A Slow Fire Burning Page 12

  FIFTEEN

  Carla stood, distracted, in Angela’s kitchen, which was empty save for an ancient kettle on the counter next to the stove top. Her mobile phone was buzzing; it kept buzzing, on and on. She didn’t bother to look at it—either it would be Theo or it would be the police, and she wasn’t in the right frame of mind to talk to either. She’d already had the estate agent on the phone, wanting to set up a time to see the place so they could get it on the market in time for the peak home-buying season of late spring. She’d found the act of engaging in conversation, with the agent, with Irene next door, almost overwhelming.

  She opened the cupboards above the sink and then closed them again, she checked down below. The cupboards were empty. She knew they were empty. She’d emptied them. What on earth was she doing? She was looking for something. What was that? Her phone? No, that was in her back pocket. The tote bag! Where did she put the tote bag?

  She left the kitchen and went back into the hallway, only to discover that she’d left the front door open. Jesus. She really was losing her mind. She gave the door a good kick, slamming it shut. She turned back and stood, aimless, staring at the point on the wall just next to the kitchen doorway, where the ghost of a picture hung. What was it used to hang there? She couldn’t remember. What did it matter? What was she doing? What had she come in here for?

  This forgetfulness was new. It came from sleep deprivation, she supposed; there was a reason they used it as a form of torture—it robbed you of all capacity. She remembered this feeling, vaguely, from just after Ben was born. Only then the distraction was suffused with joy, it was like being stoned. This was like being sedated. Or held underwater. This was more like after he died.

  Carla wandered back into the kitchen, stood at the sink, looking out into the lane, leaned forward, her head against the glass. Just about caught a glimpse of the girl, the one she’d met at Irene’s, disappearing from view. Walking with a strange shuffle. There was something about that girl, something off. Weaselly. Pretty, sharp-toothed. Sexually available. She put Carla in mind of that cartwheeling young woman who’d been all over the newspapers a few years back, the one who murdered her friend. Or didn’t murder her friend? Somewhere in France? No, Italy. Perugia, that was it. Jesus, what on earth was she thinking about now? She knew almost nothing about this girl—in fact, the only thing she did know was that in her spare time she visited old ladies to help them with their shopping. And here was Carla, casting her as one of the Manson family.

  In her pocket, her phone buzzed, an angry insect trapped in a jar, and she ground her teeth. Ignored it. Tea, she thought. I’ll have a cup of tea. Lots of sugar. She went back into the kitchen, flicked on the kettle. She opened the cupboard above the sink. Still empty. Oh, for God’s sake.

  Carla turned off the kettle again and walked slowly up the stairs; she felt exhausted, legs leaden. At the top, she paused, turned and sat, gazing down the steps at the front door, at the space on the floor beside the radiator where once had lain a small Qashqai rug. Next to her, on the top step, there was a tear in the carpet. She plucked at its fabric, running her finger along the length of its neat slit, an inch or two. Wear and tear. From the end of her nose, a tear dropped. Worn and torn, Ang, she thought. That about sums us up.

  Wiping her face, she got to her feet and walked directly into Daniel’s old room at the back of the house, empty save for the old single bed and the wardrobe with its door hanging off. She placed the notebook she was carrying on top of the pile of papers at the bottom of the wardrobe and closed the door as best she could. Then she took the dog’s lead from her pocket, shuffling her coat off her shoulders as she did so. She closed the bedroom door and looped the leather end of the lead over the coat hook, giving it a good tug. She left it hanging there, opened the door once more, and wandered slowly, taking her time, along the hall to Angela’s room, dragging her fingertips over the plasterwork as she went.

  * * *

  After Angela sent Daniel away to boarding school, Carla went round to visit less and less, until one day, she stopped going altogether. There wasn’t a reason, or rather, there wasn’t just one reason; she just found that she couldn’t face it any longer. Fake yoga was over.

  Years passed. Then one night, a good six or seven years after Ben’s death, Carla was woken by a phone call, sometime after midnight, the allotted hour of dreaded telephone calls. She took a while to answer, to shake off the fug of chemically assisted sleep.

  “Can I speak to Carla Myerson, please?” a woman said.

  Carla’s heart seized—Theo was in Italy, holed up in some remote Umbrian farmhouse, trying to write, and people drove so badly there. Theo drove so badly there; he seemed to feel the need to join in.

  “Mrs. Myerson, could you possibly come down to Holborn Police Station? No, no, everything’s all right, but we have a . . . Miss Angela Sutherland here, your sister? Yes, she’s all right, she’s okay, she’s just . . . she’s had a bit to drink and got herself into a bit of trouble. She needs someone to pick her up. Could you do that, do you think?”

  Carla called a taxi and threw on some clothes. She stumbled out into freezing London rain, unsure as to how to feel, terrified or furious. The police station was quiet and brightly lit. In the waiting area a woman sat alone, crying softly to herself, saying, “I just want to see him. I just want to know he’s all right.”

  The woman on reception, quite possibly the one she’d spoken to on the phone, nodded at Carla. “Domestic,” she said, indicating the crying woman. “He lumps her one, she calls us then decides that, actually, she doesn’t want to press charges after all.” She rolled her eyes. “What can I do for you, love?”

  “I’m here to pick up Angela Sutherland. She’s my sister. I was told . . . I was told she was here.”

  The woman checked her computer screen and nodded, called out to someone in a room somewhere behind her desk. “Could you bring Mrs. Sutherland out for me, John? Yeah, her sister’s here.” She turned back to Carla. “She’d had too much to drink and caused a scene at the taxi rank.”

  “A scene?”

  The woman nodded again. “She was being abusive to another man in line, a man who by all accounts had it coming, but in any case your sister was extremely vocal, and when one of the cabbies tried to intervene, he got it in the neck too. He called for assistance and when a couple of our officers turned up, they were called a bunch of effing c-words for their troubles.”

  “Jesus.” Carla was appalled. “I’m so sorry, I’m . . . God, I’m so sorry. She’s . . . I’ve never known her to behave like that, she’s not that sort of person at all, she’s . . . quite civilized, usually.”

  The woman smiled. “Ah, well, the drink does funny things, doesn’t it? If it’s any consolation, I think she’s feeling pretty ashamed of herself. And no charges have been brought, so there’s no harm done, really.” The woman leaned forward, lowering her voice. “I think she’s given herself a bit of a fright, if I’m honest.”

  Carla’s overwhelming memory of that night was of shame too. The shame of being called in the middle of the night to pick up her drunk and disorderly little sister was completely dwarfed by the shame of seeing what her sister had become in Carla’s absence. Emaciated, hollow-eyed, her smooth cheeks spidered with veins, her shoulders hunched.

  “Angela!”

  “I’m so sorry, Cee,” she said, her eyes lowered, her voice a whisper. “I’m so sorry, I don’t even remember doing it. They said I was shouting at people, shouting and swearing and . . . I don’t remember doing it.”

  They sat side by side in the back of a black cab on the way back to Angela’s house. Neither said a word, but Carla wrapped an arm around her sister’s bony shoulders and held her close. The sensation shamed her again: it was like holding a child, like holding her sister when she’d been a little girl—tiny and fierce and funny. Infuriating. Lifetimes ago. It felt like lifetimes since she had loved her, since
they had been each other’s best friend. Carla started to weep.

  She was still weeping when they reached the lane. She wept as she handed the money to the taxi driver, as she followed her sister to the front door, as she took in the mess of the house, its dank smell of damp and ashes.

  “Please stop,” Angela said. “Please, for Christ’s sake, stop.”

  Angela took herself upstairs; Carla could hear her running water for a bath. Carla made tea—black, there was no milk in the fridge, there was nothing in the fridge save for some ancient cheese and an open bottle of white wine. Carla took two mugs upstairs; she sat on the loo seat while her sister soaked.

  “I didn’t even mean to get drunk,” Angela said to her. She was sitting up, dabbing gently at her bloody knees with a flannel. Carla could see her shoulder blades moving; they looked ready to break through the skin. “I had a couple of glasses—three, maybe? Something else in the pub afterward? It was a work thing, you know. No one saw me, I don’t think. At the taxi rank. God. I hope nobody saw me. It was just so sudden. One moment I was fine and then I sort of just . . . woke up and there was this man, towering over me, calling me a drunk. . . .”

  I thought you didn’t remember, Carla thought, being in the taxi queue. She said: “You weigh nothing, Angie. Had you eaten anything before you went out?” Angela shrugged. “How long . . . have you been like this?”

  Angela looked back over her shoulder, her expression dulled. “Like what?” She turned away, her face to the wall. She picked at the mold on the grouting between the yellowing tiles.

  Carla helped her out of the bath, fetched paracetamol from her handbag, found some antiseptic in the bathroom cupboard, which she applied to Angela’s cuts. She helped her to bed, lay at her side, holding one cold hand, her thumb gently stroking the back of her sister’s fingers. “I should have known,” she said, “that things had got so bad. I should have known.”

  I should have forgiven you, she thought. I should have forgiven you by now.

  They fell asleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  Angela woke hours later, a cry in her throat. Carla jerked awake in fright.

  “Is he here?” Angela whispered.

  “Is who here? Who? Angie, who are you talking about? Is who here?”

  “Oh. No, I don’t know. I was dreaming, I think.” She turned her face to the wall. Carla settled back down, closing her eyes, trying to return to sleep. “Did you know,” Angela whispered, “that I was seeing someone?”

  “Oh. Were you? I didn’t know. Has something happened? Did you break up?”

  “No, no. Not now,” Angela said, her lips smacking. “Then. I was seeing someone then. I never told you this, did I? He was married. He came to the house sometimes.”

  “Angie.” Carla put her right arm around her sister’s waist, pulled her closer. “What are you talking about?”

  “Lonsdale Square,” Angela said. Carla withdrew her arm. “When I was living in Lonsdale Square with Daniel after Dad died, I was seeing someone. The night before . . . the night before the accident, we were together, in the study. Watching a film, on the screen there, you remember?” The projectionist’s screen, their father had it installed, for watching home movies. “We were drinking, and . . . well. I thought the kids were asleep, but Daniel wasn’t. He came downstairs, he caught us.” Her breathing was slow, ragged. “He was so upset, Cee . . . he was just so angry, he wouldn’t calm down. I told him—my friend—to go. I told him to leave and I took Dan upstairs. It took me a long time to calm him down, to get him to sleep. Then I went to bed. I went straight to bed. I never went back downstairs again, to the study. I never went back down to close the door—”

  “Angie,” Carla interrupted, “don’t. Don’t do this. We always knew—I always knew—that you left the door open. It was—”

  “Yes,” Angela said quietly. “Yes, of course you knew. Of course.”

  SIXTEEN

  Laura pressed her phone to her ear, hunched up her right shoulder so that she could hold it there, hands-free. She was in her bathroom, searching through the medicine cabinet for some antiseptic to put on the cut on her arm. In the sink, dampening, its ink blurring, lay a letter she’d received that morning informing her of a change of date for the hearing about the fork thing. As she swept little bottles off the shelves and into the sink, onto the letter, she started to laugh.

  “The fork? The fork, the fork, the fork! The fork is a red herring!” She laughed harder, at the connection her mind had made. “Perhaps the fork was a herring fork?” (It wasn’t, it was a cocktail fork, she knew perfectly well.)

  She released the phone from her shoulder grip and dropped it into her hand, looking at the screen to remind herself who she was talking to. She was on hold, that was it, she was on hold with the court people because she wanted to tell them that the date they were now proposing was not convenient for her. It was her mother’s birthday. They might go out for lunch! She laughed harder, laughed at herself. When had her mother last taken her for lunch?

  Perhaps she could explain, though. Perhaps she could explain the whole fork thing to whoever would be, at some point, on the end of the line. Perhaps she could tell them the story; perhaps they’d understand. It was an easy story to tell, she’d told it before, a number of times, a number of versions: to the police, to the duty solicitor, to her psychologist (We need to develop strategies, Laura, to help you control your anger), to Maya at the launderette.

  Tell it again!

  She’d been in a bar, not far from where she was right at that moment. It was very late, she was very drunk, and she was dancing, slowly, on her own. Encouraged, perhaps, by the small group of people who were gathering to watch her, she performed, slowly and impromptu, a fairly professional-looking striptease. In the middle of this routine and without so much as a by-your-leave, an aggressively bearded twentysomething—drunk too, but less drunk than she—stepped forward, right into her space, reached out, grabbed her left breast, hard.

  His friends cheered and everyone else laughed except for one girl who said, “Fucking hell.”

  Laura was thrown off her rhythm, she stumbled backward, grabbing on to the bar to steady herself. Everyone laughed harder. Suddenly, blindly furious, she lurched forward over the bar, groping for a weapon. She happened upon a cocktail fork, a two-pronged affair used for skewering olives, which she grabbed, lunging forward. The man dropped his shoulder, dodged to the right, lost his balance, flailed with his left hand, grabbed the bar with his right and there, she stuck him, right through the center of his hand. The fork went in—it really went in, sank into his flesh as though it were butter—and it stuck.

  There was quite a scuffle then, with lots of pushing and shoving and the young man screaming in pain. The bouncers waded in, one of them wrapping half-naked Laura in his jacket and ushering her toward the back of the bar. “Did that bloke do this to you, love?” he asked. “Did he attack you? Did he take your clothes?”

  Laura shook her head. “I took off my clothes,” she said, “but then he grabbed me. He grabbed my tit!”

  The police were called, and while they were waiting, the two protagonists—the man with the fork in his hand and the half-naked woman with a bouncer’s jacket around her shoulders—were forced to sit almost side by side. “Fucking mental,” the man kept muttering. “She’s a fucking mental. She wants locking up.”

  He was trying to extract a cigarette from the pack with one hand, but he kept dropping the pack on the floor, which was making the bouncers laugh. “You can’t smoke in here anyway,” the jacketless one said.

  All this while, Laura was silent—the outbreak of mayhem had sobered her up, frightened her—until the man said: “You’re going to get done for assault, you mad bitch, you know that? You’re getting locked up.”

  At this point, she turned to look at him and replied, “No, I’m not. I defended myself.”
<
br />   “You fucking what?”

  “When did I say you could touch me?” Laura demanded to know. “You assaulted me,” she said. “You put your hands on me.”

  The man’s jaw dropped. “You took your top off, you mental bitch!”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that, but when did I say that you could touch me?”

  “She’s got a point,” the bouncer said. Fork boy squeaked in disbelief.

  Laura smiled sweetly. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he went on, “it’s a fair point, love, but still. You can’t just stab people in the hand with a fork. It’s disproportionate, innit?”

  * * *

  Laura held her gaze in the mirror. She was still in the bathroom, still holding the phone to her ear. There was no sound from the other end, no one said anything. No one was listening. Laura took the handset from her ear, tapped the screen, and scrolled to her mother’s number. She listened to a familiar beeping sound, to a woman’s voice telling her, You have no credit available for this call. She placed the phone on the edge of the basin. She tried to smile at herself in the mirror, but her facial muscles didn’t seem to be working properly; she could only grimace, at her ugliness, at her loneliness.

  SEVENTEEN

  Theo knocked on Angela’s door again, louder this time. “Carla? Are you in there?” There was an edge to his voice; his mood had been veering all morning between irritation and panic. He’d not been able to reach Carla for two days now—she’d not responded to his messages and if she was at home, she’d not answered the door to him. So, irritation: because she did this sometimes, she dropped out of circulation without thought for the consequences, without caring how much others—he, mostly—might be worrying about her. Once, she disappeared for a whole week. It turned out she was in France; she wouldn’t say who with.