No Smoke Without Fire

by Claire S. Lewis

Then she looks as if she’s going to be sick, he says. So, he helps her upstairs to the bathroom. The bathroom is occupied so he waits with her in the corridor outside the bathroom door. Was he smoking? No, he wasn’t smoking. He was in training for rugby. He never smoked. Was she smoking? Yes, he thinks she was smoking a cigarette. She doesn’t usually smoke. Only when she’s drunk. What happened to the cigarette? He doesn’t know. It’s true, he can’t remember. He says that while they stood outside the bathroom door, she asked him for a joint. He recalls rolling the joint and handing it over. Beyond that, he says he can’t say. He starts to cry. A little boy in a grown man’s body.

  When pressed by the coroner he says that Celeste must have dropped the lighted joint in the upstairs corridor before he led her down the steps to the back door ‘for some fresh air’.

  Ben pauses as the coroner writes a note on the file, his scratchy nib audible throughout the silent courtroom.

  When asked why his bedroom door was locked, Ben tells the inquest that Celeste was worried that Tom would go downstairs to join the party – because Tom was only eleven years old, he says and, despite Ben’s ‘best efforts’ his mates had smuggled in alcohol and drugs. ‘Celeste didn’t want him going down and drinking shots and sharing joints with the older kids,’ he says. ‘She insisted on locking the door.’ He leans on the word ‘insisted’. Her mother would go nuts if she brought him back drunk, he says, unconscious of the irony. ‘Double standards!’ he says. He gives an awkward, complicit grimace.

  In her anguish, Celeste begins to doubt her sanity. She rakes through the ashes of her memories. She cannot imagine what could have possessed her to lock her little brother into Ben’s bedroom? Given the anger and disgust she had felt towards her father for locking her in to her old bedroom at their former family home only the week before Ben’s party, she finds it hard to comprehend why she would have done the same thing to Tom, even if she was ‘off her head’ at the time, as Ben told everyone. Why would she do that?

  Celeste is called upon to give evidence at the inquest too. She is still in a state of numbness and shock. She speaks very quietly and like an automaton. In her evidence she testifies that she can’t remember much of the events at the party leading up to the fire. She is questioned about how much vodka she’d drunk and if she’d been under the influence of drugs and whether she’d smoked weed.

  Her account is vague and unconvincing. But where she can’t remember the details, Ben’s detailed testimony fills the gaps, completing the narrative. Unlike Celeste, his recollection seems remarkably clear. He has told her so many times about how she took the key from inside his door and locked it from the outside because she thought her little brother would be safer away from the older kids at the party, that now he is word-perfect. He describes the scene in the corridor to her so vividly that sometimes she wonders whether he may have created the memory in her head of her turning the key, and locking Tom in. The line between her imagination and memory has become blurred.

  ‘Why do you have to keep repeating this to me again and again?’ she wants to say. But instead, she says, ‘I wish I were dead.’

  At the inquest, fire investigators testify that since Ben’s room is immediately opposite the top of the spiral staircase, and the forensic evidence shows that the fire started and took hold further along the corridor away from the top of the stairs, then if the door had not been locked, Tom would in all probability have had time to escape down the spiral staircase and out of the back door to the lawns. Celeste already knows this but to hear it confirmed by the experts twists her soul. The fire investigators hold up drawings and plans, complete with pin diagrams representing Tom, to illustrate their hypothesis. She is tortured by guilt and remorse.

  And then there is the fire investigators’ testimony concerning the cause of the fire, which seems to confirm Ben’s story. The spark for the blaze that engulfed the upper floor of the barn does not appear to have been caused by defective wiring or any other electrical fault, say the experts. The fire’s most likely cause is a discarded cigarette or match dropped by one of the partygoers. These expert findings are a further brutal blow.

  The testimony of the firefighters is the most painful to hear. They confirm that Tom died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital at 02.48 as a result of smoke inhalation while trapped inside Ben’s bedroom. The firefighters discovered him still alive, but unconscious, barely breathing. When they gained access by breaking down the locked door of Ben’s room with a pry axe, they found Tom’s unconscious body slumped on the floor on the other side. In a tragic twist of fate, the bedroom windows had recently been fitted with security locks following a spate of burglaries in the neighbourhood. Tom was a prisoner in the room.

  Celeste’s memories of what happened outside the bathroom door remain fragmentary and confused. But Ben’s testimony leaves no room for doubt in her mind or the minds of all the others sitting in the courtroom, that it was her drunken carelessness that started the fire.

  Stacey sits through all the harrowing testimony. Miraculously, she stops drinking for the duration of the inquest and is there every single day with notebook and pen, writing down each incriminating detail of the night. Ben is a convincing witness – he demonstrates ample contrition for his own stupidity. And he appears to have a lucid recollection of the details. He is a good performer. He is persuasive. The same cannot be said for my daughter, thinks Stacey.

  There were police enquiries in the immediate aftermath of the fire. All the partygoers were interviewed and both Celeste and Ben were questioned intensively. The phrase ‘involuntary manslaughter’ was mentioned on more than one occasion. But the police decided not to pursue any prosecutions – perhaps in part out of compassion for Celeste – who was so deeply and personally involved in the tragedy and so devastatingly affected by it. This inquest is not supposed to be about attributing judgement and blame but by the end of the process it is engraved on the hearts of both Stacey and her teenage daughter: Celeste is the guilty party. She killed her little brother. For that she will never in a million years forgive herself and neither will her mother.

  Instead of providing any kind of resolution, the inquest simply serves to fan the flames of Celeste’s despair.

  PRESENT

  43

  That night outside B Johnson’s flat, I fled the scene, but I didn’t go far. I waited around the corner on the Kings Road and minutes later I watched two fire engines pulling into the square. All the residents of the flats had evacuated the building and were gathered on the lawn. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Mia was there with him, sitting on a bench. She was crying. She sat huddled over, wrapped in a blanket, hanging her head. It was obvious to me that she was in severe pain and distress. She should have been sitting in an ambulance – that was my intention in setting off the fire alarm.

  He sat very close to her supporting her in his arms looking for all the world like a solicitous husband concerned for the welfare of his pregnant partner. His performance was astonishing. The other residents give him little approving glances. Little did they know…

  *

  Celeste slept light that night. She had left her bedroom window wide open and woke to the sound of bells drifting on the air across the fields from the parish church on the village green.

  There must be a christening today, she thought. No doubt, the bell-ringers were having a run-through in advance of the service later that morning, when they would ring again to herald the joyful ceremony. She knew the sound of those bells so well and they conjured up the world of her childhood. She noticed how the particular timbre of each bell was unique with its characteristic hues and tones. Those evocative chimes from the parish church were like voices calling to her from the past.

  Celeste jumped out of bed with a new determination to get on with the task in hand. First, she would go for a run. She had made sure to pack her new black trainers and her running kit and was looking forward to a circular run along the public footpaths that criss-crossed the Surrey countryside
linking one village settlement to another. It was unusual for her to feel this positive when she was at home and she wondered why. And then it occurred to her. This new sense of freedom had come about because for once she felt sure that she wasn’t being watched. She didn’t have to be on her guard. She didn’t have to worry about going out running alone. The fact of having driven out of London in Anya’s car gave her a sense of security that she hadn’t been followed. Her stalker would not have been looking out for a Mini Coupé.

  Celeste’s escape to the countryside wasn’t the only thing that was liberating. There was also the expectation that within a few months the house that had been the stage-set for so much tragedy would be sold, bringing down the curtain on that grim part of her life for the last time. This knowledge that it was all coming to an end motivated her to create some good memories of her last visit here so that she could in future look back in a more positive light. Perversely, it was only now that she could appreciate that her mother had tried to make this place a home – and that their life here as a threesome had not been all bad.

  After digging up the bulbs the day before, Celeste had spent the rest of the afternoon helping out her mother because it was obvious that Stacey would never get the house cleared without someone giving her a hand. Unexpectedly, working together on this shared task had been the best ‘relationship therapy’ they had undergone since the fateful party, and for the first time in several years Celeste had felt close to her. As they filled rubbish bags and storage boxes, Stacey spoke candidly at last. Her mother had acknowledged and was trying to control her alcohol addiction, attending self-help groups and the like. Moreover, it seemed that the prospect of selling the house, if not giving her closure (which she did not seek or aspire to) had at least given her the resolve to move on with her life.

  When they had finished in the sitting room (which Stacey had been using as her dumping ground for old newspapers and magazines, stacks of CDs, videos and DVDs, all her unopened mail and filing, and lots of other junk), Celeste had persuaded her mother to go out for a walk.

  ‘It’s such a beautiful evening,’ she said. ‘It’s criminal to stay stuck inside. We’ve done enough for today.’

  Celeste had suggested one of her old favourites (the same circuit that she intended to run on the Sunday morning), a pretty walk that looped between two picture-postcard villages, skirting riverbeds and winding through ancient woodlands whose undergrowth was carpeted with bluebells, before opening onto a hillside overlooking the vast sweeping curve of the river in the valley below. They had stopped at a country pub for their supper. Celeste had installed her mother at a table in the pub garden (to keep her away from the bar) and gone inside to order traditional pub fare of beer battered cod and homemade chips for them both. Celeste hadn’t eaten this dish for years – but she remembered having it the one time they went out as a family for a pub lunch on her father’s birthday.

  ‘I got us each a Diet Coke,’ Celeste had said pointedly as she plonked the drinks on to the table. ‘We should do this more often… It’s nice getting out of London. I’d forgotten how much I miss being in the countryside. I can breathe…’

  After the walk, Celeste had thought about offering to drive her mother across to Shearham village church to visit Tom’s grave. (Stacey was on a two-year driving ban for drink driving.) But in the end, she decided against it and said nothing. Their relationship was not sufficiently robust. Though seven years had passed, the trauma and pain associated with Tom’s death was still too toxic and raw for that kind of intimacy.

  *

  Over breakfast on the Sunday morning, things were getting back to ‘normal’, and not in a good way. Celeste had come back from her early morning run feeling energised and refreshed but already the tension was beginning to rise. It didn’t help that Stacey had shouted at Celeste to ‘show some respect and leave your muddy trainers outside’, before she had even stepped through the door, which was ironic since the floor looked as if it hadn’t been washed in weeks!

  ‘It would nice if you could at least say “good morning” before you started having a go at me!’ Celeste shot back. She was carrying a small bunch of wildflowers she had picked along the hedgerows on her ‘cool-down’ back to the house. She walked over to the sink and filled an empty jam jar with water for the flowers.

  Celeste had noticed that they could just about tolerate each other when they were out of the house on neutral territory but when they were back on home turf, they were conditioned to start bitching at each other like Pavlov’s dogs. Being jointly engaged on the packing up yesterday had been a bonding experience but they could only maintain the peace for so long. The only way they could avoid fighting was by keeping interactions to a minimum.

  ‘I need to get off to London soon,’ said Celeste. ‘Anya will be wanting her car back. I think she was planning to use it this afternoon.’ The fresh breath of freedom she had experienced briefly out in the countryside was extinguished and the feeling of claustrophobia associated with the family home was closing in. She had to get away.

  ‘I was hoping you would help me drive the boxes over to Mike’s house,’ said Stacey. ‘And I thought we could look in at the cemetery after that. It doesn’t seem right with you running that headstones business and visiting all those strangers’ graves, not going to visit your own brother’s grave.’ Her mother looked angry.

  ‘Stop trying to guilt-trip me,’ Celeste snapped back. ‘It’s the least Mike can do to come over and shift the boxes for you. I don’t see why I should break my back helping you with that.’ Celeste clattered around the kitchen putting the dirty dishes that Stacey had left out the previous night into the dishwasher. ‘And I’m going to pop into St Peter’s on my way back to London – it’s on the route home.’ She nodded towards the sink. ‘The flowers are for Tom. I’m sorry but you can go anytime. We don’t need to do that together.’ Her mother’s face fell, and Celeste knew that she was being cruel. Stacey’s suggestion of visiting Tom’s grave together was perhaps her own clumsy way of trying to signal her willingness to forgive Celeste at last for her part in the tragic loss of her son.

  While Stacey sipped a black coffee, Celeste finished stacking the dishwasher. Then she wiped the table, scoured the pans and rinsed out the sink. She’d had enough of acting like her mother’s scullery maid.

  ‘OK. I’m going upstairs for a shower before I clear out my room. Then I’ll be off,’ she said. ‘I need to get back to London.’ Stacey tried to persuade her to stay another night and drive back to London on the Monday morning. ‘I’ll be out for lunch,’ she said. ‘So, you can relax at home. Then this evening we could get a take-away and watch a movie. Just the two of us. For old times’ sake.’

  Celeste wondered what ‘old times’ her mother was imagining. That wasn’t the way she remembered their evenings together. But she didn’t challenge that. Nevertheless, her mind was made up.

  ‘Sorry, Mum, I have to get back. One of my friends is in hospital. She’s had some complications with her pregnancy.’ She was deliberately vague. ‘I want to go and visit her this evening.’

  Back in the guestroom, Celeste stripped the sheets and piled them up at the end of the bed. Then she turned to the wardrobe. It contained all the things that Celeste had left behind in her room when she moved into the flat in London. Stacey had unceremoniously stuffed them into the wardrobe and with that ‘Celeste’s bedroom’ had become ‘the guestroom’ (though, God knows, Celeste doubted that Stacey ever had any guests to stay).

  Out of sight, out of mind, thought Celeste. Back then, it seemed the main purpose of the ‘rebranding’ exercise had been to hide away anything that reminded Stacey of her daughter whom she blamed for Tom’s death. For more than a year, Stacey had scarcely been able to look at her.

  Stacey had tied the handles of wardrobe doors together with a length of rope to prevent them from swinging open under the weight of the things she had piled inside. When she touched the rope, Celeste remembered she had cut it from the broken
garden swing. Her sensory memory of the feel of that prickly rope on the palm of her hands was so strong. The rope was tough and so tightly knotted that Celeste had to go down to the kitchen again in search of a sharp knife to cut it free. She was adept at using knives and other blades for her floristry work, so slicing through the fibrous rope was an easy task for her. As she did so, the doors swung open and all her stuff fell out onto the carpet.

  ‘What a pile of old junk,’ she said to herself as she spread it out on the floor. ‘I can’t believe I used to be so attached to all this old rubbish.’

  It was far easier and quicker than dealing with Tom’s things. The emotional connection had gone. She hated all these old clothes and ridiculous platform shoes and bits of trinket jewellery and dried-up make-up that reminded her of a miserable episode of her youth. There was no point trying to recycle any of it. She didn’t want any of these despised possessions to have a new lease of life. She shoved almost all her stuff into the black trash bags – it would go into landfill, better still to an incinerator. She felt bad for the environment, but more important to her, was to get rid of it once and for all.

  There were a few things she couldn’t throw away, some old diaries and letters and photograph albums and school certificates and the like. She hadn’t time to sort through them all now, but they formed part of her identity and she would keep them. She leafed through the pages of a photograph album that she had put together a year after the party displaying random family photographs that her parents had taken sporadically when she and Tom were little. The pictures were shot on an old camera owned by her father, which used photographic film. There were so few images compared to the multitude of photographs people now took with the advent of digital photography.

  I guess every image cost money in those days, thought Celeste. So they took care to compose every shot. Every photograph had to count. But she reflected that although there were fewer of them, these photographs were perhaps more permanent than the hundreds of pictures taken by her generation in the digital age, since they were preserved on paper. How many of all those shots posted on Facebook and Instagram feeds would survive when the technology moved on? They would disappear into virtual cyberspace when the technology on which they were stored became obsolete.