The Burning Air (5 page)

For the briefest of seconds Kerry’s neck and ears were exposed. Both her earlobes were mutilated, the flesh appearing to drip like soft wax on either side of a vertical scar. The image of someone pulling out a pair of earrings with sufficient speed and force to tear the flesh was inescapable. Automatically Sophie put her hands up to her own earlobes as if to protect them. Kerry saw her doing it, darkened, and wrapped her hair around her neck like a scarf. Although she had seen by accident, Sophie felt guilty of a terrible intrusion. She glanced up and down the table: no one was looking at either of them. She tried to smile at Kerry, to communicate that she would not betray the secret, but Kerry’s eyes were firmly on her empty plate. You poor girl, thought Sophie. Perhaps you have more in common with Felix than we guessed.

6

T
HE FLAMING TAR Barrels carnival was a public custom that the MacBrides had taken to their hearts, but the day of wood gathering was a tradition of their own making. After breakfast the woodshed would be emptied and the the bonfire in the back garden laid. Then the family would set out with their baskets to gather enough fallen wood from the surrounding land to put in the shed for the next year. At dusk, the Guys were perched on the top of the pyre and the whole thing would be lit. It was rather a naive, childish tradition, begun when Sophie was herself small, and never abandoned, maybe because there had never really been a gap between the MacBride siblings being children and having children of their own. The routine was deviated from only in years when the weather made setting a bonfire impossible, but this weekend had so far been fine and dry.

In years gone by, Lydia had made the Guys, one for each child, from clothes so worn that even the MacBrides balked at using them as hand-me-downs. Nobody contested Sophie for this task, and she was happy to stay behind while Edie had her nap. From the upstairs window, she watched them traipse up the sloping garden and then over the stile to the woodland beyond, each with his own basket, even the little ones.

At the far end of her parents’—her
father
’s—bedroom was a mismatched pair of pine wardrobes. One housed Rowan and Lydia’s things, the other looked like the back room of a charity shop the week after Christmas. It was stuffed with clothes outgrown or forgotten, spares of various sizes left by guests and saved for visitors who didn’t know how to dress for the country. The tops of the wardrobes brushed the eaves: the triangular space behind them was also crammed with suitcases and carrier bags of clothes. She rummaged at leisure, each tiny odd sock, each holey pair of jeans evoking memories of tiny boys with white-blond hair.

Sophie heard a noise on the landing and tiptoed down the hall to her bedroom, where Edie was sleeping in the travel cot that Will had set up that morning. The curtains were drawn; the room was dim rather than dark, but still it took a few seconds for Sophie to identify the gray, hazy figure standing by the cot as Kerry. What was she doing? As Sophie’s eyes adjusted and the room came into focus, she saw Kerry bend down to retrieve Cloth Rabbit from just outside the cot. She placed the toy next to the sleeping baby and stayed for a few seconds with an expression of such tenderness on her face that Sophie felt like a voyeur. If only I could catch her looking at Felix like that, thought Sophie, this strange, uneasy feeling I have about her might go away.

She announced her presence by swaying slightly to the right, knowing the loose floorboard beneath her feet would squeak softly under the pressure. Kerry did not start but turned slowly toward her, placed her finger over her lips to show that she understood, and tiptoed away from the cot.

When they were both safely in the corridor, Sophie noticed that Kerry was barefoot.

“They sent me back to find some boots. My shoes were all wrong.” The suede pumps Sophie remembered from breakfast would not have carried her more than a few paces in the boggy autumn countryside.

“Did you have a look in the mudroom?” Kerry only nodded. It was as though, thought Sophie, she was only permitted a certain number of words per hour, and had used up her quota until the clock struck one.

“OK, let’s see what we can find for you,” said Sophie, leading the way to Rowan’s room. “What size shoe do you take?”

Kerry held up five fingers and a thumb.

Inches from Sophie’s nose there was a single Hunter boot in racing green, the number six stamped into its sole, but its partner was nowhere to be found.

“They said if there weren’t any I could stay and help you make the Guys for the boys.”

“I’ll be quicker by myself,” said Sophie, and then, realizing how harsh that sounded: “I mean, why don’t you just keep me company instead? I won’t be long.” She continued to sift through the jumble and then let out a gasp as her fingertips brushed against something soft and scratchy and shockingly familiar. The next moment she was holding up a sweater of Lydia’s that she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. Instinctively she put it to her nose and inhaled. To the objective eye it was a horrible home-knitted ’80s creation in marbling pastel wool, ice white and lilac with tiny flecks of silver in it. The rush back through time, to their house in Cathedral Terrace, was so swift that Sophie half expected to feel her hair flying. “This is older than you are,” she told Kerry. “My mother knitted this when she was pregnant with Tara. Oh . . . it’s like hugging her. Or being hugged by her. Strange how something so ugly could have such sentimental value.”

“It’s not ugly,” said Kerry. “I tried on something like that in Topshop last week.”

“Really?” said Sophie, folding it and placing it in the “keepers” pile. “That makes me feel ancient . . . things I think are horrible are so old they’ve come back into fashion again. Anyway. I’ll hold on to it forever.” She slid the pile of clothes into a drawer at the bottom of one of the wardrobes. “There. They should be pretty safe in there.”

Kerry watched so closely that Sophie felt self-conscious.

“I haven’t got anything that belonged to my mother,” she said. This is more like it, Sophie thought, seizing on the potential for intimacy. She thought hard about how to broach the subject of Kerry’s ears in a way that would establish her as a sympathetic listener rather than an interfering big sister.

Her concentration was shattered when something hit the dormer window with a gunshot crack then ricocheted away again. Sophie’s scream was a reflex action, so loud that the silence it left was somehow purer than the one that had preceded it. Kerry had her hand on her breastbone as if to still a hammering heart.

“I’m so sorry, it was only a firework,” said Sophie, nodding at the telltale carbon smut on the pane. Embarrassed by her loss of control, ashamed at how near to the surface her tension was, she started to gabble. “Kids get overexcited and throw them—they can travel for miles. Where is everyone? If I’d screamed like that in the city we’d have sirens, lights, the lot. Look. Listen.” She spread her hands out wide to indicate the lack of response, laughed to show that she was joking. “Nothing. You can do anything when fireworks are kicking off. Scream, fire a gun . . . mind you, out here you can do anything you like anyway. There isn’t a soul for miles around.”

Kerry was looking at Sophie’s hands, which were, she now saw, shaking furiously. A few doors away, Edie started to cry.

“Let me get her up for you,” said Kerry, almost falling over her feet in her haste to leave.

•   •   •

If the women had reverted to type by cooking, then the men had done the same by taking seriously the task of building the fire over the ashy remnants of the one Rowan had made the day before. The boys had made fire sticks by rolling up year-old newspapers, and they carefully laid these, along with twigs and other tinder, at the bottom while Matt and Will hefted the large, slow-burning logs to the top. Four little Guys—eventually made in a last-minute rush—sat atop the woodpile, their clothes and features indistinguishable in the dusk.

Exertion had forced the men to strip to their shirtsleeves but the female spectators were swaddled in jackets, scarves, and boots. Jake, presumably devastated by Kerry’s absence from the wood-gathering expedition, had gone to great lengths to locate the other size-6 Hunter.

Rowan, Will, and Matt helped the MacBride boys light the fire, men young and old sharing the same serious, primal concentration on the task. Edie watched, strapped into her buggy and at a safe remove from the flames, not frightened but mesmerized. The Guys took the flames more readily than the wood; now every detail was illuminated. A vile green nylon coat, a present for one of the boys, melted rather than burned and shriveled away in an initial burst before the rest of them caught light slowly and steadily. Jake cheered on his own effigy as a curve of flame caught its stuffed head and caused it to roll off. Why did boys always love such gruesome, sinister things? Would Edie, in years to come, be the same? Sophie shivered in the heat. The thought of harm coming to any likeness of Edie’s, no matter how crude, was chilling.

One of the Guys seemed to be burning brighter than the others, almost shooting out sparks. Sophie watched it, first with curiosity and then with horror as she realized that the pyrotechnic display was the burning of the tiny silver threads in her mother’s sweater. For a few seconds it was impossible to tell if the roaring noise was coming from inside her head or from the fire. She could not hear herself think and was unable to blink or move as the garment was consumed the same way it was created, stitch by stitch, row by row, until the urgency of the situation pulled her out of her trance. Only Kerry would have known it was there. Why would she have done something so cruel? She remembered the jealous note in Kerry’s voice when she had talked about her mother. Could that be it?

There wasn’t time to understand why.

“Who put that there?” said Sophie, raising her voice above the roar of the fire.

“Who put what where?” said Felix.

“Who put that . . . what is that
doing
there?” No one spoke, so Sophie grabbed Kerry by the arm and shouted into her face, “What were you thinking? Get that back. I
told
you what it meant to me. Get it back.
Get it back!
”

Felix put himself between Sophie and Kerry. “What are you doing, Sophie? Stop it. Get off her!”

Felix’s casual grip was stronger than Sophie’s most powerful effort could ever be, and she let Kerry go. In the seconds that followed, Sophie was only vaguely sensible of her family screaming and of more dark figures running up behind her. She might not be strong, but she was quick, and she scaled the loose smoking lattice of twigs at the base of the fire and found herself face to face with the blaze itself, her hands forming claws ready to clutch at the sparkling, sparking sweater, to save what she could. She was about to plunge her hand into the flames when she felt Will grab her left arm and another man—Matt, Jake, Felix, she couldn’t tell—seize the right. She persisted until the pain in the sockets of her arms and her shoulders won, then she relaxed as quickly as she had sprung into action, so that all of them fell backward and landed in a heap on the ground. She closed her eyes and listened to her sons’ sobs, her own eyes smarting.

“Jesus,” said Tara. “Someone get the first-aid box.”

Seconds later Tara was applying some kind of balm to her hands. Sophie assessed the damage in a detached sort of way. A single knuckle had swelled into a big pink blister that seemed itself to contain a miniature inferno, but this was the only pain. Kerry was telling Felix that she would never do something like that, that she didn’t understand how it had got there, that it was a mix-up, a mistake.

Will was crouching beside her, half his left eyebrow missing.

“Soph,” he said. “Sophie, what happened?”

“It must have been Kerry,” she said. “She was the only one who knew it was in the bottom of the wardrobe. She’s jealous of my mum.”

“Sweetheart, what are you talking about?”

“I couldn’t bear to see Mum’s stuff burned,” she said. “I had to stop it.”

It sounded as absurd as it had seemed reasonable moments before. Will said nothing more, but she could see what he was thinking. Lying on the grass, lungs scorched, knuckle singing out in pain, she was for the first time terrified that he might be right. She looked up at Will, Kerry standing behind him, the pair of them shadows through the smoke, and for a second she was forcibly, painfully reminded of the grainy photographs, a sheet of hair behind him, and she allowed herself to wonder if—
No
. Last time it had started like this, a slow loss of confidence in her own judgment, wild conclusions jumped to. She was sure she had put her mother’s sweater aside, but then Kerry had come in with Edie, Sophie’s concentration had been broken. Just because she couldn’t remember having done it did not necessarily mean it hadn’t happened.

Someone threw a switch and the glare of the outdoor light dulled the bonfire’s glow. She squeezed her stinging eyes closed. When she opened them, Will was still there, but Kerry had gone. This was how it had started the last time, different realities presenting themselves to her between blinks.

7

O
UTSIDE FELIX’S ROOM she raised her hand to knock, trusting that the right words of apology would come to her as soon as she saw Kerry’s face. But from within came sounds that barred her like a locked door: a slap, a giggle (Felix?), a groan (definitely Felix,
ugh
), and the sudden thud of a headboard. Hastily she backed away, creeping along the corridor and tiptoeing down the stairs.

The sitting room was empty. High-pitched battle cries from outside told her that the boys were playing Death in the Trenches by the security light. At the kitchen table were Edie and the adults who were talking in hushed, not-in-front-of-the-children tones. Sophie smiled; they flattered Edie if they thought she was old enough to understand, let alone repeat, their conversation. But as she drew closer and she could make out the odd word, her smile was knocked off its perch. She heard her own name and Kerry’s and the words “bonfire” and “lost it.”

Heart kicking at her rib cage, she pressed herself against the wall and approached the kitchen so that she could hear without being seen. If I stay here, she thought, perhaps they will tell me something about myself that I cannot grasp.

“I thought she was better?” said Tara to Will. “She seemed fine until just now. She’s been her old self since before Edie was born. Hasn’t she? None of us want a repetition of the Charlie thing . . . you’d tell us if it got that bad again, wouldn’t you?”

Matt said, “The Charlie thing?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” said Tara, in a tone that suggested she had deliberately kept it from him; Sophie felt a warm rush of gratitude at this unexpected loyalty that immediately began to ebb. “She had acute postnatal depression after Charlie was born, but nobody picked up on it. We all just thought she was knackered, as you would be with two boys and a baby, and it all came to a head one day when she just dumped him in a supermarket, left the buggy in the middle of the cereals aisle.”

Tara was wrong there. It had been the rice and pasta aisle. Sophie would never forget the way all the labels on the food had seemed too vivid, all the colors turned up to neon and glowing as if lit from within, with Charlie’s face the brightest, hottest light of them all.

“Shit,”
said Matt.

“I know. I know. It was awful. The people at Waitrose called the police in, but it was quite a while before they could identify him. Because he was supposed to be with Sophie all day, no one reported him missing and he was officially in care for about five hours, until Sophie didn’t pick the other boys up from school and the school rang Will. It took three days for them to find her. We were all out looking for her.”

It was strange to hear them recount it like this, in calm, dispassionate voices, as though there hadn’t been screaming and tears at the time.

“And where had she gone?” said Matt.

“She’d taken herself off to a hotel and locked herself in the room,” said Rowan. “They had to break the door down. We all thought she’d done the worst.”

“By then we were so relieved she was safe that we didn’t have the heart to be angry with her,” said Will.

“Not that anger was the appropriate response,” said Rowan. “She was
ill
. The police were very sympathetic, in the end, after Lydia had spoken to them.”

“Will, mate,” said Matt. “What a nightmare.”

“It was, yeah,” said Will. “I blame myself for a lot of it. I should have noticed sooner, shouldn’t I? And then later on, I didn’t handle it well either, I . . .” Sophie drew a serrated in-breath. He’s going to tell them about how he “handled” my breakdown, and because of what they have just seen, they won’t even blame him. For her family to know about his infidelity would make the humiliation complete. This, then, was to be her punishment for eavesdropping. She felt her lungs begin to strain and heard Will’s own deep inhalation before he said, “It’s just . . . it’s just grief, isn’t it?” Sophie finally let out her breath; she had been holding it for so long she was panting. “You’re all going through it.
We’re
all going through it.”

There was no response, just the noise of mugs being picked up and set down, the ting of teaspoons on crockery, the scraping of chair feet, the gentle constant of Edie’s high-pitched babble.

“But she seems so on top of things,” said Tara eventually. “I mean, she organized this whole weekend, for a start.”

And Will said, “Well, that’s Sophie, isn’t it? The more ill she gets, the more highly she functions, until one day she just . . .
doesn’t
anymore.”

“Will, I know she’s my daughter, but you can always talk to me, man to man,” said Rowan. Will made no reply. Someone drummed their fingers. Now the house itself seemed to hold its breath.

Matt cleared his throat and steered the conversation toward the familiar and unthreatening. “Well, supper isn’t going to cook itself, is it? Come on, Will, let’s see what you’re made of.”

“Let battle commence!” said Will, in the voice he used when he wanted to make light of something dark. Sophie wondered if he had any of the rest of them fooled.