No Smoke Without Fire

by Claire S. Lewis

  ‘Sexting’ is still in its infancy (provoking shock waves in the school community – not partially normalised as it is today). The headmaster is all condescension and benevolence. Celeste’s transgressions would in any normal situation have led to her expulsion from the school, he explains, but given the tragic circumstances, he is prepared to exercise his discretion to modify the school policy in this case. In his wisdom, the headmaster pronounces that it would be in the best interests of Celeste and of all concerned if she is ‘voluntarily suspended’ from the school for the remainder of the summer term on compassionate leave.

  What hope is there for Celeste to challenge Ben’s abusive behaviour towards her, when she has been hung out to dry even among the adults as a sexual deviant who distributed teenage porn, got paralytically drunk and threw herself at Ben at the party? ‘He’s an eighteen-year-old boy, not a monk!’ ‘She was asking for it!’ say Celeste’s grown-up detractors. ‘He was just being a lad.’ ‘That’s what happens at parties.’ The language is (marginally) more measured but the message is the same.

  The fact that Ben’s father is a school governor and one of the biggest charitable donors to the school fundraising project for a new science block probably goes some way to explaining why Ben gets off scot-free.

  Eventually word gets out that one of the boys circulated the nudes. Of course, Ben denies that it was him. Miranda has already taken care to delete all the evidence from his mobile phone. All the students know from their relationship and sex education lessons that Ben is the guilty party who should be disciplined or reported to the police: Celeste has not committed a criminal offence in sending him intimate images of herself whereas he has committed a criminal offence in sharing them with his mates without her consent. Ben knows this too. Ben needs a fall guy, so Ben blames Harry. The headmaster wants to rebuild the reputation of the school. Harry wants an easy life. The headmaster calls another meeting and Harry gets expelled.

  PRESENT

  41

  London is like a ghost town without You.

  I think You must have gone away for the weekend because your curtains are shut when I ride by at lunchtime on Saturday and still shut when I do a second tour at 5pm in the afternoon – and You didn’t go to work at Seventh Heaven – I checked.

  To be honest, when I come by the second time, what I feel is mainly relief because then I feel confident it’s not a long night of passion that has kept You between the sheets – I don’t believe You’d be debauched enough to spend the whole day in bed with a new lover.

  The person I have in mind when I say ‘new lover’ is that creep who put the letter through the door at Seventh Heaven. From my usual vantage point across the street the other day, I watched when he delivered it and then later I watched when You opened it, and I didn’t appreciate the way your face lit up as you read his letter. You made a show of indifference for the manager’s benefit, but I could tell that was a mask. You were engaged – engaged and excited. It was obvious – even through the medium of a long-distance lens.

  Anyway, my mind is put to rest when, thanks to my Spyware, I see You get a text message from ‘Stacey Mum’ at 17.07 saying:

  ‘Please buy low cal tonic water and bag of ice from the co-op. will give you cash when you get back and pay for your diet cokes too. c u xx’

  I can live with the idea of You spending a night or two in the country at your family home. Out there, I guess you’re safe from other men. In fact, I could use some time off. Where do You get the energy from – running around all day long? It’s exhausting watching over You.

  Examining the lining of your curtains night after night has given me a good idea – so good that I can’t understand why I never thought of it before. Maybe because your bedroom is on the second floor, You never bother to close your curtains fully. There’s always a gap of five or six inches or more where they should meet in the middle. I’m going to spend the rest of my weekend researching for a purchase that is long overdue – a piece of kit that will make my life a whole lot easier.

  I’m too big to be climbing trees. I’ll get myself arrested, falling out of branches in the middle of the night. No. I’ve had enough of that. I’m going to buy me a drone.

  *

  Celeste had asked Meghan for the Saturday off because her mother had finally decided to ‘get her shit together’ (her mother’s words) and move in with ‘The Boyfriend’, selling up the house where she had lived with Celeste and Tom after the divorce. Estate agents were coming in the following week to value the place before it was put on the market. Although it was a decent little semi-detached property on one of the village estates, the place was an absolute pigsty as Stacey was a slovenly layabout whose day started and ended with an alcoholic drink and a fag. Celeste had cautioned her mother against the move because she knew that her loser of a partner was not a nice guy and had knocked her around on more than one occasion after his bouts of drinking. But Stacey had made up her mind. There was no talking her out of it.

  For her own part, Celeste had mixed feelings. On the one hand, the house had never felt like home and was steeped in sadness and heartache. On the other hand, it was the place where she felt the strongest connection with Tom.

  Tom’s room was the only room in the house that had escaped the ravages of Stacey’s domestic incompetence. Her mother kept it like a shrine. Not a fragment of his clothing, or a piece of his Lego had been removed. Celeste would never forget the night about a year after the tragedy when she had slept in Tom’s bed while two of her girlfriends used her own bed for a sleepover. Stacey had been so angry (and distraught) when she bumped into Celeste coming out of Tom’s bedroom on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, that she had almost smashed the glass of gin she was taking up to her own bedroom for a nightcap, over Celeste’s head.

  But Celeste shared her mother’s reverence for the room. On the rare occasions when Celeste went to visit, she would open the door to Tom’s bedroom and stand in the doorway, holding very still. For a second or two she could lose herself in the sensory throwback to her childhood and imagine that he was still alive and would come bounding up the stairs any second.

  Celeste was absolutely determined that ‘The Loser’ would not be allowed to play any part in dismantling Tom’s room. She didn’t want Tom’s treasured books and toys being desecrated by that man putting his hands all over them and stuffing them into charity bags. She would take care of going through and sorting out Tom’s things as well as packing up her own few childhood remnants that were locked in a cupboard in the faded ‘guestroom’ that had been her bedroom.

  Anya had reluctantly lent Celeste her Mini Coupé for the weekend task ahead and despite the emotional baggage she carried on her journey, Celeste was happy to be driving out of London, with the sun in her eyes and the wind in her hair, into the green Surrey countryside. Thank God, for once Stacey was sober when Celeste arrived early on the Saturday morning. Driving the last few miles of the trip along the country lanes had unleashed a wave of homesickness that could not be assuaged by stepping across the threshold into her old family home. Celeste hugged her mother and breathed in that familiar mix, at once comforting and repellent, of cigarettes and Chanel that was her mother’s signature scent.

  They sat in the kitchen for a coffee and Stacey asked Celeste how work was going and regaled her with snippets of village gossip about which her daughter had no interest, concerning people whose names and faces she could not recollect.

  It was safer to keep to these trivial topics of conversation, as any deeper level of interaction led inevitably to confrontation and distress. Their mother-and-daughter relationship was now forever intimately bound up with the trauma of losing Tom and the blame and recrimination that went with that, which could never be resolved or healed. Stacey could never forgive Celeste for having taken Tom to the party and everything that followed. Celeste could never forgive Stacey for all those years of neglect and for all her failings, past and present, as a mother.

&nb
sp; Celeste finished her coffee and left her mug by the sink. She would have rinsed it out, but the sink was already full of dirty dishes and burnt pans.

  ‘Right, let’s get to it!’ she said, to herself, more than to her mother. ‘If you make a start in the kitchen, I’ll take care of Tom’s room and then I’ll clear out my old bedroom as well.’

  Celeste knew that although her mother would never admit it, she would be thankful that she was being spared the task of going through Tom’s things. Beneath the hard exterior, Stacey was so fractured and fragile that any renewed trauma could smash her into pieces.

  Celeste walked up the stairs, registering the sensations of the rough bannister against her palm and the creaking of the seventh step, which were ingrained in her sensory memory.

  She paused outside Tom’s door and took a deep breath.

  His bedroom remained unchanged.

  Celeste lay down on his pale blue duvet cover (that she knew her mother religiously washed and ironed and replaced once a week) and looked up at the vintage airplane mobile hanging from the ceiling. She was always the one who would turn out the light and kiss him goodnight. This view of Tom’s airplane mobile sent her reeling into a time warp. The mobile had travelled with them, originally installed above his cot and then his first bed at their old family home. All at once, she was back there, lying next to her little brother under the covers, cuddling him to sleep or singing nursery rhymes to drown out her mother and father screaming and shouting at each other down in the hallway.

  It was always Celeste that he would cry out for if he woke up in the night afraid of the dark.

  ‘This won’t do,’ said Celeste out loud. She got up and went over to the bookcase. It was as good a place to start as any. Even though he hadn’t been a big reader himself, somehow, she seemed to feel Tom’s presence most closely in his books, perhaps because she was the one who always read him his bedtime stories when he was little. She pulled one of her favourites off the shelf. It was a picture book version of The Wizard of Oz. The book was smudged with her own writing on the inside cover.

  ‘Dear ToTo, (that was her pet name for him then)

  Happy 4th Birthday

  Lots of love from your

  Big Sis Celeste’

  She reflected that she would have been about ten years old when she gave that picture book to Tom. She’d read the original version of the classic children’s tale, which she had borrowed from the school library after a rare family outing to London to see the musical Wicked, which she had fallen in love with. She leafed through the pages of the dog-eared picture book, relishing the vivid illustrations that had so captivated Tom’s attention as a young boy.

  There’s no way this book is going to a charity shop, she thought defiantly. She wrapped it carefully in Tom’s pale blue pillowcase and put it in her shoulder bag.

  *

  By lunchtime Celeste had been through most of Tom’s room. There was very little she could bring herself to give away to charity – some of the old puzzles and games that he’d never been interested in and a few of the soft toys that he’d grown out of long before he died. But certainly not Toto – a small fluffy brown toy dog named after Dorothy’s dog in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and the source of Celeste’s nickname for Tom). Toto had been Tom’s Christmas present from Celeste that same year.

  Toto joined the picture book in her shoulder bag. They would both be finding a new home on her bedside table. She packed up another box with Tom’s Nintendo, his football and his prized Chelsea shirt. That was destined for her flat too – even if it sat in the back of a cupboard. She wanted to keep his favoured possessions close to her. Most of Tom’s other baby toys, along with his bedding and his clothes, she packed into plastic storage boxes. Stacey had hired a storage unit. That way Celeste’s mother could defer the painful time when she would have to dispose of his stuff altogether.

  *

  It was around lunchtime by the time Celeste was loading the boxes from Tom’s room into the Mini. At the end of the day there was not much to salvage from his short life. The boxes didn’t even fill the boot. In contrast, Celeste’s heart was full to bursting. Although the task had not been physically arduous, she felt emotionally exhausted.

  Washed by a few late spring showers the sky was now a Photoshop blue and the air so beautifully clear you could cut it with a knife – every outline was sharp, and every plant and tree perfectly in focus. Celeste decided to allow herself a lunch break out in the garden. There wasn’t much food in the house to make lunch, which came as no surprise, since Stacey had never been one to keep her cupboards well stocked or to put a meal on the table for her children when they came home from school. It had often been Celeste who would scavenge for food in the kitchen of an evening and put together a meal for herself and Tom from the past-their-sell-by-date packages and tins that she found in amongst her mother’s stash of vodka and gin.

  Celeste found a Diet Coke, an apple and a sachet of peanuts and headed out to the garden to sit under the apple tree. When they first moved in after the divorce, Stacey, who had undergone a brief resurgence of her interest in gardening, had got both the children involved in choosing and planting a young apple tree. Celeste had understood at the time that there was something symbolic about this action – the three of them were embarking on a new life together. The mythology of Adam and Eve, the tree of life and the knowledge of good and evil had perhaps been lost on her, but she had grasped something of the significance that it held for her mother.

  The white apple blossoms were gone but still it was relaxing sitting with her back against the rough bark of the trunk, looking up at the fresh greens of the young leaves. This spot in the garden had been a place of refuge on summer days for her and Tom to get away from their mother’s drinking and to look up to the sky. She watched the cool breeze swaying the slender new branches on the tree. Before, she was like a new branch on a tree, flexible and bending, she reflected. Now she was like a dry old twig, rendered tough and brittle by the storms of life, which would not bend in the breeze – flex it too far and it would snap.

  She would have loved to dig up this tree and take it with her. But unlike her, it had put down its roots in this place, finding sustenance in the black soil. It could not be wrenched away. Where she sat, she was also surrounded by the dying foliage of the daffodils she had planted with Tom’s ‘help’ the autumn that they had moved into their new ‘home’ after the divorce. Celeste’s interest in growing flowers had flourished even after Stacey’s enthusiasm for the new garden had waned. Now in early summer all the yellow blooms were gone and the leaves had turned brown and crinkled. Celeste knew from her horticultural training that after the narcissi had flowered and the foliage had died down was the perfect time to dig the bulbs and store them, ready for replanting in the autumn.

  She went back to the house and shouted upstairs to Stacey who was banging around in her bedroom pulling open drawers and slamming cupboard doors.

  ‘Do you still have that old garden fork? I want to dig up some of the bulbs to take away with me.’

  ‘I haven’t used it for years,’ she shouted back. ‘Look in the garage.’

  She found the garden fork (the handle was loose and one of its prongs was bent but it would do the job) and an old hessian sack in a corner of the garage. It was better than any mindfulness exercise from a self-help manual – the physical effort of driving the steel prongs into the turf (she was pleased at the ease with which she could do this, now that her body was toned and strengthened by her regime of running and exercise), followed by the tactile pleasure of gently shaking loose the soil from the newly dug bulbs.

  When the sack was full, she felt a quiet satisfaction. She would store the bulbs in a cool place until the autumn. Then she would plant most of them around Tom’s grave. The remainder she would keep for herself to fill the window boxes she had installed outside her bedroom window at the flat.

  In the springtime she would wake every morning to a blaze of golden daffodil
s, and she would know that the ground above where Tom was sleeping was crowned with a blaze of golden daffodils too.

  PAST

  42

  In the weeks and months following the fire, Celeste runs through the events of that night again and again in her head. Her memories spool like a psychedelic horror film. But there are blanks in the sequence. She can remember nothing from the moment when she was dancing with Ben in his cavernous drawing room (the music is pounding, the lights are flashing, and she is spinning, and all around her everyone is spinning except for Ben who holds her up in his arms). Nothing, nothing until the time when she is in the boathouse with him on top of her, his pelvis grinding her to the ground – that instant when, her head reeling and stars falling from the sky, and sparks flying in the air, she smells the smoke from the fire, and senses that something is dreadfully wrong, and screams out in panic: ‘Stop, stop, get off me.’

  The time in between those two moments is a strip of empty black frames. So, Ben fills in the blanks, first for her, and then for his family, and for Celeste’s mother, and their friends, and later for the coroner, and for the local press, and for everyone else at the inquest.

  ‘She was very drunk,’ he tells them all at the inquest. ‘She brought along one of her mother’s bottles of vodka. She drank most of it herself. She was drunk before she even got to the party… knocking it back as I drove her to my house.’ He speaks of his recollection of dancing with her, and of her being so drunk that he had physically to hold her up to stop her falling over. ‘God knows what other shit she took,’ he says. ‘She was bouncing off the walls.’ In two minutes of evidence, he utters the word ‘drunk’ eleven times. Celeste is keeping count, her head bent low.