No Smoke Without Fire

by Claire S. Lewis

  Celeste squinted at the blurry images that had been stuck in the album. Some of them were of her and Tom – here she was pushing Tom on the swing, then the two of them licking ice creams, and another of them both jumping into the paddling pool.

  ‘It wasn’t all bad,’ said Celeste out loud. ‘She wasn’t all bad.’ With maturity and distance, Celeste now understood that Stacey had tried to make their childhood happy – it was the alcoholism that had overwhelmed her and made her unable to cope.

  She put the album carefully to one side and opened one of the exercise books that she had used for her diaries. On the front cover she had written, ‘January to June 2009’. She would have been fifteen at the time. She opened the diary on a random page and read a few lines. How predictable, she thought, her teenage self was lamenting something about Ben.

  Ben blanked me today. Made me cry. He was sitting next to Kate at lunch.

  They walked out together laughing about some private joke. He stared right through me as I passed them in the corridor.

  He’s such a dick. Ali says I should forget about him.

  Easier said than done.

  She couldn’t bear to read any more. It was all in the same vein. That boy had hammered her self-esteem throughout her formative years. She had been like one of those ever-hopeful, ever-grateful strays in search of a master and the occasional pat on the head. He had been the master – one minute throwing her scraps, the next minute kicking her out of the way.

  She threw all the notebooks and papers into a cardboard box. Those would definitely be going in the back of a cupboard. They were part of her history, so she felt she had to keep them. But that didn’t mean she had to look at them.

  Her old wardrobe in the ‘guestroom’ was tall and deep. She got a chair to scoop everything out from the back and the corners of the top shelf. She leaned into the furthest corner to grab a red plastic bag containing something soft and squidgy. For some reason, this bag evoked a bad vibe and the ghost of a memory even though she couldn’t remember what it contained. She jumped off the chair and looked inside. It was all coming back to her now. She lifted out the black leather jacket and put it up to her face. She wasn’t imagining it. The slightly rancid smell of leather mingled with something else. Yes, it was there. After all these years she could still detect the smell of smoke. She kneaded the leather abstractedly in her hands, breathing in the familiar scent.

  As her sensory memory conjured images of the night, a kind of horror and fascination took hold of her. She buried her face deeper into the folds of the jacket and breathed deeply. Just out of her reach, like something submerged in briny black water, she could sense the shape of her memories reforming. The mental effort of trying to touch those memories made her head throb.

  Gradually she became conscious of another scent, just a trace, lingering in the inner lining of the jacket, coming back to haunt her after all these years. It was the smell of Ben’s aftershave cologne – Eau Sauvage (a present from his adoring mum for his seventeenth birthday). After he read somewhere that Eau Sauvage contained the chemical compound called hedione, which stimulates an area of the brain responsible for the release of sex hormones in females, he wore it religiously every day. He used to spray it so liberally – thought it made him so cool and seductive – and one up on the other boys who were still dousing themselves in Lynx Africa body spray. She tossed the jacket on to the bed in disgust.

  Ben’s jacket. She spread it out on the bed. Aside the smell, it was a quality item in soft Italian leather and still in pretty good condition – charity shop or trash? She was about to stuff it into a black bin bag when she noticed the name written in marker pen on the inside of the collar. The letters were faded but still legible.

  Harry S

  So, it wasn’t Ben’s jacket. It was Harry’s. How on earth did Harry’s leather jacket come to be stuffed in the back of her cupboard?

  *

  As Celeste cast her mind back, she remembered Ben wearing Harry’s black leather jacket on a number of occasions. In fact, she had a picture in her head of him sporting it (along with tight jeans and slicked-back hair to complete the ‘Saturday Night Fever’ image), when he came to pick her up from her house in his Dad’s MG on the night of the party. She’d made some lame joke about John Travolta, which hadn’t gone down well.

  ‘He fancied himself in it, of course,’ mused Celeste. ‘That’s why he was always commandeering it from Harry.’ He wore it so often that everyone assumed it was his. The girls had picked up on his vanity and sniggered about it, behind his back. They called it his ‘pulling jacket’, but perhaps that was why Celeste had been secretly flattered to see him wearing it when he knocked on her door!

  ‘I guess I should give this back to Harry,’ she said out loud. ‘Though what would he care after all these years?’ she thought bitterly.

  Her fingers shook, as she went through the pockets, fearful yet morbidly fascinated to see what she might find. She searched the jacket methodically. She started with the breast pocket. This contained an old five-pound note, a few mouldy coins, two folded Rizla papers of the kind used for rolling cigarettes, three unopened condoms in their individual foil wrappers (He was hopeful… thought Celeste), as well as two empty ripped foil condom wrappings (Two? thought Celeste. So maybe I wasn’t his first conquest that night at the party?).

  Ben was so morally bankrupt in her eyes that these findings came as no surprise. Burning with curiosity, she unfolded the two Rizla papers, which she could see each had a few words written on them in black biro. The first read, ‘the most boring girl,’ and the second, ‘the biggest slag.’ She should have been horrified at the appalling sexism these small rectangles of paper revealed but she had known those boys too well to be shocked. She didn’t need to be a detective to work out that the scribbled words related to some ‘macho’ challenge or contest they had set up among themselves all those years ago.

  Next, she moved on to the side pockets. The left-hand pocket contained a lighter (whose fluid must have long since evaporated away), an empty plastic pouch (of the kind used to carry tobacco and weed) and a small crushed carton of Rizla rolling papers. Celeste stood staring long and hard at these items that she’d laid out on the bed. She knew they told a story, and it wasn’t the story that Ben had told at the inquest – he had testified at the inquest that he wasn’t smoking that night, that he never smoked. She had suspected it before but now she was more certain than ever. He had lied – at the very least, he had distorted the evidence. She had been painted as the villain, the person who carelessly dropped her cigarette and started the fire in the corridor outside Ben’s room. But the contents of this pocket suggested something very different.

  She cast her mind back to that moment in the corridor. The sensory familiarity of the leather and the aftershave seemed to work as a trigger, stirring her memories. As she sat with her eyes closed and her head in her hands something began to emerge phoenix-like from the ashes of the night – fitting another, alternative narrative.

  Were these real memories beginning to re-emerge or created memories? She couldn’t be sure. She knew that Ben’s parents imposed an absolute ban on smoking inside their house since it was a wooden barn. But Ben wasn’t one to obey orders. In her mind’s eye she could see Ben’s hands, expertly rolling her a joint. He was good with his fingers – at least when it came to experimenting with recreational drugs! (His clumsy fingers when it came to experimental teenage sex had been something else…) She had been enthralled and aroused, watching him do it that night. It was the first time she had seen someone rolling a joint. And now she remembered him putting it up to her lips and saying, ‘Try it. Breathe in deep. It’s good. You’ll like it.’ She could feel the touch of his fingertips on her lips.

  She had done as he said, breathing the acrid smoke deep into her lungs, and passed it back to his mouth, and so it had gone on, exchanging the joint, and it was good, and this had seemed like the most decadent and reckless and sensuous thing she had ever d
one in her entire life… until at last, unable to contain himself any longer, Ben had ripped the joint away from her lips and flung it to the floor to give her the most erotic kiss (was she imagining that or was it a true memory?) she had ever experienced.

  All the romantic stuff was irrelevant. There was only one thing that mattered. She sat with her head bowed and her eyes screwed shut as a sweet, growing conviction gradually flowed through her body, releasing the tension and filling her with peace. It was like the feeling she had occasionally heard people describe in church when witnessing their conversion to the faith. She was convinced that the vivid images she could see in her head (as if from only yesterday) were real. These were not half-remembered scenes from some second-rate teenage rom-com. These were not figments of her imagination. These were recovered memories that had lain buried for years in the mire of her trauma and shame. But now, at last, she knew the truth:

  It wasn’t her who started the fire. It was him.

  PAST

  44

  It’s not until four years after the fire that Celeste refers herself for therapy. It’s her twenty-first birthday present to herself. A session with Dr Sunita Kaul, a highly qualified trauma psychologist that she found online. She was too ashamed to speak to anyone before.

  It’s not like it is in the movies. Celeste doesn’t get to lie on a couch. She sits in a chair and the chair is uncomfortable and the grey-haired, softly spoken woman on the other side of the table takes notes and offers her a cup of tea and forgets to take out the teabag. But none of that matters.

  Slowly and painfully, the words come out. She tells the woman that she is too overwhelmed by the trauma of losing Tom to acknowledge the sexual abuse that she suffered at the hands of Ben that night… She defines herself as a killer… What Ben did to her is irrelevant and trivial in comparison to what happened to Tom… Her suffering is as nothing compared to his loss. She is locked in a pact of silence with her former schoolmate… They are both criminals… To dwell on what Ben did to her in the boathouse seems like a gross self-indulgence and betrayal of Tom… Her little brother’s death and what happened in the boathouse are inextricably linked in her head… Both she and Ben are stained with the shame and the guilt.

  The woman on the other side of the desk doesn’t say much. She lets Celeste speak. She doesn’t prompt or fill the silence. She looks down at her notebook as she writes. She listens. And when Celeste gets to the end of her story and her time is almost up, the woman puts down her pen and looks at Celeste.

  ‘You know, you were a victim that night too.’

  It’s against the rules but she reaches across the desk and puts her hand over Celeste’s.

  ‘That boy raped you…’

  The woman’s words feel like a gift.

  At last, for someone acknowledge it… to affirm it… to say the words out loud… and with kindness and understanding. Dr Kaul isn’t finished yet. She gives Celeste’s hand a gentle squeeze and looks deep into her eyes.

  ‘But you survived.’

  From then on, Celeste redefines herself. She is a ‘rape survivor’. Her mission is to work out what that means and what she should do about it.

  PRESENT

  45

  When the light goes on in your window, my heart leaps. You are back in town. Although it’s only been one night, it feels like you’ve been away for a two-week holiday. From a distance, I monitor your light and when it goes off again, I move closer to the house in time to see You at the bus stop getting on to a bus. I’m quick enough to run and catch the bus just before it moves away.

  Our journey is slow through the Sunday afternoon traffic but I’m happy to sit here observing You from behind. When You get off, I follow and it’s only a short walk to your destination, a private clinic in the heart of Chelsea. I follow You through the entrance, wait behind a stand while You enquire at the desk and then I follow You upstairs. The plaque on the door says ‘Gynaecology’. When the door releases to let you in, I can go no further. But it doesn’t take a genius to work this out. You are not bringing flowers, so this isn’t a Seventh Heaven delivery. Something bad has happened to Mia and her baby. And that bastard caused it.

  *

  Celeste opened her eyes and sat staring down at the lighter and the Rizla carton for a full five minutes. The sense of peace had gone. Now she was in a cold sweat, trembling all over. What was she to do with this? What good could it possibly serve to rake up all the embers again and set them blazing? At this remove, the police wouldn’t be interested. What would anyone care which of the two of them, her or Ben, had started the fire? They had both been irresponsible and reckless. And in any case, if she spoke to the police, Ben would just deny it. It would be her word against his. ‘He said. She said.’

  Celeste picked up the lighter and held it up to the window. She cared – even if no one else did. That was enough. All the fluid in the lighter had evaporated away. The red plastic was cloudy and scratched. She guessed it would be too late to recover fingerprints but that didn’t concern her. She had no intention of going to the police. She squeezed the lighter so hard that the brittle plastic cracked into splinters. She would find her own way of getting justice for herself and, more importantly, for Tom.

  Impatient to get going, she started stuffing the jacket into a plastic bag and felt something else – small and hard concealed in an inside pocket sewn into the lining of the jacket. The zip was stiff and caught on the fabric but eventually she managed to yank it free and slip her hand inside the pocket. She pulled out a key. Now rusty and a little blackened with age, she knew immediately what it was…

  …the key to Ben’s bedroom.

  This shocking new discovery threw her into fresh turmoil as she struggled to remember…

  How the hell did this leather jacket and the key that seemed to scorch her skin end up in her wardrobe anyway?

  *

  She wasn’t sure how long she had been sitting there gripping the key so hard that her fingernails had gouged into the palm of her left-hand when she became aware of her mother yelling at her up the stairs. Getting no response, Stacey banged into the room, where Celeste was sitting rigid on the bed.

  ‘What’s wrong? I thought you were in a hurry to get away?’ said Stacey. ‘Mike’s taking me out for lunch, so I’ve come to say goodbye. Just pull the door when you leave.’

  She gave Celeste a quick hug and then she was gone.

  Celeste heard her mother leaving the house and a car accelerating away (middle-aged Mike driving his ‘pimped-up’ Nissan Skyline like a boy racer as usual…) and got to her feet. There was no point moping around here on her own any longer.

  ‘Crime and punishment,’ she said to herself through gritted teeth, over and over, unable to get the words out of her head. The inquest had never got to the truth of what happened that night. Ben had dumped the blame squarely on her shoulders – in his account, she had dropped the cigarette and she had turned the key. Of course, no one had pressed charges against her because all acknowledged she had already been punished enough by the tragic outcome. But now it seemed that his testimony was all a pack of lies.

  What if it was Ben’s carelessness (throwing the lighted joint to the floor) that started the fire? And what if it was Ben who deliberately locked Tom into his bedroom making him prisoner to the fire? Who knows? That would have been a very different story. A hot tingling sensation rose up through Celeste’s body until her cheeks began to burn and she registered the feeling as rage. She was beginning to grasp at the truth, and she wanted revenge.

  Celeste’s knowledge of the law was derived mainly from detective stories and murder mysteries, but Ben’s conduct must surely, she reasoned, have amounted to the crime of ‘involuntary manslaughter’, which she understood from her law and politics reading to be the unintentional killing of another person as a result of criminally negligent or reckless conduct. Even though the investigation might not have led to a criminal conviction, at least if the truth had been known she wouldn’t hav
e been hung out to dry as the main culprit for the horrors of that dreadful night. Everyone’s moral evaluation of the tragedy would have been very different and perhaps, her mother and all the others would have been able to find it in their hearts to forgive her for her part in it.

  As for her, she would never forgive herself for taking Tom to the party and for getting herself drunk and for leaving him alone. But at least she might find it easier to live with herself if she knew that she was not the only one to blame for Tom’s tragic death. She was tortured with doubts once again, frustrated by the confusion and incompleteness of her memories. Why was the jacket here? Had Ben asked her to hide the evidence? To be complicit in a cover up? In the knowledge that she would get off more lightly than him? Had that been his final act of domination over her?

  Her mind was made up.

  The black leather jacket should be returned to its rightful owner. She found and reread the handwritten note from Harry, which she’d folded into her wallet. He’d as good as asked her out on a date. Yes, she would go to the reunion and yes, she would find an opportunity to talk to Harry alone. She would insist that he told her everything he knew about Ben’s actions that night. Once and for all she needed to find out the full truth of what had taken place. Her heart smouldered with a burning desire for retribution. But first she had to be sure. She tapped out the number that Harry had scrawled at the bottom of his letter and sent Harry a text – short and to the point: