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“Stole it from my ma’s wallet,” said Norrie under her breath, her eyes sparkling with that free-spirited fierceness that Lucy loved so much. She took one look at Lucy’s astonished face, threw back her head, and laughed so loudly the streets rang with the sound.
They were walking home – well, Norrie was walking her home, since it was early morning now. They’d just finished the Yewbranch Library job. (Norrie, who had grown up with two younger brothers, didn’t even think twice about this. She was going to walk her friend home, just to make sure she was safe, even though it was daylight now and the greatest danger Lucy faced was a growling stomach. Lucy let her. She knew that Norrie’s brothers were gone now, and there was no one left for Norrie to walk home. Besides, she loved her best friend’s company.)
Yewbranch had been a tiring one. Paul had staggered back to his locker, mopping blood from a shallow cut on his face with a handkerchief Lucy had offered him. Lucy had never been so glad to have been trained so ruthlessly. If it hadn’t been for Jacobs’s insistence on their drills (or, she corrected, on Norrie’s insistence that she could parry a blow even when dead exhausted and backed up against a corner), she would’ve gotten more than the bruises that were currently blossoming on her shins and her hips.
“What are you going to do with it?” Lucy said, her mouth twitching upwards in sympathetic amusement. “Won’t she know?”
“No, she’s drunker than Jacobs. She doesn’t even count her money as obsessively as before,” said Norrie flippantly. She tugged at Lucy’s sleeve, and jerked her chin up in the direction of a little street.
“Come on. I’ll treat you to breakfast and show you what I got for us. You’re gonna love this.”
Lucy lifted a shoulder, a smile hovering about her lips, and followed Norrie down a different street. As they sat across each other in a grimy cafe, waiting for their coffee to cool, Norrie fished around in her vest pocket and pulled out –
“Wasn’t expecting that,” Lucy said, eyebrows lifting.
It was a little bottle of cheap nail polish. Black nail polish. No – Lucy squinted as Norrie wagged it in the air triumphantly – dark blue. So blue it looked black in the bleak morning light.
“I’ll paint your nails if you help me with mine,” Norrie said, her eyes bright. “Can’t do my left hand by myself.”
“But won’t your ma notice? Mine will,” Lucy added, her voice taking on an edge of doubt.
“Hey. This is for fun.” Norrie took a sip of her coffee (she’d added about six spoons of sugar, much to Lucy’s consternation). She made a face – burned her tongue, Lucy guessed. Norrie was always too impatient about this kind of thing. She burned her tongue every single time they had coffee.
“Besides, who cares what they think? Ma doesn’t own my nails. And I’ve never gotten to do anything like this, have you? No sisters, no friends at school, and Paul’s not about to take us window shopping at the mall. Not that he could afford it. His money’s all going to his brother’s tuition, right?”
“Yeah, but – ”
“Believe me, you’ll look great.” Norrie pushed her cup away from her. “This colour suits you. It’ll be like… we’ll be like normal girls, you know? Painting our nails. Like the only thing we need to be worried about is test grades and who’s asking who to dances.”
Lucy relented, because she couldn’t hold out against Norrie for long, and because the excitement in Norrie’s face was catching.
“Okay,” she said, and she couldn’t keep the eagerness out of her voice. It was true. She’d never gotten to do anything… normal like this.
She knew other girls – the girls who didn’t have to join agencies, who didn’t have much Talent, who got to be normal – liked this sort of thing. She saw flocks of them hanging about the mall, near the theatre, by the fancy bakery. There were no dark circles around their eyes, no dirty half-moons of magnesium and dirt under their fingernails, no ectoplasm burns on their blouses and boots. They didn’t scrape their unwashed hair into ponytails. Some of them even had their hair done nicely, like the women in Mum’s magazines.
And when she walked past them, they smelled like flowers, like clean laundry. Not like her and Norrie. They smelled constantly (and despite all attempts at soaking their uniforms in hot water and scrubbing at their shirts) like iron – like blood.
Lucy saw them, arm in arm with friends or sisters or their mothers, giggling and chatting and having fun. And though the shadow of the Problem was over them all, she saw that the worries she and Norrie lived with had no hold over them.
It was hard not to resent them for having that sometimes. It was hard not to think: You can do all that because of us. Because of the agents who keep you safe. You wouldn’t be swanning around like little princesses during the day if it weren’t for the agents doing the dirty work at night.
But then again, she thought, they didn’t have Norrie. And she did.
It was four in the morning. Lucy watched Norrie paint her nails carefully, almost reverently, like this was some sort of elaborate friendship ritual, which Lucy supposed it was. Just like Norrie walking her home was a friendship ritual, and Lucy drying the lavender from her window box and slipping little sachets of it into Norrie’s pockets was a friendship ritual.
Sure, they weren’t normal like the girls who got to attend school and go to dances with laughing boys and gossip with their sisters and eat proper meals and sleep at night. But Lucy saved her sisters’ old ribbons for Norrie (who liked to tie them around her wrist, pretending they were bracelets), and Norrie cut out interesting pictures from her mother’s magazines for Lucy’s wall. And Lucy saved up stamps from her mother’s bills and bank notices for Paul’s collection in exchange for borrowing his camera, so she and Norrie could have pictures of each other. And Norrie filled old cracked cassette tape cases with funny good luck tokens, like coins she found on the street and shiny pebbles and daisy heads for Lucy.
When she’d finished, Norrie leaned back in her chair and surveyed her work with pride.
“You look fierce, Carlyle,” said Norrie, grinning that blazing grin that made Paul shake his head in fond exasperation. “Fierce.”
And Lucy, gazing down at her nails, really felt it.
While Lucy spread her fingers out gingerly, waiting for the polish to dry, Norrie fed her squares of toast and told her about the time Paul tried to ask out that girl who worked at the butcher’s, and how he’d stabbed himself in the foot with his rapier, trying to impress her. Lucy giggled and tried to imagine Paul blushing.
Then Lucy painted Norrie’s nails and told her all the Marissa Fittes trivia she’d read about in the magazine at the corner store, and they’d imagined what it would be like to wear the silver Fittes jacket and work with a supervisor who actually cared what happened to them. And be able to use their own money, and after jobs, go back to a home, not just a house.
“We can find ourselves a nice little flat,” said Norrie. All that was left of her coffee now was the little layer of sugar at the bottom. “If we don’t want to stay in the dorms, I mean. I guess the Fittes and Rotwell dorms are alright, but if we don’t like it, we can always find our own place.”
“Make it a real home,” Lucy agreed.
“Yeah. You can stick up your posters and paint the kitchen yellow, just like the one you like in your mum’s house magazine.”
“And you can buy yourself a camera like Paul’s and we can have our own photo wall.”
“And we can have movie nights and eat all the snacks we want.”
“And we can make our own terrible coffee and we’ll cook food we actually like.”
“And we can go wherever we want, whenever we want and do whatever we want!”
They’d laughed then, clutching at each other over the dingy little table with its wobbly legs. And Lucy had gone home with her nails midnight blue. Mum had noticed, of course, and had scoffed, but Lucy had kept obstinately passive about it all until Mum moved onto another subject.
And so it became a tradition. They’d help each other fix up their nail polish after rough missions. It was always the same colour, too, because Jacobs probably wouldn’t let them get away with anything more flashy. Lucy learned how to do it without getting polish on Norrie’s cuticles, and Norrie always did it the same way, drawing stripes of blue in neat little flicks of her wrist.
It became like war paint to Lucy from that day onwards. Every time she went out for a job, she would look at her nails and hear Norrie’s voice in her head: You look fierce, Carlyle . And that helped her. It made her feel braver, fiercer. Like she was a Fittes agent, competent and confident and ready to face any old ghoul. Like she was half the lioness that Norrie was.
She’d painted Norrie’s nails in the hospital, though the nurses looked askance at her and Norrie’s mum sighed, shaking her head.
“It’s important,” Lucy had said defensively, and Norrie’s mum had lifted a shoulder in defeat and given them some privacy.
Lucy held Norrie’s cold hand carefully, as if it were made of glass, then laid it down on her knee and went through the motions. She spoke to Norrie all the while. About the shiny gold plaque with Paul’s name on it, and how he would’ve hated that they’d added his middle name. About how she’d had to iron the old uniforms for whatever new recruits would take their place, and how she’d burned her hands so many times because they were shaking so hard. About how hard Jacobs’s eyes were. About the accusing glares she’d gotten from Mum and their teammates’ parents. About the sachet of lavender she’d found in Norrie’s vest – it hadn’t been a lucky charm after all. About how she’d probably never leave now. Who was she to go to London with? Who was going to find a little flat with her? Whose jokes would she laugh at now, whose arm would hook around hers as they walked down unfamiliar streets, whose raucous laughter would she hold in her heart, a sound she’d memorised, a sound she wanted so desperately to hear again?
And if it took her ages to paint Norrie’s nails – if her vision kept clouding because hot tears kept trickling down her chin – it didn’t matter. She wanted to finish it. She wanted to do a good job, even if it was only nail polish and the unmoving hand of the person she loved most in the world.
She’d painted her nails the day she’d left home. It was a new start but she was going to bring an old friend with her. Norrie’s always with me , she’d told herself, looking around her at this strange new city, this sprawling monster of a city, whose streets and buildings and smell she didn’t know. I’m carrying her with me. She’s always here. I’m carrying her memory and the memory of everyone who died because of Jacobs. I’m going to do this. For the both of us.
It would be a constant reminder to her. Even after she moved into Portland Row and could afford better options, she always bought the same brand, same colour of nail polish. There were dozens of more options in the shops here in London, but Lucy always chose the same one. It was Norrie’s colour. It was their colour. She’d be wearing it when Norrie came back.
“When you come back,” Lucy said into the recorder, drawing her knees up to her chest and leaning her head against the wall of her attic, “I’ll show you everywhere. I’ll bring you to Arif’s and let you try my favourite donuts. They’re the ones with the cinnamon honey glaze on top. I’ll walk with you through Fittes and Rotwell’s museums and we can make up stories about the artefacts we see. Maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of Penelope Fittes, too, and you can tell me what you think. And then when we’re done running all over London eating nice things and window shopping in all those fancy shops you wanted to see, I’ll bring you to 35 Portland Row and introduce you to Lockwood and George. You’ll love them, Norrie. And I know you’ll tease them horribly, but I think they can stand to be teased a bit.
“I’ll show you around, too. I wish you could see this. I have my own room now, and I put up the pictures I have of you everywhere. I wish I had more. The kitchen’s yellow, just like that picture in Mum’s magazine. I got my own egg cup, too. It’s a little warrior one. Lockwood chose it because he said it reminded him of Joan of Arc. I’ll get you one when you come. We can go find one you like. Anyway, I’ll show you around. You’ll always know where the mugs are, and where George keeps his special biscuits, and I’ll keep an extra pillow for you in my room, and you’ll have your own key, because even if you’re not living here, it can be home for you too.
“George’ll make his noon khamei for you. I know you’ll love them, he’s such a good cook. We’ll have proper food together. And we can go on jobs together again, only this time, I’ll always be by your side. Always. I’ll always have your back. I’ll never leave you again. We can fight together like we did, and then when we run into the Fittes team, I’ll introduce you to Kat, and you can bully Kipps all you like. I know you’d be able to make him shut up – you’re clever enough to make him speechless. And then we can come home and have dinner together, and you’ll be here and safe and warm and always, always with me – ”
Lucy had to stop at this point because she was crying too hard to speak. Her heart hurt so much, thinking of Norrie – her Norrie – her best friend in the world – her sister – lying there in the hospital back in their hometown.
And so painting her nails becomes a reminder that she will get her friend back one day. That she has so much to fight for. That she has to live for the both of them, for now. That Norrie is her bravery, her fierceness, her undying will to keep going, to keep fighting, to keep living .
Because that was what counted, wasn’t it? That was how you beat back the darkness. You had to keep living. New horrors were birthed day by day. But you came home anyhow, no matter how splattered you were with ectoplasm and blood. You came home, put your shoes away, washed the dishes in the sink, put the kettle on. You remembered the past. You forced yourself to look to the future.
You kept going. Step by step. Step by bloody, dragging, excruciating step. And in between the cracks you could see light. That was what counted. You had to keep reaching for it. When it was silent, you sang as loud as you could. When no one else would, you raised your voice. When the dark turned into a soul-sucking black hole of a void, you filled it again and again, because there was so much to fill it with. That was how you won against the dark. A shout. A song. Even a whisper. That was how you won.
“One day,” Lucy said, pressing the photo of Norrie to her heart, “one day you’ll be sitting here on the floor next to me. And then you’ll laugh with me, and it won’t hurt me so much to laugh, too. And I’ll paint your nails again, just like I did before. I’ve already bought your bottle, so you’d better come. I’ll carry you here if I need to. The bottle’s already on my dresser. It’s our colour. Blue as midnight. So blue it’s almost black. But there’s a second bottle next to it. It’s from Kat Godwin, the Fittes girl. It’s clear with golden shimmer in it. Kat said it’s for putting over the top of the base colour. So that there’ll be stars.”
She looked out the window and saw night spreading like a drop of ink in a cup of water. The sky was clear: clear and deep and dark. Just like the night she’d last spoken to Norrie, the last time she’d heard that laugh ring through the empty streets.
“Oh, Norrie,” she said softly, tapping her blue nails against the Polaroid of Norrie’s fierce, blazing smile, “when you come home, there’ll be stars for you.”