Burning Bright

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Sixteen,’ says Paul Parrett. A faint, responsive sweat tingles in his armpits. ‘Really sixteen?’

  ‘Yeah, guaranteed. No kidding. I wouldn’t mess you about. I mean, it’s wasting my time as much as yours, isn’t it?’

  ‘Six weeks.’

  ‘Could be as much as two months, I got to be honest with you. But it’ll be worth it. We could be talking long-term here. And, like I said, Vick’ll fill in for the time being –’

  ‘No. No. We’ll leave it like that. You let me know when.’

  ‘Soon as I can. The only thing is –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If Kai gets in contact with you –’

  ‘Kai’s not in on it?’

  ‘Yeah, ‘course he is, he’s my partner. But not till it’s all ready to roll, just in case there’s a problem.’

  ‘No funny stuff.’

  ‘No, this is straight.’

  ‘Isn’t it always?’

  The safe line goes quiet. If it’s safe, of course. Paul Parrett takes off his jacket, walks to the window. Night-time London blossoms beneath him. The smoky, reinforced windows don’t open, but he leans his cheek against the glass for coolness. The glass is rainy. Amplified bubbles of it roll down towards his eyeball. He can smell his own sweat.

  The service station hums and glows as if it’s been dropped from Mars. Nadine stumbles as she gets out of the car, shivering. Cold night air wraps round her legs. Kai clicks the central locking. He’s got rid of the van and she misses it, in spite of the rust, and the springs sticking into her buttocks. It felt like home. The hired BMW doesn’t smell of anything except air-freshener. She’d thought it was Kai’s at first, when he picked her up at the end of the street with her suitcases. Ten o’clock, they’d agreed, and his car radio was giving the news as she climbed in. But they hadn’t left the city straight away. He’d had to call in at two or three addresses, to leave messages, to see people. It was all business and she’d stayed in the car listening to the radio. She wasn’t looking where they were going and suddenly there was her school, a dark ghost of itself, with one security light burning over the main entrance. Nobody home. She looked back: she’d never see it again. Have a nice life, Nadine Light, eight GCSEs taken a year early, one of our highflyers. Nadine Light, half-way through her Α-level course when she suddenly stopped being able to read. But they didn’t know that. Only the essays coming in late and the coursework not done and the lessons missed. Nadine Light standing in the staff-room, face sullen, averted. A disappointment. ‘After all we’ve done for you,’ said their eyes. ‘Not university material,’ said the headmistress’s report. A BTec maybe? What that girl needs is six months behind a shop counter, then she’ll appreciate all we’ve done for her. Five years on an assisted place and nothing to show for it.

  It was past midnight by the time they got on the road, and the night was clear with a rind of moon. Kai accelerated on to the ring-road and the city shrivelled behind them. At the blue motorway turn-off they’d shot across the path of a lorry spangled with lights, carrying its freight of darkness, then they were on the slip-road. Kai put his foot down, the car leaped, then steadied, and the miles started to fold away behind them. She lay back in her seat. She was away, she was safe.

  Behind her, in the past, a tree was flowering in her parents’ garden. It was the orange-blossom. There was one in the front garden, and one in the back. The scent taunted her, brushing her face, then retreating into dry dusty caverns of leaves. She had loved it so much. She had sat inside the bush, cross-legged, longing, teasing her lips with white flowers. No one knew where she was.

  She had stood under the mock-orange, waiting for Kai. She pushed her bags into the shadow of the hedge in case anyone passed who recognized her. There was a bus-stop near by so it wouldn’t look strange if she stood there, waiting. She looked up through the flowering branches. The street-lights smudged them but they were more delicate in dusk than they were in the sun. At the last moment she saw how beautiful they were.

  Four lads in a car went by, shouting and whistling at her out of the windows. A bus slowed for her, but speeded up when she didn’t put up her hand. Five to ten. Five more minutes. Behind her, in the house, Lulu would be deep in dreams. They were hers and no one could touch them. Not even their mother could follow Lulu there, interpreting, moving her lips as Lulu moved hers. Lulu would moan and gargle or lie still in the shadows of the night-light which was always on, because Lulu hated the dark.

  Their mother was making lists again. They were selling everything, going away. Away over the sea to the centre which could help Lulu. For months they had been studying brochures and calculating their finances. If they sold the house they could do it. Nadine would be fine. She’d transfer to the tech and get a room with a nice family near by. The centre was a village of pale wood, lost in vegetable gardens, orchards and pinewoods. Here Lulu would live. Here were the kitchens where her mother would work. And her father spoke German, he could work in the office. It was all arranged. There was everything Lulu needed. Conductive education: repatterning, intensive speech therapy, hydrotherapy, music therapy, art therapy. One to one, two to one, three to one. All for Lulu, grunting and rolling in her wheelchair, fighting free of the world which pinned her down.

  Nadine blanked out Lulu’s cries, the smell of tonight’s sausages, her mother scrabbling under the sideboard to check for woodworm, her hair tied up with one of Daddy’s socks. She stood still under the tree with her suitcase ready and thought of nothing. A glossy car peeled out of the stream of traffic and pulled in at the kerb. She frowned, looked away, tugged her bags closer so it was clear what she wasn’t waiting for. Men coasted these roads all night. The car hooted and she flicked a glance at it. It was Kai.

  There are oily puddles on the service station forecourt. It must have been raining here, though it was dry at home. She saunters over to look at a bucketful of carnations while Kai fills the petrol tank. The flowers are giftwrapped in foil and cellophane but some of their petals are brown. Not worth the money, she decides, though it would be nice to put flowers on the table when they arrive.

  ‘Do you want coffee?’ calls Kai.

  ‘No, let’s get on.’

  She’s glad when they are back on the motorway. If they could go on for ever, with the traffic thinning and the road wide and black in front of them like a strip of liquorice. When they’re driving they seem to belong together. Kai opens the glove compartment and pulls out a bar of fruit and nut chocolate and a bag of toffees. He must have bought them in the service station. She feeds him chocolate piece by piece, and dissolves a square on her own tongue, rubbing the raisins clean of chocolate and then biting out their plump hearts. For once Kai doesn’t put on a tape; he hums to himself a growly little tune on five notes. In the back are her bags with her clothes and a few books and her building society savings book into which her grandparents have been putting money each year since she was born. She has nearly two thousand pounds. Her dowry. It was to help her through college. It doesn’t matter, since she’ll be getting a job. The road is dry and the tyres hold firmly as Kai pulls out to overtake. On the digital display his speed flickers to the late nineties, then down.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ says Kai.

  ‘I’m not tired. Put some music on.’

  ‘It’s all crap. I forgot to bring any tapes.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I wish we could go on and on, just driving through nothing.’

  He looks round at her and smiles, then begins to whistle his song.

  ‘When I was a kid,’ he says, ‘that’s just what I wanted. Sometimes I’d walk to the edge of our village and stare down the road going south. You don’t know what they’re like, our Finnish villages in the middle of nowhere. One day I’ll take you there, then you’ll see what I mean. There’s nothing like it here in England. Little places scattered in the forest. Fishing in summer. Tiny farms miles apart. No tourists because it was too far from anywhere. People came into the village to the dance hall o
nce a week to dance tango and drink in the car park. Get drunk, throw up, go home. All the respectable people inside going round and round and round. Maybe it’s changed now: I don’t know.’

  Nadine smiles in the darkness. Kai is lit up for her by the soft glamour of midsummer nights she’s never seen.

  ‘When I was fourteen I’d go and drink in the car park with my friends, because we didn’t dare ask the girls to dance. Boys are boys.’

  This is one of Kai’s sayings. He has several and she knows them well. Life is difficult. Boys are boys. He uses them ironically but he uses them.

  ‘My grandmother had a story she used to tell me,’ Kai went on. ‘Where I grew up was close to the sea, on the north-west coast, you know?’

  She nods. She’s looked it up, of course, in the City Library atlas which shows the tiniest village, the most fragile serration of international boundaries. And there it was, north of Vaasa, north of Kokkola, way up the coast. Her face flushed in the reference library as she lighted on its name.

  ‘She told me about a woman who lived in the snowstorms. A kind of spirit, I suppose. My grandmother had a name for her, but I’ve forgotten it – I was only about six when she stopped telling me stories. All the old people believed in spirits, but they never talked about them except to the kids. My mother would have been angry if she’d known.

  ‘The snow-woman was the most beautiful woman in the world. If you were out alone on the ice you might hear her singing, and if you listened or called to her, she’d come. She had gifts she gave to human children. You’d go to her, thinking you were going to get one of those gifts, but as soon as she touched you, you belonged to her.

  ‘She’d rock you in her arms until you fell asleep. Next morning your parents would find you frozen on the ice. All us kids knew about it. We used to whisper the spirit stories. My grandmother told us that each winter as the sea froze near our village, the snow-woman came closer. On a windy night when snow was coming from the north my grandmother would put her finger to her lips and make us listen, and she’d whisper: “Shh. Can you hear her? Can you hear her calling?”

  ‘I always wanted to find the snow-woman and get her gifts. I knew I was cleverer than my grandmother. Maybe I was cleverer than the snow-woman, and stronger too, no matter what my grandmother said. I’d trick her. I’d snatch her gift and run off with it. I kept pestering my grandmother. “What’s the gift? Where does she keep it?” I thought it must be toys or something to eat. But she wouldn’t tell me. She sat drinking coffee and saying nobody knew. I wanted to knock her off her stool against the stove and keep her there till she told me.

  ‘But I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough. So I decided to find out for myself. I didn’t tell anyone, not even the other kids. I put on my snowsuit and my skis, and buttoned my cap over my ears and skied away from my grandmother’s house. By the sea the snow was rough. I took off my skis and walked. The ice was hard and crusty and it hurt my feet through my boots. It was all white in front of me, and there was a noise of wind, just like my grandmother had said. But there was no snow coming. I knew how to tell. I walked and walked.’

  ‘On the ice?’

  ‘Yes. I kept listening. I’d never been alone like that before. I knew if she was going to come, she’d come now, when I was all alone in the middle of the ice. When I looked ahead the air seemed to dance. You don’t last long in that cold, if you get lost. My face was hurting. I cried a bit, but that hurt too because my snot froze on my cheeks. Then I got angry. The snow-woman was supposed to be looking for children. Why the fuck didn’t she come? So I started yelling for her, the way I used to yell at my mother when she made me mad.’

  ‘Did she come?’

  ‘No. Nobody came. I kept on shouting. I didn’t know how to go home. Luckily a man heard me, who’d been fishing on the ice. You know, they make holes. He was going back to shore because it was getting dark. He couldn’t believe there was a kid out there, alone. Later my grandmother told me what I was shouting. “Come here, you fucking snow-woman! Devils and Satans take you, you bitch!” All the words I’d learned from my grandfather when he was alive. This man wasn’t from our village, so I didn’t know him. He carried me to shore and into our village, and asked whose I was. I kicked him with my boots all the way home. I was lucky he didn’t leave me there on the ice.’

  ‘So you never got your gift.’

  ‘No chance. My grandmother cried and my mother pulled off my snowsuit and beat me with a wooden spoon. She was so ashamed of my bad language. “I don’t know where he’s picked it up,”’ he mimics savagely. ‘And my mother shouted at my grandmother, later on, after everybody else had gone. She never told us spirit stories again. That was thirty years ago. Everyone was moving to the cities, away from the country. They were afraid people would think they were peasants. If it was now, people at Helsinki University would be chasing my grandmother with a tape-recorder, to get her stories for their archives. But she’s dead. She couldn’t live in the city. My mother wanted to take me south. My grandmother was nearly eighty: she was forty when my mother was born. Nobody wanted to hear her stories, except us kids. My mother hated all that old stuff.’

  A sign flashes by, too fast for Nadine to read it. ‘How far is it now?’ she asks.

  ‘Another hour on the motorway. Try to sleep.’

  ‘It’s nice to talk.’

  But Kai’s silent. He’s never talked to her about his childhood before. Surely that means they’re getting closer? But it’s so hard to know with Kai. There are so many things you can’t say. Things like ‘I missed you. I want to be with you.’ But she’s going to be with him now. She’s got nothing to worry about. Of course he’s busy – all those telephone calls and trips. That’s the way business goes. It takes time to set up a deal. Kai’s in property, mainly, and it’s not a good time. He has other interests as well, and he and Tony are partners. It’s not like her father’s working world with its neat salary and deductions every month. It’s much more exciting.

  She’s going to be with Kai, in Kai’s house. The deal’s gone through. Tony’ll be there too, and she doesn’t know Tony that well. He’s a lot older than her, like Kai. But he seems all right, and besides he’s a friend of Kai’s. He’s known Tony for years.

  The car cruises on. She’s never understood why people talked of cars cruising before, but the word matches this car. She slides down in the seat and curls herself sideways. Maybe she will sleep, just for a while. She is nearly asleep when she hears Kai laugh once, softly. He’s remembering himself when he was little, she thinks drowsily, that boy in the middle of the ice, swearing and screaming, not knowing how near he was to death.

  She jerks awake with light on her face. She shields her eyes and cowers back in the seat, blinking. The car is stopped. It’s a policeman, big and square in the nearside window, an Alsatian on a short chain beside him, its front legs splayed and braced. The Alsatian looks at Nadine and rolls out its tongue. The policeman looks beyond Nadine, into the car.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ Kai murmurs. He opens the car door and gets out, leaving the door open. There’s a lot of noise, shouting, shrill continuous whistles, cars revving, horns, chanting – and can that be a mouth-organ? It sounds as if there are thousands of people out there. She peers behind. They’re still on the motorway, just by a service station slip-road, but all the traffic is stopped and dark shapes are running between cars, vaulting bonnets and blowing their whistles. Kids. Younger than her even. They bob in and out of the lights, grinning. Torchlight spills and dazzles, crossing beams of blue police lights. Sirens from stopped police cars whoop quietly to themselves. She presses the window button and Kai’s conversation with the policeman slices cleanly into the car.

  ‘Rave party…; clear it in half-an-hour. Road-block –’

  The Alsatian is right by Kai, its muzzle nearly touching his hand. Kai seems not to notice it. The heavy expensive flank of the hired car is at his side: lucky they aren’t in the old van. The young from the stopped conv
oy of cars mill across the motorway, on to the hard shoulder, scrambling towards the service station slip-road. One tattered boy juggles four clubs as he runs. His head is back and he’s laughing.

  ‘Won’t do them any good breaking through there. The service station personnel have orders not to let them in. We try to stop them using the telephones, though the leaders carry portables…;’

  ‘It must be difficult,’ agrees Kai.

  The policeman drops his voice, confidential. ‘We’re not making arrests at present. Once we know the venue we can do something. They’re waiting for the signal now. There’s always a lot of hanging about. Funny sort of way of enjoying yourself, but they can afford it. No jobs to go to in the morning – they’ve all the time in the world, this lot.’ His tone is observant but uncritical, as if he’s talking about a herd of cattle which has got on to the road.

  Kai laughs. ‘What it is to be young,’ he comments. The policeman smiles politely, but his automatically assessing gaze flicks to Nadine in the car, as if noting for the first time the twenty years between Kai and her young, pale, upturned face.

  He’s no fool, thinks Nadine. For God’s sake, Kai, don’t say any more…; get back in the car….

  Spidery bodies race back down the motorway embankment. There’s a flash of light, an outburst of whistling, cries, the sound of reversing engines. The policeman stiffens. His dog smiles, showing teeth.

  ‘Right, sir. Best get in your vehicle and wait here,’ he says and sets off at a steady half-run.

  ‘Look! Those cars are going through the gap. They’re doing a U-turn – they must be heading back north.’

  Tyres screech, two police cars rock towards the central barrier, find the gap and nose through. Hands reach down and bang the roofs as they pass. Then they’re through and chasing off up the motorway. A nearby policeman talks urgently into his radio, then lopes off along the verge. More and more cars swerve into the gap and away. There are sirens hawing in the distance, reinforcements coming up from the south, their blue flashes miles off. Everywhere kids pile into cars and vans which are already moving away as the last body hurls itself through the door. There’s a frenzy of car horns, flying crests of hair, shoehorned bodies. Faces gape at windows. The hunt turns, streams and flattens down for the race up the motorway.