Night of Fire Read online

  She is looking at me with that terrible innocence. My words fade. What am I saying? She asks: ‘What do you do, then?’

  Is she really interested? She looks like a Raphael Madonna. A coil of auburn hair, twisted with gardenias, falls down her back. And the same voice, my own, answers: ‘I’m training to be a priest.’ How does this happen? It must be her face, its unworldly gaze. Perhaps it’s the flowers in her hair, or the marriage service. The moment the words leave me, I regret them, but I cannot take them back. I say: ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I work for a house agent.’ She adds the name, as if I might know it.

  I ask: ‘Who are you, then?’ This is gauche, blatant. I want to choke myself.

  ‘I’m Rebecca Ryan. Who are you?’

  Oh God. I’m not the photographer. Who am I? ‘I’m David Sykes,’ I say. Where did he come from? I am falling down a black hole, deeper with every word. I will never reach the bottom. Do I think David Sykes sounds grand? My smile is a wavering plea, a plea for forgiveness for something unadmitted. Her eyes are still on me, and I do not know if their purity sees right through me, or if innocence sees nothing at all.

  Then she says: ‘I have to follow that little urchin.’ She gestures to where the small bridesmaid has disappeared. ‘She’s grazed her knee.’

  Then she’s gone.

  I clutch her name to me. Haunting alliteration. I even know where to find her. That is miracle enough. I cushion my lamps and cameras back inside the car. I must reverse the lie I’ve set in motion. I must become myself again.

  Richard has left. He has gone to a new job in Glasgow, where his fiancée will follow him: a sourly pretty girl named Sheila. It is our mother’s death, I think, that spurred his change. I do not know what it has done to me. I talk to her in the night sometimes. Of course the flat is emptier without Richard. I miss our rivalry. I miss talking about our mother, which keeps her alive. We scattered her ashes under Telscombe cliffs. I don’t know why it feels so cold here, in June. Often I cannot feel my legs at all. I should stop taking dope.

  When my mother’s legacy comes through, I’ll buy a place of my own. But it’s not for this that I scan a list of local house agents and recognise the name of Rebecca’s. It’s in the town centre, and when I walk past, keeping to the far side of the street, I see her sitting at a computer almost in the window. She is dressed in jeans and a white blouse. I open the door on an avenue of desks. She is seated at its end, her head lowered. Before I can reach her, a young man calls out, ‘Can I help you?’ and motions me to a chair. He hands me a form to fill in: accommodation requirements, price range, mortgage position. I dare not look at her. I imagine her scrutiny on the side of my face. Those astonishing eyes could read everything I write. So I fill in my name as David Sykes, but I add the right address and calculate a higher price than I can pay.

  The man is eager and puppyish. ‘I’ll assign you to somebody,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you.’ I don’t meet his eyes. I walk over without waiting and sit down on the chair in front of her.

  She looks up coolly. No trace of recognition. I offer a hesitant smile. She reads my completed form, and no flicker of familiarity crosses her face. I might have dreamed our meeting. She reaches behind her for an assortment of particulars, and wonders if I would prefer a period property or something more modern. How important is a garage? Off-street parking is an increasing asset. Do I need a garden? Oh, so I’d prefer something out of town, somewhere secluded. Not too easy to find nowadays. Her laugh is a distant tinkle. She alights on the brochure of a cottage beyond the north-east suburbs. ‘It would need modernising,’ she says. I imagine it a wreck. ‘I can arrange for somebody to meet you there.’

  So I could have used my real name after all. She does not know me. I could have started anew. But I can find no excuse for writing down a false name. An inexplicable mistake? A joke? Now she is waiting for me to reply about the cottage, and I am staring into those slanted eyes. They are a beautiful, opaline green. I mumble at last: ‘Yes, that’s fine.’

  Then, with no change of expression, she says: ‘And how is God?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re studying for the priesthood.’

  So she had remembered all along. I feel a rush of mixed relief and horror. She has burst into laughter.

  The cottage lies down a stony track on the edge of chalk pastures. I don’t know if it is she who will meet me. The day is sultry, but I imagine the winter winds flailing over these fields. I can see through the windows that no one is here. In the derelict garden a concrete pool has filled with reeds, and a ginger cat vanishes into a flower bed overgrown with hollyhocks.

  I could not live here. There is nothing to hold you in. No comfort in these open skies. You shiver beneath them. There is too much nothing already. I want an enclosed house, private, somewhere that embraces.

  From a long way away I see a silver car on the track. It flashes like a warning in the sun. She emerges alone, holding a folder. She comes towards me smiling. I long to tell her my name, and what I do.

  She says at once: ‘Did you get time off from your seminary?’

  ‘Yes, we’re on holiday now.’ The lie comes so easily.

  She unlocks the cottage door, which jars open on a slur of junk mail. The smell of damp is overpowering. We walk through rooms that might have been abandoned years ago. But the beds are still made up, and half-empty jars of coffee stand coagulated on the kitchen shelves. When I pull a lace curtain, it falls to pieces in my hand. A dead sparrow lies on a window ledge. She says: ‘The owner lives in Canada. He wants a quick sale. I’m sorry about the smell.’

  Strange to linger with her at the foot of the double bed. Its blankets are pocked with moth holes. A tube of hand lotion still lies on the woman’s table. His is bare. She says: ‘I don’t know why they left.’ Her shoulder brushes against mine. I imagine a ghostly intimacy: theirs or ours. She says: ‘I know it’s pretty creepy. You have to imagine it empty, David.’

  I feel light enough already, wandering in the lives of others. And now I have no name. And I’ve lost my profession. I say quickly: ‘I can’t imagine living here.’

  ‘Frankly, nor can I. It must be grim in winter.’ She goes into the bathroom.

  I check my face in the bedroom mirror. I wonder who last looked in it. I’d imagined myself gaunt, white, perhaps not there at all. But instead I see a wild, ardent-looking face, lapped in chestnut hair.

  We go outside with relief, and stand in the sun. She enjoys these encounters, she says. She likes to dovetail people and places. Sometimes buyers seem to know their houses in advance, and recognise them. Others are shocked by the discovery of what they love or what they can do without. She likes the dawning certainty in people’s faces. She laughs about the downside: the drastic surveys, the gazumping, the office jealousies. She slips easily into mischief. She seems to trust me. Perhaps she trusts everyone. If her face were not lit by those magnetic eyes, she might appear naive. She says she knows what I want now. She has other properties. She’ll be in touch. And all the time I am listening to the rhythm of her talking, slightly rasping and formal, then trickling into laughter. She has opened her car door before I say: ‘Perhaps you’ll have supper with me one evening?’

  She looks startled for the first time, her eyes reassessing me. Then she says: ‘I’d like that.’

  I watch the silver car bumping and flashing back down the track. Her acceptance nestles warm inside me. I tell myself: I’m David Sykes. I’m a Christian believer. I’m studying in a London seminary. At least for now, until I know what to do. Perhaps I will one day live in a house of her choosing. But not here, not on a cold hillside. The silence is frightening. You need the sounds of others (but not too close). And the sky not infinite.

  Before she comes to supper, I wipe out all traces of my previous identity: even the name on the doorbell. The absence of theological books is easily explained – the flat is Richard’s, after all – but my photographer’s lights and reflector
s have to be stacked away in cupboards.

  She sips my gazpacho soup and eats the overcooked cutlets with apparent pleasure, and is curious about everything: my vocation, my passions, my fractured background. I seem somehow wondrous to her. She comes from a solid home and private schooling. She glows with surety. Some bitterness surfaces in me, I know, when I think of my father’s desertion and my own disrupted schooldays, and of Richard who escaped it all unscathed, and this jarring void of my mother’s absence, even of her anger. Rebecca listens to me with her bright intensity. All evening I yearn for her lips, which are full and wide in her softly tapered face. And in the doorway, as she starts to leave, our formal embrace grows suddenly different, and we are kissing, and I feel her tautness against me, and her eyes piercing me before they close. We start talking there incongruously in the hall of the communal house, until I pull her back into the flat. A minute later we are entwined on the sofa, her blouse loosened, her back supple against my hands. She whispers that she is more confused by me than by anyone she’s ever known – and she’s already twenty-two.

  ‘I can’t be the first!’

  Well, there was one other, she says, a mistake. She laughs. She is ‘not quite’ a virgin. And I? When I tell her about Linda and Cleo, they transform in my mind less as betrayals than as quiet preludes to herself. It is wrong, I know: lovers as stepping stones to one another. But that’s how it feels. Later, lying on my bed, her auburn hair unlooses and flows over her shoulders. In loving, she becomes suddenly childlike and unsure. She stifles her cries of pleasure, as if apologising. She never opens her eyes. It is dawn when she wakes with a start and says she has to go. She is living with her parents, and must tiptoe in.

  I feel old with her sometimes. She is impatient of any sadness or misgivings. Yet everything about me is deep and strange to her, she says. She thought so even at the wedding. I was so obsessed with what I was doing, I turned everyone else grey.

  ‘I only felt obsessed when I was photographing you.’

  It’s true still. Our holidays last one day each, but I capture her in different lights and dress. Here she is in a garden by a wall of white roses, her own white beauty in regal profile, flushed by sunlight. And here standing in dappled woods, wearing a shirt I have opened on her breasts. Her eyes blaze green into the camera. And here she sits on a pier by the sea, muffled in pullovers against the louring sky, pretending to be drunk. And here statuesque on my balcony, in her black dress, her lips pursed in an uncompleted kiss.

  But at times she grows gravely serious. Then she starts to ask about my future, about the seminary, and my faith. God has meant so little to her, I think, that she’s neglected to disbelieve in Him. I wince inwardly at her questions. A month has gone by, and in theory I return to the seminary, and I start to invent again. I dread these times. I talk evasively, I know. She imagines I’m very private, and I am, oh hell, I am. When I’m with her, I fear meeting anyone I know. She thinks I’m friendless: a stubborn hermit. When she takes me to meet her parents, I can tell they don’t like me. Her father questions me too closely. Rebecca says later that they’re conservative and stuffy, explaining to herself whatever they’ve said about me. Impossible to go on with this, or end it.

  Sometimes I accompany her to the houses she is selling. I see her infectious optimism. She ignites her duller clients by painting pictures of redecorated rooms and restored gardens, and conjures the magic of a cornice or a redesigned staircase. There is a luminous candour about her. Often she will blatantly point out some defect or eyesore, as if she were not really trying to sell the place. This frankness is not tactical. It is just what she thinks. But it elicits trust, of course, and occasional astonishment. Sometimes I try to imagine our house together.

  I grow used to her calling me David. Steve is fading into a stranger. Last week I walked the grounds of a seminary in London, and mentally adopted it as mine. I’ve even read works of theology – Barth and Tillich – which were boring at first, but no longer. I think I understand the beauty of a belief I cannot hold. I people the seminary with friends, to satisfy her, and they take on deepening lives: an austere one, an innocent, an enigma. I create problems of doubt and conscience; I imagine a suicide. Are they so far from me? Sometimes, as before, I stare at my face in the mirror and it grows strange. Look long enough, and the reflection becomes someone else. I’m frightened, a little. My rooms here are now very dark and still.

  It had to happen. It comes as we return from a peaceful day by the sea, the last one, I know now, the last peace. The moment I open my door I realise something is wrong. Rebecca says: ‘Oh, I think your brother must be back.’

  I should have retreated then, made some excuse, taken her home. But instead my mind goes numb. I sleepwalk behind her into the sitting room. And there he is, Richard, suave and boorish as usual, standing hands on hips, and all my photographic equipment – lights, tripods, battery packs, flash diffusers – piled up outside his bedroom door.

  ‘Hullo, Steve, I got home early.’ He thrusts out his hand to Rebecca. ‘I’m Richard, Steve’s brother.’

  ‘Steve?’

  Her hand extends woodenly to his. I glare at him hopelessly, signalling him to shut up, but he does not see, and if he did, he might not stop. How I hate him. He says: ‘What the hell’s all your photographer’s stuff doing in my cupboards, Steve? Haven’t you had any more commissions?’

  Bewildered, Rebecca says: ‘He’s been at the seminary.’

  ‘Seminary? Steve! What seminary?’ He adds: ‘Steve’s an atheist.’

  She stares at me. I will never forget her face. My own is burning, paralysed. I can’t utter. Then the blood drains out of me.

  Richard senses something at last. He says: ‘I have a feeling I’m superfluous here’, and picks up his car keys and leaves. Rebecca goes on gazing at me with a look of deep, frozen confusion. Then she whispers: ‘Say something.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Except that I feel I’m dying now.

  ‘You’re not David Sykes.’ Her confusion is turning to horror. She asks: ‘Who is David Sykes?’ as if she might find him again.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And the seminary . . . you’re not at one at all. You don’t even . . .’

  I whisper: ‘No.’

  ‘So it was all lies. All the people you told me about. The one who hanged himself. Just lies.’

  ‘It was a story.’ Even now, I believe it a little. It’s become another truth. Because I created it, it seemed to happen. But she can’t know that.

  Now her bewilderment has turned to a speechless revulsion. Her eyes are steel. She is staring at me as if I were not quite human, a reptile. At last she says: ‘Why? Why?’

  ‘I wanted to appeal to you . . .’ How abject that sounds.

  ‘You’re mad,’ she says. ‘You must be.’

  I gaze back into another face. I know she has gone from me. She belonged to David Sykes, and he never existed. She cannot bear to look at me any longer. Her bag had dropped to the floor at Richard’s words, but now she hitches it on to her shoulder and shakes back her hair. She says: ‘You can go back to being yourself . . . if you know who that is. But you go back without me.’

  This building is starting to crumble, and the windows that face the shore leak and rattle in the wind. Bits of fallen plaster speckle the basement steps, and the flower box by my door sprouts dead geraniums. Richard has gone from our old flat, and I could not afford to pay double rent or bear to share the place again. I feel safer here, although it is suffused by damp. The other tenants mostly avert their eyes, afraid of conversation. Who the landlord is, I don’t know. I pay my rent to an agent. Maybe there isn’t a landlord at all.

  Richard is unmoved by my anguish, of course. (‘What d’you expect if you give your bird all that crap?’) He tells me I’m finished if I start taking coke; but I don’t do it much, and it restores a vibrant world to me, at least for now. He says I exist in hallucination, but he doesn’t understand. He’s okay living in dea
dness. Anyway, he’s gone to Scotland.

  I’ve almost cracked Quest for the Grail. A secret passageway leads from the dungeon up into the keep. I haven’t far to go. And the Internet is mesmerising. I find a website peopled by slant-eyed women, three or four of them, beautiful; but tonight I can’t access them, my computer so slow, and instead, again and again, I see this image of a masked head in firelight. My skin tingles, especially at night, and I can’t sleep. I pluck the mask away, and somebody says: ‘Why are you staring at me?’ Sometimes it’s hard to breathe. The oxygen drains out of the air. But I have her photographs, all their photographs, everything there is of them. These are mine: an actress on stage, and a black woman in a crimson dress. She stares into the lens, and says nothing. A dark line of fugitives is wending to the horizon. Often my heart beats too much. Something is my fault. The doctor warned me, but he doesn’t understand either. And now it starts up again, and the knowledge of Rebecca nearby. I hold her to me. Rebecca, you can’t leave, not really. You are tight against me, and my arms around you. You die quite gently in my arms. You don’t struggle much. I lay you down.

  I keep her close here, now, just under the floorboards. The landlord won’t know, or if he does he won’t admit it. So she can’t leave me again. People say there’s no space to hide a body between the floorboards and the concrete, but she’s slender, and I can sense her eyes just beneath me, whenever I walk to the kitchen, the bathroom . . .

  * * *

  In time he fell for other women: an all-seeing goddess and a blue-skinned alien screened at the local cinema. He bought DVDs of them later, then grew tired with their repetition. For a while he could not forget a mannequin in the window of a nearby shopping mall. He kept returning to gaze at her. People might say that such figures have no interior, no independent life, he thought, but they have the life we bestow on them, which is no different from how we love humans.