The Apothecary (17 page)
“Benjamin! Janie!” he said. “I have your—”
He caught Benjamin’s look of displeasure.
“Oh!” he said. “Sorry! But it’s only chess club. They’re my friends!”
Benjamin drew Sergei to the back of the room, out of earshot, and Pip slid into the vacated chair.
“Is this game like checkers?” he asked the pimply boy.
The boy rolled his eyes. “No. Well, only superficially.”
“What’s superficially?”
The boy thought about it. “On the surface.”
“Aright,” Pip said. “What do you play for?”
“Nothing,” the boy said. “For pleasure.”
“Pleasure,”
Pip said. “That’s daft. Let’s say half a crown. Can I move this little round-headed one?”
I left them to their game and followed Benjamin and Sergei to the back of the room.
“I have the book right here!” Sergei whispered. “I’ve kept it with me! I was worried. Where did the police take you?” His face was flushed with excitement.
“Has anyone asked you about the book?” Benjamin asked.
Sergei thought about that. “No! What should we do next?”
“Nothing,”
Benjamin said. “I just need it back.”
Sergei reluctantly handed over Benjamin’s satchel. “I didn’t even get to look at it,” he complained.
“I also need to borrow your Latin book.”
Sergei dug in his bag and produced
Kennedy’s Latin Primer
. “Can’t I help you? Please? I’m good at Latin.”
“We promised your father we’d leave you out of it,” Benjamin said.
“He doesn’t have to know!”
“Is he okay?” I asked Sergei. “I mean, did he get in trouble for what we said in your house?”
“I don’t think so,” Sergei said. “And he can talk again.”
“You should tell him to be careful,” I said. “He’s in a lot of danger.”
“Really?” Sergei asked.
Across the room, Pip said, “Checkmate!”
His pimply opponent was staring down at the board. He looked up at me in protest. “He asked if the game was like
checkers
!”
“That’s half a crack, please,” Pip said smugly.
“I don’t
have
half a crown.”
“S’all right,” Pip said. “I’ll take your marker. I think you’re good for it.”
We stood over their chessboard and Sergei studied it for a moment, then looked at Pip with respect. “Is it the Opera game?”
“The
what
?”
“It’s outright thievery!” the pimply boy said.
“The Opera game was played in sixteen moves,” Sergei said, “by an American master against two amateurs, in an opera box. Where do you study chess?”
“I don’t
study
it,” Pip said. “My uncle taught me down the pub.”
“Will you join our chess club?”
“Don’t let him!” the boy said. “He tricked me!”
“He can’t join chess club,” Benjamin said. “He doesn’t even go to this school.”
“I will soon!”
“Let’s go,” Benjamin said, and he nudged Pip towards the classroom door.
Sergei caught my arm. “Please take me with you.”
“I’m so sorry, Sergei,” I said, and gently pulled my arm free. “We can’t.”
So we weren’t, as you see, very good at being sneaky. We’d interrogated our own ally in a bugged house, and turned into birds in front of the entire population of Turnbull Hall, and now we’d hustled the St Beden’s chess club in the space of five minutes. We left Sergei looking brokenhearted, the pimply boy looking fiercely indignant, and the rest of the club looking like they weren’t sure what had hit them. If we were going to do anything unseen and unnoticed, we needed help.
M
r Gilliam’s chemistry classroom was locked, but it only took Pip a few seconds to open the door with a bent paper clip. The room was empty, and Benjamin relocked the door and lodged a chair under the knob.
I remembered that the invisibility spell the gardener had shown us in the Pharmacopoeia was on the page just after the Smell of Truth, and had the Greek letters ƒŸƒÂo at the top. I remembered because invisibility appealed to me—much more, even, than flying. We found the page, and the instructions were in Latin, so Benjamin started translating with Sergei’s primer.
“
Balineum
means ‘bath’,” he said. “I think we have to prepare a bath.”
“A
bath
?” Pip said. “Don’t you just drink a lickser?”
“Maybe you have to soak in this one, to be invisible,” I said.
We considered the classroom sink, which wasn’t deep enough.
“What about that?” Pip asked, pointing to a big rubbish bin in the corner.
We emptied the crumpled paper out and carried the can over near the book. It was large enough to get inside, and it wasn’t even too disgusting.
“Now what?” Pip asked.
“
Liquefac aurum
.” Benjamin flipped the primer’s pages. “
Liquefac
means ‘melt’. We have to melt something. We’ll need a Bunsen burner. Here, take the dictionary, Janie, and I’ll set one up. What’s
aurum
?”
I looked it up. “Gold!” I said, my heart sinking. “We don’t have that.”
“If we were decent alchemists, we could make it,” Benjamin said.
“We need two drachms.”
Benjamin looked at the ceiling, calculating—he’d retained at least some knowledge of compounding medicines, from working for his father. “That’s about a quarter of an ounce, I think. Not much.”
“Janie’s got gold earrings,” Pip said.
I reached for my ears and felt the small, round studs. “They were my grandmother’s,” I said. “She’s dead.”
There was a silence in the room. My nana Helen was my mother’s mother, and she’d tried to act elegant and sophisticated when she came to visit us, because that’s how she thought Hollywood was, but she couldn’t help being warm and silly, because that was her nature. The earrings were the only things of hers I had.
Benjamin looked uncomfortable. “You don’t have to give them up,” he said.
“Yes I do,” I said, and I took off an earring. “Here. Melt them.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” And I almost
was
sure, now that I’d made the offer. “She’d want us to find your father.”
“Thank you,” Benjamin said, holding them for a second in indecision before he dropped them in a clay crucible over a Bunsen burner. I looked away.
There were other ingredients, and I helped translate the rest of the instructions, but I can’t tell you what they were, because I was thinking about how my nana Helen had made me promise to wait to pierce my ears until I was twenty. I had promised, but only because I thought she’d live to see me grown up, well past twenty. She died when I was twelve, and it seemed unfair. At a slumber party that same year, I let Penny Meadows numb my earlobe with ice and then pierce it with a needle and dental floss, using half a potato as a backstop. I almost fainted—not from the piercing, which didn’t hurt as much as the ice did, but from the feeling of the floss being pulled, dragging slightly, through my ear. I let Penny do the other one, too, because I was going to be elegant like my nana Helen had always wanted to be. My mother was upset, but she came around. “A sewing needle?” she’d said, inspecting the neat holes. “And you didn’t faint? You take after your father.”
Benjamin ground the melted gold with something else until it became a powder, which he mixed into a solution that he poured into the rubbish bin and diluted with water from Mr Gilliam’s chemistry lab sink.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Lava vestibus depositis,”
Benjamin read. “That’s the last thing on the page.”
I flipped through the primer. “Oh no,” I said.
“What does it mean?” Pip asked.
“It’s a command to wash . . . um, the clothes having been dropped,” I said. “I think it means ‘get in the bath naked’. ”
We all looked at one another.
“The bird thing worked on clothes,” Benjamin said in a tone of protest, as if being naked was my idea.
“The gardener said there are different ways of changing something,” I said. “I think he called the avian elixir a transformative process, and said that this one is only a masking process. Maybe it only works on your body.”
“So if it wears off, we’ll be starkers inside a military bunker,” Pip said.
“We might feel it wearing off,” Benjamin said. “And have some time.”
“What, three seconds?” Pip asked. “Time to put your hands over your willy?”
Benjamin shook his head, dismissing the objections. “I have to find my father,” he said. “You don’t have to do this, but I do.” He shrugged off his school blazer and started untying his tie.
“We’ll go with you,” I said.
“Maybe you should turn around, Janie.”
“Wait!” Pip said. Mr Gilliam had a freestanding blackboard in the room, the two-sided kind that moves on wheels, and Pip rolled it between the rubbish bin and us. “We’ve got a screen like this at home,” he said. “’Cause the bath’s in the kitchen.”
Benjamin stepped behind the rolling blackboard, and we could only see him from the knees down. His white shirt dropped to the floor, and he kicked off his shoes and pulled off his socks. His feet were pale, and looked vulnerable. His blue wool pants dropped, and he climbed into the rubbish bin with a slosh.
“Benjamin!” I said, remembering. “The note in the margin said to leave one part of your body out!”
“What part?”
“I’ve got a funny idea,” Pip said.
“That’s
not
funny,” Benjamin said. “And it’s too late anyway.”
I blushed in spite of myself. Pip giggled.
“Maybe part of a hand,” I said. “Something you can see, so you’ll know when other people are seeing it.”
“My hands are already wet.”
“A shoulder?” Pip suggested.
“I’ll try,” Benjamin said. “It’s awkward in here.”
There was more sloshing, and we heard the thud of a knee or an elbow against the inside of the metal can. Then a wet footprint appeared on the concrete floor beside Benjamin’s clothes, and another. There were no feet making the footprints.
“Benjamin!” I said. “It works! We can’t see your feet!”
There was silence from behind the blackboard, except for the dripping.
“Benjamin?” I said.
“It’s so strange,” he said. “I can’t see myself.”
“Come out an’ show us,” Pip said.
“But I’m naked.”
“But we can’t see you!”
The wet footprints came slowly around the side of the blackboard. A pale smudge of pink skin floated five feet above the ground. I knew it must be part of Benjamin’s shoulder, but I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been looking for it. The pink spot moved, and a wet handprint appeared in the white chalk dust on the blackboard. There was no other sign of him. “It’s as if I’m not here,” he said, wondering.
“Brilliant!” Pip said. “I’m goin’ in!” He disappeared behind the board.
“I can’t tell you how strange this feels,” Benjamin’s voice said, from just above the pink floating spot of skin.
The two of us stood there awkwardly. I was as awed by the fact that he was naked as that he was invisible. There was a slosh as Pip climbed into the bin.
“Remember to leave some part of your body out,” I said.
“Right,” Pip said.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said. “It might be too embarrassing.”
“You think it isn’t embarrassing for me?” Benjamin asked.
There was another sloshing behind the blackboard, and Pip’s wet footprints came scampering around the side. He was laughing delightedly.
“I
love
this!” he said. “I always
wanted
this!”
At first I couldn’t see what was visible on him, but then I saw one floating ear. It was more identifiable as a body part than Benjamin’s shoulder was, but it was also smaller and harder to see, especially when he was facing us and we weren’t seeing the ear from the side.
“I want to go everywhere!” Pip said. “We can sneak into the cinema! An’ the casino! An’ the races!”
“First we can go to the bunker and find my father,” Benjamin reminded him. “Your turn, Janie.”
I went around the blackboard and looked at the two piles of clothes on the floor. Experimentally, I dunked a corner of my sleeve into the bath. It came out soaking wet, but unchanged. If I kept my clothes on, I’d be invisible, but in wet, visible clothes.
“Come on, Janie,” Benjamin’s voice said. “Before Mr Gilliam comes back. We can’t see you.”
I looked once more into the rubbish bin full of solution, and thought that if my grandmother’s earrings had been melted down for this, I might as well make use of it. I took off my clothes and climbed in. I decided to keep the pinky finger on my right hand out, as it seemed small and easy to hide. The water was cold, and I held my breath and tucked my knees so I could dunk my head under and get my hair wet. I waited a few seconds and then stood up, dripping, and looked down at myself. There was nothing there. It was disorienting. When I touched my arm, it felt slippery and wet, but I couldn’t see it: I only saw water dripping in the shape of an arm. The clash between what I knew and what I saw made me dizzy. I climbed out, watching the water fill in the space in the can where my body had been, and saw the telltale footprints appear on the classroom floor.
