When they swung the car out of Meeting House Lane they saw the road block and fire-fighters standing on the other side of the temporary fencing, recognised it from when it was erected on the roadside for when the carnival parade came through the Lowtown Bull Ring. She was shocked at the man standing half in uniform with his arm resting on the top of a police car, his face blackened, like someone made up for a film. The smell was everywhere here. They delivered a last crate of lemonade from the car boot and the fire-fighter grinned through his blackened face as they hoisted the cans over the low fence. She looked at Tyrone for any trace of jealousy and he did look at her and smile but she couldn’t work out what the look meant and couldn’t decide whether she wanted him jealous or not. Perhaps better not, she thought. She wondered how long the burnt smell would take to leave or if it ever would.
They’d said no casualties but she knew they couldn’t be sure. The place was vast, so was the fire, and it would burn for days, maybe weeks they said, but the blaze was under control, the phrase they kept repeating on the radio and TV, so strange to see her own street there on the television screen, all the drama of breaking news. Well, it was broken now. They said no casualties, but there were people living in there, she was certain, she knew it, that tent under the old bridge for one thing, all the drink bottles and rags, and that sense of being watched sometimes, that there were eyes on you in all that space. They meant none of the officials, the fire-fighters and so on. They’d evacuated some flats, some of the houses round and about. They meant those people, but there were others she was sure that no one would account for, and there were people who refused to be evacuated, of course there were, always was. They’d put camp beds in the hall of her old junior school.
Through the Bull Ring there was a sudden shower of ash, soft white flakes fell onto the windscreen and Tyrone put the wipers on with some water and turned it all into a grey, silty wash that meant he had to put his head through the open window in order to see to drive.
There were people out on the hillsides at Cowton, leaning over the walkways and balconies. The sounds of the helicopters now, from the fire brigade, and one that was filming for the TV news. Where they stopped they were above the high-rises, right on the valley-ridge, on the road that ran back down into Black Park. They were above the smoke even, which twisted in the sky as a giant dark plume, the sun coming through it now, and a strange light everywhere.
They spread the picnic blanket out a little way from the car on the sheep-bitten grass. From this distance there were no people and it struck her that this was Greenfield’s view, that from the painting, that she had maybe found it at last when she wasn’t looking, the lines of the rivers in the valley below, before they entered the smoke, the castle hidden just round the hillside, like the third panel of a triptych, she thought, after the last fire. They’d got the camera with them. Tyrone looked at his phone to see if a picture he’d sent had got on the news.
‘We should’ve taken that fireman,’ he said, ‘people love that stuff. I reckon he’d blacked his face up on purpose.’
So just the smallest bit of jealousy then, the best sort, she felt, and she squeezed his arm.
It was warm, not just from the fire, but from the sun cutting through the billowing smoke, strange colours at its edge, mauve and purple, chemical smoke.
‘But how do they know it’s safe? No one remembers what was left in there,’ said a voice on the radio this morning after various reassurances about safety and the size of the exclusion cordon.
She phoned her mum to check she was OK. They ate their pastries. There were birds floating on the air that came from the valley. She waited for one to swoop on some unsuspecting prey but they stayed high up and almost out of sight. Tyrone leaned back, one arm around her waist, his other hand holding the newspaper folded open at a picture of Liam with his shirt off on the pitch at full-time just as he disappeared into the crowd. There were a crowd of bodies on his body, a crowd of bodies all around him. They looked like smoke, all of them, the grey swirls on his flesh and the way the people moved towards him, to swallow him, like the way the smoke moved now and swallowed the hillside graves and half of Burnt Village and then drifted over the hill into the rest of England. When they opened the roads she would have to go and clean her mum’s plaque. She wondered if the roses would bloom with the colours of the smoke this year, or whether that took ages to happen, generations, evolution, thought of creatures with blackened bodies that lived among soot and ash, and the people in the bottom of the valley in the second painting.
The road was narrow here, a farmer’s track really. It ran over the hill and the shape of it, a sudden incline like a breaking wave, made her wonder what was on the other side, even though she knew full well. More roads, more hills. Tyrone saw her looking that way, had finished leafing through the paper.
‘We could carry on,’ he said, nodding at the brow of the hill. ‘Just keep going,’
It was tempting, to choose this moment to leave. Then she looked back at the black smoke in the valley, the charred buildings beneath, a snow of ash falling again on the Iron Towns, charred lives, she thought, my own and everyone that has ever lived here.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Let’s go home.’
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Hannah Westland, Nick Sheerin, and all at Serpent’s Tail who helped this novel happen. Likewise to Sam Copeland at Rogers, Coleridge and White, and to Alan Mahar for his ongoing encouragement. And thank you, of course, to my family, for all their support.
Iron Towns Page 24