Chapter 9 – Finding Mabel [The note]

Joyce had slept well. She could not remember the last time she had slept better. Whether it was the sea air or something about this place, only time would tell.

She was ready by eight and sat in the front room waiting for Mabel to collect her.

By quarter past, there was still no sign of her. Joyce was beginning to wonder whether she ought to telephone when a scratching sound came from the front door.

Curious, she went to investigate.

She opened the door.

A pure grey cat sat on the doorstep.

It looked up at her and, for one ridiculous moment, Joyce could have sworn it smiled. Then it raised one paw and pointed towards a folded note lying at its feet.

Joyce stared at the cat.

The cat winked.

Then it turned and trotted away.

“Crazy town,” Joyce muttered.

She bent down and picked up the note. Her name was written neatly across the front.

‘Apologies. I had to take in a delivery at the greengrocer’s. Could you possibly make your own way over?

Kindest regards,

Mabel

P.S. Don’t worry about the cat. He’s a natural show-off.’

Joyce read the postscript again.

She looked along the street.

There was no sign of the cat.

That was the moment Joyce Turner finally surrendered to the madness.

She put on her hat, closed the door behind her and set off for the greengrocer’s.

──✿──

Standing at number 6 High Street, Shirley’s Greengrocers occupied a semi-detached building nestled snugly beside the local newsagent, which in turn adjoined the warm, familiar frontage of the Brown Bear pub.

The shopfront looked as though little had changed in decades. Weathered brick surrounded sturdy timber frames painted dark green, while gold lettering across the fascia proudly announced _Shirley’s Greengrocers_. A matching wooden sign hung above the pavement from an ornate wrought-iron bracket.

As Joyce approached, she noticed a horse and cart parked a little way back from the shopfront. The horse stood contentedly munching from a nosebag, apparently unconcerned with the world around it.

For Joyce, it felt as though she had stepped back in time, into a place where nothing had changed or ever needed to. Only the triangular enamel litter bin outside the newsagent, emblazoned with R. White’s Soft Drinks, broke the illusion.

She made her way to the shop door and tried the handle. It was unlocked.

The bell chimed as Joyce stepped inside.

The smell reached her immediately, a medley of earthy potatoes and ripening fruit.

She stopped.

Apples over potatoes.

For the briefest moment she was somewhere else.

A woman’s voice floated from the back.

“I’ll just be a moment.”

It was a small shop, with standing room for no more than three customers at a time. Everything was neat and functional, the produce stacked in regimented rows, spike labels pushed between the items displaying handwritten prices.

Joyce stood waiting, but her attention had drifted elsewhere.

She knew this place.

Not recognised it. Knew it.

The thought was absurd, yet memories of a shop she had only just entered were telling her a different story.

Although it felt like an eternity, barely ten seconds had passed before Mabel Shirley appeared behind the counter. She surveyed Joyce, apparently unfazed, then smiled.

“This shop has the same effect on many people.”

Joyce twitched back into the present.

“I worked here once, but…”

Mabel waited.

Joyce looked around again. “That’s impossible.”

“Is it?”

Joyce frowned.

Something behind the counter caught her attention. “You used to keep the string down there.”

Mabel said nothing.

Joyce pointed towards a small cupboard beneath the counter. “Bottom shelf, on the right.”

“Did we?”

The question irritated her. Joyce stepped behind the counter, crouched and opened the cupboard.

A large ball of brown parcel string sat on the bottom shelf.

She stared at it.

“I knew that was there.”

“Apparently so.”

Joyce slowly stood.

“But I’ve never been in this shop before.”

“Not in this life.”

There was no humour in Mabel’s voice now.

Joyce looked at her.

Mabel rested both hands on the counter.

“This will be one of the harder things for you to accept about your role here. Yesterday I told you that you had forgotten a great deal. Today, I hope to show you just how much.”

──✿──

For most of the journey, neither woman had spoken much. Mabel deliberately, Joyce because she could not find the words.

It was only once they were clear of the town and making their way along the country roads that Joyce finally spoke.

“Reincarnation. Is that what you’re implying?” she asked tentatively.

Mabel did not reply at once. She looked towards Joyce, pursed her lips as though deciding how much to say, then turned her attention back to the road.

“Our community, the Constants, have the ability to recall previous lives. But those memories don’t simply appear. They have to be awakened, and the person must be willing to accept them. What you’ve been experiencing is the beginning of that awakening.”

Joyce inclined her head in thought.

“Magic paper, conversations without speaking and a smiling cat. I’m either hallucinating or going mad.”

“Not mad. If anything, you’re coming back to your real world from the madness beyond it.”

Joyce looked at her sharply.

“You’ve spent a lifetime being conditioned by that world. Taught what was real and what wasn’t. What you could believe and what you should dismiss. Eventually you stopped seeing what had once come naturally.”

Mabel gave her a sideways glance.

“That can change, Joyce. Right here, right now.”

“And I’m supposed to take your word for it?”

Mabel smiled.

“No. Pinch yourself and see.”

──✿──

Mabel had driven the carriage as far as the coastal path leading up to Blackmere Point, then stopped. Although the lane continued up the hill alongside it, Mabel insisted the climb was better made on foot, “to give the lungs something honest to complain about.”

Joyce almost laughed at that. It was she, not Mabel, who felt the pull in her calves as the path began to rise. The wind came clean off the sea, flattening the grasses and tugging at their coats.

“You walk this often?” Joyce asked.

“Less often now,” Mabel replied. “But enough.”

There was no frailty in her step. No tentative placing of the foot. At eighty, she moved with an economy that made Joyce conscious of her own breath.

The path narrowed near the top. The land fell away sharply to the right, the sea below a vast, slate expanse, flecked white where it broke against the rocks.

Joyce stopped a few feet from the edge.

“This is Blackmere Point,” she said quietly, though she had not meant to speak.

“Yes.”

They stood side by side, not touching. The wind pressed against them both, insistent, as if testing their balance.

Joyce felt it again. That sensation she had known since returning to Easterwich. Not youth exactly. Not strength. Something clearer. As though a layer of dust had been wiped from her senses.

“I sleep differently here,” she said, surprising herself. “I wake without that heaviness. My hands ache less in the morning.”

Mabel did not look at her. She kept her gaze on the horizon.

“It isn’t the sea air,” she said.

Joyce gave a small, almost embarrassed smile. “I suspected as much.”

There was a pause. The wind shifted.

“Easterwich sits on a current,” Mabel continued. “Not water. Not ley. Something older. It moves beneath things. Through things. Most never notice it.”

“And you do.”

“We align with it. Or we don’t.”

Joyce frowned slightly. “Align how?”

Mabel turned then, not fully, just enough for Joyce to see her profile.

“By surrender,” she said. “Not performance. Not ritual for its own sake. Sacrifice. The relinquishing of what would make life easier.”

Joyce thought of London. Of Terry. Of the job she had thrown herself into instead of grief. Of the train ticket folded into a seam and forgotten.

“I didn’t know I was surrendering anything,” she said.

“That is often the way of it.”

The wind rose sharply, lifting the hem of Joyce’s coat. She took an involuntary half-step back from the edge.

“Some have tried to take it,” Mabel added, almost idly. “To harness it. Bottle it. Claim it as advantage.”

Joyce glanced at her. “And?”

“It shortens them.”

There was no drama in the statement. No flourish. Just fact.

“The Undercurrent cannot be owned. It flows through those who release themselves to it. It recoils from those who grasp.”

Joyce was quiet. The sea seemed louder now, though perhaps it was only her own pulse.

“I have felt…” she hesitated. “As if something is waiting. Not outside. Inside.”

Mabel inclined her head slightly. “You are remembering how to listen.”

A flicker of white at the edge of Joyce’s vision made her turn.

For a moment she thought it was a trick of light. The sky brightening against the cliff. But the shape held. Tall. Still. Draped.

A woman stood a little way off, nearer the brink than either of them.

Joyce’s breath caught.

“Is there someone—”

“Yes,” Mabel said softly.

She did not turn towards the figure.

“She has always stood there,” she continued. “Long before you. Long before me.”

Joyce stared. The woman did not move. The wind did not disturb her cloak.

“Who is she?”

“A witness.”

“To what?”

“To those who cross.”

Joyce felt something tighten in her chest. “Cross what?”

“The threshold between who they have been, and who they choose to become.”

The white figure inclined her head, barely perceptible.

Joyce blinked. For an instant she feared the image would dissolve as her dream-house door had refused her. But it did not. It remained, patient, assessing.

“She sees me?” Joyce whispered.

“She sees whether you see yourself.”

The words landed with more weight than Joyce expected.

“And if I do?” she asked.

“Then time loosens.”

Joyce turned sharply. “That’s what this is? Why you—” She stopped herself.

“Why I do not look my age?” Mabel supplied gently.

Joyce flushed. “Forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

Mabel finally faced her fully.

“It is not youth, Joyce. It is depth. The more you align with the current, the less you are dragged by the surface. But it asks something in return.”

“What?”

“Honesty. About what you are. About what you have been.”

Joyce felt the familiar tremor of the old life pressing at her. The house she could not enter. The pages that would not hold words.

“I have remembered things,” she said quietly. “Lives that feels like mine and not mine.”

Mabel’s eyes softened.

“Then you are already writing,” she said.

“Writing?”

“You see what lies beneath events. You read what others overlook. You do not need to perform magic, Joyce. You need to bear witness.”

The wind eased, just slightly.

“To you?” Joyce asked.

“To truth.”

There was no vanity in it. No demand.

“If my life is to be told,” Mabel continued, “it must be told by someone who stands in both worlds. The ordinary and the unseen. Someone who knows what it costs.”

Joyce looked once more towards the white-clad figure.

The Witness was watching the sea again.

“I am not certain I am equal to it,” Joyce said.

“No one ever is,” Mabel replied. “That is why we surrender.”

They stood in silence after that.

Joyce felt no dramatic surge. No lightning bolt of revelation. Only a quiet settling, as if a decision had been waiting for her and had finally found its shape.

When she glanced again towards the edge, the white figure was gone.

Or perhaps she had never been there at all.

“Shall we go back?” Mabel asked.

Joyce nodded.

As they began the descent, Joyce realised something with a clarity that did not frighten her.

She had not come to Easterwich to investigate a town erased from a map.

She had come to remember it.

And to record what the world had forgotten.

──✿──

It was well past noon when they returned to the shop, and Mabel invited Joyce in for a cup of tea.

At the back was the heart of the building, a large kitchen and dining area. The shop had been Mabel’s birthplace and the Shirley family home for three generations.

As Joyce entered the room, she was struck again by that strange familiarity. She knew this place, but not quite as it was now. In her memory it had been more basic, more functional, without the quality furniture and comfortable trappings that now made it almost idyllic.

This time, she allowed herself to examine the memory.

Mabel noticed, but did not push.

On a chair beside the window, bathing in the afternoon sunlight, lay the same grey cat that had delivered the note that morning.

Joyce looked at him and smiled.

“It had to be yours.”

“He’s very much his own,” Mabel replied with a smile.

Joyce approached the cat and crouched beside the chair.

Something stirred.

A name.

“Malkin Grå.”

The grey cat’s eyes snapped open.

He looked at Joyce in surprise, then towards Mabel, who was trying very hard not to laugh.

“Cat got your tongue?” Joyce asked.

For once, Malkin Grå had been caught off guard.

The cat spluttered and coughed. A talking cat never allowed a human the first word. It robbed him of that much-relished look of surprise from his unsuspecting recipient.

Then Malkin began to laugh.

“Hello, Joyce. Welcome back.”

There seemed little Joyce could say to that. For a moment, they simply looked at one another, sharing the quiet recognition of two people who had known each other before either could remember.

Ten minutes later, with Malkin occupying a chair as though he had been formally invited, the three of them were gathered around the kitchen table over a pot of tea.

“There’s something I want to ask you, Joyce,” Mabel said, handing her a cup.

“I’m getting old. There’s no point pretending otherwise. I’ve seen things, learnt things and made mistakes that others shouldn’t have to make again. Most of what we know here has always been passed from one generation to the next by word of mouth.”

She settled into her chair.

“That isn’t going to be enough any more.”

Joyce looked at her over the rim of her cup.

“You want to write your memoirs?”

“No.” Mabel smiled. “I want you to write them.”

Joyce lowered her cup. “Why me?”

“Because you know how to make a record. More importantly, you’ll understand what needs recording and what doesn’t.”

Mabel paused.

“Once I’m gone, this community may never see the like of me again. That’s not vanity, Joyce. It’s simply what I am. But if someone like me does come along again, perhaps a hundred years from now, perhaps longer, those responsible for them need to know what they’re looking at.”

“And you think your life can teach them that?”

“My life, my cases, my mistakes. The people who taught me and those who stood beside me. Things we’ve learnt that exist nowhere except up here.”

Mabel tapped a finger gently against her temple.

“I may be unique, Joyce. I don’t particularly care about that. What worries me is what happens if one day I’m not.”

Joyce glanced towards Malkin.

For once, the cat offered no witty observation.

“So this isn’t really a memoir.”

“No,” Mabel said. “It’s a record for those who come after us.”

──✿──

In principle, Joyce had agreed to write Mabel’s memoir, with the caveat that she wasn’t certain she could. Mabel insisted that she could, and asked her to return to the shop after closing time the following day.

Joyce had agreed, but deep down the doubt remained. She could write a decent incident report. She had written thousands of them over the years. But something that could convey feelings and magic? Was she really the right person?

Tomorrow would be her induction with Raymond. Standard stuff, she hoped. Yet it was the meeting with Mabel afterwards that made her uneasy. Not because of Mabel herself, but because of what she might be exposed to.

But that’s tomorrow, she thought. Face it when it comes.

It was an attitude that had served her well through more than twenty-eight years of police work. Stand tall. Say what you see. Record what happened. Don’t let the madness of it all consume you.

Perhaps that was exactly what Mabel had seen in her.