Fire Colour One

by Jenny Valentine

  I set fires in all four corners of the room and stood in the middle watching them lick and snap and spread together. Shadows reared up against the walls. The shelves caught fire, and then the stacked tables and the frame of the door. The heat began to bend itself tightly around me, and things began to break and flare and pop. I heard the rumble in the air the fire made, like faraway thunder, like a herd of distant cattle and then the air began to spit and hum and crackle. I tried the door handle but it wouldn’t move. I did it again but the lock was stuck shut. I couldn’t get it open. My hair started to shrink and sizzle in the heat. I could taste fire in my mouth. My eyes were scorched and dry and my lungs were already heaving with the smoke.

  Nobody heard me banging on the door, not to start with. I think I was coughing, bent double on the floor in the raging dark when they broke it down. I think they smashed the lock with an axe. The fire leapt out into the hallway like a caged lion. I heard them all as if I was underwater. I saw them from behind glass. The blood moved through my veins like molasses, everything slowed down and sticky. My throat burned raw and my chest felt weighted down with concrete, wrapped in iron.

  The alarm was wailing and I realised it had been wailing for some time before it reached me. The janitor and a couple of teachers swooped in with their eyes rolling in their heads and the fire extinguishers spoiling everything with white foam. When they saw me they started yelling and one of them dragged me out into the hallway and covered me with a coat, or a blanket. One of them stayed with me. He didn’t touch me but I could hear his voice and he was telling me over and over that things were going to be OK, as if he knew.

  By the time the fire truck and the ambulance arrived, the whole building had been evacuated. The place was bitter with damp smoke. Foam and ash mixed together like sludge. Everyone walked in it on their way out, spreading it about, like a blanket of snow fallen pure and spotless overnight until the people come out and spoil the morning, turning everything used and dirty-grey.

  I lay very still and pictured Thurston’s shrine, the notes and photos, the drawings and flowers. I thought if I died now, if this fire killed me, then he’d think I was punishing him. Thurston would think that of me, even if it wasn’t true.

  “All for you,” he had said, and I was shocked at myself, at the way I’d reacted, and at what I’d just almost done.

  At the hospital, I had to wait for someone to come and claim me. The same teacher who found me stayed in my room like a prison guard. Mr Banks, from the biology department. Everything about him was the colour of cement, his shirt and slacks and tank top, his shoes and hair and skin. He looked just like a statue propped there against the wall, so I pretended he was one, and ignored him.

  I got a psychiatric interview. Actually I got three. The nurse then the doctors then a social worker asked me the same prying, obvious questions about my levels of happiness and any trouble at home. They asked me if I had meant to hurt myself, or hurt others. I said no to both. I said it was a stupid accident. I said I wasn’t a self-harmer, nothing like that, and they looked at me like they’d heard it all before, which they probably had, but not from me. They dressed my burns and filled me with fluids and antibiotics. They treated my scalded lungs with pure oxygen and raised their eyebrows meaningfully at each other over my head. I didn’t want to speak to any of them. I didn’t want to answer anyone’s questions.

  They couldn’t get hold of Hannah or Lowell. Big surprise. Both of their phones were switched off. I was in no fit state to leave, they said, not until they were satisfied with my progress, and definitely not without a parent or guardian. I wanted to see Thurston then more than I’d ever wanted anything before. I wanted to say thank you and sorry and please, please help me get the hell out of here. My clothes were gone. My lungs were the size of teabags. I couldn’t have escaped if I’d tried. I heard them talk about hospitalising me. They discussed hypoxia and presentation of symptoms and lack of co-operation. A fly was trying to find its way out through a window. It was drilling a hole through the glass with its wings. It wouldn’t give up. There was a fly like that inside my body. I could feel it drilling in my skull.

  When my mother finally arrived, she was sweating under her make-up, all the careful layers of basecoat and highlight and concealer starting to slip. I could smell the vodka on her breath at ten paces. She was in the mood for a fight and I worried she’d had just enough alcohol to start one and just too much to be able to win it. I picked at the bandages on my hands and kept my mouth and my eyes tight shut. I pretended none of this was happening, not to anyone I knew and definitely not to me.

  She stood outside in the hallway with Mr Banks and lied at the top of her voice. He was trying to say something sensitive and understanding, he wanted to demonstrate the school’s concern, but my mother wasn’t buying into that. Never own up if you can help it. That was the Baxter way. Every time he opened his mouth to speak, she cut him off.

  She said, “There is no way this fire was started by my daughter.”

  She said the school was negligent. She said there must have been something dangerous in the storeroom for it to burst into flames like that with a child inside it.

  She said, “Have you got CCTV in that cupboard? No? Well good luck proving it.”

  She said, “You are very lucky something worse didn’t happen to her on school property. You should be grateful nobody else got hurt. You should be grateful we are not suing you.”

  The social worker and one of the doctors took Hannah into another room down the hall. I could still hear her voice, raised high above the others. I wondered how long my mother would pay attention before she decided she needed a cigarette, or another drink, or just to get the hell out of there because everyone was so serious and ordinary and ugly and she didn’t belong. She hated being made to feel like the responsible adult. They asked her if she’d brought me any fresh clothes. She looked at them like they were the ones not taking this seriously.

  “I. Was. At. Lunch,” she said.

  I stayed the night. The next day, when Hannah reappeared, without my clothes, they gave me a hospital T-shirt and sweatpants and let me leave as an outpatient. I had strict instructions for the next twenty four hours, a follow-up appointment to check on my burns. Hannah signed all the necessary forms and paid with a cheque that wouldn’t cash. I saw her write down the wrong address and phone number. There wasn’t any money in the kitty for medical bills. We wouldn’t be coming back.

  I’d heard them arguing about money the night before I did it. They owed nearly twenty grand in bills and back rent. Their credit cards were maxed out. Hannah was drunk and online, trying to book plane tickets back to the UK. Lowell didn’t want to go.

  “What choice do we have?” she hissed at him. “We came out here so you could make it, and you plainly haven’t.”

  Lowell groaned. “It’s your nut-job daughter’s fault I didn’t get that mini-series,” he said. “Who lit a fire upstairs when the casting director was here? I had that role in the bag before she assaulted his kid.”

  Hannah carried on typing. “Well my nut-job daughter is going to need medical help at this rate, thousands of dollars’ worth. She’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. Let’s get her back to the NHS, shall we? Let’s get her back to her bastard millionaire father, and tap him for some cash.”

  “She’s ruined everything,” Lowell told her, “your stupid kid.”

  Hannah sloshed more vodka into their glasses. “Believe me, I’ve thought about that more often than you have. It’s time to get out before she burns down a mall and everyone knows our business. Drink to it, Lowell. Give it up. It’s time to go.”

  When we got outside the hospital, I looked for Thurston on the street, even though I knew he wouldn’t be there. Everybody was him, for half a second, until they weren’t. My mother stopped and lit a cigarette. Her hair was coming loose and a strand of it was stuck to the hot skin of her neck. She looked up and then down Sunset Boulevard, getting her bearings, and then we set off heading
west and turned right, towards Barnsdall Park. Hannah was tall as a giraffe in her Louboutins. A big woman walked past us on the other side of the street, tipping from side to side as she moved. Her ankles were as plump and swollen as the tops of her arms.

  “That is the only time I do that for you,” Hannah said, looking again and again at the fat woman, like there was too much of her to see in one go. “Next time you’re on your own.”

  “Can we take a cab?” I asked. “I feel kind of light-headed.”

  “No money for cabs,” Hannah said. “I used my last twenty getting here.” She showed me her empty wallet and pulled a sad face. “The cupboard is bare. You can rest when we get home. You can go to bed and you can damn well stay there.”

  We walked down Vermont and turned left on Hollywood. I felt weak and hollow and dizzy. I thought my lungs were going to break out of my chest. In the park, I watched a little boy running wide, joyful circles around his dad. I saw a family lying back on a picnic rug. Somebody tall and skinny walked towards us on the path and I willed it to be Thurston, come to rescue me, but of course it wasn’t, he didn’t. The boy was tall and skinny but he was a disappointment, a total stranger, and he walked straight by.

  “So,” Hannah said, not looking at me. “I know you started that fire. The question is, did you admit it?”

  A breeze moved in the leaves around us. I could see it passing. I could see where it went.

  “No,” I said. “But they probably know.”

  “For God’s sake,” she yelled at me. A couple of people looked over.

  “What,” I said, “did I ruin everything?”

  “Is there anything we failed to give you?” Hannah asked. “Do you lack for anything, anything at all?” and because I didn’t know how to even begin answering that question, I didn’t try.

  “You’ll end up in a madhouse, or a prison. Arson is a very serious offence.”

  “They’re called psychiatric hospitals,” I told her. “You don’t say madhouse. You don’t say madhouse and you don’t say nut-job.”

  Hannah turned on me, jabbing her pointed finger against the flat, sore bones of my chest. “You do not get to tell me what I do and don’t say, young lady. Not now and not ever.”

  “You’re bothered about paying for it, aren’t you,” I said, “if I get in trouble. If I get locked up, or sectioned,” and Hannah slapped me then, across the cheek, which I took as a yes.

  We walked in silence for a minute and then she said, “You’ve burned our bridges. That’s what you’ve done.”

  Nice pun, I thought, please God tell me she’s not going to ask me what people would say.

  “What would people say?” She stopped abruptly on the narrow path, flinging her hands towards the trees.

  “It won’t happen again,” I lied. “I won’t get caught again,” I said, which was the truth.

  Ernest said the consultant who passed on his death sentence was young and exact and carefully sympathetic. He pinched his suit trousers straight before he sat down.

  “Nice socks,” Ernest told him after the bad news, after he’d taken it in and found that he was still breathing. The socks were pink with red spots. Ernest said you couldn’t miss them.

  The consultant looked lost for a second, like an actor asked to come out of character, and then he smiled and said, “Thanks. My daughter gave them to me.”

  Ernest felt the word ‘daughter’ like a blade in his side. He said he’d had a daughter once and then lost her.

  “I’m so sorry,” the doctor told him. “Did she die?”

  Ernest was getting ready to leave the room. He’d already put on his jacket.

  “Honestly?” he said. “I’ve no idea.”

  All the way home he said he thought harder than ever about where I might be at that precise moment, what I might be doing, living or dead. He thought about his doctor, charged with the task of telling him that after all the chemo and radio and surgery, there was nothing more to be done. He thought about what he might say to the next patient, and the one after that, in life-changing fifteen-minute slots, all day long, until he could go home and put his pink and red polka-dot feet up, and be with his daughter, and try to forget.

  He said, “I thought about everything but the facts in front of me, because I didn’t want to think about those.”

  Even while the doctor was explaining it all, a large part of Ernest decided he was wrong. It was the only way to put one foot in front of the other, the only way he could stay upright and get through the waiting room, out into the car park, round the one-way system and home. I suppose his brain was hardwired to ignore the truth so it could get on until the very last second with the business of living.

  But what if death is the one and only way that you do get to live forever? If the weight of the universe never changes, regardless of who’s living and who’s dying, that must mean we never leave it, not entirely. If I become a scrap of smoke and dust, if Ernest’s ashes get flung high into the wind from his top windows, if Thurston’s body falls to the bottom of the sea, if Lowell’s is picked apart by birds and Hannah’s is buried and melts slowly back to soil, aren’t we all still somewhere? Aren’t we all still here?

  Death might be the one true fact, the one thing you can rely on, but nobody wants to hear about it. You start trying to put a positive spin on the whole idea and you can clear the room quicker than a bad DJ at a wedding. Death is off limits. That’s why we put a hood on the executioner. None of us wants to see his face.

  I told Ernest that if I could, I’d come from the planet Tralfamadore, where time is like a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, and moments are like clusters of beads on a string, laid out before you, all there at once. There is no cause and effect, no before or then or next or after. There is no difference between what was, or is, or will be. You can exist and not exist on the same string, at the same time.

  “You can be dead and still alive,” I said, “if you’re a Tralfamadorian.”

  Ernest laughed and the world’s oceans gathered in his chest and tried to drown him. “Who said that? When can we travel?”

  “It’s Kurt Vonnegut,” I said. “He died already. If there’s such a thing as the afterlife, you’ll have to look for him when you get there.”

  I told him when Kurt Vonnegut fell down the stairs at his home at the age of 84, one newspaper wrote that reports of his death shouldn’t be believed without checking Dresden for his younger self first.

  Ernest had never read any Kurt Vonnegut. I pitied him and envied him all at once, that he’d missed out and that he had it still to come. I told him that Vonnegut was a Prisoner of War in Dresden and a witness to the Allied bombings in 1945. He came up from underground and almost everyone was dead, almost everything burnt to the ground. He was twenty-two years old. He had a lot to make sense of, and after more than twenty years of trying not to think about it, he wrote Slaughterhouse Five, and invented Tralfamadore.

  Thurston read that whole book to me out loud. He lay with his head in my lap and the book between him and the sun. It took about a week. I might never have been happier.

  “I’ll read it to you,” I told Ernest, “if we have time.”

  We didn’t.

  I tried to see Ernest’s life as a string of beads. I looked at pictures of him as a young man, balancing on a fencepost, leaning against a wall, squinting into the sun. I found a photo of their wedding day, he and my mother on the steps of the registry office, and below them a woman pushing a pram, a blur of cyclist, and a man out walking his dog.

  “Why did you never divorce?” I asked him.

  “I’d need her signature. I couldn’t find her.”

  “But if someone disappears for that long,” I said, “surely—”

  “She’s still my wife,” he said. “My next of kin.”

  He looked again at the wedding picture.

  “I can’t still be there now,” he said, “because everything is different.”

  Ernest was right. This isn’t the planet Tr
alfamadore, or anything like it. Everything here is bound by beginning and end, apart from the Universe, which is not only infinite but also expanding. I have a problem with something infinite getting any bigger, and I had a problem with Ernest’s death. I needed a stop sign, a pause button. Not quite, not now, not yet.

  Ernest said I shouldn’t worry. He said he was close enough to see it quite clearly, and given that he couldn’t stop it if he tried, he might as well admit, it wasn’t such a long way down.

  The world doesn’t end when the world ends, by the way; it keeps right on turning. The world ends and you get up and put your clothes on and clean your teeth and eat your breakfast like nothing has changed at all. It made me sick to my stomach after Ernest died, that I still found things funny, that I still got hungry or tired or bored or distracted, that after a while I started to forget about him for whole minutes and hours and days at a time. It made me want to burn something down, that I’d spent so many years acting like he didn’t exist when he was right there all the time. I didn’t think I could ever forgive my mother for what she did. I could set fire to every last thing in the world she possessed and it wouldn’t begin to change how I felt about that.

  Ernest’s last few days were strange and slow and fragile. We were very careful with each other. Every single thing we said and did seemed to have weight, seemed important. We were learning to live with it, I suppose, with what we knew for sure was about to happen. We were separate, like islands. He was separate, anyway. I think that’s the point I’m trying to make. Part of him had already sailed.

  He and my mother must have come to some kind of arrangement because three days before he died she suddenly backed off. She lost interest in the whole thing and went away. She took the Bentley. I figured she left because dying is so unglamorous and wretched and contagious and she didn’t want to have any part in it. Whatever. It gave us some space at least, my father and me. It gave us some time alone together at the end. Lowell phoned once or twice while she was still here, but only to talk about how good the catering was on set and how humble and down-to-earth the other actors were, like they were from another galaxy or something. He never called to engage with what was actually happening, in the real world, to us.