Fog and Pearls at the King’s Cross Junction by Aliya Whiteley (London Centric, 2020) begins with some parental backstory about the narrator’s unhappy family life and how she runs away from home after receiving a letter from a Mr Roderick, who lives in 1950’s London and wants to employ her as his assistant. After Roderick picks her up at a grimy, post-Blitz railway station, he takes her to his unique home, the “lighthouse”, where they eat oyster stew, and he tells her about his research:
“Did you know that I used a dozen oysters in the preparation of this dish? Well, of course, you couldn’t know. That’s why I’m telling you. Have you eaten oysters before? They’re fresh from the Thames this morning.”
“I haven’t,” I said. That explained the rubbery texture.
[. . . ]
“Oysters. They have a marvellous defence mechanism. When a tiny piece of grit or a parasite slips into their shell they begin to coat it in a substance called nacre. Nacre slowly takes the painful and makes it bearable. More than that, nacre makes it beautiful. It creates a thing of perfection. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Miss Prisman?”
His tone grated on me, I’ll admit. I replied, letting my smart mouth get the better of me, “You’re telling me that you’ve let me, an irritation, into your shell. But you’ll wear me down and change me over time into the perfect assistant.”
To my surprise, he laughed out loud. “No no no! Not at all! What an imagination you have. I’m telling you that I collect and categorise pearls.”
She is then taken to another part of the lighthouse and shown the pearls Roderick has collected. In addition to the usual white ones there are gold, silver, black, blue, pink, and, finally, blood red varieties. Later, after she has been working for Roberick for some time, she learns how he obtains the pearls during a dense and life-threatening London fog. During this, they climb up the lighthouse and turn on a flashing device that Roderick’s uncle invented, and individuals lost in the fog then turn up at their door. Once inside they are provided with air canisters and facemasks to aid their breathing, but lapse into unconsciousness due to a secret anaesthetic. Roderick then tells her (spoiler) to scrub up and help him with an operation:
Roddy opened up the man’s mouth and lowered in his scalpel. I was determined not to wail and scream, and I’m proud to say I didn’t. I watched the whole thing from beginning to end, and even passed Roddy the needle and thread when he asked for it.
But the sewing up was not the exciting part, of course. The best bit was when he said, behind his little white mask, “I can’t quite believe this,” and used a long pair of tongs to reach far into the throat and produce a small red ball that he dropped into the palms of my hands.
I rolled it between my fingers. The colour didn’t come from the blood in which it was coated. It truly was red, as bright and as brilliant a red as I’d ever seen. Just like the ones in the cabinet down in the basement.
The rest of the story eventually telescopes forward in time to a period where London smog is eliminated by the Clean Air Act, and Londoners stop producing pearls. Then Roderick dies. Finally, she notes that red pearls from China have started coming onto the market. . . .
This is an original and entertainingly offbeat story—a genuinely weird idea, but one that is anchored by its convincing narrative voice (she sounds like someone from the 1950s) and historical setting. The only drawbacks are (a) the pearls would presumably also be found in normal post-mortems, and (b) there is a social justice message shoe-horned in right at the end, where she says that they were robbing the poor, just like the city does (“It takes from the poor, and seals their wealth in basements, never to be seen again”). This introduces a discordant note at the end of the story, even though it recalls the mother’s comments at the beginning. Still, not bad, and a pleasure to read something that is written in a British voice for a change (rather than the American or mid-Atlantic tone adopted by so many other Brits).
*** (Good). 6,200 words.