Page 55 of A Slow Fire Burning

There was Laura, her head wasn’t down anymore, it was up, she saw the big girl’s smile turn into a snarl, heard her friend say what the fuck, and there was Laura, laughing like a loon, like a bell, like a swarm of flies.

There was Laura, her head smacking the linoleum floor. There was Laura, screaming in agony as a boot slammed down on her hand, there was Laura, struggling for breath, as the big girl knelt on her chest.

Here I am here I am here I am.

There she was.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Three days it had been since Irene last left the house. Three days, or four? She wasn’t sure; she only knew that she felt terribly tired. There was nothing in the fridge and she couldn’t face going out, couldn’t face the supermarket, the noise, all those people. What she really wanted to do was sleep, but she didn’t even have the energy to rouse herself from her chair and take herself upstairs. So she sat instead in her chair by the window, her fingers working constantly around the edge of the blanket placed over her knees.

She was thinking about William. She’d heard his voice not so long ago. She’d been looking for her cardigan, because the weather was still terrible, still very cold, and she’d walked from the living room to the kitchen to see if she’d left it, as she sometimes did, hanging on the back of the chair, and she heard him, clear as day.Fancy a cuppa, Reenie?

Irene had left Theo Myerson’s terribly shaken. That was days ago now, but she remained shaken. There was a moment—brief but nonetheless terrifying—in which she’d really thought he was going to hurt her. As he advanced toward her with his hands outstretched, shehad almost felt them around her neck; she had cowered, terrified, and he had seen her terror, she was sure. He put his arms around her, gentle as a mother, lifted her, and helped her across to the sofa. He was shaking all the time. He did not speak and did not look at her; he turned away and she watched as he knelt before the fireplace, as viciously he tore pages from Daniel’s notebook and tossed them one by one into the flames.

A while later, she left in the taxi he had called for her, almost overcome with shame at the damage she’d done. If he had hurt her, she thought, she might just have deserved it.

Terrible as the afternoon had been, that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it came later: a couple of days after the incident with Myerson, Irene received a phone call from a solicitor saying that Laura Kilbride was due to be released from remand prison, and was asking whether Irene might be able to come out to east London that afternoon and pick her up. Irene was elated; she’d been so excited, sorelieved, only for there to be another call from the same solicitor, just moments after Irene had finished organizing a taxi to take her to the prison, saying that Laura would not be released after all, that she had been attacked and seriously injured, that they’d transferred her to the hospital right away. Irene was so upset that she’d taken down neither the solicitor’s name nor the name of the hospital, and when she phoned the remand center for more information, they were no help at all. They wouldn’t tell her how serious the injuries were or how, exactly, she’d come by them or where Laura was now, because Irene wasn’t family.

Since then, Irene had not been able to eat a thing, she’d not slept a wink, she was beside herself. Strange expression, that, and yet it seemed apt, because she did feel as though she were hovering outside herself, living through events that barely seemed real, that felt as though she’d read about them or watched them unfold on atelevision screen, at once distant and yet oddly heightened. Irene could feel herself on the edge of something. She recognized this sensation; it was the start of a slide into a different state of consciousness, when the world as it really was faded away and she was left somewhere else, somewhere frightening and confusing and dangerous, but in which there was the possibility that she would see William again.

Irene’s eyelids were growing heavy, her chin just starting to drop toward her chest, when she felt a shadow pass in front of the window and jerked awake. Carla was outside in the lane, riffling through her handbag, looking for something. Leaning forward, Irene tapped on the window. Carla started, looked up and saw Irene, and nodded, didn’t bother to smile. Irene motioned for her to wait a moment, but Carla had already turned away; she’d found whatever she was looking for in her handbag—the key to next door, presumably—and disappeared.

Irene sank back into her chair. There was a part of her that wanted desperately to justleave it, to forget the whole thing—after all, Laura was no longer under suspicion for Daniel’s murder. The damage to the poor girl was already done. The police had a new suspect for their crime now; they had Theo Myerson. It was all over the papers: he hadn’t been charged, so the police hadn’t named him, but the secret was out; some sharp-eyed photographer had snapped Myerson exiting a police car at the station, and this, added to the news that “a 52-year-old Islington man” was “helping police with their inquiries” and the fact that charges against Laura Kilbride had been dropped, left little room for doubt.

Poor Theo. Irene closed her eyes. She saw for a moment his stricken expression when he had seen the drawings in the notebook and felt a sharp pang of guilt. While her eyes were closed, Irene saw herself too. She imagined looking in on herself from outside this room, from out in the street, the way Carla Myerson had looked inon her a few moments before. What would Carla have seen? She would have seen a little old woman, bewildered and frightened and alone, staring into space, thinking about the past, if she were thinking about anything at all.

There, in her imagination, was everything Irene feared—seeing herself reduced to a cliché of old age, a person without agency, without hope or future or intention, sitting by herself in a comfortable chair with a blanket over her knees, in the waiting room of death.

Well,bollocks, as Laura might say,to that.

Irene hauled herself out of her chair and tottered into the kitchen, where she forced herself to drink a glass of water while consuming two and a half rather stale chocolate digestives. Then she made herself a cup of tea, to which she added two heaped teaspoons of sugar, and drank that too. She waited a few minutes for the rush of sugar and carbohydrate to take effect, and thus fortified, she picked up her handbag and the keys to number three, opened her front door, walked a few paces round to the left, and knocked, as firmly as her small and arthritic hands would allow, on Angela’s front door.

As she’d expected, there was no answer, so she slipped the key into the lock and opened the door.

“Carla?” she called out as she stepped into the hall. “Carla, it’s Irene, I need to speak to you—”

“I’m here.” Carla’s voice was loud and alarmingly close; it seemed to come out of the air, out of nowhere. Irene started back in fright, almost tripping over the threshold. “Up here,” Carla said, and Irene inched forward, raising her eyes toward the source of the voice. Carla sat at the top of the stairs like a child escaped from bed, picking fibers from the carpet. “When you’ve said whatever it is you want to say, you can just drop that key off in the kitchen,” she said, without looking at Irene. “You’ve no right to let yourself into this house whenever you feel like it.”

Irene cleared her throat. “No,” she agreed, “I suppose I don’t.” She approached the staircase and, placing one hand on the banister, bent down to drop the keys onto the third step. “There you are,” she said.

“Thank you.” Carla stopped plucking carpet fibers for a moment and raised her gaze to meet Irene’s. She looked awful,blighted, her skin gray and her eyes bloodshot. “There are journalists outside my house,” she said in a small, peevish voice, “and Theo’s place is being ripped apart by the police. That’s why I’m here. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Irene opened her handbag, peered into it, fumbling about with its contents. “Do you have something else for me, Irene?” Carla asked. She sounded ragged, raw-throated. “Because if you don’t, I’d really rather—”

Irene pulled from her bag the two little jewelry boxes, the one with the Saint Christopher’s medal and the one with the ring. “I thought you’d want these back,” she said quietly, placing them on the third stair next to the key.

“Oh—” Carla’s mouth fell open. “His Saint Christopher!” She scrambled to her feet, almost tumbling down the stairs to fall upon the little box, picking it up and clutching it to her. “You found it,” she said, smiling at Irene through tears. “I can’t believe you found it.” She reached for Irene’s hand, but Irene stepped smartly away.

“I didn’tfindit,” Irene said in a measured tone. “It was given to me. By Laura. Laura Kilbride? Does that name mean anything to you?” But Carla was barely listening; she was sitting again, on the third step now, with the jewelry box open on her lap. She took the little gold token and turned it over in her fingers, pressed it to her lips. Irene watched her, grimly fascinated by the peculiar pantomime of devotion. She wondered if Carla had quite lost her mind.

“Laura?” Irene said again. “The girl who was arrested? The medal and the ring, they were in the bag that Laura stole from you.Carla?Does any of this mean anything to you?” Still, nothing. “You left the bag here, right here, in this hallway. The door was open. Laura saw it, and she snatched the bag. She felt bad about it, so she returned the things to me, only... oh, for God’s sake. Carla!” she snapped, and Carla looked up at her, surprised.

“What?”

“Are you really going to do this? Are you going to sit here and feign oblivion? Are you really going to let him take the blame?”

Carla shook her head, her eyes returning to the gold medal. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

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