“Come soon,” he told her. “I don’t have much time left.”
When she put the phone down she was glowing. She couldn’t wait for Lowell to get back from his audition so she could tell him the good news. Everything about the way my mother moved around the room was different after that call, lighter, like she’d just mainlined a barrel full of hope.
I asked her how come Ernest was so keen to get eyes on me all of a sudden, after so many years of nothing. I didn’t feel like humouring him. The last thing I wanted was to be the centrepiece of an old man’s guilt trip.
“Who cares?” she said. “This is good news, Iris. Don’t try and spoil it.”
“Good news how?”
“Your father,” she told me, “was a very wealthy man.”
“Is,” I said. “You just got off the phone with him. He’s not dead yet.”
“Yes, OK.” She dialled Lowell’s number, pulled a face. “Is. But he’ll be dead soon.”
I laughed. “You look human,” I told her, “but inside you’ve got to be part android.”
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “You know he left us with nothing.”
“You’ve told me enough times.”
“So don’t waste your time sticking up for him. He’s been a terrible father to you.”
“And he’s going to be a better one when he’s dead? Is that the logic?”
Hannah hooked the phone between her jaw and her shoulder, and poured herself just an inch or two of vodka. Morning measures, Thurston called them. Breakfast of Champions.
“Get what you can out of Ernest Toby Jones,” she said. “That’s my advice to you, free of charge.”
Nothing is free of charge in my mother’s world. She never gave a thing away without making somebody somewhere pay for it. I knew her well enough to know we weren’t in this together, not for a second.
“Is that what you plan to do?” I asked her. “Get what you can?”
“You’ll feel the same way,” she said, “once you see the pictures he’s got on his walls.”
“What pictures?”
“Priceless ones,” she said.
“Which artists?”
She waved the question away with a flip of her hand and rubbed her fingers and thumbs together, the way people do when they can smell money.
“You’ve got me all wrong,” I said. “I’m not interested in how much they’re worth.”
“You will be,” she said.
“And how do you figure that?”
She smiled. “You think you’re immune to the dollar,” she said. “You think you’re above all that, but you’re not.”
She knocked the vodka back with a quick snap of her head. I watched her swallow it, watched the mechanism working in her throat like rocks in a sack. Mother’s little helper.
“To Ernest,” she said, recalibrating her smile as the drink hit her bloodstream. “You and me and his millions are all he’s got.”
Hannah and Lowell stayed up later than ever that night, getting reckless, lurching towards triple-strength cocktails and dancing in the living room. Neither of them had to be up for work in the morning. They probably thought they’d never have to work again. I could hear them talking about cruise ships and second homes in the South of France and film financing and cosmetic surgery. They were celebrating their sudden, soon-to-be fat fortune, counting their chickens, peaking too early, as usual.
I thought about the time Thurston and I talked about what we’d do with a vast, Forbes Top Ten Rich List, silly, unforgivable amount of money.
Change the world, Bill and Melinda Gates style.
Live on another planet, but only on weekends.
Get $10 bicycles for 4 million of the world’s poor.
Buy United Technologies (or Fox or Walmart or all three) and close them down.
“Give it all away to strangers,” he said, “face to face, in random, life-changing acts of generosity.”
“Set fire to it,” I said, “and enjoy the look on my mother’s face.”
He said that if by some miracle I ever got that kind of rich, I should be sure and let him know, and that he would help me decide.
“You’ll be the first person I call,” I said, even though I knew he didn’t have a cell phone and never would. Tracking devices, Thurston called them, and he refused to be tracked.
A fine principle, I told him, an interesting stand. Worse than useless, it turns out, when you’re trying to find somebody, when you want to tell them where in the world you’ve disappeared to, when you need to see if they’re anything like even halfway to OK. After we left in such a hurry, I realised I didn’t even know where Thurston lived. I never went there. He never told me. It just didn’t come up.
I rolled on to my side and pressed a pillow over my head to shut Hannah and Lowell’s noise out. I tried to think about Ernest. I’d only ever seen photos, one or two, of a serious, comb-haired, indoors sort of a guy, a bit of a geek, startled by the camera. They were yellowed and faded with age those photos, like they came from a different time, like they had nothing at all to do with me. I wanted to feel something about him dying, I knew I ought to, but really he was no more than biology to me. We had nothing in common, unless you’d count a total lack of interest in one another. His silence my whole life kind of spoke for itself. I grew up hearing it, as loud as any of Hannah’s yelling ever got to be.
I’d taken a couple of pills from my mother’s well-stocked bathroom cabinet and I lay there waiting for the day’s sharp edges to blur into sleep. The sheets felt rough beneath me like thin cotton over sandpaper and my pyjamas twisted tight around my legs like a trap. I closed my eyes and imagined random objects in my bedroom bursting obligingly into flames, something Thurston taught me, a tailor-made way to relax. It wouldn’t work for everyone, he said, but it sure as hell worked for me. Behind my eyelids, everything was torched and blasted with fire. My shoes smouldered, my alarm clock warped and melted, my bedding was ablaze. I felt like a superhero on a day off, like a plume of smoke, cloud-wrapped, buoyant. I couldn’t move but inside I was flying. The skin on my palms seethed and bubbled. I was a burning candle, I was a pool of hot wax and then I was gone.
Some days inside my head there is nothing but fire. Most nights I sleep deep inside its bright, fast blooms. I have longed for it in random places – the old baths near our flat on Grafton Road, the vacant Embassy Hotel on South Grand, that copse of larch and ash beyond Ernest’s garden, the painted house downtown where my mother went to therapy for a while and left me in the waiting room willing the fish to broil in their gravelly, weed-wrapped tank. My fingers itch constantly for the length and neck and strike of a match. My heart swells and soars at a column of smoke against the sky. I pine for the flame’s lick, the sharp scorch in my lungs, the same way an addict pines for the needle. Thurston said once that I had the sweet moment of surrender all tangled up with love, and maybe he was right, but that didn’t mean I knew the first thing about how to untangle it.
I tried to keep my fires small after we moved back here, small and secret. Hannah was watching me like a hawk, keen to ship me off to some correctional centre or other, now that she could do it on the good old National Health. I couldn’t let her see me. I needed to be cleverer than that. A wastepaper basket, some old clothes, dry leaves, a length of rope, everything has its own flame. Everything burns at its own pace, with its own particular smoke and smell. I made fires every day because I had nothing better to do; little heaps of dry matter assembled and lit before breakfast, after lunch, behind buildings, on wastelands, on walkways and under bridges. I was fast and precise. I could start one in seconds, get up and walk away, my mind a little emptier, my breathing easier. Nothing got damaged, not by the small fires. They were actually pretty useful in their way, a kind of tidying up, an imposing of order and neatness on things. They didn’t do any harm.
I was twelve, my first proper fire, and I was alone. I hid in a hollowed-out oak in a quiet dip in Griffith Park, dragging in gathere
d sticks and strips of bark like a worker ant. I was careful about building it. I took my time. I had a rolled-up old magazine of Hannah’s in my back pocket for starting it, hungry looking ladies with tight trousers and tight smiles. I had to twist the pages just so – too loose and they’d flare out before the wood could catch, too much and they wouldn’t burn at all. I’d watched Lowell do it often enough in the cramped, weed-choked yard of our apartment. Now it was my turn.
I only had one match. I don’t remember where I found it. I held it up and even I could see how small and pitiful it looked, how unlikely it was to start anything worth bragging about. I breathed in and ran the match across the gritted bottom of my shoe, felt the stroke of it, heard the little pucker of air when it caught. And then I lifted it, burning, into view. It was thrilling to me. It was the start of everything, right there in my hand.
I shielded the tiny flame, moved it slowly so its own breeze didn’t put it out, and then I touched it to the twisted paper. The smiling ladies writhed and blackened and the smoke rose in a rainbow of greys. When the fire leapt up I felt its heat, warped and dancing in front of me like liquid, like magic. I didn’t know a flame could burn so many shades. I’m saying every colour in the world was in that fire, and watching it burn was the biggest, boldest feeling. I’ve never felt it again like the first time, not quite like that.
I got out of there when I had to, when the heat and the smoke made it hard to see and harder to breathe. I stayed low and made sure there was nobody around. My hands on the ground were covered with dust and ash. They looked like statues’ hands. I moved away fast and then I stopped to watch the smoke from my fire rolling fat and dark as a storm cloud. At the top of the park, from the observatory, you can see way out over the endless fume-hung map of grid streets and thin trees and squat tower blocks and lit highways, as far as the horizon, further. My fire was a little insult to all that, something wild in plain view of the city. It felt like a door had swung open, like I’d been kept in an airless room all this time and finally I could breathe. I knew I should hurry, but it was like trying to run in a dream. Bright sparks and flakes of charred leaf floated down through the blue behind me, gentle as you like, and the flames licked and snapped like a dragon, biting clean through solid wood.
I couldn’t see the smoke on the subway but all the time I knew it was there. I looked up and there was a boy, pale and dark-haired and skinny, older than me, fifteen it turned out, and he was holding up a handwritten sign and looking at me like he wanted to make sure I saw it. It read, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? I went red hot and looked at my dust-covered shoes.
“Psst,” he said, and I looked up again and a new sign read, WAS IT WORTH IT? DID IT FEEL GOOD? and I nodded and looked straight at him and we smiled.
That was Thurston. That’s how we met. On the subway, eight stops from Griffith to home, he showed other people other signs and I watched him. He held up the signs and waited for them to notice, and the whole time he stayed looking at me. An old lady got WHERE DID YOU HIDE IT? IT WILL ALL WORK OUT FINE IN THE END. A shifty looking guy got LEAVE IT ALONE and YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE. A girl about the same age as Thurston, her hair tied up high on her head, earrings swinging, got BE A BETTER LIAR and OH. MY. GOD. Each time, they acted like he could see inside their heads and they coloured right up and couldn’t look right at him again.
I loved it. I’m telling you, nobody had made me smile like that my whole goddamn life. I got off at my stop because I had to but I didn’t want to leave and when I waved at the boy he winked at me and held up BOUND TO MEET AGAIN.
Back home, Hannah and Lowell were out, but they’d be back soon, crashing through the door and trampling on my quiet with their verdicts on the relentless heat, the price of everything, and the vital overall importance of their day. Much better, this peace, this alone time, this thinking about the boy on the subway, this picturing my fire. As it burned, I washed my hands and face, scrubbed the muck from under my nails, pulled off my clothes and hid them under the bed. The smell of it was still in my shirt, sweet and black and smoky. I put my face in the sleeve at the bend in my elbow, and I breathed.
I was hooked right then, on both of them, the boy and the fire. I don’t mind owning up to that.
In London, I’d have dreamt about Thurston if I could. I’d have traded him for fire, but even in my sleep I couldn’t find him. The next morning, the noise of the real world descended like a net and caught me in it. Somewhere a lorry was reversing, a car door slammed. I could hear Lowell making coffee, banging cupboard doors, and sweating out his hangover. I felt the weight of my own body like gravity, pinning me down in the wrong place, on this bed. I opened my eyes and everything was the same as the night before, unfamiliar, intact and unspoilt. No plain blue still-as-a-picture California sky but something lower and rolling and cold. No posters on the walls like in my old room, no piles of clothes or comic books, just unpacked boxes. No Thurston throwing stuff at my window, waiting on the corner so we could begin our day. No heaps of ash, no charred and twisted remains, just carpet and plaster and metal, and a father I’d never met and didn’t want to meet, dark on the horizon like a storm. I couldn’t have been more disappointed.
My mother has four main stories she likes to tell: the edited highlights of her modelling career (who said what, who touched her where), her disastrous marriage to Ernest (no redeeming features), her many visits to Europe (ditto – Paris is littered with dog shit apparently, Venice is a rip-off and Florence is a bore) and the time she spilt a bowl of soup at the American Ambassador’s house in Regent’s Park. She never talks about anything real. She never gives herself away. It’s like her life started at twenty-one, like nothing happened before that was worth mentioning.
“Maybe it didn’t,” Ernest said to me once. “Maybe things were awful,” and it made sense, I suppose, of the way she drinks and thinks of everything as a fight, and grabs hold of the day like it’s a sheer drop and if she doesn’t dig her nails right in, she’ll fall.
Back home, whenever we had people over, Hannah rolled out variations on her four stories while Lowell pretended to cook deli-bought meals from scratch, throwing his head back when he laughed, rattling pans and putting on a show. The moment the doorbell rang he was out on stage and she was prepping herself under the lights. I guess it made them both feel as if they were working. My job was to pour the drinks and play it like we were your dream family, like really the best of friends. We couldn’t keep it up for long. Four minutes was about the limit. If we strayed into five, one or the other of us got bored or cranky and had to leave the room. There was no trace of our usual cook-your-own pizza and stay-out-of-sight arrangement. They didn’t work their way through a bottle of vodka in old T-shirts if there were guests in the house. They hid the TV in a cupboard and acted like we spent our spare time holding hands and listening to recordings of T.S. Eliot reading ‘The Waste Land’.
I used to think it was a miracle that anyone believed them. But people believe what they see. And mostly they see whatever is put in front of them, if it’s in their interests to believe. Thurston told me that, and he was right. If someone gave you a fat stack of money and told you to spend it, you’d like to think the money was real. If they handed you a diamond and said it was worth as much as a house, you’d want it to be true, because you’d be getting something out of it.
The first and only time Thurston met Hannah and Lowell, he showed up dressed as a girl. More precisely, he showed up dressed as Hannah, wearing clothes he must have taken from her closet some time before, when I wasn’t looking.
Lowell answered the door.
“Your friend’s here,” he said to me.
“What friend?”
“Charlotte.”
I didn’t look up. “I don’t know anybody called Charlotte.”
“Well she’s here,” he said, “and she’s asking for you.”
This girl came into the room, all long legs and lipstick and fingernails. Beautiful, flawless, just Hannah’s type, the kind
of girl I avoided like the plague, who wouldn’t notice if she tripped over me in the street in her Manolo Blahniks.
“It’s Charlie,” she said, “remember?” Stretching out towards me, all grabby and polished, like some kind of sisterhood reunion. I looked down at her hands and I saw the little star tattoo at the base of the left thumb and it was only then that I knew it was Thurston.
“Oh God. Charlie!” I said. “So sorry.”
Charlie was bespoke, made-to-measure perfect for Hannah and Lowell to fall in love with, an Orange County girl, drowning in labels, with money in her veins and parents who did, “Oh, I don’t know, something in the movies.” She dropped names in a way that made the sweat break out on Lowell’s forehead, always the first name twice, to show how well she knew them.
“Leo, Leo DiCaprio’s got one of those,” she said, pointing to our crappy vintage-style blender. “Cate, Cate Blanchett would just love how you’ve done this wall.”
“She’s got style,” Hannah said, watching her own skirt stretched tight over Thurston’s narrow hips.
“Good manners,” Lowell said, doing the thoughtful movie-star clench with his jaw, already wondering whether she had a crush on him, already working out how to get in with her people.
It didn’t for a second occur to them that this was a piece of on-and-off homeless, skinny male white trash from the uglier side of town, graffiti maestro, street artist, performance poet and pickpocket, with a mild criminal record (trespass, jaywalking, vagrancy) and no sway whatsoever in the Hollywood Hills. Even if I had told them, right then I don’t think they would have believed it. Just the week before, Thurston had strung a huge banner from the top of the Ocean Palms building, hand-stitched in letters more than two metres tall, FROM UP HERE WE ARE ALL NOBODIES. That wouldn’t have meant a thing to Hannah and Lowell. There was nothing in that for them.
“Can I take your daughter out tonight?” Charlie asked, and they looked surprised as hell that someone so spectacular might know me, but they said yes, of course they said yes.
Fire Colour One Page 2