Where We Belong

by Anstey Harris

  I remember the end of everything. ‘Have we still got a museum? Is it still standing? The animals,’ I say in a half-whisper. ‘I saw the animals.’

  ‘The animals are safe, the books too. My apartment – our apartments – are . . . Unusable.’

  ‘Did the animals escape?’ I saw them run across the lawns. I watched them file two-by-two out of the house, the kangaroos, the cheetahs, slow deliberate tortoises. Did I hear a cacophony of trumpet calls and chatter, of roaring and grunting? The house cannot have woken all the animals, woken them and freed them and saved them.

  Araminta rubs my arm again: she sits back down beside me. ‘We need to talk, you and I,’ she says. ‘There is so much to say.’

  *

  Leo has aged years in the last two days: not in a bad way – not in a way that means I have lost part of him. He is ‘as well as’ what he was, not instead of.

  When he comes into the ward he is worried for me but also engaged, interested in what has happened. He has taken charge of himself while I have been sleeping.

  He is dressed in clothes I haven’t seen before: a button-through work shirt, carefully ironed, and a roundneck jumper. He is wearing blue jeans, turned up at the bottoms. He looks older, and not entirely like himself: he looks like Richard.

  ‘Mummy.’ He leans into me, presses his face against mine. It should hurt but I am so relieved to see him – so happy that he is calm and well – I don’t feel any pain at all. ‘You look sore.’ He frowns and chews his lip. ‘Does your face hurt?’

  ‘A little.’ I can’t smile widely, but I hope my voice does. ‘But I’m all the better for seeing you.’ I make a voice from one of the stories he liked when he was younger, but it hurts my throat.

  He strokes my arm. ‘Did you burn your hand?’ His voice is low.

  I move across the bed as far as I can. ‘Come up here. Come and lie next to me. It’s a scorch on my face,’ I explain to him, ‘from the hot smoke. That’s all. It’ll be all right. They’ll sort it all out today and I’ll be home tomorrow morning. We’ll be home by tomorrow.’ I say it with my voice light but I wonder if we really have a home to go to.

  Leo gets onto the bed beside me and puts his head next to mine on the pillow. I hold my bandaged hand in the air between us in case one of us leans on it.

  ‘I was very scared in the fire, Mummy. It was horrible.’

  I put my arm across his chest, it’s the closest I can get to hugging him.

  ‘I went downstairs but I couldn’t find you. And so then I had to go back up and that was scary. I couldn’t see where I was going.’ He turns towards me, gets as near as he can. His mouth is so close to me that I can feel his breath on my cheek. ‘And I thought you were dead. But you weren’t.’ He makes a whistling sound through his teeth. ‘You couldn’t get up.’

  I think of Richard on the lawn, patting his thighs with his hands. I remember his broad chest, his wide shoulders, how he was strong enough to carry me. ‘Did you come back for me, Leo? Through all that smoke?’

  He nods and I hear the tiny noise of the stubble on his jaw line rubbing against my dressings.

  ‘And did you carry me?’

  ‘I carried you to the outside. To where the animals were.’

  Reality tilts. It was Leo who carried me: Leo the man, the man with the strength to save a grown woman. But the animals, the animals were all on the drive: I didn’t imagine them. The dead animals from the glass cases, the exhibits, all set free.

  ‘What happened to the animals? How did they get out?’

  ‘Shhh.’ Leo puts his hand to his mouth, his index finger pointing up and over his nose. ‘Shhh.’

  Leo stays for half an hour. He won’t talk about the animals at all – no matter how hard I try. And I’m too tired to try for long.

  ‘How did you get here? And whose clothes are you wearing?’

  He is happy with these more solid questions. ‘Mandy brought me. She is Curtis’s mum. She’s very nice. She has a tiny little dog called Candy. Can we get a dog when we get home?’

  ‘Let’s wait and see.’ I close my eyes, exhausted with the relief that he is happy. ‘And whose clothes are they?’

  ‘They’re Curtis’s dad’s clothes but he doesn’t need them because he is in prison and he has to wear a uniform there. And when he gets out he can get lost – he’s not going back to their house.’

  The relief wavers, I am definitely going home tomorrow, no matter what the doctors say.

  I need to go home. To our home. I need to find out what has really happened. To find out what we have left. I think of the boxes stacked in our apartment – of our whole lives, our whole history. Did they burn, and with them every memory, every moment, of our past?

  *

  In the morning, when I am finally discharged, Andrew offers to drive me back to the house. I hadn’t thought about how I would get there – or how I would feel when I did. His car is sleek and black, the interior is spotlessly clean: it is exactly how I would imagine a policeman’s car to look. As I do up my seat belt, one-handed, I realise that I am trembling all over. I am so afraid of what I will – or won’t – find.

  The museum is scarred. The drive itself is a mess of water and displaced gravel, weals and welts of dark brown mud snake across it. A few windows at the top are blackened, which, from a distance, makes them look like gaping holes. Each individual panel tells its own account of what happened here.

  I try to get out of the car seat but my feet will not move towards the house. My legs are trembling and weak. The smell that has travelled with me to the hospital, that dominates my dreams, is nowhere near as strong as the smell here. The air itself smells of smoke. The grass, the leaves, the over-grown rose bushes in the beds along the edge of the drive: everything is curled and brown from the heat, choked by the smoke. The wisteria that has climbed the front of the house for a century is powdered with soot.

  I can imagine the black crystals that bloom from the banisters and wallpaper. Even here, in the untouched end, the smell is overpowering.

  Leo pulled me through that smoke.

  Leo saved my life.

  *

  One end of the museum is black: the end we live in; the end where our beds are. The other, inside the galleries, is red. It’s like a bizarre joke. In the middle, it is mostly untouched – serene as it ever was – as if the smoke was too tired to go any higher, too exhausted to search for us.

  ‘Is it safe inside?’ I cannot imagine being back in there again, sleeping there: at the same time, I feel like I can’t abandon it, that it needs me, us.

  ‘The fire started in a striplight, the Fire SOCO believes.’ Andrew clears his throat of the imaginary smoke. ‘The starters in those fluorescent bulbs, especially when they’re ancient, are notorious for it.’

  My mind flashes to where there are strip lights. I can’t picture the ceilings, can’t remember the interiors clearly. When I imagine looking up above me, all I see is grey: just smoke.

  ‘This one was in the cellar,’ Andrew says. ‘It smouldered and dropped sparks onto a tarpaulin down there, a real one.’

  ‘A tarpaulin?’ I am still certain this fire was something to do with Curtis, that he came up here for a smoke, that he left a lit cigarette – or worse – near something flammable. I have printed that truth so hard upon my mind that I can’t shift it. ‘Why would a tarpaulin burn?’

  Andrew squints up at the house, it is mostly silhouetted by the hot summer sun which blisters, silver, around its edges. ‘The clue’s in the name: tar-paulin. It’s why we use synthetic ones nowadays.’ He has his hand on my car door, and I know he expects me to walk forward, to go back in.

  ‘But it was in my room. Not the cellar. It was on my corridor.’

  ‘The Fire Investigator says it’s very simple: yours was the only window open in the house. Classic ventilated fire.’

  I wipe my face with my bandaged hand, tears are starting to gather at the corners of my eyes and I breathe hard to suck them back in.


  ‘Tarpaulin fires generate a lot of smoke – and very little flame. The smoke travelled up to your window from a slow burn downstairs: it had probably started before you went to bed.’

  ‘What if it happens again?’ I whisper it, wondering if we can ever go back inside.

  ‘We’ve disabled any remaining fluorescent strips – taken the starters away. And the Fire Service have fitted smoke alarms on all floors – Ms Buchan is a pensioner so they were able to do it for free. You’re safe now. In the short term, at least. The whole place clearly needs rewiring eventually.’

  I stand up on my wobbling legs, as feeble as a new-born foal, and start to step towards the door. I can feel the pull of it, that it needs me. The house didn’t try to kill us: it was asking for our help, asking us to realise how close it is to death.

  *

  Up in the corridor on the first floor, it’s as if there never was a fire. The quiet – the calm – at the top is eerie: I remember the silence in my bedroom, the moment the birds stopped screeching and I flinch at the idea of their little baked bodies.

  Our feet pad quietly across the patterned carpet. Araminta has had some volunteers open up three rooms on the first floor for us: the original family bedrooms. She has a small brown suitcase, presumably full of more identical tweed skirts and short-sleeved, knitted, jumpers. The clothes that cover her tiny frame would take up no room at all. I have a pair of jeans and two T-shirts that one of the nurses brought me.

  The volunteers have heaved the cotton cloths off this furniture, drapes that have been in place for decades in these beautiful rooms while we ‘made do’ with the cramped accommodation upstairs.

  We are in three rooms – all in a row: one for Araminta, one for me, and one so that Leo can come home. Each of these rooms has been empty for years, the furniture shrouded with white dust covers, but the floors and mantelpieces kept clean and polished by someone: I assume Araminta. Attached to each room is its own ancient, but fully functioning, bathroom – the fittings are far superior to the servants’ quarters upstairs.

  My bathroom is mainly green. Encaustic tiles of emerald and black on a cream background snake their way along the floor between the door and the rusty old bath. The walls are a textured ceramic that picks out a pattern of flowers and ivy, climbing halfway up: there is so much work, so much detail in every one. The shower is a rubber hose attached to the taps and the grouting is flaking and brown between the bath and the wall, but it is mine and mine alone. Why did Araminta punish herself for all those years living upstairs when these friendly, bright, bedrooms were empty on the floor below?

  I will be sleeping in a room Richard would have used when he was a little boy. I wonder if I can summon him back like I did in the hospital: it’s been wonderful having him beside me.

  And then I remember Patch, how much I long to see him: the dichotomy of falling in love with him here, where Richard’s faint shadow still moves around me, whispers from the walls and the window frames.

  *

  When I am sure it’s going to work, at least for now, I call Leo.

  ‘Will I have a big bed?’ is his first question, ‘In my new room?’

  ‘All the beds are tall, you have to climb into them. That’s how old-fashioned beds are.’

  ‘I don’t mean tall. I had a double bed at Curtis’s house. Not a children’s bed.’

  ‘They’re massive.’ I smile into the phone. ‘Can Mandy call you a taxi?’

  ‘I don’t need a taxi. I can walk.’ He sounds surprised, almost indignant, that I’ve suggested it.

  It’s not far – fifteen minutes at most. ‘Okay, will someone walk with you? Curtis?’

  ‘No one’s here at the moment.’

  My heart is in my mouth.

  ‘Mandy is at work this morning and Curtis is out. Candy needed to go for a walk so I said I’d do it. I love walking Candy. I take her out every day.’ Something distracts him on the other end of the line and he pauses for a few seconds. ‘I’ll walk home when Mandy gets back from work, okay? So Candy isn’t by herself.’

  Leo: a man who crawled through a fire to carry a fully grown woman back out. Leo, who is as brave as the lion he is named for. ‘I’ll see you when you get here,’ I say. ‘I love you.’

  ‘Love you too,’ he says and the phone clicks off.

  I collapse onto the window seat in my new room and cool the back of my head against the pane of glass, grateful for more than I had realised before. My life on the other side of the fire was different, I was passive, waiting: still in recovery from the terrible loss Leo and I have suffered. And Simon, it is Simon’s loss too.

  The fire has cleansed me, scorched away the paralyses, the immobility of grief. The fire has lit an ember of Richard’s lion heart in me, it has given me new life. I look out of my new window across the lawns and into the woodland. Indigenous Americans cleared forests and wild lands like this, fanned flames to sweep for hundreds of miles – clearing the way for new growth, for tiny green shoots to wriggle and uncurl from the scorched earth into the open air.

  I call Patch. It is time to hear his voice, to bring the memory of our brief encounter into the new, fresh, time.

  ‘I’ve been worried sick. I went to the hospital but they wouldn’t tell me anything.’ He sounds exactly as I remember.

  ‘It’s okay. We’re okay.’

  ‘Where are you staying? Do you want to come and stay with me? It’s tiny, but we’ll make do.’ The artist at Pear Tree Cottage.

  ‘We have beautiful rooms. Everything’s all right on the first floor. Will you come? Later on, after Leo’s settled in?’ I need him to come. I can’t imagine sleeping here alone, I want him to be there to hold me when the clouds of smoke colour my dreams, when my nostrils fill with the choking fumes and refuse to be told that there’s nothing there.

  ‘Of course. Text me as soon as you’re ready. I’ll be there ten minutes later.’

  The silence after the call, the comfort of knowing Patch will be here with me tonight, gives me peace. These are my first real moments to think and my head is instantly full of questions.

  I am ready.

  *

  I knock gently on the door next door to mine.

  ‘Come in.’ Araminta’s voice is small, diminished. It makes me think of how Richard ebbed away as he seeped out of himself, of how that change was audible.

  Araminta is sitting in an armchair in the corner of her room. Her legs are crossed so that her bony knee shows white through her tights. The smell of smoke is faint here – unmistakable but a suggestion, a memory, rather than the assault it is on the way up the stairs.

  ‘I sat in this chair for a story, every single night of my childhood,’ she says patting the arm of it. ‘This was Colonel Hugo’s study at one time. He used to read to me every evening before I went to bed. And then I would go back to my house – in the grounds – to my mother.’ She nods her head towards the shelf above the desk and I notice for the first time that it is full of children’s books, their colourful spines neat and pastel. ‘He was my best friend.’

  Instinctively, I stay quiet.

  Her mouth is slightly open, her eyes dreamy. She is going to tell me more if I can wait for it.

  My head is thumping but I have nothing else to do, nothing else I want to think about right now.

  ‘And everything I’ve done – mistakes I know I’ve made – I did for him. Because I promised him.’

  I remember the thing I need to know. ‘What were you doing at your solicitor’s? What was so important?’

  She pauses, holds the arms of the chair with her thin fingers, her fingertips press on the red leather. ‘I can’t tell you.’

  I don’t believe it. After all the ground we have made, everything we’ve been through together. The feet of the chair are wooden, carved lion’s paws; they splay out at each corner. Araminta has a window seat, identical to mine, except that the fabric on hers is more sober, swirls of mauve and pale blues. I sit down on it despite the fact that she
hasn’t asked me to.

  ‘What do you mean you “can’t”? You’re going to have to.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t tell you what my solicitor and I spoke about.’

  I take a deep breath in, steady myself. The shoes I am wearing are my summer flip-flops, silver plastic shoes that I had left in the kitchen the night of the fire. I slip one foot out and feel the edge of the rug under my toes. Our floor coverings here are far more comfortable than they were in the servants’ quarters.

  ‘We have been through a near-death experience. If you’d still been in the building you would probably have died. Any of us could have. This is not the time for secrets or . . .’ It’s starting to irritate me, knock at the corners of my positive attitude, as if she is attempting to deflate this bubble of hope. ‘. . . for playing games.’

  Her jawline is solid, her chin held high. She flares her nostrils once, twice, probably completely subconsciously. ‘It’s not something I can talk about and, really, it’s not something that matters anymore. Please leave it.’ And, more quietly, with definite sadness, ‘Please.’

  The penny drops. ‘You were trying to get rid of us. Trying to get us out.’ I remember her angry words to me before the fire, her face as she lay on the gallery floor with her arm so twisted and unnatural. And then, trickling in behind that, licking and snapping at my memory, I remember the fire itself.

  ‘Tell me.’

  Her eyes fill with tears and she shakes her head, gently, slowly. She is a living picture of regret. ‘I would tell you if I could. I promise you.’

  ‘After all this.’ I wave my bandaged hand at her, brush the coarse gauze across the pinprick scabs on my cheek. ‘After all this.’ And I leave her room.

  *

  I go upstairs and fetch my laptop and Leo’s games machine. It is quiet and dark up here. The taste of smoke makes panic rise in my throat but I need to think, and I need to write to Simon.

  The hop-pickers’ hessian on the walls has crackled and dried. Great flakes of it have fallen off and the lathe and plaster behind them is bare. This whole floor looks so much less civilised, so much less tame. I am not sorry to leave it behind.