After the Fire (2 page)

She hadn’t liked to say any of that to the man from the council, though. He was trying to help her. Keep her safe. Stop her from hurting herself on the stairs, or in the bathroom that wasn’t really suitable for someone of her years, he said. His voice was very loud and he spoke slowly, as if she was foreign, although he was the one who had been born overseas somewhere. India, maybe. She hadn’t liked to ask in case he was offended. People didn’t like you to ask these days. They were all Londoners. But what if they wanted to talk about home? What if they thought you didn’t care enough to ask? It was difficult, Mary thought. Impossible to do the right thing.

He was still talking, while she was thinking, words like bricks walling her into an unwanted new life. She tried to tell him she was happy, but he didn’t listen. He was too busy telling her she could do her shopping, that there was a supermarket on the estate that would be much more convenient than the local shops she’d visited all her life, where the people behind the counters knew her and talked to her.

They’d been sorry to see her go, when she went. They’d signed a card. Her neighbours had too. Young Kevin from next door had helped her to pack up her belongings for the move. The big move, everyone called it.

She’d sat up the night before and wept. Howled like a baby. She didn’t want to leave her house. She didn’t want to leave her friends. She had been happy there, most of the time, except for George’s illness.

But they were expecting her to go. She hadn’t liked to upset anyone. They had gone to so much trouble with the cards and the send-off. Besides, the council were selling off the house, Young Kevin had told her – not so young any more with his bald head and three big children, but he would always be Young Kevin to her. They would make a lot of money from the little three-bedroom house she’d lived in since her marriage. People wanted them now. They paid silly money for them and then gutted them so they could spend more money doing them up. Young Kevin started talking about school catchment areas but it didn’t mean anything to Mary. She and George hadn’t had children, so they’d never needed to know about schools.

Eight months she’d been living in Murchison House. Eight months since she’d lost her home. Mary stared sightlessly at the streets below, not seeing any landmarks that made sense to her. From up here, all the roads looked the same. Eight months and the lift had been vandalised three times. The other lift wasn’t working. It hadn’t worked in all the time she’d lived there, and no one seemed surprised that it hadn’t been fixed. Eight months. In eight months, Mary had been mugged twice – once in the corridor, once in the car park. No one had seen anything. The first time, she called the police. Someone came a few days later, a community officer. She took a statement and shook her head at Mary’s bruises and said she would be back, but that was the last Mary had seen of her.

Two kind West Indian ladies picked her up the second time, the time in the car park, and took her to a different flat in a different building and gave her tea that was full of sugar and too hot to drink. Mary had tried, all the same. She didn’t want to put them to too much trouble. Her wrist hurt and she felt dizzy and she wanted more than anything to go home, but home was the tenth floor of Murchison House now, not Greenlea Road. And all that was waiting for her in her flat was the television, the view over the streets that were suddenly strange to her, even though she’d lived in them all her life, and the crumbs on the ledge of the tiny balcony. She still tried to feed the birds – not that the sparrows and the blue tits and the finches from the old house could find their way to her now. A couple of battered pigeons visited now and then, hobbling on maimed feet. They were sullen, distrustful birds, their red-rimmed eyes fixed on Mary as they pecked at the food. They didn’t like her any more than she liked them, but the pigeons were all she had, and she was all they had, so Mary kept shaking her crumbs out on the balcony, and sat, and watched for the flurry of wings that meant she wasn’t alone.

On the tenth floor of Murchison House, three flats to the left of Mary Hearn, the Bellew family were eating. It wasn’t dinner, exactly. The kids were back from school and they came home hungry, always. Carl Bellew liked to eat when he was watching television, too, and he was always watching television. He was a big man, heavy with muscle that was well covered in fat. His size was his best asset. You didn’t need to be clever, or quick-witted, or even quick at moving when you were as big as Carl.

‘Still sitting there? What a surprise.’ His mother scuttled into the living room, her handbag over her arm like the Queen’s.

He didn’t look away from the screen. ‘Leave it out.’

‘You haven’t moved all day. All day you’ve been sat there. What have you done with yourself? Watched telly, that’s all.’

‘Mum.’ One word. A warning. Not that he’d ever hit her. He wouldn’t dare. But the kids were lying on the floor watching the telly and even though they didn’t seem to be listening, you never knew. He didn’t want them asking questions. He didn’t want them thinking he was weak, either.

‘You’re lazy, Carl,’ Nina Bellew snapped. ‘You need to get up and get going. Bring in some money for your family.’

Carl looked around, eyeing the room. Pictures on the walls. Curtains at the windows. Games consoles stacked up by the wide-screen television. ‘We don’t need any money.’

‘Stupid.’ She leaned over and jabbed her finger into the soft flesh that padded the back of his neck and bulked out the top of his shoulders. ‘Stupid and lazy. When are you going to call round to number thirty-four?’

‘I will, I said.’

‘That was two days ago. They’ll be wondering if you’re ever going to come. Didn’t realise you were so well off you could walk away from a couple of hundred quid, Carl. If you don’t go, I will.’

‘You?’ He laughed halfway through lifting a can of Coke to his mouth. ‘Yeah, all right. You can go.’

‘I’m telling you—’

‘And I heard.’

Nina turned, giving up on him for the time being, and screeched, ‘Debbie?’

‘What is it?’ Debbie Bellew leaned into the living room, her face shiny with sweat from the heat of the kitchen, where she had been ironing in clouds of steam. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Only that I’m dying for a cup of tea, not that anyone cares.’

‘Sorry, Mum.’ Debbie called her mother-in-law ‘Mum’ because she had no choice. Nina insisted. Nina Bellew couldn’t have been less like Debbie’s round, comfortable mother, who’d died twenty years earlier. Debbie missed her every day. She sometimes wondered if she would have married Carl, had her mother still been alive. She had been lonely, and scared, and young when Carl started to court her. He had seemed like the answer to her prayers.

Carl had been a mistake.

‘Have we got any cakes?’ Nina demanded.

‘Cakes?’

‘A sponge. Better for me teeth. I can’t be doing with crisps or whatever it is they’re eating.’ She peered down at the children, who were having a low-level fight. It wasn’t vicious or loud enough for anyone to feel they had to intervene, yet. ‘You won’t want your dinners,’ Nina said loudly.

Nathan rolled over. ‘What’s for tea?’

‘Fish and chips,’ Debbie replied.

‘From the chippy?’

‘No, I’m making them.’

‘Yuck.’

Nina kicked him, not gently. ‘Enough of that. You’re lucky to have anything to eat. When I was a girl we got one meal a day. By the evening your stomach’d be wondering if your throat had been cut.’ She laughed, though no one else did. ‘Sponge cake, Debbie. Got any?’

‘No, sorry.’ She felt in the pocket of her jeans for some coins. ‘Nathan, you wouldn’t run down to the shop—’

‘Nooooo.’ Nathan flopped face down on the floor, burying his head in his arms. ‘I’m not going.’

Becky turned and grinned at her mother, waiting for her brother to get in trouble. She was too young to go and she knew it.

Debbie couldn’t face a fight. Not again. ‘I’ll go myself. I won’t be long. I’ll make you your tea when I get back, Mum. Unless—’

Carl hunched up one shoulder in a silent message that was at least as effective as his son’s howling. No chance.

‘I won’t be long,’ Debbie said again.

‘It might take you a while,’ Carl said. ‘Lift’s broken again.’

‘Again? But they only fixed it last week.’ It had been broken for so long, she’d thought she’d got used to the stairs. Strange how you resented it, though, when it was broken again. It was the disappointment, that was all. The hope and then the disappointment. Debbie had had just about enough of disappointment.

She hurried to the door and lifted her anorak off the hook, wondering if she needed to get anything else. It was no joke, going up and down all those stairs. On the other hand, it gave her time she wouldn’t otherwise have. No one would expect her back for ages.

Debbie left the flat with an unusual feeling of freedom. On her own, for once. No one talking to her. No one asking her to do anything or get anything. No one interrupting her. She took her time about heading for the stairs. What was wrong with taking a few minutes for herself? Time to think.

Except that her thoughts weren’t all that comforting, when they came. And even though she knew she had time, she couldn’t enjoy it. She was going to have to run down and back up again to make up for the three or four minutes she’d stolen for herself.

Debbie started towards the stairwell, hurrying past a man who was walking up, his head bent, a cap pulled down low over his eyebrows. She didn’t really notice him. Afterwards, she couldn’t remember if he’d been carrying anything. She couldn’t remember much at all.

In the flat opposite the lift, Melissa Pell listened. Her wooden spoon circled in the pan of baked beans, slowly, as she strained to hear over the hiss of the gas flame. The television was on in the living room, but it wasn’t loud. She liked to be able to hear Thomas playing. She liked to be able to hear any other noises too. Anything unexpected. Anything unusual.

The trouble was that Murchison House was full of unexpected and unusual noises. Screaming and shouting in the middle of the night. Footsteps in the corridor, slow or fast. Doors slamming without warning. The hum and whine of the lift lumbering up and down, the judder as it stopped opposite her door. She was on edge all the time.

‘Mummy!’

Melissa started, flicking some lurid orange sauce on the cooker. She went to get a cloth. ‘You gave me a fright, poppet.’

‘Sorry, Mummy.’ He sounded it, too.

It was all wrong, Melissa thought, that a three-year-old should know to be really sorry for scaring his mother. She made an extra effort to sound cheerful as she rubbed at the ceramic hob. ‘That’s all right. I just wasn’t expecting you to burst in here.’

‘I didn’t mean to burf.’ The consonants always foxed him when they came together. It was babyish and she hated correcting him. She wanted to keep him, her sweet-smelling delicate boy, just as he was, for ever.

‘Burst,’ she said clearly.

‘Burft.’

That was as close as he was going to get, Melissa knew. She grinned at him and went to rinse out the cloth. The water rattled into the sink. She could hear his voice, but not what he was saying to her.

‘Hold on a second.’

‘Is it ready, Mummy?’

She turned just in time to see him grabbing the handle of the saucepan to tilt it towards him. The sauce was heaving with bubbles, hot as lava. She had no breath to scream at him, no time to inhale. She lunged across the small kitchen and grabbed the handle of the saucepan, pushing it onto one of the rings at the back, out of Thomas’s reach, where it should have been all along.

It was as if her husband was in the room, leaning close to her, shouting in her ear.
What the hell do you think you’re playing at? Careless, that’s what you are. And a bad mother. Selfish, too. Do you really think this is the best place for the boy? Even if you can’t stand me, don’t you want what’s best for him? Can’t you even cook his dinner without putting him in danger?

She was never going to get away from him. Even if she was hundreds of miles away from him, he was still there, in her head. She was never going to be free.

Thomas was looking wounded. ‘You snatched it.’

‘I had to, pet. It’s hot.’

‘You’re not supposed to snatch things.’

‘You could have been scalded.’ Melissa felt like screaming at her small son, but she worked very hard not to take the rage and the stress and the fear out on him. She took a deep breath, willing her hands to stop trembling. ‘It’s dangerous to be in the kitchen when I’m cooking.’

‘Sorry.’ He said it very softly, his face flushed with the effort of not crying. He was a good child, a quiet and obedient child, and he wasn’t used to getting in trouble.

‘Come on,’ Melissa said, putting the cloth down and holding out her hands. ‘Come and have a cuddle.’

‘On the sofa?’ Thomas suggested, clambering into her arms.

‘For a little while.’ She held him tight as she walked through to the living room, his soft cheek against hers, his arms and legs wrapped tight around her as if he was a baby monkey.

Dinner could wait.

In the flat next door, just under Drina’s bedroom, a man stood by the window. He was looking out, passing the time until
she
came. He wouldn’t see her crossing the car park – the flat faced the wrong way. He could imagine it so easily though: her lean, tall figure, narrow-hipped and long-limbed. That elegant neck – her easy way of carrying herself. Dignity in every move she made.

The man winced. He’d asked her once what tribe she belonged to, a conversational misstep that had almost cost him everything.

‘I was born in London, sweetheart.’ Her voice had been heavy with disapproval, a rough edge to it to remind him she’d grown up on the estate, not in Kensington, privileged like him. She’d fought her way out of the sheets and sat on the edge of the bed, running her hands down her arms over and over again. The movement reminded him of an irritated cat grooming itself.

‘I just mean originally.’ He’d traced his fingers down the length of her spine, his skin pale against her shining darkness. She was all lines and exciting leanness, not frail and sagging like Cressida.