Cold Fire Page 5

  He’s got a fair limp himself, I see. He sees me looking.

  ‘I broke my hip, then I got a new one. It’s supposed to be better, but it just feels like it’s made of broken glass. But you can’t just lie back and take it, can you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  Candour seems to be his thing, but like I say, it’s disarming and he’s got those great eyes. They twinkle with mischief and humour.

  ‘You want to come over? I’m about ready for coffee.’

  ‘I’m off the coffee.’ Something more seems expected. I lived my whole life in London. I never once shook hands with a neighbour. It feels like some kind of ritual.

  ‘I’m doing tea, though.’

  ‘I can do tea,’ he says. ‘Come over.’

  So, to my surprise, I do.

  His house is more homely than ours. He’s been there a while and he’s done some work to his. The furniture is worn, but good. The kitchen table’s thick, made from real wood, not like ours. This feels like it was once a tree. Ours feels like it was once a set piece in IKEA.

  I resolve to buy a real table.

  I sit down while he makes tea for me and coffee for him. The coffee’s quicker. He’s already got a pot on the go.

  I really like his table.

  He rolls a tight cigarette and lights it. He doesn’t ask if I mind, and I like that, because he’s not giving me the chance to embarrass myself. If he asks, and I say yes, what kind of an arsehole would I be? I’m in his house.

  This is his house, in a way our house isn’t ours. The work he’s done is quality.

  I think most of the furniture was handmade. I strongly suspect it was made by his hands. Those hands, the cigarette tiny against thick fingers, look like a worker’s hands.

  ‘Here,’ he says, gives me my tea.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘The Doctor says I should give up.’ He shrugs. ‘Been smoking since I was twelve. I’m not dead yet.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I say. This makes him smile.

  ‘Is that your wife I saw yesterday?’

  ‘If she was next door, then yes. Helen.’

  ‘She’s a nice looking woman.’

  It’s a nice thing to say.

  ‘She’s a hell of a wife.’

  I’m slipping into talking like he does. He’s got an easy tongue. He’s used to himself, totally comfortable in a way that I’ve never been, even when I was shit hot at my job with a beautiful wife and an expensive car and an insane fondness for drugs. I was alone, then, but not like he is now. There’s a photo of him and a woman on the window ledge, over the sink. He hasn’t got a dishwasher. It seems relevant to me. It’s like the lack of a dishwasher is some kind of statement. He’s alone, but he doesn’t need a dishwasher. I think back, when I was washing the dishes by hand. I feel pleased about that, though I don’t know why. He’s looking at me while I’m looking around his kitchen, though.

  It’s been a while since I had a conversation with anyone but Helen. I’ve forgotten how to do it and I’ve been staring at the spot where a dishwasher used to be, thinking about how maybe a man washes his dishes by hand so he can look at a picture of his wife every day.

  ‘Your wife?’ I say, nodding at the picture over the sink.

  ‘Dana. Passed away six years ago. Sometimes it’s hard,’ he says, with a nod. Like I’d asked.

  I don’t know what to say. I’ve only talked bullshit for years. I don’t know how to have an honest conversation. I try though, because I like him.

  ‘Helen’s a godsend. I don’t know what I’d do without her.’

  ‘Hold on tight.’

  ‘I mean to,’ I say. More seems expected. ‘The move’s a new start for us.’

  He pinches off the cigarette, drops the hot end in the sink, takes the dog end out and pitches it into a flower pot by the back door.

  ‘Dana wouldn’t have me smoke in the house. It’s a bargain we have. I don’t keep an ashtray in the house.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d understand.’

  This sounds trite to me, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

  ‘Any kids?’

  I’m not ready for that. I’ve got my standard reply ready, but fuck it. This is either a new start or it isn’t. It can’t be both.

  ‘We lost our daughter. Five years ago,’ I pause and force a breath into my lungs, suddenly tight. ‘Cancer.’

  He nods. ‘I lost two children myself. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel guilty for still being here.’

  That cuts to the bone. I know how that feels.

  ‘Me, too.’

  ‘Got one left. He lives up in Manchester. Useless. He hasn’t come to see me once. John, my second, he was the best of them. Everyone says they don’t have favourites…but, well.’

  Again, I don’t know what to say to this.

  ‘It must be hard.’

  It’s a boilerplate response, but this is a strange conversation and I’m struggling with it. Part of me, the part that’s full of bullshit, wants to say thanks for the tea, and get out. The new part, though, the part that lived and didn’t die, that part is fascinated by Frank.

  ‘It used to be. Now I’m too old to care.’

  He’s talking about the son he doesn’t see. Not the children he lost. But it’s not true.

  ‘I miss my girl every day. In her place I’ve just got the guilt.’

  ‘It never leaves you.’

  Me and Helen, we had counselling. Not one of them told us that. Perhaps they were too afraid to see the hope fade from our eyes. We wanted to know it would get better. It doesn’t. It never does. You just go on.

  ‘You just go on,’ I say. It seems profound at the time. Maybe it does to him, too.

  ‘You’ve got that right.’

  He’s finished his coffee. Forty-two, and I’ve never been in a situation like this.

  ‘Thanks for the tea,’ I say, standing. This is new territory. I don’t know if there are rules.

  ‘You want to come for dinner one night? Helen’ll cook. It’s safest.’

  ‘I’d be glad to. I can’t cook for shit,’ he says with a grin. He holds his hand out. The precedent’s set and I can’t offer my left hand now.

  His grip’s just as strong as before, but controlled.

  ‘She’s a good cook,’ I say, as I head to the back door. He didn’t use the front on the way in, but came straight into the kitchen.

  I don’t know. Maybe people in Norfolk don’t use the front door.

  ‘Beans on toast would be an improvement for me. Don’t push the boat out. It’d be a waste.’

  When I tell Helen, I tell her to push the boat out. I like him. He’s the first real person I’ve met for five years.

  *

  12.

  ‘Forget walking down the road,’ I tell Helen, after I tell her about Frank, after she gets out of the shower. Took her two hours in the end. I don’t know how the hell a woman spends two hours in a shower and comes out looking beautiful instead of looking like a prune.

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘I am, but I want to go to the sea. Fancy driving me?’

  ‘Sure. Lunch first?’

  ‘I’m not really hungry. You?’

  ‘If you’re good, I’m good.’

  So we just go. We get in the car and drive. It takes all of five minutes. A couple of those minutes are wrong turns. The sea’s so big, you’d think it’d be easier to find.

  We drive around the estate, into the old part of town, where the cottages look about a hundred years old. Maybe two hundred.

  I figure that’s character, but I couldn’t give a shit. I just want to see the sea.

  In the end, we come out at a cliff top car park. All concrete. It looks strong, and it’d have to be. There’s a concrete wall stretching for a mile or so, up and down the coast. That looks tough, too, because it’s holding back the sea, and the sea is everywhere. It’s in my chest. It fills me up, it’s so big. I can’t believe I’ve never been to the sea. It’s not a matter of geograph
y, or salt.

  Looking out, there’s the sky, and the sea, and nothing else exists for me for a full minute.

  Helen’s watching the sea. Watching me, too.

  ‘I want to go down.’

  She looks at the steps. She looks at my face. She doesn’t argue.

  The journey down is one thing. I know the journey back is going to be hell, but I feel so light, I think I can do it. I will do it. It’s worth it.

  There’s a bench half way down the cliff. An observation post. There are telescopes in the front of the railings. I don’t know why anybody would want to look through one and put borders on the sea. I’ve lived my life within borders. Streets, tubes. Cubicles, offices, cinemas, theatres, pubs…you can only see as far as the borders will let you.

  Here, I can see forever. I can see the future.

  Weather, too. The weather in London is an aside. It’s cold or it’s hot or maybe there’s rain. But London doesn’t have room for weather with personality. You look up, the sky’s got borders and it’s just what you can see between this building and that.

  This is weather. The weather should come from a sky like this, a huge sky, a sky not portioned out in parcels, but covering everything so you’re bathing in it.

  The day is mild. I’m in a jacket and a shirt. I’m warm enough. But you don’t need a weatherman to tell you the future here. You can see it yourself.

  Clouds are towering and bunching, like they’re flexing their muscles, getting ready for a fight with the sea. The clouds are just hanging out there and the sea’s rearing up to meet them. There’s rain in those clouds. They were born out there, in the sea. And that’s good, because that’s not a parcel of weather. That is the weather, the whole of it, the real thing.

  Helen can sense my mood. She sits beside me on the bench and takes my hand in her smaller, softer one. We sit that way for two or maybe three hours while we wait for the rain.

  When the chill comes we move together and I put my arm around her to keep her warm.

  Dark is perhaps an hour off, coming quicker because of the cloud covering the horizon.

  When the storm comes, it starts out slow and we haven’t got a coat or an umbrella between us but it doesn’t matter.

  The first few drops fall, hitting our heads and shoulders and thighs.

  It comes quickly, then. Suddenly, it’s pouring and we’re soaked in a second. It’s a sheet of water, falling over the sea, and then it’s dark and we’re going up the stairs, laughing like children while we’re desperately trying not to slip. We don’t bother ducking our heads, like people do in the rain. There would be no point in this.

  I don’t ache. I’m soaked to the skin, but I’m light. I float up those stairs, and only realise how cold it is when we’re back in the car, shivering, the heating turned up and the windows steaming.

  I look to the west and the sun’s last light is going under a hole in the horizon. A lighthouse sits on the cliff, and all around the lighthouse the sun’s last light is yellow. Just for an instant. Then it’s all black night.

  Helen takes me home. She takes me upstairs.

  The perfect day. I held onto that. Later. When things got hard again. When I lost the line. I lost the line because the line is yellow, and it wavers, and sometimes it so hard to even see it because it’s grey.

  I can’t rely on yellow, but I can rely on that day.

  *

  13.

  Maybe, you get up, brush your teeth, go to the toilet. That kind of thing, that’s ticking over. Everyone does that. The order might change. Those things, the minutiae, they don’t change. The minutiae are the logs in a life raft. It’s what you cling to, when the darkness deepens and it does. It always does. Darkness falls on all of us, but for a time we live in the light and even when we can’t imagine nightfall, with the sun high in the sky, it’s all around us. It’s what we come from and what we return to.

  Some part of me knows that. I’ve known since I saw a woman with snakes of fire for hair.

  But fuck it, though. Fuck it, right? You go on. The clock ticks and the dark winds down toward night and you go on and the routine is what gets you through.

  But the minutiae of day to day life change, too. Life changes us, changes our routines, shuffles us in the direction we’re meant to go.

  I don’t know where I’m meant to go.

  In those early days, I didn’t even think about it. Me and Helen, we’re learning each other all over again. We’re holding hands, we’re creating a life for ourselves in our new world, learning how to love and making the most of our time in the sun with no thought of the night.

  Like how we eat. No takeaways. We’ve got time. Helen cooks.

  Like getting up before the sun. When I was working we got up at six on weekdays, seven on weekends. Weekends used to be the bookends to the week. Now they don’t matter anymore. Our weeks don’t have ends.

  We just do the same thing. Everyday, without fail. But there are subtle differences. Like, bin day was Tuesday. Blue and black, alternate weeks. Brown…

  I still don’t know about brown. How many bins can you need? Two seems about right to me. Three seems like overkill.

  But I don’t moan about the bins. I like the bins. Bins are man things, like shaking after a piss instead of wiping.

  I see Frank on Monday, that first Monday. Helen sees him too, but I’m not there then, so I don’t know exactly what was said. I do know she liked him right off the bat. I’m glad. I wanted her to like him. I can’t say why it’s important that she does.

  Tuesday, we drive around ‘til we found a shop. Just a small chain store, five aisles. We buy the bare essentials. Bread, milk, cheese, beans, bacon, sausages. The meat’s British. We’re conscientious shoppers. Some juice, not British, but who grows oranges in Britain? You can’t even do that on the Isle of Wight.

  We get eggs. Free range. Some waffles. It says on the pack that they’re genuine Belgian waffles, but they’re made in Stockport. I don’t think that’s in Belgium, but I don’t get on my high horse about it. I just hand over the cash. The woman behind the counter takes my money, looks away. She doesn’t make eye contact at all.

  Some people don’t. I don’t cry about it. It’s just the way it is. My lip’s pretty much bounced back, but my eye is weird. I have to give her that. I don’t like the look of it, either.

  Once, there was a cleaner at my office. He’d come in when I was working late. I never liked him. Some people you don’t take to. He had crazy eyes. It’s true, you know. You can see madness in a man’s eyes.

  I don’t know what happened to the cleaner. I think he got the can. I like to think he was caught fucking chickens in the toilet. I don’t know, though.

  I don’t look crazy like that cleaner. Just not quite right. The perennial smile I was wearing lately didn’t help. People like a smiler, right up until they buy Belgian waffles made in Stockport and don’t complain. Then they get worried.

  We get home. No one’s on fire. No one’s going mad. Not me. Getting out of London did the trick.

  Wednesday, we have a late breakfast with all our purchases from the day before. We go the whole hog. Or at least the parts of the hog that make up the bacon and the sausage.

  I realise by then that as perfect as this is, I’m looking forward to Frank coming over. He’s due Sunday. Helen thinks the thing he’ll miss most, since his wife is gone, is a roast.

  I try to imagine what meal I’d miss the most if Helen wasn’t there. A roast is right there. Pig, cow, chicken, sheep.

  Pig, probably. Of the four.

  ‘Helen?’ I say.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How about pork? For Sunday.’

  ‘With crackling?’

  I smile. She’s reading my mind.

  ‘Of course with crackling.’

  ‘You can’t have crackling.’

  I just look at her. I could, but don’t say, 'I’ve given up coffee, honey, but that’s the least of it, because I gave up beer and vodka Red Bull and v
odka orange at the end of a night when I’m being healthy, I’ve given up pills, uppers, downers, dodgy valium that Dave Thorpe bought online, Viagra that I took once by mistake, marijuana in bongs round some black guy’s house with fucking dreadlocks and a gun on a coffee table, heroin in little tin foil rollies, coke…'

  I didn’t say that. I didn’t say, 'Don’t take away my crackling.'

  I could pull out the waistband of my trousers, make a pointed comment about how I need a new pair.

  I could’ve said a ton of things but I didn’t. I don’t do it like that anymore. She appreciates me not doing those things, because I don’t bully her anymore.

  She just looks at me and says, ‘OK. Not all of it, though. You leave some for Frank. You think Frank likes crackling?’

  ‘Helen. Frank’s a man. Men like crackling. Frank’ll like crackling. Frank’s been missing crackling since his wife died.’

  ‘OK,’ she says.

  Everyday, same things, different things. A marriage, kind of like I imagine retired peoples’ must be, but fresher, because each day we look at each other with new eyes.

  More urgent, because I’m not dead and we’re both glad. Urgent, because since I died the day started running down and we both know it, even if we never talk about it, not once.

  We don’t rush.

  Time’s running down, like when you’ve got a bus to catch, you rush.

  Time’s running down, like you could be dead in a month, a year? Then there’s no sense in rushing. Slow down. That’s the way to go. Enjoy the simple things.

  Really, the day’s winding down for all of us, from the moment we’re born. People don’t think about it. They rush around. All that achieves is getting there quicker.

  I don’t want to get there any quicker than I have to.

  If you slow down, you don’t miss it. People are rushing about so fucking fast I bet they won’t even know when they’re dead.

  Each day we go to the sea. It’s a two minute drive, now we know the way.

  We go to the same spot. The coast might change, but the sea’s pretty much the same. It’s not the coast that does it for me, though. When I ask Frank he says there’s a pretty good stretch of sand off to the west. Cromer’s to the east, but he turns his nose up when I ask him how that is, and I trust his judgement. Frank’s got years on me. If he doesn’t like it, I’m not going to waste my time. My time is too precious. I don’t have enough to waste.