Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  He said: ‘Rest now.’

  The day is almost gone. We are far inland. Our path moves along a shallow spine of hills, a highway in prehistoric times. To one side the sea is out of sight: there are only downlands quartered into fields; on the other, the bays and woods of Poole harbour look interfused in the twilight. This has continued too long. Our daylight will end on a windy tableland in semi-darkness. She walks beside me, flushed and carelessly beautiful, and sometimes turns to me, as though to question something. She thinks my silence has to do with work – it usually does – and asks outright: ‘What happened to that woman? And the man with religious mania?’

  ‘Roy Peters?’

  I tell her. His temporal lobe procedure went well, impersonally, as any such operation should: a process that concentrates on resecting not a human mind, but an impaired physical structure. Apart from problems with equipment (the irrigation system seized up), there were no hitches. By the time of his discharge two days later, Peters was shaky but lucid. He sat calmly in my office, wearing a jauntily tilted fedora hat to hide his bandages. We talked about his home, and his brother’s ability to look after him; about the probability of future work, and about the existence of God, or otherwise. He supposed that God existed all right, he was pretty sure of it, but that He hadn’t much time for Peters. His indifference seemed to be reciprocated.

  ‘My people were Methodists, you know. But my mother gave up going to chapel after they divorced. She was ashamed, like. We didn’t have much God after that . . .’

  His talk was weakened and sombre, but from time to time a note of frustration sounded, as if, before his epilepsy, he had been a confident, rather cocky youth. He said: ‘If you ask me, God’s a bit of a joker. He doesn’t trouble himself much with the likes of us.’ Here a twinge of irritation. ‘Did you tell me that God lived in the brain, Doc?’

  ‘I said no such thing.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing important in the brain, is there? What did you find there? You just got rid of my hippo . . . hippo . . .’

  ‘. . . campus.’

  ‘Whatever . . . and I don’t feel any different.’

  ‘You are different.’

  Kate, what was I to say? That once the world had burned with meaning, that Jesus came down and spoke to him?

  ‘You are calmer, Mr Peters. I think your seizures won’t return. You may even be able to hold down a job now.’

  ‘A job?’ He frowned. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do. I wanted to write . . .’ He rummaged in the rucksack at his feet, and pulled out a cloth-bound manuscript tied with blue ribbon. ‘I started writing this in July. It was amazing, it just poured out of me like I can’t describe, like it was being dictated . . .’ He opened and closed it again, bewildered. ‘But now . . . I can’t read it. I thought it was beautiful, but something’s happened to it. It makes no sense.’ He got up and laid it open on my desk, like a precious relic. It was titled ‘God’s Plan for the World’, and its pages were covered in cabbalistic symbols interspersed with paragraphs where half the words were underlined or indecipherable. ‘Would you read it, Doc? Maybe you can explain these things.’

  But I won’t read this man’s rubbish, Kate. We have only one life.

  Peters got up abruptly and took back the manuscript, clasping it like a body. ‘Tell you what, Doc. I don’t give a shit about the brain. I read that after you’re dead, the brain rattles about in your skull, the size of a walnut. And you know what happened to Einstein’s brain? Somebody kept it in a mayonnaise jar and . . . something . . . You can do what you like inside my head, Doc, and it won’t make any difference.’

  He slumped down again, still cradling his book. Suddenly he seemed close to tears. He whispered: ‘My brain is not me. I’m me!’

  Without knowing it, Kate, he was illustrating the deepest mystery of neuroscience. How does the brain, a lump of meat, convert into the great theatre of human consciousness? Neither Peters nor Stephen Hawking knows. There’s a theory that the sequential narrative which the brain offers up to us, giving the impression of a coherent self, emerges from a babble of competing soliloquies in our neural channels. These voices are constantly supplanting and interrupting one another. Hence the haphazard way we think. So the self is an illusion. The greatest illusion of all. It emerges only from the raw material of our speech and perceptions. We are, in a sense, these materials: the product of electro-chemical tumult.

  Kate gives a blithe laugh. ‘Speaking as an illusion, I have my doubts.’

  Yes, this theory too will pass. They all do. But walking like this, with her engagement ring tingling in my anorak pocket, I’ve grown absurdly sensitive. I realise I am afraid. My mind diverges and goes adrift, throws up a smokescreen before my asking her. Flint stones grate underfoot. A late mountain-biker strains by. It is almost dark. If I had left one extra centimetre of Peters’s hippocampus, he might have kept more of his God. The lights of Poole are starting up to our north. To our left, Bronze Age burial mounds appear. But the hippocampus was totally sclerotic, and my business is to heal people, not preserve their fantasies. Four-thousand-year-old skeletons beneath the grass with bronze implements for their afterlife. And then there is Kate. The miracle child of an alcoholic and a serial adulterer. (Of course I am in love.) Sometimes she turns and smiles at me: lemony skin over wide, high-boned features, the trace of a Polish mother . . .

  I must soon. Very soon. It is nearly night. I glimpse the scarlet fruit of a low shrub, and bend to pluck it. I will present it to her, like a quaint emissary. It will prepare her for what I will ask. The fruit is not growing, but fallen, and when I bend down to gather it, the odour is overpowering. A pear, perhaps, overripe or rotten. A wild pear. In itself the smell may be slight, I don’t know. But it carries a shock of the past – heady with undivulged promise – like the passage into a forgotten room. How curious. Anxious now, faintly sick, the aroma of damp orchards. Nothing inexplicable, of course: smells are paired with memories by the entorhinal cortex. Yet I feel something precious slipping away. It escapes as I think about it, as I straighten up empty-handed from the shrub, and my head swims.

  Foolish, this. If I go on, I’ll become as brainless as Peters. I throw back my head to the salt wind. Kate is in front of me, surveying the burial mounds in the deepening dark. They are barely higher than we are, rounded and shaven by rain and wind. A light grass covers them. They look like outsize craniums. I move behind her, hold her shoulders. I never meant to ask her this here, but it doesn’t matter. The stars are coming out, and the land beyond Poole harbour is ablaze with lights. And we are standing, shivering in the night wind, above where the Bronze Age dead lie in their foetal sleep, their brains filling with dust, and I take her hand and I ask her to marry me.

  She is staring at the ground. I can’t see her expression. I squeeze her gloved hand and hold it for what seems a long time. I think she is sobbing. Alarmed, I say: ‘You haven’t answered me.’

  She looks up. Her eyes are wet, but she is softly laughing. She says with an odd, choked whisper: ‘Of course I will, you fool.’

  She used to joke that I understood the brain, but nothing at all about the heart. It is suddenly very cold. She is in my arms now, fondling the engagement ring, then slips it mischievously on to the wrong finger. As we disengage, the jewelled hand lingers in mine. We must descend in the dark now.

  * * *

  If the house had been less solidly built, the fire would have burst through timber and plaster in a single, furious conflagration. As it was, each closed room became for a while a noxious chamber of bluish gases, where the flames lived a stifled half-life, licking at paint or munching curtains and clothes, before a window or ceiling joist cracked apart, and fresh oxygen sucked up a violent torrent of fire and light.

  He woke with a start, imagining naked flames, hugging the duvet around his body as he lurched to the telephone. But the line was dead, and his mobile phone was in the car. He found a light switch, but the electricity was gone too. His lungs were heaving and
retching. From his bedroom window he saw the flames pouring from the casement below, and could not glimpse the ground. He clenched his eyes shut. He fumbled for a bathroom tap – the water, at least, was still running – and wrapped a wet flannel round his mouth and nose. He must warn the woman across the landing, the frail-looking woman. He crashed into the packing cases heaped beside his doorway. He was leaving next week, he remembered, and it gave him irrational hope. When he opened his door, he was hit by a wall of smoke. A window exploded somewhere below. The stairways and landings were drawing up the fire faster than the sealed flats, blanketing the mezzanine fire escape. For a moment he stopped, blind, disorientated. Then he became aware of a deep, visceral shuddering in the building’s foundations, the groan of shifting timber, and a near-silent roar as from the furnace of a ship’s engine. Some instinct from school fire practice dropped him to his knees – oxygen rose between the floorboard cracks, he was taught – but now, through the damp flannel, he inhaled the suffocating stench of melting steel, and a gasping faintness.

  He backed away on all fours and closed his door, where the smoke was pouring in. In his ears sounded the deep, level roar of settled flames. He lay with his head against the floorboards, imagining air there, then realised he could not stand. He had time for a spasm of relief. Kate was not here. Then, attempting to get up, failing, he felt a bitter, transient anger: anger at what would not be, as the future fell away.

  Long after he was unconscious, he was spared the heat of the flames over his body, the terror of flames passing over Claudia Greene before her seizures. In this last paralysis he envisaged his own cremation, his skull spilling out its brains, and feebly curled his hands over his head, until the fire crescendoed in his ears and into silence.

  4

  Naturalist

  She lived beside the others in her own privacy. The building was heavy and austere – it was the overgrown garden that had enchanted her years ago – and she maintained only a guarded acquaintance with its ageing tenants, and was grateful for their self-effacement. Perhaps it was Stephanie’s increasing myopia, or the intermittent gloom of the stairs and passageways, but she would often mistake one occupant for another, and could imagine them all to be distantly related. The haggard young man in the basement, who was usually out of work, might have been the son of the gaunt bachelor in the flat above, or of the retired schoolteacher who had taken to travelling, or was perhaps related to the landlord himself, who was kindly enough, and would accept her monthly rent by hand with the distant smile of a long and tired acquaintance. As for the surgeon across the landing, her old hesitancy with men resurfaced: he was handsome in his way. In her insomniac wakefulness she would hear the vigour of his footsteps on the stair, departing early for the county hospital.

  That last night it was the choked shriek of her pet lorikeet, and the thrashing of its wings against the cage, that alerted her to a strange, deep trembling in the wall beside her head. The lorikeet could mimic human speech, and although she knew that this was a meaningless sound, she imagined the bird’s guttural cry rising from a knowing intelligence: ‘Well here we are. Well here we are. Well here we are . . .’

  Long after infancy she had projected human feelings on to even inanimate objects. Most people thought her a soft little girl. For years she could not dispel the notion that the stone tortoise in her parents’ garden was alive, and she was distraught when her father sometimes chipped its shell with the motor mower. In fact the whole garden, which petered into wilderness, possessed for her a wild and sometimes eerie magic. Nobody tended it much. It was big for a three-bedroom house in suburbia, but its rockery and straggling borders had once been planted with knowledge – groups of fragrant mahonia and daphne survived – and in autumn the overgrown orchard beyond the water butt was heavy with pears and apples, so many that they fell rotting and ungathered into the grass.

  Nearby, miraculous and solitary, as if wind-sown, stood a purple-flowering butterfly bush. Years later she wondered what life she would have led if someone had not planted it there, or if a chance breeze, blowing from another garden, had not dropped its seed into the orchard’s undergrowth. It was the most common of buddleias, she later realised, but in high summer she would watch in disbelief as its conical flowers grew jewelled with butterflies: Red Admirals, Tortoiseshells, Commas, Silver-washed Fritillaries. They shifted above her with the hypnotic scent of honey, and opened their wings on a delicate brilliance that she imagined had arrived from another world.

  The Peacock butterfly, in particular, mesmerised her. The counterfeit eyes that shone from its forewings in a wash of crimson and indigo, and flashed half concealed on its hindwings, unfurled from a body of brownest velvet. In its head, where a pair of feelers stuck out like needles, two bulging compound eyes shone back at her, and an impossibly elongated tongue curved from its mouth into the flowers below.

  She was twelve years old when a distant cousin of her mother – an old man, he seemed – visited them from Sussex. Cousin Arthur called himself an entomologist, but her parents seemed ignorant about his strange profession, and even joked about it. Instinctively she despised them for this. At first glance Arthur looked too big and ungainly to be concerned with insects. He smoked a pipe – the only person she ever knew to do so – and his grey moustache was smudged with an orange bib of nicotine. He wore frayed pullovers with leather elbow patches stitched on years before by his wife – he was a widower – and these smelt of nicotine too. But Stephanie noticed with fascination how long and high-veined his hands were, and his voice sounded oddly broken and fragile, lodged far back in his head, as if another, more delicate man were speaking deep inside him.

  Within a day she loved him. He described to her the swarms of Monarch butterflies that migrated two thousand miles from Canada to Mexico in autumn, and how the Morpho Blues and Malachites lit up the Amazon rainforest. Then he was gone. It was years before she saw him again, but a week after his visit there arrived in the post a book titled The World of Butterflies, inscribed ‘From Arthur, to my fellow lepidopterist, Stephanie’.

  Her house agent father spoke of insects only as pests and intruders. The part of the garden he nurtured was his mown front lawn (the stone tortoise soon disappeared) and its two beds of regimented tea roses. He had dressed up the house with a colonnaded porch flanked by carriage lamps, and a gravel drive leading to a double garage. Later the lamps were joined by security lights, but Stephanie could not guess what was so valuable in the house – the grandfather clock, perhaps, or the Rockingham china teapot? – that had to be protected.

  In summer, occasionally, her mother came to marvel with her at the butterfly bush, but her wonder quickly faded – Stephanie knew she was frail from a disease called leukaemia – and she would retire quickly, palely, into household routine or to rest. Years later Stephanie wondered if the faint reverie that sometimes overcame her in autumn orchards – like a passing sickness or nostalgia – had something to do with her mother. The recollected smell of rotting pears could still sicken in her nostrils.

  She could not think of her mother now without regret. Stephanie had understood almost nothing of her. All through her childhood her mother was fading, and Stephanie resented the love her mother received from her father. This affection distantly extended to her elder sister too, yet to herself never. But then her sister Louisa was sensible. Louisa you could rely on. She was sunny and ready for anything. If you asked her to do something, she did it. Stephanie, on the other hand, was dreamy, lived in her own world, and sometimes sulked. Her girlhood seemed filled with her own shortcomings, and with the accusing refrain: ‘Watch how Louisa does it’ or ‘Copy Louisa!’ or worst of all: ‘Why can’t you be like Louisa?’

  And Stephanie loved Louisa too. With Louisa began her intermittent desire to be somebody else. She loved her exuberance. She envied her long fair hair and her wide-set grey eyes. Hair was a woman’s crowning glory, her father would quote, and touch Louisa’s approvingly. But Stephanie’s was brown and lustreless.
Her mother kept it bobbed, as if there should not be much of it. Only once she murmured: ‘Yours is nice too.’ From time to time Stephanie inherited skirts and coats that Louisa had outgrown. Then she felt she was catching up, and that the approval of Louisa might one day devolve upon herself.

  Louisa, two years older, indulged her and sometimes involved her in her dreams. When Stephanie was thirteen Louisa presented her with her old record player, and she listened to country singles that Louisa had enjoyed. Louisa, meanwhile, had a new-fangled cassette player, and was besotted with Queen and Whitney Houston. She would recruit Stephanie to dance with her. In Louisa’s bedroom they writhed and twisted to funk and techno, laughing and occasionally intertwining, until their father, returned from work, would catch the twang and thump of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ or ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, and burst in to reprimand them for disturbing their mother. Stephanie relished these half-secret sessions, although her father frightened her. She was unconsciously aware that Louisa, in the reverberation of ‘I Want It All’, might be imagining another partner altogether, but Stephanie was happy dancing with her.

  When not obsessed with his business, with evaluating property or supervising brochures, her father would regale his family with funny stories about his clients. But often Stephanie did not understand. His saturnine looks (she had inherited them) seemed to contradict any humour. She felt excluded and foolish. His world was filled with the stupidity of other people. Half his sentences started with: ‘People don’t realise that . . .’ or ‘What people don’t understand is . . .’, and Stephanie feared that she belonged among these ignoramuses. Sometimes, too, he would begin: ‘Louisa will understand this one . . .’ and Stephanie would strain to unravel what was so funny or idiotic about a surveyor’s report or a vendor’s asking price. Louisa’s laughter sounded like betrayal.

  To Stephanie it seemed that her father regarded her sister with forbearance, even occasional affection, but that herself he appraised with remote distaste, something crueller than indifference. She felt he found her ugly. It even occurred to her, with dismay, that she looked like him, whereas Louisa was a full-blooded version of her mother, the woman in young health whom her father had married.