by Graham Mort
FIRE FOX
There it was, in Sophie’s memory. The time her dad had told her how he’d seen a fox on his way home, how it had flickered like a flame from the larch woods to stare into his headlights. Met a fox, he said, not seen but met, as if it was meant to happen. There was snow on the road, but he had winter tyres on the van and put the brakes on before he hit it. The van had skidded to a halt, slewing in the road. Then it had stared at him, the fox, its retinas flaring.
– It was daring me! Bold as anything!
Sophie thought of the fox staring at her father.
– How was it daring you?
Her dad shrugged and laughed, pulling off his shoes.
– Oh, I dunno. Daring me to run away to the woods, mebbe!
– That’s silly!
– Mebbe…
He rubbed his nose against hers and she giggled.
– Mebbe not.
Then her mother was calling up the stairs and he picked up his shoes and padded out. Like a fox. That’s what went through her mind, round and round as she pressed her face into the feather pillow.
Her father told her that after arriving home. He’d been working late, fitting a kitchen in someone’s house, all whiskery, smelling of adhesive, cigarillos and beer. Later she woke in the middle of the night because the fox was licking all the windows of the mill. She could hear its fur crackling. Her mother had been making yoghurt in the kitchen and a smell of sour milk rose up the green painted staircase. Then the smell of smoke, her mother wrapping her in a blanket so she could watch instead of going to sleep. Tomorrow she’d have a day off school.
The mill burned all night and they watched from the window, feeling the heat, seeing frost melt on the glass, white ferns running to water. The mill workers and the firemen in their yellow jackets teemed in the darkness under arc lights, their shadows thrown onto trodden snow. Her parents watched with her at the bedroom window, their arms around her. Her dad couldn’t stop shaking his head.
– All that cotton, it’ll burn like a wick!
Her mother tightened her arms around Sophie.
– My God! All that waste.
Want not. Cotton waste. Candlewick. The phrases banged against each other and Sophie piped up.
– Waste not, want not!
Her mother gave her a queer look and Sophie went quiet. Afterwards it became a family joke, what she’d said when the mill was burning. But they would want, all those people moving below. Water arced from the hoses into the windows and ran back out down the road towards them, glistening blackly as if the tar itself was melting, as if it would engulf the house.
The mill did burn like a wick. It burned for three days as if it was sucking up some reservoir of wax from below the surface of the earth. Thousands of rats had fled from the basements, invading the neighbourhood. People talked about them as a latter-day plague. Sophie thought of them panicking out from under spinning frames, pouring out from windows and under doors and down the winding staircases. A river of rats; a rat-river. For weeks afterwards their big grey limping cat, Janus, laid one on the back door mat with its head neatly bitten off. A gift.
The boy was still asleep. His head turned sideways on the pillow, his hurt mouth fallen open a little. She’d let him sleep a few more minutes and then wake him. She’d wake him with a kiss, watch his eyes flutter open, his wry smile. There was a smattering of freckles across his nose and his neck was translucently white. He looked as if he’d never been in the sun. His breath was soft and even and when he breathed in his nostrils pinched a little. Stephen.
The mill fire happened the winter Sophie was nine years old. It was their own apocalypse: things either happened before or after it. In the morning, she woke to see the walls of the mill still smouldering. It looked like one of those monochrome photographs from the war. Collapsed roofs and tilted beams and shattered windows blackened like broken lamp-glass. Snow was still falling sparsely, rising as steam from the ruins. Flames kept appearing as the wind stirred cotton bales that were still burning at their core. Hosepipes criss-crossed the ground and their little leaks turned to streams and deltas of ice. Firemen were picking through the rubble with axes fastened to their waists and the mill owners arrived in a long grey car to look on. A crane was delivered on a huge trailer. When it was assembled, it began to knock down the walls with a wrecking ball. The brickwork crumbled to dust and ash and sparks shot up from the debris. It took almost a year to rebuild it, a whole storey shorter in height and with a modern steel roof instead of slate. The old chimney came down too, and the little red hawk that had nested there moved on.
The memory had nudged her this morning, heading to work. Why, she wasn’t sure. Walking through an avenue of poplars on a spring day. Wearing fresh clothes. Feeling her youth coiled in her, propelling her into the future: more days like this, Gérard, of sun shining through new leaves. It was at the back of her mind as she ordered a latté at the coffee stand – a little three-wheeler van specially kitted out with hot water and a coffee maker. The owner was from Spain or Italy and he liked to talk as he snapped on the espresso machine, frothed the milk and poured it into the paper cup.
– There you goes, lady, nice day, eh?
– Yes, beautiful.
He dropped the cup into a cardboard holder and squeezed on the lid.
– Is spring eh? Here are your latté.
– Looks great! Perfecto. Thank you!
Was that Spanish? It was close. Gérard would laugh. Sophie paid the coffee man, fumbling loose change from her purse. She caught a glimpse of herself in the window of an electronics shop. Smart in a grey two-piece suit with stylishly high heels. Her brown hair was twisted into a bun. She looked every bit like a PA walking to the office, superimposed on a row of TV sets that had the news playing silently. That woman from the White House, her mouth opening and closing like a trap. Then tanks rolling from left of screen and a man walking backwards waving a Palestinian flag.
Sophie had rented a room down from the main business area, below the city square where the trams came in. A neighbourhood of small shops and large tenements built before the war. There had been trams then, too, but they’d been taken away and the lines dismantled. Now they were coming back like in her grandparents’ time. That was weird. Regeneration. She needed to call her parents this weekend. It’d been a week or so. She sipped the scalding coffee through the small hole in the plastic rim of the cup, noticing a smudge of lipstick as she pulled it away.
The entrance to the apartment block was light and tall, morning sun entering through a fanlight above the door and streaming into the stairwell. She preferred the stairs to the lift, balancing the half-empty coffee cup, feeling the pressure tighten her calves. Her ankles were her strong point, neat and slender in black court shoes. Expensively understated. That was the way she thought of them, of herself. Her first client was at 11.00 am so she still had over an hour. She might have time to read her novel or watch a little daytime TV. When she nudged open the door the flat smelled of lavender and just very faintly of the freesias that stood in a vase on the lounge table. There was a small kitchen, a bedroom with a double bed and built-in wardrobes where she kept her outfits, a lounge with a soft beige carpet, a sound system, and a glass-topped coffee table with magazines. A telephone was mounted on the wall.
Sophie pushed the door to with her foot and heard the catch click. She put the coffee cup down on the table, slipped the bag from her shoulder and then took off the thin jacket and slung it over a chair. She ran the back of her hand over the silk lining. It was sleek, sensuous. This morning, walking to work, anything had seemed possible. Sophie pulled the shade of the table lamp a little crooked. It was important to make the place feel lived in. It couldn’t be too tidy or clinical. She looked in the mirror, wet her finger and dabbed a bit of sleepy dust from the corner of her eye. Grey eyes with the lashes lightly touched with mascara. She sat on one of the upright chairs to finish her coffee.
Last night she’d dreamed that she and Gérar
d had arranged to meet someone in one of those bars on the waterfront, where the Baltic ships used to come in, loaded with fur and timber. They’d travelled on a bus for miles past desolate dockland buildings. Some of them had been damaged by the recent storms. A huge tree with a flat trunk and flaking bark was being dismembered by workmen in hard hats with chainsaws and pulleys. The bus had stopped, shaking as the engine ticked over. They got off to find the pub closed down with thick dust on the engraved windows. The Shakespeare. It had been fitted out in solid oak by a team of shipwrights. Now a pair of workmen were sanding down the panelling, room by room. She remembered that she knew one of the bar girls from school. Where was she? Then it wasn’t Gérard tugging her sleeve to leave, but a client she’d once helped. One of those who’d visited her a few times, then disappeared. She’d got out of bed remembering her work number on his cell phone, feeling bothered by it. She woke Gérard with a cup of tea, but he hadn’t wanted to talk about her dreams. Anything before eight o’clock was way too early for him. Sophie had dreamed about that pub before. It existed in the geography of her mind. How many of her memories were really dreams?
Sophie went into the bathroom, slipping down her skirt, feeling the sheer lining against her thighs and knees. The toilet seat was cold. A wooden one would be better. She flushed the loo, then made sure the hand basin was spotless and the toilet bowl was clean and the waste bin empty. That was important. She kept some make-up on the shelves and there were clean towels in the airing cupboard. Many of her clients liked to take a shower before going back to their lives. That was important, too. It was a way of keeping things in their place, of leaving things behind. A Czech girl collected the washing every Friday, bringing freshly laundered sheets and towels. You had to remember not to add Slovakia when you spoke to her about home. Marta was tall, tanned and cheerful with a bright smile and Celtic tattoos on each calf, their blue flames twisting up from her ankles.
Sophie had seen working girls under the railway bridges behind the station, their short leather skirts and thigh boots and laddered fishnet stocking. Short jackets worn wide open to show their cleavage. All the usual clichés. Some of them were from Eastern Europe. Their minders would be watching from cars. Pimps, actually, if she was honest. And the other men, the punters, cruising by. Looking for hand-jobs, blow-jobs. It was hard to imagine that kind of life, what drove them to it. Except the obvious: a drug habit, kids, debt. Maybe all three. Sophie took a file and checked her nails. It was surprising how such a small thing – a hangnail scratching across a client’s back – could upset everything. Not all of them could see the funny side. They wanted to feel special, after all, to escape from their lives or loneliness into the space she made for them. She believed them when they said they loved their wives. It was amazing how many of them told her that.
Sophie drew her chair to the window and watched the street beyond the net curtains. The flow of traffic and people was soothing, the city alive in all its dimensions. Sometimes she imagined it as a flow of electricity through millions of filaments. A huge brain teeming with information. Or water coursing through plumbing, sewers, culverts, pipework. Then radio waves that were woven together into an invisible cat’s cradle of conversation and emotion. Or it might be journeys. Think of that: a city composed entirely from the journeys of its occupants. Short journeys within the city and journeys to it, like hers, like Gérard’s or those girls under the railway arches, some of them still teenagers. Then it became a city of stories, not of cement and steel and glass and roads and rail, but a place that was told, a place that was pronounced, that existed only through utterance from the mouths of its citizens.
She’d tried to explain that to Gérard and he’d understood at once, how a place exists in the mind and imagination and speech of its people. In France this is our culture. C’est vrai. He made it sound simple. Gérard made it sound obvious. That was the nice thing about him. Matter-of-fact, to the point. It was his mystery, too, what made him cool and inaccessible. A bus paused just below the window and she saw a pigeon land on its roof and take off again. There were bird droppings on the window ledge she couldn’t get to.
Two years after the fire Sophie had gone to secondary school and that was that. Her best friend Charlotte had been sent to a private school on the other side of town. She wore a tartan skirt and a green blazer and a smart Tam o’ Shanter. Whereas Sophie was allowed to wear her own clothes to the local comprehensive. They didn’t see each other much after that. Sophie made new friends. She made friends easily. She was a good sharer, so that hadn’t been hard, really. It was funny how everything in her life had happened either before or after the fire at the mill. The night her father saw the fox.
After that, his business expanded. He took on three workers, including her uncle Pete, opened an office and employed a secretary. Mrs Rainer. Anita. Short grey hair, pink lipstick and gold bracelets, a picture of her grandchildren framed on the desk. Sophie’s mother did an Open University degree, staying up late with the television. She had one of those old Amstrad word-processors with a green screen and tractor-fed printer where you had to tear off the paper. Like a bog roll, her dad said, predictably. After the degree she got a job as an office manager at the local council.
They were going up in the world. Everything was possible with a lot of application and a bit of luck. Her dad said that, too. He had three sisters who he never saw for whatever reasons. Her grandfather had been a farm worker and a drunk who beat Sophie’s grandmother. When he died, her dad had gone out to celebrate. The old bastard’ll leave us all alone now. Her mum’s parents came to visit in a little Vauxhall with her mum’s sister, Auntie Vera, who had scoliosis and still lived at home. They were altogether more civilised. Not that she’d ever met the other half of the family.
Then they moved from the terraced house overlooking the mill to a semi on the edge of town overlooking fields and farms. Sophie wanted a pony. For two years she wanted it more than anything else in the world. Something to look after, to feed and groom and ride around like royalty. A princess. Her father was tempted. Then her mother got pregnant. It was a massive surprise and, all of a sudden, she had a baby brother to think about. She was twelve years older than Daniel and the idea of the pony went away somehow. Not that they could afford one.
Dad bought her a telescope instead and they set it up so they could stargaze from the Velux in the attic room. One winter they watched a comet burning across the sky, a primeval omen of phosphorescent fire and ice. It raised the hair on the back of your neck to watch it. It was even on the news. It had a complicated name but her dad called it Fire Fox because of the way it slinked into the night sky as the light was falling. Because it reminded him of that night, the fox’s eyes flickering from the larch woods. They watched it for weeks and then felt they’d lost something when it dropped out of view. Maybe that had been her childhood receding, burning up out there where there was no real time. Just incalculable distance and space.
These days Sophie got the odd text message from Dan. He’d Skyped with her from Thailand at the weekend, from an internet café, halfway to Australia for his gap year. Sophie felt sorry for him, really. It wasn’t easy for his generation, the job market being what it was and student fees coming in. She’d graduated in Business Studies, then worked for a housing association before deciding that she wanted to work for herself. She still gave her father advice about market trends. They thought she was a consultant, which she was.
It was ten-forty. Sophie got changed for work. A short cotton nightie with a lace neckline, a damson nightgown with brocade, Moroccan slippers. She let her hair down and combed it, slipping off her bracelets and wristwatch, laying her earrings beside the bed. Pearl droplets in silver pendants. Gérard had bought her those. He’d moved in with her two months ago, an engineer from Lyons, working on a new pipeline at the oil terminal. He was tall, smart and funny. He liked good coffee and wine and nice food. He was an excellent cook and often had dinner ready by the time she made it home after a day�
�s work, his Larousse Gastronomique open on the worktop, sipping a glass of wine, listening to Bartok, Hank Mobley or Dexter Gordon as he worked. Classical or jazz: that all depended on his mood, on the day he’d had.
Gérard knew what she did, was discreet, and didn’t care. He was clean-shaven, smooth-skinned like a child, and tidy. He often worked late on his laptop as she slept. Being French made that small difference, opened that little distance between them. Gallic. She loved that word. She’d bought a Linguaphone course and was brushing up on her schoolgirl French. He laughed at her sometimes, mimicking her pronunciation. When they made love it was intimate and uncomplicated; he knew how to take pleasure and how to give it. She knew that half his pleasure was knowing she wanted him, wanted more. But that always stopped short of putting on a performance. He’d never told her he loved her and they never talked about the future. Not yet. Though in the summer she’d take a break and they’d spend a few weeks in Brittany with his parents, picking cider apples and drinking Calvados at the local bar.
Gérard was … well, too good to be true. Maybe one day he’d call her a name and that would be that. But not yet. There was something easy about the way they lived and worked around each other. Something that had clean surfaces, that wasn’t sticky with feelings and possession. Even when they argued there was a coolness, a discretion that let it all go before it bit below the surface of things to corrode them. Right now she felt young; she felt capable of anything and she was happy that he’d be waiting for her when she got home with a cassoulet or braised poussin; a frank kiss on the mouth; a glass of Côtes du Rhône or Margaux to hand.
Sophie was at the window again as the blue Ford pulled into the parking space and the boy got out. She’d no idea how old he really was. Maybe twenty? Maybe more. His mother wound down the window and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke into the street. Then she handed him an envelope, waving him away as he hesitated. The boy had a vaguely lopsided walk, like a hare. He disappeared and a few second later the apartment bell rang. Sophie clicked on the intercom.
