Mary made her first call of the morning, which was a routine post-natal well baby check-in and mostly involved handholding an anxious first-time mother. She made appropriate reassurances that although cradle cap can in fact be a sign of major autoimmune disease it really never is, and reviewed the spreadsheets that charted the baby's perfectly standard intake and excretion. Mary never rolled her eyes once during this process because she was actually quite good at her job, but it was bloody tempting. The gentle chirp of her phone signaled an incoming text as she was walking out the door.
-Good morning, Ms. Chased-By-The-Dogs.
She smiled a bit at that, and texted back.
-Good morning, Dr. Watson!
- So are you free this Saturday afternoon?
-I think so. What time?
-Meet 430?
-That'll work. Where are we going?
-It's a surprise.
Mary did roll her eyes at this point, because she loathed surprises. It was always better to have a plan.
-Can I have a hint?
-No.
-I need to know what to wear.
-Oh, right, yeah. Can you wear flat shoes, a suit, long johns, and a vest?
Her eyebrows rose.
-This is a multi-outfit occasion?
-No, more like all at once. The underthings below the suit.
At that point, she got to her second house and greeted her second patient, another routine post-natal check in. This one was a mother of three under three who had been one of her patients for almost her entire tenure as Mary Morstan. She was entirely confident and knowledgeable in how to look after a baby. Really, she just needed somebody to keep an eye on the children for ten minutes so she could have a shower.
When she got out, she sent another text.
-This isn't some sort of weird sex thing, is it?
He didn't answer until she was in the middle of call three, a newish mum with moderate-to-severe post-natal depression who was responding very well to her Zoloft and therefore wanted to stop taking it. Mary explained for the millionth time in her career why antidepressants shouldn't be discontinued quickly and had just set the patient up with an appointment to discuss it with one of the quacks when the chirp signaled incoming.
-Oooh-err, missus, yes, I can't think of anything sexier than long johns.
-I did say *weird* sex thing.
No reply. Number four, meds check on five-year old with intractable infantile spasms. Sad call, but at least the Lamictal didn't seem to be actively hurting anything. It didn't appear to be doing any actual good yet, but doing no harm in this realm was really about all you could hope for.
Call five. Baby, three months old but really should have been a newborn if life had gone correctly, with all the normal sequelae of prematurity. Mum and Dad were fifteen years old and probably wouldn't be all that bright even if they had been old enough to deal with a medically fragile infant. Still, they were doing their best and at least Gran was on the scene. The baby was getting a good handle on growing, and-
-Sorry that took so long, things are a bit mad here. No it's not a weird sex thing. I actually have no weird sex things.
And the apnea seemed to be diminishing appropriately. The mum was clearly very proud of her new baby and new council flat, both of which were spotlessly clean. Maybe everything would be all right- and bang, there went the morning. She was queuing for her lunch at Pret a Manger when the perfect reply to Jim's last sentence came to her, and she took her phone out to text:
-Sorry to hear that.
-Cheeky.
-I do believe that I own all of those things so yes I will wear a suit.
-You won't regret it.
Though when Saturday came, and she put on her black "going to conferences" pantsuit and looked at herself in the mirror, she actually kind of did regret it. Her very first grownup job had been at a nondescript office building in Fairfax, Virginia. There, she'd spent her days examining the sale and transit of certain strategic materials to try and figure out what the hell the Chinese were doing with their nuclear weapons program. DC in the nineties was quite a formal town, and government jobs tend to be dressier than others.
When she'd been offered a field posting in her second year, she'd snapped up the opportunity. It meant money, promotion, excitement, and the opportunity to not have to care about what a Guangzhou catalysis R&D company might want with eleven thousand linear feet of niobium tubing. But she had to admit that one of the reasons she had done it - and thus ultimately one of the reasons she was now living in a foreign country under a pseudonym - was that in a covert ops job, she wouldn't have to wear a suit. At least not every day.
The wretched things inevitably transformed her from respectably petite to outright short-and-dumpy, especially without high heels. There was an interesting new wrinkle in that, now that she didn't keep her hair long, a suit also made her look very butch. Mary tried adding a hat and a waistcoat, hoping for a Diane Keaton in Annie Hall sort of vibe, but it was no good. She still looked like the oldest lesbian at the funeral.
Ultimately she just threw on more lipstick, fed the cat, and ran to catch the tube to Bethnal Green. Jim had asked for the bloody outfit and if it put him off he had nobody but himself to blame. But when she got to the address he'd given her she found that it was a) a library and b) being swarmed by other people in suits.
"Mary, over here," she heard Jim call, and she hurried over to where he was standing in the queue. His own suit was a quiet brown check, which looked very well on him, the lucky bastard.
"Hello. So it looks like we're… joining a cult this evening?" she asked.
He raised his eyebrows at her and replied, "We are going to see the Secret Cinema."
"Oooh," she said, rather impressed, "A friend of mine got to see Prometheus when they did it last summer, but I've never been to one. How'd you get tickets?"
Jim grinned, quite clearly pleased with himself, "I work in mysterious ways."
"Any idea what the film will be?" she said, craning to look at the rest of the crowd. Jim drew two folded sheets of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket, and said, "No clue. But maybe courtroom drama?"
The two pieces of paper were summons from the state court of "Oak Hampton, USA" for Daniel Parkins who was up on aggravated assault charges and Robert Harrison who had apparently committed second degree murder.
"You can be whichever one you like," Jim said.
"I'll be Daniel, thank you. Very violent person, me."
Everyone milling around the library was trying on their hardboiled American accents, which were awful but sweet. In twenty minutes, a bus came and drove them out to the suburbs. There they were herded into an old school building, where, in a set decorated as a courtroom, they were all sentenced to life in prison.
A melodramatic set piece followed in which they were told to strip off and put on prison uniforms. "Hardened cons" hinted that if they wished to smuggle their cell phones or wallets into the prison they should hide them in their underwear. Mary tucked her phone and twenty pounds into her bra, and stripped down.
Jim was a gentleman during this process, averting his eyes politely, although in her t-shirt and long johns she was perfectly decently clad throughout. Mary, not being a gentleman, had no such restrictions, though she contented herself with a brief subtle ogle. Nothing to write home about, briefs rather than boxers, but he didn't have the little pot belly common to most men his age, so she was encouraged.
Once they'd changed, they were handcuffed- just cheap little sex-toy things, she could get out of them in thirty seconds with the aid of a ragged thumbnail-but they looked well enough. Then they were marched two-by-two through the corridor of a really decent-looking prison set. More actors, dressed as prisoners, chanted "Fresh Fish" and banged metal cups on the bars.
The incident, as she would later refer to it in her mind, happened around halfway down the corridor. She was looking around, wondering if it would be kosher to take out her phone and snap a few shots, when there was a flurry of motion to her right. One of the actors had extended a hand through the bars, grabbed Jim's bicep, and growled, "Hey there, new meat."
And Jim had whirled around, thrust his cuffed hands through the bars, and slammed his assailant into them with a great deal of force. The actor, a young man, squeaked, "Oi!" in a much higher voice than his original growl.
It all took less than a second, and then Jim, looking shaken, dropped his hands and muttered, "Sorry, sorry." They continued walking until they got to a prison cell with five sets of steel bunk beds, where they were told to kneel facing the walls, and then were uncuffed and told to wait until they were collected.
Mary side-eyed Jim, who was still breathing rather heavily, and murmured, "Hey. You okay?"
"Yes! Yeah. Sometimes I just… I don't like being manhandled."
"Okay," she said, deciding to leave it behind. "So. Prison movie, then."
"Yeah. Maybe… Cool Hand Luke? Or The Great Escape?"
Mary looked around her and saw a poster on the wall. It was Rita Hayworth, dressed in a peignoir and kneeling on a bed, and somehow it pinged a memory.
She got up, and one of the twenty-something women kneeling next to her whispered "HEY! You're not supposed to do that!"
Mary glanced back at Jim and both of them rolled their eyes. Some people just didn't get the point of life. She slid a fingernail under the tape holding the poster down at the corners, and lifted it up to reveal a hole chiseled into the cinder block wall.
"It's The Shawshank Redemption," Mary said, and turned around to see Jim staring at her blankly. That gave her a bad moment. It was always the little things that ruined a disguise, and inappropriate knowledge of other cultures was something everybody had to look out for. Even now she spent a great deal of time watching British children's television shows of the 70's and 80's in order to be able to pick up any major cultural referents.
Happily, the Americans had been assiduously exporting their culture for the last eighty years, and the twenty-something woman said in an irritating Sloaney drawl, "Oeauhwah! I love that movie!" The rest of the people in the cell mostly followed suit.
It was Jim who said, "So, yeah, apparently I'm culturally illiterate."
Mary smiled. "It's a great film. You're in for a treat."
They both were, actually. In a short while the "guard" came back to let them out, and they had a good two hours to explore before the film started. There was a staged knife fight, then a gospel-singing interlude (Mary had forgotten if any such scenes occurred in the film, but the singing was much better than the knife fighting). They watched several other little tableaus, bought a shot of "smuggled-in" bourbon and a can of beer apiece, and ate dinner. Or at least Jim did… it was baked beans and hot dogs with no vegetarian alternative presented, so Mary skipped it.
The movie was always good, and when Jim put his arm around her shoulders during the bit where Brooks hangs himself, she found she didn't mind at all.
When the film ended, and they were herded back into the changing room, Jim said, "I really liked that. Though I'd probably have picked something with a bit less rape for a first date, all other things being equal."
Mary laughed as she did up the buttons on her blouse. "You did get me out of my clothes, so how bad could it have been?"
"Point."
"It's always been one of my favorites. I like the optimism."
Jim snorted as he shrugged into his jacket, and took Mary's out of her hands to help her in.
"Did we see the same film?" he asked, "It's about an innocent man being falsely convicted and having his life ruined."
Mary frowned. "I guess I always looked at it as more about Red than Andy. And Red is someone who did something awful but did his time and got his happy ending. Optimistic."
"I suppose," Jim said, though he still sounded dubious.
"Look, I'm starving to death," Mary said, "I don't suppose you could eat a second dinner? It'll be veggie-friendly but I'll treat."
Jim found that he could eat a second dinner, and so they wandered around in one of those bizarre London restaurant deserts for twenty minutes before finding a noisy, crowded pizza place clearly mostly supported by university students. They split a watery pizza Margherita and a bottle of sugary Lambrusco and talked, lightly, about nothing in particular.
Despite the terrible food it was, in fact, a very nice date. So much so, that when he went full-on gentleman after the meal and insisted on hailing her a mini-cab and then asked if he could kiss her goodnight, she said "yes" without hesitation.
And when he actually kissed her, gently but thoroughly, with the mini-cab driver watching them impatiently and his hands on her unflattering-pantsuit-clad hips, she came to an abrupt realization.
She very much wanted to take this man to bed.
Except she had no idea if Mary Morstan did that on a first date. In her old life, yes, absolutely, but in that life it was likely as not she'd never see any given man again, even if one or both of them didn't end up dead within the next few weeks. In her quieter, more serene new existence, she'd never once had the inclination to rush the "sex" component of a relationship… and she had no idea if it was appropriate to even propose the idea.
Mary hated when she didn't know quite how to be a normal person. She wished she had time to text Janine and ask. She didn't, though, since Jim had already stopped kissing her, said goodnight, and started walking away.
So to hell with it, Mary thought. She was a thirty-eight year old woman and if she wanted to get a man's trousers off for a test drive on the first date she could damn well do so and if he thought less of her for it then he could piss off.
She called out, "Jim," to his retreating back, but he didn't seem to hear. So she raised her voice and shouted, "Oi! Watson!"
Jim turned around, and she crooked her finger at him. From the expression on his face, even if he did think less of her tomorrow at the moment he entirely approved of her plans.
They slid into the back of the cab, and the driver asked, "Where to?"
Mary tilted her head towards Jim. "Yours, I think."
"Not yours?"
"Certainly not. You could be a serial killer for all I know."
That startled a laugh out of him. "And that doesn't put you off of going to my flat?"
"You'll be just as much a serial killer on the third date, won't you? And at least this way you won't be a serial killer with my address."
That actually made Jim crack up, and he barely managed to choke out an address in nearby Hackney to the irritated cabbie.
Jim's flat was in a nondescript tower block, and was very clean but very underdecorated in that sad bachelor way. He had clearly at some point in the not-too-distant past gone to Ikea with a list of the things that belonged in a flat and purchased all of them from the UMLAUT series.
When they got in the door, he seemed lost for a moment, with none of his previous aplomb.
"So," he asked, rubbing the back of his neck, "Would you like a drink? Or something?"
Mary replied, calmly, "No, thank you, though I would like you to kiss me again."
He did, and this time he wasn't gentle at all, and Mary knew she'd made the right decision.