The Heatwave

by Kate Riordan

  The barn door is closed, which it never is, and my blood freezes. There are no flames on the outside and some sensible, adrenalin-drenched part of my brain tells me this is a good thing. The fire can’t have been going very long. Apart from the brick back wall, the barn is entirely constructed from old, seasoned wood, which is currently drier than usual because it hasn’t rained for weeks. Once it gets hold it’s going to be unstoppable.

  As I wrench the heavy door open, Greg and Charles arrive on the scene, the terror I’m already in the grip of only just registering in their faces. Margaret appears behind them and she looks much more how I feel. I’ve never seen her so undone, her hair torn from its chignon, eye make-up smeared down her cheeks.

  I go in and the heat is a shock, like a physical wall. The fire has been set in the middle of the floor, where a big pile of wood, straw, old newspapers and even books has been heaped up. One book has fallen clear and it’s an old one of mine from childhood, a collection of fairy tales I gave to Élodie as a child.

  ‘Emma!’ I scream. ‘Emma!’

  The roar of the fire grows louder, and there’s a huge pop as an old log blows apart, sending sparks over our feet and making Margaret shriek. The flames leap higher, closer and closer to the old oak beams. Once the roof catches … Charles and Greg begin to search the dark corners at the back, among the old mowers and tools, the dark recesses between shelves stacked with nails and rusted tins of varnish.

  I can’t move, my eyes scanning the cavernous insides, lit weirdly by the flames so that shapes and shadows shift and move, tricking me into thinking I see you. Margaret is coughing now, a terrible rattling sound and Charles rushes her out. I can feel the smoke in my own lungs and my eyes are already burning. I tear off my blouse to hold over my face.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Greg shouts, suddenly appearing from behind the wall of fire. ‘I don’t think she can be in here. Dad’s gone to ring the fire brigade.’

  And then I look up and, because Charles has left the door open, just enough light is cast on the loft so I can see all the way to the dim back of it. It’s nothing more than a glimpse of lemon yellow but it’s enough.

  ‘She’s up there! I can see her T-shirt. Greg!’

  He’s already running towards it and I’m just behind him. We both realize the ladder has gone at the same moment. We hadn’t noticed but it’s there, in the heart of the fire, hacked into pieces.

  ‘Emma! Em, can you hear me?’ Greg’s voice is much stronger than mine.

  ‘She must be unconscious,’ I say, sounding oddly faraway. The sounds of the fire seem to be deepening, spreading. And then you move – I think you move. It’s hard to tell but the pale yellow shifts, just an inch or so.

  Greg sees it too. ‘Emma! Emma! Come here, come to the edge. Now, you’ve got to come now.’

  And you do, so slowly I think I’m going to die, crawling inch by agonizing inch. You’re so scared of heights. Dimly, in the long dark spaces between each cogent thought, I marvel at how she got you up there. Finally, you’re kneeling up at the edge, eyes huge and dark, your little face stiff and chalk-white with terror.

  ‘You’ll have to jump, darling,’ Greg shouts, but you don’t move.

  Behind us, the burning pile of wood shifts, the side nearest us collapsing, like a cliff, so it’s closer, and so much hotter.

  ‘Now, Emma,’ says Greg, his voice hard with determination. ‘You’ve got to jump now or we’re not going to get out of here.’

  And you stand, and for a terrible moment I think you’re going to turn and walk to the back of the loft and curl into a ball, like a frightened animal cornered by a forest fire. But you straighten up and I can see your small chest heaving because you’re so wheezy and then you close your eyes and jump, and I hear the air thumped out of Greg’s body as he catches you, and I begin to sob.

  The sky, when we get out, is so huge it makes me dizzy. I half fall as I reach out to take you from Greg. You’re struggling for breath and so frightened that you’ve wet yourself. You’re almost catatonic. But you’re alive, you’re intact. I’ve got you.

  1993

  When I open my eyes again it’s morning. My body finally feels as though it’s beginning to right its inner equilibrium, though my head still pulses with pain and my nightdress is wringing with sweat. Then I remember I never made it downstairs to check on you. I stumble to the window but the terrace is deserted, except for a tide of empty bottles and ashtrays. The salon doors are still open. Someone’s T-shirt is discarded over the back of one of the chairs.

  A presence behind me makes me turn and nearly lose my balance. It’s Élodie, hollow-eyed and unkempt but still beautiful.

  ‘Maman, you shouldn’t be up.’

  She helps me back to bed, turning over my pillows so they’re cool and dry, then brings me a tall glass of iced tea just like you did the day before, or was it the day before that? I can’t work it out.

  ‘Where’s Emma?’

  ‘Fast asleep. It’s early still. Only just seven.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  She shushes me and produces a cold flannel, pressing it to my temples. It’s blissful.

  ‘What about Luc?’ I manage to say, though the heavy blanket of exhaustion is creeping over me again.

  ‘Luc? Luc wasn’t here.’

  ‘But I saw him. I saw the two of you. You were –’

  She places two cool fingertips on my mouth, and as she leans over, a hank of her long hair falls forward to brush my collarbone, goosebumps rising all over my sore skin in response.

  ‘Hush, Maman, you must have dreamt it. He was never here. Sleep now.’ She kisses my forehead and then she’s gone, closing the door softly behind her. I lie there peacefully for a while, then force myself to get up, get dressed. But the vertigo and nausea swell again, and I lie down, helpless. The hours pass meaninglessly, the sun moving round behind the shutters oddly fast, like someone’s time-lapsed the day and is playing it back to me. Soon enough, it’s dark again, and Élodie is back with another drink.

  You slide into bed with me that night, I don’t know when, and relief that you’re okay penetrates the fog briefly. There’s a strange odour to your skin but I’m still too weak and cotton-headed to work out whether it’s perfume or alcohol or something worse. It comes to me just as I drift back into another fathomless sleep: you smell older.

  In the morning, I feel weak but purged. Almost like myself again, which in itself seems quite miraculous. We forget to appreciate feeling well until we’re ill. We lie on our sick beds and the memory of just feeling ordinary – no sickness, no pain – is like a beautiful shore we’ve been carried away from, exiles who might never be allowed to return.

  I look down at you, asleep beside me, and feel as though the two of us have survived a shipwreck. I can see the remains of make-up around your eyes, mascara clogging your lashes, glitter on your lids, but you’re intact. There are no bruises or pinch-marks, there’s no awful wheeze as you breathe in.

  I creep downstairs, noting that Élodie’s door is closed. There has been some sort of attempt to tidy up but the kitchen and salon still carry a soiled air, cushions squashed down into the gaps between chair seats and frames, crumbs and sticky patches on the work surfaces. The wine and beer that were in the fridge have gone, but much of the food looks untouched. I wonder when you last ate.

  Out on the terrace, a coffee bowl overflows with cigarette ends, some hand-rolled, others bought. I can smell it on the hot air, distinct from the smoke that doesn’t seem quite so strong today – that, and the sourness of spilt beer. It makes my mouth water nauseously and I remember that I need some food. I have no memory of eating anything in two days, swallowing only those drinks, which kept arriving, cold and sweet down my sore throat. As I sit eating stale baguette dipped in milky coffee on the terrace steps, a plane goes over, wings glinting in the sunlight. Though the sky above the house is a sharp, celestial blue, it’s one of the Canadair planes, heavy with water pulled from the Mediterranean
. Dimly, I think I ought to check the news, see what’s happening with the fires.

  I don’t hear Élodie come up behind me until she’s already there and putting a sunhat on my head.

  ‘Thank you,’ I manage to say, as she sits down next to me. I’m startled by her sudden presence and oddly shy of the intimate way she’s helped look after me. I have a vague memory of her changing me into a clean nightdress before you came up to bed, moving me about with a nurse’s deftness and ease, as though I was as light as a bird. But perhaps I’d dreamt that too.

  ‘Maman, I’m so sorry about the mess. I thought I would get up early this morning and clear up but you’ve beaten me downstairs. I’ll replace the wine.’

  I wave my hand. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ And I think I mean it. She’s twenty-four. If she wants to smoke and drink, who am I to stop her?

  The day wears on and I stay in the shade. You and Élodie take turns to bring me cold drinks under the oleander tree, where Élodie has dragged a lounger and heaped it with pillows. I even venture into the pool in the afternoon, the water silken and soothing to my dry skin and gritty eyes. When I get out, Élodie is standing there with a plate of cheese and grapes.

  ‘You must eat,’ she says, smiling. ‘Your body needs sustenance after being so ill.’

  I do as I’m told, though I can’t manage much. I let Élodie plump my pillows and brush my tangled hair. I’m so bonelessly weak from the sunstroke that I don’t even have the energy to feel anxious. Anxiety becomes habitual, adrenalin pumping at the slightest provocation. But the sunstroke has apparently reset me, leaving my system drained but tranquil.

  Even as the light fades out of another day, night seeping in from the darkest corners of the garden, I remain calm. I am becalmed, I think: a placid sea. I test the feeling gently, as though inspecting a bruise, but it’s real. It holds. Even when I look at the turquoise necklace that’s still around your neck, the tremor is only very slight, like thunder that’s long moved away. I can remember everything about my old fear. It’s just that I’m viewing it through thick glass now. Oh, and it’s such a relief to let it go.

  All evening and into the next morning, we three are inseparable. Just before noon, Élodie announces that she is going to buy food, before the shop in the village closes for the three-hour lunch tourists always find outrageous.

  She comes back with two bags full of the kind of food a child would choose: Petit Écolier biscuits, caramel ice-cream, mini glass bottles of Orangina, a heavy tin cylinder of sirop – the same brand of grenadine I always used to buy.

  ‘Did you buy anything healthy at all?’ I say, marvelling at the ease in my voice, I who could never sound anything but sharp with her.

  She pulls a melon out of a paper bag and squeezes it. ‘It’s perfectly ripe. It’ll be like eating sunlight.’

  Melons were always her favourite, especially the ones from Cavaillon. I had always loved them too, that Amaretto sweetness that seems so decadent compared to other fruit. A barbed memory springs up then: I’m trying to wipe her face clean of melon juice with a flannel, and she claws my cheek with her sticky little fingers because she doesn’t like it, making it bleed. I push the memory down again and find it recedes, quite easily.

  She’s also bought fromage frais, which she spoons into the dessert glasses my mother once used for îles flottantes. Then she stirs in strawberry jam – the expensive stuff in the squat hexagonal jars – until it marbles, pink and cream. It’s delicious: soft, pillowy unctuousness with bursts of intense fruit. I have a small helping before drifting into a light doze, still aware of your voices, kept low so as not to disturb me.

  Élodie wakes me a couple of hours later, her breath smelling of grenadine, her tongue and lips dyed an artificial pink. ‘I know the sirop is too sweet for you,’ she murmurs. ‘I’ve made you another tisane.’ It’s iced tea again and I gulp it down, vaguely wondering if it’s Lipton’s or whether Élodie made it herself, enjoying the sound of ice clinking against my teeth. From the bottom of the garden, I can hear you splashing about in the pool.

  ‘Is Emma okay?’

  ‘She’s fine. Like a little fish in the water.’ She hands me my drink and stands to rearrange the cushions behind me. Faintly, I can smell her old scent, sweetened into headiness by the grenadine.

  ‘Maman, do you remember what you said to me the first night you were sick?’ She strokes my hair back from my face and sits down next to me.

  ‘I – I’m not sure. It’s all a bit of a blur.’

  She moves a little closer. Even in the soft light, I can see every minute shading of colour in her amber eye. It looks almost golden. The blue eye is darker, more uniform, the sea after a storm, sand swirling out of sight below the surface.

  I try to cast my mind back but it veers away to more scenes of the sea, heaving gently, the sway of Élodie’s hair. I can’t concentrate. I’m so tired and my head is starting to ache again.

  ‘You said that when I was born you were so full of love you couldn’t eat.’

  I smile. ‘That’s true. It’s true.’

  As I fall away into unconsciousness again, the ormolu clock tick-ticking, she’s smiling back at me.

  1983

  The pompiers have just left. They were fast and this means the barn has been saved. The inside is charred but the flames hadn’t quite reached the roof. It’s structurally intact. Part of me wishes it had burnt down, the fire razing the place that might have been the scene of your … But I can’t bear to go near the word.

  Margaret has been sedated and put to bed. Greg and Charles are in the salon with you asleep between them, large brandies in hand. The doctor said you were fine, miraculously. Though you’d needed your Ventolin you hadn’t inhaled much smoke. Still, when I’d held you close, you’d smelt sharply alien. It was fear.

  ‘You didn’t see her?’ I say quietly to Charles, when you’ve fallen asleep, the trembling from your shock finally subsided.

  He shakes his head. Greg knocks back his brandy. All three of us know we’re talking about Élodie. I leave them then, once Greg has promised he won’t let you out of his sight.

  When I get outside, smoke hangs in the air above the garden, still shockingly new. I begin to run. I need to burn off some of the fear still swirling inside me. She’s nowhere in the garden, though. I knew she wouldn’t be but I had to look anyway. I go to the barn next.

  The interior is dark and dripping from the water, the walls scorched. The smell of smoke is still acrid enough to catch in the back of my burnt throat. I methodically search every shadowed corner, though of course I can’t get up to the loft because the ladder has been reduced to ash. I look and look but there’s no sign of her, not until I clamber up on to an old storage cabinet to survey the place from a higher vantage point and see the glint of metal. It’s a chain, caught on a large splinter sticking out from the edge of the loft floor. I almost lose my footing in my haste to get down, my heart missing its beat as I catch myself.

  I fetch a long pair of garden shears and manage to knock it loose, snatching it up to make absolutely sure. Of course it’s what I think it is: a silver necklace strung with tiny turquoise stones, a long golden hair tangled in the broken catch. I think back to when I last saw her, as she got out of the car on Friday afternoon, and, yes, I’m sure she was wearing it. The silver and blue always looked so bright against her caramel skin. It’s the only piece of jewellery she never takes off.

  I rush out and sit down hard in the dust, the sun and my shock bleaching everything around me to stark, featureless white. The chain feels hot in my hand and I want to throw it as far and hard as I can. But I can’t. I need to show it to Greg first. I need to make him understand that the barn is our last warning. I don’t think we’ll get another chance.

  If anyone had told me I would ever consider deliberately hurting you, even just a little bit, I would have thought them insane. But I have come to understand that the means to an end is not always a straight path: it isn’t about easy decisions.


  After I find the necklace on the barn floor, I go straight back to the salon.

  ‘Greg, I need to talk to you. Now.’

  Charles looks at me fearfully, his eyes sunken, ten years older than when we left for Cannes. You’re still fast asleep. ‘Stay with her,’ I say again. ‘Don’t take your eyes off her.’

  Greg follows me to her room. I don’t know why I go there. It seems appropriate, somehow.

  I hold up the necklace. ‘I just found this. In the barn. It was up there, where Emma was.’

  I watch his face blanch. ‘But … That doesn’t mean … She could have lost it any time.’

  ‘She was wearing it when we dropped her off. I’m certain she was.’

  ‘How can you possibly remember that? Anyway, if she was here, where is she now?’

  When he caught you in his arms in the barn, I loved him more than I ever had. Now I hate him for his cowardice, for not giving voice to his perfect comprehension of what has happened – the awful knowledge I can read in the new lines etched into his face, lines that weren’t there this morning.

  I throw the necklace at him, as hard as I can. It goes wide, hitting the top of the dressing table behind him, its surface littered with hair-bands and make-up and balled-up receipts from places I’ve never heard of. It skitters to the back and vanishes. I’m glad. I never want to see it again.

  ‘Why don’t we take her back to that doctor, then?’ he says weakly, after a long, loaded silence. ‘See what he has to say.’

  ‘Morel, you mean? You want to go to him now? Don’t you think it’s a bit late? I told you what he said years ago. I told you what he said when I went back, after Emma was born.’

  He squares his jaw and I want to cross the room and smash my fist into it.

  ‘Shall I remind you?’ I say, louder now. ‘He said that we had to be vigilant. He said that younger siblings can be vulnerable. That they can be a source of resentment. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it? You always said it was alarmist advice, that if we were to ask for proper support, the authorities would surely need some proof, though really you meant you, didn’t you? Well, if today is not enough for you, not enough proof, then nothing ever will be.’