Page 8 of Lucy Undying

“Where to, miss?” the driver asks. He has warm brown skin and a fantastic, sculpted black beard. I’d put him in his thirties, but I’m bad at guessing ages.

I glance down at my documents. “Hillingham?”

He enters it in his phone and frowns. “Nothing’s coming up.”

I look closer. “Oh, no, sorry. Haverstock Hill?” I show him the address.

“Right, close to Hampstead, near the old zoo. I know the area; my husband has a restaurant nearby.” He gives me the look all queer people share when we find one another. I instantly feel safer. And glad that my multitude of rainbow backpack patches—leftovers from my teen years, trying to make my family recognize my queerness—made him feel comfortable enough to mention his husband. Maybe it’s biased of me to inherently trust other queer people, but I do.

“Glad one of us knows where we’re going,” I say. “And glad it’s the one of us who’s driving. What’s Hillingham, then, if it’s not a street?”

He shrugs. “Could be the neighborhood, could be the house itself. It’s an old area with loads of historical mansions. Most used to have their own names.”

“Seems a bit pretentious.”

“Welcome to upper-class London.” He laughs, the sound brassy and bright, and I laugh with him. For once I don’t worry that he’s secretly working for my mother or spying on me. Goldaming Life is one of those subtly bigoted groups, despite their glossily diverse brochures. No one in power there is anything other than white and straight.

He pulls into the street. “I’m Rahul.”

“Iris.” I relax into my seat, letting the neighborhoods blur together. Part of me wants to take it all in, since I’ll never come back. But I’m too tired to care. London is a means to an end.

“Here for business or fun?” Rahul asks, and I’m glad he didn’t say “pleasure.” That phrase has always creeped me out.

“Business, I guess. My mom died. I’m sorting out her estate.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m not.”

He glances in the rearview mirror in surprise, then shrugs. “My mum’s the best, but my husband’s mum was awful. More relief than grief when she passed.”

“May they rest in silence.” I hold up my coffee cup like it’s a toast, then go to take a sip only to find it empty. It feels like karma for speaking ill of the dead, but why should I value that wretched woman just because she’s gone?

“Was your mum a Londoner?” he asks as we enter residential areas. The deeper we get, the fancier the houses. The street is lined with row homes, shared walls between them, each four stories tall and a delicious variety of cheery pastels. Thirty-one flavors of paint. I wonder how the car’s suspension can handle the cobbled road. Kudos to London for refusing to make concessions to little things like modernity.

I raise my voice to be heard over the clattering tires. “American. I don’t think she ever even visited the UK. I have no idea why she still owned this house.”

“Should be worth a mint if you decide to sell.”

“You in the market?”

He laughs again. “Can’t afford a house pretentious enough to have its own name.”

“Fair. Plus it’d be like adopting a pet someone else had already named. What if you wanted to call the house Cuddles, instead?”

“And it would only answer to the old name. Tragic.”

I like Rahul. Maybe I’ll just give him the house on my way out. Then again, that would draw him into Dickie’s orbit. Albert’s, too. Rahul seems lovely; I don’t want to do that to him.

Rahul carefully navigates roads that predate automobile traffic, twisting and winding into what I assume are the aforementioned Haverstock Hills. The houses get bigger, no longer built shoulder to shoulder, but instead sitting regal and chilly on their own lots. Gone are the pinks and blues and yellows; everything is ash gray, rust red, or chalk white. At last Rahul pulls to a stop in front of an actual mansion.

He lets out a suitably impressed breath. “Yeah, that house is not going to answer to the name Cuddles. Wait. Wait! I think this is the wolf house!”

“The wolf house?” I ask, intrigued and alarmed.

“Bit of a local legend. Ages ago a wolf escaped from the zoo, jumped through a window into a house, scared a woman to death, and then went back to the zoo.”

“Really? That actually happened?”

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