Hokey Pokey, page 25
Nora took Berenice’s hand, and asked: “Did you feel, when we met at the hotel, how different we were from everybody else? I kept waiting for you to acknowledge it. Do you feel how separate we are?”
“I don’t recognise your voice,” Berenice murmured. “Something happened to you.”
Only that Nora had spent years caring that she was believed, and hearing that her own beliefs were false. Now she would do neither.
“Don’t you like my new voice?” Nora asked.
“It is interesting,” Berenice granted. “Did you eat Reid and Westall?”
“No. But I ate the man who did. Among others.”
Through the window the Birmingham skyline unfolded, passing into view and out again.
“I don’t like people who delude themselves,” Nora said. “There’s something snivelling in their guilt. I prefer the travellers who are without remorse, who believe the only rules that matter are the ones they set. Particularly if they are honest about that fact.”
“You’ll tire of me, then,” Berenice said. “I need a little delusion.”
Like the belief she could tame a beast.
“Where are you travelling to?” Nora asked.
“Zurich,” Berenice said. “Isn’t that where you’re going to?”
“No. Anywhere but there. Come with me somewhere else instead.”
“Such as?”
“We could stop in Paris. Go to Rome. Athens. Constantinople.”
“You’re right. Anywhere but Zurich.”
Berenice let go of Nora’s hand, and examined her wedding ring. She slid it from her finger.
“Are you going to throw it away?” Nora asked.
“No. Never. It will be a good reminder, not to get married, if I keep it hidden somewhere safe. For now…” She took a dainty handbag from the neighbouring seat, unfastened the gilt clasp, and dropped the ring inside.
Nora took her tooth from her pocket. “Hide this with it.”
Berenice threw back her head and laughed. It wasn’t a widow’s laugh. “That’s a disgusting thing. Is it one of your victim’s?”
“If you like.”
“What a macabre thing you are, my baby.” She let the tooth fall into the bag, too.
“Your Russian song…” Nora said.
“Yes?”
“I put the English words to a tune.”
“Sing it.”
“The girl pretended to be the grass,” Nora sang, remembering the blood in the hokey pokey. “She pretended to be the weeds. She pretended to be the fields. I pretended to be a scythe. I have to tell you, I’m thousands of years old, and this is the pretence of love. The girl pretended to be a story. She pretended to be a page. She pretended to be a book. I pretended to be a storyteller. I have to tell you, I’m thousands of years old, and this is the pretence of love. The girl pretended to be bread. She pretended to be milk. She pretended to be meat. I pretended to be teeth. I have to tell you, I’m thousands of years old, and this is the pretence of love. Are you asleep, my baby?”
Berenice’s eyes were closed. Ever since Nora cured her, she’d slept the sleep of the guiltless. Nora silently watched her tranquil features. It was a shame there was no corridor on the train; all the passengers were divided from each other. But one of them might have a compact mirror. The journey was long, if you didn’t eat.
Author Note
Birmingham has several historic hotels, including one with its own spring and another with a cathedral view. Although some of these businesses have archives, they weren’t available to the public at the time of writing. Accordingly, I invented the Regent, a fictional hotel situated in the real streets of Birmingham. My depiction of hotel life in 1929 was informed by hospitality literature, including interwar copies of The Hotel Review, Restaurant Gazette & Catering News and The Hotel and Restaurant Diary and Year Book produced by Practical Press. I consulted Ed Burrow’s British Hotels (Burrow, 1923), W. Bently Capper’s Licensed Houses and Their Management (Caxton, 1926 edition) and Ernest M. Porter’s Hotel and Restaurant Careers for Women (Pitman and Sons, 1931). The pandemic put paid to my original plan of consulting trade archives at the British Library and the Bodleian Library. Fortunately I could get relevant ephemera at little cost from hotels and private individuals across Britain: old receipts, guest books, menus and advertisements. I was also interested in how hotels were written about by novelists in the late twenties and early thirties; my favourites were Arnold Bennett’s Imperial Palace (1930), Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel (1927) and Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel (1929). I let Nora make a reference to reading Grand Hotel, though she must have been quick off the mark and bought the original German edition for it to squeeze into the time frame.
The Holzberg is also imaginary. The following books were helpful for checking that the building and its day to day running were appropriate for Zurich in the period: The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, edited by Greg Eghigian (Taylor & Francis, 2017); Treating People with Psychosis in Institutions by Belinda S. Mackie (Taylor & Francis, 2018); Material Cultures of Psychiatry, edited by Monika Ankele and Benoît Majerus (Verlag, 2020); and Behind Walls: Photography in Psychiatric Institutions from 1880 to 1935, edited by Katrin Luchsinger and Stefanie Hoch (Scheidegger & Speiss, 2022). While thinking about the role of women in such hospitals – as psychoanalysts, the wives and lovers of psychoanalysts, and patients – I found it helpful to read Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present by Lisa Appignanesi (Virago, 2011), Catrine Clay’s Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis (William Collins, 2016), and Susan Baur’s The Intimate Hour: Love and Sex in Psychotherapy (Cengage Learning, 1997). The inkblots used by Leo during Berenice’s analysis are based on the images in Psychodiagnostik (Hans Huber, 1921) by Hermann Rorschach.
Lastly, a note on Nora’s place of birth. The village in the woods roughly corresponds to Meriden, which is about twelve miles from Birmingham. The intersection of roads at Meriden was once believed to be the centre of England. Crossroads are significant in vampire lore; depending on local superstition, they’re meant to be places where vampires are especially dangerous, and especially vulnerable. It is, then, exactly the kind of place you might find Valery caged. On this occasion I was deliberately anachronistic: the story uses the village’s archaic name, Alspath, as recorded in the Domesday Book, because Nora’s coming of age feels dream-like and out-of-time. Nothing in her childhood has unfolded quite as it should.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Oli Munson, Madeleine O’Shea, Clare Gordon, Laura Palmer, Sophie Whitehead, Helen Crawford White, Tamsin Shelton, Kathryn Colwell, Amy Watson, everyone at Head of Zeus who worked on the novel without my direct knowledge, Elizabeth Lee, Cara Attwood, Richard Beard, Stephanie Butland, Tracy King, my mom, and Matt.
About the Author
KATE MASCARENHAS is a part-Irish, part-Seychellois Midlander. Since 2017, Kate has been a chartered psychologist. Before that she worked as a copywriter, a dolls’ house maker, and a bookbinder. She lives with her husband in a small terraced house which she is slowly filling with Sindy dolls. She is the author of two other novels, The Psychology of Time Travel and The Thief on the Winged Horse.
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Kate Mascarenhas, Hokey Pokey
