A River in Egypt

Things are finally returning to normal around here, and thank heavens for that. We’ve been sprucing up the shop, and it’s actually looking a bit posh now -- too posh for my tastes, really. But we’ve got all these society types coming in now, and I’ve never seen Ann happier. Well, as happy as she gets, anyway. What an odd duck she is. I just stay in the back when I can, and put on my best public school accent when I have to work the front. And boy does it ever make a difference. If I go out to lunch with Shaw it’ll start to slip and you can just see their face start to pucker as you’re talking with them when they hear that East End accent start to slip in. They’ll just turn away from me and talk to the Professor and it’s like I’ve turned invisible. Stupid toffee nosed bastards. Well joke’s on you, your account’s got your home address on it, doesn’t it? I haven’t done any second story work in years, not since I was working with Jackie, but boy does it ever seem tempting some days.
 
I stayed over at Grandfather’s Saturday night. At one point in the night I woke up and I was panicked and I couldn’t move. I was sitting up and my throat was raw and sore again and someone was screaming “make it stop looking at me” and then I was awake all of a sudden. Grandfather was hugging me so tight I thought I’d break and he said I had woken him up with screaming and he was worried I was going to hurt myself, and he didn’t know what else to do except to hold onto me. He asked me if I needed to go to hospital and I told him I was fine, it was just a bad dream. He made me some hot chocolate and put a couple shots of cream de menthe in it. Why haven’t I ever thought to do that? God, it was amazing. I have to do that again sometime.
 
But in the morning he asked me about it, and… I felt so completely foolish. I couldn’t tell him I’d been breaking into someone’s office of course - wouldn’t he have gone through the roof then! So I made up some nonsense about someone making fun of me in primary school. He hmmed and nodded, like he always does whenever he knows I’m lying, but he didn’t press it. I thought about it though, and it’s so easy for me to make up stories like that in my head. I was awful (or so brilliant depending on how you look at it) about just making things up for fun when I was younger, and I really made myself stop and think about what happened at Dives’ office.
 
I know when I was dating Tom if we got in a huge row over something, I wouldn’t remember the details. It would just all turn into a scratchy red blur for me. I remembered how I felt very clearly, but not the things that were said, precisely. And that day there’s no two ways about it, I was scared. I mean, it was thrilling and all, but I worked myself up into quite a state. I tried to think about what was in the room - the map of London, the vesica piscis (fish symbol thingy), the jars with the air and the water and the earth. The markings on the ground. It was dark because the shades were down, and of course we’re not daft enough to turn on lights in a dark building, even in the middle of the day. But in trying to reconstruct it, I think there was a poster, or a painting or something. Yes, on the wall, opposite the door. Of a giant [scratched out] monster thing. That’s right, because I remember thinking at the time it was like blokes who put “pin up girls” in their locker, thinking this was probably who (what) Dives was worshiping, the sick bastard.
 
But somehow I was in such a state that I thought the thing in the picture was actually there. Something about the lighting, I think, because it looked so bright...so vivid. But I can absolutely “remember” the made up story I told Grandfather about too, and the more I think about it the more details my brain adds to it. I remember that horrible burning feeling, but I know I just imagined that because I’m absolutely fine. Ugh! Thinking about it makes it start up again. So I’m just not going to. Von Kant’s “dog” was bad enough - I think I was thinking about that, and I got scared and blew it up into -- whatever it was that I thought it was. No. Putting it out of my mind. Hell of a scary picture and further proof that man is not right in the head, but that’s all it was.
 
At any rate, I gave Shaw a diary today - actually bound it up myself, and I’m pretty proud of how it came out. This writing has helped me suss some things out, and it might help him. He got his bell rung hard, and that’s the truth. Gave him a couple fancy fountain pens to go with it, too. Fun fact, though: apparently barristers don’t generally carry pens in their pockets. Apparently, they’re in their briefcases. So… I gave him the briefcase they came in too. We could probably file off the initials, or not. Either way we’re going to have him looking like quite the proper catalog agent to go along with our quite proper little shop!