by Неизвестный
‘Wait a second,’ he says. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Audrey . . . Hepburn. Flat as a wall!’
‘Brute.’ I kick the sheet at him.
He clasps my toes, lifts my foot, then holds his breath in deep concentration.
‘I know these scars,’ he finally says. ‘The way the skin regrows. You have no footprint. Just like I –’ he shows me his palm, ‘– have no handprints. The lines never come back. They never told me that when I had the graft. Those whorls and swirls. We lose the very thing that’s supposed to always identify us.’
‘Now you can burgle without fear.’
Derek smiles, but I feel his grip on my foot tighten, ever so slightly. ‘I opened a door. I was nineteen, and eager to prove myself. You?’
I suddenly wish it were night-time, and pitch dark. I gaze out the window. ‘I didn’t open a door.’
‘This stuff . . . it’s hard to talk about.’ He lifts my bare foot and, as if it is the most delicate of birds, rests the sole gently on his shoulder. ‘I hated working the engine. House fires. Buildings with people. Out here it’s different. Just me and the flames. No bystanders. Or that’s what I thought.’
I remember listening to the radio the day his partner died and he called for the medic: Get here, just fucking come help, I can’t do anything. His voice had the heightened pitch of a child’s.
I stare at the muscled slope of his shoulder, the hairy breadth of his arm. I cannot, or perhaps refuse to, imagine that voice coming from him.
‘So did you prove yourself?’ I ask. ‘When you were nineteen?’
‘I went in for an old lady who decided to jump out the window rather than wait for me to get upstairs.’
‘She was scared.’
‘She should have been scared of the concrete.’
‘She died?’
‘She died.’
I pull my foot from his shoulder, slide it under the blanket, and then he carefully arranges the blanket around my foot, as though putting it to sleep. He scoots towards me, presses his chest to my back and whispers into my hair, ‘Sarah . . . It started in the basement, yes?’
I can speak of every fire, except one.
My pregnancy had been uneventful but for some minor insomnia. Through my eighth month, I went kayaking and hiking; every day I ate spinach and broccoli and sardines; I didn’t once touch alcohol. I felt entirely ready for the birthing process.
Luke had made me a mix CD – classic rock for active labour, heavy metal for pushing. And as my due date approached, we bought scented candles, an exercise ball; we loaded our camera with film, packed a bag with baby clothing and placed bets on when I would go into labour, how many hours it would take.
What happened was this: my water broke in the middle of the night, but labour did not begin. So we lazed around the house, eating scrambled eggs, waiting for my contractions. We called friends, family, laughing at the anticlimax of it all, we watched morning television, cooking shows and small-claims-courtroom disputes; we took photographs of me supine, balancing the labour bag on my belly. Then at noon our midwife called and recommended I drink some castor oil to avoid being induced at the hospital.
This, too, was done with a good deal of silliness – Luke pouring the castor oil into a Martini shaker with grapefruit juice and ice. He served it to me in a sugar-rimmed glass, putting Marvin Gaye on the stereo. Within an hour, though, I was crawling the floor. The pain – like being bludgeoned from the inside – overwhelmed me, and nothing Luke said could make me look at him. He hovered nearby with cups of tea, glasses of coconut water, crackers. Like a dying animal, I curled up in the corner of the bathroom and moaned.
I had imagined labour as a process of endurance, like climbing a mountain; something that required strength; instead, it was trauma. I had difficulty thinking. As water leaked from me and the contractions strengthened, I lost my grip on memory and intention. It was as if I were being born, a terrified and weakened version of myself.
‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I cried.
‘We’re going to the hospital right now,’ said Luke, a look of terror on his face.
I hobbled into the back seat of the truck, writhing as we drove, trying to assure Luke, between gulps of air, that I was OK, until I felt my skin tear. I reached down and felt the baby’s head. Luke pulled over to climb into the back seat as the midwife and ambulance raced our way. He poured water into my mouth, held my hand as I whimpered.
Once the medics arrived, I pushed for an hour while Luke and the midwife held my legs. I closed my eyes, at times stopped pushing because the pain dizzied me. I wanted to sleep; I wanted it all to end.
‘You did it,’ Luke finally said, as he held Emily to his chest.
‘What choice did I have?’
Later, when I had rested and recovered, I said to Luke, ‘I never thought pain could scare me so much.’
‘She was ten pounds,’ said Luke. ‘Go easy on yourself.’
‘You don’t understand. I never felt pain like that. I had no idea that part of me existed.’
‘Well,’ he said, kissing my forehead, ‘it only existed for a few hours.’
I remember thick smoke; I remember tripping over my shoes. I remember air so hot my eyes felt singed. Fire eats oxygen and sucks the air from your lungs. It strangles you. I swung my arms around, knocking down easels, gasping and trying to find my way out.
The door was a rectangle of flame. I stopped moving, trapped, until the heat began to eat my skin. I stepped back and prayed to anything and everything and kicked at the door. It fell forward, and I stumbled onto the flaming wood. I didn’t feel the pain on my feet until I stepped out onto the cool ground beyond, toppled over and vomited. The cuff of my jeans was on fire, and I rolled until the flame died.
Behind me, the entire house thundered and crackled. I scrambled along the grass to the front porch, grabbed a rail and pulled myself up. My feet stuck to the wood, skin peeling off as I mounted each step. I stood before the front door and heard the splintering of wooden beams. Glass shattered in the window to my right and flames leapt out. Emily’s room.
I opened the door and a blast of air seared my face. Throughout the living room, columns of flame spiralled upwards. Between them, a thick black smoke, lit with embers, churned scraps of wood and glass.
I could not move.
I called her name. I must have, right? I must have at least done this.
Then I closed the door and stumbled away.
‘Object permanence’ was coined by Jean Piaget to describe a child’s understanding that objects and people exist when not seen.
Watch a baby in its early months, and it shows little concern when things disappear. Hide its favourite toy, and there is no protest. A baby won’t even cry when its mother leaves.
But somewhere between eight and twelve months, infants realize that things exist when out of sight. A baby that age will understand that its mother is in the next room, down the hall, outside the door. A baby that age, in distress, wants her mother to come back.
When the fire truck arrived, I was lying on a blanket in the back of our truck, having passed out from smoke inhalation. Luke, bare-chested in running shorts, stood beside our neighbour Max, both spraying kitchen-sized fire extinguishers into Emily’s flaming window, to no avail, then tossing in heavy wool blankets.
From the bottom of the hill, coming back from his run, Luke had seen smoke rising from the house. He had seen me on the porch, had seen me, as he ran faster than ever to reach the top of the hill, pull closed the front door.
Doubled over, he looked up at my blackened face.
‘Tell me she isn’t in there.’
I wanted to tell him she wasn’t in there.
‘Sarah!’ He shook me hard, as though to loosen words.
It took the firefighters almost two hours to extinguish the blaze; I learned this later in the hospital, where I was treated for my burns. I lay silently in the bed, as a stream of nurses and doctors and friends came to offer their sho
ck and condolences.
‘She tried to go back in,’ Luke would say, hugging his legs in a chair by the window. ‘She kept trying to get back in to save Emily.’
‘Stop it, Luke,’ I said when we were finally alone, the words garbled by my oxygen mask. My eyes, with what strength they had left, reminded him that I knew he’d seen me close the door.
‘It’s OK,’ Luke said, tears in his eyes. ‘She was already gone.’ He pulled his chair close and searched for a part of me that wasn’t singed, some piece of my former self, his wife, that was left intact, that he could still grab hold of. He rested his hands in the crook of my elbow and set his forehead on his hands.
I did not tell him that Emily wasn’t already gone. Because through the door, beneath the roar of the fire, I heard her calling for me.
It is getting dark, and with each exchange, with each detail spoken, I find myself putting on an article of clothing. I wear socks, my underwear, and I’m clutching a grey cardigan at the waist. Derek remains naked beneath the sheet, but I stand and cross the room and find his jeans. I hand them to him, coins falling to the floor in a noisy rattle.
‘A mother is supposed to do anything for her child,’ I say.
‘You’d have been caught in the flashover. You would have burned to death.’
I slowly pick up each of the coins.
‘People jump out of windows rather than walk through fire,’ he continues, setting the jeans down. ‘Maybe you can walk through fire – once. And then you know what it feels like. Once you’ve known that pain, you can’t make yourself face it again.’
‘Yes, of course. You’re right.’
‘Sarah.’
‘I’ll forgive myself; I’ll start a new life. I’ll have more children and make it all better.’
‘Sarah, come on.’
‘You should go.’
He steps into one leg of his jeans, then looks up. ‘Survivor’s guilt, Sarah. I know it back and forth.’
I want to tell Derek that in ancient Rome, while Romulus ruled and Tacitus wrote and Horatius stood alone on a bridge against the Etruscans, an order of vestal priestesses, all virgins, guarded a single flame for a thousand years.
I want to tell Derek that the Earth itself is filled with hidden flames that can never stop burning.
The Baba Gurgur in Iraq has been aflame for thousands of years. In Turkey and Taiwan, in New York and Washington, fires smoulder – small and controlled – which can never be extinguished. In Australia, a single coal seam has burned for 6,000 years.
‘Derek,’ I say. ‘I didn’t survive.’
At night, I lie in bed, alone, and think of her. She would be six. She would be in school. She would tell me about her day – her friends, her art class, a pet turtle that her class adopted. She would ask questions about rainbows and rivers, she would demand to know why about everything, the way children do, and I would have answers.
Instead, I have questions.
After everything I have learned about fire, I do not understand this: Why is it that one day a wire in the basement overheats? And why are you asleep when it happens? Why is it that you are in the same house as your child, but your husband, in kindness, has built you a separate entrance, so that to get to her you must walk through two walls of flame? And why is it that, despite your love, despite everything you ever believed about yourself, you can’t?
You shake your head: You would have raced in, you think. Walked through the flames, carried her out in your arms. You would never let that happen to your child.
I am here to tell you: you don’t know.
GRANTA
* * *
SAFETY CATCH
Lauren Wilkinson
* * *
1
Her mother left them the year before and went back to Martinique. Her daddy’s name is William and he served in Korea. He risked his life for his country, was stationed in Biloxi where they made him sit at the back of the city bus when he left the base, still in his crisp air-force uniform. He’s a hero and as far as Marie’s concerned no other man is as brave or as handsome.
They live in a yellow house out in Queens Village. John Ali and Albert Taylor, two of her father’s old army buddies, are waiting for him by the front door, both of them wearing hats. She watches her father put on his coat and say I love you to her older sister Hélène.
William is a beat cop in Hell’s Kitchen; he does his best to keep order but it’s the Westies who run the neighbourhood. He tells his girls about the time he saw Mickey Spillane himself, damn near respectable now on account of marrying rich Maureen McManus, with his foot up on a hydrant. ‘Pulling up his sock. And he looked up at me smiling and said you want something from me, niggercop? Grinning like he’d won a foot race. But still, New York isn’t so bad as Mississippi. Or Vegas. Those are the two most racist-ass places I ever been to in my life.’
William is learning the basics about wine while he’s on duty, from a sommelier on 25th Street. At home he tells his girls to remember you can never go wrong ordering a Pinot.
On Christmas Day he tries to take their picture, the whole family. Marie is eight. Hélène is thirteen and trying to keep their Airedale Rajah still and the Santa cap on his head. Their father fiddles with the camera on its tripod. He’s wearing a fishing cap, a polo sweatshirt and boat shoes; his duty gun is in its holster over his jeans because you never can be too safe. The first photo is a failure. Rajah is a brown blur; Hélène is looking at the dog in open-mouthed frustration; Marie is rubbing one eye; their father doesn’t get into the frame in time and his shadow falls over both girls. But later, the picture makes it into Hélène’s photo album anyway.
Her father reads books by Basil Davidson because he’s interested in Diaspora. He likes to make reminder lists on his typewriter and tape them up around the house. On the wall above the toilet:
COUNTRIES TO VISIT
1. Brazil
2. South Africa
3. France
4. Ghana
5. Egypt
On the wall by a light switch in the kitchen:
PAINT JOB FOR SWEET AND LOVELY’S HULL
1. Solvent
2. Epoxy filler
3. Soft rags
4. Rust-Oleum marine paint (red)
5. Small can for topside coating (black)
GUN RULES
1. Your girls are as curious about guns as boys would be. Don’t be mysterious about your firearms or hide them. Be the one to teach them gun safety so they’ll learn under competent supervision
2. Teach your girls to touch a trigger only when they’re ready for the gun to go off
3. Show them what a gun can do; impress them with the power of a firearm
4. Muzzles point up, down or down-range only
5. Eye and ear protection are essential
He takes the girls to his gun club, which is just a five-minute drive away. Because he’s a cop and has been going there for years, they bend their rules about minors for him. He wears his boat shoes to the range. He rents a .22 and, leaning on the wooden counter, tells the girl behind it, ‘I swear to God, Denise, if I were fifteen years younger I’d give you a fit.’ Denise smiles like she’s heard it before.
There’s a knothole in the wooden counter and Marie puts her eye to it hoping to spy on a new little world of something or at least through to the other side and to Denise’s bottom half. But there’s just shallow black space inside. Denise leans over the counter towards her. ‘Such a pretty little girl! Try and keep your daddy out of trouble, huh?’
In October he takes the girls deer-hunting upstate. The car still smells like crayons from when Marie left a box of them on the seat and they melted in the heat of the summer.
Arriving at Daddy’s favourite hunting spot, they find it empty. The spot is near a deer trail and has a wide stump in it. Marie sits on the ground and leans her back against it.
They wait for a long time. She is nearly asleep when Daddy taps Hélène’s shoulder and gestures towards t
he deer trail.
‘Go,’ he mouths.
Hélène lifts the .30-06 into position. ‘Can he see us?’
Daddy puts his finger to his lips and shakes his head no.
‘Is it gonna kick?’ Hélène whispers.
He shakes his head.
‘It’s gonna hurt my shoulder,’ she says, louder now, but still the buck doesn’t look up from its low shrub. Hélène takes a deep breath and, pulling the trigger, manages to hit the buck right in the neck. It drops to the leafy forest floor, feet still moving like it got the notion to run away a second too late.
‘Unbelievable eye, kid!’ he says and claps his hands once. ‘Did it kick?’
‘If it did, I couldn’t feel it,’ Hélène says in a soft voice.
Daddy makes Hélène straddle the buck and hold its head up by the antlers. There’s blood on its black nose, pooling in its open mouth, dripping down to the white fur beneath its straight, white, almost-human teeth. Daddy takes photo after photo of unsmiling Hélène until she says, ‘Can I get off it please?’
Marie tugs on his hand. ‘Can I try the big rifle too?’
‘In a couple years, Pumpkin.’ He puts his camera away and gets his knife out. Turning the buck on its back, he presses the knife into its belly and says, ‘Your first cut is here, where the white fur starts. You pull up to the top of the sternum –’
‘I’ll be in the car,’ Hélène says.
‘And then what?’ Marie asks. ‘What cut do you do next?’
On the drive to a butcher he knows upstate, Hélène throws up in the back seat. She says it’s only because the car smells like melted crayons, she swears to God that’s the only reason she feels sick.
Marie is lying on the living-room carpet watching TV when John Ali, Albert Taylor and her father come into the house, bringing the cold in too. Mr Ali takes off his wool coat, unwraps his scarf and falls back on the sofa, stone drunk. He pulls his hat down over his face. Still in his coat, Mr Taylor takes the reclining chair. She finds her father in the kitchen gulping water from a glass.