Page 25 of A Slow Fire Burning

Psychologists were always big on devising strategies: strategies to stop her acting out, lashing out, losing control. To make her stop and think, to prevent her from picking the wrong course of action.You know your problem, Laura, you make bad choices.

Well, possibly, but that was only one way of looking at it, wasn’t it? Another way of looking at it might be to say, you know your problem, Laura, you were hit by a car when you were ten years old and you smacked your head on the tarmac, you suffered a fractured skull, a broken pelvis, a compound fracture of the distal femur, a traumatic brain injury, you spent twelve days in a coma and three months in hospital, you underwent half a dozen painful surgeries, you had to learn to speak again. Oh, and on top of all that, you learned, while you were still lying in your hospital bed, that you had been betrayed by the person you loved most in the world, the one who was supposed to love and protect you. Is it any wonder, you might say, that you are quick to take offense? That you’re angry?

The One Who Got Away

In the place her smile should have been there is a question: So, where are we off to, then? Now there’s no space where her smile should have been because now she is smiling and he’s not angry anymore, he’s thinking of how it’s going to be, he’s wishing the friend wasn’t there in the back, but if he just doesn’t look at her doesn’t think about her then maybe it’ll be okay.

He doesn’t like the way the friend looks at him. The way she looks at him reminds him of his mother, who he should have forgotten all about but he hasn’t. She was ugly too, bitten by a dog when she was a girl and yapping about it ever since, her mouth scarred, lip twisted like she was sneering at you, which she usually was.

Scarred inside and out, always yelling, at him or at his dad, wanted him to be miserable, just like her,couldn’t stand it whenever he was laughing or playing or happy.

Now look. He’s thinking about his mother again. Why is she always in his head? It’s the other one’s fault, isn’t it, the ugly one in the back, she’s made him think of his mother, he thinks of her when he’s doing things, all sorts of things, driving his car, trying to sleep, watching TV, when he’s with girls and that’s the worst, makes him feel all hollow inside, like he’s not got enough blood to fill him up. Makes it so he can’t do anything. Can’t see anything, except for red.

FOURTEEN

Irene was very worried about Laura. In her kitchen, gently heating a saucepan of baked beans to pour over her toast (Carla would not approve), she thought about phoning her up, to make sure she was all right. She’d said she was (“Golden! You know I am!”), but she seemed distracted and anxious. Of course, she’d just lost her job, so she was bound to be worried, wasn’t she? But it seemed like more than that. Today, Laura had seemed uneasy in Irene’s company in a way Irene had never noticed before.

Not that she’d known her very long. Just a couple of months they had been in each other’s lives, and yet Irene had quickly come to care for the girl. There was something so terribly raw about her, so unguarded, Irene feared for her. Someone like that seemed so vulnerable to the worst the world had to offer. And it was on this vulnerable young woman that Irene had come to rely, because without Angela, Irene found herself alone. She was aware, of course, that there was a danger in allowing herself to see Laura somehow as a replacement for Angela.

They were, in their way, quite similar: both funny, kind, visiblyfragile. The best thing about them, from Irene’s point of view, was that they didn’t make assumptions. Laura didn’t just assume Irene would be incapable of learning how to use a new app on her mobile phone; Angela didn’t assume Irene would have no interest in the words of Sally Rooney. Neither of them assumed that Irene wouldn’t laugh at a dirty joke (she would if it were funny). They didn’t take for granted that she would be physically incapable, or small-minded, or uninterested in the world. They did not see her, as Carla did, as a busybody, an old fool.

Irene was eighty years old, but she didn’t feel eighty. Not just because she was, sprained ankle notwithstanding, a spritely, trim woman, but because it was impossible to feel eighty. Nobodyfelteighty. When Irene considered it, she thought that she probably felt somewhere around thirty-five. Forty, maybe. That was a good age to feel, wasn’t it? You knew who you were then. You weren’t still flighty or unsure, but you had not yet had time to harden, to become unyielding.

The truth was that you felt a certain way inside, and while the people who had known you your whole life would probably see you that way, the number ofnewpeople who could appreciate you as that person, thatinsideperson, rather than just a collection of the frailties of age, was limited.

And Irene no longer had too many people around who’d known her her whole life. Almost all of her old friends, hers and William’s, had moved out of the city, many of them years ago, to be nearer to children or grandchildren. At the time it hadn’t bothered Irene all that much, because as long as she had William, she never felt remotely lonely. And then one bright March morning six years ago, William went off to get the newspaper and he never came home; he dropped dead in the newsagent’s from a heart attack. Irene thought he was strong as an ox, she thought he’d go on forever; she thoughtshe might die from the shock, at first, but then that wore off, and the grief came, and that was worse.

A door slammed and Irene jumped. It was next door; Irene was well accustomed to the particular timbre of the front door slamming. She struggled to her feet, leaning forward to see out the window, but there was no one there. Carla, presumably, doing God knows what. Angela had been gone for two months and still Carla came to the house, day after day, “sorting through things,” though Irene struggled to imagine what there was to sort; Angela hadn’t had much. They came from money, Carla and Angela, but somehow Carla seemed to have ended up with most of it. Angela had the house, of course, but nothing else. She eked out a meager living doing freelance editing and copywriting work. She’d had her child young, that was the thing. His father was one of her university professors. There was an unhappy affair, an unexpected pregnancy, and Angela’s life was derailed. She’d had a difficult time of it, Irene was aware; she’d struggled a great deal, with the money and the child-rearing and all her demons.

People assumed you couldn’t have much of a life without children, but they were wrong. Irene and William had wanted kids. It hadn’t worked out for them, but Irene had had a perfectly good life anyway. A husband who loved her, a job as a dental receptionist that she’d enjoyed more than she’d ever expected to, volunteering at the Red Cross. Trips to the theater, holidays in Italy. What was wrong with that? She could do with a bit more of it, if she were honest. And she wasn’t done yet, despite what people thought; she wasn’t in death’s waiting room. She’d the Villa Cimbrone she wanted tovisit, in Ravello, and Positano, where they’d filmedThe Talented Mr. Ripley. Oh, and Pompeii!

Irene had read in a newspaper article that the happiest people on earth were unmarried childless women. She could see why—there was a lot to be said for that sort of freedom, for not being answerable to anyone, for living exactly how you pleased. Only, once you’d fallen in love you could never be truly free, could you? It was too late by then.

After William died, Irene fell into one of her moods. Depression, they called it now, though when she was younger, it was just moods. Angela called it the Black Dog. Irene had been visited, infrequently, by the dog ever since she was a young woman. Sometimes she took to her bed, sometimes she plodded through. The moods took her suddenly, sometimes triggered by an obvious sadness (her third miscarriage, her last), though sometimes they descended without warning, on the brightest of days. She kept her head above water and she never went under because William didn’t let her. William always saved her. And then when William was gone, miraculously, Angela stepped in.

The year William died, 2012, Christmas crept up on Irene. Somehow she’d managed to miss the gradual appearance on shop shelves of decorations and festive food, she’d turned a deaf ear to the annoying music, and then suddenly, it was freezing cold, and it was December and people were carrying trees along the lane.

Irene received invitations—one from her friend Jen, who’d moved to Edinburgh with her husband, and another from a cousin she barely knew who lived inBirminghamof all places—but she declined themwith barely a thought. She couldn’t face the Christmas traveling, she said, which was quite true, although the real reason she felt she ought to stay at home was that if she didn’t spend Christmas alone this year, then next year would be the first one without William, or the one after that. All the Christmases for the rest of her life were going to be without William. She thought it best to just get the first one over with.

Angela, who was sensitive about this sort of thing, said that at least Irene should pop round on Christmas Eve. “Daniel and I will be having a takeaway curry from the Delhi Grill,” she said. “Delicious lamb chops. Won’t you join us?”

Irene said that sounded very nice indeed. On the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, she went out to get her hair set and her nails painted, and to buy some small gifts: a hardback copy ofThe Hare with the Amber Eyesfor Angela and a voucher for art supplies for Daniel.

On returning home, she’d barely had time to put down her things when she heard the most peculiar sound, a kind of moaning, a lowing almost. That strange, animal sound was interrupted, sharply, by another: something shattering, glass or china. Shouting came next. “I cannot deal with you! It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and look at you! Just look at you. Jesus!” Daniel’s voice was high and strangled, the voice of someone at the end of their tether; Angela’s was the voice of someone way past that. “Get out!” she was screaming. “Just get out, you... youbastard. God, how I wish...”

“What? What do you wish? Go on! Say it! What do you wish?”

“I wish you’d never been born!”

Irene heard the sound of someone crashing down the stairs, the front door slamming so hard the whole terrace seemed to shake. From the window she watched Daniel storm past, his skin livid, his hands balled into fists at his sides. Angela came reeling out into the street a few moments later; she was falling-down drunk. Literally—Irene had to go outside to help her up. She managed—after a fashion, after a great deal of consoling and cajoling and gentle and then not-so-gentle persuasion—to get Angela inside and up the stairs to bed.

Angela talked all the while, mumbling to herself, scarcely audible at times. Irene heard this, though: “Everyone told me to get rid of it, you know that? I didn’t listen. I didn’t listen. Oh, I wish I’d had your good fortune, Irene.”

“My good fortune?” Irene repeated.

“To be barren.”

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