Page 81 of Deja New
THIRTY-EIGHT
SEPTEMBER 1949
CAMPDEN, ENGLAND
On Sunday, Augusta Harrison read about her own murder in the paper.
It must be a joke,was her first shocked thought.Like those fake newspapers you can buy where the headline proclaims you King of the Universe. Or perhaps it’s someone with the same name as me.
As it turned out, it wasn’t a joke and it wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. A year after she’d moved to Paris, then London, a man named John Perry found a pile of her bloody clothes in the living room of an abandoned house, and promptly contacted the authorities.
The police went looking for her and, of course, she could not be found. Augusta had only lived in Campden for a few months before moving on; her mother used to claim she had Gypsy blood. She hadn’t formed any real ties and did notnotify anyone of her departure. She had gone to Paris—delightful, but ultimately too expensive—and then London, settling into a rented townhouse in the West End a few days past. Only half of her belongings had been unpacked when she read about her murder.
The clothes Perry had found weren’t just bloody; they had been repeatedly slashed with the kind of knife found in Mr. Perry’s kitchen. When Mr. Perry’s lawyer pointed out it was the kind of knife found in nearlyeverykitchen in England, the jury had not been swayed.
Worse still, Mr. Perry had been convicted of assault three years earlier at age nineteen (for which he served twenty-seven months), and had an IQ of seventy-eight. Once the bobbies had finished with him—which took days—he implicated not only himself but his mother and brother. The entire family had been convicted and would hang in a matter of days.
She sent a telegram to the Gloucestershire police.
Nothing.
She packed, bought a train ticket, went back to Campden, a town she had ardently hoped never to see again. Walked into the constable’s station. Announced herself.
Nothing.
Found Mr. Perry’s lawyer, who was engaged in dying from sepsis after his appendix burst and was, understandably, distracted.
She went back to the police and explained again. And as she perhaps should have foreseen, rather than admitting a mistake had been made, they decided that, somehow, the mistake was hers.
Because—and was it not absurd that this would cost a man and his family their lives?—she wasn’t like other girls. She had a history. She didn’t like staying in one spot very long, that was one thing. The thought of binding herself to a man and a house and his children for decades was horrifying, that was another. And she liked to drink. And she liked theideaof men, and the things an open-minded couple could do in a bedroom with the blinds drawn. Only the daily domestic details smacked of tedium.
Like this: She was small and red-haired and fair-skinned and dark-eyed and pretty and looked sweet, but wasn’t. Men wanted to take care of her, and were piqued when they discovered she neither wanted nor needed them. She liked to fuck and she liked her freedom, not always in that order.
Much of the time, this worked well for her. But sometimes those things combined in a most disagreeable way and she had to leave town earlier than she planned. But there were always new places and new men, and if she wasn’t hurting anyone, what was the harm?
She tried to explain this to her stone-faced audience, men who didn’t understand why a woman would want to be in charge of her own life, men who found the idea as repellant as it was incomprehensible.
But how to explain her bloody clothes?
“I have no idea! Before I moved away I donated a number of items to the church. I did the same in Paris. Anyone could have picked them up, and they could have blood on them for any number of reasons.”
But what were the odds ofherclothes turning up soaked with blood?
“A good way to determine that the blood isn’t mine would be to note thatI’m still alive.”
That was another thing. Her temper.
At least one suggested that she wasn’t who she said she was. “You don’t look like an Augusta,” one of them said, eyeing her riotous red curls and freckles. “You look like a Sally. Or a Bridget.”
It was all she could do not to fly at him and tear his face with her fingernails.
When, incredibly, it appeared the execution was going forward, she started talking to the press. “The press” in town consisted of an older gentleman in his forties, who was much more interested in her legs than the pursuit of justice. He, too, seemed to think the entire affair was a darkly hilarious misunderstanding, one it would be too much trouble to correct.
“But I’m here. I’mright here, I’m not dead. They didn’t kill me.”
A shrug. “Well, they killed someone.”
“How does that follow? As I told the police, that blood could be on the clothes for any number of reasons. And, once again—I do hate to belabor the point—I am not dead!”
