by Sarah Jasmon
‘Vic!’ her voice wobbled. ‘Vic, are you OK?’
She wasn’t sure her legs were steady enough to make it over to where Victoria lay huddled on the ground. The flare of flame died down, leaving the giddy after-scent of fuel. A scrubby clump of dried grass smouldered, sending out a thin plume of smoke. She gave Victoria a shake.
‘Vic!’
Victoria was shuddering. Helen touched her rounded back again, and the touch sent her rolling over, until she was lying with her arms and legs outstretched on the ground. She was laughing, her breath coming in short gasps.
‘Did you see me? Commando roll or what?’ She pulled herself up to sitting and wiped her eyes. ‘Helen, you’re a maniac. But did you see it go?’
‘It wasn’t my fault! How did I know you were going to get in the way?’ Helen rubbed her hands down the side of her legs, but it was as if petrol had soaked into her skin.
‘What was that?’ Victoria scrambled up to her feet, and came over to where Helen was standing.
‘What?’
‘I heard something.’ She held on to Helen’s arm, turning her head like a scenting dog. ‘Look, over there.’
Helen followed the line of her finger across the hedge and over to the first of the haystacks. She couldn’t see anything. Victoria bent over and ran across, playing up to her quasi-military persona. Her foot kicked at the bottle she’d misthrown, and it clattered across the concrete. Like disturbed pheasants, the twins broke cover and made a run for the house, whoops of laughter drifting behind them.
‘They must have been following us all the time.’ Victoria spotted a tiny strand of smoke some distance from the point of Helen’s explosion and went over to step down on it. ‘That’s all the world needs, Will as a revolutionary.’
‘You don’t think they’d …’ Helen was looking over the field to where the twins had vanished into the garden.
‘Try to blow up the Houses of Parliament?’ Victoria sounded amused. ‘I wouldn’t put it past them.’ She kicked at the patch of ground again, then came over to where Helen was standing.
A shiver ran up Helen’s spine, and she gave an involuntary shudder.
‘What?’ Victoria turned to look at her.
‘Nothing. Goose walked over my grave.’
‘No geese here.’ Victoria started to run across the field, turning back to shout over her shoulder. ‘Come on, I’m starving. No breakfast!’
With a last glance back at the glasshouses, Helen followed.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The bonfire had been built on the scrubby lawn at the back of the cottage, as far away from the building as possible without being close enough to the apple tree to scorch the leaves. Helen came around from the side path and stopped in surprise when she saw how big it had become. She hadn’t left until teatime the previous day, when the pile of wood had been reasonable, but nothing like this. Layers of pallets had appeared, and lengths of planking peeling with old paint. The scratched framework of an old sofa perched on the top, a layer of rusted springs supporting a loose-limbed effigy. It wasn’t much more than a pair of trousers and a jumper fleshed out with newspaper, but someone had painted a leering face on to what appeared to be an upended pudding basin, and it wore a battered captain’s cap at a rakish angle.
‘Pretty good, huh?’
Victoria was leaning in the open doorway of the kitchen, scraping out the contents of a mixing bowl.
‘It’s amazing! Where did it all come from?’ Helen pushed away the knowledge that it had happened without her.
‘Friend of Piet’s.’ Victoria put the bowl down on the doorstep and gave her fingers a final lick before strolling over to where Helen was standing. ‘He turned up with all this stuff on a trailer at about eleven. We had to have the headlights on the van lighting it all up.’
‘And when did you make it?’ Helen pointed at the guy.
‘This morning.’ The guy’s arm was hanging down the back of the sofa frame, and Victoria reached up to lay it along the top edge. She seemed to be avoiding Helen’s eyes. ‘I was going to come and get you, but I thought you must be busy, you know, otherwise you’d have already been here.’
Helen opened her mouth, but Victoria’s last words blistered on her consciousness. She forced herself to smile.
‘He’s fab. Who thought of the cap?’
‘Oh, Moira.’ Victoria swung round and headed for the apple tree. ‘And this is where I’ve hidden you-know-what.’
Helen stayed where she was, staring at the guy without seeing him. She wanted to kick the whole stack of wood over, to tell Victoria to use someone else’s boat as an excuse for a party for. Her fingernails dug into the soft flesh of her forearm and she concentrated on the sharp pressure until the wave of anger rolled back. She still didn’t trust herself to turn around.
‘Here.’ Victoria was behind her.
‘What?’ She glanced round to see Victoria holding a bottle in each hand.
‘We need to work out exactly what we’re going to do.’ Victoria was oblivious to her mood. ‘I think we should come up here,’ she waved towards the side of the cottage, ‘and sort of burst in on everyone.’
‘And what if the bonfire’s already lit? Or if people are too close and it blows up in their faces?’
Victoria groaned. ‘Are you back on all that again? I thought we’d finished with the worrying.’
‘How would you even get them to explode?’ Helen pushed it a bit further. ‘You know how hard they needed to hit the ground. They’d bounce off the wood and who knows where they’d end up?’
Victoria had one of the bottles with its neck between finger and thumb, watching the liquid rock from side to side. Her mouth was clamped in a tight line.
‘And if we buried them in the middle, the glass could hurt someone. I say we forget it …
‘Is this all because of Moira?’
The abruptness of Victoria’s question made Helen stop. Said out loud like that, it made her feel stupid.
‘Well—’
Victoria didn’t wait for her to finish.
‘Because we didn’t invite her to come and do the guy, she just turned up. And if I wanted to do the petrol bombs with her, I’d do it.’ She bumped Helen’s shoulder with her own. ‘I want to do it with you. Moira would only take over.’
From inside the house, Pippa’s voice sounded in a squeak of indignation, followed by a laugh and a rumble of words from Piet. Seth came out of the kitchen with his amplifier under one arm, ignoring them and paying out a line of cable as he went. Helen watched as he set it on an upturned tea chest and checked something at the back before returning to the house. A few moments later, a needle crackled on the edge of a record before a billow of sound swept through the air. Helen recognized it straight away, the music Seth had said he would come on stage to when he was famous, surrounded by billowing clouds of dry ice. The layers of sound built up in a crescendo of grandeur, heading towards the final, triumphant crashing blast, and then the needle stuck. Two notes hiccupped on, dah dah, dah dah.
‘It’s going to be a rubbish party otherwise.’ Victoria glared at the waiting bonfire, swiping an arm across her eyes. ‘Sparklers if we’re lucky.’ She sat down on the grass, balancing the bottle on the ground in front of her. The end bit of the fabric flopped sideways, releasing a scent of leaking fuel.
‘It looks like a weird table decoration.’ Helen sat down next to her, and reached for the other bottle to line it up with the first.
‘Yeah. Perfect for a revolutionary restaurant. Light it before you leave.’
‘They’d have violin players bringing them round …’
‘… specially for when you’re breaking up with someone.’
‘Comrade, there comes a time in every relationship …’ The lifting of tension was making Helen want to laugh. ‘Comes a time…’
‘What are you two up to?’
It was her dad, heading towards them, beer in hand. He had changed his shirt and smoothed his hair down with water
.
‘All ready for the big moment?’
‘Oh yes.’ Victoria’s face was bland, but she shot Helen an amused glance, making her dip her head and cough into her shoulder. ‘It’s going to be a blast.’
Helen shifted across so she was hiding the bottles, but the attempt backfired.
‘What’s in those bottles?’ Her dad’s attention had shifted. He sniffed, and took a step towards them.
Victoria stood up, trying to block him off. She pointed towards the cottage.
‘Isn’t that Piet? I think he’s looking for you. It must be time to get the fire started.’
He pushed her aside, bending down with a grunt of effort to reach for one of the bottles. He straightened with difficulty, holding it up to his nose and again inhaling.
‘What’s going on?’ He looked at Helen.
She tried not to catch Victoria’s eye, clamping her lips together to stop herself from giggling, even though it wasn’t funny any more. Sweat prickled her back as she thrashed about for a convincing explanation. She felt caught out and guilty, and angry with him for making her feel small. Like being ticked off by a teacher in public.
‘A … a game. Nothing.’ She felt stupid, sitting down on the ground with her dad towering above her, and scrambled to her feet. Without thinking, she found herself right up against Victoria. Shoulder to shoulder into the fray, she thought.
‘It’s not nothing. These are petrol bombs. They’re extremely dangerous.’ Mick drew himself up, cleared his throat, and fixed them both with his serious look. The edge of pomposity made Helen want to giggle again. She stared down at the ground, telling herself to keep quiet, let him get it out.
‘What you two don’t realize is that people get killed …’
Victoria’s voice interrupted him.
‘We do realize, actually. We know quite a lot…’
‘Now you listen to me …’
‘… about it. And the reason it was …’
‘… now just you …’
‘… was a secret,’ Victoria’s voice rose to finish her sentence, ‘was because we knew you’d make such a big deal out of it.’
Their voices faded into silence. Then, ‘You, young lady, have too big a mouth for your own good.’
He bent down again, reaching for the other bottle and manoeuvring his beer under one arm in order to manage them both.
‘One day you’ll understand why I had to do this.’ He fixed them both with a look of sorrow. ‘I’ll dispose of them somewhere safe, and I expect you to be more sensible in future.’ After a few steps, he stopped and seemed to come to a decision before turning and walking towards them holding the bottles out in front. ‘On the other hand, perhaps you should take responsibility for your actions. I want them somewhere safe, understand?’
Helen reached out automatically to take them. He looked straight at her. ‘I’m trusting you here. Don’t let this one talk you into anything. And I’ll be checking on you later.’
They watched as he turned and walked away down the garden. Helen caught a waft of fuel in her throat and tried not to gag. She felt like throwing them after him, smack against his head. Or against the boat. She pictured it, the boat drifting away in flames, the orange glow reflected up from the water, remote, unsalvageable, then the fire reaching the fuel tank and exploding outwards in a raging fireball. Victoria’s voice broke in.
‘Well, your dad really is a bit of a wanker, isn’t he?’
And she too was gone. Helen could feel her legs shaking. Stupid, she told herself, when nothing had happened. The bottles felt like ton weights. She should go and put them in the shed, she thought, but it seemed such a long way away. A crackle from the amp broke the quiet. Everyone would be coming out and she couldn’t face explaining what she was doing. She shoved the bottles behind Seth’s tea chest and broke into a shuffling run to get around the corner before whoever it was saw her.
Chapter Twenty-eight
She went home to wash the petrol off her skin and change her clothes. As she came out on to the bank from the lane, she paused. The boat was tied up on the far side of the cottages, nearly at the bridge, and the canal stretched out beyond the grey stone arch. The sun was beginning to set, grazing the top edge of the treetops. The air felt full, the moment holding itself in readiness, warmed through from the day and not yet at the point where it would slide into evening. Everything was touched with a golden light, the leaves and the grass and the figures around the boat taking on the permanence of an oil painting, and the water swallowing the colours before giving back its own dappled version. Pippa broke through the frame, jumping down from the side of the boat to run along and take her hand.
‘It’s all ready!’ She was practically hopping, brimming over with excitement. ‘I made a garland and Fred has got a bottle with some fizzy wine and Uncle Piet says he can bang it on the side.’ She slowed almost to a halt, pulling Helen’s head down to whisper. ‘I wanted to do the fizzy stuff, but Fred said first.’ She sighed. ‘Uncle Piet said I could do it next time. But he gave me this to use instead.’ She held up a black object slung around her neck on a strap. ‘It’s called a Polaroid, and I have ten pictures to take.’ She pressed a button, and the bottom part of the camera slid open. ‘Come next to me and I’ll take our picture.’
They stood with their heads together, the boat behind them. Pippa tried to hold the camera steady, but it was too big.
‘You do it, Helen.’ She unhooked the strap from around her neck. ‘I’m all right when I’m pointing it forwards, but I can’t do it this way round.’
Helen held it at arm’s length and they both smiled. There was a whirring sound, and a square of white slid from the camera’s base. They stood with their heads touching, waiting for the picture to come. When it did they saw that their heads had ended up in the bottom corner, and Pippa was slightly blurred, as if she’d been turning her head.
‘You can look after it.’ Pippa held it out like an award of merit, then grabbed her hand. ‘Come on, let’s get ready for the launch.’
Victoria had appeared at the far end, keeping herself at a slight distance from everyone. Helen tried to catch her eye, but there was no response, so she stopped next to Seth, who was bending down to untie the rope from a stake buried in the grass. Pippa ran across to pick up a chain of coloured paper flowers, and tried to make Will hold one end, but he was jumping about with a bottle in his hand, swinging it around by a piece of string tied about the neck; if it was the fizzy wine, there wasn’t going to be much fizz left at the rate he was going.
‘Are we all here?’ The flap of plastic that served as a door was rolled up out of the way, and Piet was there, looking out of the gap, a bottle of beer held up in one hand.
Helen stood on tiptoe to whisper in Seth’s ear.
‘Shouldn’t we wait for Alice?’
Seth scanned the front of the house and Helen followed his line of sight to Alice’s window.
‘She won’t mind,’ he said. ‘Though I might—’
He was interrupted by Piet’s voice. ‘Come on, Mick, we need you to set us off.’
Seth bent sideways, his mouth almost touching her ear. ‘I think we’ll leave it.’
Piet stepped on to the bank with a flourish as her dad appeared, struggling to keep his balance as the boat rocked from Piet’s departure. Piet took a grip of his arm as he followed, and handed him a beer from a box down by his feet.
Helen held her breath as her dad turned around, holding the beer out as if he was proposing a toast. She remembered at the same moment that she’d left the bottles of petrol on the grass by the wall. It wouldn’t matter for a bit. She’d get them afterwards.
‘I’d like to start by saying,’ Mick began, leaning over to hold on to the cabin roof, ‘that today is the end of a very long road.’
Piet’s head came into view over Mick’s shoulder, and he clinked his bottle against the one in Mick’s uplifted hand. The boat rocked, and her dad nearly lost his balance. Seth stepped across to pi
ck up one of the ropes which held the boat in. Helen watched him as he leaned back to keep the tension as the boat steadied and, beyond him, noticed a figure standing next to Victoria. It was Moira, wearing a white vest and cut-off denim shorts, her army boots unlaced on her feet. She had a bulging plastic bag in one hand, and was watching the activity on the boat with a dismissive interest.
Helen swung her eyes back to her dad, who was getting into the swing of it now. ‘We have waited for this moment for some years.’ He gave the nearest piece of timber a slap, and drew himself up. ‘She doesn’t need a christening …’
Moira detached herself from the group and set off down the towpath. Helen couldn’t help noticing that Seth, too, watched Moira leave.
‘If we’re all ready?’ Mick nodded to Piet, and a plume of smoke drifted up from the far side of the boat as the engine roared into life. Mick’s voice shouted above it.
‘May God bless her and all…’
Before he could finish, Will darted forward and swung his bottle on to the edge of the deck. Glass and liquid sprayed out over Mick’s legs, who hovered on the brink of a bellow of anger before visibly changing his mind and lifting his own beer bottle in a salute. Helen felt her throat swell with emotion as a cheer spread along the bank. She wished she was close enough to give her dad a hug, to tell him how pleased she was the moment had come. She even took a step towards him, but the engine shuddered to a halt and Piet was there, slinging an arm around Mick’s shoulders and leaning in to say something in his ear. The two of them stepped over to the bank and, still talking, headed for the path around the side of the cottage. Mick didn’t even see her.
She turned to see Pippa, tears running down her cheeks.