First Fruits (35 page)

And this time, Moira failed. In the
terrible chaos of a house on fire, she must have turned the keys in the doors
the wrong way. Smoke does that, suffocating the brain, making you move in the
wrong direction, do the wrong thing. And that's how the doors were found later.
Locked. No-one else came out of the house alive, including Moira. But she had
done her best.

No wonder the papers had a field day. It
made you proud to be British. Editorials carried her name, recommending that
her photograph be pinned up in every youth club and guide hut in the country.
It would have been all wrong to dwell on just the one unhappy fact.

That none of it would have happened if
Moira hadn't been trying to fry chips in the middle of the night.

Only the woman's page in one particular
newspaper paid any attention, to ask what it is that drives some women to eat
forbidden foods in secret. It went on to wonder what kind of compulsion drove
Moira that night, into the kitchen, into the dark, reaching for the chip pan,
while everybody slept.

Besides, there was that other point of
much greater interest. Of  history repeating on itself, regurgitating events in
a most spectacular fashion. Journalists picked over old cuttings and found they
had another story on their hands.

It had happened before, in another part
of the country, to this self-same family. My family. A previous fire that started
whilst everyone was sleeping. But then only the one person had been unfortunate
enough to die, a young woman. They had found her, much too late, lying in bed
with her arms by her side. The peaceful, undisturbed, completely burned shell
of what had been my mother.

Luckily there had been Gran then, making
sure it all made sense, telling the papers how my mother had always been one
for her bed. Telling them how she would sleep through church, sleep through the
long nights when
he
was working, sleep when she should have been up
making his breakfast. It was the drink, she said - and being a secret smoker
with it. That's where the fire started, in her bedroom, with a cigarette among
the bedclothes.

But there are lots of things I remember
now. And I don't remember my mother smoking, or drinking. I only remember her
trying to do her best for me, trying to keep me quiet. Trying to keep me safe.

Yet it means it's all on record still.
'Facts' about my mother; too lazy put out a cigarette, too drunk to wake up.
That's what Gran told them. And they must have believed her. After the flames
had finished with her, there was nothing left to say any different.

My father though, that was a different
story. For a short while he was famous. Famous for running through the flames
that same night with his tiny daughter in one arm, and a picture under the
other. A lucky little girl, the newspapers called me at the time. Except for
the damage to my leg of course.

Lucky this time round as well.

THAT’S
all the stuff that people read about. But it was nothing like that.

That first flight from a burning house,
for instance; I remember it now. My father snatching me up and striding,
not
running
, with me through the flames. As we went, he seemed to be carrying
his own flame, his very own lighted brand, lighting his way through the lesser
light of ordinary fire. It proved we were not alone and fitted with the prayer
that he was reciting at the top of his voice, loud enough to fill a church,
louder than the crackling of flames and timbers crashing. His voice only broke
as he reached the
Amen
, and handed me into the arms of a neighbour.

Naturally, I thought he was God.

I never realised the flames that
followed us were all mine, that it was my own leg burning. I had been screaming
all the while, but that was because she wasn't with us. Because I hadn't waited
as she had told me to wait. Now he was carrying me away, and I was leaving her
behind.

It was me.
I
left
her
.

But it's only now I remember this. All
these years I thought my Dad was the source of all the light. And all the time
it was me, burning.

Later in the ambulance, he held my hand,
cradled my head, stroked me - until he was sure that nobody was looking, and
took his hand away. Less than perfect now, you see. I remember it all.

BUT
the newspapers were wrong; history didn't repeat itself. It was all different
this time round. This time, we walked from the house the way we would have done
the first time, the way
she
had planned. Hand in hand, no screaming, no
burning. Nothing touched us, nothing even came close that I knew of. I heard
the flames and I breathed in the smoke, but I saw nothing. Then again, I only
had eyes for her. We walked and I wished the walk could last for ever.

Outside she took her hand away. Stay
here, she said. So what could I do but stay? At first then, I stood in the rain
with the cool drops falling on my head and heard the sound of car doors
slamming in the lane and people shouting. Minutes later Lydia and Hilary
arrived outside, shocked and shivering, but I didn't even look at them. I was
watching for her. For Moira to come back.

But Moira didn't come. I don't suppose I
expected her to. But they should have let me back in, those people who came
running. They should have let me try. Instead of holding on to me as if I was a
mad thing, as if I was doing something wrong. Stopping me from going back
inside, and finding her. Again.

SO.

I've been staying with Lydia and her
parents for a while now. No-one quite knows what to do with me. They think I've
changed of course. But I haven't, not enough. Not yet. I'm sitting on
It
,
keeping it under wraps, doing everything I can not to let it show. I got it
from him you see, and it's never going to go away.

It used to keep me awake those first
nights, lying in their lemon coloured bed, worrying about it. Having
It
means he is still inside me. Because of me, he'll live for ever.

I am the future. That's what he said.
And that's what I thought. He will stay alive in me.

Or will he? Now I'm not so sure. He
reckoned without the past, didn't he, and what happens when you begin to
remember. And I'm remembering everything. Thanks to history 'repeating' itself,
I remember more and more of her each day, and the more I remember her, the less
there is of him. He is not the only one who made me. He is not going to live
through me. I don't have to let him, not now.

And to help me I have the horse, the
crystal prancing horse she took for me out of his drawer. It's still missing
its leg. But it's perfect. Absolutely perfect.

LYDIA’S
mother cried at Moira's funeral, even though she had hardly known her. She kept
saying what a terrible thing it was, a mother who wouldn't come to the burial
of her own daughter. But Moira's Gran, she didn't seem a bit surprised. She
didn't even cry, which Lydia's mother says she simply cannot understand, since
Moira must have been everything to her.

But Lydia's mother wasn't with me when I
walked up to Moira's gran outside the church. And if she had been, I don't
think she would have understood, even then.

It was raining and Moira's gran was
wearing the same plastic rain hood that Moira wore that time it rained on us.
Listen and you could hear the rain drops pattering in just the same way. Her
eyes were a light, faded blue, sharper than Moira's.

They rested for a moment on the top of
my head, as if recalling someone else. Then she said: 'I knew your mother, of
course. Right from when she was a girl, from the time when she was your age.
She'd come home with my daughter almost every night after school. Years ago
that was.'

And I nod. As if nothing could surprise
me. As if this was something I had known all along. As if, years ago, when I
first came to my school, a girl called Moira with a slow creamy voice had once
told me exactly this - and I had put it out of my head.
Don't talk about
her. Don't even think about her
. That was the rule. The rule that never
once got broken.

'I didn't want her to marry him. He was
whipping people up in church even then. It made you wonder what he'd be like in
his own home. It's what I told her, it's what her mother would have told her,
if only she'd been alive. But she wouldn't listen. Girls don't listen.'

And again, I nod.

'She married him and I never saw her
after. Not once. He closed the doors and never let her out. I'd ask to see her,
and that mother of his would send me away with a flea in my ear. But when I
heard you were at the school, I told my Moira she should keep an eye on you. I
thought one day you might come and see me. And I thought it would make Moira
feel...'

...Needed. That's what her gran had
tried to do for Moira. And this is what Moira had done for me; she did as she
was told. Moira kept an eye on me. Exactly as her gran had said to do. And then
something happened. And it wasn't
just
Moira, watching me.

Moira's gran doesn't smell like Moira.
She smells of loose powder and rain and resignation.

I
didn't cry when it was the day for Dad and Gran.

Apparently, it was only to be expected.
I heard Lydia's mother whispering to Lydia's father, asking if he thought I was
still in shock, and he nodded, as if he had seen it all before. As if experts
in Trompetto know everything about everything. I almost shot him a smile then,
the sort I would have treated him to before, just to see his face.

But I didn't. It's not the kind of thing
I would want my daughter to do. Not at a time like this, not at a funeral.
Daughters should think what their mothers would want and try to act
accordingly.

That's what I've decided. Since there's
no-one left I'd want to listen to, I'm going listen to my mother.

Which is why, here, in this lemon
coloured bed, I wait for her, night after night. If I am quiet enough, I can
almost hear her talking to me, deep in that small space inside where he never
was able to reach. She is always there. I am not alone.

All the same, I can't stay here forever,
going to sleep each night in someone else's bed, tucked up in sheets that don't
belong to me. I'm upsetting the balance of everything. Lydia's father is still
worried that he's going to find me looking at him the way I did before. And he
has a point. Old habits do die hard.

So I'm going to have to tell them about
the letter that came this morning, from Moira's gran. Describe rather than show
it to them, perhaps. They might be taken aback by the spelling, think the less
of her, and her offer. Some people believe that if you can't spell, you can't
think. Which has to be wrong, because Moira's gran must have thought hard about
what to put in this letter.

She wants to know if I would consider
going to live with her, now that she doesn't have Moira, now that she's alone.
Now that we both appear to be alone.

So I'm thinking about it.

Of course, you know exactly what he
would have thought, my dad.
He'd
have said it was a disgusting idea.
There's nothing special about Moira's gran, nothing to suggest that she's been
chosen - apart from the fact that she didn't cry at Moira's funeral. He'd say
no daughter of his would so much as think of it, even for a second.

And he's right of course - no daughter
of his ever would.

WHICH
is probably one reason why I shall be writing my own letter in the morning, to
tell Moira's gran I'm coming. Drink a cup of tea with her and listen to the
world swing full circle.

The End