Page 41 of A Slow Fire Burning

Music starts to play from somewhere, a radio, a jukebox, the girl has heard this one before, something slow, a man’s voice soft and hoarse over acoustic guitar. In the hot afternoon sun, the girl’s skin is cold. She feels as though someone has poured petrol all over her, and yet there is a point at the back of her scalp, right where her ponytail is secured, that throbs with a vicious heat.

Something bad is going to happen.

TWENTY-FIVE

The basin almost full, her hands plunged wrist-deep into warm, soapy water, Miriam experienced a flashback so pin-sharp she recoiled. It wasn’t visual but a sensation—the sudden, surprising heat of arterial blood bubbling up through her fingers, the shock, immediately afterward, of disappointment. Of sorrow.No taking itback.She stood at the sink in her tiny bathroom, her arms in the water, unable to move for a minute, perhaps even two. Her right hand squeezed a nail brush and her left gripped the handle of pair of scissors, as if in spasm.

And then the moment passed, her hands relaxed, and she came back to herself. She pulled the plug and watched the soapy water run out, she replaced the brush and the scissors on the little shelf beneath the mirror. Carefully, she dried her hands before tipping a little antiseptic lotion onto a ball of cotton wool, which she applied gently to the scratches on her neck and arms. She took the strips of adhesive bandage she’d cut from the roll and applied them to the worst of the wounds, along the side of her left forearm.

When she was finished, Miriam returned to the main cabin andbegan to tidy up. She replaced the books that had tumbled from the shelves, she put her wooden box back in its place, and with a dustpan and brush she swept up broken pottery and soil, one of her herb pots having fallen from the sill. The plant itself, a little spike of tarragon, was irredeemable. Back aching, knees pressed painfully into the cabin floor, she worked methodically, trying her best to sweep away all traces of her confrontation with that vicious girl. She was angry, but her fury was controlled, simmering, right up until the moment that she discovered, under the table, one of Lorraine’s gold hoop earrings, bent slightly out of shape, and she started to sob.

Why must people take what does not belong to them? Why must they take what is hers, and ruin it?

What Miriam remembered most vividly from the time immediately after her abduction was not the hospital. Not her mother, sobbing so hard she literally had to be propped up by Miriam’s father when they came to see her for the first time. Not the hours of interviews with the police, not the crowds of people camped outside their home, the journalists and the television cameras.

What she remembered most clearly was the unbearable kindness of Lorraine’s parents. Lorraine’s father, weeping when he came to her hospital room, squeezing her hand, murmuring,Thank God, thank God you’re all right.

Surely, Miriam thought, that cannot really be what he was thinking? Surely he must have been thinking:Why not you? Why wasn’t it you?

After Lorraine’s funeral, there was a wake at her parents’ home. Miriam asked if she could go upstairs, if she could spend some time in Lorraine’s bedroom, and Lorraine’s mother, this small brokenwoman, managed to smile at her.Of course you can, she said.You are always welcome here. You can visit anytime you like.

Upstairs, sitting at Lorraine’s dressing table, Miriam looked at all her friend’s brightly colored scrunchies, her lipsticks in dark pinks and reds, her eyeshadow palette in purple, blue, and white. There was a jewelry box in front of the mirror. It played “Greensleeves” when you opened it; Miriam had admired it since they were little girls. Inside the box there were necklaces and bracelets, a ring too small for Miriam’s fingers, and the earrings, the gold hoops, which she slipped into her jacket pocket. She left the wake without saying good-bye.

•••

Three days later,Jeremy’s car was found in a car park on a cliff in an area euphemistically referred to as a beauty spot, one of those places people go when they have nowhere left to run. Three days after that, in very bad weather, the coast guard called off the search. And three weeks after that, two young children playing on a beach near Hastings came across a severed human foot that was the right size and color and contained blood of the right type. Whether dashed against rocks or chewed up in a boat’s propeller, Jeremy was gone for good, all that remained of him being the note he left in the glove compartment of his abandoned car, a note of apology, a single word,Sorry.

Sorry.

At school, everyone felt sorry for Miriam. Everyone felt sorry for her, and nobody wanted to be anywhere near her. Everyone looked at her and no one met her eye. Her name was on everyone’s lips and no one spoke to her at break time, at lunch. She walked past and they smiled, even the teachers, kindly, looking at some point in the middle distance, not at her. She was tainted. People—her parents, her grief counselor, the police—told her what had happened to Lorrainewasn’t her fault.No one would have expected you to do any different, Miriam.But the fact that they felt the need to say it told its own tale. The fact that they felt the need to say it meant that they had thought about it, they had thought,You might have done something else.No one would have expected you to. But you might have.

No one ever said that out loud, not until Theo Myerson came along.

The One Who Got Away

When he catches her, she knows what he is going to do to her. She has come full circle, this girl. Lying in the dirt, she sees herself as she was that morning, at her dressing table, brushing her hair, pulling it back into a ponytail that she secured tightly with a band at the nape of her neck.

Still innocent, then.

She could have stopped it, couldn’t she? She could, when her friend suggested skipping school, have simply shaken her head and walked ahead to double math. She could, when they were in town, have refused the pub and suggested the park. She could have said, I’m not getting in that car. She could have said it louder, don’t.

Even after it had all been set in motion, she could have done something different.

She didn’t have to run.

She might, instead of running, have selected a piece of glass from the debris lying on the yellowing grass outside the window she had shattered. She might have slipped this sliver into the pocket of her jeans. She might have crept back into the house, following the sounds of her friend’s distress. She might have slunk into the room where he held her, where he pinned her to the filthy floor. In bare feet she might have moved quickly, breath held. She might have grabbed hold of his hair, pulled his head back, and jammed the piece of glass into his throat.

But now it is too late.

TWENTY-SIX

Irene, dozing in her chair next to the window, a copy of Pat Barker’sBlow Your House Downopen in her lap, was woken by the rain, a sudden downpour so heavy the raindrops drummed like hail against the flagstones in the lane outside, the sound of it so loud that Irene almost missed the sound of someone weeping.

She thought she’d imagined it at first, and then, rising to her feet, she thought with a sinking heart that it might be Carla—despairing, tragic Carla—back to haunt the house next door once more. But then she heard a knocking at her door, so soft, so tentative it might have been the work of a child. She heard a small voice call out, “Irene? Are you there?”

Laura, on her doorstep, soaked to the skin and in a dreadful state, her jacket torn and a livid bruise the size of a tennis ball marring the left side of her face. She was trembling, weeping like a little girl.

“Laura, good God! Come inside.” Irene reached for her, but Laura drew back.

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