Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  But a cold sadness has opened up in him. He no longer meets the medium’s gaze, or responds at all. He does not hear his mother’s voice in the man’s words. It is not how she spoke or felt. He has lost her, she was never there.

  And now the medium’s eyes have closed again, and he selects another. Steve hears everything that follows with exhausted indifference. Some clients nod and sigh and give back fulsome answers to ‘Would you understand?’ Others remain mute, or shake their heads. The medium seems locked in some trance of his own. Sometimes he smiles. His eyes are cold and guileless. His imperial beard gives him a look of old-fashioned charm, and of access to the past.

  When Steve leaves the building his footsteps sound noiseless to him, even the traffic far away. He feels a perfect, terrible blankness in his head, as if he were walking into oblivion. There is so little of him.

  The chief neurosis of photography, his father had said (before bunking off to Canada) was to stop time in its tracks. For months now, on weekly visits to his mother, Steve had wanted to bring his camera and record her as he might last remember her. He had wanted a bulwark against the delusions of re-remembering. He was anticipating grief. He photographed her at random under her orchard’s sunlit trees, but she suspected he was seeking to memorialise her, and baulked at the camera. So he pretended technical preoccupations – photography was his profession after all – and captured at last the gaunt force and irritation in her face, and a rare, flashing smile. Even now, a few days before her death, her exasperation with him surfaced. Why couldn’t he follow Richard into some sensible profession? His elder brother had come to terms with the world, but Steve was twenty-three and still dreaming like an adolescent. There was no future in photography. His brother worried about him.

  ‘Richard worries about me? Why on earth?’

  ‘He says you’re too solitary, he thinks you’re going off the rails. Even your photography. He says you pose your sitters like goddesses.’ Her voice thins to gasping. ‘Never idolise women, Steve.’

  I don’t, he thought, I don’t. He supported her indoors and settled her into an armchair. He brewed her lemon tea. She hated this dependence, but she could no longer walk unaided. She began talking about his childhood, as if there was something there she had not grasped, or else some hidden affliction between that time and this. Did he still have his childhood fear of being lost, she wondered, or his recurring nightmare when he was torn into bits yet went on living? She spoke of these with irritation, as if he should have stopped them. Why were you such a haunted boy? Meanwhile the care worker – a young black woman – was making up the bed that he and Richard had lugged downstairs, and checking the pill dispenser before filling in a report form. Steve wondered if she was listening.

  When he got up to leave, his mother struggled from her chair to say farewell. As he reached the door, she tried to follow, but halted, her hands clenched on her chairback. Her breath was a whistling rush. She said: ‘I’m all right.’ He gentled her back into the chair, while the care worker took her other arm. She repeated peevishly: ‘I’m perfectly all right.’

  But he had the illusion, as he opened her front door, that it gave on to emptiness. He was stepping into mist. Everything that lent him substance or meaning was being left behind in the figure of his mother, still solid, but soon no longer. Then he felt the cold, hard surface of the camera against his chest. It was like a nugget of hope. He felt for a moment as if it physically contained her, absorbed and living, and that through it he had saved himself.

  Before the door closed behind him, the care worker appeared. She said: ‘You’re worried, aren’t you?’

  He looked back at her. Perhaps it was his faintness, he later thought, or something delusive in his head, but she was looking at him with familiar eyes: the hypnotic slant upward, a deep hazel, and soft.

  ‘If anything concerns you,’ she said, ‘I live just a few streets from here.’ She gestured beyond the road. ‘You can call me.’ She had written her mobile number on a slip of paper. When he took it he noticed his fingers quivering, and her own tapering to polished nails. Beautiful hands.

  He took to walking along the coast near the town: not the spectacular cliffs to the east, but more enclosed, sombre places. These beaches appeared to him shorn and primordial: low chalk cliffs and dark pebbles against a fretted hem of sea. Often, even in summer, they were deserted. No buildings, no shrubs, no sound but the water. The moment his feet clashed on their grey stones, the solitude elated him. For hours he photographed the waves where they broke on the stone shore and retired in dissolving rivulets of foam. Often he awaited the right sunlight for half a morning. But whatever it was that his eye or brain experienced was sometimes lost to his camera, and he returned again and again. As he walked, the ebbing tide yielded up a melancholy detritus: plastic toys, old sandals, glass worn to turquoise pebbles, seagull feathers, bones.

  It was here that he took his mother’s care worker, Cleo, on a solitary stroll from his flat. The March afternoon had turned blustery, and a cold sea was storming in. But she seemed to relish the harsh wind. He loved her long, athletic stride over the stones, and she had a knack of spotting curiously marked shells and pebbles, whose strangeness she shared with him. After her initial uncertainty when he telephoned (‘You mean . . . Why? . . . Well, yes . . .’), he felt her relax with him into a hesitant trust. She seemed oblivious of her wave-soaked ankles and wind-torn hair, which was tied back at the nape from the high ridge of her cheekbones. The waves were cascading over the ruined slipways and jetties beside them in a turmoil he would usually have longed to photograph. But he was listening to Cleo, to the reverberant softness of her voice.

  She had visited his mother for only a few days, she said, replacing more regular carers, but she’d admired her defiant refusal to rest, and noticed her dark, still opulent voice. She had noticed too how his mother had scowled when another care worker patted her hands and addressed her as ‘we’.

  He wondered later precisely when he started to fall in love with her. Perhaps it was the moment when she picked a plastic doll from the sea wrack, and looked at it with a mixture of distaste for its tackiness (it blinked with coy blue eyes) and compassion for the child who had lost it.

  By the time they returned to his flat – Richard was away – the excitement of her presence extended to everything she touched: even how her eyes scanned his bookcase and DVDs, and her delight at the view from his windows – a wedge of silvered sea. The miracle of her was compounded and complicated by her colour. He had not known any black women, and now this consciousness intensified everything she did, and touched her with enigma. The way she sat on the sofa with her long legs crossed and her hands smoothing her hair seemed at once familiar and exotic. And there were qualities that he imagined to be purely hers: the purl of her speech which cushioned each syllable with the next, the impossibly slender and sensitised beauty of her hands – he could imagine no white hands like these – and those feline eyes which crinkled upwards when she smiled, and in their hazel softness suggested to him some undefined peace.

  He poured her wine, which she barely drank, while he gulped his down to still his nerves. He tried to ask her delicately how she came to be here, alone in a white seaside town, but his words blundered, and she laughed. ‘Oh, there are others besides me, a few. Down in the club scene it’s quite hip to be black. But I don’t go there much.’ And no, she was not Caribbean, although everyone assumed she was. Her people had never been slaves.

  He caught an edgy note of pride, and asked: ‘Where then?’

  Nigeria, she said. Almost fifty years ago, aged only ten, her father had left his home town in a line of refugees, holding his mother’s hand. The dead or exiled leaders she cited – Ironsi, Gowon, Ojukwu – meant nothing to him, and little even to her. Now her father rarely spoke of them. They were the ogres or saviours of a childhood that had gone missing. The son of a newspaper editor, her father had become a porter in a London hospital and married a nurse from Lancashire. Hence,
she said, her pale skin. But Steve could see no English in her. Her skin glowed, to him, a deep, burnished bronze.

  ‘My grandparents confused me when I was small. My father’s parents were lonely, I think. They wanted to go back to Nigeria, but they never did. My mother’s parents would have thought: good riddance. They still hate immigrants.’ He imagined he caught every nuance in her talking, and sensed a transient anger. ‘But my father’s mother was my best friend. When she got ill, that’s when I became a care worker. Those girls looked after her like they were her daughters, and earned next to nothing.’

  ‘So you thought: that’s the job for me . . .’

  ‘Well, I didn’t go to much of a school.’ She laughed, remembering something. ‘Care worker isn’t a posh job, not like your photography.’

  ‘Photography isn’t posh.’ It seemed, at this moment, pure self-indulgence. ‘And I don’t deal with the dying, like you do.’ He was thinking of his mother. ‘Weren’t you afraid that one day you’d arrive and find a client . . . like her . . .’

  ‘That’s happened to several of us. Of course you worry about some like that.’ She was looking at him in a way that he read as profound sadness. Her gaze lapped against his eyes. How could he not love her? he thought. He imagined her calm to be the outcome of her care for those ageing close to death. Her lips started faintly to smile. She said: ‘We get fond even of the crazy ones. There’s one who greets me every morning as Eileen. She thinks I’m her sister, who’s been dead for years. Others get anxious, and worry about losing their possessions – clocks and handbags – even in bed. Another asks me all the time, “Where is everybody?” And you have to wash them, even the men. Some of the girls won’t do the men. But you get used to it. It kind of makes you understand old age, everything, how we’re all on the same track for that. We ask the men to sponge their own private parts. Except some of the old ones are past it. Anyway, I’m black. They may not think of me in the same way.’ She left this undefined. ‘One old guy always wants to kiss me, but its sexless, like he kisses his dog – he’s got a pet spaniel that stinks . . .’

  He felt his desire for her now, imagining himself old, she washing him, her blackness only an allure. She said: ‘The worst is when you don’t really care any more, the care workers, I mean, when you wonder what’s the point . . .’

  She stopped there. But he imagined her going on: When you think: they’re degraded. And they’re dying.

  He had wanted his mother to die at home. He had wanted this more than ever for her. To die in her own bed in the familiar room, facing the window with its climbing roses. Sunlight, perhaps.

  He relished taking Cleo to places she could not have afforded: to intimate restaurants, to the theatre, to sights in London. He bought a second-hand Fiat and drove her to seaside towns that neither of them knew. They walked the cliffs beyond Dover, and along the South Downs to Chanctonbury Ring. Sometimes she broke into vivid excitement, but an innate reserve – it struck him as a quiet dignity – never quite left her, and she was often silent, absorbing whatever was around her with an unruffled and rather solemn attention.

  When he took her to the theatre that spring, he basked in the spectacle of her transformation. Her appearance became dramatically at odds with her shyness. Crimson and vivid green set off her neck and shoulders, and the gold discs that dangled from her ears lent her a witching glamour. They saw comedies and a thriller that brought her hands clasped to her mouth, while in the auditorium’s dark he could not help secretly watching her, taking in the amused twitching of her lips, or the intensity of her gaze.

  Once she said: ‘I don’t understand how people go on stage. I’d die. How can they do it?’

  For her twenty-third birthday she asked to go to a ballet – neither of them had seen one before – and they found themselves watching Giselle, the fairy tale of a peasant girl betrayed in love. Nothing they had seen had moved her so palpably. In the last act, as the corps of spirits drives the faithless lover toward his end, her hand crept into his. The dancers moved in a moonlit whiteness: the ghosts of abandoned brides, their diaphanous dresses and blanched faces the antithesis of Cleo’s own, and she was starting to weep.

  But there was a second Cleo whom he understood less than he did this one: the sudden dynamo he once took clubbing, who lost or found herself in dancing of her own. It was as if in the enclosed dimness of the nightclub, half invisible, she became someone else. He liked to suppose that her furious gyrations, her long arms flying above her head, her eyes closed, arose from her African unconscious, but she only laughed at this.

  His brother Richard dismissed Cleo as ‘another of your infatuations’. Steve gave up inviting her to their mutual flat; but she shared hers with three others, and they went instead to seaside hotels. Then an illicit excitement brewed up: the arousal of entering a pristine room, a room without memory, private and prepared for them. The clean linen and small bathroom luxuries (she would take them away), their window overlooking the sea or some street where others walked unknowing, created an intoxication of their own.

  At first he could scarcely believe that she would sleep with him. When she slipped off her crimson dress and he took her body in his arms, the skin he had imagined copper-smooth came rough and tingling to his touch, and her pinned-back hair loosed itself in a black aureole around her head. Her flared lips had unnerved him when he first kissed them, but now he found his mouth consuming hers, and he opened his eyes to see the glitter of metallic eyeshadow over her closed lids, so that he imagined she might love him.

  Yet to the last there was something resistant in her, something that seemed subtly to confine him even as she softened, and he never knew if she experienced orgasm, only this mounting, fierce breathing and crying that relaxed when he did. But sometimes she sighed thank you, and seemed at peace, and her eyes opened on his with their look of consolation.

  He could never separate the wonder of her ancestry from the veneer of common Englishness. Once she showed him photographs her father had inherited, of the Igbo refugees streaming southwards, he among them, in a blurred procession of white bundles and small children. Some, she said, had died along the way. He even imagined her walking in their midst. At other times, especially when drinking with her care worker friends, she seemed very English, almost ordinary. She shared their jargon, laughed at the same jokes. Then he found himself wanting to extract her back into the marvel of her strangeness.

  In May the weather was warm enough for them to picnic on Camber Sands, and he photographed her all afternoon while she swam or paddled in a blue bikini. To him she was a different species from the raw white bodies around them. His camera explored her as it might have traversed a bronze statue, burnished and unchangeable. But when he arranged her for his lens, dropping her shielding forearms from her breasts, directing her eyes at the Leica, an old frustration crept in. The darkness of her skin seemed resistant to discovery, and she would shy away, telling him it was all too much, and to put away that stupid camera.

  Soon afterwards the first of his friends to become engaged sent a wedding invitation from London. His schoolmates had dispersed these past few years, and had frozen in his memory. He had not kept up. He would go to the wedding with Cleo, he thought. She would be amused by his reassembled past.

  But Cleo said: ‘I can’t go.’

  They were sitting on a bench above the sea. ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘I just can’t.’ He imagined she had turned pale. ‘I wouldn’t know . . . I wouldn’t know what to say. I have nothing to say.’

  ‘They’re no different from your friends.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I can’t do those kinds of things.’ She looked taut and suddenly lost. ‘Three years ago I couldn’t even go alone into a shop or the post office. I’d start to shake. I’ve always been like that.’

  ‘But you look after the old and sick. You wash and dress them. You risk finding them dead!’

  ‘That’s different. They need me.’

  He said g
ently: ‘You mean you have to feel in control?’

  ‘Something like that. I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so.’ She added unsmiling: ‘I’m happiest with children.’

  She passed a hand across her face, as if to obliterate herself. A sudden tic was quivering beneath one eye. He felt bitterly bewildered. He did not want to listen to this. He wanted the mask returned to her face: perfect, invulnerable. He said: ‘It’s not because you’re black?’

  ‘No. If people dislike me it’s because I come over surly when I’m scared. Like in shops. I can’t say anything right.’

  He asked: ‘Are you ever scared with me?’

  ‘You’re different, Steve. When I saw you with your mother you looked terrible . . . so sad. I just wanted to help you. I wouldn’t normally have given you my number.’

  ‘You felt sorry for me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He did not know what to make of this. But later the things she’d said began to fall into place, and his past with her to reassemble. Her reserve, even her gentleness, became something else. Everything had its roots in her fear. Once by her bedside he had glimpsed a photograph of her with an ex-boyfriend – Steve supposed him at first to be one of her younger clients – the man leaning awkwardly against her, while she inclined to him protectively, one of her hands clasping both of his. When Steve’s own photographs returned from the laboratory, he had expected Cleo to look high-spirited, even proud, standing on Camber Sands. But instead he saw a woman whose expression was subtly withdrawn, somehow bereft, as if the camera had caught something to which he had been blind.

  Photographs do not heal. Examine the portrait photo long enough, and the familiar face becomes unknown. As he leafs through his mother’s albums, his own face empties into boyhood, and he becomes baffling to himself, while Richard grows blander, his mother smooth-skinned, and his father a stranger. In his own work the hunt for essence becomes a fool’s errand, and every face, in the end, an enigma.