Astonishing Splashes of Colour (42 page)

I lift Megan off. She comes surprisingly easily. She thinks I’ll save her. She believes I can do this miraculous thing, and I don’t know how to tell her that I can’t. She trusts me, but she really shouldn’t. She clings to me, putting her arms around my neck.

“It’s all right,” I mutter into her ear. “It’s all right.” She can’t possibly hear me. I can’t hear myself. But I feel calm. How is this possible when I could live or die? It doesn’t matter which. But now, only now, I know instantly that it does matter.

I lower Megan to the floor and wrap my body round her. I want her to live. I will save her, even if I sacrifice myself. She needs to live. She’s only a child and she has so much further to go than me.

The heat is like a solid wall, and I know we can never escape by going back through it. I think of us cooking, like sausages in an oven, turning brown, rolling over, splitting open. The flames are nearly upon us, and we can’t last much longer. They have swallowed up my father’s entire creative output for the last three months. They won’t hold back when they reach us.

I hear a violent explosion. It takes a few seconds for me to realize that the window has broken, shattered glass sprinkling down on us. Why don’t they use oven-proof glass for windows? I wrap Megan more tightly, close my eyes and wait. I’m curiously unafraid.

There are new noises, bangs, crashes. I open my eyes. Two black legs have appeared. They move, they walk around and I am being picked up.

“Megan!” I scream, afraid that she’ll be left unprotected. But
there are two more legs, and she’s being picked up too. We’re carried back to the window. I wonder if this is death, come to fetch us personally, to check we don’t escape through some unexpected loophole.

I’m wet. There is a another roaring sound, and water streams past me as I’m lifted through the window. The fire brigade. I forgot about the fire brigade. Someone must have phoned them. I’m carried down the ladder by a fireman, and it’s difficult not to see him as superhuman. He seems enormous, at least ten feet tall, strong as an ox, safe as houses.

“Wait!” I scream. “There’s somebody else in there. Go back!”

“Don’t worry,” says a deep voice. “We’ll find him.”

I’m astonished by the calmness of his voice, the voice of someone who’s in complete control.

Outside, they make me lie down. “I’m all right,” I say to everyone. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

James’s face is above me. So who was it who tried to save us and got swallowed up himself? I think James is saying, “Kitty, Kitty,” but I’m only guessing. He has blood dripping down the side of his face. He’s hurt, I think, and I try to touch him, but my hands are not where I think they are. He doesn’t seem worried by the blood, but he’s crying. Tears are pouring down his cheeks, and I feel his hand gently touch my cheek. I’ve never seen James cry before. I didn’t know he could.

10
that pinprick of time

T
he nurses bring cups of tea at 6:30 in the morning, walking in cheerfully and loudly, pulling back the poppy-strewn curtains. They talk to us to wake us up: “Morning, Helen. Did you sleep better, George? Why are half your pillows on the floor, Katherine?” They don’t call me Kitty. I like that. I can believe that Kitty is the inward, secret part of me that I don’t have to share with strangers. I hear everything coming to life before 6:30, when they start making the tea. A clink of cups and saucers, a murmur of voices, sometimes a stray giggle, followed by someone saying “Shh.” I’m glad they’re happy.

I can’t use my hands because of the bandages, so they give me a cup with a straw, carefully positioned on the locker beside me. I lean over and sip slowly, waiting for the tea to cool. I feel like a child again, drinking Coca-Cola through a straw—except it’s hot and not sweet.

I’m usually awake long before the tea comes. I think sometimes that I never sleep, but maybe I just can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality. I’ve stopped taking their sleeping
pills because they keep me awake. There are far too many other pills to take, anyway.

I lie painfully in the dim half-light and watch the other patients moving restlessly, creaking on their plastic mattresses. I hear the rasping of their breath, the snores and snorts, the sudden gasps for air. I listen to the nurses talking, watch them wheel beds around when a new patient is brought in, a motionless, sleeping body tucked up kindly in a blanket.

Then I remember and cry again. Tears that never want to stop.

James comes and helps me eat my meals. He cuts everything up, chasing the food around with a knife and fork, until he has a reasonable mouth-sized portion. I open my mouth and he pops in the fork. We tried a spoon at first, but it wasn’t very successful. Spoons are not cleverly designed, we discovered, and it’s almost impossible to get the food out of the hollow. We use a fork now. I chew, swallow and wait for the next mouthful like a child, three years old. I wonder sometimes if that’s why James stays, puts up with me. He sees me as a child; it makes him feel wanted. Or maybe he’s just feeding the child we’ll never have.

“How would you feel about adopting a child?” he says one day—earnestly, afraid he might upset me. He’s spent the last thirty minutes getting to the point.

I’m surprised that he hasn’t thought it through. “They’re not going to let us, are they?” I say. “Not after all this.”

He doesn’t reply.

It was Martin, of course. I think I always knew it was Martin, wanting to be like Samson, or Porthos in
The Man in the Iron Mask,
powerful as a mountain, holding up the doomed building so that everyone could escape, dying in the process. And he didn’t manage to save us. He didn’t even need to try, because the fire brigade
was just around the corner. James had made the first rescue attempt, but Martin had pushed him downstairs and taken over.

I like the quiet, dull routine of the hospital. The boredom of it all pleases me: I’d be happy to lie in bed and think of nothing all day. Pain needs a lot of concentration. But they won’t let me. I have to walk around the ward once every two hours. It’s not very far, but it feels like twenty miles—I have to stop after every four steps because I can’t breathe. They tell me there’s nothing wrong with my lungs, that I’m holding my breath because of the pain. Am I holding my breath? I can’t catch myself doing it. They bring breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, tea, supper, a soothing night drink. The price of a drink is conversation. They want to talk to me and I have to answer.

James comes in for all the meals except breakfast, feeding me, reading to me. He uses taxis, so he can keep his work going at home. We’re reading the Narnia chronicles. We have reached
Prince Caspian,
and I love the ruins, the sense of nostalgia and loss, the children’s return to a world which has gone on without them. I could be there, I think. Everyone has moved on while I’ve been standing still. I might even have been slipping backwards.

Sometimes, James just sits with me while I cry for Martin. He doesn’t say anything, but I think he cries for him too, in his quiet, private way.

Dr. Cross came to see me shortly after the fire. I opened my eyes one day and found her sitting next to me, calm, patient as always.

“Hello,” she said when she saw me looking at her. “You’re awake.”

I smiled. I can still do that—the burns are not too close to my mouth.

“How do you feel?”

“All right. I don’t know. It hurts.”

I won’t be too disfigured, apparently. My hands are the greatest problem, but the doctors think they’ll be functional after a few operations to graft on skin from the top of my legs. I’ll still be able to use a word processor, I’ve been told by one of the many doctors who appear and disappear mysteriously. My back will heal without interference, but they may need to do more work on the side of my neck, just below the hairline. Not too bad really. It could have been a lot worse.

Dr. Cross and I didn’t talk much. I couldn’t think of anything to say. But we sat together and I felt her calm soak into me. Before she left, she told me that someone from the hospital would come and see me regularly.

“You’ll like her, I think,” she said.

“I like you,” I said.

“She’ll have more time.”

I wish she would stay, but I know she’s very busy. “Come and see me when you’re home,” she said.

I will have to go on liking her, because it is impossible not to.

Martin’s willingness to save us makes me feel inadequate. Like a terrible mistake, that I am not worth saving.

I think of all the people who will now never meet Martin. Never know what a likeable person he was, never see the simple goodness that made him special.

I cry again.

My father comes to see me every afternoon for thirty minutes. He usually arrives just after James leaves, so presumably he hovers around downstairs until he knows I’m on my own. I know he’s not my father, but names are habits, and it’s too difficult to change things yet.

He sits by my bed and talks. “The insurance is paying up—no problem. But I don’t know if I’ll have the house repaired. It might be cheaper to sell the whole thing. They can knock it down and start again.”

I’m amazed that the house is still standing. The fire spread to two bedrooms and a bathroom on the floor below, but no further.

“There’s a lot of smoke and water damage. It seems a good moment to give up the old place.”

I don’t want the house to go. I want it to stay the same, the house where I was brought up by my father and my brothers. But it isn’t the same anymore—part of it has already been destroyed. I see the fire as the symptom of a disease, a cancer that spread through the house, growing stronger the further it advanced. It didn’t reach every corner, every dust-laden mantelpiece, but it will get there in the end. The treatment worked on the surface, but the rot continues, eating its way through the house quietly, destroying.

“Pity I lost all that work. But I’m not too worried—I can remember most of it. I’ve been looking at new houses. I don’t need anything so big, as long as I have a studio …”

I watch his mouth moving up and down and wonder what he’s really saying. Is he just thinking about houses, or is there more that he can’t speak about? It’s impossible to know his real feelings—he’s so good at being dramatic that nothing seems genuine anymore. How do I know what is real and what is fake? Is he capable of responding instinctively to Martin’s death?