The stairs up to the flat were insurmountable. Mount Everest had nothing on them. Thea stood at the bottom, hand on the bannister, eyes trained on the
topmost step, unable to move. Upstairs her father was playing the violin. Sort of. The frequent stops and starts meant he was composing. Standing by the
window, half-empty sheet on the music stand, propped up on a book of Bach compositions to safeguard from poking holes in the pages as he wrote, ballpoint
pen balanced precariously on the little edge of the stand. He always composed with ballpoint because pencils were for imbeciles.
Thea's first grade teacher had had a pencils-only policy, arguing that it was easier for the children to erase and correct their mistakes. One afternoon she'd
physically cornered Sherlock and demanded he confiscate Thea's fountain pen and send her to school with the appropriate writing equipment. She'd caught him
on a bad day, poor Miss Henley, but even if it had been the best day of his life, he still would have let her have it. As it was he annihilated her. Thea stood
open-mouthed next to them as her father reduced her teacher to an ashen faced pillar of salt before storming off. When she caught up with him halfway to the
tube station, she'd asked him what 'repressed penchant for military kink' meant and he'd explained that it was 'an extreme enjoyment of unpleasant men in
uniform'. A few days later she'd been moved up into second grade. The only people allowed to use pencils were Russian astronauts.
Thea felt as though she was wearing a space suit when she lifted her foot of the ground and placed it carefully on the first step up. She was wading through
honey, knee deep in treacle…the violin returned for a few bars then stopped abruptly again. Soft footsteps upstairs indicated a tea break. Tea was a constant
in her life. There had never not been any tea, no matter how much everything else deteriorated. Even at his most out of it and dysfunctional, Sherlock had not
once let them run out of tea. They'd run out of accommodation twice, but even then the deep pockets of his coat had held zip locks with tea bags in them and
stolen packets of sugar.
On the second step, Thea imagined she could hear his spoon clicking against the sides of his cup. It was probably an auditory illusion, but the image of his
hands handling the cutlery and crockery assaulted her nonetheless. Subtly racketeering with his cup and spoon, driving her uncle to distraction and raising an
eyebrow at Thea to encourage her to join in.
Thea froze with her foot in the air above step three when she heard the door upstairs open.
"Are you quite alright?" Sherlock called down.
A lump the size of a sovereign state stuck in her throat prevented Thea from answering.
"Are you carrying something exceedingly heavy?"
Thea cleared her throat violently, dislodging the lump enough to croak out
"Sorta."
"Sort of. Well, either get on with it or put it down, but do come up. I require a second fiddle, so to speak."
His footsteps receded back into the living room and Thea, acutely aware of the mechanical working of her joints, ascended the stairs at a measured pace. She
stopped at the door, surveying the room that was at once perfectly familiar and completely alien.
Sherlock was back at the window, his violin resting on the sill, leaning against the glass. Tea steamed from the cup next to it.
"Fetch your violin, provided you remember what it looks like and where it's located," he said without turning around.
"I'll fetch nothing," Thea ground out between gritted teeth. Her jaw was hurting.
Her father turned around and let his eyes sweep over her.
"What?" he asked. "Do you have something better to do? Truancy can be so demanding-"
"Shut up!" Thea yelled.
"Considering I've assured your school secretary that you are in bed with a slight to moderate fever, you may want to adjust your tone accordingly," Sherlock
said coolly.
In response Thea grabbed a golf club that was inexplicably leaning on the wall next to the door and hurled it at him. Her father side stepped with feline grace
and the club struck the window with enough force to shatter it. Sherlock dived for his falling violin, catching it millimetres above the floor and was upright just in
time to dodge the hardcover on local architectural quirks flying his way.
"What is wrong with you?" he asked, sounding genuinely interested.
"With me?" Thea roared. "What is wrong with me?"
"Apt question considering you appear to be on some sort of rampage, wouldn't you say?" Her father kept his eyes on her, ready to evade another object, while
placing his violin in its case and pushing it under his chair for safe keeping.
"Shut up!" she repeated at top volume.
"If I do, will you explain what on earth has gotten into you? Because if you won't there's precious little point in me shutting up."
Thea took hold of another book, this one about smugglers' routes in the London sewer system, and raised it.
"John's got a bookmark in there," Sherlock said sounding almost bored. "He'll be cross if it falls out, he's incapable of remembering where he's up to."
Thea lobbed the book at him, he slid out of its flight path and the skull came clattering off the mantle.
"Your funeral." Sherlock shrugged, turned his back and ambled towards the kitchen.
Seething and deprived of her an attentive target for her rage, Thea aimed a vicious kick at the couch, actually moving it closer to the wall.
"That's better. Attacking inanimate objects is a brilliant way to work through a tantrum."
Thea spotted a machete in the umbrella stand. It was surprisingly heavy and as she raised it over her head she wondered for a brief, distracting moment how
people managed to hack their way through jungles with these things. She'd hoped she would split the coffee table in two when she brought the weapon down
on it, but it merely took a chunk of wood out of the table top and send unpleasant reverberations up her arms.
She turned towards the kitchen, machete still at the ready and was startled to see her father holding two cups of tea, one regular cup and an oversized one
bearing the image of a tyrannosaurus skeleton and the caption 'Tea-Rex'. He'd bought it for her at the natural history museum a thousand lifetimes ago.
"Lots of tea?" he asked.
Thea clenched her fist on the machete's handle and started to cry so violently it hurt her chest.
"Is everything alright up there?" Mrs Hudson's voice drifted up the staircase.
"Certainly, Mrs Hudson," Sherlock called back. "We just misjudged some distances."
"It'll-"
"-go on the rent," he finished her sentence. "That's fine!"
When he approached with the tea, Thea lifted the machete again, aiming it at him, at least vaguely, she couldn't see all that well through her tears.
"I'll chop your head off," she sobbed.
"That would be novel," her father said calmly, setting the tea on the wounded coffee table and settling in his chair.
The machete clattered to the floor and Thea stood helpless under the onslaught of so many emotions she couldn't even begin to process them. She thought
about curling up on the floor or covering her face with her hands, but it seemed too much of an effort. So she simply remained upright where she was, weeping
with almost luxurious abandon. The physical sensation of it was quite astonishing, so much so it penetrated the chaos in her head. Her shoulders were moving
on their own accord, her tear ducts were aching with the effort of production, her throat was being brutalised by hiccups to the point of near agony. All of it
completely outside her control. Amazing. Awful, to be sure, but also amazing.
When her body was tired of putting on a show, five minutes or an hour later, Thea felt as if she'd been in a washing machine.
"Finished?" Sherlock asked.
She nodded, took three wobbly steps and flopped on the couch.
"That was quite something," her father pointed out. "Did that hurt? It looked like it might have."
"A little," Thea said weakly, closing her eyes and sinking deeper into the sofa. "Bollocks…"
"What was that?"
Thea cracked her eyes open and noted that Sherlock was leaning forward, head at a slight angle, enraptured with interest. It was the sort of stance he usually
reserved for particularly confounding case files.
"Overload," she said.
"Sensory?"
"Emotional."
"Oh." Even though her eyes were closed again, Thea knew her father winced slightly at this. "Can you pin point its origin?"
Thea grabbed the small couch pillow near her hip, pressed her face into it and screamed.
"Second wind?" Sherlock inquired.
After a couple of deep breath Thea took the pillow off her face and looked at him.
"Oh my word, you look awful."
"Thanks."
"So," her father ventured in uncharacteristically cautious tones, "what brought this on?"
"I-" Thea froze. It was entirely possible to simply not tell him. About anything. She could just chalk the whole thing up to experience and carry on as per usual,
hoping the weird sensation of being in a play would disappear on its own accord. Only she had reasonable doubt that it might not; which meant the only way
to escape the play was to rip the script so the actors couldn't be in character anymore.
Her father pushed her giant cup towards her and she picked it up with both hands.
"I did something really stupid," Thea told the quivering lake of tea in front of her.
"How stupid?"
Something in Sherlock's tone made her look up at him and though it might not have been worry as such, what she found in his expression was very close.
"Probably a nine."
"Are the police looking for you?" he asked.
"Not that kind of stupid," Thea said.
"Do you need medical attention?"
"Not that kind either."
"Alethea. What. Did. You. Do?"
For the second time in one day Thea stepped onto Satan's speeding escalator.
"I went and saw Philippa Greene."
As soon as it was out she tensed like a boxer preparing to absorb a flurry of punches, steadying herself for the inevitable torrent of reprimand.
"Who?"
She stared at him.
"You cannot be serious," she said quite loudly. "Philippa Greene."
Sherlock made a little face and shook his head. Thea very nearly threw her teacup at him.
"My mother's girlfriend? Philippa? Phil Greene? The only other person present when I was born?"
"Actually there were about twel-"
"Non-medical," she cut him off. "The only other person who was not hospital personnel. You were in the room with the picture of the unmoored boat together?"
"Oh…oh…I seem to-"
"Did you delete her?" Thea asked dumbfounded.
"I must have," her father admitted.
"You remember the picture?"
"Ghastly," he replied without hesitation.
"But not the woman with you in the room?"
"Not…specifically." Sherlock cleared his throat. "The host's girlfriend, you say?"
"Say her name."
"Phyllis?" he ventured.
"No!" Thea shouted. "It's Philippa, but never mind that, say my mother's name."
"Agnes."
"Good. You're not allowed to call her 'the host' anymore."
"But-"
"You're forbidden."
Her father rolled his eyes and huffed slightly.
"Fine," he said. "So, you went and saw Agnes' girlfriend, Philippa."
"Yes," Thea sighed.
"I presume this was a research based visit."
She nodded, chewing her lip mercilessly.
"That doesn't seem stupid," Sherlock said pensively. "Provided she has adequate powers of memory, she'd be an excellent source of the kind of information
you so clearly crave…though I get the impression you didn't particularly care for whatever she chose to divulge."
"Whatever gave you that idea?"
"Oh, good. A healthy display of sarcasm, you must be on the up." He looked at her intently. "What could she possibly have told you to warrant this kind of
reaction?"
Thea took a deep breath.
"She's presented me with a conundrum."
"The conundrum being?" her father prompted.
"What she told me…" Thea trailed off, gathered herself and tried again. "What she told me seemed like conclusive proof that you are a complete idiot.
However," she said quickly as Sherlock opened his mouth, "I'm fairly confident in your intelligence, which unfortunately leaves me no choice but to consider that
you're in fact a liar."
"You know I'm a liar, I lie all the time," her father frowned.
"To me you don't," she said. "At least not about important things. I didn't think so, anyway."
"Right…you will need to be a bit more specific. I'm at loath to admit it, but I don't think I follow."
"Did you know she duped you?"
"Philippa Greene?"
"Agnes!" Thea snapped. "The whole science project thing was a ruse. How could you not know that? You work everything out. Always."
"What do you mean, it was a ruse?" Sherlock's eyebrows were knitted in intense concentration. "You've read the project proposal yourself."
It was true, she had. He'd shown it to her some years earlier, when the story of the Jar-Baby was starting to move her to questions. Agnes' deception had
admittedly been pretty thorough.
"Are you telling me," Thea said quietly but somewhat dangerously, "that you at no point realised that my mother didn't have purely scientific motives?"
"What other motives could she have possibly had?" her father asked.
"She just wanted a child."
"Whatever for?"
"And that," Thea said grimly, "is the very thing."
Sherlock sighed.
"You're being ludicrously cryptic."
"Did you want me?"
"Pardon?"
"So you didn't?"
"Alethea-"
"My mother wanted me."
"What is your point?" Sherlock sounded just a tiny bit tetchy.
"She wanted me," Thea said, her fists clenched so tightly she was sure she'd pierce the skin of her palms. "She didn't want a specimen or a protégé – she just
wanted me."
"You're being completely irrational." Her father seemed perfectly composed, but it didn't escape Thea that his teacup hand had been suspended halfway
between the table and his lips for the better part of two minutes. "You were in utero, she did not know you. It's literally impossible to feel a specific want for an
unfamiliar entity, at least one that later translates into anything other than disappointed fantasizing."
"Do you love me?"
It was as though gravity was suspended for a long fraction of a moment. Everything in the room rose, floated for a brief moment and shifted position ever so
slightly when it all slammed back to the ground.
"What?" Sherlock spat, staring at Thea like he had never seen her before.
"Do. You. Love. Me?" she repeated. "My mother loved me. Do you?"
Her father placed his teacup on the table with more force than strictly necessary and his now free hand flew to the bridge of his nose.
"Love is an intangible, imprecise and utterly constructed term," he said.
"No it's not," Thea hissed.
"It absolutely is," Sherlock snapped back. "People claim to love all manner of things. I love you. I love toast. I just love this song… it's the most useless verb in all
of linguistic history. And even if we assume for the sake of this frankly ludicrous argument that it is possible 'to love' anyone or anything, it would still be naïve
to the point of stupidity to believe for one second that the host did that when it came to you."
"You're not-"
"Agnes, fine, Agnes then. She might have been enamoured with the idea of who she presumed – with no grounding of any sort, I might add – her foetus would
turn out to be; but to claim that she loved you, specifically, is nothing short of ridiculous. And I refuse, absolutely, to be coerced into employing meaningless
terminology simply because you're experiencing some kind of juvenile identity crisis."
Outside a car screeched to a halt. Downstairs Mrs Hudson turned on the blender. A pigeon sat on the window sill and examined the broken glass curiously
before taking off again. Thea put her feet on the floorboards, startled to find them solid, placed her cup on the table next to her father's and got up.
She was still wearing her jacket, the keys to her bike lock jangled in its right pocket as she slowly walked to the door, down the stairs and out of the house. It
was entirely possible that her father called after her; as it was, Thea heard only the rushing of her blood and the pounding of her heart.