Where We Belong

by Anstey Harris

  The door gives and swings towards me. The roar knocks me backwards off my feet, my throat scorches and what was my larynx silently squeezes in an effort to make the word ‘Leo’.

  I lie on my back and bicycle my feet against the floor. One foot hits what I hope is the door and I roll forward to shove it closed with my shoulder.

  Leo is on the other side of this door. Leo is somewhere in that black bedlam.

  I have shut the door and I have no idea how to open it again. On my hands and knees, I crawl back towards it. I reach up, my palms flat against the hot wood. The door is tight shut, tendrils of smoke – whiter than the greyness floating in my room and hot – leak their way in, determined to invade every inch of my space.

  I bang on the door, over and over, trying to knock it down, refusing to accept that it won’t open. The noise behind it is staggering, a suffocating threat daring me to open the door: taunting me that it has my son.

  I move my hand to the doorknob again, squeeze it tight and scream and scream as I turn it.

  There are still enough nerves left in my hand to register the cauterisation when I grab the doorknob but this will be no pain at all compared to letting the fire have my son.

  My knees trip on the towel as I try to bowl myself forward out of my bedroom. I grab it and stuff it against my face. An advert, a film – some memory – tells me that I should wet the towel and I wonder whether the person who decided that has ever seen the inside, the pulsing moving belly, of a fire.

  Leo’s room is to the left of mine. Inches away. I scrape my face along the carpet, dragging myself forward. I can’t breathe, I can’t see: the fire is a monster in my ears; it is the air in my lungs; it is the food I swallow.

  For the first time I truly understand Richard’s illness. His actions. In all my counselling – despite all the wisdom of professionals – I never processed his terror, the overwhelming horror of what was happening inside my beautiful husband. This fire, this is what took Richard. The smoke blinded him, the stench burned night and day in his nose. The choking confusion overwhelmed him. This bedlam is all he knew in those years: of course he wanted it to end.

  Now that I am robbed of my senses – the way I process the world – and only the grazing pain of the carpet under my face is real, I get it. I know why Richard couldn’t live through this. I have only been its hostage for minutes, seconds, not the months and years that he had to fight for breath, to make sense of the world beyond his skin.

  Now, the fire is everything and the dry ghost of vomit rises in my throat where air and water used to flow. I wonder whether burning from the outside in – or the inside out – is worst.

  ‘I know, Richard.’ I slur the words, though they are silent under the raging wind of the smoke, the vast blooming gold of the fire. ‘I understand.’ My lips are sealed together now, like hands in night-time prayer. I can sleep.

  The mane of the lion is soft, his fur winds round my fingers, soothes my burning hands. He must have been here all the time. He must have hidden in the corners, his huge feet padding – silent – through the house at night.

  He roars again and his breath is fetid on my face. I understand him, I hear his words: he is the spirit of the house, he is Richard’s lion heart. He is Leo.

  I kiss his golden fur.

  Richard leans down and scoops me into his arms. His face is as familiar as my own, the dark eyes, the straight black hair. I had thought I would never see him again and yet he is here; solid under my fingers, strong enough to carry me.

  The smoke is a stinking grey veil and Richard staggers from one side of the corridor to the other, barrelling, tripping. I turn my face towards his wide chest: I bury myself in him and know that I am home.

  I have missed him so. If I had known it was so easy to summon him, I would have done so long ago. The trade of air for Richard is a simple one, one I welcome with every atom of me.

  *

  I know we are outside. The night is cold – still choking, still black and swirling – but colder now. I carry the fire with me in the palm of my hand, an amber coal, the beating heart of it, the vivid ember.

  We are at a fairground and the carousel of lights spins around, blue and red and fiery orange. People shout and I try to lift my arm to wave, to tell them that I, too, have joined the party, come to the fair. I listen for the music; sniff deeply for the smell of candy floss and doughnuts.

  I remember how once there was a searing pain in my hand and I laugh out loud because it doesn’t hurt any more. I turn my head to tell Richard, to show him the living coral centre of the fire held in my hand, but only my eyes move. I remember that Richard is at the fair with me, and my heart soars. He is standing next to me, his back towards me. He is as solid and corporeal as before I closed my eyes. His shoulders are broad and masculine, his stance confident and true.

  He is restored.

  Richard turns around to face me, the red lights shine across his hair. His almond eyes are closed tight against the smoke. He slaps his thighs rhythmically with his hands: on and on.

  Behind him, animals parade across the grass. I can see people’s feet, boots, mud. I can see hoses and cables and car tyres. I can see paws and hooves and claws. I can see lions and tigers and bears. Books flutter and hop like birds. They hover above the ground, loose pages dropping like pieces of spring straw onto the mud below.

  *

  Something plastic fixes over my mouth and nose. I know it is white from the edge that obscures the bottom half of my vision. I am being lifted and, as I rise higher into the air, I see the full carnival of the animals. Bison swap their plaster tundra for real grass, hippo stand confused in the English countryside, wondering where the nearest watering hole might be. Zebras pass for thoroughbreds against the rusty rail of the paddock and countless deer, unidentified and generic, swarm across the lawn and onto the gravelled drive.

  Stacks of books lean against fence posts, laconic as ranch-hands. I move forward through the air and the oryx – his shoulders muscular and powerful – stares balefully as I leave, his glass eyes sparkling with electric blue. I see the hunched backs of a hyena pack and imagine the siren of their laughter as they see me off.

  The lion is not here on the grass. The lion would not leave: I know he is still prowling the charred corridors, checking the singed bedrooms, guarding the burnt and broken heart of the house.

  Leo. I remember in the fairground. I have lost little Leo at the carnival. He has slipped from my hand and disappeared.

  Where is Leo, I ask silently, as I slide, half-blinded and hallucinating, into the cavern of the ambulance.

  *

  I remember little after that except the dreams. In my dreams I was in a hospital, not this one, with a see-through plastic cot beside me. Sometimes the baby in the cot – his eyes struggling to focus, his perfect rosebud lips drawn by instinct towards me – is Richard, sometimes he is Leo, sometimes he is a baby I do not know yet: Leo’s baby. A baby whose name I must write in the book. A mouse sleeps beside the baby, curls against his body, and sometimes Simon comes and strokes the little mouse, smiles at the baby. The mouse has golden hair, a yellow tail of fire. When the baby wakes, the mouse scuttles across his skin, stands upright with its tiny paws against the edge of the crib; facing me, daring me to touch the baby.

  I can’t smell the baby, even in my dreams. The smell of smoke is etched into my flesh. It is a tattoo.

  The light is different in my dream hospital: it is a filtered softness, slipping through slatted blinds at the windows. It spills striped shafts onto my face and I wonder if it might take me back to the sky with it.

  When I wake from the dreams I am trapped, pinned to the bed by a wide white tube forced down my throat. From one of my eyes, I can see the bend of the tube as it disappears into me.

  The other eye is sightless, that much I have been able to work out. One eye can see the coiled snake, ready to strike: the other only a purple softness. The shafts of light stepping heavenward; the white snake choking me;
the empty violet nothing: they all fight to take me.

  I can’t speak. I can open one eye and signal wildly to the nurses. I can convey panic by the flaring of an iris, the flicker of an eyelash. All I say with my one eye, over and over, is, ‘Where’s Leo?’

  The people who come and go in my hospital room are ghosts. Some are solid: they float around my bed with graceful steps and have jobs to do: they move me, they talk to me, they make things snap or pop or peel against my body. Others are proper old-fashioned ghosts, see-through and wavy. Not all these things can be real. But, I know I saw Richard too. And Simon was here in the hospital. One of them is dead, one in New Zealand, one is – where is Leo?

  ‘Leo is safe, Cate,’ the policeman standing by my bed says.

  ‘Leo,’ I say to him in a voice that is not my own.

  ‘Leo.’ My face is tight with pain. ‘Leo.’

  ‘Your son is safe with his friends. He’s staying with Curtis Hogben.’

  The word ‘safe’ swamps me, covers me. The baby in the plastic crib beside me raises his small downy head and smiles, the mouse under his chin. I try to tell the policeman that the baby isn’t real, he’s not here.

  But my son is safe.

  I open my eye and the policeman is still there. The doctor is standing next to him. The walls are pale green – celery. The colour is celery. The white slatted blind swings and rustles.

  Simon.

  Richard.

  Leo.

  *

  It took a day – I later find out – to stabilise my reaction to the morphine they gave me for my poor burnt hand and the damage the smoke did to my lungs: time was elastic. Sometimes the lion visited me and I knew nothing was real: other times I looked beside me and saw that perfect pink baby and I hoped that I was simply back in that time, the best time.

  ‘Is Leo okay?’ It has taken this long to get these words out of me. I am desperate.

  ‘He is with his friend Curtis. I saw them yesterday and this morning.’ The policeman has the look of a family man about him: he is kind, gentle. His name, he tells me, is Andrew. ‘They’re all right. We’ll get him in to see you today. As soon as we can.’

  My skin pulls so tight across my cheek that it makes me cry, involuntarily. I have to fight to stay awake. I have to get Leo back.

  The red room, the bloody gallery, fills my vision, drowns me in its portent of what came next. I see the word ‘Murder’ dripping down the glass.

  ‘Curtis Hogben.’ I whisper it like a curse. ‘He attacked us.’

  The policeman sits in the chair that Simon has only moments ago vacated. ‘No, Curtis Hogben is taking care of Leo.’

  ‘I saw him.’ Speaking is sword-swallowing and pain jabs through my throat. ‘With the paint. Did he start the fire?’ I try to sit up. ‘And my son is with him? He’s dangerous.’

  ‘There’s nothing dangerous about Curtis Hogben, except perhaps for his old joy-riding habit.’

  I don’t understand. What is he talking about?

  ‘His erstwhile joy-riding habit, I should say. He took his mother’s car, no licence, but didn’t even get out of Crouch before he was caught. But you know about that, I suppose, the community service?’ The policeman, Andrew, is smiling and shaking his head, as if Curtis were no more than a naughty boy, a wayward teenager.

  ‘I saw him.’

  ‘You saw Floyd Hogben. Floyd Hogben threw the paint.’

  I don’t understand. Has Curtis been pretending all along? Is he not even called Curtis? It makes no sense. I stare at the cracks across the off-white ceiling, the stress of knowing Leo is with that boy throbs across the front of my forehead.

  ‘We arrested the Hogben lads straight after the assault on Ms Buchan. We march them in for anything involving four young men at once. This time it was Floyd. Floyd and some misguided animal rights activists who thought they’d recruited a local. Floyd Hogben doesn’t do anything for “causes”. Only to make trouble.’ He makes quotation marks with his fingers.

  ‘Curtis didn’t answer his phone. Leo was upset.’ I thought that memory was supposed to protect you from trauma. Mine is punishing me, sharpening the detail of every word, every accusation.

  ‘We kept Curtis in until late. Till we were sure which one of them did it. It was always going to be Floyd though.’ He sighs. I can only see the left-hand side of the policeman’s face, his large hairy ear.

  ‘One more thing, Cate, we need to talk to Ms Buchan – Araminta. She discharged herself from A&E on Saturday night and hasn’t been seen since. Do you have any idea where she might be?’

  *

  When Andrew has gone, the nurses come to peel the dressing from my eye. There will be no lasting damage, apparently. My eyelashes are scorched off and I have a graze across my cheek that I know, from my memory of before the fire, matches the exact weave of the threadbare matting in my bedroom. The palm of my hand is scorched, it will need to stay dressed while the skin underneath it does its best to heal, to knit together. I wonder if the rest of my life can recover in the same way.

  Andrew assured me that Araminta wasn’t in the fire: they have done a thorough search of the building and there are – thank God – no casualties. But no one has seen her in the thirty-six hours that have passed since it happened and, until she turns up, the police can’t be entirely sure what her role in the whole thing is or was.

  I don’t really believe Araminta would hurt us. She certainly would never risk harming Leo or the house: that much I would stake my life on.

  My phone is inundated with messages. None of them are from Araminta and most of them are from Patch. He says he has been at the hospital most of the time I have, but he’s been given very limited information and not been allowed in to see me because he’s not family. It makes my eyes water, and that in turn makes my cheek sting. No one is family, apart from Leo and me. Our vulnerability has never been so vivid. There’s only the two of us, and this thing, this terrifyingly close call, makes me realise that that’s not enough.

  I text Patch back. I tell him that I’m coming home.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Real life returns quickly once the confusion ebbs. The majority of my symptoms have been caused by the side effects of the morphine and I happily trade the tight pain in my hand for a clearer vision and the ability to make my way out of here.

  I try to piece together the missing hours but I can’t remember much of the fire – I am too relieved by that to try harder. I do remember staring out across the lawn and seeing, as vividly as real life, all the animals from the dioramas: chimps chasing tigers away from the people; armadillos – two of them, one curled and hiding, one stretched out and brave; a giant fruit bat, supine on the grass as if it had not survived the flight from its glass case. I know that I saw hundreds and hundreds of books that had taken on the powers of the people in their pages, positioned themselves around the drive, around the house. It all goes over and over in my mind, as clear as day.

  Araminta almost runs into my tiny room, she doesn’t say hello. ‘Where’s Leo? Is he all right? Please tell me Leo’s all right.’ Her skin is bleached white, her eyes puffy and red-rimmed. She is out of breath and her left arm is in a sling.

  ‘Where have you been?’ She looks frail and exhausted. ‘And how did you get in here?’

  ‘Where’s Leo?’ she asks again as if she hasn’t heard me speak.

  ‘Leo’s fine. Except that he’s with Curtis.’

  She sinks into the chair and I can only see this side of her. ‘They wouldn’t tell me where he was. Even though I told them I . . .’ She stops, puts her one good hand to her mouth. ‘They wouldn’t tell me.’ She takes out a small lace handkerchief. It has been tucked inside the foam loop of the sling. The spite has gone from her voice and she sounds like the trembling old lady she is. I can only assume the nurses thought she was a harmless – and very elderly – relative.

  ‘The police were looking for you.’

  ‘I know. Andrew called me an hour ago. My phone has been o
ff.’ She reaches a hand out to touch me, it is shaking. She lays her hand on the edge of my pillow and then changes her mind, pulls it back. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

  For a moment I don’t know what she means but, from the way she holds her trembling hand out towards me, I understand that she wants to touch me but isn’t sure where would be safe, where isn’t burnt.

  ‘It’s only smoke damage to my eye. It looks worse than it is,’ I say and then remember the tightness, the stretching, under the dressing. ‘And I burnt my hand.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘So sorry. I’m so ashamed of how I’ve behaved.’ She chooses a spot between my shoulder and my elbow and leaves her flattened palm there in a strange strained gesture.

  ‘Where were you, Araminta? Why didn’t you come back to the house?’ I’m piecing the hours together by trying words and seeing if they fit.

  ‘I had to tell the police all of this. They thought I started the fi . . .’ She can’t finish the sentence, can’t make the word. ‘I couldn’t, Cate. I truly didn’t.’

  I move my uninjured hand over to hers. She looks so small in here, away from the museum. I realise I have never seen her outside of the grounds, away from the house. It is as if she has left her shell there, her carapace. ‘I know.’ My tongue is thick in my mouth. The silent words, Then who did? float between us like a ghost.

  ‘Where were you?’ I grasp the thought again. ‘Where have you been?’

  She stands up, walks towards the window. The venetian blind moves beside her and I hear its plastic clatter. ‘When they let me out of the hospital, I came back to pack, to get my suitcase. I heard you crying in the kitchen and I didn’t want to have to see you. I couldn’t . . . I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I took the last train to London,’ she says, although I have to ask her to repeat herself and I only hear her the second time. ‘And I went to see my lawyer.’

  I sigh and sink into the pillow.

  ‘Then, when I’d seen my lawyer, I met with one of the members of the Board to talk about how we go forward. Once I’d made my appointments, I let my phone go flat: I had no one to speak to.’ She moves, uncomfortably, in her chair. ‘I knew nothing of the fire until they told me at my meeting this morning.’