The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Martha shouted over the noise, through the fabric of her makeshift mask. “We’ve got to go!”

  She took hold of the sleeve of Olivia’s nightdress and pulled again, hard. Olivia didn’t fight her. She’d let herself be dragged out onto the upstairs landing when she realised what she hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard.

  “Pamela,” she said, still coughing. “Where’s Pamela?”

  “Come on!” said Martha, yanking at Olivia’s arm, avoiding her question.

  “My sister!” Olivia said, almost screaming to be heard. The noise was growing, more roar now than rumble, though she couldn’t have said where it was coming from. “Where’s my sister?”

  Martha’s eyes darted left, to the room at the end of the landing: her mother’s bedroom.

  With a twist of her hips, Olivia broke free of the cleaning lady’s grip and ran towards it, mindful of neither the thickening smoke pouring from under the closed door nor the temperature, which rose to boiling point as she neared the room.

  “Bloody stop!” Martha shouted, tearing after her, but too late: Olivia’s elbow was already on the stainless steel handle of the door, the weight of her body pressed into her forearm as she lurched forward into the searing heat of the wood.

  She’d never known pain like it - pain so enormous, so absolutely all-encompassing that it was as if not just her arm but her whole body was on fire, the fat and muscle roasting in its own skin, and she could neither speak nor force her thoughts into coherence.

  She screamed again, or thought she did, and fell to the floor.

  Martha took her by the waist and pulled her upright; picked her up with a strength that Olivia - the thinking, functioning Olivia - wouldn’t have expected of a woman that small, and slung her over her shoulder, pressing Olivia’s face into the side of her neck.

  She carried her down the stairs and out of the house through the back door in the kitchen, the heat and smoke growing less and less the further they travelled from the upstairs bedrooms. At the bottom of the garden, a rusted-iron gate led out onto the road - not a busy main road like the one at front of the house, but a quiet one, facing a few square feet of scrubby common land that she and Pamela and some of the other kids used as a playground, ducking in and out of the thigh-high weeds in summer and pushing each other into the mud the day after a rainstorm. Martha carried her down the path and through it, into the street.

  She’d known about the gate, Olivia realised later. Known about it, even though none of the grownups ever used it - even though her mother had forgotten it was there.

  “Can you walk?” Martha asked her, placing her down on the pavement. The concrete was icy under her bare feet; the polar opposite of the fire in her arm.

  She took her weight in her legs and stood, not quite able to speak. This seemed to be enough for Martha. She took Olivia’s hand, her other hand, and tugged her - with less force this time - onto the common land, and over it, until they spilled out onto another road, a side-road that was more like an alleyway.

  A car was parked there - a little silver Aston Martin, a James Bond car. It looked brand new, sleek and unscratched and polished to a high shine.

  She’d have wondered, if she’d been able to think, how it was that a cleaning lady could afford a car like that.

  “Get in,” Martha said, climbing into the driving seat and pushing open the passenger door from the inside.

  Mindlessly, Olivia obeyed.

  Martha put a key in the car’s ignition, turned on the engine and pulled out into the street. Something about the motion seemed to jump-start Olivia, to bring a part of her back to life, and the tumble of her thoughts hit her one by one and all at once, striking her like the shards of a rockfall.

  The smoke. The heat. Her arm on the bedroom door.

  Her mother.

  Pamela.

  She opened her mouth, the beginnings of another scream rising up through her throat from her chest, and the world went dark.

  ———

  Voices brought her round, close by and unfamiliar.

  “Perhaps we should have taken her somewhere,” said the first - a woman’s voice, so crisp and clear it could have been delivering the Queen’s Speech on the television.

  “No,” said a second, this one deep and male and strangely-accented. “Any hospital, one look at her arm and they’d be asking questions.”

  “Can’t you do nothing for her, Win?” asked another, one that sounded like it could have been Martha.

  “I’ve washed and dressed the area,” said the man, with an air of authority Olivia associated with doctors and dentists. “Painkillers would be a good idea, when she wakes up. But she’ll need more help than I can give her here if there’s any infection.”

  “We’ll just have to hope there’s not, then, won’t we?” said Martha.

  She forced her eyelids open and took in the people around her, standing over her: Martha, soot on her cheek and a strip of leopard print cloth tied around her head; a tall black man with a pencil moustache, one of his hands pressed to the stiff white bandage running from the wrist to the elbow of her damaged arm; another woman, brown skinned and black haired, with a small gold stud in her nose and perhaps the most beautiful face Olivia had ever seen, the face of a film star or a pin-up girl.

  Wherever she was, she was lying down on what she took to be a sofa or a chaise longue - her feet extending out in front of her and the back of her head supported by something soft but firm, a pillow or a cushion. She took in the gas fire, the orange rugs, the radio on the sideboard, and decided that it had to be a living room - the living room of someone else’s house. There were toys on the floor, she noticed: marbles and Matchbox cars, toy soldiers, a wooden Muffin The Mule.

  “You’re alright,” said Martha, seeing her looking. “You’re safe here. It’s all alright.”

  She laid a palm against Olivia’s forehead.

  “She’s burning up still,” she said, less to Olivia than to the other two adults in the room.

  “It’s the heat from the fire,” said the man. “It’s built up in her system. She needs water, cold water.”

  The other woman, the beautiful woman, raised a glass to Olivia’s mouth. She smelled like night air and jasmine, clove cigarettes and cinammon.

  “Drink,” she told Olivia, squeezing her undamaged hand.

  Olivia swallowed. The water was lemon-scented, the glass half-filled with ice cubes, and so cold it hurt her teeth. She coughed, and it came right back up, falling in thick droplets onto her nightdress - which was covered, now she noticed, in black powder, dark as coal dust. She wiped her mouth and sunk back onto the maybe-cushion, tired and embarrassed, confused and afraid, and wishing, desperately, that she could remember enough of the preceding hours to understand how she’d ended up here, in a state like this.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  She sounded hoarse, scratched. Wondered if they’d know what she was saying, through the croaking.

  “You’re at my place,” said Martha, after an eternity of awkward silence. “Our place, I should say.” She stepped in closer to the black man; rested a palm on his lower back. “This is my husband, Winston.”

  “Why am I here?” Olivia said, the words escaping in a frightened whisper. “What happened to me?”

  Where’s my Mum? she thought, but didn’t say. And where’s Pamela? Why aren’t they here?

  Another awkward silence.

  “Tell her,” said the man to the two women, in a low voice he probably thought Olivia couldn’t hear. “You can’t keep it from her, something like this. It’s not fair.”

  “She’s ten years old, Win,” said Martha reprovingly.

  “And how old were you?” said the man cryptically. “Ten is old enough to know."

  The woman who wasn’t Martha - Sita, she learned later, her name was Sita - hesitated, and then, appearing to reconcile herself to some kind of decision, lowered herself down on the sofa beside Olivia.

  She too
k Olivia’s hand between both of hers; rubbed pacifying circles with her thumbs into the thin skin around the joints of Olivia’s fingers.

  “There was a fire,” she began. “At your house. And your father… it looks very much as if he started it.”

  ———

  Many years later, leafing through one of the true crime books Seb devoured during his downtime, she came across a phrase, a descriptor used to categorise a particular genre of man: family annihilator. Men who slaughtered their wives and children, suddenly and violently, with carving knives, cans of lighter fluid, showers of bullets; aggrieved men, resentful men, men who’d rather stab their partners with a barbecue fork than fight a custody battle. Men reacting to, or fearing, loss of status; coldly pragmatic men, who saw their families as impediments to their own good fortune, as obstacles to be removed by any means necessary.

  Her father, she’d thought, fit the last archetype perfectly.

  He’d started the fire at the house, Sita had told her, as she lay that night - or the morning after, she couldn’t be sure - on an almost-stranger’s sofa, head spinning and pain radiating outward from her ruined arm. Had left after the row with her mother, but then come back; let himself in with his own key, carrying a can of lighter fluid and newspaper for kindling, and gone straight upstairs, to her mother’s room.

  “We think he set the fire there,” Sita said “and then closed the bedroom door behind him before he left. To give him time to slip out through the back garden. His doing that… it would have stopped the flames spreading straight away. It’s almost certainly why Ruby was able to get you out in time.”

  Ruby? she’d thought. Who’s Ruby? And then: Pamela.

  “My sister,” she said, the thought that had been dancing horribly around the edges of her mind crystallising into something like knowledge. “I told her to go and sleep in with Mum. In her bedroom.”

  Sita and Martha exchanged looks, but it was the man who spoke.

  “I’m afraid,” he said, slowly and patiently as an undertaker, “that there wasn’t time to get to them. Ruby tried, but with the fire and the smoke, she wasn’t able to get through. The door was too hot, too heavy. I’m very sorry.”

  They’re dead, she thought. Dead and burned.

  And it was him who killed them. Locked them up in a room for the fire to eat them.

  If anyone had asked her, before just then, how she thought she’d react to knowing this - to being told this - she’d had imagined crying, screaming. Not the numb calm that settled inside her, that landed in her stomach and pushed up and out like an icicle, freezing the parts that should have screamed, should have cried.

  (I was in shock, she’d tell herself later. How could I not have been?)

  Calmly, she asked: “who’s Ruby?”

  ———

  Ruby was Martha, and Martha was Ruby.

  “Martha’s a, what do you call it?” Martha/Ruby said, sometime in the long, strange hours of the day and night immediately after the fire. “A stage name. For work.”

  Olivia didn’t ask, then, why a cleaning lady would need a stage name.

  Other things she didn’t ask: how Martha - Ruby - knew that her father had left the house and then come back, when she’d left herself before he did. How she’d come to see him go in, and then out again. How she known what he was doing there.

  The pain in her arm was no less intense than it had been - in spite of the cup after cup of milky tea and plate after plate of biscuits Sita insisted that she eat and drink, in spite of the ointment the man called Winston rubbed into the red-raw skin whenever he changed her bandages.

  (She’d winced, the first time he’d tried to dress the wound; pulled her arm away sharply, protecting herself from the fresh starbursts of agony created by every dab of the cotton pad.

  “Let him get on with it,” Ruby had told her, not unkindly. “He was a medic in the war. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “I’ll make it as fast as I can,” Winston had said. And true to his word, had swiped the rubbing alcohol so quickly and so efficiently over the burn that she barely had time to cry out).

  It was impossible to determine, from her position on the sofa, just how much time passed for her in Ruby’s living room. The curtains were drawn, and heavy enough to block out any natural light, and the daily lives of Ruby and Sita and Winston seemed to follow no obvious pattern. The children whose toys she saw, whose voices she heard in the rooms outside never materialised; probably, Olivia thought, Ruby was keeping them away deliberately, stopping them from seeing anything that might upset them or encourage them to ask awkward questions.

  She found that she couldn’t think about Pamela or her mother, even when she wanted to. The part of her brain that usually held the shape of them - the memory of them now, she supposed - wouldn’t open up to her; wouldn’t spring to life when she tried to access the material inside.

  (“Trauma,” Ruby told her later, when she asked why something like that would happened, what was wrong with her that she couldn’t remember her own family in anything other than the broadest strokes. “Does funny things to your head”).

  The adults came and went, bustling in and out of the room with their plates and cups and bottles of peroxide. The initial impulse to ask questions, to find answers had ebbed away, and she found she didn’t want to talk to them, not then - even when they asked how she was or how she was feeling.

  Instead, in the absence of clocks and daylight, she used the rhythms of her body to mark time: the rumbling of her stomach, the throbbing in her arm, the frequency with which she emptied her bladder into the ceramic pot tucked discreetly under her sickbed (and taken away to be emptied, just as discreetly, whenever Sita came in to reclaim the crumb-covered plates and empty teacups. Olivia thought at first that she ought to be embarrassed to have someone who looked like Sita doing that for her - but then found that embarrassment, too, was beyond her emotional reach, in that room).

  Days, hours, minutes later, Ruby was back beside her, pulling up a footstool beside Olivia and sinking down onto it with a sigh Olivia associated with people much older.

  “We need to have a talk,” she told Olivia. “I didn’t want to have to do this now, and Christ knows you’re barely well enough to stand, let alone move about, but I’m not sure it’ll keep. The fact is, you can’t stay here. Not because we wouldn’t have you,” she said quickly, pre-empting any possible offence Olivia might have taken. “You could stay here as long as you like, for me. Me and Win. But it ain’t safe, not here. Not in London.”

  “Safe?” Olivia said, not following.

  “Your old man,” Ruby said. “I don’t know how much you know about him - not much I reckon, if he had anything to do with it. But he’s an influential person, if you know what I mean. Got a lot of connections in a lot of places. And if he were to find out that we got you out of that house, out of the fire… it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d try to come looking for you, or get one of his mates to.”

  And if he did? she thought - memory-images of the man who asked her about her homework and took her out for ice cream colliding dissonantly with the man she’d been told about, the one who’d walk into his own kids’s home with an armful of accelerant and walk out again without looking back. If he did find me, what then?

  “You could name him, is the problem,” Ruby continued. “Tell people who he is - who he is to you. Tell his wife. Tell the Old Bill. And he’s not gonna want that.”

  A creak of door hinges, and Winston was in the living room, crouching down next to his wife, looking right at Olivia.

  “It’s alright, though,” he said, speaking softly. “We’ve found you somewhere, somewhere you can go. Somewhere you’ll be safe.”

  Chapter 21

  St Luke’s Hospital, Islington

  1996

  El leaned back against the wall, grateful again for the quiet privacy of the Death Room.

  “And they did it?” she asked - fully awake now, her earlier exhaustion banished. “Ghoste
d you out of London, just like that?”

  Rose rested her own head again the same wall, lost in the telling.

  “More or less,” she said.

  ———

  They gave her clothes to wear - a skirt and a blouse two sizes too big, a pair of tan tights, brown loafers that fit her feet, just about, but looked like nothing either Ruby or Sita would ever choose to own. She had nothing of her own left to take with her, nothing to pack.

  It was morning then - the living room curtains, now opened, giving her a glimpse of the light outside. Only Ruby and Sita went with her, bundling her out of the flat - it was a flat she’d been in, she realised, not a house - and downstairs, straight into the back of a yellow Ford Anglia that was, Olivia thought, the polar opposite of the Aston Martin Ruby had driven. Winston stayed behind, charged with looking after the kids she’d heard but never seen.

  “Everything will be alright,” he told her sombrely before she left. “We’ll make sure of it.”

  They were going north, Sita had told her - out of the city and up, on to Yorkshire, to somewhere near Sheffield. There’d be people to see there - a man and a woman named Ackroyd, old friends of Ruby’s and Sita’s.

  “They’re good folk,” Ruby said. “Solid. You’ll like them.”

  “And what are we going to do when we get there?” she asked.

  “That’s really up to you, darling,” said Sita. “You and Arthur and Diane. You must see how you feel, when you meet one another.”

  The answer, if that was what it was, had left her none the wiser.

  Olivia hadn’t often been driven to places. Her mother didn’t drive a car - hadn’t driven a car - and her father had always been reluctant to take her and Pamela out in his, and she found herself excited, despite the circumstances; gazing breathlessly out of the windows as Ruby barrelled the Anglia past Elstree, Potters Bar, Luton, the names of each place as alien and exotic as their village greens and old stone churches.