The Fire Child Read online

  I listen to the sea it sounds like a big man breathing, a big scarry man and mummy in the darkness and the blackness. I have fritening dreams about you with no fingers to Im sorry. you are smiling

  Jamie xxxXXXxxx

  One more letter to go. One more is enough. This final letter looks to be the most recent, the handwriting is significantly improved. I can see my name in the first paragraph, this letter must have been written after I entered his life.

  Leaning closer to David’s desk lamp, I take up the notepaper, and read.

  Dear Mummy

  Daddy’s new wife is here now and her name is Rachel Daly but she is now a Kerthen like you and me and Daddy. Are you angry with her for taking yor your place? Don’t be she is nice she teaches me photography but she is not my mummy YOU are my mummy.

  Sometimes I do not like to look at the mine where you fell down Mummy I know you are alive and alright now but the mines friten me. They look like monsters. Rachel is sad sometimes she laughs a lot but then she looks unhappy.

  I remember when you were sad a lot before the accident fall. When Daddy and then you said what you said I wont tell anyone?

  Today at school Miss Anderson showed us pictures of heaven but I do not think I believe in heaven any more because I used to think you lived in heaven with grandad. But now you arent in heaven you are in the house at night so how does that work? Did you swim in the mine and climb out?

  Yesterday we had swimming. I can do front crawl and back crawl but I can’t do butterfly. It is very hard. You swam a long way in France when you went on and on and Daddy was laughing and saying you were swimming to England because you want to get away from us.

  Wish you ha

  I loved you just as much as daddy, I am sorry

  I learned a story about penguins. There are penguins in Antartica that spend all the winter looking after the baby penguins. It is very cold so cold your eyes turn into ice and then you have to wear gogles. The penguins looking after the little penguins are daddy penguins. The wind blows and blows and blows and the daddy penguins keep the baby penguin warm with there fluffy feathers. Then after ages they see the mummy penguins. they thought the mummy penguins were dead but then they see the mummy penguins come back through the wind and the snow and they are happy. The mummy penguins always come back.

  We are going to go to a castle this weekend and have a picnic with Daddy and Rachel. But it may be raining so we may stay in but I think it will be sunny. Today it is hot and we went swimming me and Daddy and Rachel at zawn hana and Mummy you were there in my head and then I saw you in the house.

  I miss you lots and lots like wisky shots thats what Daddy says and I am going to go to sleep now. Bye bye

  Jamie xxx

  Carefully, I slip the letters back into the folder, and replace the folder on the shelf. Cassie will surely be back soon with Jamie, and Juliet too. I do not want to be caught in here, even though it is my own house. And I do not want anyone to suspect I was snooping.

  Making my way around the study, I straighten anything I might have disturbed. Then I pause at the window and follow Jago Kerthen’s gaze down the darkened, rain-streaked valley to the mines and the cliffs and the sea.

  What do these letters tell me? They tell me that Jamie is deeply confused, on a level I had not suspected. They tell me that I am possibly not helping, even though he seems to like me, or tolerate me, at the same time. They tell me that his grief is pure and ceaseless, that he is suffering deeply; they tell me it is my duty to help this poor boy in any way I can.

  They also tell me one final thing. There were arguments that night Nina died. Arguments that were bad enough for Jamie to remember them.

  Yet there were no arguments mentioned in the inquest.

  What do I do with this information? Approach David? That would mean revealing that I have been sleuthing around his study. Sifting through his private papers.

  My thoughts are brought to a stop by a piercing scream.

  Evening

  I turn off the desk lamp and run to the door, the anxiety tight and fierce in my chest.

  ‘Please, someone!’ Juliet yells. ‘Someone come!’

  The corridor outside the study is empty. It runs down to the New Hall. Then I see a figure emerging at the end – Jamie. In his school uniform. They all came back to Carnhallow and I didn’t even notice? I was so absorbed in his letters.

  ‘Rachel! It’s the Old Hall,’ cries Jamie, looking my way. ‘Granny, I heard her, heard her shouting.’ His face is pale, his lip trembling. ‘It’s coming from the Old Hall. Please come!’

  I follow him, running so fast the floorboards squeak in pain. I turn the cast-iron handle of the Old Hall. The tall lancet windows show grey-black clouds, like night has fallen early. All the light is coming from within the room itself. A shaking orange light that makes shadows dance along the walls.

  Because the floor is etched with lines of fire. Patterns and whorls, loops and lines, of urgent low flame, like a maze of meaningful cracks has appeared in the flagstones, and the burning mines beneath can now be seen, fingers of fire reaching up, inside, clawing into the house. Juliet is flapping at the horrible flames with a jacket, panicked, nearly in tears.

  ‘My God. What is this, what is this?’ Her voice is hoarse with alarm. ‘I only came in here for a short-cut, out of the rain. I hate this room. I never come here normally because of all that, and them, and then’ – she points – ‘then I found this, found this all here, these people, who did this, why did she do this?’

  Desperate, I begin to stamp out the flames. But it is difficult. The lines of fire are small but fierce and persistent, and somehow all the more sinister for that. Like a modest display of a much greater power, designed to frighten and threaten: See what I can do. There is a smell of petrol in the air, along with smoke, and maybe something else. A perfume?

  ‘Jamie, help me, help your granny.’

  He does nothing. He has gone around the maze of little flames and is staring rapt from the other side of the Hall at this flickering display. This smoky light that makes our own shadows lurch around us, palsied, quivering.

  Juliet flaps, haplessly, at the flames once more. They are beginning to die of their own accord. Their job done, perhaps. Then she whispers to me, ‘She did this. Nina did this.’

  Jamie is standing there, smiling and amazed. He predicted this. He told me in the Drawing Room. There will be lights in the Old Hall.

  No, this is absurd. It is some joke.

  Walking around the lines of licking flame, I place a comforting arm over his shoulder. Then I look at the fiery pattern from his perspective. And now I realize maybe why he is amazed, or scared, or shocked. The dancing lines of yellow fire are not haphazardly arranged. They spell out a burning word.

  MUMMY.

  82 Days Before Christmas

  Evening

  David stood at the window, sipping from his tumbler of Macallan, listening to the undergrads laughing on their way home from university, through the ghosts of evening mist. Usually, he liked this time of year, the sense of quickening intellect, under yellowing leaves. But tonight the youth of these students reminded him merely of his advance into middle age, and their happiness emphasized his regret.

  Jamie.

  Back at his desk, he set down his Scotch, opened his laptop screen and dialled the number, checking the time as he did.

  Six o’clock: their regular slot.

  His son’s face came online.

  ‘Hold the phone up, Jamie. I can’t see you.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad. Is that better now?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s better.’

  David scanned the screen, looking at his son’s bedroom. Football posters. Neat bookshelves. A black microscope, hunched like Nosferatu, sitting on a desk. To the right was the window, overlooking the lawns, where you could look down the long slope, all the way to the mines and cliffs. The sky in Cornwall looked brighter than the brooding London clouds here in Bloomsbury.

  �
��Nice evening down there?’

  Jamie shrugged, his expression blank. Then he looked away from the screen as if hearing something, in the house.

  ‘Jamie?’

  ‘Sorry. Yes, Daddy. It was really sunny today. Me and Rollo played three and in.’

  ‘Good. That’s good.’

  ‘Then we went down to the zawn and played skimming and stuff. It was nice and there was a seal.’

  ‘Ah. I wish I’d been there.’

  ‘Hmm, yeah.’

  ‘I do, Jamie. I really do.’

  David stared into his son’s expressive eyes and felt the flowering despair. It should be him, the father, skimming stones with his son, not Rollo all the time; it should be him playing football on the lawn, laughing in the cool, mild air of a fine October twilight. But he wasn’t there. He was seldom there. He was missing far too much of Jamie’s childhood. The sensation of this – missing his son’s ascent to adulthood – made David feel queasy at the grievous waste. Liquid silver was running into a drain. The boy was growing up and David was missing the last precious years of childhood, as he had missed the years before.

  ‘Are you all right, Daddy?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I was thinking.’ He forced a smile. ‘So how are things with Rachel? Have you said sorry?’

  ‘Sorry for what, Daddy?’

  ‘For playing that trick, that joke, with the fires, and the lighter fuel.’

  David waited, inwardly praying that this time Jamie would confess: that if he casually asked him, like this, the boy would finally yield.

  ‘I didn’t do any joke, Daddy. I told you. I didn’t! Maybe it was Cassie, or Granny, not me. Maybe it was Rachel, she does funny things, she acts funny sometimes. She can be weird.’

  ‘Jamie – please.’

  ‘Daddy, I didn’t do it!’

  The boy looked sincere enough. Face eager, pained, truthful; but David was wholly convinced that Jamie had done it. Because Jamie was surely reliving in his turbulent mind an incident from his childhood. When Jamie’s sixth birthday had come around, Nina had done this: written Jamie’s name in fire on the floor of the Old Hall, as a surprise, like the entire floor was a massive birthday cake and he could make eight hundred wishes. His mother always loved open flames: bonfires, hearth-fires, candles.

  David remembered Jamie’s cry of delight when the trick was pulled, when his son was ushered, blindfold, into the Old Hall, then the blindfold was whipped away, revealing the flaming words, Happy Birthday Jamie, written in fire on flagstone – and then Jamie turned and found all his friends hiding in the darkness, and giggling, and then behind them trestle tables of saffron cakes, and fresh lemonade, and sticks of celery and apple. That was the best birthday party ever, thank you, Mummy, thank you, Daddy.

  That kind of precious memory would stick with a child. It had stuck with David. The happiness that could never return, the last real happiness they’d known as a family. It was perhaps not surprising Jamie had re-enacted this scene, trying to summon his mother back, by doing a kind of childish fire-magic. Write my name in light and I will reappear.

  Yet still the boy wouldn’t admit it.

  Jamie’s face was set firmly in the negative, now. A stubborn, faintly arrogant tilt of the chin. That Kerthen expression.

  David sighed.

  ‘OK, we’ll talk about it another time.’

  Jamie nodded, uncaringly – then offered a tight little frown. ‘Can I ask you a question, Dad?’

  ‘Sure. Of course you can. Shoot.’

  ‘Do you love Rachel?’

  David had been expecting this question for a while, so he had an answer ready to go.

  ‘Yes. Naturally. That’s why I married her. That’s why she is here. Or there. In Carnhallow.’

  ‘OK. And, Dad,’ Jamie hesitated. ‘Do you love Rachel as much as you loved Mummy?’

  ‘No, it’s different, Jamie – quite different to that. I will never love someone the way I loved your mother.’

  ‘And do you miss Mummy?’

  ‘Absolutely, Jamie. Every day. We all do. But daddies can get lonely too.’

  Jamie nodded, but looked rather melancholy at the same time. David yearned to reach his arm around his son’s slender shoulders, give the boy a reassuring hug. But they were at either end of the country. So he reached out by talking.

  ‘Just because Rachel has moved in with us, that doesn’t mean anything about the way I loved your mother. It doesn’t take anything away from the past.’

  ‘All right, Dad. I understand.’ Jamie did a teenagerish sigh, then glanced to the side. ‘I’m going to tell Cassie I’ll be down soon, she’s calling, for supper—’

  The boy rested his phone on the desk, so that it was staring at a blank ceiling, a rectangle of pinked whiteness, lit by the setting sun. David could imagine the scene, the view from the house over Zawn Hanna, a dazzle of dying sunlight turning Morvellan black, against the faded gold of the twilit sea.

  David checked the clock. He had another file to go through: he had to go back to work shortly. He was too busy even to have a proper phone call with his own child, his grieving son, wrestling with traumas and confusions, and his father’s terrible mistakes.

  The guilt returned, triumphant. For all his efforts, David was doing what he had once vowed never to do. Reiterating his own father’s cruelties.

  David’s father had deliberately excluded him from their non-existent family life, by sending him to boarding school. Now David’s job excluded him from Jamie’s life, as he slaved in London, trying to repair the damage his own father had done. The only son was left alone. Again.

  It was as if they were destined, as a family, to recycle the same cruelty in every generation. As if Jamie’s fate was revenge taken by all those boys sent down the mines. This is what you made us do, decade after decade, now you Kerthens must suffer the same.

  How had it come to this? It wasn’t for lack of paternal love. Sitting here in the calm, orderly silence of his London flat, David recalled his own ferocious happiness when he first held Jamie as a baby: a happiness so great it encompassed a significant element of sadness, within. He remembered a striking phrase his mother had used for parents of newborns, of firstborns, their conflicting sensibilities: Your heart is cut by a thousand shards of happy glass.

  It was painfully true. The happy glass entered your heart when you had a kid and it never went away: needling anxiety, pinpricks of worry and, occasionally, a lancing, inexpressible joy, a happiness so intense you knew that, when you died, this was how you would judge and remember your life: this was what you would think about on your deathbed. Not your career or your accomplishments, not your partners, not sex, not how many cars or wives or holidays or millions you had, but how you had done with your kids. Was I a good father? And were there enough of those diamond-hard, dazzling moments of paternal and filial happiness?

  ‘Daddy.’

  Jamie was back.

  ‘Yes. Hi there.’

  ‘Sorry, Cassie wanted something and I had to fetch it.’

  ‘That’s fine. But, well, I’ve got to go myself, soon. Work.’

  The boy flinched. Was that a flash of anger, or disgust?

  ‘You’re busy?’

  ‘I am. I’m sorry. I am busy, but if I get it all done now, then I promise not to work at the weekend.’

  ‘You said that last weekend, when you came down. But you looked at your phone the whole time.’

  David inwardly blushed at the truth of this. Then he remembered his concerns, what he’d wanted to ask, during this phone call. ‘Jamie?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You said something about Rachel. You said Rachel can be weird.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why did you say that?’

  ‘’Cause, Daddy. ’Cause she can, she can, she asks me things. And she looks for things, in the house.’

  David scowled, but tried to hide it. ‘Things?’

  ‘Things, and stuff. Things that have happened, are happening.’


  David calmed himself. He had to do this firmly, but without alarming his son.

  ‘Jamie, she is trying her best to fit. You have to cut her some slack. She’s the one who has to adopt our lifestyle, become part of our family, and she’s trying very hard, getting to know Carnhallow, that’s why she asks questions, or maybe seems uneasy. But’ – he leaned closer to the screen – ‘you do remember our promise, about the past? What we agreed.’

  Jamie’s eyes widened, though he surely knew what David was talking about.

  ‘C’mon, Jamie. You remember. You have to remember.’

  ‘Yes, Daddy, I know. Don’t like talking about it.’

  ‘I know, it’s difficult and sad. But I need to stress this again. You mustn’t ever talk about what happened, that night, anything anyone said, what you saw. You mustn’t talk about it, about that night. Agreed? It’s like the therapist, exactly the same. Even if someone questions you, if anyone questions you, say nothing. Even to Rachel.’

  ‘Nnn.’ Jamie shrugged, as if this was nothing at all, or something he was about to ignore.

  ‘Jamie!’

  ‘OK, Daddy, yes!’

  Jamie sipped at a can of drink. San Pellegrino. His blue-violet eyes were beautiful, even when seen through a laptop screen. The boy spoke:

  ‘Daddy I have my own question, before you go.’

  David smiled, in a fake way, as if everything was made good.

  ‘Of course. Ask anything you like. I know I’m not there much – but I’m always here for you, on the phone, on the screen, always, always.’

  ‘OK, Dad.’

  A long pause. Jamie looked nervous.

  The light was beginning to fade.

  ‘Jamie? What was your question?’

  The boy sighed. And shrugged. He seemed to be wrestling with some dilemma. Finally, he spoke: ‘Daddy, is Mummy still alive?’

  David gazed, wordless, at his son. He hoped he was mishearing.