A Slow Fire Burning Page 7

“Yeah, and yesterday was Tuesday, and it was also your shift, only you didn’t show up, did you?” Laura started to say something but Maya held up the palm of her hand. “Nah, I’m not interested. I’m sorry but I’m not flipping interested, Laura, I don’t care what your excuse is this time, I’ve absolutely had it—”

  “Maya, I’m sorry—”

  “Do you know what yesterday was? Do you? It was my grandson’s fifth birthday and his mum was taking him on a special outing to the zoo and I was supposed to be there an’ all, only I flipping wasn’t, was I? Because I was here, covering for you, who didn’t even have the decency to call me.”

  “I couldn’t, Maya, I’m so sorry, I really am, I’m so sorry for letting you down—”

  “You couldn’t call? Why? Banged up, were you?” Laura hung her head. “Oh, you’ve got to be bloody joking! Excuse my French, but you got arrested again?” Maya raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry, love, but I can’t have this. I just can’t. Enough’s enough. I’ve put up with enough of your nonsense. And you’ve been warned, haven’t you? Time and again. Late, unreliable, rude to the customers—”

  “But Maya, it wasn’t—”

  “I know! I know what you’re going to say. It’s not your fault. It’s never your fault. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it isn’t your fault, but it’s flipping well not mine, is it?”

  * * *

  Laura vomited on the pavement outside the launderette. Fish fingers and pizza all over the place. “I didn’t do it on purpose!” she yelled through the window at Maya, who was watching her, open-mouthed, aghast. She didn’t do it on purpose. It wasn’t like she could throw up on demand—it was just that she’d stuck her card into the cash machine right next door to the launderette and confirmed that she had seven pounds and fifty-seven pence in her bank account, which, combined with the four pounds in change she had in her purse, was all she had in the world. And now she’d been sacked. It hit her then, like a straight punch to the solar plexus—getting sacked meant getting sanctioned. They could withhold her housing benefit; they’d done it to people she knew, sometimes for months. She’d be homeless, she thought, unless she went to prison for murder. That was when she threw up. She wiped her mouth and walked away, biting down on her bottom lip, trying to quell the feeling rising in her freshly emptied stomach, of pure panic.

  As soon as she got home, she rang her mother, because no matter how badly her mother disappointed her, how many times her mother let her down, Laura couldn’t seem to stop herself from loving her, from believing that this time, things might be different.

  “Mum? Can you hear me?” There was a crackle on the line, noise in the background. “Mum?”

  “Laura! How are you, darling?”

  “Mum . . . I’m not so good. Could you come and see me?” A long pause. “Mum?”

  “Sorry, sweetheart?”

  “I said, would you be able to come for a visit?”

  “We’re in Spain at the moment, so that might be tricky!” She laughed, a low throaty laugh that made Laura’s heart ache.

  “We’ll be back in a few weeks, though, so maybe then.”

  “Oh. A few weeks? I . . . where are you?”

  “Seville. You know, like the oranges.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of Seville.” She swallowed hard. “Listen, Mum, some shit’s happened and I’m in a bit of trouble. . . .”

  “Oh, Laura! Not again.”

  Laura bit her lip. “Yes, again. Sorry. But . . . I was wondering, could you lend me some money, to tide me over? I’ve just had a bit of bad luck, it really wasn’t my fault. . . .”

  “Laura . . .” There was another crackle on the line.

  “I missed that, Mum.”

  “I’m saying it’s just not such a good time at the moment; things are very tight for us.”

  “In Seville?”

  “Yes, in Seville. Richard’s got some pieces in an art fair here, but it’s one of those deals where you have to pay the dealer for space, so . . .”

  “He’s not sold any, then?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay.” There was a long pause, another crackle, Laura heard her mother sigh, and in that moment, something cracked; she felt her disappointment wrap like a fist around her heart.

  “Laura, are you crying? Oh, Laura, don’t. Please. Don’t do this. You know I can’t bear it when people try to emotionally manipulate me.”

  “I’m not,” Laura said, but she was sobbing now. “I’m not.”

  “Listen to me,” her mother said, her tone brisk, businesslike. “You have a good cry, and then you ring me back, all right? I’ll talk to Richard about the money, okay? Laura? You take care now.”

  Laura cried for a little while, and when she was done, all emotion spent, she called her father, who didn’t pick up. She left a message. “Dad, hi. Yeah, so I got arrested yesterday, accused of murder, they’ve let me go without a charge but I got fired ’cos I missed work due to being in police custody and all the food I bought went off and I’ve got fuck all money left so could you give me a call back? Cheers. It’s Laura, by the way.”

  The One Who Got Away

  When he wakes that morning, he can’t imagine how the day is going to go, can’t imagine how it’s going to end up, all the highs and lows. Doesn’t imagine, while he’s shaving in the dirty mirror in the back bathroom, rusty water in the sink, stink of shit everywhere, doesn’t imagine that he’ll meet such a lovely girl.

  How could he imagine how it’d go? How she’d tease him and flirt with him and hurt his feelings and then come running back, thumb stuck out, asking for help, asking for his company, for his hand on her lovely soft thigh in the front seat of the car.

  When he wakes that morning, he can’t imagine the rough-and-tumble later on, the excitement of it, the anticipation.

  NINE

  Four days a week, Miriam worked at Books on a Boat, a floating bookshop on the canal, just beyond Broadway Market. The shop, a mix of new and used, had been circling the plughole of bankruptcy for years. Nicholas, its owner, had in recent times been forced to rely on—in his words—the kindness of hipsters (crowdfunding) to keep the place afloat. (This was literally true: they’d recently crowdfunded to repair damage to the boat’s hull when it started to take on water.)

  Miriam’s function was, to a large degree, back office—she did the accounts, kept on top of most of the admin, stacked shelves, and kept the place tidy. She was no longer permitted to serve customers (too rude), nor was she allowed to write the shelf talkers—the little blurbs where bookshop staff gave their views on the latest releases (too brutal). Plus, she was off-putting. Nicholas never said so, but he didn’t need to. Miriam knew very well that she was not an appealing person to look at, that she did not draw people to her, that whatever the opposite of magnetism was, she had it in spades. She was conscious of these things and was prepared to face them. Why not, after all? What would be the alternative? There was little point in pretending that things were other than they were, that she was other than what she was.

  Wednesdays, Nicholas went to see his therapist, so Miriam opened up the shop. Always on time, never late, not by a minute; she couldn’t afford to be. This morning, she ducked under the Cat and Mutton Bridge at exactly quarter to nine and so was surprised to see that, already, there was a customer standing outside the shop, hands cupped around his face, trying to peer through a window. A tourist, she thought, and then the man stepped back and looked her way and Miriam froze, adrenaline spiking. Theo Myerson.

  Recovering, she reminded herself: this worm was turning. She took a deep breath, drew herself up to her full five feet two inches, and marched confidently toward him. “Can I help you?” she called out.

  His face darkening, he hopped off the boat and came to meet her. “You can, actually,” he said.

  As luck would have it, there was a momentary lull
in foot traffic and the pair found themselves alone on the path. The bridge behind her, the boat before, Theo Myerson was in her way. “We’re not open yet,” she said, and she stepped out, toward the water, trying to edge past him. “We open at nine. You’ll have to come back.”

  Myerson shifted in the same direction, blocking her path once more. “I’m not here to browse,” he said. “I’m here to warn you to stay out of my business. To leave my family alone.”

  Miriam shoved her trembling hands into her pockets. “I haven’t been anywhere near your family,” she said. “Unless . . . do you mean your nephew?” She looked him dead in the eye. “Horrible business.” Retrieving the bookshop key from her bag, she elbowed her way past him at last. “I’m a witness, did they tell you that? The police came to see me, asked me a whole lot of questions, and I answered them.”

  She turned to look at Theo, a tight smile on her face. “Would you have had me do otherwise? I tell you what”—she reached into her handbag and took out her mobile phone—“shall I give them a ring? I have the detective’s number in my phone; he said I should call if I remembered anything, or if I noticed anything untoward. Shall I ring him now, shall I tell him that you’ve come here to see me?” Miriam watched the consternation pass over his face like a shadow, and the rush of pleasure she felt was intense and quite unexpected. “Mr. Myerson?”

  So this, Miriam thought to herself, is what power feels like.

  * * *

  When Miriam got home from work that evening, before she’d even made herself a cup of tea or washed her hands, she took her wooden box, the one in which she kept her trinkets, from the shelf above the wood burner and placed it on her kitchen table. She opened it up and sorted through its contents, a ritual she engaged in from time to time to soothe her anxiety, a way of calming herself, ordering her thoughts, focusing on what it really was that was important to her.

  She was an odd fish and she knew it; she knew what she was and she knew how people saw her. People looked at Miriam and they saw a fat, middle-aged woman with no money and no husband and no power. They saw an outsider, living in a houseboat, clothes from the charity shop, cutting her own hair. Some people looked at her and dismissed her, some people looked at her and thought they could take whatever they liked, imagined she was powerless and couldn’t do a thing about it.

  From the box in front of her, Miriam took out a piece of paper, a sheet of A4, folded in half and into quarters; she unfolded it, spread it out in front of her. She ran the heel of her hand over the letterhead, she read the words again, words she had read so often she felt she might be able to recite them, or at least the most offensive parts of them, by heart.

  Dear Mrs. Lewis,

  I write as in-house counsel for Harris Mackey, Theo Myerson’s publishers, in response to your letter of February 4. I write on behalf of both the company and Mr. Myerson, who has approved the contents of this letter. We wish to make it clear from the outset that Mr. Myerson completely denies the allegations of copyright infringement made in your letter; your claim is entirely without merit.

  Your claim that The One Who Got Away, the novel penned by Mr. Myerson and published under the pseudonym “Caroline MacFarlane,” copies “themes and significant portions of the plot” of your memoir is flawed for a number of reasons.

  In order to establish a valid copyright infringement claim, there needs to be a causal connection between the claimant’s work and the allegedly infringing work; you must demonstrate that your memoir was used by Mr. Myerson in writing The One Who Got Away.

  Mr. Myerson acknowledges that you asked him to read your manuscript and, despite his extremely busy schedule and considerable demands on his time, he agreed to do so. As Mr. Myerson explained to you when you went to his house on December 2, he placed the manuscript into his luggage when he flew to Buenos Aires for a literary festival; unfortunately, his luggage was lost by British Airways and was not recovered. Mr. Myerson was therefore unable to read your manuscript.

  The similarities you claim between The One Who Got Away and your own memoir are nothing more than generic themes and ideas . . .

  We consider it neither reasonable nor necessary to address every weak comparison you attempt to make . . .

  You have made serious and false allegations against Mr. Myerson . . .

  Any legal action by you would be inappropriate and unreasonable and would be robustly defended by Mr. Myerson; he would look to recover all legal costs from you which, in light of the above, we have no doubt the court would grant.

  There it was, in black and white. For all the insults they hurled at her, for all the hurtful, unpleasant accusations, for all the dismissal of her claims as entirely without merit, flawed, weak, false, inappropriate, unreasonable, the substance of their argument, boiled down to its essence, could be found in that final sentence: We have all the money and therefore all the power. You have nothing.

  Hands trembling, Miriam refolded the letter and tucked it back into the bottom of the box, retrieving instead the little black notebook in which she recorded comings and goings on the canal. She had lived here, on this boat, for six years, and she had learned that you had to be vigilant. All human life was here: good, decent, hardworking, generous people, mixed in with drunks and druggies and thieves and all the rest. You had to keep your wits about you. You had to keep your eyes peeled. You had to learn to watch out for predators. (Miriam knew that better than most.)

  So, she noted things down. She had, for example, noted the time on Friday evening when Mad Laura from the launderette had shown up with Daniel Sutherland; she had made a note too of when Carla Myerson, the boy’s aunt, with her good haircut and her nice coat and her straight teeth, had come knocking. Last Wednesday it was. Two days before Daniel died. Bottle of wine in hand.

  Next, she picked up the key—Mad Laura’s key, the one she’d taken from the floor of the dead man’s boat. She turned it over in her fingers, feeling its edges, still tacky with blood. Miriam had the sense that, whatever the girl might have done, Laura should be protected. After all, she was another without power, wasn’t she? Oh, she was pretty, bright-eyed, and slender, but she was poor too, and troubled. There was something wrong with her; she walked with a limp, and had something mentally wrong too. Not quite right. People could take advantage of someone like that, a small, powerless young thing like Laura, just as they had taken advantage of Miriam.

  But power shifts, doesn’t it, sometimes in unexpected ways? Power shifts, and worms turn.

  What if, contrary to what she’d written down in her little book, Miriam hadn’t seen Laura at all? What if, as she’d told the police, she’d only seen Carla Myerson with Daniel Sutherland? And what if, now she came to think about it, she might even have seen Carla Myerson more than once? The detective had asked her to get in touch if she thought of anything else, hadn’t he? If she remembered something, it didn’t matter how small, that might be significant? What if—oh, now it was coming back to her!—she remembered overhearing something, raised voices, she’d thought merriment at first, but perhaps it was something else, perhaps it was an argument?

  Miriam made herself a cup of tea and soaked her feet, working her way methodically through half a packet of digestive biscuits while she considered what she needed to tell the detective inspector. Should she mention, for example, her encounter with Myerson that morning? Or was that card best held back, kept in reserve to play another time? She was acutely aware that she needed to be careful about how she handled things, that she should not be reckless, should not let this new power of hers go to her head.

  She rang the detective’s mobile phone, listened to his voicemail greeting.

  Hello, Detective Barker? It’s Miriam Lewis. You said I should call you, if I thought of anything? Well, it’s just that . . . it’s occurred to me that the woman I saw, the one I told you about, the older woman? I’ve just remembered that I saw her on the Friday night. Yo
u know, I was thinking it was the Thursday, because I’d just come back from work when I saw her going past, she was carrying a bottle of wine, you see, not that that’s important but the thing is that I’d just come back from work, but I didn’t go to work last Thursday because I had a bit of a stomach bug which is unusual for me because I’ve got the constitution of an ox generally but in any case I wasn’t feeling well on Thursday and so I did my shift on Friday instead . . .

  Miriam ended the call. She leaned forward to take another biscuit from the packet and then reclined, swinging her legs up onto the bench. How satisfying this was, to hold something over Myerson! She imagined, for a moment, the great man himself, standing in his study, holding the phone, a call from the detectives, perhaps, telling him they were taking her in for questioning, his darling Carla. She imagined his panic. What would such an ordeal do to her? And just think about the bad press!

  That would teach him, wouldn’t it, for taking what wasn’t his? For treating Miriam as though she were nothing, as though she were material, to be used and discarded as he wished.

  And if Carla suffered too, well, that wasn’t ideal, but just as my enemy’s enemy is my friend, sometimes my enemy’s friend is also my enemy, and that just couldn’t be helped, that was the way of the world. That was how this sort of thing happened; it wasn’t fair. In any sort of conflict, there were bound to be innocent casualties.

  Miriam closed her notebook. She put it back into the box, and on top of it, Laura’s key, nestling against the mahogany with Lorraine’s gold hoop earrings, the silver cross her father gave to her on her confirmation when she was fourteen, and an ID from a dog collar, inscribed with the name Dixon.

  The One Who Got Away

  The sobbing has stopped. There are different noises now.

  The girl uses the cover of these new sounds to break the window. Then, working quickly, she clears as much glass as she can before trying to climb out. Nevertheless she cuts herself badly, on her shoulders, her torso, her thighs, as she forces her solid flesh through the small square of the window frame.