by Jim Crace
14
It was Fire not Fish that put an end to Festa. Some water might have saved her life.
Early, on her fifth day of research, the study house was hardly visible. A damp sea mist had dug more deeply into the land than usual. It had crossed the high, absorbent peaks of the inner dunes, depositing its slightly brackish dew into the sweet-water ponds and puffing its grey breath against the veranda’s clammy glass.
Inside, at seven in the morning, the hopeful doctors were all sleeping, even Celice. Their thesis tutor had visited the evening before for dinner and had expressed his broad approval of their field researches, if not their cooking. That night, when he had gone back to the Institute, they celebrated with four bottles of Van Paña and a drunken game of charades. They’d had to mime the names of animals. Joseph guessed the sprayhopper as soon as Celice puffed across her palm at him, like someone blowing kisses. The others seemed to take it as the natural order of the universe that Joseph and Celice would become attached, though they neither touched nor paid excessive attention to each other. Odd sticks to odd; that was the formula. The three men flirted only with Festa. In fact, at two in the morning, when everyone else had gone to bed and sleep, Festa and the ornithologist were still in the common room, kissing noisily.
It must have been one of those two, Joseph thought, who’d placed the kerosene lamp underneath the table and turned the flame down to its lowest setting for a more romantic light, perhaps, then left it burning through the night. He wasn’t even sure if he’d imagined it. When he’d got up at seven thirty the common room was almost bright with natural light. The feeble kerosene flame would not have been especially noticeable. It might, in fact, have been already dead. He’d only half noticed it before rushing out to circumnavigate the house and stand on the open ground outside the veranda waiting for Celice. Joseph wasn’t sure if there was any smell from charring wood. He should, he knew, have checked the lamp and turned it out if it was on, or moved it somewhere safe away from wood before he left the study house. ‘Maybe, even if I’d definitely seen a flame I’d not have turned it out,’ he admitted to Celice, years later, to comfort her. He was not the sort to interfere. He was preoccupied. Thank heavens that he didn’t say, ‘I’m far too short to play with fire.’
Celice had not seen anything, no fight, no lamp. She’d only seen Sprayhopper Man, waiting outside for her as she’d asked (‘instructed’ was the truer word, he’d say), half consumed by mist and half obscured by ochred glass.
The night before, Joseph had admitted – drink talks – that he’d spied on her through the veranda windows. Such an arousing liberty, Celice had thought, and one that she was impatient to repeat. ‘Come for me in the morning,’ she had said, when they had gone back to their beds. Indeed, he’d come for her, come into her, come with her a dozen times that night, in dreams. He’d sung for her. He’d played piano on the bone-keys of her spine. He’d held her in his palm and breathed on her and she had flexed and sprung her endless legs for him and tumbled in the air.
So when she saw him standing in the garden, beyond the glass, Celice was hungry to be loved. She did not try to hide herself, nor did she try to show herself. She just pulled down the sleeping-bag and stood up, naked on the mattress, as if she didn’t know that she had purposefully placed him there to watch her tug her nightshirt by its shoulders high above her head. For a few seconds, she was blinded by material and Joseph was enlightened on how her body looked. The pear. The pigeon. And the truth of it. The wisp and tuft of body hair. Her shoulders and her modest breasts. Her squabby hips. Her virtues and her blemishes. When her head and hair sprang out again into the light she half expected to find Joseph with his nose pressed to the glass. But – and this was touching and oddly arousing too – he had stayed exactly where he was, a soft-edged figure in the mist. She dressed for him. A shirt, no brassière. Some underclothes. Jumper, trousers, socks and walking boots. She put her fingers through her hair, a mermaid’s comb, and waved at him. For Celice this was the high point of their love.
How long had Festa been awake and watching her? (She’d never have the chance to ask.) But while Celice was sitting on her mattress tying her shoelaces, her room-mate suddenly sat up in her sleeping-bag, bleary-eyed and pastry-faced, and begged for one of Celice’s cigarettes. ‘I’m feeling awful,’ she said, and gave her irritating laugh. ‘My mouth’s a bird’s cage.’
‘I’m not surprised.’ Celice lit two cigarettes and handed one to Festa. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said. ‘I’m going down to the bay with Joseph.’
‘You work too hard.’ It would seem that Festa hadn’t noticed the garden spy, thank goodness. ‘Are you going to make some coffee?’
‘I’m leaving now. We want to catch the tides,’ she lied. ‘I’ll put the water on.’
That’s exactly what she’d done. She had half noticed the lamp, she’d say, either underneath the common-room table or on top of it. She wasn’t sure. She had, she thought, taken her still burning cigarette with her into the common room. It was just possible that she had left it standing on its end on the veranda floor. That was her habit, balancing a narrow cigarette to knit its thinning scarf of smoke while she was busy doing something else. Or – so many oversights, so many ways to fail – she might have left the cigarette standing on the table by the sink while she splashed her face and filled the saucepan with water for Festa’s coffee. Or she might have stubbed the cigarette out in the sink. She was too hurried to take much notice. Two things were certain. When she left the study house on this, her grimmest day, Festa was half asleep and smoking in her bed. And there was a naked light below the saucepan on the unattended hob.
Here, then, were several possibilities. There was no evidence to say which one occurred. The study house – all wood and glass – was too badly burned for autopsies. The unextinguished lamp, left to burn all night and left to burn by Joseph, too, as he went out that morning, finally gave purchase to a second flame on the underside of the table in the common room. The wood had blackened, charred and finally surrendered to combustion. The flame was upside down and would not have burned for long if this had been a modern table, its polish and its lacquers emasculated by the safety rules of modern manufacturing. The timber of this table had been sealed by combustible varnishes, which were too old to liquefy when heated, but dried instead, went scaly, lifted from the wood in flakes and dunes, and let the flames migrate across the table’s underside.
Or else the unwatched hob, in a sleeping house, boiled off the water in the coffee pan until the pan itself began to cook. Its bottom would have enamelled first, bright greys and blues. Then the gas flames would have begun to spread. They’d have licked the sides and tongued the plastic handle of the pan. Pan plastic doesn’t melt. It flares. And if the heat becomes intolerable it turns the energy it cannot cope with into squibby detonations, which crack and spring with flames. The pan, unsteadied by the discharges, could have fallen off the hob and spread its molten metals on the boards.
Or maybe one of those nicely balanced cigarettes, which Celice might have left burning on the table by the sink, on the veranda floor, had toppled over to smoulder on the splintered wood in its sweet time. Or Festa might have fallen back to sleep and dropped her own kingsize, her first gasp of the day, on to her mattress to bake herself in man-made flaming fibres. Or she might have stumbled out to make her coffee from the boiling water and caught the lamp beneath the table with a toe on her way back to bed. The spilt kerosene would race across the floor. So would its chasing flame. Or else. Or anything. Or something different. The dead don’t speak. It could have started in a thousand ways.
Whatever the initial cause, whosever fault it was, whoever volunteered to take the blame, a tongue of flame could hardly wish for more dry wood.
The three sleeping men were lucky: their door was closed so when the first flame dipped and reached for fuel and oxygen, stretching its neck for sustenance like a little orange chick, they could not hear the flexing of the floorboards or smell the
scorching timber and the melting paint in the adjoining room. They did not wake at the explosion of the lamp with its shallow reservoir of kerosene or sit up startled as the kindled wood finally ignited and combusted with the detonating crackle of musketry.
The fire seemed to have two speeds, the thorough and methodical, and the racing. First there was the toasting of the wood, the snacking, fervent torching of everybody’s coats, the melting of their boots, and then the sudden, tindery conflagrations – a cereal packet left out on a kitchen surface, their books and lecture notes, the pile of magazines. The tongue became a sheet became a wall of flame.
But even when the fire had spread across the common-room floor and reached the men’s door, it could not slip into their bunk room and race across the mat and their abandoned clothes to wake them in their beds. The door lips were too good a fit. Wood swells. The flames could only climb to singe and blister the outer, painted surface of their door, then set to work on the soft joists, the panels of the ceiling and the timbers of the roof.
The fire and smoke were drawn instead by their love of space towards the light and towards the open door on to the veranda where Festa slept. They sent their roasting thermals and simooms out of the furnace through the unprotected door to rape the cooler air with singed and pungent breath. If Festa woke before the flames reached her or the smoke suffocated her, she’d either have to squeeze her plump and warmly brimming self through the too-small window-panes or make her escape through the fire into the common room and out into the yard. She’d not get through the common room: within five minutes of the toppled cigarette, the overheated coffee pan, the spilt kerosene, the common room was an inferno, a box of bluing flames, containing all the gaseous wastes of burning wood. Hot walls. Hot floors. And a furnace ceiling returning its white heat on to itself until it broke through into the open air beyond the roof and sent its celebrating fireball up to the sky to glut on oxygen. Now all the self-consuming blues within the study house leaped up, five metres high, to liberate their reds and yellows on the roof.
This – the bang – was when the three men woke. Their door had lost its middle panel and the bunk room was already filling with smoke. The whole house sounded like a grounded ship, protesting timbers and collapsing joists, the fire as swelling and as rolling as the sea. It didn’t take them long to spot the one way out. One of them smashed the bunk-room window with a stool then knocked out the centre struts to make a hole big enough for them to squeeze through. It didn’t matter that they cut their hands and chests and didn’t have time to dress or rescue any of their clothes. The flames were catching up with them and torching the two bunks and their bedding. Their oxygen had disappeared. Their lungs and legs were scorched.
It wasn’t warm outside. Their naked backs were cold. Thank goodness for the flames. They stood and watched the study house blaze and carbonize. They watched the fusing and the melting of the metal pipes, the draining-board, the door handles and locks. They listened to the tom-tom of the exploding window-panes in the house and its veranda. They watched the fire attempt – and fail – to cross the remains of that once-fine garden to the outer walls and bid for freedom in the undergrowth.
It was not long before the study house was a charred and branded frame containing embers, cinders, charcoal, bone ash. All that remained (apart from a protracted claim from Festa’s family against the Institute for neglect and damages) were concrete steps, foundation bricks, a sink, a seared and smelted fridge, charred and wheezing wood, the blackened metal corners of Joseph’s fussy suitcase, a pall of drifting, marinating smoke and the deep, nostalgic smell of boys and bonfires.
No one could say exactly when Festa had been kippered and cremated or whether she had even had the chance to try to save her life. At first, it did not occur to the men that anyone had died. They themselves had slept too late as usual. The world would have breakfasted and gone to work before they woke. Their three missing colleagues would be where they always were by that time in the morning, down on the coast pursuing doctorates, up to their knees in flame-consuming sea.
15
Syl took the Friday train down to the coast, a seven-hour journey of mostly sleep and fields. It ended, late afternoon, in heavy rain, then heavy traffic during the cheap, unlicensed taxi ride to the hillside neighbourhoods in a moonlighting student’s car. Her pirate fare, he said, would help to educate an architect. ‘No tip for that,’ she muttered to herself.
They reached the family home in fading daylight. The house, one of only three on an unmetalled side road above Deliverance Park, was dark and silent from outside, no light or radio or music. The window shutters had not been lowered but her parents’ car was missing from the rattan-covered port. Syl was relieved. No car, no bodies in the house, at least. If her parents were not at home, there was still the probability they would return intact from their field trip, from their untypical delays, so that the squabbles with their daughter could begin.
Syl was nervous, nevertheless, of the empty rooms. A family home is always full of alarming corners and portentous doors, and places that are frightening to pass or face. She’d have to overcome her contempt for student architects. She asked the taxi driver – he said his name was Geo and that he was in no hurry – to come with her to check the house. And then to have a coffee or a beer, if he had the time. Who knew what she might find inside? Whatever happened, she wouldn’t want to find it on her own, or have to open doors, or have to spend the evening alone without the usual comforts and distractions. Geo was convenient, as well as reasonably presentable, already mesmerized, and (she realized at once) doggedly compliant. She’d put him to good use. She might even require him to stay all night. He could prove to be a bore. His Zappa underlip, his drystone necklace and his little self-regarding name were evidence of that. But at least his car would be useful.
They parked at the bottom of the garden steps and ran up to the porch through splashing rain. Syl’s hands, she was surprised to find, were trembling. She blamed it on the shaking tensions of the journey and the night of drink and dreams. She could not credit herself with any family feelings but she could hardly put the key into the lock. Geo had to do it for her. He was tense and shaking too, but for lesser reasons.
Syl took deep breaths. What had become of her? Where was the irritated, stalwart girl who only yesterday had dumped the MetroGnome in what seemed at the time like the shedding of a straitjacket? Now she felt as if her skin was too tight, that she could split and burst at any moment. This was a familiar sensation. She’d often trembled in this porch, and at this door. She’d often failed to fit the key into the lock. It was the outer chamber where, as an adolescent, she’d always had to sober up, compose her hair and clothes, rub the wildness and the chemistry from her euphoric and expanded pupils, hide her habits and her purchases, and try to reach her bed before her father, book in hand, could peer out of his room to say, ‘You’re late,’ or ask, infuriatingly, if she had had ‘an interesting evening’. To cross this threshold was to cross the Styx. Sins were discovered there, and questions asked. She would be judged. Now, no longer adolescent, in this brief shelter from the rain, the image of the Styx was doubly relevant and chilling. Something ancient and intuitive was telling her that she was entering the chambers of the dead. This was the gateway to the underworld. Geo was her ferryman. She’d have to call him Charon from now on.
The threshold of the house was swollen. The front door jammed, as ever, and Syl had to show her driver where to push to ease it open. The darkness of the house fell out into the darkness of the street. She called out cheerily from the open doorway, switching on the porch, the landing and the stairway lights, one at a time. Not panicking. They did not want to alarm anyone, particularly themselves, if anyone was there. She filled the empty spaces with her father in his dressing-gown, her mother crossing the upper landing with her hair wrapped in a towel. She even hoped to hear them say, ‘You’re late.’
No sound, except the drumming of the rain and those disgruntled mutterings t
hat houses always make when lights come on.
Otherwise, everything seemed as it had always seemed, the must of books, the jackets hung across the banisters, the line of little country rugs along the wooden floor on which she’d loved to slide and ride when she was small, the pile of shoes, the pile of magazines, the bicycle her mother never used, the shadow-loving potted fern, the frame of family photographs, the clean and cooking smell of placid lives. Syl gathered up the mail from the floor and stacked it on the bottom stair. Then, holding on to Geo’s jacket like a child, she started looking in the rooms. Downstairs first. The living room. The kitchen. The clutter room. The garden studio. The storage cupboard. No signs of life. Not even moths or mice. And then the upper floor.
Syl was most fearful when they reached the closed door of her mother’s bedroom. Closed doors were always ominous, but when her mother’s door was closed it meant, Do Not Disturb, I have a migraine, or I’m sleeping; I’m lying in the dark with Father in my arms; I’m in a temper, let me be; I am cocooned.
Syl hesitated. She even knocked, but then went in behind the taxi driver. In the few split seconds before Geo found the lamp switch and the room was snapped alive by light, she still had time to mistake the twisted shadows and misread the grey shapes on the bed.
Now, at last, there was some evidence of recent life. There was an almost empty tea-glass and a dish, the fruit rinds harvested by ants and sugar flies, on the bedside table. Her mother’s cotton nightdress lay across the pillow. The bed was still unmade. One of the windows was wide open and two days of intermittent rain, dripping from the blinds, had made a wet patch on the floorboards and the rug. The bedclothes and the coverlet were damp. A book – Calvino’s Antonyms – was on the floor. Another – The Goatherd’s Ancient Wisdom, which she’d bought her father for his birthday, mostly to annoy him – was on the dresser under a pot of orange house spurge.