by Lissa Evans
Above the poorly pointed brickwork of number 33, above the dodgy guttering and the gappy slates and the wavering line of the roof ridge, the Apocalypse had arrived. A bank of smoke had turned the pinkish London sky a true night-time black, and from the mouth of the chimney a tongue of flame quivered, the wind pulling a spray of orange sparks from its tip and briefly brightening them before they blew to extinction. The lips of the chimney pot were blackened and a triangular chunk had broken away, leaving a gap through which a whiter flame was visible. A faint but constant roar, audible even against the wind, was punctuated by odd little cracks and tinkles that seemed to have no physical origin. Fran dragged her eyes to the front of the house and for a moment it seemed incongruously normal – the living-room curtains drawn, the hall light shining through the frosted glass of the front door – but there was an odd, blank look to the upstairs windows and with a jolt of realization she saw that it was smoke, pressed against the glass and obscuring the normal contours of Peter’s room.
She started running, the bags banging against her knees until she dropped them by the hedge and threw the front gate open, fumbling in her pocket for the keys. She jabbed at the bell over and over again, trying to open the door at the same time, but there was no response and in the end she needed both hands to guide the unsteady key into the lock. She was shouting Barry’s name as the door opened, and she stumbled into the hall where the air seemed smudged and grubby as if viewed through a dirty lens. The smell was acrid, almost industrial, and it caught the back of her throat like vinegar fumes. Her eyes started to water.
‘Barry! Where are you?’
She ran to the door of the living room, flung it open and saw flames. There was a second of horror, and then she saw the fire as it was: a baby fire, tame, tucked away in the grate, caged by a makeshift guard of two oven shelves taped to the surround; only just big enough, in fact, to ignite a hundred years of soot encrusted to the inside of the chimney. She looked around, wildly; the sofa bed had been folded and the room tidied by dint of shoving everything bar the furniture in one corner. Barry was not in it.
She ran into the hall again, and then, prompted by some dim memory of a fire lecture, spun round and slammed the living-room door. She took a deep breath, coughed, took another breath and then shouted his name as loud as she was able. In the quiet that followed she could hear the soft and ominous roar.
He was not in the kitchen, and the door to the garden was bolted from the inside. She shouted again, then took a tea towel, wet it under the tap and holding it in one hand, like a weapon, ran to the foot of the stairs and looked upwards. The landing light was on, and smoke hung like a theatrical curtain, a yard above the top step. It was not as dense as that which filled Peter’s room – she could see through it to the doors of the bathroom, and the junk room and her own bedroom at the back of the house – but she knew her own stupidity in approaching it. She should be outside, she should be phoning the fire brigade, she should be alerting the neighbours. Instead, she wrapped the tea towel around her mouth, and finding that the ends were too short to tie at the back, tucked them into the neck of her jumper; it might be that the whole business of wet tea towels was at best obsolete and at worst an urban myth, but for the moment it was a talisman against the fire, and with the soaking cloth in place she climbed the stairs, dropped to her knees and crept under the curtain.
It was only a few feet to the bathroom door, and she reached up and yanked it open.
‘Barry?’
It was in darkness but enough light bounced off the white enamel to show her that it was empty, and she backed out again and crawled along to the junk room. It was a jumble of looming shadows, a craggy landscape of trunks and suitcases, odd pieces of lino and stacks of newspaper, and a swift glance assured her that no one on crutches could even have got past the door. The tea towel was dripping down the back of her neck and a smell of wet carrot peelings held the acridity at bay but her breaths were rapid and scared and with every second the urge to run back downstairs again was stronger. The door of her room was slightly ajar and as she crawled towards it, she knew where she would find Barry; he had been hinting for days about the discomfort of the sofa mattress, and she was suddenly sure that he had taken advantage of her absence and was asleep in her bed. Or perhaps more than asleep. Heart thudding, she pushed the door further open and saw, in a band of light shining in through the window, the quilt stretching flat and unoccupied. There was a scrabbling noise from the far side of the room, and from beneath the dressing table two small green circles emerged. Mr Tibbs.
Fran knelt for a moment, trying to compose herself, and bit a fold of tea towel to moisten her mouth. Surely Barry wouldn’t have gone into Peter’s room? Surely he wouldn’t be in there now, lying on the bed by the chimney breast amidst the smoke that must have curled through the ventilation brick and filled the space with such deadly uniformity? What would happen if she even opened the door – would there be some dreadful escalation of the fire if she gave it an extra dose of oxygen? She hesitated. The cat crept towards her and pressed himself against her knee, and from just below the window she heard the familiar screech of bolts that signalled the opening of Iris’s back door. She raised herself slightly and peered over the frame. Diagonally below her was Iris’s kitchen.
Diagonally below her, one of the twins was flapping the door, evidently trying to get rid of cigarette smoke.
Diagonally below her, sitting at the table, having a fag, drinking a beer, laughing – actually laughing – while the other twin tried out his crutches, was Barry.
Barry was next door.
Impelled by amazement, her forehead clonked against the glass, and the twin by the door glanced upwards, did a visible double take and then starting shouting.
The cat tried to climb onto her lap and she grabbed it and headed for the door. As she scuttled, bent double, towards the stairs, Mr Tibbs panicked, somersaulted in her hands and tried to scale the front of her jumper, whipping away the tea towel in the process and raking her cheek with his claws. She jerked her head back and tried to drop him but his back legs were entangled in the wool and he kicked frantically and painfully until she wrapped her arms around him in a bear hug and ran down the stairs into the hall. The bell rang as she was freeing a hand to open the door and there was Tom – or Robin – on the doorstep, and Robin – or Tom – shouting over the hedge that he’d called the fire brigade, and then she was hustled, coughing, into the windy street.
Someone took a photo of her as she stood on the pavement opposite the house, wedged between Tom and Robin and about fifty thousand other people who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and it wasn’t until the flash left her blinking white silhouettes of the fire engine that she realized she was still holding Mr Tibbs and that her arms were beginning to ache under the weight. She looked at him and he looked back at her with his usual half-witted intensity and then the old lady who lived at number 21 and to whom she had never previously spoken came up and congratulated her on her bravery and offered the cat a refuge in her back kitchen. One of the twins had to detach him claw by claw before Fran could hand him over.
She felt strangely calm, shielded from the moment by sheer disbelief. The transformation of the suburban curve of Stapleton Road into a cockpit of frenetic activity – seething with uniforms, splashed with blue light, hemmed by the tapes of police barriers, criss-crossed by flaccid lengths of hose which arched into life at the twirl of a stopcock, the whole crowned with flame and smoke and arcing water – had the choreographed drama of a film set in which she was simply a spectator, craning her neck to see what was going on, as keen as the next person not to miss anything.
‘The chimney’s going to go,’ said someone, and with a kind of swooning elegance the whole stack crashed through the slates and a girl behind her screamed excitedly. There was a puff of black dust from the newly opened hole, and a flicker of light, and then suddenly the maw was filled with flames.
‘Jesus,’ said a twin and a thrilled mur
mur ran through the crowd.
At ground level there was a flurry of activity, and then the arcs of water shifted and converged and great clouds of white vapour began to boil from the hole.
‘Oh, it’ll go out now,’ said someone, disappointed.
‘Where’s Iris?’ asked Fran, suddenly.
‘Round at Grandad’s,’ replied a twin.
‘Where’s Barry?’
‘Over there.’
Through the shifting crowd she caught a glimpse of a drooping figure sitting on a garden wall, forehead resting against his crutches, eyes on the ground.
‘What was he doing round at yours?’
‘Borrowing some milk. Only he locked himself out.’
There was a noise like smashing crockery and she turned back to the house and saw a cascade of slates dropping into the garden, followed by a length of guttering which bounced off the porch and came to rest halfway across the garden wall.
‘I put that up,’ she said, almost indignantly.
The exposed roof beams looked like a broken toast rack and through the smoke she could just discern a big old suitcase that had belonged to her father and a roll of left-over loft insulation that had sucked in the water like a sponge and expanded to twice its width.
Then there was another crash and both items disappeared.
‘Upstairs ceiling’s gone,’ said someone, casually. In Peter’s room, water started running down the inside of the window.
‘I painted that room,’ said Fran. ‘And I put up the coving. And I got all the gunge out of the ceiling rose. It took me ages.’
‘What?’ asked one of the twins, his eyes still fixed on the devastation.
‘That’s my house,’ she said, and burst into tears.
The woman who had taken in Mr Tibbs gave Fran a nauseatingly sweet mug of tea which she drank, and one of the twins gave her a hug and a miniature bottle of vodka which she also drank, and the combination made her feel both better and worse: chemically buttressed against the immediate situation, but vulnerable, for the first time, to the awful practicalities that lay ahead. To one phone call in particular. A second miniature vodka appeared from somewhere and she took a nip and eased her way back through the thinning crowd towards the barrier. The hoses had been turned off and a new noise had replaced that of the pumps – a steady dripping, emanating from every sill and ledge and remaining gutter of number 33. The façade was largely intact and the house shone in the massed headlights, the newly washed bricks as red as when they’d first emerged from the kiln. The firemen had lost their intensity of purpose, and those not engaged in checking or packing equipment were standing around in a kind of post-coital stupor, gazing at the damage with what looked like admiration. Fran leaned across the striped tape towards one of the watchers.
‘Excuse me.’
‘What is it, love?’ He was a heavy-set man in his forties, with bloodshot eyes and a mournful expression.
‘That’s um…’ She gestured. ‘That’s my house.’
‘Is it?’ His face fell further. ‘You the owner?’
‘Yes.’
He shook his head. ‘That’s a real mess, that is.’
‘I know.’
‘If you’d kept your stack re-pointed we might have saved your roof, but…’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry, love, I really am. We did our best.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m not blaming –’
‘I mean that must be the worst chimney fire I’ve seen in ten years. Alan!’ He called over to a colleague. ‘I’m just saying that’s the worst chimney fire I’ve seen in ten years.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Alan, wandering over. ‘Easy.’
‘Ten years. And that was in…’
‘Walthamstow,’ said Alan. ‘Lovatt’s Lane. That was a stack collapse.’
‘But it fell the other way there. Missed the roof.’
‘Hit the shed.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s right. Killed a rabbit.’
‘Can I ask you something?’ said Fran.
‘What’s that then, love?’
‘There’s an old piano in the front room downstairs. Do you think it’ll be all right? I mean, do you think it’ll still be playable?’
Alan frowned.
‘Oh don’t get him started on pianos,’ said the other one.
‘How near is it to the fireplace,’ asked Alan, a wary note in his voice.
She shrugged. ‘Couple of yards?’
‘Couple of –?’ He looked as if he could hardly believe his ears. ‘And I bet you keep the lid up as well, don’t you?’
‘What?’
He exhaled slowly, and when he spoke again it was with an air of weary irritation. ‘Pianos need care. That’s what I’m always telling people – they’re delicate, they’re complex mechanisms. If you keep a piano that close to an open fire, it’ll already be ruined. Every time it’s lit you get an expansion of the metal infrastructure and then –’
‘It’s never been lit before,’ said Fran, exasperated. ‘That’s the whole point. I had a complete tosser staying in the house and he –’
‘It was me. She means me,’ said Barry huskily, limping towards them like a cut-price Spartacus. ‘It was all my fault. I was a bit cold,’ he added, undercutting the nobility.
‘I told him the chimney wasn’t swept,’ muttered Fran.
‘Yeah, but… I didn’t really know what that meant,’ he said, humbly.
The firemen exchanged glances. ‘In that case,’ said Alan, ‘it might be salvageable… depends how much water’s come through. Keys’ll be filthy, mind, from the smoke. You could try cleaning them with lemon juice.’
‘Thanks,’ said Fran, heavily. She looked at Barry.
There was something about his pallor and the hopeless set of his shoulders that reminded her of the day that Porky had escaped and she had yelled at him. She had been furious with him then, and had been equally furious when he had given her phone number to Janette and when he’d broken the banisters, and when – only a couple of days ago – he had failed to clean out the bath and left the fridge door open all night and forgotten to give her three phone messages. Over the months, as they had teetered from one trivial incident to another, she had used up an enormous amount of emotion on Barry. Now, though, with the knowledge that she had actually – and pointlessly – risked her life for him, had almost died saving a cat, was standing in the street because he had burned her house down, she realized that there was nothing left in her armoury. She’d wasted her ammo on small fry; today’s events were in a different league and for once she was floundering for a response.
‘Sorry,’ said Barry.
She sighed. ‘You great idiot.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
She could think of no appropriate reply to this. He edged a little closer. ‘What are you going to do now?’
She considered the question for a while, and the answer seemed to rise up with a sound of trumpets, with banks of choirs and a thunderous organ. ‘I’m going to live somewhere else,’ she said.
20
The poster drew Iris like a siren song. She had left the house with the sole intention of going round the corner to the Greek bakery and buying a bag of warm white rolls, but ten minutes and a quarter of a mile detour later she was once again walking past the covered market towards the library in search of her third fix in as many days. ‘Surprise!!’ the twins had shouted the first time, after they had led her the last few yards blindfold, but she had found each subsequent viewing almost as extraordinary as the first.
It was huge – six foot by three – a vast black-and-white photo, artistically grainy so that the images seemed to drift into focus as you approached. Tom was slightly in the foreground, only his head and shoulders visible, and his right hand which was holding an open copy of Utopia. His expression was intent, lips slightly parted, eyes apparently drowning in the text. Just behind him, in the same pose and wearing the same expression of counterfeit concentration was Robin; in his hand was a copy of The S
hining. Tom was wearing a white t-shirt, Robin a black one, and the poster caption read: ‘We’re all different. Local libraries – here for everyone. Let’s keep it that way.’
‘It’s not just us,’ Tom had explained. ‘They’ve used five sets of twins but they said we gave them the idea for the campaign.’
‘The photographer said we were brilliant,’ Robin had added.
‘They didn’t pay us but they let us keep the tshirts.’
‘And they said we could keep the books.’
‘Did you?’ she’d asked faintly, unable to tear her eyes from the image.
‘I kept The Shining,’ Robin had said, ‘but I couldn’t get into it.’
She’d gone back the next day with her father and he had stared at the poster in silence for some moments.
‘Has Tom read Utopia?’ he’d asked, eventually.
‘No,’ she’d said, with absolute certainty.
‘They should have asked you and me to do it, Iris.’ She had been quite touched by the suggestion.
This time, in the early quiet of a Saturday morning, with the pavement almost deserted and only the odd car swishing along the High Street, Iris could do what she had wanted to do from the first moment she had seen it: stand and gape. In the frozen moment, detached from the twins’ usual accompaniment of thuds and smells and amiable thoughtlessness and raucous laughter, away from the sheer ordinariness of their presence, she could look at her sons with amazement. They were beautiful; the camera saw it and so, now, did she. The combination of her own nondescript genes and Conrad’s borderline-handsome ones had come up with a couple of racehorses, glossy and perfect, flawless even in gigantic close-up. She almost had to remind herself of her relationship to these monochrome gods; she knew now that it would be hard to counter their latest career plan, vacuous though it was. They had been planning it for weeks without telling her.
