Burning Bright

by Helen Dunmore

  The computers will be whispering about her still, back in Security, brushing in the last strokes of the multi-dimensional portrait. ‘Colour of eyes: grey. Colour of hair: dark brown. White Caucasian female, nineteen [?] – possibly younger. No scars or distinguishing marks. White silk dress, black linen coat, black leather handbag, black pumps. No trace on police computer. No previous security record. Fingerprints obtained from coffee-cup. Voice-print available.’ Even my own mother wouldn’t recognize me. Especially my own mother, fast asleep in her curved wooden chalet above the lake, breathing in the smell of the communal vegetable gardens beneath her open window, listening for Lulu even in her sleep.

  ‘Where’s Deenie?’ The rasp of Lulu’s voice. When she’s upset only the family can understand her.

  ‘She’s fine, Lulu. She’s back in England with her friends, remember? Now go back to sleep. Back to sleep, Lulie-lu. Back to sleep.’

  I’ll go to Enid. She won’t mind me waking her up if she’s asleep. She lies awake, with her memories, those memories she’s so worried I’m not going to have. She’ll make me some tea in the thin china cup, and she’ll open a new packet of Rich Teas for us. The tea won’t be strong enough and Enid’ll call it water bewitched. And the biscuits are flour and water. I’ll dip them in the tea – we’ll even put sugar in, it doesn’t matter for once. I’m so tired. It could be shock. Now, for the final part of our evening’s entertainment we present…; the unshockable…; the unstoppable…; the unforgettable…; Miss LIGHT. He thought it was a professional name. Cathy says it’s a good name for a performer. I thought he thought I was on the stage. He thought I thought he thought. My fingers are jumpy, they won’t keep still. Or else it’s the train that’s trembling. I’ll go up and up the stairs to the attic, without turning on any of the lights so that even the house doesn’t see me. It’s Kai and Tony’s house, not mine, and I haven’t the strength to make it mine tonight, or to call it home. Up and up the dark pillar of the house, away from the rocks and the sea, to where Enid keeps her light on. It’s like the beam of a lighthouse. If I follow it, I’ll come safe home.

  Even the traffic sounds like the sea up there in Enid’s room. You can’t hear voices, and if you shut your mind the traffic and voices could be waves and seagulls. In her lamplit room Enid’s waiting for me. No. That was the witch locking up Rapunzel in her tower. She only did it to keep her safe. She had the right idea. What did Rapunzel think she was going to do with all that yellow hair? I’d tell her to stay in the tower. That old witch knew how to look after her. It’s not safe outside. What they don’t put in the story is that the witch got too tired and she couldn’t take care of Rapunzel any more. That’s what the story’s really about. Mothers getting tired and bored.

  ‘Go back to sleep, Lulu. Deenie’s fine. You don’t need to worry about her.’

  I can’t picture her face any more, only her back. Mother’s back turning away from me as she bends down doing something for Lulu. And Daddy’s hand stroking Mother’s crossed ankles as she lies back on the settee. I’ll sleep with Enid all night, and in the morning Kai will come looking for me. He’ll say the words that’ll magic away what Tony told Paul Parrett. It was just part of the dark, one of Tony’s things. Arrangements.

  The taxi-driver has been waiting at the station since one o’clock without a fare. Business is bad. He’s not really a taxi-driver. He’s just driving taxis until he can get another HGV job, but there’s nothing going. No vacancies, no interviews. He’s rung round thirty firms: nothing. There’s not a lot of money in taxi-driving: the rent’s a hundred and thirty a week, that’s just to get your calls put through, then what with petrol and repairs and insurance you’re looking at eighty, ninety quid a week take-home pay. And he can see the drop in the number of fares, even in the nine months he’s been driving. When you used to meet the London trains there’d be a long queue waiting for taxis. Now there’s half a dozen. Well, there isn’t the business. People aren’t travelling the way they used to. Day out, was it?

  ‘No,’ says Nadine. ‘It was a business trip.’

  He overcharges her but she tips him anyway. The house is as dark as she knew it would be, and the taxi-driver waits, engine running, as she fits the key into the lock and pushes open the door.

  Immediately she smells cigarette smoke. Tony and Kai don’t smoke. It might be the stale smell of her own cigarettes. It’s nauseating. She really must make the effort to give up. This is an unfriendly house to come back to. She snaps on the hall light and its too brilliant glare shows nothing. She’ll go straight up to Enid. No. She’ll take off this dress and coat first. She never wants to wear the dress again: its washed silk smoothness feels clammy against her skin. Unbuttoning the linen coat she walks up to the next floor, to their bedroom, and opens the door.

  There isn’t much light but there’s enough. It shows her a tumbled heap on the bed. It shows a shape which is too big to be just Kai. Bodies. A rasp of panic begins in Nadine’s throat but she does not cry out. She grips the door frame with her left hand, while her right hand continues automatically to unbutton the black linen coat. Her eyes get used to the dark and she sees more. Kai is on the side of the bed closest to her. He has fallen asleep on his stomach. But he never sleeps on his stomach. One hand hangs, knuckles down, brushing the floor. The other is around the right breast of the naked woman lying on her back beside him, so close that their heads are touching where hers leans into the angle of his neck. The pose is unconscious, and very beautiful. They are both deeply asleep and the woman is snoring slightly, because she is on her back. Nadine pushes the door wider, so there will be more light for her to see them by. Now she knows the woman. It’s Vicki, her tanned predatory face smoothed out by sleep. She hasn’t taken off her gold bracelet. One knee has kicked aside the rust and gold duvet, and Nadine’s linen sheets are tangled between her thighs. Nadine looks at Kai’s hand on Vicki’s breast. He is not touching the nipple, but the soft shallow curve of the breast, spread sideways under its own weight. The touch looks tender, as if his hands remember Vicki and know she’s lying beside him even though he’s now deeply asleep. His body is utterly relaxed and his face turns sideways, towards Vicki.

  All the buttons on Nadine’s coat are undone. She raises her unbuttoning hand to her mouth and bites it hard, but not so hard that she’ll draw blood. She bites to stop herself crying out. She mustn’t wake them. She daren’t wake them. It’s like childhood again, standing by Mummy’s and Daddy’s bed after a bad dream, willing them to wake and take her in with them. But they never woke. They sailed on in their dead-beat sleep. Sometimes Mummy whimpered, dreaming of Lulu.

  No. I am not that child. No. You won’t make me back into her. I should have known it when you came to the door with your older-woman voice, your experienced face. I was a fool, thinking that you were one. You took me in with that violin lesson patter. You wanted me to think you were the business side of Kai’s life. Nothing to do with us. No danger. I kept my eyes shut while yours were wide open.

  But even you can’t see everything, Vicki. You don’t know where I’ve been and you don’t know what I know. Downstairs there’s a drawerful of knives. Tony’s taken off the plastic wrap and they’re as sharp as your eyes were when you looked round my house. But I’m not that sort of a girl.

  The way they’re lying there, they look like old friends. Friends of the same age. That’s where real friendships grow. She’ll know all the songs he knows, the ones I don’t know.

  Kai. Open your eyes. Look at me. She isn’t beautiful at all. That tired old tanned skin. Give her two years and she’ll look like a crocodile, that’s what you said.

  But they sleep on, adult, omnipotent.

  Enid is only dozing. She sleeps lightly with a book by her bed and the lamp-switch dangling just within reach. Often she wakes and makes tea and reads a chapter or lies there, thinking back into the past. She doesn’t mind the night, or long for the dawn. She adapts to the shape of each night, noisy or quiet, sleepless or dream-filled.
She wakes easily, so tonight she hears Nadine’s light tap immediately, and her bedside lamp is on before Nadine has started to turn the doorhandle.

  ‘It’s only me.’

  ‘Are you all right, dear? Is something wrong?’

  The girl looks as if she’s gone out wearing her slip as she advances into the room, milk-white and pinched, trailing her black coat, her arms crossed over her chest, hugging herself.

  ‘What’s happened to that lovely dress?’

  ‘It got dirty.’

  ‘You don’t look too good. Shut the door. I’ll put the fire on.’

  Enid pulls back her nest of sheets and blankets, sticks two frail bare legs over the side of the bed, and toes around, feeling for her slippers.

  ‘Let me lie down on your bed a minute,’ says Nadine suddenly, going so pale that Enid thinks she’s going to faint. Hurriedly, she pushes aside the blankets and makes space for Nadine. Nadine lies still, looking up at the ceiling. Slowly, her colour returns.

  ‘I thought you were staying in London,’ says Enid.

  ‘I was, but I came back.’

  ‘Pity,’ remarks Enid. ‘Coming back when nobody was expecting you. You look as if you saw something you didn’t expect either.’

  ‘Did you know they were here? Did you see them?’

  Enid pauses. ‘Well, not as such,’ she says. ‘But I heard her. She laughs so loud I can’t help hearing her. They think no more of an old woman up in the attic than they’d think of a nest in the chimney. I don’t pay attention to much of what goes on. See no evil, hear no evil.’

  ‘Has she been here before?’

  ‘She has, dear. Once or twice. I didn’t like to tell you when you seemed so sure it was only business. Though business and pleasure is all the same thing to your Kai, I don’t need to tell you that.’

  Triumph in Enid’s voice. She’s got it right again. Right about Kai, right about the business, right about all of it. I was wrong. She’s vindicated herself.

  ‘I wondered if I ought to say something to you when I saw you ready to go to London with that Tony, you looking so lovely and him looking like the cat that’d got the cream. So what happened to your dress?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s dirty from sitting on the train.’

  ‘Did he try something on, then, Tony?’

  ‘No. Nothing like that. There was a misunderstanding, that’s all.’

  ‘And now there’s another misunderstanding downstairs in your bedroom, concerning your Kai, is that it?’

  ‘Oh, Enid. If you knew, why didn’t you say? You could have told me. I’d rather have known.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have wanted to believe me. You’d have gone and asked your Kai.’

  ‘And he’d have kicked you out, is that what you were worried about? Why didn’t you think about me? Why did you leave me to find out like this?’

  ‘You don’t understand. It wasn’t the right time. Anyway, who was I to interfere? It’s not my house. It’s not my business where the money comes from. I live here, that’s all.’

  Enid scrambles off the bed and tugs down her night-dress. Her wispy hair is pinned up with pink-tipped hairgrips and she has rolled a thick yellow crêpe bandage round one knee. She reaches down and feels the knee cautiously, intimately, as if pressing a sponge-cake to see if it’s done. All she thinks about is herself, thinks Nadine, why did I ever expect anything else from her?

  ‘I’m going to make us both camomile tea,’ announces Enid. ‘No sense in losing a night’s sleep on top of everything else.’

  She really is unfeeling. As far as she’s concerned it’s no more than if I’d lost my doll or fallen over and cut my knee. She can’t begin to imagine – or perhaps she hasn’t got any imagination. Nothing shocks her because nothing sinks in.

  ‘So what was your other misunderstanding – the one up in London?’

  ‘Tony’s a pimp,’ says Nadine.

  ‘Yes, dear, I should have thought that was on the cards. Though they’re very high class, aren’t they, your Tony and your Kai? You wouldn’t catch them putting girls out on the streets.’

  ‘Kai! No. It was Tony I was talking about.’

  ‘Was it, dear? I thought they were partners? Isn’t that what you were always telling me?’

  ‘Well, they call it a partnership, but Kai’s the one who’s really in charge,’ replies Nadine automatically – then hears herself.

  Enid says nothing, she just watches Nadine, her light clear eyes friendly and curious. Then she prompts, ‘But you must have known there was something up. Where did you think all the money was coming from?’

  ‘You know they deal in property. They have to take some risks – the law’s so stupid –’

  ‘Oh, isn’t it,’ agrees Enid at once. ‘Isn’t it stupid? Now which law were you thinking of? The one that says you can’t put old ladies out on the streets if they’re taking up space in a house you want empty, or the one that says you can’t put your girlfriend out on the streets to earn a bit of cash for you? Both equally stupid, no doubt.’

  She drops a handful of dried camomile into a pot and puts the kettle on the boil. Nadine sits up on the bed.

  ‘OΚ. Tony’s a pimp and Kai’s in partnership with him. So, for God’s sake, stop calling them my Tony and my Kai. Where does that leave me?’ asks Nadine. ‘I live with Kai. I couldn’t afford this place on what I earn. Not even the food we eat, let alone what we drink.’

  ‘I can’t answer that, can I, dear? I live here too. Anyway, it’s not as simple as that. Show me the girl who wakes up one morning and decides, “Oh, yes, that’s a good idea, I’ll go out on the streets. I’ve always wanted to be a prostitute.” No, it’s all much more gradual, at least it is the way Kai and Tony do it. She lives with a man, and then one day one of his friends takes her out for dinner, somewhere expensive, and they drink a lot, and they both get carried away and then the next day she doesn’t know what to tell her boyfriend – because she’s a nice girl and she thinks he’s nice too. But she tells him in case his friend does first. What a relief it is when he doesn’t take it too badly. He even laughs and tells her these things happen. People get carried away. And then he leaves it for a while. The next thing is he says there’s someone coming to town who needs looking after, and can she go out with him, so she does, and this time she gets a present. It won’t be money for a long time, it’ll be jewellery: a gold bracelet like the one that Vicki’s got on downstairs. I’ve seen it. Later on, when she’s got a bit more used to it, they’ll start talking to her about money. A proper talk. It’s because it’s so gradual that it works. They’re nice girls from Ruislip, their mums thought they ought to be fashion models, they don’t want to know what they’re really up to. I’m not talking about streetwalkers, but then neither are Kai and Tony. I’m not talking about those poor kids who’re on the game by the time they’re fourteen either. They’re hooked on something they can’t get any other way. They’re no good for the clients who can really pay. They want something with class. But as for where it leaves you, it doesn’t leave you anywhere. Not unless you want it to.’

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘I’m like you,’ says Enid, and makes a small stabbing jump to fetch down the biscuit tin from its high shelf. ‘I know things and I don’t know them. And I watch what I ask, if I think I’m not going to like the answers.’

  She doesn’t care, thinks Nadine, and why should she? Kai’s nothing to her, or Tony either. And what about me? Maybe she doesn’t need me after all. I was the one who needed her. ‘I must get back to Enid…; Oh, Enid’s this old woman who lives up in our attic, she’s amazing, really interesting to talk, to…;’

  ‘You still haven’t told me,’ says Enid, ‘what went on up in London.’

  It’s not a question. It’s a space which Nadine can fill or not, as she chooses. Enid is putting out her best china cups, wiping them round with a cloth.

  ‘He reminded me of the Manchester Ladies,’ says Nadine. ‘He had a ga
rden way up above London. Orange trees and tomatoes and little hedges. You’d never guess it was there.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The client.’

  ‘The one Tony took you to meet.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t know. We had dinner, then Tony had to go off. I thought he was ill.’

  ‘A man like that’s never ill unless he wants to be, you ought to know him better. Don’t tell me, dear,’ says Enid, holding up a traffic policeman’s hand. ‘Let me guess. You went back to his place for coffee.’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t like that. He was really nice.’

  ‘What was he, then? Someone with money. Lucky I’m good at guessing. Merchant banker. Judge. Something in the city. Go on, give me a clue.’

  ‘You’re getting warm.’

  ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier…; politician.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They always are. Anyone famous?’

  ‘Paul Parrett.’

  Is that sly pride in Nadine’s voice? Enid gives her a sharp look. ‘Very discriminating,’ she remarks.

  ‘I liked him.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it? You liked him, Tony’s happy, Kai’s happy, everyone’s happy.’

  ‘I don’t know why. He just seemed so alive.’

  ‘It’s power that does it to them. It’s like plugging them in to the grid every morning.’

  ‘No, it was the garden as well. He loved it.’

  ‘So what went wrong? You came shooting back fast enough. You must have been on the train by one o’clock. Not much time for love’s young dream.’

  ‘I couldn’t do what he wanted.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘I wish I had now.’

  ‘That’s only to spite your Kai.’

  ‘No – it was him wanting it so much – and it was awful, nearly – only not quite. And I could have made it all right.’