by Julia Gray
Then, with a dull blink, the electric lights went out and everything went dark.
They say that scenes from your life flash before your eyes, and I can confirm that this is more or less true. But they did not flash, precisely. They played, an old-fashioned film reel unravelling, full of clicks and hisses. Footage of my life spilled into the dark around me: walking down a cobbled Paris street; standing on the deck of a ferry; turning over my rainbow onto the kindergarten table; hopping around a toadstool under the poison-gaze of Rita Ellory; drawing Vanessa in Life Class with both hands; kissing Jonah Trace in a forgotten corner of a London park; playing a fairy in St Michael’s hospital; sitting in Bel’s conservatory while the rain fell, reading Jacaranda.
I felt my body chime with channelled energy; I felt points open up from head to toe; a humming seemed to come from somewhere inside me. I lost myself inside that dark open space. There was no tightrope now. There was just water. Not the ponds. Not the pool. These were the chilled waters of the Channel. A faint trail of churned surf was all that was left of the ferry that must have passed on. I floated, adrift. There were the flowers. Red, orange, turquoise, yellow, green, violet, blue … I had never seen anything so sinister and so exquisite. They formed a chain around me in the darkness, shimmered, blinked, faded.
A faint humming seemed to be coming from somewhere. My hands tingled with energy; my breathing was steady and slow. I was ageless, and almost shapeless, a Norian shadow-form, no more. I went on and on through that warm and watery darkness until I came to the shore, and then, after a time, a small white house, a cottage with a window either side of a red door, and I knew at once where it was. It was our old cottage in Normandy. I opened the door and went inside.
And there he was.
He was sitting at his desk, angled three-quarters away from me. He turned as I came in, put down his pen and his reading glasses. For the first time in ten years, I saw his face. He saw me.
Felix Tobias regarded me in silence. It seemed that this silent scrutiny went on for the longest time. And then he said, very simply:
‘Qui êtes-vous?’
I opened my eyes. Overhead was the roar of fire, harsher and harder than ever, the bitter smell of chemicals and burning wood. And suddenly it came to me – and it should have come sooner – I couldn’t allow this to happen. I couldn’t allow Bel to do this. I couldn’t leave Evie.
And I didn’t want to die on Giacomo’s boat.
There was no point in going back upstairs. That left only the windows. I tried them all, one more time – the one over the banquette, the main cabin, the two smaller ones. All were locked tight. Could I smash one? I grabbed first a torch and then a doorstop, and tried, and tried … Bel, so much more in touch with her physical side, would surely have had no trouble. The windows were tough, tougher than me. It was hopeless, and I felt like a fool. Even so, I tried each window again, once more wrestling with the catches, pounding at the glass.
Then I realised I’d forgotten the window in the bathroom. It was round, narrower than my chest. Too small to fit through. But it was worth a try. I climbed onto the black-painted toilet seat while the headless doll dangled from the light cord and the skeleton leered behind the cistern. It was almost too dark to see what I was doing. The window was firmly shut, and at first I thought it was locked as well. But it wasn’t. It was just stiff. Every minute the heat and the threat of the creeping smoke redoubled, and I understood the absolute urgency of getting out now, and the urgency lent me speed as I wrenched the window open. Crumpling myself up, not caring if I broke things – mine or otherwise – I folded my body into the metal frame, feeling the scrape of something sharp, a vicious twinge of pain, and then the hot night air moulded itself briefly to my skin before I slithered with a splash into the river.
Swimming ten metres, I turned, treading water, to witness Bel’s handiwork. Morgan le Fay was hunched low in the water, tilting, smothered in a halo of flame. It was eerily silent on the wharf; whether the other boats were unoccupied or their owners were simply away, I didn’t know. I had cut my wrist badly on something, and my lungs felt heavy and congested.
But I was alive.
I swam to the side and pulled myself onto the quay.
The second night of A Doll’s House – the night that Bel set fire to Morgan le Fay, with me in it – was the 25th of June. It’s August now. I’ve been sitting here, writing this, for almost four weeks. I’m not sure, but I think I’ve managed to get the Chronicles of Nora into some kind of coherent shape. I have followed the trail of my memory, and although I haven’t always liked where it’s taken me, I feel I’ve learned a lot as I’ve tried to set things down truthfully.
I should explain why I am here in Scotland. It stemmed from a misunderstanding on Evie’s part. I’ve always said how tuned in I am to Evie; well, it seems that my mother is also tuned in to me, because she said afterwards that she was on the set of the short film that was shooting in Manchester when she was hit by a bolt of clearest, surest, absolutest knowing that there was something the matter with her daughter.
‘After what happened with Dad,’ she said, ‘I just … knew.’
Back to London she drove, getting home early on the Saturday morning. She found me in the bathroom, naked, with a ragged cut snaking along my underarm like a map of the Thames.
She drew a conclusion. It was impossible to get her to undraw it.
‘All these years, I’ve known you weren’t happy,’ said Evie, halfway down a tub of Pralines and Cream ice cream. The bleeding had stopped and she’d bandaged the cut well with her capable hands; in the morning, we’d get it looked at by a doctor. ‘But why now, Nora? When everything’s going so well for you? Was it the pressure of the play? A boy? Something to do with that girl? I thought there was something wrong when you came back from Cannes, but I didn’t think … oh, Nora, and your beautiful skin. What the hell did you use? It doesn’t look like a razor.’
I said nothing, which was safest and best. I had my reasons for silence. I had no intention of telling my mother about the fire and the failed attempt on my life by my so-called friend. Although I was a little sorry that my mother thought I’d hurt myself on purpose, it was easier to let her believe that this was true.
‘I want to go somewhere quiet,’ I said, ‘and just … think. Or not think. Just be. Totally alone, for a while.’
As I’d predicted she would, Evie said: ‘Petra’s house.’
And I said that would be just the place.
So here I’ve been, all summer, in self-imposed near-solitude, with the rat-dog and the rain for company. Evie’s come a few times, to see me and then to visit Nana. Sometimes I go with her – it’s always good to see Nana, who seems much better. I don’t hear from anyone apart from Megan, who checks in on me from time to time. I don’t know if we’ll remain friends, now the play is over, but the fact that I seem to be Honest Nora around Megan is something I find both attractive and scary. I don’t read the papers; I’ve no idea what is happening in the news. It’s important to switch off, in order to heal, says Petra. The last thing I read in a newspaper was the little square that appeared two days after the fire – Thames Houseboat Goes Up in Flames. There was no mention of cause. No mention of casualties.
I said that I needed to think, and I have been thinking. And while I’ve been writing, I’ve been thinking more. I’ve thought about every lie I’ve ever told – the ones recounted here, and others too. I can count them like beads on an abacus. Still I am not able to decide whether I was born a liar, or whether I grew into it, shrugging Falsehood over my shoulders like a mink coat. But let’s say that it doesn’t matter why I have told so many lies. Even though I believed, and still believe, that I was to some extent wronged by these people – Toby, Rita, Jonah, Bel … I don’t know if I can honestly say that my actions were entirely justified. Could I have done things another way?
What I’ve also been thinking about is this: I will never feel good about myself if I continue to live in this w
ay. In many ways, lying – and scheming and planning and getting people to behave in exactly the ways I anticipate, like my own personal chess pieces – has been fun. I won’t deny it. But when I had that vision of my father, as I stood there on the burning boat, and he did not know who I was … that was no fun at all.
‘Qui êtes-vous?’ he said. Who are you?
To my father, I was unrecognisable.
He’d been gone such a long time – twisted into stories I told without even hearing them any longer – that I forgot something important.
Felix Tobias valued truth.
And if he’d known half the things I’d done, he’d have been horribly, heartbrokenly disappointed. As indeed would Evie. I love few people on this earth, but I do love my parents. I would like Evie to know me (and I would like to know her, because I realise that she is stronger than I give her credit for, even if she asks questions that I do not ask, and wants things that I do not want). I would like her to be proud of me. I would like to think my dad would be proud of me. Unlike Evie, I don’t believe in a Rive Gauche café in the afterlife, where one day Nana will unfold her knitting in the company of Felix and her long-dead dogs.
But if that café does exist, I’d want to be there too.
I have been thinking also – I am reminded every time I go past the octagonal studio – about what really happened on the cold February night when we contacted the dead. In opening up the Chakra Flowers of Doom, guided by Petra and her poorly-educated signposts, did I really manage to reach Felix Tobias? For all that Evie was totally convinced, I never was. Everything I said he said was a lie, for a start. But the flowers, and the dreams that followed, had a resonance and potency and other-worldliness that felt so … uncanny. And then there were those words, written by my unknowing hand:
O angry flame. Attention, Aliénor.
I puzzled for a long, long time, about those words. They felt like a strand of some unravelling tapestry that I hadn’t quite followed back to its source. It wasn’t until I sat down the other day with Petra and Bill for a fireside game of Scrabble, which I had no doubt I’d win with ease, that I finally noticed something interesting. I’d drawn an A, and also G, M, N, O, R and Y.
I made angry first. Then I made Nora.
I pushed them around, making different shapes with them, experimenting.
And then I saw it.
O angry flame is an anagram of Morgan le Fay.
Now Felix Tobias loved an anagram, it’s true. It’s possible that he was trying to warn me. (Beware the boat. Not bad advice, all told.) But I love anagrams too. Maybe I was just trying to warn myself. It’s the kind of complexity that Nimble-minded Nora is more than capable of carrying out. Or maybe it was neither me nor my father, but just the memory of him that I carried in me, somewhere. Or maybe – just maybe – I am too quick to see anagrams in everything.
One thing I’m sure about: I will never try anything like it again.
Today, before I settled down to write, I went for a walk. I love the peninsula at first light, on the rare days when it looks like there won’t be rain. This morning was one of those. I had breakfast alone – rye bread, honey, banana; Phyllis Lane’s habits die hard – and, of my own accord, found Oscar, who was delighted to join me.
Just as I was about to leave, I heard footsteps upstairs. The girl in the room next door, who’d been in recovery, was up and about. It occurred to me to invite her to come with me. She wasn’t often awake at this hour, but like I said, we were on almost friendly terms and I thought she might fancy the exercise.
Instead of walking down to the loch, we took the path above the house that leads through the woods and then out onto open land that stretches for mile after mile of sheep-studded green. Oscar roamed freely, delving into ditches and rabbit holes and skittering about. My arm, I realised, was much better. I held it out experimentally. There would always be a scar, a bad one, but that was no bad thing. It would be a useful reminder, for a long time to come, about the dangers of flying too close to the sun.
The girl from the room next door caught me looking at it and said, ‘You’re healing, honey.’
‘So are you,’ I replied.
It was true. She’d come to Aunt Petra’s house not long after I arrived, with dressings on one side of her head and all down her neck and shoulder. They still needed to be changed every couple of days, and though the skin underneath was the colour of an ugly sunset – coral and burnt-orange and irritated pink – it was new-minted, and would improve, if slowly. Her hair existed only on one side, like an eccentric, blonde-bubble wig.
Bel was, typically, quite proud of her burns.
‘After all, they’re a bit like badges of heroism,’ she had already pointed out, several times.
She claimed that she didn’t start the fire. Oh, she locked me in and left me. This she admitted. But the fire – no, not she; the revenge she’d had in mind was leaving me alone on Giacomo’s boat, to think about what I’d done.
‘You don’t seriously believe that I’d do something like that?’ she asked more than once, her face a mask of bandaged indignation.
‘You’re saying you didn’t pour lighter fluid onto the deck and light a match?’
This last from Darian, only a few days after the fire as he sat next to her four-poster bed while I stood, a little cautiously, in the doorway. From downstairs floated the smell of chicken soup; Anton was busy cooking.
‘Christ, of course not. I do remember a smell of fuel,’ she said, wrinkling her nose as though she could smell it now. ‘Maybe it was a spark from someone’s barbecue. I mean, Darian, that’s the story we’re all going to stick to, remember. A barbecue. Nowhere near the river. Nowhere near the boat.’
‘You maintain you had nothing to do with the fire. You just locked Nora in for fun,’ Darian repeated.
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ said Bel. ‘It was probably someone on a passing boat, chucking away a lit cigarette.’
She looked towards the doorway, holding out her hand for me. Slowly, I approached.
‘When I turned back and saw the fire, my heart could have stopped beating,’ she said.
Darian rolled his eyes and muttered ‘bullshit’ under his breath. It’s funny: he was so angry – on my behalf, on Giacomo’s – that it made me, by default, calmer and more reasonable than I might have been otherwise.
‘Giacomo will put two and two together eventually, if he ever sees you,’ he said.
‘I’ll make sure he doesn’t,’ said Bel.
She winked, on the good side of her face. Her burns looked worse than they were, but it was still hard to look at her. It was as though she’d spent too long in a special-effects booth. I found it incredible that she never once, to my knowledge, mourned the loss of her beauty. It would take a very long time for her skin to recover. If it ever did. Perhaps she was in denial. But perhaps she was just braver than I’d ever imagined she could be. After all, it takes more than a pretty face to be an actress.
Bel looked sad for a moment. ‘I loved that boat too, you know,’ she said.
Downstairs, while she slept, Darian and I dosed ourselves with chocolate, barely speaking.
‘Is she beyond help?’ he said at last.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s lying. I know she’s lying. But she believes what she’s saying,’ said Darian.
‘She’s just … Bel,’ I said.
I didn’t believe her, either. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. One thing, however, was irrefutably true. Bel came back to the boat for me. Not long after I pulled myself onto the quayside, I heard the thud of her boots. A banshee-wail of my name, louder than I’d ever heard it before. Huddled in the shadow of a barge two or three boats down from Morgan le Fay, I was just out of her line of sight. Before I could say or do anything to draw her attention, she ran past, hair and kimono flying like streamers, and onto the burning deck.
I’d never seen anything braver.
Now I got to my feet and ran after her, cal
ling her name. Through a garden of fire, she made for the wheelhouse door. I watched as she fended off a wall of flame with her sleeve. It happened very fast. Her sleeve seemed to melt in a red-gold wave; her cry turned into a higher-pitched scream of rage and pain.
You will have to believe me when I say that I did not hesitate as I scrambled over the gangplank. In moments like these, there isn’t time to think about the accountancy of friendship – of who did what, or who deserved what. As I got to her, she was already falling backwards; I caught her, and dragged her to shore. In a heap, we collapsed.
‘Nora,’ she gasped. ‘I am so very sorry.’
It was the only time she ever said it.
I battered her with my jacket. We’d done this in a first-aid course at school. I had a memory of Megan, bent over a life-size plastic torso, demonstrating her skills to the rest of us. I would be as capable as Megan was, for once. I willed the flames to go out. And they did. But I could see that Bel was badly burned on one side of her face and body. Somehow I got her out of the charred kimono. I threw it into the river.
‘Give me your phone,’ I said. ‘We need to call an ambulance.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘We have to get out of here.’
I don’t remember the next part well. She leaned on my shoulder as we walked. A woman in a car stopped for us and drove us to the nearest A and E, asking no questions. By the time Bel was seen by the triage nurse, we’d agreed on our story. That was the story we told everyone, Anton included. Only Darian knew the truth.
‘She tried to save me,’ I reminded Darian, before I left to go home.
‘She tried to kill you first,’ he reminded me, in turn.
