Jenny Valentine - Fire Colour One

“Do I have to come with you?” I said.

Hannah smashed out her dead cigarette on a plate like it had done something to offend her. She pulled on the other one so hard her cheeks caved in and I thought she’d smoke the whole thing down in one breath. She saw me, and I knew what she was thinking. Gone were the days when Little Miss Arson could be left alone in the house. There wasn’t enough insurance money in the world that would pay for that.

“Yes, you have to come,” she said. “It’s you he’s interested in.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Since when?”

Her fingers drummed hard on the worktop and she declined, as usual, to answer the question. “It’s not optional. We’re not negotiating.”

“I’m a cone in your parking space,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it? I’m a marker on your property.”

“Think of it as a holiday,” Lowell suggested, the shoulders of his suit rising up for no good reason to meet his ears, his right cuff already streaked with butter. “You can explore the garden. You can bring your bike.”

I looked at him. “What am I? Eight?”

“God forbid we’re there long enough for a bike ride,” Hannah said.

Lowell stuck with it. “You can walk, or swim in the river. Maybe he’s got a boat.”

“An outward-bound holiday in a dying man’s house?” I said. “Nice. Sensitive.”

Hannah smiled coldly at me.

“Let’s be honest,” I told her. “You’re going fishing and I’m the bait.”

“It’s remote,” she said. “It’s isolated. He’s got acres of land, and woodland. It’s a great place for a fire. You could light ten of the damn things out there and nobody would even notice. You’re coming and you’re going to like it.”

I didn’t look up. I kept my eyes on my cereal bowl. “Who else is going to be there?”

“Just us,” Hannah said. “Ernest’s been on his own for years.”

“How do you know?” I said.

She bent towards her reflection in the side of the toaster. It was warped and squat and gauzy. “I just do,” she said, baring her teeth to check for stains. “Trust me.”

My chair legs scraped loudly against the floor as I got up. “Why the hell would I start doing that?”

I rinsed my bowl in the sink. Through the window, I could see next-door’s cat lurking on the fence by the bird feeder, waiting to take one out mid-flight with a swipe of its paw.

It was the start of the summer. I had plans.

Hannah played with her lighter, grinding the flint back and forward with her thumb, holding the gas down, looking right at me over the flame.

“Is he at death’s door?” I said, and (may God forgive me), “Will it be quick?”

“Cross fingers,” she smiled, and Lowell got up to start packing the car.

We drove towards Ernest on a bright clear day. He said he woke up to the dry powder blue of the sky and he knew we were coming. The Severn Bridge looked like the entrance to Heaven in an old film I’d seen about a pilot who’d rather not die yet, thanks all the same, because he’s just met a nice lady and only recently started to enjoy himself. The service station on the other side where we stopped for coffee looked like the mouth of Hell.

Later, much later, I told Ernest this. We were playing cards. He said I played poker like a professional. Apparently, I shuffle like a croupier.

“And by the way,” he told me, “it’s only in a film you can decide not to die because your life has taken a sudden turn for the better.”

I smiled, and kissed him on the forehead, and fanned the whole deck of cards out with one snap of my hand.

It was Thurston who showed me how to handle cards. He knew hundreds of tricks. He had this one where the card you chose would end up ripped in half in your back pocket and he wouldn’t ever tell me how it was done. “Magic” was all he said whenever I asked him. He said his Uncle Mac taught him but I knew that was a lie because I once saw Mac try to shuffle a deck and it was like he was doing it with his feet. By then I knew that Uncle Mac wasn’t even his uncle, just some guy he’d met at a hostel, just another stray like me.

I thought about Thurston in the car all the way to Ernest’s place. I remembered the look on people’s faces when he pulled that card trick, the wonder, like he’d given them just what they’d been hoping for, like they were kids again just for a second, until they leant in towards him and said, “How?”

Partly, I was glad he’d never told me. It would have ruined it, probably, to know.

Four hours after we left home, we drove into Ernest’s garden like tourists, suitcases piled up in the back, shopping bags and a black collapsible bicycle crowding at the windows to get out.

“If he’s dead already, it all stays in the car,” Hannah said.

I opened my window, which was tinted and stole the colour from everything, like driving in black and white. The house was a warm golden yellow in the sun, tall with dark latticed windows and narrow brick chimneystacks. Lowell turned the car on the gravel drive and it scuttled over the stones like a roach. To our left was a copper beech hedge, the colour of old coins, to our right a view of the vivid green garden through an iron gate in the wall. The wind moved in the leaves and I could hear birdsong, and music coming from somewhere inside. I tried to picture someone lying upstairs in a darkened room, listening to a violin concerto, reeking of decay and disinfectant while we swooped in to stake our claim. I wondered if he heard the growl of our tyres on his gravel, the beat of our wings.

“Look out, Ernest,” I said. “Here come the vultures.”

Lowell braked too hard and the bike caught me on the side of the head with a punch.

“Ouch!” I said.

Hannah retouched her make-up, pressed her lips together. “Be quiet, Iris. If you haven’t got anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all.”

I wanted to ask if, under those rules, any of us might ever speak again, but I kept my mouth shut.

Ernest wasn’t dead, not yet. He wasn’t on his doorstep to meet us either. Lowell brought the car to a halt and frowned into his rear-view mirror. Birds scattered and resettled at the tops of trees and the front door stayed shut, as if nobody was in. Hannah balled her hands into fists and took an in-breath that didn’t seem to end. Lowell passed her a paper bag and she breathed into it in quick little sips and flapped her spare hand back and forth in front of her face.

“Are you hyperventilating?” I asked. I’d never seen anyone do it in real life before.

She let out a high-pitched whine like a steam kettle.

“Stay calm,” Lowell told her, reshaping his Superman kiss-curl with one finger. “We’re on the home straight.”

“Yeah,” I said, “maybe he’s kicking it right this minute. Cling to that hope.”

Truth is, I felt pretty high-pitched myself. My head was full of white noise and I couldn’t sort one sound from another, like everything was demanding to be heard at once, like I’d been turned inside out and exposed to the loud air. I don’t suppose I expected to feel normal. It’s not every day you get to meet the dad you never had.

Lowell and my mother clamped iron smiles to their faces and we got out, slamming the doors behind us. I turned my back on the house and looked out over the garden, across the fields, towards the woodland and the distant, shadowed hills. I breathed. Some species of tree are specially adapted to withstand and encourage fire. Some rely on it for their survival, to ensure their domination over other species, and to clear the soil and canopy for new growth. Trees look like their own shadows when they’re burning. Flames fan out and eat up a hillside, way quicker than you’d think.