overcoat was hanging by the door, and I grabbed it and put it on. It was enormous, but I didn’t care.
There were voices back down the hall, beyond the smoke screen.
“Look at this
smoke
!” the girl who’d gone for a coffee said.
“Is it a fire?” a man’s voice asked.
We ran silently towards the elevators, the smoke billowing behind us. Benjamin grabbed a jacket off one of the switchboard chairs and pulled it on just as his legs became orangely visible.
An alarm rang out, making me jump. There was coughing and shouting in the obscured hall behind us.
We reached the elevator lobby and Pip pressed the call button. It didn’t require a key to go up. I grabbed two khaki overalls and two hard hats off the hooks on the wall. Jin Lo was still waving the vial into the hall, spreading smoke.
“Take this,” I said, handing her one of the overalls. “And put your braid up under the hard hat. Pip, you take the other.”
She started pulling the overalls on over her clothes.
“You look like the invisible man,” Benjamin said to me, looking at my long coat.
“Well, you look like the invisible girl,” I said. The jacket he had stolen was actually a woman’s light blue raincoat, cinched at the waist, with a full skirt.
Pip, still naked and half visible, was busy brushing the orange dust off his skin. “It comes off!” he said. His arm had vanished again. “Brush it off and take those stupid coats off! Quick!”
We scrubbed ourselves clean as quickly as we could— the orange dust came off easily—and handed our clothes to Jin Lo as the elevator opened. She still wielded the smoke-spewing vial in one hand.
I heard a shriek from the female guard down the hall. “The prisoner’s gone!” she cried.
But the elevator doors closed, and we were on our way out.
T
he elevator took us up to daylight, and Jin Lo left the vial of orange smoke by the front door of the bunker so that it poured out into the street. She looked boyish in the khaki overalls, with her long braid up under a hard hat, and she walked purposefully away, carrying her bundle of clothes, as if she were a workman going for help in controlling this strange chemical fire.
A few people came out of houses, staring at the orange smoke rising into the air, but no one stopped Jin Lo, and we were around the corner before we heard shouts coming from the building, and a man’s loud voice asking if anyone had seen a Chinese girl in black. No one had, and Pip and Benjamin and I were still invisible.
A bus came by and stopped, and we climbed aboard. Jin Lo nodded to the driver and walked past him with her armful of clothes.
“You’ve got to pay!” the driver said, but Jin Lo ignored him. The rest of us filed invisibly after her.
There were seven or eight other people on the bus, including a white-haired woman with a curly white dog in her lap. The dog started to bark hysterically as we passed, and she murmured and hugged him close.
“It’s just a Chinaman, my angel, selling clothes,” I heard her say.
The dog kept barking—smelling, I was sure, all four of us.
We found a place near the back of the bus where no one was going to bump into us, and the driver gave up and drove on, flummoxed by the inscrutable Chinaman and late for his route. The old lady got the curly dog to be quiet, but it gazed back over her shoulder, panting.
Jin Lo dumped the pile of clothes beside her and sat down.
“So who are you, exactly?” Benjamin whispered, under the rumbling noise of the bus’s engine. “How do you know my father?”
“Only letters,” Jin Lo said. “I come from China to meet him.”
“Are there lots of girl chemists in China?” I asked. This was 1952, after all.
Jin Lo frowned as if the question had never occurred to her. “I am apprentice, very young, to chemist in Shanghai. I have no other school. When he die, I finish his work, write to colleagues.”
“What was his work?” I asked. “He wasn’t a normal chemist, right? Was he an alchemist?”
Jin Lo shrugged, as if the idea of normality was unimportant. “Everyone work different. Where you last see apothecary?”
“In his shop,” Benjamin said. “He was given a message saying you had been taken, and he would be next, so he hid us in the cellar. Some Germans burst in, and when we came upstairs, my father was gone.”
“Germans—they say what?”
“We don’t know,” Benjamin said. “It was in German.”
Jin Lo frowned. “Why you not speak German?”
“I don’t know,” Benjamin whispered. “I guess because of the war. No one wants to. Do you speak Japanese?”
Something I couldn’t identify passed over her face, and I remembered that parts of China had been occupied by Japan. “Yes,” she said. “When soldiers come, better to know what they say.”
“Oh,” Benjamin said, abashed. “Well, I don’t speak German.”
“You take me to shop,” she said.
The dog up front gave a petulant bark, and the old lady sneaked a look back at the Chinese rag seller. Then her gaze seemed to shift to me, and I looked down at my two visible fingers, which were holding on to a pole. It wasn’t just my fingers anymore, but a whole stretch of my hand and forearm that was visible—
actually
visible, not just dusted with orange. My other arm was visible in patches, too, and so was part of my left knee.
“Jin Lo!” I whispered. “Stare at that lady with the dog, quick.”
Jin Lo did, glaring so fiercely that the old lady whirled to the front, embarrassed and confused, pulling her dog down into her lap. I grabbed the blue raincoat from the top of the pile and wrapped myself in it, tying it at the waist. It covered me to the knees, and I crouched down on the seat, trying to blend into the pile of clothes.
“You’ll draw attention without a head,” Benjamin whispered.
“Not as much as you’ll draw in a second.”
He looked down at himself and saw that his shoulder patch was growing, down his biceps to the elbow. Half of his smooth, pale chest had appeared: the shadow of a collarbone, a pink nipple, and his belly button, which was a neatly sewn inny. He grabbed the general’s coat and pulled it on.
I looked at Pip, and half of his face was visible, too, spreading across his cheek from his ear. “Aw, all the
pockets
I could’ve picked,” he whispered. “Another hour and I’d be rich!” He pulled on the spare overalls and rolled up the cuffs on the arms and legs.
By the time we filed off the bus near Regent’s Park and the apothecary’s shop, we were fully visible and fully clothed. The Chinese rag seller seemed to have spawned three non-Chinese teenage children, in strange costumes, all riding for free. The little dog barked wildly at us, vindicated, and the old lady and the bus driver watched us go in disbelief.
We surveyed the door to the apothecary’s shop from across the street. Jin Lo looked around to all the neighbourhood windows that might have a view of the front door. No one seemed to be watching the building, but still I was afraid to go inside. The Germans could come back, or Danby and the British officers.
The door to the shop was unlocked, the latch forced by the Germans, and my heart pounded as Jin Lo pushed it open. We all slipped inside and stood in the dark chaos, listening. Things were overturned and broken, as the intruders had left them. Jin Lo’s soft braid spilled over her shoulder like a snake when she took off her hard hat, and she brushed it away. I imagined she would brush away a real snake with the same disinterested calm.
The shop seemed to be empty, so Benjamin ran upstairs to his flat to get some clothes to replace the general’s overcoat. He brought me a pair of his trousers, a shirt, and a jumper, and I went behind a ransacked shelf to change out of the pale blue raincoat. I liked having trousers on again, even if they were loose and I had to belt them tightly. I had never felt quite right in the pleated skirt.
Jin Lo finished her inspection of the shop. “So—you hear voices,” she said.
“Right,” Benjamin said.
“And you see German with scar.”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t see them take apothecary away.”
“No, we were in the cellar.”
“We go down now to see,” she said.
We went back to the office, and Benjamin opened the iron grate that led to the cellar. We all climbed down. We showed Jin Lo and Pip where we’d been hiding against the wall. Jin Lo looked up at the grate.
“So,” she said. “You hear them say, ‘Ha! I got you now, apothecary!’”
Benjamin and I looked at each other.
“No,” I said. “We heard an explosion.”
“What kind? Small? Big?”
“Medium.”
“You see explosion?”
Benjamin thought about it. “No. Also there was a police car’s bell! That’s what made them leave. But the police never came.”
“Sit here,” she said. “Wait.”
She ran up the ladder, and we heard her light footsteps in the shop, and the clinking of jars. Then she climbed back down, with one arm on the ladder, carrying an armful of things in the other, including a mortar and pestle.