Fire Colour One

by Jenny Valentine

  “Of course,” he told me, “that wasn’t his name then. When I knew him, his name was William Lowe.”

  “That’s who you searched for?”

  “It’s why I didn’t find you.”

  Ernest couldn’t stand Lowell, from the first moment. He said he oozed into the house like floodwater, coating everything in the same dark matter, cutting off its air supply. Hannah said he was just jealous.

  “He’s harmless,” my mother told him. “It’s me you should be worried about.”

  Most mornings, while Hannah slept, Ernest went to work in his studio, a converted grain store behind the house. It was invisible, just like he was. I’ve been in it a hundred times now. You’d never guess it was there, if you didn’t know. From the outside it’s just a wind-ravaged, tumbledown outbuilding. Inside, you step down into a white, paint-splattered cube with enough glass in its ramshackle roof to flood the place with natural light. My mother didn’t set foot in there, not once. She didn’t notice when he went to meet dealers in London or Paris or Amsterdam or New York. She never wondered where Ernest was when he was gone. She wasn’t interested in what he was doing or when he might be coming back. She just enjoyed the time without him.

  He said, “For our first anniversary I bought her a Chagall painting.”

  Thurston told me a story about Marc Chagall. He asked a group of children looking at one of his stained-glass pieces in the cathedral at Reims, “Do you understand Chagall?” and they said, “Yes, we do.”

  “That’s strange,” the artist told them, “because I don’t understand him at all.”

  “Which one?” I asked Ernest. “Is it The Promenade? I think I’ve seen it downstairs.”

  Green prism hills and houses, a pastel pink church, a red crumpled picnic blanket and a man, trapping a bird with one hand, and holding on to his weightless, floating lover with the other. Ernest said it was meant to be a celebration of Chagall’s blissful marriage to Bella Rosenfeld. But when Ernest saw it, he could only think the man was anchoring her there to stop her from getting away.

  My mother left him seven times. Sometimes he only knew where she was because of the credit card bills – restaurants in Nice and Copenhagen, spas in Morzine and Milan, department stores in London and New York. It got a little easier when she left, each time. He hardly survived the first. The second and third, he couldn’t eat, or think, or breathe. But he could work. When Hannah was away, he said that was all he did.

  “Dealing art?” I asked.

  “I made money,” he nodded, “and I stored it like a dam against the possibility of her leaving me for good. She always came back to the money, like an ant to sugar.”

  They lived like that for more than five years. And then one morning Hannah came into the kitchen and stood across from him at the table. Ernest was just getting up. She was on her way to bed. She turned to look out at the garden and he remembered the first time she had stood there, and all the fine things he had hoped for them, at the beginning.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said, and with a sharp laugh added, “God knows how.”

  Ernest put his cup down, got up and walked to where she was standing. He put his arms around her and Hannah burst into tears.

  “She cried?” I said. “My mother cried?” I’d never seen her do that.

  She cried while he put her to bed. She cried while he told her friends it was over now, and time to go home. She cried while he cooked and cleaned, while he painted and repainted the nursery. She cried because the party was over, because he’d trapped her, and wouldn’t let her drink. She cried because she felt like a whale, and couldn’t sleep, and had to pee every five minutes. Ernest put up with her whining and wallowing because finally it wasn’t all for nothing. He put up with it for their coming child, for me, I suppose, because at last, he said, he was dealing with something that was perfectly real.

  Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio is the mathematical principle of beauty, 1:1.62. Leonardo da Vinci called it the divine proportion, like God had a tape measure or something. A perfect face is 1.62 times longer than it is wide. A body should be 1.62 times longer from the belly button to the feet than from the same spot to the top of the head. A nose ought to be 1.62 times narrower, at its widest point, than a mouth. It’s simple. Everything in art and architecture and nature obeys the same rule. If a thing doesn’t measure up, it’s not beautiful and that isn’t a matter of opinion, it is a mathematical fact. Thurston told me I should always remember that Mr Fibonacci came up with his golden ratio, his perfect number in nature, while he was watching rabbits screwing. He said it was the best reason he knew to be less judgemental about how other people spent their time.

  According to Fibonacci, I’m not beautiful. No big surprise. None of my numbers are right, and that’s fine by me. But according to Ernest, I was better than da Vinci’s The Last Supper, or Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, or Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, or George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières or Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs, all flawless examples of the divine proportion in action. Bullshit, obviously, the final ramblings of a fond and dying man, but Ernest persisted.

  He said, “You were the first time I had ever, in my life, preferred real life to art.”

  I was born three weeks early, by Caesarean section, and I don’t think my mother will ever forgive me for those scars. Afterwards, she slept and Ernest stayed up, watching me in my plastic, fish-tank crib. There were wires attached to my chest. He said I jerked and shuddered in my sleep, as if all of my dreams were about falling, and my hands opened and closed like tiny stars. He said I was no bigger than a bird.

  We were in the hospital for a week. The midwives talked only to Hannah, as if Ernest was just there to carry the bags, but he listened because he knew it would be him taking care of me. He knew Hannah wasn’t interested, not really. She might try, but something as demanding as a child would fail to hold her interest for long.

  The first time she handed me to Ernest she said, “Sorry it’s not a boy. I imagine you’d have preferred that.”

  It was a warm, dry summer. Ernest fed and bathed and dressed me. He read in the garden and I kicked at my blankets in the shade of the old sycamore tree. He sang me to sleep, all the songs and rhymes he remembered from his own childhood. He stopped work. When I was born, Ernest lost interest in money.

  He said, “Your mother found that very hard to comprehend.”

  For nearly four years, he took care of me while she took up her life where she’d left off. The house filled with people again, and Hannah’s trips away grew longer and closer together. Ernest stayed behind. He says he was with me when I saw my first moon, my first horse, my first bird’s egg and my first puddle. Ernest was with me, not Hannah. It was him I went to if I fell and hurt my knees. It was him I looked for with a fever or a question or a gift.

  I wished more than anything that I could remember it. I said so, and Ernest looked sadder than I’d ever seen him, and nodded.

  “So do I,” he said. “So do I.”

  The day after Hannah’s thirtieth birthday, the weekend crowd had thinned and straggled home, but Lowell’s car squatted low on the drive, coiled and mean-looking, like something about to pounce. Hannah came round the side of the house. She hadn’t meant to bump into Ernest. He said he could tell by the look on her face.

  He asked her where she was going.

  “I’m leaving you,” she said. “I’m not coming back.”

  I was in the back of Lowell’s car. Ernest could see me. I was playing with my bear. I must have been four.

  “I’ve tried,” she said, “because you’re so dependable and so rich. And you’re a good babysitter, Ernest, you always have been. But I can’t do it any more. I can’t stand you.”

  “William appeared to have money back then,” he told me, and I had to remember who he was talking about, remember that William was Lowell. “Hannah must have thought it would last longer than it did.”

  He said she would never have left him if she’d kn
own that everything was on credit, all borrowed against Lowell’s ambition, the power of his positive thinking and astronomical self-belief.

  “How do you know all that?” I said.

  “I had him investigated. William Lowe. Bankrupt, defaulted, then gone. He vanished, owing thousands. I always thought your mother would come back to me when she found that out.”

  “And you’d have let her?”

  “I’d have done anything, Iris, to see you.”

  “You can’t just take our daughter,” he told her. “It’s illegal. I can stop you from doing that.”

  Hannah looked like she almost felt sorry for him and then the steel shutters came down behind her eyes.

  “Just watch me,” she said.

  Whenever I think about a fire, I trace it back to its very beginning, when it’s still nothing, when it hasn’t even happened yet. An un-struck match, an unwanted cigarette end, each humble thing on the edge of greatness, each thing giddy with potential. I think about fires in forests and cities and hillsides. I visited the monument to the Great Fire of London when we flew back, tall and straight as a candle, its height the exact distance it stands from the spark that started the fire. I climbed the 311 steps to the viewing platform. I watched a film of the same view, a time-lapse video of the city, where the lights flicker on and off like blown embers and the cranes wave like insects’ legs at the passing sky.

  I thought about the tiny seed of hatred Hannah planted in me the first time she told me about my real father, the little sparks of rage she fanned when she said he didn’t want me, wasn’t interested, hadn’t cared.

  And I’d been thinking the same way about Thurston, trying to isolate the moment things started falling apart, the misplaced card that caused all the other cards to fall. I couldn’t help what my mother had done, but Thurston was my fault. I’m as certain as I could be of that.

  Thurston made something for me. That’s all he did. He asked me to meet him and he said I should bring a candle.

  “But no petrol,” he said. “This isn’t bonfire night.”

  “Well, what is it then?”

  “It’s a gift,” he said. “You’ve got to see it. It’s all for you.”

  The address he gave me was downtown, near the church on Hill Street that looks like a club. Thurston wasn’t there, but at the corner I could see the flickering lights of other candles spread out on the sidewalk, so I went that way. There were a few people there, come out of the church mostly, I could tell from the loud slogans on their T-shirts, SO LOVED and GET YOUR BRAVE ON. I could tell from their too-good-to-be-true smiles. It was a shrine to someone. I kept walking, and when I got right up to the middle of it, I saw it was a shrine to me. Thurston had tied flowers to the railings and left notes and pictures as well as candles. I could see almost all of them were his, more than ten photos and drawings of me, different sizes, some covered with plastic, some faded and softened already by the heat of the sun and the damp, humid nights. It must have been there for a few days. People had started to add their own best wishes and souvenirs. I watched someone leave a single rose. I saw a woman and her daughter stop to look, and frown at each other with their hands on their hearts, and move on. Somebody lit my candle and I put it on the ground with all the others. I read a few of the messages, SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME, AND FORBID THEM NOT. LIGHT A FIRE IN HEAVEN IRIS B. GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN XXX. He’d drawn my eye too, right there on the tarmac – the sharp black pupil, the clean white ball, the swirling bright circle of colour.

  “Shit,” I said, under my breath, and I was thinking that this pretend, dead Iris had more friends than me. I was thinking that if I really died, nobody would leave notes like that, or flowers. There would be no drawings or photos or soft toys. I was almost jealous of her. It made me more sad than anything else. It was a lousy present.

  I stood up and looked around for Thurston because he’d be there somewhere on the edge of it, enjoying himself, watching the thing he’d made become more than the sum of its parts. I should have kept my head down because that’s when someone recognised me. A girl about my age with tight, pulled-back hair and wide black eyes, dilated like hollows, pointed at me and her mouth kind of fell open and I suddenly knew this was what Thurston had been hoping for all along. I was the girl who showed up at her own shrine. I was Lazarus. Somebody reached out and touched me. Someone else took my picture. The news passed between them like a current, like electricity. They didn’t take their eyes off me and they talked to one another like I couldn’t hear them, like I wasn’t really there. “Is that her?” “Did she say something?” “Does she have a message?” “What’s going on?”

  One of them made the sign of the cross. Some guy dropped to his knees right there in front of me.

  “It’s not real,” I said. “It’s a joke. It’s just a bad joke,” and I tried to back away, but they were behind me too, stopping me, and there were more of them than before. I was stuck. I was surrounded.

  I felt Thurston before I saw him. He came up behind me, flipped something over my head and walked me out of there and out of sight, double-quick. They shouted at us. A few of them followed. We hid in a doorway down the block.

  The hood was still over my head and Thurston shielded me from the street, his chest pressed up against my back. I was on the very edge of something, right there in that doorway, I could see it was about to happen, but instead I just got angry, because angry was way easier to do. I rammed my elbow hard into his ribs.

  “What the hell was that for?” he said, stepping back fast. It shocked him, my fury. I don’t think he’d seen it before.

  “Screw you,” I said.

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “No, I hated it.”

  “People have been paying their respects for days,” he said.

  “That’s your gift to me, is it?” I asked him.

  He said I was the miracle those people could take home and give thanks for before supper. He said, “You are their proof of the existence of God.”

  “Are you mocking me?” I said. “Don’t do that, Thurston. Don’t you do that.”

  “Don’t you get it, Iris? I thought you’d get it.”

  He was right. I did. It was classic Thurston and I should have rolled with it and played along. But for some reason I’d decided to fight him, and even though half of me wanted to, I couldn’t seem to back down.

  “You think people don’t see you,” he said. “You think you’re forgettable. But those people saw you. They won’t forget.”

  “I don’t want people to see me,” I said. “Not like that.”

  “Sure you do. You’re always saying stuff about it.”

  “Don’t make me the butt of one of your jokes ever again,” I told him. “Not without asking.”

  “Iris,” he said. “What is this?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Aren’t we best friends?” he said. “Better than that?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I don’t know what we are.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  I shrugged.

  “What do you want from me, Thurston?” I said. “Do you want me to be grateful?”

  He shook his head. “How come you can’t see how much you’re loved?”

  I couldn’t look at him. I thought to myself, when someone puts you high up like that, in the end it’s just further to fall.

  “Just leave me alone,” I said.

  “IRIS,” Thurston said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t think we should see each other for a while,” I said, and I’ve no idea why. I didn’t mean it. I guess I was trying to break something before it got broken, which is stupid, and for what it’s worth I’ve been paying for it ever since.

  “Are you serious?” Thurston said.

  “Yes, I’m serious,” I lied. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I’m SORRY,” he said. “I told you I’m sorry.”

  “Not good enough,” I said.
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  “If you break this,” he said. “I swear to God, I’ll—”

  “You’ll what, Thurston? You’ll fucking what?”

  And because I was angry with him, I walked away before he could tell me.

  I shouldn’t have said what I said. I should have laughed, and taken his hand and gone with him to the beach or the hills or wherever he asked me to go. But those were the last words I said to Thurston. It was the last time I saw him before we left.

  That week I looked for him in all the usual places but he wasn’t there. Not by the bread shop on Monday, not in Griffith Park on Tuesday, or at my apartment block on Wednesday and Thursday, or outside school on Friday morning with a plan, like always. He stayed away because I told him to but really it was the last thing I wanted.

  Friday afternoon in class, I was going crazy. I guess I’d had enough. I stole a key to one of the upstairs store cupboards. I walked through the halls, quiet and empty apart from my footsteps because everyone was in class. The store cupboard was just a room, shelved from floor to ceiling, quiet and dark and dusty, stacked with textbooks and art paper and old costumes and equipment. The door was heavy and it swung shut quick behind me and I should have checked that I could open it again but I didn’t. I was in too much of a hurry. I didn’t even look for the light switch. I just leaned against the wall in the dark.

  The matchbook was in my pocket, tight against my hip. Flat, blue-black, glossy, it fitted neatly in the palm of my hand. The matches were planted in two tight rows, one behind the other, lined up together underneath the cover, white with black tips. Lowell had left it in his coat. It had someone’s phone number scrawled on it, someone’s lipstick mark, not Hannah’s. One match was torn off. A scar ran across the base where it had been struck. There were thirteen left.

  I lit one and put it to the corners of some old posters stuck up behind me on the wall. I dropped one into a nest of old papers. I tore the pages out of some books on a shelf top, crumpled them in my fists and set them alight as well. Everything was dried out and happy to burn. The only light in the room came from the flames.