Firewatching

by Russ Thomas

  Now, though, she stands, one foot hanging over the threshold, as though some other, physical, force is keeping her at bay. Everything is so quiet, and she feels a renewed sense the cottage doesn’t want her anymore. As though Edna, dissolved into ashes, has blown her way through the house and locked herself into its fabric, claiming the place as her own. She’s in the pile of the carpet and the weave of the bedspread; she’s collected in the hem of the curtains. No longer will Lily be able to slap the Cavalier’s footstool without breathing her in. Edna has become the house. There’s no room for Lily anymore.

  “Aunt Lil?” Oscar says quietly.

  She looks up to where he hovers on the path. Perhaps it’s the angle, but he looks even taller than before. Older, too. He seems tired, almost dirty. She didn’t notice that when he arrived. It reminds her of how he often looked as a child. Never immaculately turned out, this one. A grubby little urchin, her mother would have said.

  He comes to her, and she puts her arms around him and he begins to cry. She rubs his back, and he shrinks in her arms and he’s a boy again. She coos at him as though she’s consoling him over a grazed knee. There, there. It’ll be all right. No harm done.

  It occurs to her that she has him all to herself now. There’s no one to share him with. She can hold him as long as she wants, and Edna can’t interrupt them. Instead, she pushes him away.

  He wipes giant drops of water from his cheeks and takes an almighty sniff. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. I had to sort everything out with the police.”

  “It’s all right,” she says without really meaning it. “You’re here now.”

  “They won’t bother you again. I’ll make sure of that. How are you coping?” he asks, though it seems to her she’s coping better than he is.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “We knew it was coming, after all.”

  “Not like this. Can I do anything? Can I get you anything?”

  She shakes her head. What does he think he can get her? A cup of tea? A wireless for company in the evenings? It’s almost as though he’s desperate to put something right, almost . . . The thought comes to her, and once it does she cannot push it away. If she didn’t know better she’d say he was guilty of something. He looks just as he used to when they caught him up to some mischief or other. She hesitates. She supposes there is something that needs doing but . . . she can’t ask him that, can she? It wouldn’t be fair.

  “Can you help me clean?” She nods to the mark on the carpet. “Perhaps we could do it together?”

  “Of . . . course,” he says.

  “I’ll get a bucket.” And now the barrier is gone. Lily walks into the house and gets to work. When she returns to him with the gloves and the bucket and some soapy detergents, he’s sitting on one of the chairs in the garden, biting at a filthy nail. “Oscar,” she calls sharply. His hand drops into his lap. “Come along then.”

  Together they sponge at the marks on the carpet. It’s easy now, like cleaning the step for Mother. The water in the bucket turns to a sludgy, muddy puddle. Oscar’s face drains of the little color it had. Lily begins to tire and stops for a breather. She watches him from the conservatory, where there’s a faded photograph of the man . . . at the bar next to her says, “Steady, old girl!”

  He’s one of the most handsome men she’s ever seen. He’s with the Royal Air Force, an officer, and his uniform is pressed so neatly. Not like some of the army boys. The man on her other side is American. He’s not as pretty as the RAF boy, but he certainly has more charm. She can’t decide which of the uniforms she prefers.

  She knows she’s probably drunk too much. When she laughs, she giggles like a schoolgirl but she can’t help it, they’re both so funny. Edna is giving her funny looks. Disapproving looks. Lily’s thankful for this new friendship. She was so lonely when she first came here, and the girls at the theater hardly fell over themselves to welcome this upstart girl . . . this northerner! . . . to dance among them. With Edna it’s different. Different from any friendship she’s ever had before. It’s just that she can be so boring at times! And put a foot wrong in Edna’s eyes, and she’s quick enough to tell you where you’ve gone wrong. Susan at the office says she’s sharp as lemons. Lily laughs to herself. She’s not wrong about that. But Lily sees something in this prickly, hard-nosed woman that intrigues her. She is just so confident. She is a force of nature. Susan and the others from the office have already gone, leaving Edna to watch while Lily flirts at the bar. Lily giggles again. Poor disapproving Edna sitting all alone. She will go over. In a minute.

  The RAF boy wants to buy her another drink. She’s had enough really, but she doesn’t want to look like she’s inexperienced. She glances back to see if Edna is still watching, but she’s gone. Just like that. Without so much as a word. Well, the blessed cheek! She turns to look round the pub and stumbles against a table.

  “Whatchit,” slurs the old fellow whose drink she spills.

  She feels sick. She’s really not used to drinking. This isn’t like her, but then the war has made them all reckless. She needs some fresh air.

  It’s dark outside. No moon, and the blackout keeps the night pristine. She breathes deeply, but the fresh air only makes her head spin faster. She hears someone say her name and then she’s falling. Bang. Suddenly the night is full of bright lights and crackling noise.

  She feels something tug at her clothing and knows that she should say something. This is wrong, but she can’t move. She wants to lie here and wait for the world to stop turning. There’s a great weight on top of her now. She tries to speak but there’s something over her mouth, a hard woven fabric. The cuff of a greatcoat. Then comes the sharp pain between her legs, and the dirt and grit beneath her head dig into her scalp. The pain only lasts a few minutes and then the weight is gone again.

  She lies there drifting, afloat in the night.

  “Lily. Lillian? Lillian!”

  Someone slaps her hard in the face. Edna.

  Lily says, “I thought you’d gone,” and is surprised the words come out all right.

  “I went to the lavatory. Oh, Lord, Lillian! We need to get you home.”

  “No,” she shouts. Home is Auntie Vi’s. “No, I can’t go there!”

  “All right, all right,” Edna says. “You can come back to mine. We’ll get you all cleaned up.”

  Lily starts to cry. “Oh,” she says. “Oh.” There really isn’t anything else to say. She doesn’t even know which one it was. Which uniform would she have preferred?

  “Don’t think about it,” says Edna. “Not now . . .”

  After all, you have a guest . . . Edna is back, swinging on the sun lounger, watching Oscar clean up her mess. He must sense them both watching him because he suddenly looks up.

  “Aunt Lil?”

  “The police were here earlier,” she says.

  He stands up and comes to join her outside. “No,” he says, “that was yesterday. I was here with you, remember?” He’s looking at her now, as though he’s concerned about something. “Are you all right, Lily?” He strips off his Marigolds and crouches next to her.

  “They asked about your father.” She no longer feels the need to protect him. “They think it’s him they’ve found, in the cellar.”

  “Yes,” he says. “It is. They confirmed it.”

  “He was a lovely young man,” she says, “that policeman. Very polite.”

  “They’ve found another body, too,” he says. “A woman.”

  They’ve never talked like this before. So honestly. Edna would never have allowed it. But now Edna just watches, smiling her ghastly toothy smile.

  “Awful,” says Lily.

  “Do you know who it is? The other body?”

  “What’s that?”

  He doesn’t say anything else for a bit, then, “I think . . . I think I’m going to go away for a while. I can’t stay in this
place anymore.”

  “I see,” she says.

  “I wondered . . .”

  “Do come on, Oscar,” she snaps, “spit it out.” She has never spoken to him like that before. It’s as though, with Edna gone, Lily has to fill in for her, become the authoritarian.

  He looks shocked but recovers enough to ask, “It’s just, I’m a bit short . . . I wondered if . . . ?”

  So it’s money he’s after. She pretends to consider it for a moment. “I don’t think so, dear,” she says, and looks across at the sun lounger. “I don’t think Edna would approve. Perhaps Michael could help out in some way?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Well,” she says. “Never mind. I’m sure you’ll get by.”

  He stares at her sullenly, the way he used to when he wanted his own way on something. But it won’t wash this time. Lily glances at Edna where she swings on the phantom sun lounger. She’s sure now; there’s just no conceivable way Edna could have managed the furniture on her own, and she wouldn’t have asked a stranger for help. Edna smiles and nods at her. I already have a good idea who might be . . . she’d started to say before Lily cut her off. Then what had she done? Rung that person perhaps? Asked him to come see her?

  “Where will you go?” she asks. “Overseas, I imagine?”

  “Yeah. I dunno yet; I might travel for a bit. I guess I’ll let you know where I end up. Maybe you could visit.”

  “Oh, I don’t travel well, dear. And anyway, there’s Edna to think about.”

  “Lily,” he says, “Edna is gone.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes stray to the sun lounger again. “You won’t go until after the funeral, though, will you?”

  He hesitates. “No, of course not.” He gets up. “I should be getting back.”

  “All right, dear.”

  He kisses her goodbye. His breath is fetid and stale. She walks him to the front gate. He pauses for a moment, and she thinks he’s going to ask her about the whole business again. This time she will tell everything she can. Everything she remembers. No more lies and half-truths and obfuscations. In return she will demand the truth from him as well. Instead he says, “You’re sure I can’t help with anything?”

  “No, dear,” she says, “I think you’ve done more than enough, don’t you?”

  She watches him walk away from her down the path, no longer the little boy she once loved. He has grown overnight into a tall, grubby stranger.

  No, not a stranger exactly. He reminds her of his father, sneaking about and always so full of secrets. And his grandfather . . . the man in the greatcoat from the pub.

  * * *

  —

  Tyler shivers and breaks from his reverie. The sun has dropped while he has been sitting in the graveyard. He stands up and stretches the kinks from his aching limbs. He takes one last look at his father’s headstone and heads back to the car.

  On the way home he wonders who Sophie Denham told about Gerry Cartwright’s wandering hands. He thinks he knows. It explains Denham’s reaction when they spoke at his office, and it explains why Denham wouldn’t want his daughter involved with Oscar. He must have had some idea what Gerald got up to, even if he wasn’t involved himself. What stronger motive than a father protecting his child? And if so, it might go some way to explaining why the fire at Denham’s office seemed different, because he set it himself as a blind. Or maybe, as Enfield said, the solicitor’s office just felt different because it wasn’t in Castledene. And if Denham is the fire watcher, none of this explains why he’s setting fires in the first place.

  Night has fallen by the time he arrives back at his apartment but it’s still as warm, the air thick and close. The roads are empty but for the orange glow of the streetlights. Something catches his eye as he gets out of the car, and he looks up at the abandoned office building opposite. There’s a crack in one of the windows on the first floor that resembles a large black candle flame, reaching up to the rooftop.

  There’s a brief flash of light, the headlights of a car as it swings past on the ring road, and with it he sees a shape in the darkness. Someone in the building. There’s a jerk of movement, and the shape vanishes.

  It could be anyone, of course. No reason to assume it’s Oscar, or the fire watcher, assuming those two are not one and the same. He locks the car and crosses the road to the empty building.

  The front door of the building is locked, but he knows there’s a side entrance down the alley to the left. The small door has been boarded over, but the wooden planks are loose and he pushes them aside easily. The door behind swings open with a loud creak, and the stench of damp and urine is almost overpowering. He considers calling it in, but what is it exactly? A shadow glimpsed in the night? No one’s going to come rushing out for that, and certainly not on his say-so. The thought reminds him of his mobile and he pulls it out, uses the light on the camera to negotiate his way through the rubble. The corridor he’s in leads directly to a set of stairs, no other doors. An emergency exit. He takes the stairs slowly, broken glass from the smashed lighting above crunching beneath his feet. Another door, its emergency bar long broken, stands open and leads into a wide room scattered with abandoned office furniture. There’s a bit more light here, street light filtered by the cracked and missing windows.

  The room is enormous and stretches the entire length of the building, but his view is obstructed by a number of pillars that support the roof. There are desks and chairs as well, partitioning that once would have separated the cubicles of bored call-center workers. Plenty of hiding places. Dark corners that neither the diffuse orange street light nor his tiny pinprick torch can reach. He moves forward slowly, edging his way nearer to the windows on the front of the building, his eyes searching the darkness for some telltale movement, a shadow that seems out of place. He glances out quickly through one of the broken windows at the street below, but there’s no sign of anyone. The battery on his mobile beeps again. He reaches the part of the building that lies directly opposite his own flat. There’s the cracked glass pane that looks like a black flame, only from this side the flame is orange and bright. Through it he can see his own living room, the cheap eBay sofa, the IKEA breakfast bar, the bookcases.

  Then the window shatters, bursts into a thousand razor-sharp quills.

  Tyler reacts instinctively, dropping his mobile and raising his arms to protect his face. He takes a step backward, crouching down, the sound of the shattered glass settling around him. His heart smashes against his rib cage. He looks down at the stone as it comes to a standstill. He hears laughter and looks outside to see a bunch of kids haring away up the road. He exhales loudly. They must have heard him coming and found another way out of the building.

  The battery on his phone beeps three times in quick succession and the light goes out. Tyler picks it up off the floor and stares into the darkness until his eyes adjust a little. He heads back the way he came, inching his way slowly back down the stairwell in the darkness.

  Just kids messing about in an abandoned building. Nothing to worry about. Nevertheless, when he gets back to the flat he deadbolts the door and puts the chain on. He glances through the window at the building opposite where the familiar cut-out black flame has now gone. In its place, there’s a large, jagged hole.

  * * *

  —

  Rabbani sits up in bed, staring at the off-white walls of the hospital ward.

  There are four beds in her section. The woman in the bed opposite, Sandra, is watching television, but every now and then Rabbani catches her staring. She guesses it’s the ten o’clock news. She can only imagine what she looks like, laid out in the graveyard prematurely. But that makes her think about the vicar. She’s getting delusions of grandeur; as if the media gives a shit about what happened to her when they’ve got him to write about.

  She’s sorry for him. She didn’t like the guy, a
nd he was obviously some sort of perv, but still . . . When she thinks about how he must have died, how she nearly died . . .

  She shivers. She doesn’t think she’ll ever feel warm again.

  The woman in the bed next to her groans intermittently. They’ve separated them with a curtain, which seems to stay closed pretty much permanently. Rabbani can’t say she’s sorry about that.

  The fourth bed is empty. And somehow that one unsettles her most of all.

  She can’t remember much of anything after the church. Not the trip here in the ambulance, nor the night spent in intensive care, though occasionally she thinks she remembers puking up phlegm and pus into a bowl.

  Her throat is sore and the water they’ve given her doesn’t seem to help, just makes her need the toilet all the time. She doesn’t think the coughing sounds as bad now, but every few minutes she has another fit of hacking up slime and Sandra looks across at her disagreeably from behind her TV.

  The immediate danger has passed, it seems; she’s here for observation only now, arrhythmia of the heart. But what if they find something else? Who knows what other damage has been done? Maybe now that she’s here they’ll never let her go. Just like her grandfather.

  At least her family has gone. How they all managed to get in she has no idea. There were twelve of them at one point, with Sandra looking over in disgust. Well, fuck her! At least Rabbani has people who care. Though if her mother really cared, she might not have spent quite so long cursing her, cursing the force, and insisting Ghulam give her a second opinion—as if a neurologist knows anything about lungs! She could have died with embarrassment. Rabbani hits the button on her mobile for what must be the twentieth time and waits for the line to connect. It’s not like there’s anything else to do. Besides, she won’t be able to sleep until she’s talked to him. She’s not expecting him to answer any more this time than the last twenty times, so she doesn’t even have the phone to her ear when she hears his tinny voice barking up from her lap. “Tyler.”