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Let entering…
Let winter impress you. Let spring.
Allow the ocean to wake in you…
May you come to the fence and whinny.
- “Let Birds” by Linda Gregg
He covets.
Sherlock Holmes is not outwardly sentimental. It’s unusual for him – the nostalgia, the tenderness – precisely because it does not come naturally.
But he covets, and so there are some things he cannot bring himself to erase.
In no order of importance, the text messages are:
1. I’m thinking of sending you a Christmas present. - IA
2. Bored in a hotel. Come join me. - IA
3. I’m not hungry. Let’s have dinner. - IA
4. I saw you in the street today. You didn’t see me. - IA
5. I’m not dead. Let’s have dinner. - IA
The Woman is most herself when presented with a challenge.
When she was a child, she could wait for hours. In fits of hide-and-seek, Irene was always the winner. Patience was her greatest ally. While she counted, slow and even, her hands over her eyes and her back turned to the wide expanse of an outer London’s suburban park, the other neighborhood children would gallop away in shrieks of excitement. They hid their tiny bodies behind trees and beneath benches, tucked their delicate bones inside of concrete jungle gyms. And they would wait, breathless, ears perked for any approaching noise, eyes sharp on the brunette with her steel posture and turned back. Eventually, muscles cramping from their crouched and frozen positions, they would grow tired. Sleepy-eyed, mouths open in yawns of boredom, they would slink from their respective hiding spots.
“Irene,” they would complain in their sullen, petulant manner, “Irene, you aren’t playing the game.”
(“Self-possessed little thing, isn’t she?” her mother used to say to the other ladies, watching her daughter curiously from a distance, newspaper temporarily spread over her skirted lap, cigarette tucked between the fingers of her left hand.
Her mother never had a clue. Irene had always had a knack for defying expectations. For breaking the rules, for misbehaving.)
They were like mice crawling into the cat’s jaws, too sluggish and confused to understand how easily she had caught them. They couldn’t see – she never quit playing. They did all the work for her, giving up the allure of the hunt in a matter of minutes, quick to flitter off like careless butterflies, each new game just around the corner like a beautiful but unappreciated flower.
They were trivial things. They did not have her insight, her clarity, her fortitude. They did not know what she knew, even then, as a child: all animals are just looking to be caught. They will bare their necks and vulnerable, white bellies in the end.
Over the years, Irene proves her assertion with the fine leather of a riding crop, the insurance of certain delicate information, the pulling of strings. She starts young and pulls many – small things, really – things most intuitive children learn to do: how to manipulate one parent’s feelings over the other, when to cry, how to laugh, when to turn a glass-cut cheek in silence, how to apply pressure to the most hidden of spots.
Irene learns fast. She starts winning chess games at nine – still patient, still clever – and discovers how to anticipate the next move. The game is one of endurance, and therefore it’s familiar.
She waits two years before toying with the people closest to her.
She’s eleven when her parents begin to fight; she’s thirteen when they divorce (four months later than she had anticipated, admittedly); she’s sixteen and still in secondary school when she moves into a flat on Catford with a destitute girl from her class. Her father deposits money into her account on a monthly basis, guilt-ridden by his perceived abandonment, while her mother sends groceries and takes her out for Sunday supper. Her flatmate is named Brooke and thinks simple thoughts, casually indebted to Irene’s generosity and the opportunity she provided with a warm bed.
Brooke likes Irene’s thin waist and steady voice. Brooke likes her hair pulled and a ruler rapped against her knuckles when she’s forgotten a chore or made a mess, reminiscent of Catholic school guilt.
After Irene has finished tightening Brooke’s copper hair around her first and pulling the girl’s neck taught, Brooke also likes to make Irene a cup of tea. She tries touching the inside of Irene’s wrist once when she passes her the steaming saucer. Irene slaps her hand in scolding.
“Don’t frown, Brooke, it makes you look ugly,” she instructs, the rim of her cup hiding her own mouth.
Brooke bites her lip instead. “Sooner or later, you’re going to need someone on your side.”
“You think I don’t have plenty of people already?” Irene asks, smiling her most beguiling smile.
It’s true – she collects people the way others collect dolls or antiques. They’re all specimens in the end. She spends her life stockpiling secrets and affections, interchanging the two for various values as needed. So, as England’s finest detective stumbles into her web, Irene feels prepared. She has been waiting all her life for such a worthy experiment, for someone more than simple, for someone that knows hunger.
When Irene traces across Sherlock’s sharp cheek with the end of her crop, she knows - for this one, she will have to wait.
He does not answer her texts.
His phone moans alerts, and still he is silent.
Until New Year’s. Until her goodbye.
Karachi has its beauty. There are monuments and memorials, palaces to attract tourists, mausoleums for the macabre, sprawling parks that surprise in their lushness. The cold, barren deserts are not without their own appeal. Irene can admit as much now that she is showered and unwrapped from the thin black of the hijab. She brushes the sand from her long hair, curled on top of a hard bed in a cheap, nondescript hotel. She is slow with her gestures, methodic, a predator preening itself after the kill.
A wooden clock and the glide of her brush ticks away the seconds, punctuating the silence. She doesn’t speak until she has finished, until she has placed the brush on the rickety nightstand as though to emphasize the start of her words. “I might have preferred not having terrorists present for our reunion, honestly.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Sherlock corrects, casual in the way he has draped himself across a stiff chair. He is parallel to her, strategically placed, hiding behind his typical arrogance and suit. “I was in the city.”
She’s the sharpest woman he knows, all the angular lines of her face masking the topography of her emotions, but she softens when she smiles. It’s small and lovely, the gentleness of the expression leaking into her voice. “Lucky me then.”
He makes a noise, a hum of agreement, pacified until she raises her arms above her head, curving her back to stretch away the stiffness of her spine, the silk of her peignoir slipping against her skin. There’s perfume on her wrists – blackcurrant and jasmine – and the sharp slice of her collarbone. It hits Sherlock like a slap, and her smile widens, shifting into one that is sly and knowing.
“Brick red.”
“Sorry?”
“Your lipstick. Not a blood red, is it? Blood would be too dramatic, too typical. You wanted something blunter. And the perfume is the same you wore at Eaton Square. You are flattering yourself with expectation.”
“What are you deducing?”
“You’ll need a man’s disguise to leave the city.”
Sherlock starts by undoing the button of his jacket and begins committing her to memory.
He is categorical. Logical. His mind palace suggests as much; it helps him to record and reflect upon his own experiences, problems, his vast knowledge of the world. It is a fortress of solitude, a monastery for self-contemplation.
But always the intruder, Irene finds a way in. He’s smoked a cigarette with two cups of black coffee and played his violin but still he can’t seem to exorcise her ghost. She’s squeezed through the one crack along the surface, intimate, pervasive, as heady and cloying as the undercurrent of her perfume or the tangle of her curls between his fingers.
“You’re not her,” he insists, annoyed, eyes shut in the flat on Baker Street, but mind roving furiously through imaginary halls. “You’re just my conception of her. And you don’t belong.” He shapes each word vehemently.
“Too distracting, am I?” She’s wearing that quip of a smile again and nothing else, dressed for battle, her naked legs crossed one over the other. Impudent as ever, she’s in his favorite armchair – the overstuffed, broken-leather one his father had loved the best – and the gleaming leather brings out the midnight brown of her hair. They’re in the library from his childhood, the one his parents had always forbid him from using without Mycroft’s supervision, and Sherlock understands the implied defiance in placing her here. Amongst the comfort of books and desire and hurt.
His thoughts are her thoughts now, and Irene curls her knuckles under her chin, amused. “Magnussen was right about my being a pressure point then. I miss your funny hat, by the way.”
“Oh, do shut up.”
“Careful, Sherlock.” Irene taps the end of her crop against the delicate side of her ankle in warning, trailing the flat leather up her calf. She wasn’t holding it earlier, but his mind creates the details from memory and inserts them as needed. The crop is finely crafted and ornately designed, so at ease and familiar in her hand. “Stop all this business and come play with me. I’ve been missing you.”
“You have clients.”
“They have the decency to pay for a game. You play for sport. I admire that. Call me. We can have dinner.”
Sherlock’s mouth hints at a smile. “You’re never hungry.”
“Precisely.”
He sighs (in anyone else it would be wistful) and turns away from her with the resolution of a man accustomed to denying himself. He flicks his wrist, gesturing. “Out of my head now, I really am busy.”
“Tell me a secret and I’ll go,” Irene whispers, her mouth red and suddenly so close to the shell of his ear. She is smaller than him, a slight warmth, disarmingly slender with her sharp bones battling the feminine curves of her hips and breasts.
Sherlock stiffens. One of her hands rests between his shoulder blades, the other touches the inside of his arm. “I’m good at keeping them,” she promises, a hush of breath against his vulnerable neck.
He thinks of what it means to walk a tightrope, to feel the unexpected prick of a rose’s thorn, or the tension of having a knife pressed to his throat, pushing lighter and lighter, until -
Outside of Baker Street, Sherlock can hear Mrs. Hudson fumbling with the lock, her arms undoubtedly full of groceries from her customary Tuesday visit to the corner shop.
Inside, he curls his long fingers around the arm of his chair and breathes.
Inside, he turns his face to Irene’s and tells her about the one time he enjoyed losing.
The East Wind threatens but does not destroy.
After, Sherlock takes what he covets.
In no order of importance, the text messages are:
1. Bored in a hotel. Come join me. - IA
2. I’m not hungry. Let’s have dinner. - IA
3. Happy New Year’s. – SH
4. Happy Birthday. Let’s have dinner. - IA
5. You know where to find me. - SH