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Fire Colour One
Jenny Valentine


A bold and brilliant novel about love, lies and redemption, from award-winning author, Jenny Valentine – one of the greatest YA voices of her generation.Iris's father, Ernest, is at the end of his life and she hasn't even met him. Her best friend, Thurston, is somewhere on the other side of the world. Everything she thought she knew is up in flames.Now her mother has declared war and means to get her hands on Ernest's priceless art collection. But Ernest has other ideas. There are things he wants Iris to know after he's gone. And the truth has more than one way of coming to light.























Copyright (#ulink_284f1ed6-09cb-5e1f-8469-351d791a74f3)


First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

Text copyright © Jenny Valentine 2015

Jenny Valentine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007512362

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008126230

Version: 2015-06-23


For my Dad.


Contents

Cover (#u92fd92f9-bfba-5e0f-9b3e-b29807bc04c8)

Title Page (#u1ea0881f-f0b7-5cbb-b0ea-95ee194a3969)

Copyright (#ue157b5d0-f236-58a7-aff0-1b99eb2a179b)

Dedication (#ubd908398-f356-5277-8ecd-27f28a035021)

Chapter One (#u87985f81-261b-53fc-9994-144095340851)

Chapter Two (#ue83fa692-d1f5-5f3f-9e5f-e709bf5d17e7)

Chapter Three (#ud01edbb9-b770-5d33-91cc-03afc49911f4)

Chapter Four (#uedfe7678-1d57-51a4-9493-6173d51f0492)

Chapter Five (#u5bb136b4-2e7d-53e0-bf6f-3c0bfa93da76)

Chapter Six (#u4f3b704f-a936-5db3-8767-1a3705e21a86)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Jenny Valentine (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)







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At my father’s funeral, after everything, I lit a great big fire in his honour, built from stacked apple crates and broken furniture and pieces of a fallen-down tree. It towered over the scrubby piece of land I call the bonfire garden, and blazed, too far gone to fight, against the fading afternoon. On the lawn below me, my family gulped for air like landed fish. They clawed at their own faces like Edvard Munch’s Screamers, like meth-heads. His mourners poured from the house, designer-clad and howling, lit up like spectres by the flames.

My stepfather, Lowell Baxter, ageing pin-up boy, one-time TV star and current no-hoper, stood swaying, dazed and hollow-eyed, a man woken up in the wrong place after a long sleep. Hannah, my mother, crumpled on to the wet grass like a just-born foal in all her credit-card finery, her gorgeous face collapsing in a slow puncture. She clutched at her own clothes, sobbing violently, but she didn’t bother getting to her feet. I doubt she could remember how, she was so weighted down with debt.

I could have filmed them, preserved their agonies for repeat viewings, but I didn’t. I did what my best and only friend Thurston always told me. I savoured the moment because the moment was more than enough. I stood back and watched them suffer, feeding fistfuls of paper to the flames.

I wondered if they’d ever speak to me again. I’ve always longed for Hannah and Lowell to stop talking.

They didn’t behave that way when it was my father in the furnace. Neither of them was sorry to see him go. Before the fire, there was a service for him at the crematorium. Ernest Toby Jones, one of a queue of waiting dead. Lowell worked the room in a tight suit and Hannah wore big black sunglasses to hide her lack of tears, and shiny black high heels with red soles, same colour as her lipstick. High-impact accessories are my mother’s answer to big occasions, in place of actual feelings.

I couldn’t stand the thought of Ernest lying in that box with the lid closed, all dark and lonely and gone. None of it made sense to me. I couldn’t keep up. But like water putting out a lit match, the rest of the world closed over the fact of his absence, and ran on. His hearse moved through everyday traffic. Cars behind him on the road tested their patience on his slow and stately journey to the grave. Only one old man, walking with a stick, stopped as the coffin navigated a roundabout and met my eye, and bowed his head politely to the dead. Inside, Ernest’s thin crowd spread itself out across the pews and tried to fill up the room. God knows who most of them were. They wore their dullest clothes and tuned their voices to the frequencies of sadness and loss. I sat on my own. I didn’t want anything to do with them. The chapel’s technicolour carpets looked like off-cuts from The Shining, from a shut-down Las Vegas casino. I wanted to meet the person responsible and find out if they were joking, or colour-blind, or just a fan of Stanley Kubrick films. I wanted to tell Thurston about them because he would get it and because on that day of all days I could have done with him there. And then I realised the carpets were chosen perfectly, because they took my mind off the elephant in the room, the rubbed-raw stump of what was missing, the lack of my father, the lack of Ernest, who was never ever coming back.

I didn’t have him for long enough. That’s the bare bones of it. I wasn’t ready, once I’d found him, to let go.

“Do you want a song played?” I asked him, the week before. “When the curtains close, when your coffin goes through. Do you want a hymn or something?”

He thought about it for one waterlogged, morphine-soft moment.

“Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes,” he said, and his voice sat like pea gravel in his mouth, sounded like mice scampering in a faraway attic. It took an age for the words to come out into the air. “If you don’t know me by now.”

“You will never, never, never know me,” I sang, somewhere between laughter and tears.

Thurston threw a fake funeral once. He hired a hearse and his Uncle Mac drove it. I sat up front and even though the coffin behind me was empty, it brooded, like something moody and alive, and I kept thinking there was someone else in the car. Thurston walked ahead on the street at this slow, slow pace in a threadbare tailcoat and a tall black hat, a face like wet thunder, streaked with tears. It was a Sunday in the suburbs, Long Beach way, out by Rossmoor. People were washing their cars and tidying their yards and a gang of kids were riding their bikes in circles round a run-over cat. Uncle Mac just kept driving, slow as could be, following Thurston’s lead with a great big smile plastered to his face. He didn’t know what was going to happen next and he liked it that way.

“I trust the boy,” he said, “’cause he’s a genius.”

I wasn’t about to argue with that.

The kids stopped circling, people stopped mowing and raking and more still came right out of their houses, and everyone watched this funeral that wasn’t theirs. You could see them wondering whose it was and what the hell it was doing on their street, on their weekend. And then when we had everyone’s attention, Thurston reached into his jacket pocket at the exact same time I opened the car windows and cranked up the stereo, It’s Just Begun by The Jimmy Castor Bunch. In one fluid movement, as the music gathered itself together, Thurston took four home-made pigment bombs and flung them out and down on the tarmac in front of him. He walked and we followed, stately and respectful, through a thick and billowing cloud of colour that swelled and rose and then drifted down, clinging to his tear-stained skin and his black clothes and to our sombre, bug-stuck car. As we emerged from the colour cloud and the song kicked in, Thurston started to dance. Not just foot tapping or finger clicking, not just any old thing. His whole body dipped and slipped and flowed like water through the music, the notes flinging him into the air and then low and wide across the ground until the smile on my face hurt just watching him, until I forgot to breathe. God, that boy could move.

Everybody but us was still, like we’d cast some kind of spell on them, like we’d stopped time but carried on travelling right through it. People stared. That’s all they could do. It was the kind of funeral you’d long to have, the kind you’d see and then years later couldn’t say if it was real or only a dream.

It was a moment, that’s what it was. Thurston dreamed it up and handed it over to those Rossmoor people, for free. They had no idea what they were getting. They didn’t know how lucky they were.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

When Ernest’s emptied body had hit temperatures close to 1000 degrees centigrade and been reduced to a shoebox full of strangely damp sand, cooling down for collection, I wished for a great burst of sound and colour, a celebration, a free dream. Instead everything was quiet and ordinary and shut down. There might have been a hymn, and people got up and shuffled out, looking only at the ground. We drove back in silence to his house for refreshments and small talk, for gin-laced cocktails and tiny, harpooned sandwiches on the lawn. It would have been so much better with Thurston there to help me. I remember thinking that. It would have been something breathtaking and spectacular.

I wasn’t wrong.

In the end, it was my best and last fire. I went out into the garden alone. The heat had dropped out of the sun and the light was leaving. I took a deep breath. I lit a match, put it calmly to the petrol-soaked rags at the bonfire’s skirts, and I waited.

And I wished with all my heart that Ernest could have been around to see it.







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Ernest must have given up on ever seeing me again when my mother called him at home out of the blue. We’d only been back in the country five days. It was a Monday morning and it was raining. The clock by his bed said 11.32. The nurse passed him the phone while it was still ringing. Ernest said if he’d drawn up a list of a thousand people it could possibly be, we wouldn’t have made the bottom of it. We’d been gone more than twelve years. He’d quit thinking he’d find us a long time ago.

Hannah and Lowell had talked about it the night before. They’d talked of nothing else for days in fact, since before we left home, how she was going to play it, what she was going to say. Lowell told her to front it out and act like nothing had happened, and I guess that’s what she did.

“We’re back,” she said to Ernest, just like that, like we’d been away for the weekend.

A wormhole could have opened on the other side of the room and Ernest would have been less surprised, less terrified. He looked around for confirmation that he was awake and alive, not dead already, not sucked back in time, not dreaming.

“Hannah?” He breathed her name into the receiver. “Is that you?”

I could hear his voice, small and tinny through the back of the phone, like a man trapped in a cookie jar. I stayed close and listened. I’d never heard my real father speak before, not that I could remember anyway. He’d washed his hands of us a long time ago, and that was that.

“Yes, Ernest,” my mother said, assessing her face in the mirror, smoothing out the lines around her mouth with her free hand then letting go, facial time-travel, back and forth, back and forth. “It’s me.”

It must have stripped him right back to the bone, her sudden call, her carrying on like nothing had happened all those years. I didn’t think about it then but I do now, all the time.

“God, this place is a dump,” she said, over his stunned silence. “So grey and so cold.”

“Is Iris with you?” Ernest asked her.

She didn’t answer him directly. It’s one of the few things about Hannah you can always count on – her lack of generosity, her guaranteed refusal to give a person what they want. The question bounced off her and she just moved right along.

“We’ve got some work with the BBC.”

“News to me,” I said under my breath, because as far as I knew, we’d been running from a mountain of debt and other trouble, not headed towards a bright new future. Hannah slapped me on the back of the arm and gestured at me to zip it or get out.

“It’s a really good move for us,” she said, “apart from the weather.”

“Why have you called, Hannah?” I heard him say. “What do you want?”

My mother has a special voice for deal making. It’s sharp and flinty, like a rock face, like gritted teeth. She locks everything into a safe and then she opens her mouth. “Shall we meet?”

There was a pause, just quiet on the line like he was thinking about it. The way I saw it, he wasn’t exactly jumping at the chance.

“Why now?” he said.

“Don’t you want to?” Hannah put her hand over the mouthpiece and hissed, “See?” like this was proof she’d always been right about him. I got ready to be rejected all over again. I hadn’t been expecting anything different. It wasn’t even that big a deal.

“It’s not that,” he said.

“So what is it?”

“I’d need you to come here.”

I figured that was that. I was about to leave the room and get on with the rest of my Ernest-less life. Hannah told me once that Ernest lived alone in the middle of nowhere and that she’d never go back because it was just about the dullest place on earth, with no shops or Wi-Fi or bars or people or tarmac or houses. My mother was a fish out of water in a place like that, a bird of paradise in a cesspit.

“Just sheep,” she’d said, “and grass. And Ernest,” and she’d shuddered at the horror of it. “Never, ever again.”

“Why’s that?” she asked him now in an I’m-holding-all-the-cards, mountain-to-Mohammed, over-my-dead-body kind of way. “Why don’t you come to London? I thought we could meet at the Royal Academy. You can buy me tea at Fortnum’s, like you used to.”

A trip like that was beyond him. Just getting out of bed was a half-hour operation, followed by a three-hour sleep. Ernest wasn’t going anywhere. He said so.

“Bring Iris if you can,” he said. “I’d really like to get another look at her before I’m gone.”

“Another look?” I whispered. “What am I? A vase?”

“Gone?” she said, swatting me away. “Where are you going?”

“I’m sick,” he told her.

“What’s wrong with you?”

He paused. I could hear it. “Lung, liver, bone,” he said. “Oh, and brain. I forgot to say brain.”

He could have lied. He could have made something up, I suppose, but he gave it to her straight. He was dying.

I felt the base of my stomach drop out, just for a second, like it does on a rollercoaster, when you’re at the top and about to tip over and it’s too late to change your mind and go back. Thurston was always looking for that feeling. He said he went after it because he could never tell if it was the tail end of excitement or the beginning of remorse. I said maybe it was both and wasn’t that possible and he said that was exactly why he liked me, precisely how come we were friends.

Hannah’s pupils deepened like wells and she gripped the receiver harder, until her knuckles went white. She made the right noises but they didn’t match the look on her face.

“Oh God,” she said. “How long have you got?”

“Hard to tell,” I heard Ernest say. “Weeks, if I’m lucky.”

“And how long have you known?”

“Not nearly long enough.”

“And you’re sure?”

“I’m sure, Hannah,” he said. “It’s over. I’m out.”

I watched her wet her lips with the tip of her tongue, like she could taste something sweet. Hannah saw me watching and turned away. “She’s sixteen, you know,” she said, twirling at her hair with her fingers, sliding it past her teeth, checking for split ends. “Iris. Can you believe it?”

Ernest breathed for a bit, which sounded like someone walking on bubble-wrap, and then he said, “There are things I’ve been hoping to give her. Family things. It would mean a lot, to be able to tell her myself.”

It didn’t mean much to me one way or another, not back then. I was too busy working out how I was ever going to get home, worrying about how I was going to find Thurston. Family wasn’t high on my list. Blood is no thicker than water, not when you’ve been on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean for most of your life, not when the one person you care about is still over there, and not talking to you, and you haven’t had a chance to say sorry, or goodbye. Hannah looked at me, all worked up and wide-eyed, but I just shrugged.

“What things?” she said, too fast if you ask me, too hungry.

“Just some paintings.”

“Just some paintings,” she echoed through her Cheshire Cat smile.

“If she wants them.”

“Oh, Iris is into her art,” she drooled. “She’ll want them.”

“So bring her,” he said. “Come and visit.”

She used this pouting, sugar-soaked voice to shake him down. “And what do I get if I do? Are you going to make it worth my while?”

I was ashamed of her, honestly. I didn’t know where to look. And at the same time I thought maybe Ernest deserved to be played by her, that he’d made his own bed, after all. I definitely remember thinking about that.

“Let’s talk about it when you get here,” he said.

“If I get there,” Hannah hardened up again, “not when. I can’t promise, Ernest. It’s not a given. I can’t just drop everything.”

I wondered what it was she reckoned she was carrying, what it was she’d have to drop, apart from credit cards and cigarettes and gum.

There was a silence then. I heard the loose wet rattle of him sighing into the phone. Hannah counted with her fingers, slowly, for my benefit, to show she knew already how this would go. She winked at me, like we were in it together.

“You’ll be rewarded,” Ernest said. “You know how generous I can be.”

“I do,” she said.

“Come soon,” he told her. “I don’t have much time left.”

When sheput the phone down she was glowing. She couldn’t wait for Lowell to get back from his audition so she could tell him the good news. Everything about the way my mother moved around the room was different after that call, lighter, like she’d just mainlined a barrel full of hope.

I asked her how come Ernest was so keen to get eyes on me all of a sudden, after so many years of nothing. I didn’t feel like humouring him. The last thing I wanted was to be the centrepiece of an old man’s guilt trip.

“Who cares?” she said. “This is good news, Iris. Don’t try and spoil it.”

“Good news how?”

“Your father,” she told me, “was a very wealthy man.”

“Is,” I said. “You just got off the phone with him. He’s not dead yet.”

“Yes, OK.” She dialled Lowell’s number, pulled a face. “Is. But he’ll be dead soon.”

I laughed. “You look human,” I told her, “but inside you’ve got to be part android.”

“Don’t give me that,” she said. “You know he left us with nothing.”

“You’ve told me enough times.”

“So don’t waste your time sticking up for him. He’s been a terrible father to you.”

“And he’s going to be a better one when he’s dead? Is that the logic?”

Hannah hooked the phone between her jaw and her shoulder, and poured herself just an inch or two of vodka. Morning measures, Thurston called them. Breakfast of Champions.

“Get what you can out of Ernest Toby Jones,” she said. “That’s my advice to you, free of charge.”

Nothing is free of charge in my mother’s world. She never gave a thing away without making somebody somewhere pay for it. I knew her well enough to know we weren’t in this together, not for a second.

“Is that what you plan to do?” I asked her. “Get what you can?”

“You’ll feel the same way,” she said, “once you see the pictures he’s got on his walls.”

“What pictures?”

“Priceless ones,” she said.

“Which artists?”

She waved the question away with a flip of her hand and rubbed her fingers and thumbs together, the way people do when they can smell money.

“You’ve got me all wrong,” I said. “I’m not interested in how much they’re worth.”

“You will be,” she said.

“And how do you figure that?”

She smiled. “You think you’re immune to the dollar,” she said. “You think you’re above all that, but you’re not.”

She knocked the vodka back with a quick snap of her head. I watched her swallow it, watched the mechanism working in her throat like rocks in a sack. Mother’s little helper.

“To Ernest,” she said, recalibrating her smile as the drink hit her bloodstream. “You and me and his millions are all he’s got.”







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Hannah and Lowell stayed up later than ever that night, getting reckless, lurching towards triple-strength cocktails and dancing in the living room. Neither of them had to be up for work in the morning. They probably thought they’d never have to work again. I could hear them talking about cruise ships and second homes in the South of France and film financing and cosmetic surgery. They were celebrating their sudden, soon-to-be fat fortune, counting their chickens, peaking too early, as usual.

I thought about the time Thurston and I talked about what we’d do with a vast, Forbes Top Ten Rich List, silly, unforgivable amount of money.

Change the world, Bill and Melinda Gates style.

Live on another planet, but only on weekends.

Get $10 bicycles for 4 million of the world’s poor.

Buy United Technologies (or Fox or Walmart or all three) and close them down.

“Give it all away to strangers,” he said, “face to face, in random, life-changing acts of generosity.”

“Set fire to it,” I said, “and enjoy the look on my mother’s face.”

He said that if by some miracle I ever got that kind of rich, I should be sure and let him know, and that he would help me decide.

“You’ll be the first person I call,” I said, even though I knew he didn’t have a cell phone and never would. Tracking devices, Thurston called them, and he refused to be tracked.

A fine principle, I told him, an interesting stand. Worse than useless, it turns out, when you’re trying to find somebody, when you want to tell them where in the world you’ve disappeared to, when you need to see if they’re anything like even halfway to OK. After we left in such a hurry, I realised I didn’t even know where Thurston lived. I never went there. He never told me. It just didn’t come up.

I rolled on to my side and pressed a pillow over my head to shut Hannah and Lowell’s noise out. I tried to think about Ernest. I’d only ever seen photos, one or two, of a serious, comb-haired, indoors sort of a guy, a bit of a geek, startled by the camera. They were yellowed and faded with age those photos, like they came from a different time, like they had nothing at all to do with me. I wanted to feel something about him dying, I knew I ought to, but really he was no more than biology to me. We had nothing in common, unless you’d count a total lack of interest in one another. His silence my whole life kind of spoke for itself. I grew up hearing it, as loud as any of Hannah’s yelling ever got to be.

I’d taken a couple of pills from my mother’s well-stocked bathroom cabinet and I lay there waiting for the day’s sharp edges to blur into sleep. The sheets felt rough beneath me like thin cotton over sandpaper and my pyjamas twisted tight around my legs like a trap. I closed my eyes and imagined random objects in my bedroom bursting obligingly into flames, something Thurston taught me, a tailor-made way to relax. It wouldn’t work for everyone, he said, but it sure as hell worked for me. Behind my eyelids, everything was torched and blasted with fire. My shoes smouldered, my alarm clock warped and melted, my bedding was ablaze. I felt like a superhero on a day off, like a plume of smoke, cloud-wrapped, buoyant. I couldn’t move but inside I was flying. The skin on my palms seethed and bubbled. I was a burning candle, I was a pool of hot wax and then I was gone.

Some days inside my head there is nothing but fire. Most nights I sleep deep inside its bright, fast blooms. I have longed for it in random places – the old baths near our flat on Grafton Road, the vacant Embassy Hotel on South Grand, that copse of larch and ash beyond Ernest’s garden, the painted house downtown where my mother went to therapy for a while and left me in the waiting room willing the fish to broil in their gravelly, weed-wrapped tank. My fingers itch constantly for the length and neck and strike of a match. My heart swells and soars at a column of smoke against the sky. I pine for the flame’s lick, the sharp scorch in my lungs, the same way an addict pines for the needle. Thurston said once that I had the sweet moment of surrender all tangled up with love, and maybe he was right, but that didn’t mean I knew the first thing about how to untangle it.

I tried to keep my fires small after we moved back here, small and secret. Hannah was watching me like a hawk, keen to ship me off to some correctional centre or other, now that she could do it on the good old National Health. I couldn’t let her see me. I needed to be cleverer than that. A wastepaper basket, some old clothes, dry leaves, a length of rope, everything has its own flame. Everything burns at its own pace, with its own particular smoke and smell. I made fires every day because I had nothing better to do; little heaps of dry matter assembled and lit before breakfast, after lunch, behind buildings, on wastelands, on walkways and under bridges. I was fast and precise. I could start one in seconds, get up and walk away, my mind a little emptier, my breathing easier. Nothing got damaged, not by the small fires. They were actually pretty useful in their way, a kind of tidying up, an imposing of order and neatness on things. They didn’t do any harm.

I was twelve, my first proper fire, and I was alone. I hid in a hollowed-out oak in a quiet dip in Griffith Park, dragging in gathered sticks and strips of bark like a worker ant. I was careful about building it. I took my time. I had a rolled-up old magazine of Hannah’s in my back pocket for starting it, hungry looking ladies with tight trousers and tight smiles. I had to twist the pages just so – too loose and they’d flare out before the wood could catch, too much and they wouldn’t burn at all. I’d watched Lowell do it often enough in the cramped, weed-choked yard of our apartment. Now it was my turn.

I only had one match. I don’t remember where I found it. I held it up and even I could see how small and pitiful it looked, how unlikely it was to start anything worth bragging about. I breathed in and ran the match across the gritted bottom of my shoe, felt the stroke of it, heard the little pucker of air when it caught. And then I lifted it, burning, into view. It was thrilling to me. It was the start of everything, right there in my hand.

I shielded the tiny flame, moved it slowly so its own breeze didn’t put it out, and then I touched it to the twisted paper. The smiling ladies writhed and blackened and the smoke rose in a rainbow of greys. When the fire leapt up I felt its heat, warped and dancing in front of me like liquid, like magic. I didn’t know a flame could burn so many shades. I’m saying every colour in the world was in that fire, and watching it burn was the biggest, boldest feeling. I’ve never felt it again like the first time, not quite like that.

I got out of there when I had to, when the heat and the smoke made it hard to see and harder to breathe. I stayed low and made sure there was nobody around. My hands on the ground were covered with dust and ash. They looked like statues’ hands. I moved away fast and then I stopped to watch the smoke from my fire rolling fat and dark as a storm cloud. At the top of the park, from the observatory, you can see way out over the endless fume-hung map of grid streets and thin trees and squat tower blocks and lit highways, as far as the horizon, further. My fire was a little insult to all that, something wild in plain view of the city. It felt like a door had swung open, like I’d been kept in an airless room all this time and finally I could breathe. I knew I should hurry, but it was like trying to run in a dream. Bright sparks and flakes of charred leaf floated down through the blue behind me, gentle as you like, and the flames licked and snapped like a dragon, biting clean through solid wood.

I couldn’t see the smoke on the subway but all the time I knew it was there. I looked up and there was a boy, pale and dark-haired and skinny, older than me, fifteen it turned out, and he was holding up a handwritten sign and looking at me like he wanted to make sure I saw it. It read, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? I went red hot and looked at my dust-covered shoes.

“Psst,”he said, and I looked up again and a new sign read, WAS IT WORTH IT? DID IT FEEL GOOD? and I nodded and looked straight at him and we smiled.

That was Thurston. That’s how we met. On the subway, eight stops from Griffith to home, he showed other people other signs and I watched him. He held up the signs and waited for them to notice, and the whole time he stayed looking at me. An old lady got WHERE DID YOU HIDE IT? IT WILL ALL WORK OUT FINE IN THE END. A shifty looking guy got LEAVE IT ALONE and YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE. A girl about the same age as Thurston, her hair tied up high on her head, earrings swinging, got BE A BETTER LIAR and OH. MY. GOD. Each time, they acted like he could see inside their heads and they coloured right up and couldn’t look right at him again.

I loved it. I’m telling you, nobody had made me smile like that my whole goddamn life. I got off at my stop because I had to but I didn’t want to leave and when I waved at the boy he winked at me and held up BOUND TO MEET AGAIN.

Back home, Hannah and Lowell were out, but they’d be back soon, crashing through the door and trampling on my quiet with their verdicts on the relentless heat, the price of everything, and the vital overall importance of their day. Much better, this peace, this alone time, this thinking about the boy on the subway, this picturing my fire. As it burned, I washed my hands and face, scrubbed the muck from under my nails, pulled off my clothes and hid them under the bed. The smell of it was still in my shirt, sweet and black and smoky. I put my face in the sleeve at the bend in my elbow, and I breathed.

I was hooked right then, on both of them, the boy and the fire. I don’t mind owning up to that.

In London, I’d have dreamt about Thurston if I could. I’d have traded him for fire, but even in my sleep I couldn’t find him. The next morning, the noise of the real world descended like a net and caught me in it. Somewhere a lorry was reversing, a car door slammed. I could hear Lowell making coffee, banging cupboard doors, and sweating out his hangover. I felt the weight of my own body like gravity, pinning me down in the wrong place, on this bed. I opened my eyes and everything was the same as the night before, unfamiliar, intact and unspoilt. No plain blue still-as-a-picture California sky but something lower and rolling and cold. No posters on the walls like in my old room, no piles of clothes or comic books, just unpacked boxes. No Thurston throwing stuff at my window, waiting on the corner so we could begin our day. No heaps of ash, no charred and twisted remains, just carpet and plaster and metal, and a father I’d never met and didn’t want to meet, dark on the horizon like a storm. I couldn’t have been more disappointed.







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My mother has four main stories she likes to tell: the edited highlights of her modelling career (who said what, who touched her where), her disastrous marriage to Ernest (no redeeming features), her many visits to Europe (ditto – Paris is littered with dog shit apparently, Venice is a rip-off and Florence is a bore) and the time she spilt a bowl of soup at the American Ambassador’s house in Regent’s Park. She never talks about anything real. She never gives herself away. It’s like her life started at twenty-one, like nothing happened before that was worth mentioning.

“Maybe it didn’t,” Ernest said to me once. “Maybe things were awful,” and it made sense, I suppose, of the way she drinks and thinks of everything as a fight, and grabs hold of the day like it’s a sheer drop and if she doesn’t dig her nails right in, she’ll fall.

Back home, whenever we had people over, Hannah rolled out variations on her four stories while Lowell pretended to cook deli-bought meals from scratch, throwing his head back when he laughed, rattling pans and putting on a show. The moment the doorbell rang he was out on stage and she was prepping herself under the lights. I guess it made them both feel as if they were working. My job was to pour the drinks and play it like we were your dream family, like really the best of friends. We couldn’t keep it up for long. Four minutes was about the limit. If we strayed into five, one or the other of us got bored or cranky and had to leave the room. There was no trace of our usual cook-your-own pizza and stay-out-of-sight arrangement. They didn’t work their way through a bottle of vodka in old T-shirts if there were guests in the house. They hid the TV in a cupboard and acted like we spent our spare time holding hands and listening to recordings of T.S. Eliot reading ‘The Waste Land’.

I used to think it was a miracle that anyone believed them. But people believe what they see. And mostly they see whatever is put in front of them, if it’s in their interests to believe. Thurston told me that, and he was right. If someone gave you a fat stack of money and told you to spend it, you’d like to think the money was real. If they handed you a diamond and said it was worth as much as a house, you’d want it to be true, because you’d be getting something out of it.

The first and only time Thurston met Hannah and Lowell, he showed up dressed as a girl. More precisely, he showed up dressed as Hannah, wearing clothes he must have taken from her closet some time before, when I wasn’t looking.

Lowell answered the door.

“Your friend’s here,” he said to me.

“What friend?”

“Charlotte.”

I didn’t look up. “I don’t know anybody called Charlotte.”

“Well she’s here,” he said, “and she’s asking for you.”

This girl came into the room, all long legs and lipstick and fingernails. Beautiful, flawless, just Hannah’s type, the kind of girl I avoided like the plague, who wouldn’t notice if she tripped over me in the street in her Manolo Blahniks.

“It’s Charlie,” she said, “remember?” Stretching out towards me, all grabby and polished, like some kind of sisterhood reunion. I looked down at her hands and I saw the little star tattoo at the base of the left thumb and it was only then that I knew it was Thurston.

“Oh God. Charlie!” I said. “So sorry.”

Charlie was bespoke, made-to-measure perfect for Hannah and Lowell to fall in love with, an Orange County girl, drowning in labels, with money in her veins and parents who did, “Oh, I don’t know, something in the movies.” She dropped names in a way that made the sweat break out on Lowell’s forehead, always the first name twice, to show how well she knew them.

“Leo, Leo DiCaprio’s got one of those,” she said, pointing to our crappy vintage-style blender. “Cate, Cate Blanchett would just love how you’ve done this wall.”

“She’s got style,” Hannah said, watching her own skirt stretched tight over Thurston’s narrow hips.

“Good manners,” Lowell said, doing the thoughtful movie-star clench with his jaw, already wondering whether she had a crush on him, already working out how to get in with her people.

It didn’t for a second occur to them that this was a piece of on-and-off homeless, skinny male white trash from the uglier side of town, graffiti maestro, street artist, performance poet and pickpocket, with a mild criminal record (trespass, jaywalking, vagrancy) and no sway whatsoever in the Hollywood Hills. Even if I had told them, right then I don’t think they would have believed it. Just the week before, Thurston had strung a huge banner from the top of the Ocean Palmsbuilding, hand-stitched in letters more than two metres tall, FROM UP HERE WE ARE ALL NOBODIES. That wouldn’t have meant a thing to Hannah and Lowell. There was nothing in that for them.

“Can I take your daughter out tonight?” Charlie asked, and they looked surprised as hell that someone so spectacular might know me, but they said yes, of course they said yes.

Thurston kissed them on both cheeks when we left and they didn’t feel the stubble underneath his smooth skin, didn’t notice the bitten-down nails behind the false ones.

“I can’t believe you just did that,” I said.

“No big deal,” he said. “Everyone here is faking it.”

“I suppose.”

“How the hell,” he asked me, taking my arm on the stairs, “does anyone walk in these shoes?”

We stopped at a restroom round the corner from our apartment. He’d stashed his clothes there, his baggy black T-shirt and ancient jeans. When he came out looking like Thurston again, I thought he was a hundred times more beautiful than Charlie, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t say so.

He grinned. “They loved me, right?”

“You were perfect,” I told him. “How could they not?”

“Jeez,” he said, “your parents are easy to please.”

Charlotte didn’t appear again. A while later, Hannah and Lowell asked me what happened to her.

I was reading about a sinkhole that had opened up out of nowhere underneath a man’s house and swallowed his bed with him in it.

“I haven’t seen her,” I said.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“I get it,” I told her. “Too good for me, right?”

“Such great potential,” Hannah said, like she’d know.

“I wanted to get her parents over at the weekend,” Lowell said.

I suppose they wanted to believe I’d had a friend with connections, that it might almost make me somebody.

“She died,” I told them, and I didn’t care if they bought it or not. “She moved away.”

Lowell’s face hovered somewhere around shock at the further thinning of his address book, and Hannah said, “Well, which is it?”

“Both,” I said. “But not in that order.”

They didn’t bother to argue

Gullible works both ways. Tricking people requires their full co-operation.

“We’re lazy,” Thurston once told me. “We’re happy to have the wool pulled over our eyes, because everything else is just plain hard work.”







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I call my mother Hannah because she told me to. When I was about seven, she said it was time to stop being a baby and start using her proper name.

“Otherwise,” she said, turning to enjoy her reflection from behind, “the older you get, the more you’ll age me.”

She is a beauty. You’d have to give her that. Tall and dark and glossy, like some kind of racehorse, with legs and curves that people feel the need to stare at in the street. We are not one bit alike.

I am plain-looking, skinny and flat-chested and small, and it suits me. I live in thrift-shop jeans and secondhand sweaters because they come in under budget and under the radar and they’re just easy. I cut my hair short like a boy for the same reason. I’ve banked myself plenty of time and money by never minding too much what I look like. I think my day is about four hours longer than Hannah’s without all the grooming in it. It’s really quite liberating, not giving a shit. What am I missing out on exactly – make-up, brand anxiety and crippling self-doubt about shoes? Big deal. Poor me. If I was in charge, mirrors would be for making sure there’s nothing stuck in your teeth or sticking out of your nose or tucked into your trousers, nothing more. I’m not likely to start staring into one and wishing I was different.

I used to wonder if that’s why Thurston chose me, because I was unremarkable, because I’d be useful to him that way. Every hustler needs an invisible friend. He laughed at me when I asked him.

We were making him a mask out of old, broken sunglasses, sticking the smashed lenses on to a plain latex face, so that when people looked at him, all they would see was repetitions of themselves.

“I like you, Iris,” he said, holding it up in front of his face, pulling the strap to the back of his head, “because you are you.”

I was fourteen. I’d known him on and off for two years and he was the only thing I had worth knowing. It was the nicest thing he could have said to me. My smile just about exploded, reflected at hundreds of angles by his mirrored mosaic of a face.

Hannah and Lowell think I am determined to be ugly. They think my attitude is aimed at them, out of spite. It’s beyond them that somebody would go a whole day without looking in the mirror. They wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without a layer of light-reflecting foundation and an accessory with a three-figure price tag. Looking good is the actual bedrock of their moral code. Presentation is ethics to them, which is why they bought me the dress. Hannah threw it down on my bed like a gauntlet, this loud patterned thing with a belt. I avoided it, walked around it like you would a patch of vomit in the street. I took a shower, pulled on yesterday’s clothes and went downstairs for breakfast.

It was Saturday, the weekend after Hannah called Ernest and agreed to bring me (I think) for a price. Since then, you could see they’d been shopping. Lowell was pacing the kitchen in a stiff pale suit that made him look like a rectangle, like a man in a cardboard box. Hannah had on a mink silk top and a skirt so tight I wasn’t sure she could move. I think she had to cross her legs the whole time to fit into it. They looked like they’d just stepped out of a shop window. I wondered how many hours the two of them had spent fantasising about the scene at Ernest’s deathbed and the muted, elegant, expensive clothing they could suddenly afford to wear. I wanted to put a match to the hem of her skirt and set it alight, drop a hot coal down the neck of his jacket and watch it swallow up the fabric like a black hole.

“Morning,” I said.

Hannah leaned against the kitchen counter, nursing a cigarette for breakfast. My mother often smokes instead of eating. She’d sell you a diet book about it if someone would let her. Her blown smoke bloomed in the bands of sunlit air that striped the kitchen, vanishing in its shadows, expanding to fill the room.

“Kiddo,” Lowell said, like every morning, in his faked transatlantic drawl. “Nice of you to show up.”

“Where’s the dress?” Hannah asked, and I poured myself some cornflakes before I told her it was still in the wrapper.

“Aren’t you going to wear it?”

“Nope. You should definitely take it back.”

Hannah pointed at me with her smoking hand and an inch of ash fell soundlessly on to the soft suede toe of her brand-new shoe.

“Well you can’t go like that.”

“Why not?” I looked down at myself. “I’m always like this.”

“Lowell,” she said, still pointing. “Talk to her.”

Lowell’s jacket was too starched and too big, like the cardboard box was trying to swallow him whole.

“It’s a great dress,” he said, “really on-trend,” as if his opinion mattered, like that would swing it. He talked like one of the girls at my old high school. I thought he’d fit right in there, simpering over labels in the hallways, bitching in the lunch queue about boys.

“So you wear it,” I told him with my mouth full. “Help yourself.”

“Just once,” Hannah said through gritted teeth.

“Just once what?” I asked her, but I knew the answer. She wanted me to slot seamlessly into the picture-perfect lifestyle she had filling the space in her head, to stop being difficult and strange, to dress up and shut up and play along. We stared at each other. She looked away first. I always win that game.

Lowell had already given up and gone back to his magazine. There were lots of people in it he’d stood quite close to over the years. Things were happening. Men more successful than him were starting to lose their hair.

“Let her wear what she likes, Hannah,” he said. “A dying man is going to have other things on his mind.”

My mother put her hands together in prayer at the word ‘dying’ and looked up past the burst radiator stains on the ceiling.

“God knows,” she said, “we could all do with a bit of good luck right now.”

I asked her where she thought God filed that kind of prayer, the please-harm-others-for-my-benefit kind, and she ignored me. “In a box marked DAMNED probably,” I said, “in a whole archive called Be Careful What You Wish For.”

“What do you care?” she asked me. “You’re an atheist, aren’t you? You don’t believe in God.”

“Humanist,” I said. “There’s a world of difference.”

Hannah lit a new cigarette off the old one so she was holding two. She said, all deadpan, like it was the last thing in the world she was really thinking, “You must explain it to me sometime.”

Thurston made a God box once. It was like a mailbox, with a slot, and he wrote on it PRAYERS ANSWERED. You were supposed to write your prayer and post it. That was the idea. He left it for four days on the corner of Westwood and La Conte, near the University. When he went back there was some trash in it, a couple of crushed cans, a banana peel and half a bagel. There was some angry stuff about blasphemers and the wrath of the Lord. And mostly there were wish lists, money troubles, exam results, job opportunities, and a couple of lonely hearts. My favourite one was written in pencil on a square of pink paper – THAT THIS BOX IS FOR REAL.

My cornflakes were stale and chewy. The milk was on the turn. New outfits aside, it hadn’t been a good month money-wise, again. I knew that’s why we were doing this. Hannah had slot-machine eyes, especially now she knew Ernest was on his way out. She was desperate to get there and clean up. Beneath the surface she trembled with it, like a greyhound on the starting blocks, like a size zero bull at a gate.

“When did you last see him?” I asked.

“When did he abandon us? I don’t know. Thirteen years? Fourteen? Maybe twelve. When was it, Lowell?”

Lowell shrugged. “Beats me.”

I pushed my bowl away. “And why are you all dressed up, exactly? What’s with that?”

“We’ve got to look like we’re doing well,” she said, pinching a strand of tobacco from the surface of her tongue without smudging her lipstick, the same smashed cherry colour as her nails. “I don’t want him thinking we need his money.”

As if a new outfit could do that. As if a throw-up dress or a stomach-bug brown suit would hide our flock of overdrafts, a good silk blouse erase the sly and bottomless need from our eyes.

“Why do you care what he knows?” I said.

“We’re going in there with our heads held high,” said Lowell.

“And coming out with our hands full, right? To the victor the spoils?”

I didn’t want a thing from Ernest. I didn’t want to know him. I thought they should go without me. I had my eye on a clean conscience and the place to myself. I’d exercise control, build a fire in the grate and feed it kindling so it stayed small but never went out. I’d write letters to Thurston at all the addresses I could think of – the bar where Uncle Mac drank, the record store he liked in Echo Park, everyone at my old apartment building. I’d track him down so I could tell him what had happened, where on Planet Earth I was. I’d leave the lights off and the blinds down, be nothing but a glowing, empty house. I wasn’t interested in helping Ernest feel better about himself. I didn’t have room to play suck-up to my sick old stranger of a father for what he might be leaving me in his will.

“Do I have to come with you?” I said.

Hannah smashed out her dead cigarette on a plate like it had done something to offend her. She pulled on the other one so hard her cheeks caved in and I thought she’d smoke the whole thing down in one breath. She saw me, and I knew what she was thinking. Gone were the days when Little Miss Arson could be left alone in the house. There wasn’t enough insurance money in the world that would pay for that.

“Yes, you have to come,” she said. “It’s you he’s interested in.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Since when?”

Her fingers drummed hard on the worktop and she declined, as usual, to answer the question. “It’s not optional. We’re not negotiating.”

“I’m a cone in your parking space,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it? I’m a marker on your property.”

“Think of it as a holiday,” Lowell suggested, the shoulders of his suit rising up for no good reason to meet his ears, his right cuff already streaked with butter. “You can explore the garden. You can bring your bike.”

I looked at him. “What am I? Eight?”

“God forbid we’re there long enough for a bike ride,” Hannah said.

Lowell stuck with it. “You can walk, or swim in the river. Maybe he’s got a boat.”

“An outward-bound holiday in a dying man’s house?” I said. “Nice. Sensitive.”

Hannah smiled coldly at me.

“Let’s be honest,” I told her. “You’re going fishing and I’m the bait.”

“It’s remote,” she said. “It’s isolated. He’s got acres of land, and woodland. It’s a great place for a fire. You could light ten of the damn things out there and nobody would even notice. You’re coming and you’re going to like it.”

I didn’t look up. I kept my eyes on my cereal bowl. “Who else is going to be there?”

“Just us,” Hannah said. “Ernest’s been on his own for years.”

“How do you know?” I said.

She bent towards her reflection in the side of the toaster. It was warped and squat and gauzy. “I just do,” she said, baring her teeth to check for stains. “Trust me.”

My chair legs scraped loudly against the floor as I got up. “Why the hell would I start doing that?”

I rinsed my bowl in the sink. Through the window, I could see next-door’s cat lurking on the fence by the bird feeder, waiting to take one out mid-flight with a swipe of its paw.

It was the start of the summer. I had plans.

Hannah played with her lighter, grinding the flint back and forward with her thumb, holding the gas down, looking right at me over the flame.

“Is he at death’s door?” I said, and (may God forgive me), “Will it be quick?”

“Cross fingers,” she smiled, and Lowell got up to start packing the car.







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We drove towards Ernest on a bright clear day. He said he woke up to the dry powder blue of the sky and he knew we were coming. The Severn Bridge looked like the entrance to Heaven in an old film I’d seen about a pilot who’d rather not die yet, thanks all the same, because he’s just met a nice lady and only recently started to enjoy himself. The service station on the other side where we stopped for coffee looked like the mouth of Hell.

Later, much later, I told Ernest this. We were playing cards. He said I played poker like a professional. Apparently, I shuffle like a croupier.

“And by the way,” he told me, “it’s only in a film you can decide not to die because your life has taken a sudden turn for the better.”

I smiled, and kissed him on the forehead, and fanned the whole deck of cards out with one snap of my hand.

It was Thurston who showed me how to handle cards. He knew hundreds of tricks. He had this one where the card you chose would end up ripped in half in your back pocket and he wouldn’t ever tell me how it was done. “Magic” was all he said whenever I asked him. He said his Uncle Mac taught him but I knew that was a lie because I once saw Mac try to shuffle a deck and it was like he was doing it with his feet. By then I knew that Uncle Mac wasn’t even his uncle, just some guy he’d met at a hostel, just another stray like me.

I thought about Thurston in the car all the way to Ernest’s place. I remembered the look on people’s faces when he pulled that card trick, the wonder, like he’d given them just what they’d been hoping for, like they were kids again just for a second, until they leant in towards him and said, “How?”

Partly, I was glad he’d never told me. It would have ruined it, probably, to know.

Four hours after we left home, we drove into Ernest’s garden like tourists, suitcases piled up in the back, shopping bags and a black collapsible bicycle crowding at the windows to get out.

“If he’s dead already, it all stays in the car,” Hannah said.

I opened my window, which was tinted and stole the colour from everything, like driving in black and white. The house was a warm golden yellow in the sun, tall with dark latticed windows and narrow brick chimneystacks. Lowell turned the car on the gravel drive and it scuttled over the stones like a roach. To our left was a copper beech hedge, the colour of old coins, to our right a view of the vivid green garden through an iron gate in the wall. The wind moved in the leaves and I could hear birdsong, and music coming from somewhere inside. I tried to picture someone lying upstairs in a darkened room, listening to a violin concerto, reeking of decay and disinfectant while we swooped in to stake our claim. I wondered if he heard the growl of our tyres on his gravel, the beat of our wings.

“Look out, Ernest,” I said. “Here come the vultures.”

Lowell braked too hard and the bike caught me on the side of the head with a punch.

“Ouch!” I said.

Hannah retouched her make-up, pressed her lips together. “Be quiet, Iris. If you haven’t got anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all.”

I wanted to ask if, under those rules, any of us might ever speak again, but I kept my mouth shut.

Ernest wasn’t dead, not yet. He wasn’t on his doorstep to meet us either. Lowell brought the car to a halt and frowned into his rear-view mirror. Birds scattered and resettled at the tops of trees and the front door stayed shut, as if nobody was in. Hannah balled her hands into fists and took an in-breath that didn’t seem to end. Lowell passed her a paper bag and she breathed into it in quick little sips and flapped her spare hand back and forth in front of her face.

“Are you hyperventilating?” I asked. I’d never seen anyone do it in real life before.

She let out a high-pitched whine like a steam kettle.

“Stay calm,” Lowell told her, reshaping his Superman kiss-curl with one finger. “We’re on the home straight.”

“Yeah,” I said, “maybe he’s kicking it right this minute. Cling to that hope.”

Truth is, I felt pretty high-pitched myself. My head was full of white noise and I couldn’t sort one sound from another, like everything was demanding to be heard at once, like I’d been turned inside out and exposed to the loud air. I don’t suppose I expected to feel normal. It’s not every day you get to meet the dad you never had.

Lowell and my mother clamped iron smiles to their faces and we got out, slamming the doors behind us. I turned my back on the house and looked out over the garden, across the fields, towards the woodland and the distant, shadowed hills. I breathed. Some species of tree are specially adapted to withstand and encourage fire. Some rely on it for their survival, to ensure their domination over other species, and to clear the soil and canopy for new growth. Trees look like their own shadows when they’re burning. Flames fan out and eat up a hillside, way quicker than you’d think.

The front door swung open just as Hannah and Lowell reached it. The nurse must have run down as soon as she saw us.

“Welcome,” she said. “Do come in.”

Hannah and Lowell acted like they hadn’t seen her. They know how to treat staff, how to exploit a potential VIP situation with disdain and to their own advantage. They learnt that, at least, in the States, if nothing else. I caught up and followed them in, met the nurse’s eye, tried to say in a smile that I was sorry about them and that I wasn’t the same. I wasn’t sure if she got it.

The square entrance hall had deep tall windows and a high-backed chair drawn up to the fireplace. The walls were washed grey, and on the dull stone floor a thin bright yellow rug marked the pathway to the staircase, like the sun’s pathway on the sea. I thought my shoes would leave marks on it, but they didn’t.

Ernest might have had minutes to live but we still took our time about it. We had to check on the state of the art before we checked on him. First, Hannah wanted to show us the Joan Miró in the old kitchen, the Chagall lithographs and the Braque in the hall. She went all weak-kneed at the Picasso prints and the Modigliani in the dining room.

“I had that valued ten years ago,” she said to Lowell behind her hand, whispering, “over four million.”

Lowell put his hand on her arm and gave it an imagine-what-it’s-worth-now squeeze.

They were like this couple I saw at a gallery once. She was wearing silver jeans, I remember, and the sound of his boots on the gallery floor were like gunshots, shouting look-at-me, look-at-me, look-at-me. They wanted to buy a painting. They didn’t even care which one. They just stood in front of the brightest and the loudest and said, “How much?”

I thought of them while Hannah and Lowell grinned up at the Modigliani.

“Tip of the iceberg,” she said, beaming at him like she’d swallowed a torch.

However rotten their core, I have to admit Lowell and my mother make a handsome couple and a damn good entrance. I watched them getting into character on the way up the stairs, walking with their shoulders back and their stomachs sucked in, shutters down on their eyes and catwalk sneers on their faces. It was like Fashion Week had arrived. The mannequins, Thurston used to call them, the rare times they came up in conversation; mannequins one and two. As in, Thurston: Will mannequin one let you stay out that late? Me: She won’t even know it. Thurston: What does mannequin two do all day? Me: Mirror work mainly.

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” Lowell told me once, and I had to stop myself from pouring petrol over his shoes and lighting it up right there and then.

We let the nurse take us up but we could have found the room ourselves by following its sweet-sharp, metallic, medical stench to the first floor. It smelled pretty terrible in there. At the door, my mouth dried up and all the bones in my spine started singing. I’d have run away if I could, if it wasn’t already too late. Ernest was propped on a few extra pillows in his sparse, stone-coloured bedroom, kind of sitting up when we came in. I felt white hot when I looked at him. I was half-drowning in pins and needles, top to bottom, but I didn’t take my eyes off him, not once.

Lowell shook his hand too hard, pumping it like a man trying to get water from a dried-up well. This is his audition handshake, two-handed, the one that goes with unnerving amounts of eye contact and exposed teeth. Somebody somewhere must have told him it was a good one and he has tried, once or twice, to teach it to me. Ernest yelped a little when it started up and then he held on tight and brought the thing to a stop, like a galloping horse. Somewhere in his head I swear he was Gary Cooper, or John Wayne, just for as long as that handshake. I thought his shoulder might dislocate. I thought his arm might snap clean off.

“Hello, old chap,” Lowell said, the country house vibe already seeping into his language. “Great to meet you.”

He looked so healthy next to Ernest it was almost an insult. Lowell’s teeth are toilet-bowl white. His eyebrows are plucked. He has shiny Ken-doll hair, not a strand out of place. He is tanned and well moisturised, still a catch. The carcass looks good, but I’m saying inside there is nothing but air. If you punctured Lowell Baxter with a pin he would shrivel to nothing, loud and aimless like a balloon.

Ernest didn’t speak. I guess dying people don’t much go in for small talk. It’s not that they’re more honest; I just don’t think they have the time.

My mother stood behind Lowell, tapping her foot, and when he stepped back, she moved in, smiling too hard, like something sweet had stuck her teeth together. She bent to brush her cheek against Ernest’s and her arms slid around his neck like snakes.

“Ernest, darling,” she drawled, the words spooling from her mouth like cold syrup. “How areyou feeling?”

She didn’t need to ask. You could see how he was. There was nothing but sickness in that room, with its drawn curtains and watering eyes and thinning skin. Ernest looked about twice his age, like if you held him up to the light, you’d see straight through.

Hannah tried to ditch her gloating expression but it stuck to her face like the wind had changed. “I hope you’re not in too much pain,” she purred, stroking the front of his vest like a cat fixing to climb the curtains. Jesus, she was so damn obvious.




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