Burning Bright

by Helen Dunmore

  Kai’s arm lies crooked and exposed. The underside of his arm is white, but heavily muscled, invulnerable. Nadine’s little sister used to sleep like that, both arms braceleted around her head. The only time Lulu looked like other children was when she was relaxed by sleep, eyes shut, limbs sunk into the mattress. Nadine knew the names of all those muscles once. She did them at school. The hair in Kai’s armpit is straight and silky. She’s been staring at him too long. He’s beginning to make no sense, like a name repeated too often. He is almost frightening.

  She wants to bury her face against his arm, but it would wake him. She wants to lick his skin and breathe in the burned smell of him, like the skin of a child who’s been playing in the sun all day. No. There’s nothing at all childlike about Kai. He just smells burned, that’s all.

  Her parents have left England. They took the van that had been adapted for Lulu’s wheelchair, and clothes, and passports, and maybe they took with them some old photographs which show Nadine squinting against sunlight in the back garden. She phoned the empty house and there was a long, low, flat sound, the sound of nowhere. She phoned again and a bright female voice answered. The new people. The back garden must be ashy with all the things her parents have burned: Nadine’s school exercise books, reports, certificates, a stack of winter clothes. Her parents have gone but she knows where they are. They know where she is too. One phone call.

  ‘I’m fine. Really fine. Staying with friends. And I’ve got a job. Yes, I’ll write. Make sure you send the address in Germany, and love to Lulu.’ Lots and lots of love to Lulu. They didn’t come after her and she knew they wouldn’t. She’s had her turn.

  ‘We’ve got to think of Lulu now. This might be her chance.’

  She imagines her mother’s face, transparent and ugly with hope. This might be Lulu’s chance. Sell anything, go anywhere. Nadine’ll be fine. It’s so respectable you could put it in a Christmas circular letter.

  ‘Nadine’s fine. Not very academic after all, as it turned out. Those GCSEs were a bit of a false dawn. Still, she’s got a job and a room in a house with friends. Oh, yes, we’re in touch. She phoned us just the other week. Nadine’s always been old for her age. Independent. You wouldn’t believe she was only sixteen.’

  No, thinks Nadine, they’d leave out the last sentence. Even an unbelievable sixteen is a bit much, a bit much to ask people to swallow. Well, she’s not sixteen any more. She’s nineteen at work and nineteen with Enid and anyone else she meets. Nineteen is fine.

  Six

  Above, the plumbing wheezes. Someone’s running water into the bath. It’s deep, claw-footed, and it takes ages to fill. Water gushes and then coughs in the pipes before it trickles into the geyser and out again in a thin boiling stream. It takes for ever. Nadine wants a bath or she’ll smell all the next day, of sweat and semen and her own vaginal juices. She likes all these smells when they are fresh, but not when they are stale and masked by a quick squirt of deodorant before work.

  ‘Nadine! Nadine! Are you there, dear? Have you got a minute?’ Nadine flips out of bed, runs to the door, calls up softly, ‘I’m coming!’

  At least Enid’s not deaf. You don’t have to bawl around the house to make her hear. So it’s Enid in the bath, her wispy hair damp round her face. She always runs the water too hot. She can manage the geyser as nobody else can. With a flick of her wrist she keeps the balance between a rush of cold and a trickle so hot it makes the geyser blow back and shut itself off. But then Enid ought to know, because Enid’s always been here.

  The geyser is huge, dangerous and stained with verdigris. Enid likes the smell of hot water, she says to Nadine, ‘Oh, hadn’t you ever noticed it, dear? Put your face over a basin of hot water, then – it smells quite different from cold.’ She’s right, it does. She likes to simmer, slowly reddening her skinny calves and thighs. Getting in is a gradual immersion, staged with small pained lip-pursings and a hiss of indrawn breath.

  ‘I…; KNOW that my redeemer liveth,’ hoots Enid from above. Nadine pads up the uncarpeted stairs, past the dirty windows on the stairway where three pigeons sit plump on the ledge. Warm used-up air moves deliciously against her, while the insides of her thighs catch as she walks, sticky with Kai’s semen, her body leaking with Kai, her nipples dark and swollen from his sucking. The big bare house echoes as she goes up through it. ‘And that He-ee-ee-ee,’ sings Enid, her voice thinning as it spreads through the sun-warmed cavern of the house. All day the tiles have been baking until they shimmer, and now they pump back stored heat into the upstairs rooms. You can scarcely breathe up in the attic, where Enid lives. Flies die of heat, and toast on the window ledges. Nadine pulls her baggy t-shirt on over her head.

  The bathroom door is off its hinges and propped up against the door frame outside, leaving a gap through which Enid and Nadine can slide with ease, although Kai and Tony have to manhandle the heavy door aside each time they want to go in. Enid doesn’t mind the lack of privacy. She likes company when she’s in the bath. She calls out again, hearing Nadine, in a hesitant old-lady voice which she knows Nadine will not be able to resist. ‘Are you there, dear? Just come in a minute, would you?’

  As soon as Nadine is through the gap and into the bathroom, Enid’s voice deepens and firms to its usual tone. ‘Nadine, just look behind the toilet a minute. The soap’s down there. The bugger slipped out of my hands when I was getting into the bath. And you know I’m not supposed to bend down.’

  Enid claims that the doctor has told her never to take a bath on her own. Since flu last winter, and pneumonia after it, she ought not to risk it. ‘Dr Govind says it’s affected my heart,’ she tells Nadine now, as she tells her every bath-time, fixing her with small peremptory eyes in which there is also a trace of genuine fear. ‘After all, what if I fainted? Who’d hear me in this mausoleum? I’ve got to think of that.’

  We’d break down the door. And then Kai’d give you the kiss of life.’

  A small discriminating grimace from Enid. ‘No, thank you, dear, it would scarcely be worth his while, would it? With an old woman like me.’ And Enid pats the wicker dirty-linen basket beside the bath, leaving a wet hand mark on its satin seat, inviting Nadine to sit there. Nadine stoops behind the pedestal, locates the soap and rinses fluff off it before handing it to Enid and sitting down. Enid soaps the small pouched purses of her breasts. These breasts fascinate Nadine. They are empty. They have outlived their purpose, as if Enid has metamorphosed into some new and unexpected creature, reborn into sexless innocence. Is this what everything comes to? Enid has voyaged through decades of being a woman and come out on the other side. Now she doesn’t bleed, she doesn’t fill and empty each month. Her buttocks are hollow and she is breastless. It’s not so long since Nadine was breastless too, and she remembers it clearly. A white ribby sheet of chest, and two nipple pimples. The freedom of swimming in a pair of cotton pants, to the indulgent smiles of adults. Then the first warning signs: small burny triangles lifting themselves from her chest, like the symptoms of a disease. And someone whispering that it was time that child stopped running round in her pants.

  Enid smiles and hands Nadine her special Castile soap. Frail ropy muscles move on Enid’s arms. Nadine worries that Enid is frighteningly thin, but then she is the only old woman whom Nadine has seen naked. Perhaps under their layers of brown and fawn and washed-out blue all old women are like this. Enid’s grey groin looks innocent as a child’s. It’s hard to believe that a baby has fattened inside Enid, has pushed his way out through those concave thighs, has blissfully petted Enid’s breasts through a trance of milk. For Enid breastfed her child for a month before it was adopted. ‘He was like a tiger for milk. I had a lovely figure, dear, and he didn’t spoil it. Two weeks after the birth my stomach was as flat as a board. Not like these girls you see sagging along. There’s no need for it.’ Enid has told Nadine the whole story. She couldn’t keep the baby, because in those days if you weren’t married there weren’t any of these benefits. You had to crawl to official
s, and then all you got was a few shillings from the National Assistance, if you were lucky. No chance of a flat either. You’d get the door shut in your face. In those days they could do as they liked. But Nadine wonders. If Enid had wanted to keep the baby, a hundred officials wouldn’t have budged her. Enid’s tough.

  Enid never wears old-lady clothes. Fawn and beige and stone are anathema to her. From behind, in her black reefer jacket, beret and ski-pants with a strap under the foot, she looks like a skinny bold twelve-year-old who’s pretending to be grown up. Her ankle socks are scarlet.

  ‘Is your Kai at home?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, but he’s asleep.’

  Enid nods, satisfied, and puts out her hand for the soap again. Her sharp glance takes in Nadine’s body, knows what it has been doing. That sort of thing doesn’t bother her at all, she’s made it quite plain. And besides, Nadine keeps Kai sweet. Enid is wary of him, and Nadine isn’t sure if it’s just because he’s the landlord or not. If only Enid wouldn’t leave the bathroom in such a state when Kai was around. And she ought to get properly dressed in the bathroom, not just wrap a little towel round herself which falls off as often as not as she clambers back upstairs to her attic. She doesn’t know how puritanical Kai can be. An old woman should not have a body, let alone risk its being seen. Enid disgusts him. He’d be well pleased with an Enid subdued in fawn and stone.

  Enid never cleans the bath after using it, because Dr Govind told her not to stoop. Often she does not flush the lavatory after using it either. The cistern is erratic and Enid is afraid it may affect her blood pressure if she stretches up and hauls on the chain. Nadine flushes it after her when she’s at home, releasing the roaring brown waterfall which it takes the cistern ten minutes to collect. Nadine wipes around the bath and rinses it too, before Kai or Tony can come upon Enid’s soap scum, Enid’s small curled grey hairs beached on the ring round the tub.

  Enid lies back, eyes closed, her weightless body bobbing. Her eye sockets are deep and sunken. They are filling up with darkness. But it’s only the way the light falls that makes her face look like a skull, not a living face at all –

  ‘Enid!’ cries Nadine, suddenly panicking.

  Enid opens her eyes. ‘What is it, dear? Is something the matter?’

  ‘You looked awful. Are you OK?’

  ‘You mean you thought I was dead. Oh, no, I’m not going to die in the bath, not with you here. Very upsetting all round. You needn’t worry about that,’ says Enid and stands up, so that water divides over her hip-bones and her small shrunken stomach, and puts out her hand for the towel Nadine gives her. Then the careful patting and drying and powdering, the gathering of the Castile soap into its special soap-box and Enid is ready, towel trailing, arms bundled with clothes and soap.

  She squeezes her way around the door, leaving the bathful of water rocking gently and puddles of water and talcum on the floor.

  ‘There you are, dear. Now you can have your bath. Just give that geyser time. It blows back if you rush it. Come up and say goodnight later on if you like, I shan’t be asleep, I’m going to do my jigsaw.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Terrible, you never saw so much sky in your life. It’s like one of those day-trips to Lincolnshire to see the bulb fields. Still, I have just put in the top of a chimney-pot, so things are looking up.’

  She goes out, across the landing, up the winding carpetless stairs to her attic room. No one comes up here. Enid does not find it stifling. She likes the heat soaking through to her bones. She stoops and picks up leggings and t-shirt. She’s never worn leggings before, but there was a pair in the Oxfam shop, so she decided to give it a try. Perfect for sleeping in, she finds. Warm and elastic, like a second skin. She pulls her WOMAD t-shirt over her head – Cancer Care – and looks at the sky spread out on the table. The jigsaw has one thousand pieces. Enid likes a challenge. Sky isn’t all the same anyway. It deepens and darkens, and there are clouds. But jigsaw sky is an even mid-blue all over. You have to forget about colour and go for shape. The best thing is not to stare too long. Catch a bit out of the corner of your eye and it fits. You have to take a jigsaw by surprise. It’s all instinct. The sky is on the table and the grass is on the floor. Enid leans down, stirs the pieces, pounces. There. That bit goes on the corner. The brown house bits are still jumbled together, not even spread out. It’s a dull jigsaw, but they are much the most satisfactory. A house, grass, sky. No clues, but everything you need. She sniffs the Johnson’s talcum powder smell settling round her.

  I wonder if you can still buy that powder Sukey bought. Rose Geranium. Sharper than roses. I used to dredge myself with it as if I was a sponge cake, till I saw the price in John Lewis one Saturday. Sukey didn’t care. I saved for weeks and bought her some, but it was no more to her than if I was delivering the milk. ‘Why, Enid, darling, that’s sweet of you.’ She always had things like that around her, so it meant nothing to her. A smell like that takes you back. You couldn’t get Floris powders in the war; you couldn’t get anything. It must have been years later I went past the perfume counter, not even thinking. Years later. And I was back there in her green bathroom, with the soap in cold glass shells and the water rocking. I never knew people had bookshelves in bathrooms, and fires, and plants so tall they were nearly trees. And the bath standing on its own feet, out in the middle of the room, so that when the fire was lit you could see the pattern of the flames on your wet skin. The flames would run up from the coals like flags. It was best coal, Welsh coal. It burned with a clear flame and no smoke. She had big Turkey towels, put away with lavender bags between the folds so you could smell it when you shook out the towels. And a low window with a window seat in it and the chestnut tree growing outside, making the light green. Sukey would sit naked in the window seat after her bath and I’d see the chestnut candles lit up behind her head. White candles. That spring we saw the hands of the chestnut leaves spread out against the window, touching it. It was the greenest thing in the world. Sukey had iris in the bathroom then, tall purple and brown iris. I sat in front of the fire reading out of a book with red covers, rough, not nice to feel. It used to catch on my nails. Λ Fairy Tale Treasury, it was called. Sukey had had it when she was a little girl.

  We needed the fire. It was April and April’s cold in Manchester. We didn’t often see sun coming through the leaves. The sky was grey, grey behind green. Long grey afternoons with the fire burning. It was everything I’d ever wanted. ‘No point going out in this, darling,’ Sukey said, and she turned the hot tap on with her toes. The hiss of rain keeping us in, the fire burning up, me on the hearthrug reading The Red Shoes. Clara danced through the forest. Dance, dance, she must keep on dancing. The only way they could stop her was to chop off her feet. I’ve never forgotten Clara’s red, bloody feet. I can see them as clearly now as I can see those green leaves. That was what you got. It was the price you had to pay. Not that I cared then, with the heat of the fire on my back.

  She looks like a dancer. Nadine. I would never have thought she belonged with those two. When I saw her come I thought for a moment she was his daughter. She’s young enough. Nineteen! She’s no more than sixteen, if she’s that. But then I saw the way he touched her. I saw her glance up at my stairs, as if she wanted to climb them and find out what was up here. I knew then she’d come and see me.

  The first time was, she didn’t know how to work the geyser. Could I show her, she asked.

  ‘There’s only me at home,’ she said. Oh, yes, she’s quick. She’d guessed I wouldn’t have come down, not if her Kai and that Tony were about. I don’t ask people up here. Jenny never came up, it doesn’t do. But there was something about the way Nadine looked up the stairs and said, ‘It must be nice up there, away from everything.’ It made me feel different. We’d run the bath and it was waiting, but I said, ‘Come and have a look if you like.’

  She didn’t say much, didn’t touch anything. I had bunches of peppermint hanging up to dry, and she did ask what they were, but n
ot in that way people ask as if they’re laughing at you inside themselves. I said I’d make her some mint tea if she liked, and so she sat down. She wasn’t bothered about the bath cooling. So we sat and talked for a bit. Nothing much, but it was nice.

  She knocks most days. ‘Enid, I’m going out to get the milk. D’you want some?’ ‘Enid, I’m sure there’s mice in the kitchen. Have you ever seen them?’ I don’t tell her I’ve seen worse than mice here, till Jenny got the cat. ‘Course her Kai’s got rid of that.

  Nineteen! If she’d any sense she’d put on a bit of make-up and not cut her hair so short. But I suppose he must like it. Some men are funny that way.

  I like having her here.

  Seven

  The bathroom is clammy with steam. Nadine pushes up the window. She won’t bother to have a hot bath, she’ll just pour cold water over herself. This is the only sash window which still works. Freshening night air flows in, carrying the city’s gabble. Police sirens flee downhill towards the docks. Each night Nadine lies awake long past midnight, listening, unable to sleep. She hears fights, cries, groans, high heels clipping past alone, much too late, much too fast, alone and frightened. When everything’s gone quiet a baby always starts to howl through an open window. It doesn’t matter how far away it is, the sound pierces her like a needle. Nothing seems to join up. She can’t read what is going on here. And Kai sleeps and sleeps. It’s as if she’s the one with the bad conscience. She can’t put her finger on what keeps her awake. There’s just this faint threatening sense of tension, as if something bad is about to happen. If she keeps awake she’ll be safe. It’s been hot too long, that’s the trouble, one flawless day following another. We need rain to wash away the dried dog shit on the pavements, the burger litter and the dust.

  It’s the end of July, and the weather’s changing. The spell is beginning to break. Quick wings of cloud are moving from the west. The leaves are dark green and drying to crisp edges. Soon it’s going to matter that there’s no heating, and many of the tiles are missing. She hasn’t got any warm clothes, only the summer stuff she came with. On the top landing there are dusty plastic buckets to catch the rain when it falls. Better not think of that now. She’ll just fetch a clean top and her jeans and go down to the kitchen and make coffee. No, not coffee – it’ll keep her awake even more. Something to eat. That tin of ravioli – has anyone eaten it? She won’t put on the kitchen light, because it’s nice in the kitchen in the half-dark. The electric lighting in this house hasn’t been touched since the twenties, Kai says. In the kitchen there’s a brass chain to pull down the big light-globe from the ceiling. Its brilliance scores your eyes and stains your retina so that even if you shut your eyes you see the same patterns pulsing red behind your lids. There aren’t any sidelights or table-lamps in the house yet, because they would overload the circuit. Even as it is the fuses blow regularly. But it’s summer and it doesn’t matter.