A Slow Fire Burning

by Paula Hawkins

  She needn’t have worried about Theo’s head being turned. He tired quickly of touring life, of the punishing enthusiasm of bright young things. All he really wanted to do was to stay home, with her, and to write—he was planning a prequel to his successful novel, chronicling his protagonist’s mother’s experiences in the First World War. After Carla fell pregnant, he was even less-minded to travel, and once the baby was born, less so still.

  Theo had missed two deadlines and was on course to miss a third when, just after his son’s third birthday, Carla announced that she had to go to Birmingham for a sales conference. She’d only recently gone back to work and it was vital, she said, that she make trips like this one if she wasn’t going to be sidelined, shunted onto the mommy track.

  “Maybe I could come with you?” Theo suggested. “You, me, and Ben—we could make a weekend of it?”

  Carla’s heart sank a little; she’d been fantasizing about the hours she might spend alone, soaking in the bath undisturbed, putting on a face mask, fixing herself a long drink from the minibar. “That would be lovely,” she said carefully, “only I’m not sure how that would be perceived. You know, me turning up with my husband and toddler in tow? Oh, don’t look like that, Theo! You’ve no idea what it’s like. If you showed up to a work do with Ben, they’d give you a medal for father of the year. If I do it, they’ll say she can’t cope, her mind’s not on the job, there’s no way she can handle any more than she already does.”

  Instead of yielding, instead of just saying, Oh, all right then, darling, I’ll stay in London with Ben, you go ahead, Theo suggested they leave Ben with his parents.

  “In Northumberland? How am I supposed to get him all the way to Alnmouth before Friday?”

  “They could probably come and pick him up. They’d love it, Cee, you know how Mum adores him—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. If you really insist on coming, he’ll have to go to my sister’s. And don’t make that face, Angie adores him too, and she’s five minutes away and I don’t have time to organize something else.”

  “But—”

  “Let Angie have him this time; next time he can go to your mum’s.”

  There never was a next time.

  On the Sunday morning, they received a phone call in their hotel room. They were packing, getting ready to return to London, quarreling about the best route to take. The man on the phone asked them to come down to the reception desk, then he seemed to change his mind, spoke to someone else, and then said that in fact they should wait in their room, that someone would come to them.

  “What on earth is this about?” Carla asked, but she received no reply.

  “I bet some fucker’s broken into the car,” Theo said.

  There were two police officers, a man and a woman. There had been an accident, they said, at Carla’s sister’s home. Ben had fallen from the balcony on the second floor of the house onto the garden steps below.

  “But she keeps the study door shut,” Carla said dumbly. “The railings on the balcony are broken, so the door is always shut.”

  The door hadn’t been shut, though, and little Ben had toddled out and slipped through the railings, falling onto the stone steps twenty feet below. His eight-year-old cousin, playing in the garden, found him; he’d called an ambulance right away.

  “Is he going to be all right? Is he going to be all right?” Carla kept asking the same question over and over but Theo was already on his knees, howling like an animal. The police officer, the woman, had tears in her eyes and her hands were shaking. She shook her head and said that she was very sorry, that the paramedics had arrived within minutes but there was nothing they could do to save him. “But is he going to be okay?” Carla asked again.

  * * *

  After Carla and Angela’s mother died, too young, of breast cancer, their father stayed on in the rambling three-story family home on Lonsdale Square, although it was obvious it was too much for him, the climb from his study on the second floor to the bedrooms on the third taking longer and longer, becoming more and more precarious. The garden became wild and overgrown, the gutters went uncleared, the roof leaked, the window frames began to rot. And the wrought iron railings on the little Juliet balcony leading off his study rusted all the way through.

  Their father moved into a care home six months before he died, and since Carla was already living with Theo by this time, Angela took the old place over. She had grand plans for it, she foresaw years of painstaking renovation, she designed murals she planned to paint in the hallways and above the staircase. First off, however, were the essential repair jobs, the top priority being the roof. That, of course, took all the money there was to spare, so everything else had to be put on hold.

  The rusted railings were barely thought of until Daniel was born. Once he was old enough to crawl, Angela locked the study door and left it that way. The rule was the study door stayed shut. At all times, the study door stayed shut.

  “Where was Angela?” Carla and Theo were sitting in the back of a police car, neither in a fit state to drive. “Where was she?” Carla’s voice barely more than a whisper, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. “I just . . . I don’t understand. Where was Angela?”

  “She was in her bedroom,” the policewoman told her. “She was upstairs.”

  “But . . . why did Daniel have to call the ambulance? What was my sister doing?”

  “It seems she was sleeping when the accident happened,” the policewoman said.

  “She wasn’t sleeping,” Theo said, “she was sleeping it off. Wasn’t she?”

  “We don’t know that,” Carla said, reaching for his hand.

  He snapped his hand from hers as though scalded. “Don’t we?”

  * * *

  The police drove them straight to Whittington Hospital. They were met by a family liaison officer who tried to persuade them not to see the body. “It would be far better,” she said, “to remember your little boy at his happiest. Running around, or riding his bike . . . ?” They didn’t listen to her. Neither of them could countenance never seeing him again; it was an absurd thing to ask.

  In a cold and brightly lit room, they stayed for more than an hour, passing their son between them. They kissed his tiny fingers, the soles of his feet. They warmed his cold flesh with their hands and their tears.

  Afterward, the police drove them back to their home on Noel Road, where Theo’s parents were waiting for them. “Where is she?” were Theo’s first words to his mother. She jerked her head toward the stairs.

  “Up there,” she said, her face and voice tight as a drum. “She’s in the spare room.”

  “Theo,” Carla said, “please.”

  She heard him shouting. “You were fucking sleeping it off, weren’t you? You were hungover, weren’t you? You left him, you left him alone, you left the door open, you left him. You left him. You left him.” Angela was wailing, keening in agony, but Theo would not relent. “Get out of my house! Don’t you ever come back here. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  Carla heard Daniel; he was crying too. “Leave her alone! Uncle Theo! Please! Leave her alone!”

  * * *

  • • •

  They came downstairs, Angela and Daniel, holding hands. Angela tried to embrace her sister, but Carla would not have it; she turned away, she hunched her shoulders and crouched down and curled herself into a ball, like an animal protecting itself from a predator.

  When they were gone and the front door was closed, Theo’s mother turned to Carla and said, “Why didn’t you let him come to me? I would have looked after him.” Carla got to her feet, she balled her hands into fists, she walked through the kitchen into the back garden, where her son’s tricycle lay on its side in the middle of the lawn, and she started to scream.

  Carla and Theo blamed themselves and each other endlessly; every sentence began with an if.

  If you h
adn’t gone to the conference

  If you hadn’t insisted on coming

  If you hadn’t been so worried about perceptions

  If we had taken him to my parents

  Their hearts were broken, shattered forever, and no amount of love, no matter how deep, how fierce, would be enough to mend them.

  EIGHT

  Twenty-three hours after they’d picked her up, the police told Laura she could go home. It was Egg who delivered the news. “We’ll likely need to speak to you again, Laura,” he said, “so don’t go anywhere.”

  “Oh yeah, no problem, I’ll cancel that trip to Disney World I had planned, don’t you worry,” Laura replied.

  Egg nodded. “You do that,” he said, and he smiled his sad smile at her, the one that told her something bad was coming.

  It was after ten when she walked out of the station into a cold and steady drizzle. She caught the bus on Gray’s Inn Road, collapsing, exhausted, onto the only spare seat on the downstairs deck. The woman next to her, broad-beamed and smartly dressed, wrinkled her nose, shifting herself closer to the window in an attempt to minimize contact with this damp and smelly new arrival. Laura tilted her head back against the seat, closing her eyes. The woman sucked her teeth. Laura ignored her, turning her face away. The woman sighed. Laura felt her jaw tense and her fists tighten. Count to ten, her father used to say, so she tried, one two three one two three one two three—she couldn’t get past three, couldn’t get anywhere at all, and the woman sighed again, shifting her fat arse around, and Laura wanted to scream at her, It’s not my fault it’s not my fault it’s not my fucking fault.

  She got to her feet. “I know,” she snapped, eyeballing her neighbor, “I stink. I know I do. I’ve been in a police station for twenty-four hours and before that I was doing my grocery shopping and before that I had an eight-hour shift at work so I haven’t had a shower in, like, two days. Not my fault. But you know what? In half an hour I’ll be smelling of roses and you’ll still be a huge fat cow, won’t you?”

  Laura turned away and got off the bus three stops early. All the way home she couldn’t stop seeing the woman’s hurt expression, her face crimson with embarrassment, and she had to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from crying.

  The lift was still out of order. She dragged herself up seven flights, fighting tears all the way: tired, her leg aching, the cut on her arm throbbing, starving. She’d been given food at the station, but in her anxiety hadn’t been able to swallow a mouthful. She was ravenous, her head light with hunger as she slipped her spare key into the lock, jiggled it about, coaxed the door open. The kitchen looked as though it had been ransacked—had been ransacked, she supposed, by the police—the drawers and cupboards open, pots and plates strewn about. Among them lay the ruined food she’d bought from the supermarket with the last of her money.

  She turned her back on it all. Turned off the lights and went to her room without showering or brushing her teeth. She crawled into bed, sobbing quietly, trying to soothe herself by stroking the nape of her neck, the way her father used to do to ease her to sleep when she was troubled, or in pain.

  * * *

  She’d had plenty of it, trouble and pain. Her early childhood, lived out in grimy south London, was uneventful. So uneventful, she remembered almost nothing of it except for an oddly sepia-toned mental image of a terraced house on a narrow street, the sensation of dry, scratchy lawn beneath her feet in summer. Her memory seemed only to bloom into full color from around the age of nine, which was when she and her parents moved to a little village in Sussex. Where all the trouble started.

  Not that there was anything wrong with the village. Laura liked the village; it was quaint and pretty, with stone cottages and cricket on the village green, polite neighbors with blond children and Labradoodles. Laura’s mother, Janine, declared it stultifying, which was a bad thing, apparently. Laura liked it. She liked the village school, where there were only fifteen people in her class, where the teachers declared her a very advanced reader. She liked riding her bike, completely unsupervised, along narrow country lanes, in search of blackberries.

  Laura’s father, Philip, had secured a job in a nearby town. He’d given up on his dream of a life in theater stage design and was now working as an accountant, a fact that prompted Janine to roll her eyes whenever it was mentioned. “An accountant,” she would hiss, drawing hard on her cigarette, plucking at the sleeves of her peasant top. “Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  “Life can’t just be about fun all the time, Janine. Sometimes one just has to be an adult.”

  “And God forbid adults should have any fun, right, Philip?”

  Her parents hadn’t always been like this, it seemed to Laura. She vaguely remembered her mother being happier. She remembered a time when her mother had not sat at the dinner table with her arms folded across her chest, barely picking at her food, replying in sullen tones to her father’s every question. There was a time when her mother had laughed all the time. When she had sung!

  “We could go back to London,” Laura would suggest, and her mother would smile for a moment and smooth her hair, and then look wistfully into the middle distance. But her father would reply—too brightly, with a little too much vim—“We can’t go back, chicken, I’ve got a job here now. And we’ve got such a nice house here, haven’t we?”

  At night, Laura heard them arguing.

  “You’ve got a job,” her mother hissed in a horrible voice, “in financial advice! Christ’s sake, Philip, is that really what you want to do with your life? Count other people’s money all day?”

  And

  “Is that really the life we’re going to live? An ordinary one? In the countryside? In Sussex? Because, you know, that’s not what I signed up for.”

  And

  “Signed up for? This is a marriage, Janine, not a drama course.”

  Laura, a hopeful child, pretended not to hear the arguments, convinced that if she worked very hard and behaved very well then whatever it was that was making her mother unhappy would blow over. Laura tried hard to please her; she was quick to pass on compliments from teachers or to show her any drawings she’d done at school.

  At home in the afternoons, Laura stayed by her mother’s side; she helped out if there was cleaning to do, or sat at her side while she read, or followed her quietly from room to room as she moved restlessly around the house. She tried to read her facial expressions, tried to imagine what it was that she was thinking about, that made her sigh like that, or blow the fringe out of her eyes in that way, tried to figure out what she could do to earn a smile, which sometimes she succeeded in doing, although sometimes her mother would yell, “Christ’s sake, Laura, give me a minute, would you? Just one minute to myself?”

  In the autumn, Janine started taking art classes. And by the time the Christmas holidays came around, something had changed. A freezing wind blew in from the east, bringing with it achingly beautiful blue skies, a bitter chill, and as if from nowhere, a familial thaw. A truce seemed to have been declared. Laura had no idea why, but something had shifted, because the arguments stopped. Her father no longer looked hangdog, harassed. Her mum smiled while she did the washing up, she cuddled up close to her while they watched television in the evenings, instead of sitting apart, in the armchair, reading her book. They’d even been on outings to London, once to Hamleys and once to the zoo.

  The new year started in a glow of optimism, her mother waving her off to school in the morning with a smile on her lips. There was even a promise of a family sledding trip on the weekend, if it snowed.

  It did snow, but they didn’t go sledding.

  That Friday, two and a half inches of snow fell in less than an hour, enough to cancel football practice. It was only just after three o’clock when Laura freewheeled down the hill toward home, riding out in the middle of the road, where the snow had melted clean away due to the weight of tra
ffic, but it was already getting dark, and she neither saw nor heard the car that swung out into the road. It seemed to come from nowhere.

  She was thrown twelve feet, landing on her back on the road, the crack of her helmet on the tarmac audible to her mother, who was standing in the driveway in front of the house. Her skull was fractured, her leg and pelvis badly broken. The driver of the car that had hit her did not stop.

  Then came the trouble, and the pain. Six operations, months and months in hospital, hours upon hours of agonizing, exhausting physical therapy, speech therapy, trauma counseling. Everything healed, eventually. More or less. A bad seed had been sown, and although everything got better, Laura was left worse. She was slower, angrier, less lovable. Inside her a bitter darkness bloomed as she watched, with helpless desperation, her once-limitless horizons narrow.

  * * *

  In the morning, Laura put all the defrosted food into the microwave and blitzed the lot. She ate as much of it as she could stomach, threw the rest in the bin, and got dressed for work.

  “What d’you think you’re doing?” Maya, Laura’s boss at the launderette, said when she came in from the back room to find Laura taking off her coat and hanging it on the peg behind the counter.

  “It’s my shift,” Laura said. “It’s Wednesday.”