I shrugged. “I’m just tidying up.”
He looked around at the weed-choked yard, at the broken lawn chairs and left-behind toys and smashed-up deck. “That’s one way of putting it.”
He asked me how old I was.
“Nearly fourteen,” I said. “You?”
He smiled. “Nearly seventeen.”
He picked up an armful of leaves and dumped them on the heap, but before he did it he asked me if it was OK. “May I?” he said. I liked that.
I watched the flames and Thurston watched me for a quiet, crackling minute.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
Leaves have this tang when they’re burning, like nuked fruit juice. I can’t think of a better way to put it than that.
“You need a mark,” he said.
“What?”
“A sign or something.”
“Why?”
“Say which fires are yours. Show where you’ve been. So I know.”
“So you know? Why do you want to know?”
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to leave it so long next time, to see you.”
He got these paint cans out of his jacket and started spraying the wall of the pool. His back was half to me and I couldn’t see what he was doing, but it was over pretty quick and when he stepped back there was an eye: sharp black pupil, clean white ball, swirling bright circle of colour.
“Iris,” he said. “That’s you,” and then he jumped up out of the pool like there was still water in it to lift him. I didn’t want him to go.
“Use it if you want,” he said. “See you around.”
Back home I practised drawing it the way he did, until I got it right. Then after that I started leaving little eyes in all sorts of places; along my ride to school, outside our apartment, on the boarded-up windows of the emptied houses, their lightless rooms dark against the sky like missing teeth. It got to be a habit. It got so I couldn’t stop. When I saw that eye up against a door or a fly-poster or a stretch of ground, I knew I was somewhere and that Thurston was somewhere too, noticing me.
Nobody really noticed me at Ernest’s. It wasn’t about me and that was fine. There was this tug-of-war going on – the nurses on one side doing what they could to keep him comfortable and alive, Hannah and Lowell on the other side willing him to die, giving it all they’d got. I guess I slipped through a gap somewhere in the middle, because it was the quietest place to be. I kept thinking that if I could just tune in to the right frequency, I’d hear the sound of all that struggle, the way a dog hears things streets away that don’t even register with the human ear.
And then after two or three days of doing his best to hope for the worst, Lowell decided it was time to go back to London, or my mother decided for him, it’s always hard to tell. He was happy enough to do it. He was up for a role in a daytime soap so he needed to get back and get to grips with his Yorkshire accent. I had no idea he was leaving until I saw him with his suitcase in the hall. He didn’t even stop walking, that’s how little I counted. He waved at me over his shoulder. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“You’re going?” I said.
“I’ve got a job. An audition. They asked for me.”
I followed him out to the car. “Since when?”
Lowell slung his case on to the back seat and slammed the door. He was somewhere else already. In his head, he’d finished filming, been taken out for lunch and offered a spin-off series of his own. I know that’s how his mind works. The only thing that’s ever mattered to Lowell is his big break, and he’s kind of heroic, I suppose, for always charging after it, for believing without fail that it’s just round the bend. He could take or leave most of the real world but he’d go to the ends of the earth for a sniff of fame. I guess that’s how we ended up in LA in the first place, chasing Lowell’s disappearing dream. It’s an addiction of sorts, like Hannah’s credit card problem, or my thing about fire. You’d have thought we’d all understand each other better by now.
“I’d say you’re here to the bitter end, Kiddo,” he said, and he winked because he really couldn’t have cared less, and got in the car. My mother came outside and stood behind me as he gunned it up the drive and on to the road.
“Right,” she said, clapping her hands together, turning back towards the house. “Let’s get to work.”
“What are we doing?” I asked her.
“Do you remember that place we rented in San Diego?” she said.
“Yep.”
“Do you remember how the landlord had a list of every single damn thing in that apartment so that when somebody broke the lightshade and the sun loungers he kept all the money from our deposit?”
Hannah and Lowell threw one hell of a party in that place when he got a speaking part in a movie (third cop – he ended up on the cutting-room floor). The lightshade broke because four half-dressed people were swinging on it. The sun loungers got thrown into the pool. I was eight or nine. Three different men came into my room that night and tried to pee in the corner.
“I remember,” I said.
“Well, we’re going to make a list like that,” Hannah said.
“Of what?”
“Of everything in this house. So we know what’s coming to us when he dies.”
“You’re serious?”
“Room by room,” she said. “If anything goes missing, I want to be able to tell.”
“Does Ernest know?” I asked.
Hannah looked at me like I hadn’t been listening. “Of course he doesn’t know. And there’s no need to tell him. He’s unconscious most of the time. He doesn’t even know what day it is.”
“I think he does.”
I’d started to think that Ernest was overdoing it a bit when Hannah was around. Not faking it exactly, but he got drowsier when she walked into the room. He sagged and drooled and aged. He was hiding from her behind the thing she was so busy seeing, which was how little time he had left.
“He’s on his way out,” she said. “He’s half gone already.”
“Nice,” I told her. “Really soft-hearted.”
“This is insurance,” she said. “I’m thinking ahead. I’m protecting our assets. I’m trying to do the right thing.”
Just to be clear, my mother has never tried to do the right thing. She wouldn’t know it if it hit her square in the face. But she’s a survivor, I guess. She knows how to keep her head above water, if nothing else.
She handed me a notebook and a pen.
“Start in the dining room,” she said. “I know for a fact there’s Baccarat crystal in there, and box-loads of eighteenth-century silver. Just count it and write it down. That’s a new car at least, in one sideboard. You’ve no idea how wealthy Ernest is. And we haven’t even started on the art.”
“You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you,” I said.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said with a straight face, like there was any other way to take it, “but it’s the answer to all our problems. This is a fresh start for us. Ernest couldn’t be doing this at a better time.”
I walked away from her.
“Oh, and Iris,” she said, her chin stuck out in fight mode, her teeth pressed so tight together I could see the line of her jaw. Hannah has this thing about a double chin, like it’s an offence worse than murder to ever get one. The tendons in her neck stand up under her skin like witch’s fingers, like a handful of sticks.
“What?”
“If you find matches, or a lighter, and you put them to anything, anything in this house, I swear to God I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” I said.
“I’ll kill you.”
It was her fault. I pictured her collapsed and wailing by a heap of burning treasure and I couldn’t stop smiling. She started it.
“What’s so funny?” she asked me.
“Now you’re just putting ideas into my head,” I said.
Back home, before we left everything behind in such a hurry, Hannah’s closet was filled to bur
sting with all her best things: her skirts and handbags, her elaborate, wire-boned underwear, and all of her spike-heeled, angry-looking shoes. More than half her debts probably occupied the shelves and hangers in that thing, walk-in proof of her compulsive shopping habit, her addiction to plastic, serotonin and sky-high rates of interest. She tended that closet like you would a garden. She lavished more attention on those few square feet than she’d ever mustered up for me. What can I say? It went up in flames like it was born to, like it had only ever wanted to burn all along.
It wasn’t spite. I didn’t plan it. It was the first time I lit a fire because things got beyond my control. I don’t remember having any say in the matter. I don’t recall there being a choice.
She and Lowell were throwing a lunch party for some hotshot media couple, a casting director and an agent, I think, something like that, some supposedly irresistible combination of power. They’d been planning it for months, like it might actually amount to something. Lowell couldn’t get enough of grabbing me by the arm and telling me in a hushed kind of shout how important this was, how make or break career-wise. And I got it. I’m not all bad. Awkwardness aside, I was willing to try.
They brought their Neanderthal teenage son with them, Jesse, so it was my job to look after him. When they showed up, everyone got a drink and Jesse was tall and broad and charm and politeness and straight teeth. He said “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am” like some perfect, cherry-pie-eating, football-playing all-American dreamboat. Hannah was quite taken with him. I could see that. She has a better smile for the attractive ones, however old or young they might be. She looks up at them so you can see the low whites of her eyes.
Everyone was getting on fine in a fake kind of way and after a while Jesse asked to see my room.
“Good idea,” said Hannah, biting into the surface of her ice-cold vodka. “You youngsters go ahead and get acquainted.”
On the way up the stairs, I told him there wasn’t much to look at, and Jesse pulled a fat joint out of his pocket and smiled.
He said, “I’m sure we’ll stay entertained.”
We smoked the joint and my head felt heavy on my neck and numb like I’d stuffed it with wet cotton wool. I wanted to be out in the open air with Thurston, not shut in with this plastic-perfect jock. I took Jesse’s box of matches and held on to it, as if it was the guardrail, and we were two hundred storeys up. I had a kind of shadow on me that I couldn’t shake off. He looked at me and laughed and laughed.
It turns out we had very different ideas of what entertainment meant. After ten minutes he had me pinned under him on my single bed. His breath was sour and hot in my face and his eyes were glazed over, like he didn’t even see me any more. He tore my T-shirt. He hurt my arms.
“Get off me,” I said, but he didn’t.
“Don’t touch me,” I said, but he did.
I could see my shut door from where I was lying. I shouted. I called HANNAH and HELP ME and SOMEONE PLEASE and I could hear them downstairs, I could hear their low stupid jazz and their giddy, getting-to-know-you laughter, so how come they couldn’t hear me? When Jesse started undoing his fly, I dug my nails into his face hard and pulled, got out from under him and ran. I locked myself quick in Hannah and Lowell’s bedroom. I heard him moaning and cursing and calling me a frigid little bitch. The fire started in me then. I felt it ignite. My parents were downstairs pinning their hopes, networking like crazy, playing host like the rest of their lives depended on it, and I knew they’d already failed, because of me. That bastard Jesse would go in bleeding, and make up some story, and the whole thing would be over before it was really begun. They hadn’t even served the food yet.
I went into Hannah’s closet to hide. I listened. It was dark and quiet and my heart was pounding in my ears like bass from a speaker. Jesse must have gone down around then, because I heard a scream and raised voices, and Hannah’s footsteps on the stairs.
I still had Jesse’s matchbox. I shook it and the matches ratcheted up against one end and then the other. I pushed it a little way open and touched them where they were sleeping, then I tipped them into the palm of my hand and counted them one by one. There were twenty. Ask anyone who’s interested, twenty matches is a find, twenty fires if you don’t waste any and you pay attention to what you’re doing.
Hannah was storming through the top floor, swearing and slamming things, looking for me. She tried the door of her bedroom. I heard the handle rattle.
“Get out here, Iris,” she said. “Get out here and explain yourself.”
I stayed where I was.
“He touched me,” I said, and I expected her to at least get it, but she didn’t.
“He what?”
“He hurt me,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hannah said through the door. “Come out right now and say sorry.”
I held on to that first match a little while before I struck it. I didn’t put the light on. I folded myself up in the dark and the quiet, bringing my breath back down to normal, feeling the weight of the match hardly there in my hand, rubbing the tip with my thumb. When I brought it down on the side of the box it sparked fast, orange-white, and then it flamed up bright and lit my skin a deep golden yellow in the gloom. I held on to it as long as I could while the spent end glowed and then dimmed, black and withered and done. One delicate curl of smoke furled upwards like an opening fern when I dropped it.
“Are you listening to me, Iris?” she said.
“No,” I told her, my mouth pressed up against the wall.
I did it again. The smell of the second match was like hot sun and brimstone and dust and autumn leaf. There was a space at the base of the flame, a little wavering hollow and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was that silence and emptiness I craved, the absence at the heart of it. I wanted to climb right in. Nobody would think to bother me in there.
My mother didn’t let up. She told me I was selfish and ungrateful and unhinged. The longer I stayed quiet the more toxic she got. She said a lot of things through that door, but I didn’t satisfy her with an answer.
It was the seventh or eighth match that I held to the net hem of one of her dresses. It went up like touch paper and in less than half a minute, Hannah’s rack of clothes was raging. The paint on the closet wall started to blister. The harder it burned the less angry I got, the quieter it was in my head. I came out slowly. I shut the door and watched smoke pumping itself through all the cracks and spaces it could find, in a great rush to get out into the room. The flames started coming with it, feasting on my mother’s possessions, devouring her closet from the inside out.
“Iris?” she screamed, banging on the door with her fists. “What’s going on?”
I pulled the bedroom door open and walked straight past her like she wasn’t there. The smoke rolled out of the room. The glass in her hand fell and bounced against the skirting, trailing droplets of vodka like tears. She said SHIT and WHAT THE? and OH MY GOD, IRIS, JESUS CHRIST and then Lowell came running. The two of them filled jugs and bowls with tap water and flung them at the fire. They drowned towels and blankets in the shower and dragged them down the hall to throw on to the flames. They were all activity and repetition, like a panicked hive. I didn’t help. I didn’t want to put my fire out. I wanted it to burn and burn.
When it was done, they took turns wailing and yelling until I stopped hearing them, until there was no air left in the room for the sound to carry.
At some point, the power couple took their darling boy home. They saw themselves out before anyone could stop them. Jesse got away with it. Hannah was too busy crying in the wreckage of her stupid outfits, her Louboutins and her Ungaro and her Donna Fucking Karan.
“You might have killed us all,” she said, fists full of ruined fabric.
Lowell had his head in his hands. He’d already turned that almost-lunch into the mythic, one clear chance of his acting career. He’d already decided it would be my fault now, if he didn’t make it.
He asked m
e what the hell I was thinking. I picked at a hole in my shorts and I didn’t bother to tell him that the beauty of it was that I hadn’t been thinking at all. That’s the thing about a good fire. It empties your head completely. It razes everything to the ground so there’s nothing left. It’s the very definition of calm.
I took in the stench and the smoke and the soaked carpet and the ruined, irreplaceable clothes and the great smouldering wound of a closet and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was worth it. I knew I would have done it all again.
That night, instead of sleeping, I thought about rage and what else I might like to burn to the ground. I thought about Jesse, trapped in a building, with all the exits blocked, eaten alive by flames. I wished for an inferno wherever he was, harder than I’d wished for anything else in my simmering, sad little life.
And early in the morning, while Hannah and Lowell were still sleeping it off downstairs, I went into their damp and blackened room with my old paint set and I painted an eye on the window, the pupil small and black, the eyeball white and the iris as close as I could get it to the colour of fire, like someone staring into a flame. When I left the house to look for Thurston, it watched me. It followed me all the way down the street. It didn’t blink.
The first night Hannah and I were alone here, the day Lowell left, I got called into Ernest’s room very late. Lisa the night nurse crept in to get me.
“Who’s that?” I said, sitting up in the dark.
“He’s asking for you, Iris.”
“Me? Where’s my mother? Can’t she go?”
She said Ernest didn’t want her there, only me.
In his room, Ernest held on to my hand like he’d fallen into quicksand and I was the one pulling him out. He said there were things he hadn’t explained yet. He said he needed to unburden himself and I thought, oh here we go, he’s going to get it all off his chest and dump it on mine.
“Do you have to?” I said, and he seemed to think about it. I gave him some credit for that.
I stayed quiet. I thought it was the smart thing to do. I tried to make a list in my head of places I’d rather be. 1. With Thurston. 2. The airport. 3. The Grand Canyon. 4. The middle of the ocean. 5. Mars.
Fire Colour One Page 6
