Totterdown

He was asleep when the phone went, which was the first thing he held against himself, before he knew there was anything to hold.

“Aled. It’s Jas. Sorry.”

He was sitting up. The clock on the cooker across the room said six minutes past four; he could see it from the bed because the flat was one room and a bathroom, and he had never minded.

“Go on.”

“Her flat. Totterdown. Somebody put petrol through the letterbox about two and lit it.” Jas’s voice was flat and quick, the voice for giving things in order. “Next door’s smoke alarm went, then hers. Fire service had it out by half past. The hall’s gone. The rest’s smoke. Nobody in, nobody hurt. Next door were out on the pavement in five minutes. The address had a marker on it and it took them till quarter to four to get to us.”

He had his feet on the floor. His keys were on the table by the door, where they always were.

“How is she?”

A pause.

“Dressed,” said Jas. “She was dressed before I knocked. She’s in the kitchen doorway with her coat on.” Another pause, shorter. “She wants to see it.”

· · ·Scene break

He drove to the bakery flat in forty-one minutes and did not remember any of it but the rain starting at the county boundary.

She was in the kitchen when he came up the outside stair, standing, as Jas had said, in her coat, with her hands in the pockets. She did not say anything when he came in. She looked at him the way she had looked at the petrol receipt, and he let her, and then she said:

“I’d like to see it.”

“I know.”

“Is that about safety?”

It was, and she knew it was. She was not asking whether it was. She was asking him to say why, out loud, the way they had agreed he would, so that she could hear whether the why was good enough.

He gave it to her.

“It’s the one address they’ve just shown us they know. Somebody stood on your step four hours ago with a can of petrol. If anybody wanted to see what you’d do about it, the first place they’d look is your own street, this morning.” He stopped. “That’s the reason not to.”

“And?”

“And by the time we get there it’ll be light, and there’ll be a fire investigator, and tape across the street, and a marked car at each end, and half your neighbours out on their steps in dressing gowns watching the whole of it. It’ll be the most looked-at street in Bristol.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “That’s the reason it’s all right. For half an hour. And it’s your flat. You’ve a right to see what they’ve done to it.”

She took that in. He watched the drawer open and shut.

“Thank you,” she said. “Who’s driving?”

“Jas. She’s on till eight. Imran’s on his way in early, he’ll follow.” He looked at Jas, in the doorway of the front room with the radio, who looked back at him and nodded once. “I’ll be in the front.”

· · ·Scene break

The street was as he had said it would be, and worse.

They came down the hill in the first grey of the light, with Rashid behind, and the terraces stepped away below them the way he remembered them from the night of the eleven minutes, every front door painted a different colour. Hers was the only one open. The blue had gone black around the letterbox in a shape like a hand spread out, and the black went up the door and over the fanlight, and above the fanlight the brick was streaked to the sill of the window over it.

There was tape at the gate and a PC in a high-visibility coat standing inside it with his hands in his armpits. A van from the fire service with its back doors open. A woman in a white suit coming out of Esther’s door with a clipboard. Along the street, on four or five steps, people in coats over their nightclothes, holding mugs, watching, and a man in slippers who had clearly been telling the PC how it had happened for some time.

The smell came into the car before Jas had stopped it. Petrol, and under it the thick wet smell of burnt things that had been put out with water, which is worse than burning.

Esther did not move.

He looked at her in the mirror. She was looking at her door through the side window with no expression on her face at all, the way she had looked at nothing in the back of the car at Weston.

“Take your time,” he said.

“I’ve taken it,” she said, and opened the door.

· · ·Scene break

The fire investigator was a woman of about fifty with soot on her forehead where she had pushed her hair back, and she spoke to Esther as if Esther were the only person on the street, which Aled noted and was grateful for.

“The hall took it,” she said. “He put it through the letterbox, a fair amount of it, and put a light to it, and went. It ran along the floor and up the walls. Your inner door was shut.”

“I always shut it.”

“Well, you saved your front room.” The investigator looked at her clipboard and not at her. “Smoke’s got through. You’ll smell it on everything. But the room’s there. The kitchen’s there. The hall isn’t, much.”

“Can I go in?”

“The hall only. Stay on the boards I’ve put down. Don’t touch the walls, don’t touch the ceiling, don’t open that door.” She held out a pair of blue overshoes. “Five minutes.”

Esther put them on standing on one foot and then the other, holding the gatepost, and stepped over the tape.

He went with her as far as the step.

· · ·Scene break

The hall was very small. He had not known that. On the night of the eleven minutes the door had been locked behind her and she had been on the pavement with her holdall, and he had never seen inside.

It was black. All of it. The floor under the investigator’s boards was a soft black crust with water standing in it. The walls were black to the ceiling and the ceiling was black and blistered, and the door at the far end, the inner door, was charred on this side, and would be white, he supposed, on the other. The post had gone to nothing on the mat. There had been a coat hook; there was a coat hook, with a shape on it that had been a coat. The light fitting hung down on its wire, melted into a drop.

On the left, at head height, there was a shelf.

It had been painted white, he thought. It was brown now, and bowed in the middle. On it there was a cardboard box, the size of a box a pair of boots came in, with a lid.

Esther stood on the boards in the middle of the hall and looked at it.

He stood on the step with his back to the street, filling the doorway, so that nobody on any doorstep could see past him, and watched her.

She did not touch it at first. She looked at it for a long time. The lid had gone brown and curled up at one corner, and the side nearest the door was scorched, a dark tide-mark three inches up from the bottom. Then she reached up with both hands, the way you would lift down something that might come apart, and took it down, and held it against her coat, and lifted the curled corner of the lid.

He could see from the step. Paper, folded, packed on its edges in rows, the way she had packed the envelope on the windowsill at the cottage. The tops of them were brown. The rest was white.

She put the lid back down.

“They’re all right,” she said. She did not turn round. “The tops have gone. The dates are on the bottom. I always write the date on the bottom.”

“Good,” he said.

It was the wrong word and the only one he had.

She stood in her burnt hall with the box against her chest. The water dripped from the ceiling onto the investigator’s boards. The smell was very bad in here, much worse than in the street, the petrol under everything like a fact.

“Aled.”

“I’m here.”

“Would you come in?” She still had not turned round. “Not for anything. I don’t want you to do anything. Just come and stand here. I’d like somebody to be standing in it with me.”

He looked at the hall. It was perhaps nine feet long and three and a half wide. With her in it, and the boards, and him, there would be no room in it at all that was not her.

He could go in. There was nothing against it that anybody would write down. A protection officer steps into a burnt hallway behind his principal. The PC at the gate would not look twice; the investigator would tell him not to touch the walls. And he knew what it would be, the two of them in nine feet of black with nobody able to see in, and her asking. He knew it the way he had known on the back of the envelope what an hour and a half on the Weston road would be. That was what the terms were for. She had written them for this. She had written them at ten to six on a Tuesday with her hair wet, knowing that there would be a morning when she would be the one who asked, and needing him to be the one who did not come.

He stepped over the threshold.

One step. His right foot on the investigator’s board, his left still on the step behind him, on the stone, on the street side of the door. The doorframe against his shoulder, charred, and the smell of it on his coat. He was in her hall, and he was in her doorway, and he stayed there.

She heard it. She turned round.

She looked at where he had stopped. At his foot on the board and his other foot on the step. She looked at it the way she would have looked at a line in a schedule she had been expecting, and knew the value of, and had hoped for all the same would be different.

“You’re in,” she said.

“I’m in.”

“That’s one step.”

“It is.”

She held the box. He saw her hands tighten on it and then let go a little.

“I’d ask,” she said, “if it were next month.”

“I know.”

It was very quiet in the hall. Outside, behind him, the man in slippers had started telling it again from the beginning.

“All right,” she said. And then, in a different voice, the one she used for figures: “The front room’s through there. My mother’s photograph is on the mantelpiece. Would you ask her if I can have it?”

He asked the investigator. The investigator went in and came out with a photograph in a frame, the glass smoked grey, and gave it to Esther across the tape; and Esther wiped the glass with the cuff of her coat, and a woman much younger than Pat and very like her looked out of it from a beach, laughing at whoever held the camera.

· · ·Scene break

Adair rang when they were back on the motorway.

“I’m told you weren’t on,” she said.

“No, ma’am. I was at home.”

“Good,” said Adair, and he heard her not think about it. “Is she going to go on?”

“You’d have to ask her, ma’am.”

“I’m asking you to ask her.”

He turned in his seat. Esther was behind Jas, with the box on her knee and the photograph on top of the box and both hands flat on the photograph. She had heard every word; the car was small and Adair was not quiet.

“She wants to know whether you’re going on,” he said.

Esther looked at him.

“Tell her the fourth of March,” she said. “Tell her I’ll be there at nine, and tell her I’ll want the photograph of the pool back when it’s done with. It’s a good photograph. It’s the only one I’ve got of me swimming.”

He told Adair the fourth of March. He told her nine o’clock. He did not tell her about the photograph, and Adair did not ask, and rang off.

A few miles on, Esther said, “Saturday.”

He waited.

“I’d like to cook. For everybody. Properly, in that kitchen, with the oven.” She was looking at the photograph, not at him. “Is that about safety?”

“No.”

“Then I’m going to.”

“All right.”

“You’ll have a meal break,” she said, “at one. You always do.”

“I will.”

She did not say anything else. He did not turn round. In the mirror on the sun visor he could see her, with her mother on her knee and her receipts under her mother, and her face turned to the window and the grey fields going past, and the smell of her burnt hall coming off both their coats in the warm car, the same smell, so that Jas, after a while, without a word, opened her window an inch.

It was Wednesday. Thursday; Friday. Then Saturday, and her kitchen, and a table with two chairs at it. Sunday. And on Monday, Court Three.

One weekend, he thought. There was one weekend left of this, and after it there would never be another one like it, whatever happened; and he found that he did not know, sitting in the front of the car with his coat smelling of her hall, whether that was the worst thing he had thought all year or the best.