A Slow Fire Burning Read online

  Irene shook her head. “Oh, no, I don’t think so. I’ve no idea how that works. I’m not even sure I have one of those on my phone.”

  “Course you do.” Laura picked up Irene’s handset and swiped the screen. She located the voice recorder app and clicked on it. “Crunchy nut cornflakes,” she enunciated, loudly. “Not sodding muesli.” She winked at Irene. “Then, see here, you can play it back.” Crunchy nut cornflakes, not sodding muesli, the phone intoned.

  “Oh, that does look easy,” Irene laughed. “Show me again.”

  * * *

  After they’d put together a new list, Irene told Laura to take a twenty-pound note from her purse to cover the shopping. Irene paid her five pounds per time to fetch her groceries, which was pretty generous since it generally took her all of fifteen minutes, but this time Laura helped herself to two twenties anyway. She spent fourteen pounds and pocketed the rest, losing the receipt on the way home.

  While she unpacked the groceries, she filled Irene in on what had been going on—how she’d lost her key and had to break into her flat, how she’d hurt her arm and then lost her job on top of that. She left out the part about Daniel. Irene didn’t want to hear about that, didn’t want to hear about the fucking and the argument and the getting arrested.

  “I’m really sorry I didn’t get in touch earlier,” Laura told her, once she’d finished putting everything away, once she’d made them both a cup of tea and laid some chocolate biscuits out on a plate. “I’ve just been all in a spin, you know?” Irene was sitting in her favorite chair and Laura was leaning up against the radiator under the window, her legs stuck out in front of her. “I didn’t mean to let you down.”

  “Oh, Laura.” Irene shook her head. “You didn’t let me down, I was just worried about you. If something like that happens again, you must let me know. I might be able to help you.”

  Laura thought of the money she’d taken and hated herself. She should give it back. She should slip it back into Irene’s purse, and then just ask her, straight out, the way a normal person would, for a loan. For help, just like Irene said. It was too late now, though, wasn’t it? Irene’s bag was right there next to her chair—she couldn’t put the money back now; there was no way she could do it without Irene noticing. And anyway, if ever there was a time to ask for help it had just passed, a few seconds back, when Irene offered it. She stayed for a little while longer, time for another cup of tea, a couple more biscuits, but she’d barely the appetite for it; her dishonesty curdled within her, souring everything.

  She made her excuses. She left.

  On her way out, she noticed that the door to number three—Angela Sutherland’s house—was slightly ajar. She pushed it open, very gently. Peering inside, she saw Carla Sutherland’s coat draped over the banister, the expensive handbag hanging from the newel post, and the other bags, the shopper and the tote, just slung on the floor. Just lying there, within reach of an open door! Fucking rich people. Sometimes they just asked for it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Back at home, she emptied the contents of the tote bag onto her living room floor, her heart racing as, along with the crappy old scarf and the decent but ancient Yves Saint Laurent jacket, came tumbling two small leather boxes. She grabbed the first, the smaller, purple box, and opened it: a gold ring, set with what looked like a large ruby. In the second, the smaller, brown leather box, there was a Saint Christopher’s medal, also in gold, with the initials BTM engraved on the back, along with a date: March 24, 2000. A christening present, maybe? Not for Daniel; the initials were wrong. Some other child. She snapped the box shut. It was a shame about the engraving, she thought, it made the medal less sellable. But the ring, if it was real, that must be worth a bit.

  What a piece of shit she was.

  In the kitchen, she emptied her pockets and counted out all the cash she had to her name: thirty-nine pounds fifty, twenty-six of which she’d stolen from her friend Irene.

  What a lying, thieving lowlife.

  Laura listened to the voice recordings on her own phone, listened to her own voice reminding her to contact the council about her housing benefit, to contact the building’s maintenance people about the boiler (again), to call the nurse at the doctor’s surgery to talk about refilling her prescription, to buy milk, cheese, bread, tampons . . .

  She paused the recording, exhausted at the very prospect of all the things she had to do, at the obstacles she could already see rising in front of her. She scrolled quickly through her messages, from boys she’d been chatting to, prospects she’d been cultivating in whom she now had no interest and for whom she had no energy. She listened to her voicemails, one of them a cold call about insurance, the other a message from her psychologist.

  You’ve missed two appointments, Laura, so I’m afraid if you don’t make the next one we’re going to have to take you off the service, do you understand? I don’t want to do that because I think we’ve been making good progress and keeping you on a nice, even keel and we don’t want all that hard work to go to waste, do we? So I’m expecting to see you on Monday afternoon at three and if you can’t make it, please ring me back today to reschedule. . . .

  Laura slid lower into her chair. She gently massaged her scalp with the tips of her fingers, squeezing her eyes shut, tears sliding out from under her lids and across her cheekbones. Stop stop stop, she said quietly to herself. If only it could stop.

  Laura had been referred to the psychologist after the fork incident. She was a nice enough woman with a small face and large eyes; she reminded Laura of some sort of woodland creature. She told Laura that she needed to stop reacting. “You seem to spend your entire life firefighting, Laura. You keep lurching from one crisis to the next, so what we need to do is to find some way to break this pattern of reaction. We need to see if we can devise some strategies . . .”

  Psychologists were always big on devising strategies: strategies to stop her acting out, lashing out, losing control. To make her stop and think, to prevent her from picking the wrong course of action. You know your problem, Laura, you make bad choices.

  Well, possibly, but that was only one way of looking at it, wasn’t it? Another way of looking at it might be to say, you know your problem, Laura, you were hit by a car when you were ten years old and you smacked your head on the tarmac, you suffered a fractured skull, a broken pelvis, a compound fracture of the distal femur, a traumatic brain injury, you spent twelve days in a coma and three months in hospital, you underwent half a dozen painful surgeries, you had to learn to speak again. Oh, and on top of all that, you learned, while you were still lying in your hospital bed, that you had been betrayed by the person you loved most in the world, the one who was supposed to love and protect you. Is it any wonder, you might say, that you are quick to take offense? That you’re angry?

  The One Who Got Away

  In the place her smile should have been there is a question: So, where are we off to, then? Now there’s no space where her smile should have been because now she is smiling and he’s not angry anymore, he’s thinking of how it’s going to be, he’s wishing the friend wasn’t there in the back, but if he just doesn’t look at her doesn’t think about her then maybe it’ll be okay.

  He doesn’t like the way the friend looks at him. The way she looks at him reminds him of his mother, who he should have forgotten all about but he hasn’t. She was ugly too, bitten by a dog when she was a girl and yapping about it ever since, her mouth scarred, lip twisted like she was sneering at you, which she usually was.

  Scarred inside and out, always yelling, at him or at his dad, wanted him to be miserable, just like her, couldn’t stand it whenever he was laughing or playing or happy.

  Now look. He’s thinking about his mother again. Why is she always in his head? It’s the other one’s fault, isn’t it, the ugly one in the back, she’s made him think of his mother, he thinks of her when he’s doin
g things, all sorts of things, driving his car, trying to sleep, watching TV, when he’s with girls and that’s the worst, makes him feel all hollow inside, like he’s not got enough blood to fill him up. Makes it so he can’t do anything. Can’t see anything, except for red.

  FOURTEEN

  Irene was very worried about Laura. In her kitchen, gently heating a saucepan of baked beans to pour over her toast (Carla would not approve), she thought about phoning her up, to make sure she was all right. She’d said she was (“Golden! You know I am!”), but she seemed distracted and anxious. Of course, she’d just lost her job, so she was bound to be worried, wasn’t she? But it seemed like more than that. Today, Laura had seemed uneasy in Irene’s company in a way Irene had never noticed before.

  Not that she’d known her very long. Just a couple of months they had been in each other’s lives, and yet Irene had quickly come to care for the girl. There was something so terribly raw about her, so unguarded, Irene feared for her. Someone like that seemed so vulnerable to the worst the world had to offer. And it was on this vulnerable young woman that Irene had come to rely, because without Angela, Irene found herself alone. She was aware, of course, that there was a danger in allowing herself to see Laura somehow as a replacement for Angela.

  They were, in their way, quite similar: both funny, kind, visibly fragile. The best thing about them, from Irene’s point of view, was that they didn’t make assumptions. Laura didn’t just assume Irene would be incapable of learning how to use a new app on her mobile phone; Angela didn’t assume Irene would have no interest in the words of Sally Rooney. Neither of them assumed that Irene wouldn’t laugh at a dirty joke (she would if it were funny). They didn’t take for granted that she would be physically incapable, or small-minded, or uninterested in the world. They did not see her, as Carla did, as a busybody, an old fool.

  Irene was eighty years old, but she didn’t feel eighty. Not just because she was, sprained ankle notwithstanding, a spritely, trim woman, but because it was impossible to feel eighty. Nobody felt eighty. When Irene considered it, she thought that she probably felt somewhere around thirty-five. Forty, maybe. That was a good age to feel, wasn’t it? You knew who you were then. You weren’t still flighty or unsure, but you had not yet had time to harden, to become unyielding.

  The truth was that you felt a certain way inside, and while the people who had known you your whole life would probably see you that way, the number of new people who could appreciate you as that person, that inside person, rather than just a collection of the frailties of age, was limited.

  And Irene no longer had too many people around who’d known her her whole life. Almost all of her old friends, hers and William’s, had moved out of the city, many of them years ago, to be nearer to children or grandchildren. At the time it hadn’t bothered Irene all that much, because as long as she had William, she never felt remotely lonely. And then one bright March morning six years ago, William went off to get the newspaper and he never came home; he dropped dead in the newsagent’s from a heart attack. Irene thought he was strong as an ox, she thought he’d go on forever; she thought she might die from the shock, at first, but then that wore off, and the grief came, and that was worse.

  * * *

  A door slammed and Irene jumped. It was next door; Irene was well accustomed to the particular timbre of the front door slamming. She struggled to her feet, leaning forward to see out the window, but there was no one there. Carla, presumably, doing God knows what. Angela had been gone for two months and still Carla came to the house, day after day, “sorting through things,” though Irene struggled to imagine what there was to sort; Angela hadn’t had much. They came from money, Carla and Angela, but somehow Carla seemed to have ended up with most of it. Angela had the house, of course, but nothing else. She eked out a meager living doing freelance editing and copywriting work. She’d had her child young, that was the thing. His father was one of her university professors. There was an unhappy affair, an unexpected pregnancy, and Angela’s life was derailed. She’d had a difficult time of it, Irene was aware; she’d struggled a great deal, with the money and the child-rearing and all her demons.

  People assumed you couldn’t have much of a life without children, but they were wrong. Irene and William had wanted kids. It hadn’t worked out for them, but Irene had had a perfectly good life anyway. A husband who loved her, a job as a dental receptionist that she’d enjoyed more than she’d ever expected to, volunteering at the Red Cross. Trips to the theater, holidays in Italy. What was wrong with that? She could do with a bit more of it, if she were honest. And she wasn’t done yet, despite what people thought; she wasn’t in death’s waiting room. She’d the Villa Cimbrone she wanted to visit, in Ravello, and Positano, where they’d filmed The Talented Mr. Ripley. Oh, and Pompeii!

  Irene had read in a newspaper article that the happiest people on earth were unmarried childless women. She could see why—there was a lot to be said for that sort of freedom, for not being answerable to anyone, for living exactly how you pleased. Only, once you’d fallen in love you could never be truly free, could you? It was too late by then.

  After William died, Irene fell into one of her moods. Depression, they called it now, though when she was younger, it was just moods. Angela called it the Black Dog. Irene had been visited, infrequently, by the dog ever since she was a young woman. Sometimes she took to her bed, sometimes she plodded through. The moods took her suddenly, sometimes triggered by an obvious sadness (her third miscarriage, her last), though sometimes they descended without warning, on the brightest of days. She kept her head above water and she never went under because William didn’t let her. William always saved her. And then when William was gone, miraculously, Angela stepped in.

  * * *

  The year William died, 2012, Christmas crept up on Irene. Somehow she’d managed to miss the gradual appearance on shop shelves of decorations and festive food, she’d turned a deaf ear to the annoying music, and then suddenly, it was freezing cold, and it was December and people were carrying trees along the lane.

  Irene received invitations—one from her friend Jen, who’d moved to Edinburgh with her husband, and another from a cousin she barely knew who lived in Birmingham of all places—but she declined them with barely a thought. She couldn’t face the Christmas traveling, she said, which was quite true, although the real reason she felt she ought to stay at home was that if she didn’t spend Christmas alone this year, then next year would be the first one without William, or the one after that. All the Christmases for the rest of her life were going to be without William. She thought it best to just get the first one over with.

  Angela, who was sensitive about this sort of thing, said that at least Irene should pop round on Christmas Eve. “Daniel and I will be having a takeaway curry from the Delhi Grill,” she said. “Delicious lamb chops. Won’t you join us?”

  Irene said that sounded very nice indeed. On the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, she went out to get her hair set and her nails painted, and to buy some small gifts: a hardback copy of The Hare with the Amber Eyes for Angela and a voucher for art supplies for Daniel.

  On returning home, she’d barely had time to put down her things when she heard the most peculiar sound, a kind of moaning, a lowing almost. That strange, animal sound was interrupted, sharply, by another: something shattering, glass or china. Shouting came next. “I cannot deal with you! It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and look at you! Just look at you. Jesus!” Daniel’s voice was high and strangled, the voice of someone at the end of their tether; Angela’s was the voice of someone way past that. “Get out!” she was screaming. “Just get out, you . . . you bastard. God, how I wish . . .”

  “What? What do you wish? Go on! Say it! What do you wish?”

  “I wish you’d never been born!”

  Irene heard the sound of someone crashing down the stairs, the front door slamming so hard the whole terrace seemed to shake. Fr
om the window she watched Daniel storm past, his skin livid, his hands balled into fists at his sides. Angela came reeling out into the street a few moments later; she was falling-down drunk. Literally—Irene had to go outside to help her up. She managed—after a fashion, after a great deal of consoling and cajoling and gentle and then not-so-gentle persuasion—to get Angela inside and up the stairs to bed.

  Angela talked all the while, mumbling to herself, scarcely audible at times. Irene heard this, though: “Everyone told me to get rid of it, you know that? I didn’t listen. I didn’t listen. Oh, I wish I’d had your good fortune, Irene.”

  “My good fortune?” Irene repeated.

  “To be barren.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It was Boxing Day before Irene saw Angela again. Angela came round with a book (a collection of Shirley Jackson stories) and a box of chocolates, apologizing for the missed dinner. “I’m so sorry, Irene,” she said. “I feel awful, just awful, but . . . the thing is, Daniel and I had a row.”

  She didn’t seem to have any recollection of her fall, of what she’d said afterward. Irene was still angry; she’d half a mind to repeat what Angela had said, to tell her how hurt she had been. Angela must have seen something in her face, perhaps had a flash of recollection, because her own face colored suddenly, she looked ashamed, and she said, “It isn’t me, you know. It’s the drink.” She exhaled a short, painful breath. “I know that’s not an excuse.” She waited for a moment for some response and when none came, she stepped forward and kissed Irene lightly on the cheek. Then she turned away from her, toward the door. “When they’re born,” she said, her hand resting on the door handle, “you hold them, and you imagine a glorious, golden future. Not money or success or fame or anything like that, but happiness. Such happiness! You’d see the world burn if only it meant they would be happy.”