Fire Colour One

by Jenny Valentine

  “Why didn’t you say something before?” Ernest asked. “Why did you bring her here if she’s such a threat?”

  “You told me to,” she said. “You wanted it.”

  I could almost taste it, his disapproval, of her or of me, I wasn’t sure.

  “That mattered all of a sudden, did it?” he said. “What I wanted?”

  “We left the States,” she told him, “because Iris burned us out. People were threatening to sue.” I pictured her pinching her finger and thumb together. “She was this close to getting arrested for arson, or sectioned, or both.”

  Neither of them spoke. I stood still in the quiet, hardly breathing, hearing even the sound my eyelids made when I blinked. I should have told him myself. What must he think of me now?

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” said Hannah.

  “She lights fires.” Ernest sounded far away, like he’d been punching the morphine button.

  “She’s dangerous.”

  “What do you want from me?” he said.

  Hannah stood up again and walked across the room.

  Ernest asked, “What does your boyfriend say?”

  “Nothing,” Hannah told him. “He says nothing useful at all.”

  “About Iris? Or about everything?”

  “Don’t change the subject, Ernest,” she said.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  “I need to borrow some money,” she said, “to take care of her.”

  I should have seen it coming. With my mother, all roads lead to that. Hannah would tap him for a few thousand, not for a private facility or a hospital or a school, but to get her out of Dodge with her creditors. My mother wouldn’t throw good money after something bad like me.

  “Well, I’ve plenty of money,” Ernest told her. “You know that.”

  She smiled. I heard it in her voice.

  “And let me have the paintings,” she cooed. “I’ll take care of them.”

  “You should have come back before now,” he said. “We might have salvaged something.”

  “You and me?” she said.

  “No. Me and Iris.”

  “You know what your collection means to me,” she whispered.

  “It means money to you,” he said. “I think with Iris it’s about the art.”

  She licked her lips. I heard her.

  “Why should I believe a word you say?” Ernest asked her.

  “I’m not a monster,” Hannah told him. “I am your wife and the mother of your child. Whatever else has passed between us, I am the woman who has given you that.”

  They were quiet in there for a moment and then Ernest said, “I want to leave Iris something. What can I give her?”

  “Just leave her one painting,” Hannah said. “Give her that new one. It’s not my thing.”

  “Just one?” he said.

  “Leave the rest of them to me,” she said. “I wouldn’t trust Iris with anything that hasn’t already burnt down.”

  I went down the back stairs to the old kitchen and I cried for exactly one minute, out of anger more than anything. I went through the house like a bug bomb, in and out of everything, picking up anything that could start a fire, cramming it all into my pockets. I emptied Hannah’s handbag. I took her lighter and her cigarettes, and her phone too, just to piss her off. Then I came out to get my bike. It was leaning up against the wood store. I tried not to think about that neatly stacked firewood wall splitting and burning and caving in on itself in a heap of fire and rage and ash. I grabbed a stack of old newspapers and a jar of white spirit I found in a shed. I took my bike straight to the other side of the woods, crashed it across long fields and through wet grass and down bone-rattling paths.

  I didn’t want Ernest hearing that stuff about me. Not from her. I knew what knowing it would do. I thought I could hear it in his voice already – knowledge, contempt and distance. He would wash his hands of me all over again. Who wants to have a problem child? Not him. Not a man who didn’t want to be a father in the first place.

  I kicked out a big dip in the soft ground with my heels and filled it with dust-dry leaves and snaps of kindling. I struck a match. It made my heartbeat pop like a hit of strong caffeine, like an adrenalin shot. I put the flame to a clutch of dead and tangled grass, dropped it on a nest of papers. It flickered and spread. I crossed cuttings and small branches like a lattice across the top of the bowl, like the bars of a cage, and the fire ate through them, hungry as hell. The air got thick and sharp and my eyes watered. When I dragged some of the larger branches on to the flames and sprinkled them with white spirit, they cracked and sighed and blackened as the thing began to take hold. For a while I stopped thinking. It started to get dark and I was doing a pretty good job of clearing the forest floor of anything fit to burn. It looked like a swept carpet. The fire was huge. They must have heard it booming and crackling from inside the house. They would have seen its vengeful, halo glow, flinging light and shadows out across the fields. I wondered if they watched, or drew the curtains and turned their backs on it. That would be the difference between us.

  All night I dragged fallen branches and scrub and clusters of hissing spruce on to the flames. I didn’t stop to rest or think. It took up all the air and space and noise in my head. I was trying to burn my mind clean with it.

  I explained it to Thurston once, because he was interested, because he bothered to ask. I find it near enough impossible to look anywhere else when there’s a fire burning. It dips and flares and travels and breathes, a living thing, and it occupies me completely. I think about how old it is, this scrap of magic, this creator and destroyer, how fundamental and miraculous, how constant and opposite. I think about the dancing, shifting, elusive character of a fire, of the colours it paints, unlike any other colours I will ever find, in a whole lifetime of looking. I am seduced by it. It gets me every time.

  In the morning, Hannah came to find me. I heard her moving through the woods before I saw her. I heard the broken cereal crunch of leaves and snapped twigs under her feet. I hadn’t slept. My fire was still burning and I was still angry. So was she. The walk through the forest had messed up her hair and ruined her shoes.

  “How could you?” I said.

  She glared at me, one part mascara, two parts war. “Ernest deserves to hear the truth.”

  “Why?” I said, and I found it hard to look at her. “What good does it do?”

  “That’s hardly the point.”

  I couldn’t stand the thought of him lying there in his room, knowing all this about me. I wondered what else I was supposed to feel, apart from fury and disappointment, apart from shame.

  I should have told him myself. She should have let me.

  “What was the point of bringing me out here?” I said. “If you were just going to turn him against me, why did I have to come?”

  Hannah didn’t answer. She just stood there picking bits of leaf and twig off the front of her sweater.

  “You ruined everything,” I said. “You are such a bitch.”

  She smiled. “Well there you are, you both probably still agree on something.”

  I wiped my hands down the sides of my jeans, wiped my face with my sleeve. I was shaking. My fire wasn’t working, not any more. I didn’t feel calm, or empty, or better. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. I wanted to hit her. If Thurston had been there he’d have held on to me, and talked me down. He would have understood me, even if nobody else did.

  “Anyway,” my mother said. “Ernest wants to talk to you.”

  I asked her what for and she said, “How should I know?”

  She stood there with her arms folded, drumming her long fingers on her own elbows. I didn’t move.

  “Are you coming or aren’t you?” she asked me, and I said I didn’t know.

  “Well, I’m not waiting,” she said, brushing her palms together, scratching at her neck, reaching up to fix her hair. “This place is crawling.”

  “So go,” I said. “I didn’t ask you to
come and get me.”

  “No,” she said. “He did.”

  When she left, I watched her disappearing through the trees and it hit me for the first time just how tired I was of all of it, of being here and being alone and trying to stay upright, trying to be so damn strong. I didn’t think I had any fight left in me, so I gave up. I got my bike and followed Hannah back to the house. I couldn’t stay by the fire forever, and I had no idea what else I was supposed to do. I didn’t catch up and walk with her. I didn’t overtake, even though I knew a quicker way. I just stayed behind at a safe distance, like you do when you track a wild animal, because you can never be sure when they are going to turn on you and let down their claws and attack.

  I brought the smell of fire into Ernest’s room, the proof of my guilt, right there in the air around us. I’d washed my hands and face but my clothes still stank. Hannah went ahead of me up the stairs and when we walked in he didn’t take any notice, not at first. Dawn was shaving him without disturbing the oxygen tube that ran between his upper lip and nose like a moustache, keeping his blood fed, given his lungs’ reluctance to do so. He didn’t say a word until she was finished, and when he did speak, he sounded bone weary. You could hear it.

  “Ladies. Leave us, please.”

  Dawn went first but my mother stayed put with her hands on her hips.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  Ernest waved her away with his hand.

  “Go and cash your cheque, Hannah,” he said. “Go into town and bank it, before I change my mind.”

  She thought about arguing, I watched her think it through, and then she backed out, closing the door behind her. Ernest motioned for me to open it again so we could be sure she was gone, and not listening like before. Outside, a breeze brushed through the trees. Birds trilled and whistled. Somewhere I could hear a tractor, the odd car passing. Other than that the silence between us felt like lead injected straight into the air. Ernest broke it first.

  “Margot was like you,” he said. “She felt better when something was burning.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Cleaner and calmer,” he said. “That’s what she told me, something like that.”

  I emptied my pockets on to a table, matches and lighters and rags and sticks and old paper. I said I was sorry he hadn’t heard it from me.

  “We all have our secrets,” he told me. “I wouldn’t blame you for that.”

  I should have said I wouldn’t blame him then, for leaving me alone my whole life, but I held it in. I kept it to myself. I still feel bad about that.

  “Are you worried now,” I asked him. “About your stuff? About your collection and everything, with me here?”

  “Should I be?”

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t do anything to damage your paintings, or hurt you,” I said.

  Ernest smiled. “I didn’t think so.”

  “If there’s a fire inside this house, I swear it won’t be because of me.”

  “I know,” he said. “I believe you.”

  “I don’t know why she told you,” I said. “She didn’t have to do that.”

  “Radix malorum est cupiditas.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

  “Yep,” I said. “You got that right.”

  Ernest let out a breath and it hurt him. I could see how much it hurt. I looked around the room. There were three photos of me on the dresser, silver-framed Irises aged one and two and three. I hadn’t noticed them before.

  “Are you ashamed of me?” I said. “Am I a disappointment?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Don’t think that.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you,” I said. “I really wouldn’t.”

  Ernest shifted himself in the bed. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “I used to know how I’d answer,” I said. “I don’t any more.”

  “What did Hannah tell you,” he said, “about me?”

  “Nothing good. Why?”

  “I just wondered what you knew.”

  I looked out of the window because I couldn’t look at him.

  “She said you weren’t cut out to be a father. She said the whole children thing left you cold.”

  “Not true.”

  “She said you weren’t interested. She said you threw us out and knew where we were the whole time but you chose never to contact us.”

  He shook his head. His voice was cracked and swallowed but he got the words out in the end. “She’s lying, Iris.”

  Those pictures you see of people who have spontaneously combusted, those old, black and white photos of a pipe and slippers and just a heap of ash. I was about to be one of those. I could feel it. Any minute now I would be nothing but dust.

  Ernest’s skin was dull like wax, beaded with sweat. He pressed the button for his morphine, three times. He looked up at the ceiling. His eyes kept closing. He dropped off for about twenty seconds and then his breathing stopped and he woke right back up again with a start, like something made him jump.

  “It was impossible,” he said. “So I gave up.”

  “What was impossible? Being my dad?”

  “All the questions I asked,” he said, “and the people I paid, who tried and failed.”

  “What do you mean,” I asked him, “people you paid? What are you talking about?”

  “I would have traced them there,” he told me, words slurring slightly, “but they changed their names.”

  “Ernest,” I told him. “Look at me. I’m Iris, right? I’m not Margot. Do you know that?”

  He looked at me sideways. He didn’t turn his head.

  “Funny,” he said. “If Lowell had found any kind of success as an actor, I’d have found you.”

  “Were you looking for me?” I said, and I felt this thundering in my chest, like horses’ hooves, like the spilling lip of a waterfall. “I didn’t know you were looking for me.”

  Ernest closed his eyes again. He spoke without opening them. “For over twelve years. One hundred and forty-six months. Six hundred and thirty-two weeks.”

  I moved closer to him, dragging the old smell of burning halfway across his room.

  “Four thousand, four hundred and twenty-six days, to be precise,” he said.

  “You counted?” I asked him, and something bloomed in my head when I said it, something like wonder, or relief.

  He nodded. “Where did they get the name ‘Baxter’ from anyway,” he said, like I would know. “A tin of soup?”

  “What are you saying?” I asked. “They changed their names? Why would they do that?”

  Ernest was quiet for a moment. I think he was deciding on the right words. High up in my chest I felt the buzz and flap of wings, like a flock of birds, or those hillsides thick with butterflies, or a swarm of bees.

  “So I wouldn’t find them,” he said. “So I wouldn’t find you.”

  “But they didn’t want me,” I said. “Not really.”

  “No, but I did.”

  I think I steadied myself at the foot of his bed. I think I looked down at my fingers clinging on there. I remember I felt like I wasn’t in the room, not any more, and also that I’d never been more in a room in my life.

  “You weren’t the only thing they stole from me,” Ernest said, and he turned his face to the window, “but you were the most precious.”

  I sat down. I saw the shape of his legs in the bed, thin and wasted, and I sat beside him.

  “And if they did this to you,” I said.

  “To us,” he interrupted.

  “Then why would they come here? Why would they bring me back?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve asked myself the same question. I think they ran out of rope.”

  “And you were ill,” I said.

  “A real gift horse,” Ernest added. “A real piece of luck, for them.”

  He was paler than ever, contorted somehow against the pain.

  “Call the nurse,
” he said. “I’m sorry. This is unbearable.”

  I went out into the hallway and shouted for her. She wasn’t far. I heard her running. When I came back, Ernest reached for my hand and I held on to it.

  “Stay, please,” he said. “Don’t leave before me.”

  I could feel his panic like static through the tips of his fingers. I’m surprised my heart didn’t swell and burst free of my chest at that, his fear, his brave smile when our eyes met. I’m surprised Dawn didn’t have to get down and defibrillate it, where it landed at her feet.

  Ernest and I could have been Father and Daughter. We could have been such good friends.

  Dawn was calm and she knew what to do – an intravenous dose of something, a jab of something else. Ernest’s face softened and his grip on my hand did too.

  “How’s the pain, Ernest?” she asked.

  His eyes were shut. “Magnificent.”

  “Still got your sense of humour I see.”

  “Hanging on by a thread,” Ernest told her. “Hanging on by a thread.”

  He pulled at my hand until I got closer and bent down to hear him speak.

  “Your mother will be back soon,” he whispered. “There isn’t much time.”

  “I’m listening, Ernest,” I said. “I’m here.”

  Ernest painted my mother a few times at the beginning, never successfully. Apparently, Hannah was a terrible life model. She couldn’t sit still. She couldn’t seem to hold a thought in her head long enough for him to get it on to the canvas. Even his sketches of her lacked something. He said, “It was like trying to see into a woman made of chrome.”

  He thought it was his mistake but later he saw that those sketches were pretty accurate, and that what he was getting was a clear picture of who she was now, all surface, all restlessness and emptiness and boredom. She’d erased her past until there was nothing left.

  Hannah filled the house with people. She said if they weren’t allowed to live in London, then London would have to come to them. She never tired of flaunting her new money before her friends. Lowell Baxter was a regular fixture apparently, dark and striking, the planes and lines of his face so accurate, so perfect that he seemed to be made of something different to the rest of them, he and Hannah both.