Fire Colour One

by Jenny Valentine

  “I thought you were asleep,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Resting. Listening.”

  “I’m sorry for what you heard.”

  He pulled the blankets tighter around him even though the sun was out, and pretty warm. “No need. I’m sure she’s said worse.”

  “It’s pretty much your own fault,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “I don’t know. All of it.”

  He closed his eyes again. “I see.”

  “Have you ever seen The Royal Tenenbaums?” I asked him.

  “Is it a painting?”

  “No, a film.”

  “About what?”

  “About a group of grown-up child prodigies who get together because their dad is dying.”

  “And you like it?” he asked me.

  I nodded. “Family isn’t a word. It’s a sentence.”

  I looked out across the fields towards the black shadows of the mountains.

  “It’s good to see you, Iris.”

  “You should have invited me sooner,” I said, and it sounded more spiteful than I meant.

  Ernest looked at me but I didn’t take my eyes off the view. “You and I need to find more reasons to be alone together,” he said.

  “We do? Why?”

  “We have a lot to talk about.”

  “Like what?”

  “There are some things I’d like you to know,” he said. “Things about me. About you and me.”

  There were tubes running into the back of his hand, stuck down with tape. His veins looked risen and solid, like twigs.

  “Not to be rude or anything,” I told him, and we both knew I meant the exact opposite, “but isn’t all this a bit late?”

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” he said.

  “So what’s the point then?” I said. “Are we just making nice?”

  Ernest sighed. He sagged slowly, the way an inflatable does when the party’s over and the air’s leaking out.

  “We can fight if you like,” he said. “We can do all of that. It’s your choice. But I want you to know, we might not have time to make up.”

  Jane came outside to clear the plates. Her cheeks were the colour of raspberries. The bony points of her body, her knuckles and elbows and wrists, were lost in her flesh, like someone inside a duvet.

  “How are you, Mr Jones?”

  “Still alive,” he said drily. “Always a bonus.”

  We could hear Hannah inside the house, raising her voice over something.

  “Are my guests being difficult?”

  She looked straight at him. “I don’t know who she thinks she is.”

  “The lady of the house,” Ernest told her. “My wife.”

  “You’re still married?” I said. “You’re kidding.”

  Ernest nodded. “Twenty-one years this November.”

  Jane’s jowls shook like a Basset Hound’s. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”

  “A bottle of the widow,” he said, “and four glasses.”

  “Should you be drinking, sir?”

  “No.”

  “Is it wise?”

  “No,” he said. “But I don’t think it’ll be the thing that kills me, do you?”

  Jane frowned.

  “We’re celebrating,” he said. “I’ll just taste it.” He put a hand on her arm. “And thank you, Jane, for asking.”

  She carried the loaded tray back across the grass, her apron caught in her waistband, her thighs like bolster cushions in her jeans. It was nice, the way she spoke to him, like it was her job, but she cared about him anyway. I liked her for that, even if I didn’t like Ernest all that much.

  “What are we celebrating?” I said. “Your long and happy marriage?”

  Here I was, thousands of miles away from home, worried about Thurston, trapped in the wrong place, a pawn in some old war between Ernest and my mother. Honestly? It wasn’t a champagne moment for me.

  He leant back in his chair, blinked up at the sky and tried his hardest to breathe.

  “I’m not sure yet,” he said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  Hannah and Lowell followed Jane back out of the house, trailing the bottle like iron filings behind a magnet. My mother was at the isn’t-everything-great stage of drunk. She arranged herself in her chair and sighed loudly.

  “Champagne,” she said. “How marvellous.”

  Ernest looked at Lowell and pointed at the tray. “Do the honours, would you.”

  Lowell popped the cork and Hannah showed more teeth. I could see her eyeing the bottle, trying to calculate how much was left.

  “A toast,” Ernest said, raising his glass. “To us.”

  My mother’s laugh was quick and shrill and high. “I’ll drink to that,” she said, as if there were things in the known world she wouldn’t drink to.

  “Hear hear,” said Lowell.

  “To family,” Ernest said, looking only at me. “Whatever that might mean.”

  Thurston and Uncle Mac used to buy lapsed storage units and sift through things once precious enough to keep safe and now abandoned. He said it was like buying into whole lives. You pieced together what you knew about somebody from the things they’d done their best to save. Vivien Maier’s photographs were found that way, her life’s work bought in job lots at auction after she died. Thurston spread everything he bought out like a map and then photographed it, and each photo had the name of the person who’d owned it. Leonard D Theil. Marsha Louise Hunter. Margot Florian Jones.

  Apparently, I reminded Ernest of his sister Margot. Sometimes, when the pain got really bad and he went to town on the morphine, he thought I was Margot, come to visit. He talked to her instead of talking to me and I pieced her together like one of Thurston’s photos from the things Ernest said. I didn’t set him straight. If he wanted to see his sister then let him. There was no harm in it, after all. In some ways it took the pressure off having to be me. I could just sit back and listen.

  When Ernest said, “How are you, Margot?” I said I was fine. If he said, “Do you remember the time when?” I said, “No, tell me again.”

  He talked about this grassy bank at the foot of the garden. When he was a boy the gardener told him it was a burial mound for an elephant. The circus had come here in 1832 and the elephant caught flu and died.

  “You can’t do much with a dead elephant,” the gardener had said, “except bury it.”

  Ernest wanted to dig down and find the elephant’s skeleton the way an archaeologist unearths a dinosaur. He wanted to dust at its bones with toothpicks and paintbrushes but he wasn’t allowed. The gardener said they weren’t to disturb the dead and Margot said, “Quite right. Leave them where they bloody well are. They’ve had their turn.”

  “You said the elephant would come and haunt me as punishment for wanting to open up its grave,” Ernest told me. “You warned me to listen for its footsteps at midnight and then you paced the corridor outside my room banging that drum until I wet myself in terror and you skidded off to bed.”

  I smiled. “Sorry,” I said.

  Ernest waved his hands at me. “Don’t be. You were always worth more than the trouble you caused.”

  Ernest reminded me of an elephant. The skin around his eyes was thick and dark and wrinkled, like an elephant’s eye. And there were so many things he couldn’t forget.

  “Do you remember that hollowed-out elephant’s leg in the hall for storing umbrellas?” he asked, and I pretended I was Margot again and said yes.

  “Where did it come from?” he said.

  “A dead elephant?” I suggested, and Ernest smiled and said, “Oh, Margot, I’ve missed you. It’s been far too long.”

  Once he got started I think he carried on talking even when he was the only one left in the room, like a juggernaut too big and slow to turn around in a hurry. He was telling his life from start to finish, and it didn’t seem to matter if anyone could hear him or not. Sometimes I listened from out in the hall because I d
idn’t want to go in and disturb him. I didn’t want to interrupt his flow.

  Margot got sent away to school but Ernest stayed home because of a weak chest and allergies and something else his mum called an indoor disposition and his dad called a damn shame. He had tutors for maths and science. His dad taught him French and some military history and his mum taught him everything she knew about her favourite artists, Caravaggio and Vermeer, Botticelli and Gauguin, Da Vinci and Millais. The family owned a handful of valuable paintings. If he promised not to touch, Ernest was allowed to stand on a chair with his face inches from the canvas and study the precise brushstrokes of Gericault’s Portrait of a Kleptomaniac or the urgent, frantic sweeps of Van Gogh’s A Wind-Beaten Tree. In the library overlooking the garden she gave him books too heavy to carry, full of paintings and sketches. She showed him tricks the early masters used with mirrors and crystals and candles to trap an image right there on the page. Ernest loved copying the way they caught a hand or a foot or an eye. He imagined the real person in front of him, a servant maybe, a relative or friend. He wondered what likeness he got, if any, so many hundreds of years later, in his version of a version of them.

  I listened to Ernest’s ramblings and I thought this was where Thurston should be, listening with me, sitting with his knees up and his back against the wall. He’d have loved it. They would have been instant, proper friends. I have no doubt about that.

  Ernest said his parents thought it was Margot who should be sitting quietly and drawing, but when she was at home Margot liked to ride and climb and swim and row and shoot.

  “Can you still serve a ball straight on to a coin eight times out of ten?” he asked me, when he was asking her. “Can you still scale a tree like a primate?”

  He said she was proud of her mud-streaked shins and filthy clothes and uncombed hair. It was Margot who caught a fish with her bare hands and bashed its brains out on the stones of the shrunken riverbed. Ernest could only watch. She brought it home, gutted it with her penknife and cooked it over an open fire. Her parents said it was no way for a young woman to behave.

  “Thank God,” said Margot, pulling fish bones out of her teeth, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “I have no intention of ever behaving like one.”

  She called Ernest a mummy’s boy, and Ernest was so struck by the idea that he cried and proved her right. But he liked to think he protected Margot, in his way, from the sharpened arrows of their expectations, the bullets of their many disappointments. By being their constant companion, the child they could control, he took their attention away from his tomboy sister.

  “Stand up straight,” they snapped at him when Margot slouched past.

  “Your hair is a disgrace,” they said, looking the other way as Margot pulled herself backwards through the box hedge and cut across the square, flat lawn, her own hair stuck with twigs and dressed with feathers.

  Ernest half-smiled at me in the hazy, shut-curtained gloom of his room. “I was always in trouble because of you, Margot,” he said.

  “One spike or two?” she’d say, and if he asked why, she’d tell him, “Because you’re such a bloody martyr. Live a little, for God’s sake. Stop minding so much what people think.”

  Thurston would have liked Margot too, by the sounds of it. He’d have approved of the way she was different to the rest of her family. He always said the best people stick out like sore thumbs, that the black sheep are the ones to watch.

  “Look at you,” he said. “You’re nothing like who you should be.”

  “And you?” I asked him. “What are your family like?”

  “Gun-toting, stranger-bashing, rage-twisted, tight-fisted creationists,” he said. “I haven’t spoken to them in years. I had myself emancipated in a court of law. I can’t see how we’re even related.”

  Neither of us spoke for a minute and then Thurston said, “Please don’t ask me about them again.”

  Ernest told me that at eighteen, Margot eloped with a taxi driver and lost a small fortune at a casino in the South of France. A month later she ran off to New York with a camera salesman. She didn’t bother to marry him, which made things simpler. Her parents washed their hands of her after her third affair, with an ex-airline pilot, and a bit of light smuggling. They paid off the judge and then they cut Margot off without a penny, which was what she’d wanted all along. She used to tell Ernest that being born into money had made them all worthless and unmotivated.

  “Look at you,” she said, teasing. “They may as well have pulled out your spine.”

  Ernest said she went to London, trained as a nurse, and joined a team of doctors working in conflict zones and refugee camps, in the paths of epidemics and earthquakes and hurricanes. She never once visited home. She was done with it. She sent Ernest postcards from all the far-flung, war-torn, disease-ridden, beautiful places she wound up.

  “So very different,” she would write, “from the home life of our own dear Queen.”

  If his parents got to them first, her cards ended up in pieces in the bin and Ernest had to put them together like a puzzle. He marked each place in his atlas with a cross, so he could see at a glance where his sister was, and how far from them she had gone.

  “Don’t hang about, little brother,” she told him. “Get out while you can. Times are changing. There’s a whole world out there. Honestly, I do things that would turn your hair grey overnight and nobody bats an eyelid.”

  But all Ernest wanted to look at and think about was art.

  “What good is the real,” he asked me once, “when there are so many better versions of it to distract you?”

  He stayed behind with his books and his paintings and his parents. When his dad died of a heart attack at sixty Ernest took over the family collection. He sent works to galleries and institutions on loan. He bought when the price was low and sold at a profit. He had a feel for it. He and his mum sat for hours at the feet of Rossettis and O’Keeffes, of Pollocks and Rembrandts and Gentileschis, of Kahlos and Hockneys and Rothkos. She broke their silences with updates on the absent. “Margot would hate this,” or, “I want you to sell the little Gauguin,” or, “Your father would have closed this deal by now.”

  He disappeared and it suited him.

  “You were right, Margot,” he told me. “There was a whole world out there and I avoided it like the plague.”

  “You did what you wanted,” I said. “That’s OK, isn’t it?”

  He smiled. “But just think of all the life I missed while I was living my own.”

  I don’t think Ernest believed his family were together in some form or another in the afterlife, waiting for him. He didn’t expect to see them again any time soon.

  Margot died in a house fire in Nairobi when she was twenty-nine. She would have been almost sixty by now. Their mum died on a flight from Colombia to New York. The plane ran out of fuel and crashed into a hillside on Long Island’s North shore. That night at home there was a storm. Ernest had no electricity for three days because the winds had wrecked the power lines. Otherwise, he might have known sooner. He thought the trees were going to come crashing through his bedroom window. He was awake all night, waiting for it to happen. He didn’t know yet that he was the only one left.

  “I miss Margot,” he said, when he remembered I was Iris and she was gone. “She was my best friend.”

  “I’ve lost one of those,” I told him.

  “It hurts, doesn’t it,” he said.

  “It does,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Her name?”

  “Who?”

  “Your friend.”

  “Oh, his name. He’s a he. Thurston. Thurston Shaw.”

  “Marvellous name.”

  “Marvellous person.”

  “Tell me about this Thurston,” he said. “What does he do? Why do you like him?”

  “He’s an artist, I suppose. Not just nine to five, not for money or anything. He just sort of lives it.”

  “Sounds reckless.”

  “He’s brave
,” I said. “And smart, and colourful, and funny.”

  Ernest smiled. “And how did you lose him?”

  I told him I hadn’t seen Thurston since a week before we left the States. I said he had no idea where I was, and I had no way of finding him either.

  “We fell out,” I said. “I don’t think he was talking to me.”

  He smiled. “What did you do?”

  I felt like crying. That doesn’t happen often, to me. “I hurt his feelings.” I told him. “I said some things I shouldn’t. And then I got dragged here, so I lost him. He’s a needle in a haystack.”

  Ernest nodded. “The world is a very big place when you’re looking for someone.”

  “I miss him,” I said. “And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.”

  “Get on with the business of living,” Ernest told me. “You don’t have any other choice.”

  The second time I met Thurston I was burning leaves in an empty swimming pool on an abandoned lot over by Long Beach, repossession central. The pool liner was this bright grimy turquoise and the leaves that had fallen into it were copper and chestnut and desert red. I was happy. I remember that. I looked up through the thick, sweet smoke and he was standing on the edge, looking down at me. I recognised him straightaway, the boy from the subway, still tall, still pale, still skinny. Suddenly there was a point to things, a reason for them. That’s what it felt like, seeing him again.

  “Hey,” he said. “It’s you,” and he smiled and jumped in, one hand on the side, landing light on his feet in the dry deep end.

  The leaves spat and settled and he put his hand out across the fire to shake mine.

  “Thurston,” he said.

  “Iris.”

  “Do you remember me?” he said. “From the subway?”

  I nodded. “The boy with the messages.”

  “Did you start the fire on Willow and Melrose,” he said, “in the bakery?”

  “No,” I said.

  He dropped his head to one side, crinkled up his eyes. “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t do buildings,” I said. “Not working ones. Not like that.”

  “But swimming pools are OK.”