Burning Bright

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘They’ve gone,’ says Nadine.

  Behind them lorry-drivers get back into their cabs and overnight salesmen put coats back on hooks in the backs of cars. Law abiding, the remaining traffic hovers, waiting for the off. Engines start and turn over, but no one goes forward until a police motorbike comes up alongside, going slowly along the line of stopped traffic as its rider speaks to the drivers.

  ‘Right, sir. The road’s clear ahead.’

  The knotted traffic stirs as vehicles edge into position. A few minutes later they are humming down the motorway again, each car or lorry a separate pencil of light. The incident’s over.

  ‘Just as well we were in this car,’ says Nadine.

  ‘Money’s the one language every policeman in the world speaks,’ says Kai.

  ‘You didn’t try and give him money!’

  ‘No need. He only had to look at the car.’

  ‘He might have thought you’d stolen it.’

  ‘Do I look like a thief?’ Kai turns to Nadine and smiles, then flashes his lights to make the car ahead pull over. The soft, supple, leather jacket. The shoes. The heavy hand-made cotton shirt. The old-fashioned gold watch. None of it too new, all of it living on Kai as if it had been born there. Money might not be Kai’s native language, but he certainly speaks it well. Nadine lifts his left hand off the steering-wheel. She rubs her cheek against the jacket, breathes in. The smell of leather, the smell of money.

  ‘I love this jacket,’ she says.

  ‘We’ll get you one. You’ll look good in leather.’

  Five

  The scrubbed floorboards are scabby and cool under Nadine’s feet. Kai said the whole house smelled of cat’s piss. It was all coming from this room. He scrubbed the boards with a bristling wooden-backed scrubbing brush, then he bought a yellow plastic mop and bucket and swilled the floor with boiling water and washing soda. The planks are swollen and the grain of the wood is raised. Later they’ll sand down the wood, seal it, make it smell of clean pine and resinous varnish. She slides the soles of her feet gently backward and forward while her bare body cools until it feels dense as marble. Behind her the bed is a warm, sweat-damp heap of expensive linen and Liberty covers. It smells of sex and new goods, and it’s too hot to lie there through hours of summer twilight when she can’t sleep. Kai can always sleep. He’s asleep now, behind her, on his back in the centre of the bed, one arm flung up and crooked behind his head, palm open.

  There was a cat in this room when they first moved in. Nadine saw her streak across the landing, followed her, found the nest of torn newspaper and ginger kittens. She would have shut the door on them and gone away until the kittens were full grown. There were plenty of rooms. But Kai and Tony were close behind her, going through the house room by room, deciding what had to be done. They opened the door and there was the cat, back arched, legs stiff, covering her kittens, spitting and showing her teeth. She was a feral cat, Kai said, who must have got in somehow when the door was left open. She’d been looking for somewhere safe to give birth.

  Kai got rid of her. He did not want animals in the house. The carpet stank of cat piss and cat shit, so he and Tony rolled it up and it went into the skip along with the sodden underfelt and the litter of newspaper. The kittens were half grown. Kai baited a box with mackerel and trapped the mother in it, then it was easy to drop the kittens in after her. They were straggle-limbed writhing creatures with needle-sharp teeth: even Nadine couldn’t make herself want to touch them or tame them. A kitten twisted in the air as Kai half lifted and half threw it into the box. A narrow red thread of blood zipped down his arm. He stopped, holding his arm, looking at the small bright beads of welling blood.

  ‘Have we got any disinfectant?’

  There was nothing but bleach. Kai poured salt into water and swabbed his arm.

  ‘Filthy creatures. God knows what they’re carrying.’

  Kai hates sickness. He does not like blood or dirt. When Nadine has her period she flushes the toilet twice so that he will not be disgusted by small floating cardboard tubes, tipped with red at one end. Yet he’ll want sex during her period.

  Now, after five weeks, the room is habitable. Floor by floor, room by room, they are occupying the house. Until two nights ago Nadine and Kai slept downstairs in the drawing-room, with its marble fireplace covered in liverish paint and its floor-length windows. Their bed was a raft of new, expensive brass. They can do what they like in this house. The spaces are vacant, unmarked by furniture, waiting for the word.

  ‘Let’s have this as our bedroom. What about this for you, Tony? It’s nice with the plane tree outside the window.’

  The four-storey house is as fluid as a child’s brick playhouse. Anything might happen here.

  Nadine stands up. She is naked but for the ghost-haze of last year’s suntan bikini. She steps out quietly to the brocade chair, beached on pale boards, where Kai has slung his jeans and his heavy cotton sweater. The sweater cuffs brush the floor, nearly hiding Kai’s gold watch. It looks careless, this arrangement of cloth and gold, but by now Nadine knows that Kai is never really careless. Blindfold, he could trace the ticking of that watch as easily as the beat of his own heart. It is valuable. It represents a past which he doesn’t yet possess, just as this house does. Kai’s slim heavy dark gold watch with its old-fashioned face and inscription on the back in minute flowing cursive: To Captain Robert Denville on the occasion of his marriage, 28th September 1924. The watch and its history have nothing to do with Kai, but it’s not out of place on his wrist, the strap pushing flat the dark hairs that grow there. Nadine bends and touches the sweater, then stops. The jeans’ legs are buckled where Kai has stepped out of them. They hold the shape of his body so strongly that he’s bound to wake if she touches them. She glances round. He’s still sleeping. For once he’s vulnerable. It happens so rarely that she stops to enjoy the quiet-breathing room, the sleeping man, her own power. The only other time she feels like this is when Kai strips off his clothes at night, his back to her, and then turns and walks to the bed where she lies propped on her elbows, reading. She turns, looks up and sees his erection. It’s part of him, but at the same time it’s apart from him. It’s like a present which can’t be wrapped up or hidden. What if nobody wants it?

  Often Kai comes home even later than she does, and she’s late enough after the evening shows at the Warehouse. He smells of night air, tobacco, drink. He’s lit up and triumphant. Things are going well, he tells Nadine. Another deal’s firming up. She is naked. He holds her tight against his jacket. The cool supple graininess of leather moves against her skin. It is like being enfolded by an animal. She rubs against the leather and her legs part.

  Kai sleeps on safely. Her thin-boned brown hand slides into the fold of his jeans, searching for the pocket slit. Kai lies like a dead man, like a man buried in sleep. But he might open his eyes any minute. When he does he’s awake at once, wary and alert. He doesn’t wake up bleary like Nadine, burrowing back into the bed’s heat. He snaps out of sleep between one second and the next. His features tighten. There’s no tenderness in the mornings with Kai, no blurred moments of murmuring and dozing. He’s up and off.

  I must have a cigarette, Nadine excuses herself, feeling deeper into the pocket. Kai doesn’t like her smoking, but when she’s run out of cigarettes late at night he’ll always find a new packet in a drawer somewhere and give it to her, the cigarettes snug in their wrap, fresh and moist. If he sees her going through his pockets she’ll say she was looking for cigarettes. She risks another glance round. Kai has turned away on to his side. Deeper and deeper into his pockets her hand goes, her narrow hand which he so admires. She draws out a packet.

  New banknotes are just as fresh and moist as cigarettes. She eases them over the lip of the pocket. The money is dense but pliable, and surprisingly heavy. The band around the notes is unbroken and it’s too tight for her to slip them out or fan the edges of the notes and count them without the risk of the band tearing. Then he’ll know
she’s been in bis pockets. The notes smell of new books with a touch of metal. They have bent where Kai shoved them down into the bottom of his pocket. Nadine fingers the edges. Fifty-pound notes. Three thousand, perhaps? Probably more, carelessly stuffed into Kai’s jeans. What’s the difference between a naked woman holding three thousand pounds and one with empty hands? She smiles. It’s not so much what you can do with the money; it’s what can’t be done to you once you’ve got it. Money’s another kind of cover.

  Kai always has money. If he’s got a bank account she’s never seen him use it, and he doesn’t use credit cards. No electronic spider can trace Kai through a web of his signatures on credit card blanks: a tank of petrol bought here, a meal bought there, an overnight stay, air tickets. Easily traced. His transactions don’t show up on any maps. It’s Nadine with her casual wages who has a smart grey cheque-book and two cards in plastic folders and a monthly statement addressed to the house. Tony has money too, but she rarely sees him use it. Tony has ‘arrangements’, a system of exchanges which works without cash. For Tony the city is like one of those tourist maps where you press a button to light up you are here. The people and places where he does business are brilliant and the rest are blanks. Asda and Sainsbury can wink and glisten, Marks & Spencer can open a new wing, Tesco can crowd itself with special offers, but none of them affects Tony’s economy.

  Once Nadine went with Tony to buy wine from a warehouse down by the canal. Tony was acting big. Money was on its way, and you could hear it coming. Things had to be done in bulk, in style. There was a snap in the air like the first frost. Yes, the money was so close now that you could nearly smell it.

  And now she can. She sniffs the wad of notes. It is cool and reassuring in her hands, like good luck. That day Tony had got hold of a white Transit van and parked it by a peeling garage door at the back of the warehouse. Nadine got out and stood in the sun. There was honesty flowering in one corner of the yard. Buddleia burst its way through the beaten-up roof. Tony knocked at a side door and a man let them into a cave-like concrete warehouse. It smelled of earth and air which had been closed in all winter. There were no bottles, no labels, no descriptions. It was cold too. The man saw Nadine shiver and fetched a two-bar electric fire which mottled her legs as she waited. Lists were spread out on the desk. Tony leaned over them, ran a finger down, pointed. They talked in Italian and Nadine stopped trying to follow. At last the men shook hands, coffee was brought with grappa, and by the time Nadine and Tony went out into the sun Tony’s boxes had already been loaded into the back of the van. No money, no signatures.

  Nadine went to London with Kai. They took taxis everywhere and kept them waiting outside shops, clocking up time. It didn’t matter. The whole weekend went by in a soft noise of money. They went to shops where girls of her age drifted and fingered and giggled, not dreaming of buying. Nadine and Kai were borne past on their wave of money. She was different now, not free to loiter and spray expensive perfumes on to her wrist until the smells blurred and cancelled one another out. She had to make choices. When Kai bought the brass bedstead he paid in cash, peeling off notes from his calfskin wallet. He stood there in his battered deck shoes on his raft of money. He knew what he wanted next: linen sheets, plain white.

  ‘Feel these, Nadine,’ he told her. ‘After all, you’re going to be sleeping in them.’ He only ever used her name now. Never dear, never darling.

  ‘Superb quality,’ the shopman murmured sacramentally, tweaking a pillowcase. Superb, thought Nadine. One of those words nobody uses in real life. Around them people lifted and looked and felt, not buying. An invisible chapel of money surrounded Nadine and Kai and the shopman. Inside the chapel there was a holy echo of money and voices talking about money without ever saying the word aloud. Kai didn’t ask the price of anything.

  ‘Will these do?’ he asked Nadine.

  Her voice was small and cool as she answered, ‘Yes. But we’ll need three sets. We can’t wash linen at home. These will have to be sent away to the laundry.’

  He smiled at her approvingly. He liked her to display such knowledge, but she had so little of it. She had never touched linen sheets in her life, though she had read a book on household management – Mrs Beeton perhaps – one rainy caravan holiday in the Gower when there was nothing else to read. Rain on the roof, a bible of housekeeping on her lap (all those things she was never going to need to do), the taste of chocolate – Mars bars cut into slivers so they’d last – Lulu wasn’t there. She must have been in respite care.

  The house was a cash sale too, dirt cheap. How many inches of money had it cost? She wasn’t there to see. No trips to estate agents with the two of them clearly a couple, no lists of particulars or young men in cheap suits ushering them through carefully tidied sitting-rooms. Buying this house was like buying a ship which had been wrecked at sea, towed into port and sold off at auction. The shipwreck had left the structure and some surprisingly intact detail – a cornice, some exquisite moulding, a frieze of nursery-rhyme characters in an upstairs room with barred windows, one porcelain cup hanging on a hook in the kitchen. But tides of dirt and neglect had beaten over the hull year after year and it was barnacled, stripped by crabs and nibbling shoals of little fish. The whole creaking structure of it, laced with parasites and dependants, was knocked down to Tony and Kai. It had all been under the water for years.

  The banknotes are springy against the tips of Nadine’s fingers as she shoves them back into the soft white cotton lining of Kai’s jeans pocket. Jeans, sweater, gold watch, roll of money: Kai’s equipment. In the mornings Kai dresses and is gone. Some nights it surprises her to find him home when she gets back late from a second showing. His departing back looks so final. There’s no promise of return in it.

  Did he stir just then? Is he pretending to sleep, testing her to find out if she will take his money? No, he is still as a stone. She only asks questions of Kai when she knows he is asleep.

  ‘All that money,’ she whispers. ‘All that money, Kai! Where does it come from?’

  She slides back into bed beside him, her bare cool skin prickling with anticipation, as it does whenever she touches him. After a minute she lifts her head to look at his face. Under his eyes the skin is pulpy. He has a weak chest and last winter he had bronchitis so badly it frightened her. She hadn’t known him long then. She can hear his breath creak inside the narrow tubes of his chest when she lays her head against it. It sounds as if there’s a bird’s nest in there. He ought to lose weight, but she likes him as he is. His colour is bad tonight, as it was just after his bronchitis. That might be just the light filtering in through the dirty lace curtains and dirty magnificent windows. The windows haven’t been cleaned for years, ANGIE 4 DICK someone has written, and baz wuz yer. There’s been no one living here properly for so long, unless you count Enid upstairs. Seven years, Kai says. Seven years of dust silting in curtains which are held up by tacks because the brass poles were the first things to go, seven years of blistering paint, newspapers rucked and yellowing under doors, mouse droppings in the kitchen, crisp spider-wrapped packages of flies. The house has had five owners in seven years. The property market has never come right. Prices don’t go up as they used to any more. Each new owner waited a year or so for the sudden rise, like beautiful fireworks signalling the sell-off. But nothing happened. The market stalled or crept up or down by an inch. They cut their losses and sold without doing more than stir up the dust, sell scrap metal from the backyard, try to bully the sitting tenant out of her attic.

  Kai can’t bear dirty things to touch him. The new sheets, bluish-white like skimmed milk, are tangled into ropes where Nadine and Kai have tossed and sweated and kicked and twisted. A new duvet with a Liberty cover swells over the bedstead. They are buoyed up on brass and rust and rose and bronze. They have two pillows each and a bolster which he took from an apartment in Rouen. He might have bought it, paying off the concierge in French notes as immaculate as his English ones, or perhaps he just walked out of the bui
lding with the bolster under his arm like a corpse. No one would have stopped him, because Kai always looked as if he had a right to do what he was doing.

  ‘Feel how firm it is!’ said Kai, thumping the ticking stripes. Nadine smelled shuttered French rooms.

  Nadine has polished the bedstead until its brass knobs wink at her. The bed is a promise of what is going to happen, in this bare room with its streaky wallpaper, its damp patches on the plaster, its thick hook set in the ceiling as if for you to hang yourself there. The curtains don’t fit. Lace roses make maps of lighter and darker grime. The curtains are slung up on a plastic washing-line which dips in the middle, showing a few inches of glass. Outside, the grubby sky is changing to violet. Where the sash cord has rotted, Nadine has wedged the window open, and warm petrol-laden air blows in.

  Kai rolls, pinning her shoulder. He is heavy and when he is asleep he spreads out to claim the bed. She braces herself on her left elbow and shoves him away. Kai is always warm, and now the steady pulse of his body heat has settled for the night. He’ll be fresh for tomorrow. Things to do, people to see. The soft July light will last for an hour or so yet. She sniffs for the thread of jasmine perfume which comes into the room at about this time, from the bush below their window. It seems as if the jasmine has been flowering for ever, just as the summer has been going on for ever. When it’s dark you’d never know that its stems are lodged in builders’ rubble, and its starry flowers are coated red with brick dust.