Astonishing Splashes of Colour (41 page)

“Come on, Martin,” says my father. “Tell him what he threw.”

Martin unfolds his arms. “Well—” he says and stops.

“Hello,” I say into the silence.

They all turn round. My father and James jump to their feet, spilling Monopoly pieces on to the floor.

“Kitty!” says my father, and I’m five again, wrapped around by his words of welcome, made secure by his pleasure in seeing me.

I stand, quite still, and James comes over to me. He doesn’t say anything. He circles me with his arms and I lower my head on to his shoulder. I know now that the love I have for him is as strong as the love he has for me. We stand together for some time. The silence is made extraordinary by the presence of my father.

“Come and sit down,” says James after a while, and I take a seat at the table, in front of the abandoned Monopoly.

“We don’t need all this now,” says my father, and he sweeps the pieces into the box. The little dog and a hotel have fallen to the floor, but he doesn’t notice. “Just filling in time,” he says. “Waiting for you. Do you remember the games we used to have with the boys? They all cheated.” He looks at James.

I look at him with amazement. “You were the one who cheated—all the time.”

“False memories, Kitty,” says my father. “You were only little. You wouldn’t remember.”

James says nothing. He sits down next to me and fingers some crumbs on the table, crumbs that have probably been there for weeks, unnoticed by anyone except James. He sweeps them up, running his fingers along the grooves of the table, drawing them into a neat little pile.

“Let’s have some coffee,” says Martin, and switches on the kettle. He takes four unwashed mugs out of the dishwasher and
rinses them sketchily under the tap. When he’s finished, James gets up and runs the tap for a while. Then he fills the bowl with hot water and Fairy liquid and washes the mugs properly. He starts to work his way through the dirty crockery piled next to the sink. He rinses everything meticulously under a running tap.

“We do have a dishwasher,” says my father.

Martin watches for a bit, and eventually takes a tea towel and dries them.

James ignores him.

I sit watching them and feel suddenly secure. I can’t think why I went away, why I thought I couldn’t manage all this. The warmth of the kitchen spreads through me, finally reaching my poor cold feet.

“I thought it would be better to come here,” says James, turning round, “because the police are waiting for you at home. I sneaked out by the back door. They think you might have taken this child—she’s been missing for two days now. We’d better ring them and let them know they’re wrong.”

“James,” I say.

He looks at me, but I can’t go on. I’m too tired. I need to tell him, I want to tell him, but it’s too difficult to find the right words.

The kettle is boiling, the warmth of the kitchen creeping into me, and I feel light-headed. It must be all that chocolate, I think. I don’t want anybody to move, anybody to speak. I would just like to hold it all together, here in this old neglected kitchen where I grew up, where nothing is ever washed properly. I like the piles of empty jam jars and wine bottles in the corner which no one remembers to take to the bottle bank, the mounds of bills and documents waiting to be noticed, the chairs with unsteady legs. This is where I grew up, the centre of my childhood, when mothers didn’t seem to matter so much because I had so many willing brothers.

I give up and let myself be swamped by this enormous feeling of relief. I watch Martin make the coffee, his huge fingers somehow neat and precise with the granules, knowing exactly how much he shouldn’t waste.

We hear the front door creak open and shut.

James looks up. “Paul,” says my father. “He said he’d be back about now.”

“Should we ring Adrian and Jake?” says Martin.

“No,” says my father. “They can wait. As long as Kitty’s safe—that’s the important thing.”

James still says nothing. He sits down beside me again. He doesn’t smile, but he looks at me, and I think he is gathering every ounce of energy he has available and pouring it into me. How could I ever have forgotten to include him in my plans?

My father walks to the door. “Paul,” he calls, but there is no answer. “Funny,” he says. “You’d think he would come in and say hello.”

“I’m sure he will when he wants to,” says James.

My father opens his mouth to contradict James, then stops, surprisingly. “Food,” he says. “What can we have? Chinese takeaway, fish and chips, balti, eggs, bacon, sausage, cheese on toast …”

There are footsteps in the hall and Paul comes in. “Hello, Kitty,” he says nonchalantly. “Nice to see you’re all right.”

I don’t reply. I can’t think of anything to say.

“Anything to eat?” he says, looking inside the bread bin. “Where’s all the bread gone?”

“In the freezer,” says my father.

“Not much good there, is it? Shall I go for a takeaway?”

“Yes,” says my father.

“By the way, you left the door on the latch. Anyone could have come in. You shouldn’t leave it like that.”

“Are you going to fetch some food then?” says my father. “We’re all starving, aren’t we, Kitty?”

I try to nod, but I’m not sure if my head is moving properly.

“Right, I’ll go for a Chinese, shall I?”

“Great,” says Martin.

“Cough up,” says Paul to my father. As I sit here watching, it’s difficult to believe that we’re all grown-up, middle-aged even. Paul’s hair is starting to recede as well as going thin on top, Martin is growing a noticeable paunch, my father has to put his glasses on to check the money in his pocket. But the hierarchy is the same. My father is in charge, my brothers still boys.

“Cheers,” says Paul, taking the money.

“Get a selection,” says my father. “Be extravagant. Get a couple of bottles of wine.”

“I don’t think you’ve given me enough money for wine.”

“Hurry up, Paul. We’re starving. We’ll sort out the money later.”

Paul goes to the door. “Back in thirty minutes,” he says and leaves, jangling his car keys in his hand.

He comes back in again almost immediately. “Can anyone smell burning?” he says.

The smell comes strongly through the door. We get up and go into the hall, just as a violent, nerve-jangling shriek comes from our only smoke alarm on the first-floor landing.

Megan, I think. Megan and her matches. She must have followed me here, come through the open front door, crept up the stairs on her own, found a neglected bedroom, made a pile of chairs, beds, sheets, towels, anything, and used her matches—

“Megan!” I shout, and run to the stairs.

James is with me, behind me, somehow keeping up on his uneven legs. He knows, I think.

I don’t know where anyone else is. “Megan!” I shout again as we race up the stairs, opening doors on the first floor, checking
the bedrooms, the bathrooms, along the creaky landing and up the spiral staircase to my father’s studio. I can hear the fire now, crackling, almost comfortable, and I know that Megan is here, sitting on top of the world, lighting matches in my father’s studio. She’s creating her own secret, fascinating world.

I stop at the open door. A pile of objects in the middle of the room—Megan’s wigwam—everything alight: Dad’s easel; canvases; the red and black throw from the sofa; books and magazines. But it’s still only a bonfire, still controllable. Megan’s on the far side, perched on the window sill, gazing calmly into the fire, with no awareness of the danger. The smoke alarm is shrieking downstairs, hammering its way inside my head, pushing out all coherent thought.

“Megan!” I shout. My voice is swallowed instantly, and then I realize that the fire is much bigger than I first thought.

Megan looks across at me quite suddenly, as if she is waking from a dream, and her expression changes. She looks lost, bewildered, her fascination turning to fear. The noise from the smoke alarm and the fire itself overwhelms all other sounds. I need to reach her, before it’s too late. She’s staring straight at me, her mouth opening and shutting, and I know she’s calling me. She needs me now. I am here.

James and Martin are shouting behind me. “Water—” I hear ”—blankets—” There isn’t time for all that now.

I pick up one of the large blank canvases by the door, and use it as a shield. I have to get round to Megan before the fire gets too powerful. Someone is trying to grab me from behind, catching hold of my cardigan. I can hear voices, but I don’t know what they’re saying. I struggle out of my cardigan, leaving it behind with the pulling hands. Then I’m free, inching round the edge of the room, holding the canvas in front of me to protect me from the heat.

“I’m coming!” I shout to Megan. “I’m coming!” I can’t hear myself. My voice doesn’t exist—I can only shout silence.

Time seems to have grown and stretched, like Dali’s clocks, so a second is an hour, a minute a thousand hours, and I feel as if I’ve been crossing the room for ever. Behind my canvas I can see the flames: they’ve grown into something unreal. They’re in front of me, on either side of me, but their roaring, flickering strength seems more exhilarating than dangerous. Every colour that ever existed is here in this room: the reds, the blues, the yellows, oranges, purples, green, brown, black, white, leapfrogging over each other, fighting for dominance, their dangerous fascination weaving beautiful and complex patterns around me.

I’ve lived all my life, come all this way to be here. This is my own, my only unselfish act, my chance to give a child life. This is it.

I get round the edges of the flames in the middle of the room, and reach the other side with Megan, watching myself from above. Kitty—incompetent in every trivial detail of her life, incapable of having children or even looking after them—is suddenly fearless. Kitty, the heroine, who leads a child to safety. I watch myself stamping at the fire with my feet, grabbing another painting from the corner, trying to smother some of the flames before they spread. But I’m mad. This fire is big. I arrived too late. The easel at the centre of the room is no longer recognizable, swallowed by the insatiable monster in the flames, which are spreading outwards now, towards Megan and me and towards Martin and James on the other side of the room.

Megan is huddled into a tight ball on the window sill.

“Kitty,” I think she says. I can’t really hear her. She puts her arms out to me, and I hold her tightly. She’s trembling with fear.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she shouts into my ear.

“I think it was mine,” I splutter. But I don’t think she can hear me. We’re both coughing now, choking in the fumes. The
sound of burning dominates everything—a rushing, cracking, angry roar that batters my mind.

I look back to the doorway and see James shouting. He tries to dive into the room towards me, but Martin grabs him from behind, holding him back. Good, I think. No point in both of us risking our lives for Megan. I’m the one who has to do this. I’m the one who brought her here. No one else should have to make sacrifices.

I climb on the window sill with Megan and we squeeze together in a corner. There’s no chance of getting back. Martin and James have had to retreat from the heat. I keep hearing James’s voice—”Kitty, Kitty!” but I realize that the voice is in my head, because nobody could shout louder than the fire. I try to shut him out. I can’t concentrate if I think of him.

I look to see if we could climb out of the window. But we are two storeys up with a sheer drop below. There are rhododendrons beneath us. Would they break our fall? If I open the window the air will feed the fire.

You have to lie on the floor. Why do you have to do that? Something about the fumes. They kill you before the fire gets to you. That sounds less alarming. I don’t want to be burnt alive—I would rather be dead before it gets to me. But we are both coughing.

“Get down!” I shout at Megan. “We have to lie on the floor.”

She looks at me without understanding. I try to edge her from the window sill, but she’s rigid with fear, mesmerized by the fire.

Another of my father’s paintings has fallen into the flames. The sea, of course, the pebbles on the beach, a fishing boat coming in. It looks like my mental image of the seaside, not the real one where I went with Megan. The fire is eating its way through the picture, devouring my father’s red, rippling through the sea, swallowing it whole.

I can see anything I want in the fire. All the colours of the universe, swirling round each other, and merging, so they become one colour, shades and variations of a perfect whole. I can see the pink van with the circling question marks. It’s real, fully formed, inviting me in. And I see Dinah, my mother, falling through the air, her multi-coloured dress billowing out round her, all the colours I have ever encountered, swallowing each other up and becoming one smudged, confused brown. I can hear her cry. I know it’s her. I know that she’s crying my name, realizing that she’s going to die. And I know that I was there, that I saw her fall.

A bookcase from the side of the room crashes down, the books queuing up to be the next victims of the fire. The crash jerks me awake. I must do something. Someone’s at the doorway, covered in a blanket, holding a coffee table as a shield, moving forward slowly into the flames. I can’t look, the heat is so intense. I put my hand up and try to see through my fingers. Is it Martin or Paul, my father, or James? It could be any one of them. They would all rescue me if they could.

He’s pushing burning objects out of the way with the table, clearing a passage to us. He shoves everything aside, stamping out flames under his feet. The blanket is on fire, but still he keeps coming. He’s going to make it. He’s going to save us.

A second bookcase topples directly on to him. He falls, tries to save himself, but loses his balance. I can see him trying again, but then he gives up, and lies there, surrounded by burning books. I hold my breath for him, willing him to get up. The floor collapses underneath him, and he and the blackened books disappear into a raging furnace.

“No!” I scream without sound. “No!” And I don’t know who it is that I’m crying for.

Megan moves beside me and I force myself to concentrate.
The flames are reaching upwards to the roof. We have to get down. I climb off the window sill. The fire has not quite reached our side of the room. There’s a hard-backed chair by the window and I grab it, hoping to use it to hold back the flames. There’s still room for us to crouch down on this bit of floor.