Page 40 of A Slow Fire Burning

“Twice,” he said quietly. “She asked to see me the second time, and I went. I couldn’t tell you, Cee... it was”—he exhaled hard—“just before she died. I went to see her and a week or so later she was found at the bottom of the stairs. It looked bad.”

“It looked bad,” Carla repeated. “And was it?” she asked, her voice soft. “Bad?”

“Cee...” He reached for her hand and she let him take it. “I don’t want to have this conversation here, do you? It’s Ben’s day. It’s his eighteenth. I don’t even want to think about her today.”

“Why did she ask to see you?” Carla asked. Theo didn’t answer. He leaned across toward her and kissed her on the mouth, and she let him.

“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I don’t like it when you disappear.”

They sat for a while in silence, hand in hand. Theo had brought cognac in a hip flask; they took turns sipping from it, passing it back and forth between them.

When the alcohol was burning hot in her chest, Carla asked him: “What would you do differently? If you could? Would you still marry me if you knew what was to come?”

“Of course I would, I—”

“I don’t think I’d have married you,” she said. Theo winced. She squeezed his hand, dropped it. “I don’t mean that to be cruel, but if I had known, I don’t think I could have. Only, I suppose it didn’treally matter who I married, did it? It might have happened anyway, mightn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” He took hold of her wrist, finger and thumb looping around the slender bone. With his other hand he reached out and touched her face; he tried to turn her chin so that she would face him, but she pulled away.

“The poison,” she said. “It came from me, frommyfamily.”

“You are not your sister,” Theo replied.

Then, finally, she met his eye. “You should forgive her, Theo.”

Theo tried to get Carla to go home with him, but she insisted that she wanted to stay awhile. At first he offered to stay with her, but eventually she managed to persuade him to go. Though not before he’d handed over a USB drive with a draft of his latest novel for her to read. “Theo, really? I do have quite a lot going on at the moment, you know? I haven’t even—” Her voice caught. “I haven’t even done anything about the funeral. Daniel’s funeral, I need to...”

“I could do that,” Theo said, still pressing the USB stick into her hand. “I could make those arrangements, but...Cee. You’ve always been my first reader. You can’t just stop being my first reader; it doesn’t work like that.”

Carla watched him weave his way through the gravestones, a little the worse for the cognac, dappled sunlight picking him out as he made his way to the main road. She waited for a while, to make quite sure that he was gone, that he hadn’t turned back, wasn’t loitering somewhere keeping an eye on her, before she took from her pocket a handful of ash and sprinkled it over the grass covering Ben’s grave.

She tried to conjure up her sister’s lazy drawl, her throaty laugh.

•••

“Do you rememberthat house in Vaugines, Cee?” Angela had asked her, years ago. They’d been sitting on the sofa in Angela’s living room in the house on Hayward’s Place, weak sun shining through half-closed curtains, illuminating the room with a dirty yellow glow. Angela sat with her feet tucked up underneath her; she was smoking, picking at her nails. Her hands were steady, which meant she’d already had a drink. “Do you remember that place, by the olive grove, with all those strange animal head sculptures on the walls? And Daniel and I stayed in the pool house? Ben was still a baby, he wastiny”—she held out her hands to demonstrate—“warm and perfect like a loaf of bread.”

“Of course I remember,” Carla said. “It was the first holiday we ever took him on. Theo and I spent all our time on those daybeds beneath the trees, falling asleep with him tucked in between us.” She closed her eyes. “What were those trees? Were they oak trees, do you think? Or maybe plane...”

“Those incredible sunsets,” Angela said. “Remember those? All that rosé.”

“And you couldn’t get Daniel out of the pool, not for love nor money. Do you remember how cross he got, because he wanted to teach Ben to swim and we kept telling him Ben was way too little?”

Angela shook her head. “Did he? Did he really?” she asked, bending forward to stub out her cigarette in the ashtray on the carpet. “It seems impossible, doesn’t it? Thinking about it now, fromhere”—she gestured at the ugly room around them—“that we were all so happy. It seems unimaginable. All that happiness, wrecked.”

Carla’s own hands shook; her arms, her legs, her whole body trembled as she rose to her feet, as she stared down at her sister, lamenting their lost contentment. “Unimaginable,” she croaked. “It is,isn’t it? Just a few moments of carelessness, an hour or two of unthinking neglect, a door left open. And here we are.”

She remembered the way her sister stared at her then, glassy-eyed, her mouth working but making no sound.

Carla took another handful of ash, and brought it to her lips before she pressed it down, into the earth.

The One Who Got Away

They skip school, slipping out through the gates unseen. There’s a bus to and from town, one an hour, on the half hour. Hurry up! Her friend hitches up her skirt, sprints ahead, waving frantically to attract the driver’s attention. The girl half jogs, book bag slung awkwardly over her shoulder, large breasts bouncing. They board the bus, pass the smirking driver, pass the other sour-faced passengers.

The moment they get off the bus, the girl regrets coming. It is baking hot, pavements crammed with shoppers. There’s nothing to do here, nowhere to go. Listlessly they drag their feet, shop to shop, they look at clothes they cannot afford, they buy cigarettes from the corner shop, cheap ones, rough on the back of the throat. They smoke, lighting one from another, until they feel sick.

They go to the pub, but the barman won’t serve them. They sit at a table outside, skirts hitched up. Sunning themselves. The old blokes sitting at the next table give them dirty looks. A younger man approaches, he looks at them, looks at the friend, not at the girl, he smiles. He is ugly, his eyes too close together, acne on his neck, red raw. Her friend rolls her eyes. As if, she says, and she laughs.

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