Fire Colour One

by Jenny Valentine

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

  HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

  1 London Bridge Street

  London, SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Text copyright © Jenny Valentine 2015

  Jenny Valentine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780007512362

  Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008126230

  Version: 2015-06-23

  For my Dad.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jenny Valentine

  About the Publisher

  At my father’s funeral, after everything, I lit a great big fire in his honour, built from stacked apple crates and broken furniture and pieces of a fallen-down tree. It towered over the scrubby piece of land I call the bonfire garden, and blazed, too far gone to fight, against the fading afternoon. On the lawn below me, my family gulped for air like landed fish. They clawed at their own faces like Edvard Munch’s Screamers, like meth-heads. His mourners poured from the house, designer-clad and howling, lit up like spectres by the flames.

  My stepfather, Lowell Baxter, ageing pin-up boy, one-time TV star and current no-hoper, stood swaying, dazed and hollow-eyed, a man woken up in the wrong place after a long sleep. Hannah, my mother, crumpled on to the wet grass like a just-born foal in all her credit-card finery, her gorgeous face collapsing in a slow puncture. She clutched at her own clothes, sobbing violently, but she didn’t bother getting to her feet. I doubt she could remember how, she was so weighted down with debt.

  I could have filmed them, preserved their agonies for repeat viewings, but I didn’t. I did what my best and only friend Thurston always told me. I savoured the moment because the moment was more than enough. I stood back and watched them suffer, feeding fistfuls of paper to the flames.

  I wondered if they’d ever speak to me again. I’ve always longed for Hannah and Lowell to stop talking.

  They didn’t behave that way when it was my father in the furnace. Neither of them was sorry to see him go. Before the fire, there was a service for him at the crematorium. Ernest Toby Jones, one of a queue of waiting dead. Lowell worked the room in a tight suit and Hannah wore big black sunglasses to hide her lack of tears, and shiny black high heels with red soles, same colour as her lipstick. High-impact accessories are my mother’s answer to big occasions, in place of actual feelings.

  I couldn’t stand the thought of Ernest lying in that box with the lid closed, all dark and lonely and gone. None of it made sense to me. I couldn’t keep up. But like water putting out a lit match, the rest of the world closed over the fact of his absence, and ran on. His hearse moved through everyday traffic. Cars behind him on the road tested their patience on his slow and stately journey to the grave. Only one old man, walking with a stick, stopped as the coffin navigated a roundabout and met my eye, and bowed his head politely to the dead. Inside, Ernest’s thin crowd spread itself out across the pews and tried to fill up the room. God knows who most of them were. They wore their dullest clothes and tuned their voices to the frequencies of sadness and loss. I sat on my own. I didn’t want anything to do with them. The chapel’s technicolour carpets looked like off-cuts from The Shining, from a shut-down Las Vegas casino. I wanted to meet the person responsible and find out if they were joking, or colour-blind, or just a fan of Stanley Kubrick films. I wanted to tell Thurston about them because he would get it and because on that day of all days I could have done with him there. And then I realised the carpets were chosen perfectly, because they took my mind off the elephant in the room, the rubbed-raw stump of what was missing, the lack of my father, the lack of Ernest, who was never ever coming back.

  I didn’t have him for long enough. That’s the bare bones of it. I wasn’t ready, once I’d found him, to let go.

  “Do you want a song played?” I asked him, the week before. “When the curtains close, when your coffin goes through. Do you want a hymn or something?”

  He thought about it for one waterlogged, morphine-soft moment.

  “Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes,” he said, and his voice sat like pea gravel in his mouth, sounded like mice scampering in a faraway attic. It took an age for the words to come out into the air. “If you don’t know me by now.”

  “You will never, never, never know me,” I sang, somewhere between laughter and tears.

  Thurston threw a fake funeral once. He hired a hearse and his Uncle Mac drove it. I sat up front and even though the coffin behind me was empty, it brooded, like something moody and alive, and I kept thinking there was someone else in the car. Thurston walked ahead on the street at this slow, slow pace in a threadbare tailcoat and a tall black hat, a face like wet thunder, streaked with tears. It was a Sunday in the suburbs, Long Beach way, out by Rossmoor. People were washing their cars and tidying their yards and a gang of kids were riding their bikes in circles round a run-over cat. Uncle Mac just kept driving, slow as could be, following Thurston’s lead with a great big smile plastered to his face. He didn’t know what was going to happen next and he liked it that way.

  “I trust the boy,” he said, “’cause he’s a genius.”

  I wasn’t about to argue with that.

  The kids stopped circling, people stopped mowing and raking and more still came right out of their houses, and everyone watched this funeral that wasn’t theirs. You could see them wondering whose it was and what the hell it was doing on their street, on their weekend. And then when we had everyone’s attention, Thurston reached into his jacket pocket at the exact same time I opened the car windows and cranked up the stereo, It’s Just Begun by The Jimmy Castor Bunch. In one fluid movement, as the music gathered itself together, Thurston took four home-made pigment bombs and flung them out and down on the tarmac in front of him. He walked and we followed, stately and respectful, through a thick and billowing cloud of colour that swelled and rose and then drifted down, clinging to his tear-stained skin and his black clothes and to our sombre, bug-stuck car. As we emerged from the colour cloud and the song kicked
in, Thurston started to dance. Not just foot tapping or finger clicking, not just any old thing. His whole body dipped and slipped and flowed like water through the music, the notes flinging him into the air and then low and wide across the ground until the smile on my face hurt just watching him, until I forgot to breathe. God, that boy could move.

  Everybody but us was still, like we’d cast some kind of spell on them, like we’d stopped time but carried on travelling right through it. People stared. That’s all they could do. It was the kind of funeral you’d long to have, the kind you’d see and then years later couldn’t say if it was real or only a dream.

  It was a moment, that’s what it was. Thurston dreamed it up and handed it over to those Rossmoor people, for free. They had no idea what they were getting. They didn’t know how lucky they were.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  When Ernest’s emptied body had hit temperatures close to 1000 degrees centigrade and been reduced to a shoebox full of strangely damp sand, cooling down for collection, I wished for a great burst of sound and colour, a celebration, a free dream. Instead everything was quiet and ordinary and shut down. There might have been a hymn, and people got up and shuffled out, looking only at the ground. We drove back in silence to his house for refreshments and small talk, for gin-laced cocktails and tiny, harpooned sandwiches on the lawn. It would have been so much better with Thurston there to help me. I remember thinking that. It would have been something breathtaking and spectacular.

  I wasn’t wrong.

  In the end, it was my best and last fire. I went out into the garden alone. The heat had dropped out of the sun and the light was leaving. I took a deep breath. I lit a match, put it calmly to the petrol-soaked rags at the bonfire’s skirts, and I waited.

  And I wished with all my heart that Ernest could have been around to see it.

  Ernest must have given up on ever seeing me again when my mother called him at home out of the blue. We’d only been back in the country five days. It was a Monday morning and it was raining. The clock by his bed said 11.32. The nurse passed him the phone while it was still ringing. Ernest said if he’d drawn up a list of a thousand people it could possibly be, we wouldn’t have made the bottom of it. We’d been gone more than twelve years. He’d quit thinking he’d find us a long time ago.

  Hannah and Lowell had talked about it the night before. They’d talked of nothing else for days in fact, since before we left home, how she was going to play it, what she was going to say. Lowell told her to front it out and act like nothing had happened, and I guess that’s what she did.

  “We’re back,” she said to Ernest, just like that, like we’d been away for the weekend.

  A wormhole could have opened on the other side of the room and Ernest would have been less surprised, less terrified. He looked around for confirmation that he was awake and alive, not dead already, not sucked back in time, not dreaming.

  “Hannah?” He breathed her name into the receiver. “Is that you?”

  I could hear his voice, small and tinny through the back of the phone, like a man trapped in a cookie jar. I stayed close and listened. I’d never heard my real father speak before, not that I could remember anyway. He’d washed his hands of us a long time ago, and that was that.

  “Yes, Ernest,” my mother said, assessing her face in the mirror, smoothing out the lines around her mouth with her free hand then letting go, facial time-travel, back and forth, back and forth. “It’s me.”

  It must have stripped him right back to the bone, her sudden call, her carrying on like nothing had happened all those years. I didn’t think about it then but I do now, all the time.

  “God, this place is a dump,” she said, over his stunned silence. “So grey and so cold.”

  “Is Iris with you?” Ernest asked her.

  She didn’t answer him directly. It’s one of the few things about Hannah you can always count on – her lack of generosity, her guaranteed refusal to give a person what they want. The question bounced off her and she just moved right along.

  “We’ve got some work with the BBC.”

  “News to me,” I said under my breath, because as far as I knew, we’d been running from a mountain of debt and other trouble, not headed towards a bright new future. Hannah slapped me on the back of the arm and gestured at me to zip it or get out.

  “It’s a really good move for us,” she said, “apart from the weather.”

  “Why have you called, Hannah?” I heard him say. “What do you want?”

  My mother has a special voice for deal making. It’s sharp and flinty, like a rock face, like gritted teeth. She locks everything into a safe and then she opens her mouth. “Shall we meet?”

  There was a pause, just quiet on the line like he was thinking about it. The way I saw it, he wasn’t exactly jumping at the chance.

  “Why now?” he said.

  “Don’t you want to?” Hannah put her hand over the mouthpiece and hissed, “See?” like this was proof she’d always been right about him. I got ready to be rejected all over again. I hadn’t been expecting anything different. It wasn’t even that big a deal.

  “It’s not that,” he said.

  “So what is it?”

  “I’d need you to come here.”

  I figured that was that. I was about to leave the room and get on with the rest of my Ernest-less life. Hannah told me once that Ernest lived alone in the middle of nowhere and that she’d never go back because it was just about the dullest place on earth, with no shops or Wi-Fi or bars or people or tarmac or houses. My mother was a fish out of water in a place like that, a bird of paradise in a cesspit.

  “Just sheep,” she’d said, “and grass. And Ernest,” and she’d shuddered at the horror of it. “Never, ever again.”

  “Why’s that?” she asked him now in an I’m-holding-all-the-cards, mountain-to-Mohammed, over-my-dead-body kind of way. “Why don’t you come to London? I thought we could meet at the Royal Academy. You can buy me tea at Fortnum’s, like you used to.”

  A trip like that was beyond him. Just getting out of bed was a half-hour operation, followed by a three-hour sleep. Ernest wasn’t going anywhere. He said so.

  “Bring Iris if you can,” he said. “I’d really like to get another look at her before I’m gone.”

  “Another look?” I whispered. “What am I? A vase?”

  “Gone?” she said, swatting me away. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m sick,” he told her.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  He paused. I could hear it. “Lung, liver, bone,” he said. “Oh, and brain. I forgot to say brain.”

  He could have lied. He could have made something up, I suppose, but he gave it to her straight. He was dying.

  I felt the base of my stomach drop out, just for a second, like it does on a rollercoaster, when you’re at the top and about to tip over and it’s too late to change your mind and go back. Thurston was always looking for that feeling. He said he went after it because he could never tell if it was the tail end of excitement or the beginning of remorse. I said maybe it was both and wasn’t that possible and he said that was exactly why he liked me, precisely how come we were friends.

  Hannah’s pupils deepened like wells and she gripped the receiver harder, until her knuckles went white. She made the right noises but they didn’t match the look on her face.

  “Oh God,” she said. “How long have you got?”

  “Hard to tell,” I heard Ernest say. “Weeks, if I’m lucky.”

  “And how long have you known?”

  “Not nearly long enough.”

  “And you’re sure?”

  “I’m sure, Hannah,” he said. “It’s over. I’m out.”

  I watched her wet her lips with the tip of her tongue, like she could taste something sweet. Hannah saw me watching and turned away. “She’s sixteen, you know,” she said, twirling at her hair with her fingers, sliding it past her teeth, checking for split ends. “Iris. Can
you believe it?”

  Ernest breathed for a bit, which sounded like someone walking on bubble-wrap, and then he said, “There are things I’ve been hoping to give her. Family things. It would mean a lot, to be able to tell her myself.”

  It didn’t mean much to me one way or another, not back then. I was too busy working out how I was ever going to get home, worrying about how I was going to find Thurston. Family wasn’t high on my list. Blood is no thicker than water, not when you’ve been on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean for most of your life, not when the one person you care about is still over there, and not talking to you, and you haven’t had a chance to say sorry, or goodbye. Hannah looked at me, all worked up and wide-eyed, but I just shrugged.

  “What things?” she said, too fast if you ask me, too hungry.

  “Just some paintings.”

  “Just some paintings,” she echoed through her Cheshire Cat smile.

  “If she wants them.”

  “Oh, Iris is into her art,” she drooled. “She’ll want them.”

  “So bring her,” he said. “Come and visit.”

  She used this pouting, sugar-soaked voice to shake him down. “And what do I get if I do? Are you going to make it worth my while?”

  I was ashamed of her, honestly. I didn’t know where to look. And at the same time I thought maybe Ernest deserved to be played by her, that he’d made his own bed, after all. I definitely remember thinking about that.

  “Let’s talk about it when you get here,” he said.

  “If I get there,” Hannah hardened up again, “not when. I can’t promise, Ernest. It’s not a given. I can’t just drop everything.”

  I wondered what it was she reckoned she was carrying, what it was she’d have to drop, apart from credit cards and cigarettes and gum.

  There was a silence then. I heard the loose wet rattle of him sighing into the phone. Hannah counted with her fingers, slowly, for my benefit, to show she knew already how this would go. She winked at me, like we were in it together.

  “You’ll be rewarded,” Ernest said. “You know how generous I can be.”

  “I do,” she said.