Picking up her bag from the floor, she came back to the bed and kissed me one last time. Then, with a final lingering glance, she went to work. For about eighteen minutes I toyed with the idea of just waiting around to see if she still felt the same when she got back. But while the best-case scenario of that plan looked enticing, the worst-case scenario involved restraining orders and police cars. Plus there was at least some chance her kids would be home before she was and I did not want to explain to a pair of teenagers why a strange naked woman was wandering around their lovely family home.
I also wasn’t sure I wanted to explain to myself why I’d been naked in that last hypothetical.
I dressed, briefly considered leaving a note but realised I didn’t have a pen, or any paper, and stealing somebody else’s property in order to leave them a thanks for the one-night-stand card was probably at the very least mixed etiquette. So I left the house, and left Brentford. I felt weirdly like crying.
Now things were no longer case-critical I could take the slower overland route back to the centre of town. It meant I was crowded onto buses alongside the sorts of people who travelled on buses—so weirdos who believed that travelling by tube put you at risk of being haunted by visions of dead wizards—but the anonymity of public transport gave me space to think.
I was sliding fast into one of those too-much-to-do-not-enough-to-do spaces where there was a whole lot going on but not a great many ways I could affect any of it. At some point I needed to repeat my so far 100% successful call-every-estate-agent strategy in Maidenhead. Which would be a faff, and probably wouldn’t end anything like as well as it had this time, but would at least help me help Galatea find what had happened to her husband, although my experience of missing spouses was that the client never liked the answer, since it was almost always “dead”, “cheating” or in particularly depressing cases “dead and cheating”. Then there was operation fix Elise, which basically involved sitting around and waiting for Dr Bright to text back. And we capped it all off with my seemingly never-ending problem of being sent mystical visions by magical women who wanted me to do vague but symbolically important things that they could never quite be bothered to explain the details of.
About halfway through Chiswick, my phone buzzed.
I had a dream. You died.
Then.
:sad emoji::sad emoji::sad emoji:
I hadn’t heard from Sofia in a while. Last I’d heard she’d done a lot better in her A-Levels than I did under similar circumstances—I guess she was just smarter than me—and was now well into a five-year medical degree at Imperial. Of course she was also still technically the reincarnation of the Delphic Oracle and so I tended to take it seriously when she dreamed about things.
Dead how? Then in an effort to seem down with the kids I searched for a suitable pictorial representative of my emotional state and settled on a slightly befuddled-looking blue elephant.
Stabbed. Or drowned. A bit unclear. Why did you send me an elephant? :confused emoji:
Oh joy. How can it be unclear?! Stabbing and drowning are very different. What’s wrong with the elephant? :penguin emoji:
A woman in a black dress held you under a lake. Then you were dead on the shore and stuck full of swords. It was weird. :worried emoji:
Then a moment later. And I know I’m nearly twenty now, but you should probably be careful about sending me random emojis because half of them mean sex stuff.
Shit. Wait, which ones mean sex stuff?
Lots of them. Use your imagination.
I have a really dirty imagination. That won’t help.
If it looks like a penis or a pair of breasts, it’s probably sex stuff.
I was kind of pleased that Sofia had grown up enough that she could type the word penis into a text message perfectly comfortably. Then again she was a medic now, she’d probably been slicing them off cadavers since fresher’s week. You are no help.
You realise you’ve spent more time asking me about sex emojis than about how I foretold your death.
She had a point. Although, to be honest, she’d known me long enough I couldn’t imagine she was terribly surprised. People try to kill me all the time. I don’t often accidentally sext teenagers.
Enough time passed without a reply that I panicked slightly. It was the penguin, wasn’t it. Do penguins mean cunnilingus?
:confused face::confused face::confused face:
Then
I suppose they do now?
Here lies Kate Kane. Was in a hole. Didn’t stop digging. Beloved daughter, sorely missed.
Tell you what. Let’s go back to talking about me dying. I’ll feel way better.
Good idea.
I waited for a moment, but nothing else was forthcoming. So—anything else?
Just what I’ve told you. Black dress. Water. Swords. I made a note in my dream journal.
You have a dream journal?
My dreams are messages about the future from the God of the Sun. Of course I have a dream journal.
She had a point. Again. It still sounded a bit teenagery to me but then she was still technically a teenager, so she had me coming and going.
Am I the only one who’s in danger? I tried.
I don’t know.
That was vague. Vague was seldom good when it came to prophecies. Of course it was also usually all you got. It seemed that consulting the oracle had taken me about as far as it was going to.
Or maybe not. A thought struck me.
Sofia, have you ever tried doing the prophecy thing deliberately?
:scared emoji: What do you mean?
I mean someone asks you a question and you talk to the gods or destiny or whatever
Out of habit, I split it into two texts. And then you say something cryptic and ironic that they can look back at later and be all oh right she was talking about MY empire.
There was nothing for a moment. The bus stopped and I had to get up to let somebody off. Then Sofia sent: Try asking me something.
I thought about it. There was a lot I wanted to know. There was also a lot I absolutely didn’t want to know. I tried for something low-risk. How can I save Elise.
Another long pause. Two more bus-stops passed and I had to give up my seat for an old man with a walking stick.
Finally Sofia got back with: Nothing. Sorry.
Perhaps we need to get you high.
You’ve already sent me a suggestive penguin, now you’re trying to push drugs on me?
I really thought you’d stop being able to play the “help you’re corrupting my innocence” card when you turned eighteen.
:shy emoji:
Don’t come all blushing face with me, young lady.
:tongue-sticking-out emoji:
Then
It’s good to hear from you. I’d been worried.
Fuck me in the ear with a rusty egg whisk. How downhill had my life gone that a psychic teenager with an on-again-off-again vampire boyfriend and all the pressures of actual real life medical school had enough space to be concerned about me? I’m fine.
I know you can take care of yourself. It’s just you usually don’t.
It was beyond humiliating that she was the one giving me life advice. I liked to think I’d been a non-terrible influence on her, if only as a kind of negative example, but I wished I could at least sometimes pretend I was more of a grown-up than she was. I’m doing better, I think. How’s Patrick?
Another pause. Out of the picture for now. It was getting weird with him still being all highschool and me having clinics to do.