Page 32 of A Slow Fire Burning

That’s what they called her in the launderette, because she was short and hairy and she looked like she might live in a burrow or a warren or something, although it turned out she actually lived on a boat, which was in itself quite weird.

“Well?” The woman was frowning at her, more confused than angry. Like when her dad got cross with her, only he tried to deny it and said,I’m not angry, chicken, I’m disappointed.

“They won’t let me in,” Laura said limply, the red mist burning off, quick as it had descended. “She won’t let me in, and I didn’t even want to start any trouble, I only wanted to talk to Tania about something, it’s not even anything to do with the shop, it’s not even...” Laura stopped talking. It was pointless. All of it, pointless. She sank down onto the edge of the pavement, her knees up under her chin. “I didn’t want to cause any trouble.”

The hobbit leaned heavily on Laura’s shoulder as she sat down at her side. “Well,” she said gruffly, “I’m not certain chucking bottles about is the best way to not cause trouble.” Laura glanced at her and she smiled, baring a mouth full of crooked, yellowing teeth.

“I can’t remember your name,” Laura said.

“Miriam,” the woman replied. She patted Laura on the knee. “I take it you’re not working there any longer? I’d noticed you’d not been around.”

“I got fired,” Laura said miserably. “I didn’t turn up for twoshifts on the bounce, and it wasn’t the first time I’d missed, and I didn’t call Maya to tell her, so she missed her grandson’s birthday, which is really shit, but the thing is that I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean any of it. It wasn’t my fault.”

Miriam patted her knee again. “I’m so sorry. That’s horrible. Horrible to lose a job. I know how that feels. Would you like to go somewhere, to drink a cup of tea? I’d like to help you.” Laura shifted away from her slightly. “I’ve had to rely on the kindness of strangers myself, once or twice,” Miriam said. “I know what it’s like. It can be disconcerting at first, can’t it?” Laura nodded. “But I think,” Miriam said, smiling at her benevolently, “I think you’ll find that we’re really quite alike, you and me.”

No we’re fucking not, Laura thought, but she managed not to say anything, because she could see the woman was only trying to be kind.

“So then four years after I got run over, my mother married the man who knocked me off my bike.” Laura paused, adding milk to the mugs of tea she’d made. She handed the less-chipped mug to Miriam. “It fucks you up, stuff like that, no question. I mean, obviously, being knocked down by a car fucks youphysically, it leaves you with pain and scars and all sorts ofimpairments, doesn’t it?” She gestured downward, to her gammy left leg. “But the other stuff’s worse. The emotional stuff is worse, the mental stuff. That’s what fucks you up for good.”

Miriam sipped her tea and nodded. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said.

“So now,” Laura said, collapsing into her chair, “I do stuff, stupid stuff sometimes, like this morning, or like... whenever, and it’snot like I even mean to, or sometimes I do mean to, only it’s like something’s been set in motion and I can’t stop it, and all I can do is react, try and minimize the damage to myself, and sometimes when you do that, you end up damaging other people, but it’s notdeliberate. Not premeditated.” The hobbit nodded again. “People scoff, you know? People like my stepmother or my teachers or the police or Maya or whatever, when I say it’s not my fault. They’re like, well, whose fault is it, then?”

Janine, Laura’s mother, stood in the driveway in front of the house, looking over at the bird feeders in the apple tree. They needed filling up. She wasn’t sure they had any more feed, but she didn’t want to go to the shops now; it had been snowing for a while and the roads would be horrible. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, enjoying the pull of cold air into her lungs and the almost perfect quiet, which was broken suddenly and violently by a squeal of brakes. There followed a long, swooping silence and then a horrible, sickening crack. The drive was about two hundred yards long and tree-lined, and there was a hedge at the edge of the property, so there was no way of seeing what had happened in the road, but Janine knew. She told the police when they came that she just knew something terrible had happened.

The car was gone. Laura lay in the road with her legs twisted around at a strange angle. As she sank to her knees at her child’s side, Janine saw a slow trickle of blood dripping from the back of Laura’s helmet onto the slick, wet tarmac. She reached into her pocket for her phone and found that it was not there and she started to scream and scream, but no one came, because the next house along was half a mile away.

The police wanted to know what she had seen and heard—was she sure she didn’t glimpse anything of the car, perhaps a blur of color? Janine shook her head. “This was my fault. It was my fault.”

“It is not your fault, Mrs. Kilbride; this is the fault of the driver of the car that hit Laura,” the policewoman said to her. The policewoman put her arm around Janine’s shoulders and squeezed her. “We’ll find him. Or her. We’ll find whoever did this. Don’t you worry, they’re not going to get away with this.” Janine pulled away from her, gazed at her in pale, wordless terror.

They did find him. CCTV half a mile away captured two cars going past within minutes of Laura’s accident: the first belonged to an elderly woman whose car was found to be immaculate, without any sign of a collision. The second belonged to Richard Blake, an art and antiques dealer who lived a few miles away in Petworth and whose car, he said when the police tracked him down at work, had been stolen the night before. He had not reported it. As the police officers were leaving, Richard asked in a strangled voice, “Is she going to be all right?” and the policewoman asked, “Iswhogoing to be all right?”

“The little girl!” he blurted out, wringing his hands in front of him.

“I mentioned a child, Mr. Blake. I didn’t say she was female. How did you know the victim was a girl?”

A criminal mastermind Richard Blake was not.

That’s how it happened. That’s what Laura believed. That’s what she was told, so—she was ten years old, remember?—that’s what she believed.

At first, of course, she didn’t believe anything at all, because shewas in a coma. Twelve days unconscious, and then when finally she woke, it was to a new world, one in which she had a broken pelvis and a compound-fractured femur and a smashed skull, a world in which, it seemed, someone had done a full factory reset, sent her all the way back to zero. She had to learn to speak again, to read, to walk, to count to ten.

She’d no memory of the accident, or of the months preceding it—the new school, the new house, her new bicycle: it was all gone. She had a vague memory of their old house in London, of the next-door neighbor’s cat. After that, everything went blurry.

Gradually, though, as time passed, things began to come back to her. A few weeks before she left the hospital, she said to her father: “The house we live in now, it’s at the foot of a hill. Is that right?”

“That’s right!” He smiled at her. “Good girl. Do you remember anything else?”

“Bungalow,” she said, and he nodded. She frowned. “The car. It’s green.”

Her father shook his head, a rueful smile on his lips. “Red, I’m afraid, chicken. I’ve got a red Volvo.”

“No, notourcar. The car that hit me. It was green. It turned out of our driveway,” she said. “It was leaving our house, just as I was coming home.”

The smile slid from her father’s face. “You don’t remember the accident, chicken. You couldn’t possibly remember the accident.”

A few days after that, when her mother came to visit (they never visited together any longer, which seemed odd), Laura asked about the car that had hit her. “It was green, wasn’t it?” she asked. “I’m sure it was green.”

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