Fire Colour One

by Jenny Valentine

  Lowell and my mother clamped iron smiles to their faces and we got out, slamming the doors behind us. I turned my back on the house and looked out over the garden, across the fields, towards the woodland and the distant, shadowed hills. I breathed. Some species of tree are specially adapted to withstand and encourage fire. Some rely on it for their survival, to ensure their domination over other species, and to clear the soil and canopy for new growth. Trees look like their own shadows when they’re burning. Flames fan out and eat up a hillside, way quicker than you’d think.

  The front door swung open just as Hannah and Lowell reached it. The nurse must have run down as soon as she saw us.

  “Welcome,” she said. “Do come in.”

  Hannah and Lowell acted like they hadn’t seen her. They know how to treat staff, how to exploit a potential VIP situation with disdain and to their own advantage. They learnt that, at least, in the States, if nothing else. I caught up and followed them in, met the nurse’s eye, tried to say in a smile that I was sorry about them and that I wasn’t the same. I wasn’t sure if she got it.

  The square entrance hall had deep tall windows and a high-backed chair drawn up to the fireplace. The walls were washed grey, and on the dull stone floor a thin bright yellow rug marked the pathway to the staircase, like the sun’s pathway on the sea. I thought my shoes would leave marks on it, but they didn’t.

  Ernest might have had minutes to live but we still took our time about it. We had to check on the state of the art before we checked on him. First, Hannah wanted to show us the Joan Miró in the old kitchen, the Chagall lithographs and the Braque in the hall. She went all weak-kneed at the Picasso prints and the Modigliani in the dining room.

  “I had that valued ten years ago,” she said to Lowell behind her hand, whispering, “over four million.”

  Lowell put his hand on her arm and gave it an imagine-what-it’s-worth-now squeeze.

  They were like this couple I saw at a gallery once. She was wearing silver jeans, I remember, and the sound of his boots on the gallery floor were like gunshots, shouting look-at-me, look-at-me, look-at-me. They wanted to buy a painting. They didn’t even care which one. They just stood in front of the brightest and the loudest and said, “How much?”

  I thought of them while Hannah and Lowell grinned up at the Modigliani.

  “Tip of the iceberg,” she said, beaming at him like she’d swallowed a torch.

  However rotten their core, I have to admit Lowell and my mother make a handsome couple and a damn good entrance. I watched them getting into character on the way up the stairs, walking with their shoulders back and their stomachs sucked in, shutters down on their eyes and catwalk sneers on their faces. It was like Fashion Week had arrived. The mannequins, Thurston used to call them, the rare times they came up in conversation; mannequins one and two. As in, Thurston: Will mannequin one let you stay out that late? Me: She won’t even know it. Thurston: What does mannequin two do all day? Me: Mirror work mainly.

  “You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” Lowell told me once, and I had to stop myself from pouring petrol over his shoes and lighting it up right there and then.

  We let the nurse take us up but we could have found the room ourselves by following its sweet-sharp, metallic, medical stench to the first floor. It smelled pretty terrible in there. At the door, my mouth dried up and all the bones in my spine started singing. I’d have run away if I could, if it wasn’t already too late. Ernest was propped on a few extra pillows in his sparse, stone-coloured bedroom, kind of sitting up when we came in. I felt white hot when I looked at him. I was half-drowning in pins and needles, top to bottom, but I didn’t take my eyes off him, not once.

  Lowell shook his hand too hard, pumping it like a man trying to get water from a dried-up well. This is his audition handshake, two-handed, the one that goes with unnerving amounts of eye contact and exposed teeth. Somebody somewhere must have told him it was a good one and he has tried, once or twice, to teach it to me. Ernest yelped a little when it started up and then he held on tight and brought the thing to a stop, like a galloping horse. Somewhere in his head I swear he was Gary Cooper, or John Wayne, just for as long as that handshake. I thought his shoulder might dislocate. I thought his arm might snap clean off.

  “Hello, old chap,” Lowell said, the country house vibe already seeping into his language. “Great to meet you.”

  He looked so healthy next to Ernest it was almost an insult. Lowell’s teeth are toilet-bowl white. His eyebrows are plucked. He has shiny Ken-doll hair, not a strand out of place. He is tanned and well moisturised, still a catch. The carcass looks good, but I’m saying inside there is nothing but air. If you punctured Lowell Baxter with a pin he would shrivel to nothing, loud and aimless like a balloon.

  Ernest didn’t speak. I guess dying people don’t much go in for small talk. It’s not that they’re more honest; I just don’t think they have the time.

  My mother stood behind Lowell, tapping her foot, and when he stepped back, she moved in, smiling too hard, like something sweet had stuck her teeth together. She bent to brush her cheek against Ernest’s and her arms slid around his neck like snakes.

  “Ernest, darling,” she drawled, the words spooling from her mouth like cold syrup. “How are you feeling?”

  She didn’t need to ask. You could see how he was. There was nothing but sickness in that room, with its drawn curtains and watering eyes and thinning skin. Ernest looked about twice his age, like if you held him up to the light, you’d see straight through.

  Hannah tried to ditch her gloating expression but it stuck to her face like the wind had changed. “I hope you’re not in too much pain,” she purred, stroking the front of his vest like a cat fixing to climb the curtains. Jesus, she was so damn obvious.

  I stood in the doorway and let myself look back along the hall so I didn’t have to watch any more. Through a half-open door I saw a bright room with books piled on tables and curtains lifting in the breeze and a sofa in front of a cold fire. I’d have been happier in there – anywhere but here, probably, seeing all this. Next thing I knew, Hannah pulled me right into the room and pushed me towards him.

  “Here’s Iris,” she said, like I was a clause in their contract, the parcel she’d been paid to deliver.

  Ernest reached for my hand with his candle-wax fingers and I steeled myself and let him take it. His palm was damp and cold against my skin.

  “Hello,” I said, and my voice shook, my whole body hummed with the high-level strangeness of it all.

  Later, Ernest said his larynx felt like a wood chipper. Great branches of thought passed through it and came out as nothing but dust. Here I was, and his damn voice wouldn’t work. He smiled, he said, because that’s all he could do, and there wasn’t a word on earth good enough for him to use anyway.

  I was all set to feel angry or sad or bewildered, and I think I was all of those things, and more. When Ernest smiled, the creases on his face stacked like towels in a showroom, like pieces of a puzzle. How many times do you have to smile to carve such deep lines in your cheeks? Ten thousand? One million? If a person spends twenty years of their life asleep, how many weeks of it do they spend smiling? How much does that vary, from the saddest to the happiest life? How could this man have turned his back on me? These are the things I was thinking the first time I saw his face. I think I smiled back though, and I didn’t let go of his hand, not until I had to. Ernest was marooned on the white-pillowed island of his bed, with Hannah and Lowell swimming around him in ever-tightening circles like sharks, and he clung on to me like I was the one who could help him. I didn’t know how to feel about that. I told myself this was my father, my actual flesh and blood dad, and I just about rode that wave but I had no idea what was supposed to happen next.

  Spending time with Thurston, I’d got used to that lip of a cup, edge of a drop feeling, like it was a good thing. He was always pulling stunts, winding things up and seeing which way they went. Like when he sto
od at the Mall in Lakewood in a suit pinned thick, collar to ankle, with $10 bills (some of them real, most of them made with a scanner) shouting FREE MONEY over and over again like some garbage truck Wizard of Oz scarecrow. My job was to wait for the reaction, to watch and remember, no filming, no recording allowed, just as a witness. Other people filmed him. There were more than enough phones in the place for that. At first people flowed around where he stood, avoiding him like a rock in the river, and then somebody reached out. I remember the first hand, and then all of a sudden they were like bees to honey, like locusts, and I couldn’t see Thurston at all until they’d stripped his suit bare and he was left there, spun and dazed and smiling, clean as a picked field. Afterwards he said it wasn’t about the money, it was the moment, the story they got to tell. It was for the look on people’s faces when they said, “You’re kidding. That happened for real?”

  Sometimes the most exciting part was the waiting. At Ernest’s house that first day, I told myself I knew my way around the what-happens-now better than anyone else in that room. Thurston might not be here to help me but I could hear him anyway, telling me to breathe, and sit back, and not be afraid, and just let it come.

  The nurse shifted in the corner.

  “Who is that?” Hannah asked.

  Ernest didn’t stop looking at me.

  “Lisa,” he whispered in a voice like dry straw. “Or Dawn.”

  “It’s Dawn, Mr Jones,” she said.

  “And who is Dawn, please?” Hannah showed her teeth in place of a smile.

  “Dawn is the day,” Ernest mumbled.

  She smiled. “I’m one of the nurses. There are two of us looking after him. I do the dayshift and Lisa does the nights. Oh and Jane comes in to cook. She’s been cooking for Mr Jones for—”

  “How charming,” Hannah interrupted, her face pinched, her voice stretched tight like a twisted rag. She sighed, already bored, and looked out of the high windows at the cloud-washed, Turner-painting view. Lowell hovered with his hands at his sides, clenching his lantern jaw, rocking on his feet in that suit, waiting for her next instruction. Ernest closed his eyes. Whole continents must have shifted. Glaciers formed. The land must have pressed together into mountains before he opened them again, and squeezed my hand, and said, “I’d know you anywhere. Isn’t morphine the damndest thing?”

  “We’ll stay a couple of days,” Hannah said, because she reckoned that’s all Ernest had left. “Go and get your things from the car,” she told me. “Take the yellow room. Lowell, we’ll have the blue.”

  “Lowell?” said Ernest.

  Hannah and Lowell stopped moving. They stopped dead for less than a second, like a break in transmission, but I noticed it still. The nurse cleared her throat and half put her hand up to speak.

  “The blue room’s Lisa’s,” she said. “I’m in the yellow.”

  My mother looked her up and down. “You’re living here?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Dawn is the day,” I repeated. “And Lisa is the night.”

  “So we’ll take the green room. And Iris will have to go in the attic.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

  Lowell left quickly, ahead of her. I didn’t move, not yet. Ernest was still holding on to my hand.

  “Hannah,” he said.

  She stopped in the doorway and turned back towards him. She has great hair, my mother. It swings and bounces and falls, shining like dark lacquer, or an oil slick. She works hard at keeping it moving at all times. If she wrote a CV she’d have to add it to her list of skills.

  “Yes?”

  Everything Ernest was really thinking, he must have flattened and folded like a car in a crusher, and crammed into the quick look he gave her, like a library stored on the head of a pin. I must have blinked. Otherwise, I’m sure I’d have seen it. He’d have given himself away.

  “Thank you,” he said, a pearl of politeness after a lifetime of eating grit.

  His mouth sounded as dried-out as sea sponge, his eyelids looked heavy as lead.

  “Lowell,” he said, looking straight through me.

  “Do you want me to get him?” I said.

  Ernest smiled and shook his head. “Lowell and Hannah and Iris.”

  I looked at the nurse.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “he’s tired now. He’ll brighten up later.”

  He closed his eyes and for a while he seemed to think he was in the garden, flapping at insects and muttering about the lavender. He held on still to my hand and the nurse kept busy in the corner, folding things, counting pills, making notes on a chart. The way Ernest must have seen it, Hannah came storming through the long grass towards him in her heels, and the long grass became the floorboards of his room and he was in bed again, not outside, and she was glaring at us.

  “What are you still doing in here?” she said to me.

  “Nothing.” I let go of Ernest’s hand. I pulled a piece of thread from his dull green Camberwick bedspread and wound it tight round my finger until the end started turning from pink to purple. “Just leaving.”

  “So do it,” Hannah said, her hands on her hips, a teapot with no spout.

  “Is that a Vermeer?” I asked, pointing with my bound finger to a small painting in a deep gold frame of a girl in a red hat. The light on her face looked warm and real. Her mouth was open, like she was about to speak. “I love Vermeer.”

  “You do?” Ernest said, trying to sit up. “You know a bit about art?”

  Hannah said, “She can bore you another time about that.”

  “It’s lovely,” I said, and she looked hard at me as if to say, “It’s mine.”

  I unwound the thread from my finger and dropped it on the carpet.

  While the nurse hooked up another bag of fluids to Ernest’s drip, my mother bent to pull his sheets straight.

  “If there’s anything I can do for you,” she said, more business-like than kind, “just let me know.”

  Ernest let his eyes roll back in his head. He started to cough, a wet thundercloud that rumbled through his body and left him weak and sweating on the bed. He hacked away until the noise drove Hannah out, and she drove me from the room.

  “As if she had any bargaining power left,” he told me later. “As if your mother had anything any more that I wanted.”

  Hannah and Lowell marked out their territory like tomcats, and Ernest’s house soon stank of perfume and vodka and ashtray and under that something high like rotten meat. I think it was their livers. The two of them drank all day, which was nothing new. You could always hear where they were in a house by the clink of ice cubes in glasses. Hannah’s high heels left flinty marks on the floorboards and four-inch spike holes in the garden. She measured out her day in tight sealed boxes: two minutes for snapping through a magazine, two for a cigarette, two for looking in on Ernest, or whispering with Lowell, or barking at the nurses, or at me. She was killing time, waiting for the grim reaper to arrive, looking at her watch like he was late and she was paying him by the hour. She bounced from wall to wall, over and over, like a fly mapping a room.

  Lowell prowled the perimeters of things, noticing himself in every reflective surface. He passed the time picking up ornaments and looking underneath them, like a secret service agent checking for bugs. It struck me that the way he moved was precise and considered because the one person really properly watching him do anything was himself. Now and then he posed at a fireplace or a window and turned his face so that the light hit him just right – screen idol, male model, action man. I would never accuse my stepfather of being the sharpest tool in the box but he has a pretty good instinct for flattering lighting.

  Ernest made a big effort to be out of bed. The nurses helped him downstairs and wheeled him out into the sheltered courtyard, tethered to his oxygen, the ends of his nose and fingers slowly turning greyish blue. He sat with us, pale and sweating, swaddled in blankets, and looked out over the bright lawn while we were eating lunch. Hannah took in
his waxy, unshaven face and his laboured, bubbly breathing and dropped her fork into her salad in disgust, like she’d ever needed an excuse not to eat. She scowled behind her sunglasses and lit another cigarette.

  She’d already been to see Jane in the kitchen and handed over her list of sugar-free, low carb, low calorie, no gluten, no dairy, organic, Californian-style, fresh-only demands. Hannah will only smoke her way through the very best ingredients. Jane was overweight, with marbled arms and legs and sensible shoes and a chin that flowed straight into her neck. You could tell she was more suet than tofu. She scanned my mother’s recipes with her shiny raisin eyes.

  “You won’t get almond milk here,” she said.

  “So get it delivered.”

  Hannah was about a metre taller than Jane in her heels. They didn’t look like the same species.

  “He only eats soup.”

  “Well his guests don’t. And don’t screw up, or I’ll make sure he fires you.”

  At the lunch table, Ernest’s chin slumped low against his chest. The breeze whipped his hair about in little tufts like cotton candy. Jane and the nurses watched us from the kitchen window.

  Hannah looked at Lowell, “I don’t trust any of those women. Gold-diggers, I’m telling you.”

  “Well you would know,” I said, and she glared at me, and flicked ash into her lamb’s lettuce.

  “This is different.”

  “In what way?”

  Hannah looked over at Ernest. “We’re family.”

  I laughed. “Family? Since when?”

  “Since I said so, Iris,” she said, standing up before the rest of us had finished. “Since we came here to get what we deserve.”

  She went inside to get herself another drink. Lowell left the table too. That day he was on a pretty short leash. Ernest opened his eyes and winked at me. At least I think he did.