Burning Bright

by Helen Dunmore

  She’s got to have something to eat. Her stomach’s growling. There’s Enid’s door shutting with a squeak and a click. She must be going to bed. Often she leaves her door ajar all evening, drawing voices and music up her attic stairs and into her room. Perhaps she’s lonely and likes to listen out for the sounds of the house. Hers is the only door which closes properly, the only one which still has its brass doorknob. The rest have gone in the steady stripping of the house over years of shifting owners and disappearing tenants. Only Enid has been here all the time, the sitting tenant, riding out long silent nights in her room, lighting fires in her grate with coal which she buys in blue plastic sacks and wheels through the city streets on a buggy frame. She collars the postman to help her lug the sacks upstairs. ‘I can’t lift anything, dear. It’s my heart.’ Enid has kept her doorknob. Nadine wonders if Enid ever woke up to hear the mouse-like sounds of a screwdriver working away at the plate which secured it to the door. Did she wind herself up in her sheet and go out to tell the kneeling young thief that he might take every other doorknob in the house, but not hers?

  ‘I live here, you see, dear.’

  So much of the house has disappeared. The lead flashing, the downstairs cloakroom fittings, brass curtain rails torn out of every room, leaving holes in the plaster; the wrought-iron balcony railings sawn through and sold. Georgian cast-iron is worth money. Now the balcony is just a narrow unguarded ledge from which you step off into space. It faces south and gets the sun most of the day, so in spite of the sheer drop to the pavement Nadine still sunbathes there with one foot drooping over the void. If she kicks she touches the overgrown branches of lime and plane trees tangled together in the air. Leaves brush against her toes. No one has pollarded the limes for years. The square is a communal garden and as derelict as the houses which share it.

  A whole marble fireplace has been hacked out of the back sitting-room, but whoever took it missed the matching one in the front of the house. They must have been in a hurry, and besides, the second fireplace is disfigured with dusky red paint, mould-spotted like salami. They might not have seen that there was marble underneath. What was Enid doing while thieves hauled a six-foot wide marble fireplace through the hall and down the front steps? Did she shut herself away in her attic room, or did she peer down over the banisters and encourage them: ‘Up a little, dear! Careful now or you’ll do yourselves an injury.’

  Now the house has passed to Kai and Tony in its time of weakness and nakedness. They walk round it, plumbing its flaws. They are the possessors. Even Enid in a way belongs to Kai and Tony. That is why Nadine is so quick to clean the signs of Enid from the bathroom before the men see them. They have power, and Enid has none.

  The kitchen is at the back of the house, facing north against the steeply rising terraced hill and its criss-cross of fire-escapes, backyards and walls shaggy-topped with broken glass. The kitchen is cool and shadowy. The shadows hide dirt which is beyond any cleaning Nadine knows how to do. It needs industrial machinery to shift it, not human strength. The dirt is organic, rusted and sooty and earthy, oozing out of gaps between walls and skirting boards, growing upward between red tiles which haven’t been scraped or waxed for years. There is black fungus around the sink. When you bend down a thin acrid smell sets your eyes stinging. One set of tenants kept ferrets in the basement, years ago, says Enid. Congealed grease coats the plates of the Aga, which has a damaged flue and can’t be used. A man is coming to take it away. The gas cooker is more or less usable. Kai poured two bottles of cleaner over it and left the paste there to penetrate layers of burnt-on fat. He scraped the mixture off the next day, and, though the cooker surface is dull and scratched, it is now clean. But even Kai failed with the sink. A whole packet of washing-soda and a bucket of boiling water hadn’t cleared its sweetish smell of decay. A sour blob of water and fat went round and round in the plughole.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Tony. ‘Is it blocked?’

  ‘I’ll have to take the U-bend apart. There’s some crap in there blocking it up. We’ll have to get shot of it. Yes,’ he repeated, relishing the idiom, ‘we must get shot of it. And the rest of this so-called kitchen,’ and he allowed his gaze to sweep scornfully over the three cream-painted 1930s cupboards which no longer had doors, over the scored Formica table and the enormous gas refrigerator which opened to reveal a minute cave of ice.

  Nadine takes a tin of ravioli from the cupboard, opens it and glops its contents into a saucepan. Every sound rings hollow in this kitchen. It’s too high for its area and has too little furniture in it. Nothing absorbs sound. Her bare toes curl up against the sticky cling of the tiles. Apart from the ravioli there’s a loaf of rye bread, a piece of Parmesan which Tony got from Paolo’s where he eats, and six bottles of wine. Otherwise the kitchen is bare of food. And yet she’s earning a wage and she has her building society book. Kai has three thousand pounds in his jeans pocket. Why don’t they have nice food? Why don’t they sit down together?

  She’ll have a glass of wine. There’s another bottle open somewhere, from last night. Yes, here it is, wedged in the snow which nearly fills the fridge, half a bottle of white Burgundy.

  ‘They could use our fridge for the Winter Olympics,’ Tony had said. ‘For making snow on the ski-slopes. It’s unbelievable.’

  There’s the front door now. It won’t be Enid, who never goes out after she’s had her bath.

  ‘Tony?’

  He comes in with carrier-bags slung on both hands. He puts them down on the table, wedged so that they won’t keel over and spill their contents. Food, thinks Nadine, peering into the bags. But the top of the largest bag is full of knives. Tony takes them out. There are four. A carving knife, a cook’s knife, a vegetable knife and a knife for which Nadine can’t imagine a use. It’s long and thin and flexible, made of the same dull steel as the others. Like them it has a matt-black handle. The knives are sealed in bubbles of plastic. Nadine picks up the slender knife and weighs it across her hand. It’s beautifully made.

  ‘What’s this one for?’

  Tony removes it from her. ‘It’s a boning knife.’

  ‘Boning?’

  ‘For getting flesh off the bones. Like this.’

  With his knifeless hand he sketches a gesture so graphic that Nadine flinches. She turns over the other knives, looking at the prices. ‘£28.99! Tony! Or is that for all of them?’

  ‘You’re looking at quality here. Real lifetime stuff. See that edge. You get what you pay for with this sort of thing.’

  ‘Shame we haven’t got any food to cut up.’

  He points to the other bags. ‘Here, have a look.’

  Nadine delves. Veal. Flour. Oil. Cheese and herbs in transparent wrappings. A net of tight-skinned peppers, red, orange, yellow, purple. A fat scented cantaloup melon. A thick bar of expensive plain chocolate, and a dozen eggs which are slightly too big for their cardboard box. White briny cheese, and a jar of plum tomatoes. Plump olives, a mophead of endive. And more. She spreads out the stuff on the table and breaks off a piece of chocolate.

  ‘I’ve had enough of eating out. It’s always the same,’ says Tony.

  ‘I thought you liked it. You’re always saying –’

  ‘Yeah, well, it gets boring. Anyway, I’m a good cook.’

  Tony always eats out, usually at the same restaurant: at least, he has done so in the brief always which is all she knows of him. The restaurant he goes to is Paolo’s, which is what everyone calls it, although it has La Dolce Vita scrolled on the awning. They cook family food, low-key and strongly flavoured, and the wine is sent over from a family vineyard. Paolo still has land at home, and cousins work it for him. At weekends the restaurant is packed out with Italian families celebrating weddings, baptisms, first communions, confirmations. Tony has an arrangement there too. He eats late. Sometimes Nadine sees him walking up the road to Paolo’s when she’s already on her way back from the pub with Enid. He goes alone, but often he eats at the family table, and the daughter, Clar
a, stops work for a few minutes to talk to him. That’s the pattern Nadine knows. But, after all, she hasn’t known Tony that long. Perhaps something’s gone wrong. Paolo likes Tony, you can tell. He’s always calling Clara out of the kitchen to have coffee with Tony after the meal. Maybe that’s the trouble. You can’t mess about with Paolo’s daughter. Tony’ll have to be careful.

  ‘Have some more chocolate, Nadine,’ says Tony, snapping the bar in half. It’s beautiful chocolate, dark and silky. Tony grins. He has a narrow wedge-shaped face and very short hair, black and shiny as wax. He’s ugly, most of the time, but he has a warm Manchester voice and when he smiles his face matches it, lighting slowly from the eyes. ‘You’ll get fat,’ he says now. ‘Here, chop up these peppers for me.’

  You think you see a pattern, you call it normality, but it’s when you’ve known people well for a short time that you know them least. Better not to think of that. Better to think of Tony and Kai drinking round the kitchen table when she gets home from work, pouring another glass of wine for her. Tony always grumbles about the music Kai puts on the stereo. Peasant music, he calls it. She’s always tired after hours in the cinema’s headachy darkness, and she can’t be bothered with anything but beans on toast. Sometimes Kai makes it for her. Once he scraped ice out of the fridge, packed it into a clean tea-towel and put it on Nadine’s forehead because her head throbbed after hours of stuffy cinema darkness. They were like a family.

  Tony takes off his jacket, eases out a pair of gold cuff-links, rolls up his sleeves, unwraps the veal and spreads it out. It glistens on the brand-new chopping board. Tony unzips the meat knife from its plastic shell with a razor-blade, and rinses it under the cold tap. Nadine puts out her finger.

  ‘Here, what you doing? You don’t want to touch that,’ says Tony. He dries the knife on a paper towel, then he unrolls the veal, flattens it with the back of the knife and begins rapidly to slice it into fine, almost translucent ribbons of flesh. The meat is nearly bloodless. It doesn’t looks like flesh at all. Her mother would never have veal in the house, because it was cruel. Nadine watches the small muscles moving in Tony’s forearms as veal ribbons peel away beautifully from one another, then spread out fanwise on the board. They look like the gills of oyster mushrooms. Certainly this meat doesn’t look as if it was ever part of anything as warm and sweet-smelling as a calf. She’s fed calves from a bucket on a farm holiday, and let them suck her fingers after with their warm rasping tongues.

  ‘Is Kai asleep?’

  ‘Yes, he was tired. No point waking him up to eat.’

  ‘Tired!’ Tony sweeps the veal into a pile and begins on the sauce. ‘What you been doing to him, eh, Nadine? You’ll wear him out.’

  He looks up from the meat and smiles. The smile is much too intimate, with a spice of contempt in it, as if he’s been watching them from the foot of their bed. Both men are so much older than her. It’s not surprising Tony’s got some funny attitudes, she thinks. Tony’s known Kai for years, ever since Kai came to England. She was a little kid then. To him she’s someone of Kai’s and he’ll be nice to her as long as she’s going out with Kai. He’s never mentioned other girls of Kai’s, the ones who came before her. Tony doesn’t need to score easy points. His attitude to women is to do with the way he was brought up, Nadine reassures herself. He grew up in a close Italian web, that’s what Kai says, even though his parents have lived in Manchester for thirty-five years. He has two ways of thinking about women: girls you fucked and girls you married. One way for a woman like Clara, another for me. He’d never dream of smiling at Clara like that. He knows there’d be consequences. Girls like Clara are chaperoned even when they go with their fiancés to talk to the priest about their wedding.

  She’s seen Tony talking to Clara. The three of them were at the restaurant one Saturday night: Tony and Kai and Nadine. Clara was going out with her aunt. Clara worked in the restaurant all week, but now she shone out in her midnight-blue dress and her gold jewellery. The customers stopped eating to look at her, but they didn’t stare. That wasn’t the way. She progressed through the tables, stopping to talk to favoured customers. It was a Saturday night ritual. Tony stood up and pulled out a chair for her and there she sat for a few minutes, talking to him in Italian, her small lively hands smooth with cream and manicure, betrayed only by a nick at the base of her thumb. She nodded to Kai, but she didn’t take any notice of Nadine.

  Clara, a girl going out from her father’s house, accompanied – no, chaperoned – by her aunt. But also a girl who more than earned her own living, who was not afraid of hard work and who helped to build up the family business. She had new ideas, and they worked. Her parents watch her with concealed vigilant satisfaction. Are they even a little afraid of Clara, who did so well at school and could easily have gone on to college if she’d wanted? Clara, whose English is the perfect English of a child born here, and yet who chooses to speak not only in Italian but in the dialect of her parents? One day she’ll have a fine wedding, with embossed cards for the nuptial mass. She’ll organize the catering and God help anyone who tries to put anything past Clara. She’ll be back in the restaurant with her apron on the day after she returns from a magnificent honeymoon in New York and San Francisco. There are branches of her family in both cities, but naturally the young people will stay in expensive hotels,

  Clara doesn’t waste her time on Nadine, who has no family, no apparent qualifications, and who works in a job with no future. She lives in a house with two men and a crazy old woman who also has no family to look after her and who sings in the streets on Friday nights on her way home from the pub. Eccentric, eh? You could call it that. Nadine’s here today, but who knows where she’ll be tomorrow? You don’t waste time on her. Once she’s gone you’ll never hear her name again, and you’ll never know where she went.

  It’s completely different with girls like Clara. They know where they’re going. No matter how short the journey, they give destinations and times of arrival. They are met by uncles who wouldn’t dream of letting them carry any luggage but a handbag. They are kissed on both cheeks by aunts who cry a little at the sight of them, and exclaim that they’re much too slim, they need feeding up. Clara knows where she belongs. She’s never going to disappear.

  Tony’s sauce bubbles and thickens on the stove. The kitchen smells of basil and vaporizing wine and new bread. Nadine lays two places. They’ll put some of the meat sauce in the ice-crater of the fridge for Kai to eat tomorrow. Tony stirs in the ribbons of veal until the meat whitens and loses its translucency. He turns the mixture once more, then reduces the flame. He throws two handfuls of fresh pasta into a panful of simmering water. The water swells up the sides of the pan and he calms it with a few drops of olive oil.

  ‘Two more minutes,’ he warns Nadine. ‘Give me the plates. But what the fuck’s this?’ He takes the lid off the small pan which holds Nadine’s congealed and cooling ravioli and peers into it. ‘Has the old bitch been in our kitchen again?’ he asks. ‘You’d better speak to her, Nadine. She’s pushing her luck.’ And with a flick of his wrist he shoots the tinned ravioli into the open bin.

  Eight

  ‘I can’t bring myself to do it. I just can’t, that’s all. It makes me go all goosey thinking about it.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you’re not really trying, are you, Lila? A bright girl like you. You’ve just got to make the effort. This is a really big client we’re talking about.’

  ‘I know he is, ‘course I know that. I’ve seen him on television. I pretend I don’t recognize him, though – I’m not stupid. It’s not the client, Kai –’

  ‘It’d better not be. He’s the kind we want.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing against him. I didn’t even mind that other stuff, I mean, I’d rather do it straight but there’s no harm in it, after all, is there? That whip’s just a toy; the worst thing is trying to keep a straight face. But if he wants more than that, there’s girls that specialize aren’t there? I mean it’s like in the magazines. Some of them
would make you sick. Girls doing it with donkeys. It’s just not my cup of tea.’

  ‘Did you tell him that?’

  ‘Well – I did, sort of. But he kept on it was me he wanted to do it. He’s got this thing about tall girls, and then me being blonde as well is just right, apparently.’

  ‘Listen, Lila. We can’t afford to lose him. Just what did you say to him?’

  ‘I keep telling you, I didn’t say anything. I just kept thinking, what if my Rosie was to come in and see me doing it. I mean, I know she’s at the nursery and she can’t, they would never let her out, but I just can’t stop thinking about it. After all the trouble I had getting her to use her potty, if you get me. What’s it going to look like? Him lying there with his mouth open and me weeing into it sort of thing? It’s not what you’d want a child to see her mother doing.’