Fire Colour One

by Jenny Valentine

  He sat up in bed and looked out while he told me.

  “The crane driver sat in his cab,” he said, pointing, “and when the tree lifted, it came up head first and then hung just there, strangely upright, like it was planted in mid-air.”

  It cast a shadow over all the rooms they ran through, a great dark beast flying past the house. It blocked out the sun, the birds stopped singing and downstairs someone dropped a plate on the flagstone floor.

  The men dug a crater on the east side of the house, a great bowl of a scar, the turf cut open and pulled back over itself like so much skin. Ernest said it looked as if the moon had fallen right out of the sky and landed in their garden. Margot wanted more than anything to crouch at the bottom of that hole and look up at the sky. She saw herself out there in the cool, upturned earth, like buried treasure. She would open out, she said, with her spine pressed into the ground like a worm and the shadows of birds gliding across her face.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said his mum, one hand resting on the back of Margot’s neck.

  “Of course it was too late,” Ernest said. “She already had.”

  Thurston planted one hundred trees in unexpected places the spring before last. He’d grown all these saplings from scratch, yogurt pots and buckets filled with the things and we went around putting them outside buildings, in cracks in the sidewalk, in car parks and alleys and gas stations. We made a map so we could visit them all and water them. He wanted to start a forest in the middle of LA. Most of them got pulled up or trampled in the first week. Then he got this group of secret gardeners together, kids mostly, who snuck out in the middle of the night to dig up public spaces and plant vegetables. That whole spring, instead of paint and glue, his hands were covered in soil, but nothing lasted. He didn’t get a full-grown tree like this one. He had to start with nothing, and nothing got left where it was, to grow.

  Margot and Ernest weren’t allowed to get their hands dirty, not that day. They sprawled across the nursery floor like late bees, dying of boredom. The tree was lying slain in the garden and the men had stopped for lunch. In a fit of caution, their mum had locked the doors. Nobody was allowed outside until the thing was staked and planted. She didn’t trust the men to know what they were doing. She didn’t trust it not to roll or break or fall. Ernest’s dad called her a catastrophist. He said Margot would get cabin fever, but not Ernest of course, her houseplant child, her rare orchid.

  Ernest was trying to make the perfect spit bubble. Margot said it was the worst birthday ever. They lay on their backs, staring at a crack in the ceiling until their vision blurred and the crack swam about and disappeared.

  Margot said, “I want to bury something. Let’s hide treasure under the tree for someone to dig up in five hundred years. What have we got that’s good enough?”

  They packed everything neatly into a black metal box, locked it and shared out the keys: one left in the lock, to be helpful, and one above the picture rail in the nursery. Margot climbed on top of the toy cupboard to put it there. Ernest still remembered the things they’d buried like it was yesterday. While he was telling me, he looked down at his lap as if they were spread out on the bed in front of him, as if he could see them all. A pocket mirror, the front page of the newspaper, Margot’s silver christening cup. Ernest’s wounded toy soldiers. A photo of both of them together. A feather, an old horse medicine bottle with Ernest’s baby tooth in it, and some of Margot’s hair, and a drop of each of their blood. Margot cut his thumb with her whittling knife and said, “Who knows what they’ll be able to tell about us in the future from these samples? They might make new ones of us altogether. We’ll wake up in a lab in a thousand years and get to live our lives again.”

  Ernest wanted to know if he’d remember his first life, this one, when they buried the stuff.

  “Probably,” Margot said. “But mostly we’ll remember the five hundred years of waiting under that tree.”

  Ernest said, “I didn’t want to do that.” He said he started to snivel, but Margot told him to be brave, in the interests of future science.

  Work had started up again. The tree was airborne, swinging into position.

  It was her idea, she said, so it should be her job to bury it.

  Ernest watched from the window while Margot skipped down the back stairs, took the spare key from the hook in the kitchen and was gone.

  “By the time anyone else saw her,” he said, “it was almost too late.”

  The crane screamed in its efforts to stop the tree from crashing down on top of her. There was a great screeching of brakes and a grinding of metal on metal and then the shouts of the men got louder. Ernest said his mum ran out of the house, shrieking and tearing at her hair, white as a sheet. She looked seasick, everyone did. Only Margot looked overjoyed and defiant, beaming, her arms and legs stuck with mud as she climbed out of the crater, the tree’s roots swaying like snakes in the air less than six feet above her head. Her dad slapped her face, and Ernest burst into tears, but Margot didn’t stop smiling.

  “Why didn’t you just throw the box in?” he asked her later through her bedroom door. Margot had been sent to bed without supper. She was officially in disgrace. He’d have been in trouble just for talking to her.

  “Where’s the fun in that?” she said. “I had to lie down in there, the way I pictured it, or the box would have seen what I never got to see.”

  “A tree, coming to crush you to death?”

  “Exactly,” hissed Margot. “It was terrifying. It was brilliant.”

  “But it was so dangerous,” he said. “You could’ve been killed.”

  “Haven’t you worked it out yet?” Margot asked him.

  “What?”

  “Life’s big secret. If a thing’s not dangerous, it’s hardly worth doing.”

  “That can’t be true,” he said.

  “Oh, but it is.”

  “Mother is going to kill you,” he told her.

  She was tired of the conversation. He could hear it in her voice. “Don’t be silly, Ernest. That’s precisely the last thing she’s ever going to do. Mother is all about keeping us alive, at the expense of anyone having any actual fun.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Do you remember the last time we were really high up on the ridge in the wind and Mother panicked and told us all not to look down? Well, she was wrong. I looked down and the view was unbelievable.”

  Ernest looked at me and smiled.

  “She said, ‘What’s the point of being up there if you’re not going to look down? What’s the point of doing anything at all?’”

  Hannah watched Ernest and me pretty closely. She didn’t much like us spending time together, not without her there. Guaranteed, after less than five minutes her footsteps would echo up the stairs or she’d call my name from somewhere else in the house. I wasn’t used to it, my mother minding where I was. It made me feel uncomfortable.

  “She’s anxious about her inheritance,” I said to Ernest. “You know she was listening outside the door the other night.”

  “Of course she was,” he said. “She wouldn’t be Hannah if she wasn’t.”

  Fluid from his lungs was draining into a bag. It was the colour of mustard water, cloudy and adrift like a lava lamp. Without that bag, he’d have drowned.

  “She’ll be furious if you leave me everything.”

  “I know,” he said. “She thinks it’s a terrible idea.”

  “So give it to her,” I told him. “I don’t need it.”

  He smiled. “I’m waiting for her to persuade me.”

  “Really?” I said. “Good.”

  “She doesn’t like being upstaged by her daughter.”

  “I’m not upstaging anyone,” I said.

  “Yes, you are,” he said and his throat sounded thick and hoarse. “And what’s worse is, you’re not even trying.”

  “I don’t want to try.”

  “Even more infuriating. Your mother is used to being the centre of a
ttention.”

  “Lowell’s worse,” I said, and he looked unconvinced. “I mean it. Seriously.”

  I told him that Lowell spent even more time in front of a mirror than Hannah did. He was the first to wilt if nobody was looking at him, like a plant in a drought. He lasted two minutes and twenty-eight seconds in a room alone before he picked up the phone and called somebody so he could talk about himself. I knew that for a fact because I’d timed him. Two minutes twenty-eight was his personal best.

  Ernest’s laugh was like stones landing in a puddle. “She met her match then.”

  “I don’t know about that.” I’d always wondered what there was for her to like about Lowell, once she’d got used to his handsome, predictable face.

  He said, “Have you ever met her family?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t think there was any,” I said. “I figured she was born out of an egg.”

  “They were poor,” he said. “I know that much. I worked that much out for myself.”

  “Well she loves money well enough.”

  “It saved her,” he said, and I told him, “Depends which way you look at it.”

  He said, “She never liked how you and I got on.”

  “Us?” I said. “You and me? Did we?”

  “Like a house on fire,” he said, and I tried not to blush, but felt my cheeks flaming up anyway.

  “I don’t remember,” I told him.

  “But I do,” Ernest said.

  He closed his eyes while the nurse shut off the tube in his side and covered it with a clean dressing. He knew what Hannah was up to, with the inventory and everything. I showed him my notebook. I hadn’t paid much attention to the dining-room cabinets, but I had walked through the rooms making a list of all the art. My mother was right about one thing. Ernest’s collection was incredible.

  I told him. I said he must be proud of the beautiful things he’d filled his house with, centuries of them, old masters and impressionists and modernists silently preening on his walls. I said I wished Thurston could be here. He’d have been so happy to get that close without an alarm sounding, without three security guards removing him from the building. He’d tried to touch the Mona Lisa when he was a kid and it came to LA. He hardly moved before they stopped him, grown men with static radios and steel-cap shoes.

  “It was a thought-crime,” he said. “And the second time I tried, I was out. My feet didn’t touch the ground.”

  “Do you have a favourite?” Ernest asked me, but I didn’t. How was I supposed to compare them? It wasn’t possible.

  “But look at this,” I showed him my notebook. “We’re cataloguing you. I think Hannah’s getting ready for the biggest yard sale of all time.”

  He leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers.

  “She’s done that before,” he said. “She knows what’s here. She’s had everything valued already.”

  “When?”

  “Years ago. Your mother likes to be in control of things.”

  “No shit,” I told him. “I’ve met her too you know.”

  He laughed. “And she wants to control what we talk about.”

  He shifted in his bed. I got up and sorted out his pillows. “Better,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

  Ernest said she was afraid of the things he knew, things she wouldn’t want him to tell me.

  “Like what?”

  “My story,” he said. “My version of the truth.”

  “So why would she bring me,” I said, “if she had stuff to hide?”

  “Money,” he said. “The prize. Don’t underestimate its hold over her. Your mother will stop at nothing to get it.”

  “You think?” I said, smiling.

  “And she didn’t expect me to last this long. I don’t think she planned for us to meet at all.”

  “True,” I said. “She kind of hoped you’d be dead when we got here.”

  “Your mother never liked to wait for things.”

  “So when are you going to tell me your version?” I said. “You’re going to, right? You will?”

  We could hear Hannah’s voice on the stairs, getting louder. “Iris? Iris! Where are you?”

  “Three and a half minutes,” I said. “She’s getting quicker.”

  “You’ll know everything,” he said. “As soon as we get the chance.”

  “Fire Colour One,” I said. “Tell me about that.”

  “Oh God, not now,” he told me. “Not a word. Not in front of her.”

  My mother pushed into the room, loud and breathless, looking from me to him and back again like she’d be able to tell by our faces how much had been said.

  “Jane needs you in the kitchen,” she said. “That woman hasn’t the first idea how to make a California roll.”

  “I’m coming,” I said, staying right where I was. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  “No,” she said, gripping on to the door with both hands, white-knuckled with stress and boredom and the slow passing of time. “You’ll go now.”

  She was showing signs of going for too long without a copy of Vogue or an eyebrow wax. The polish on her nails was beginning to chip. Her hair looked kind of greasy. It was only a matter of time before she’d have to go back to the city.

  “An egg you say?” Ernest said, and he winked at me and sank back into his pillows. I could see he was in pain and it occurred to me that he hadn’t taken his morphine, not that I noticed, not while he was with me.

  A vein in Hannah’s temple was pulsing. Her eyes burnt laser holes into my sweatshirt, willing me to leave. I got up slowly, to annoy her more than anything.

  “See you later,” I said.

  Ernest waved and Hannah and I stared each other out until she shut the door on me, shut herself in the room with him, and turned the key in the door. It occurred to me she could step up and play the grim reaper herself if she just had five minutes with him on her own. It was a terrible thing to think about my own mother, but it had the ring of truth about it all the same.

  From where I was standing at the top of the stairs, I caught the faint, acid scent of burnt paper. It was there and then it was gone. I wondered if it was one of my little fires, still burning; or my own brain playing tricks on me.

  I stayed where I was. I had this dumb idea about trying to protect him. If anything happened I could beat the door down or go and get Dawn. And I was curious too. I wanted to listen to what they were saying. I wondered what it was like between the two of them now, my mother and my dad.

  So I deserved to hear what I did. Standing on the wrong side of that locked door in the quiet, I suddenly realised Hannah was ramping up the competition, playing me to win. And like the cage-fighter she was underneath that glossy surface, she didn’t care how low down she went to do it.

  My mother was pacing Ernest’s room in her high heels, with her loping walk. Her shoes were loud as hammers on the wooden boards. I pictured her reading charts or dialling up the morphine dosage or getting ready to switch something vital off or up or around. When she finally sat down, I heard the sigh and shush of her skirt riding up, her legs crossing and uncrossing, Hannah-style, and I heard my own heartbeat, pulsing away in the quiet of the hall. I’ll bet she ran her hand up and down her arm and gave him her best look too.

  She did something like that, because Ernest laughed, just a little. “We’re way past that, Hannah,” he said. “Just tell me what you want.”

  “We need to talk about Iris,” she said.

  Ernest’s breath sounded like that last little drop of soda being pulled through a straw. “What is there to say?”

  “She seems pleased to see you.”

  “I think we’re doing OK.”

  “Don’t be fooled,” she told him, and every cell of my body went on high alert.

  “By what? By Iris?”

  “I don’t think you can trust her.”

  Ernest waited. I counted to three before he said, “What is this, Hannah?”

  “She’s
dangerous,” my mother said. “She could hurt you.”

  I went cold all over. I wanted to bang on the door and have my say, but I didn’t even move. I just stood there.

  “Believe me,” Ernest told her. “Nothing is getting through this morphine wall.”

  “You don’t understand,” Hannah said. “Iris isn’t right.”

  I pressed my head against the wall and tried to breath right.

  “How?” said Ernest. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about arson,” she whispered, like saying it any louder could make it happen.

  She wasn’t lying. I couldn’t exactly deny it.

  “Arson?”

  “You can’t let Iris near matches or anything like that,” Hannah said.

  “You’re serious?”

  “She’ll burn the place down as soon as look at you.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?” Ernest said.

  “I’m worried about you with her here. I can’t sleep or even think straight I’m so worried about your safety.”

  “My safety’s not really an issue,” he said. “If I die tomorrow it’s only a few days ahead of schedule.”

  “And the paintings?” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. “That’s more like it. The paintings. They’re insured, Hannah.”

  “They’re irreplaceable,” she said. “You know that.”

  “And?”

  “And I think we should move them now.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. An auction house, proper storage. Somewhere else.”

  Ernest sighed. I heard him. His voice was small and flat and defeated. “I don’t think we need to do that.”

  “If Iris starts one of her fires,” Hannah told him, “we won’t get you out of here quick enough. You’ll go off like a bomb with all this oxygen in the room.”

  I had this idea that my mother was going to torch the place and then blame it on me. It rushed through me like a blast of cold air.

  “Not such a bad way to go,” he told her.

  “She set fire to my bedroom,” Hannah said. “And our apartment block. She set fire to her school, for God’s sake. She’s out of control. She won’t stop.”