Decay Inevitable

“What is it?” she asked, softly. The house creaked and groaned around her as the wind and rain buffeted it. It too seemed affected by whatever it was that Sean had discovered.

“I’ve been here before,” he said. “When I was a child. But I can’t remember... I can’t remember how.”

She pressed against him and looked through the gap between his arm and the curtailment of the banister. The room had no tiles in it; the floor was covered with a ragged piece of matting. Chalked signs and messages had been scratched into it. The walls seethed in shadow and light, spoilt further by an imbroglio of graphite and ink and spray paint.

Emma said, in a voice too small for the room: “Me too.”

What illuminated the walls, what quaked and pulsed at the centre of the room, was hidden within a tube of fabric that was pinned and pegged to a scaffold that reached up to the eaves. An arched window, the only one on this level, provided a view of the tower at Sloe Heath, as if it were a painting, framed and hung.

Sean unfastened the fabric and let it fall. The fire that was revealed, burning in a small, ceramic crucible, was unlike any flame Emma had seen. The tongues of it, reaching to the newly revealed ceiling, were sometimes milky and smooth, sometimes purpuric. Acid whites became mottled with cartoon orange; sudden, impossible black flames measled with slowly expanding moments of electric green. At the ceiling, they rilled and plaited like flecks of rain on glass. The sheer alien spectacle was enough to shock tears from her, but what elicited the pain to go with it, a bone-gnawing sadness, was what coalesced at the heart of the fire.

She had not seen her grandfather for twenty years, yet here he was, bathed by the flames, as scrubbed and as fresh as a child. He turned to look at her, his eyes animated with joy. He was trying to speak to her but either the words were being soaked up by the conflagration or she wasn’t close enough to hear. The enticement of listening to a voice that had been lost to the vagaries of time and her untrustworthy memory was irresistible. She edged towards the tower of fire, cocking her head to improve the trajectory of his words, and saw Sean doing the same. Tears made his cheeks shiny. How could he be feeling this way for someone who belonged to her? She remembered weekends spent with this man, when her parents were having some time to themselves. She would sit on his knee while they watched Charlie’s Angels or Starsky and Hutch or The Six Million Dollar Man. He would waggle her toes and tell her stories about dark horses in stormy fields and angels who played with your hair while you slept and how that was what made you become more beautiful every day. He brought her cakes from the factory where he worked as a confectioner, icing buns and decorating birthday sponges.

She couldn’t say “Grandad” back then. It was too hard a word for her. She called him “Gaga”.

“Gaga,” she said now, the first time she had uttered the name since his death in 1976. It was like understanding what life meant. It was like, for an instant, glimpsing a detail of God’s face. He might as well have died yesterday, so fresh in her mind was he now. And suddenly she could remember how he spoke. The richness of his voice slammed into her consciousness with such clarity that she staggered. Sean reached out and grabbed her arm. He appeared to her as though through a sea of syrup. His eyes were wide, his mouth comically stretched. Was he shaking his head?

Emma flapped his arms away and turned again to her grandfather. He was laughing, his eyes screwed up, happy wrinkles squeezed into the corners of the face. “Count my happy wrinkles,” he’d say. “Count my happy wrinkles and times by five, that’s how long I’ll stay alive.”

Here he was, saying things to her again that she couldn’t hear. Conscious that Sean was behind her, reaching out, trying to stop her from being with a man she had loved so much, she ran to her grandfather, arms outstretched. The flames, when they consumed her, didn’t hurt at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: SALAMANDERMAN

“CROSS HIS PALMS with crimson, traveller,” the nut said, capering in Will’s wake like a harlequin on speed, busting his guts to impress a king. Ahead of them both, a man in a long brown coat was striding across the cricket pitch, the straps of his First World War flying helmet whipping around his neck in the wind.

“Plasma or fire, he takes either,” the nut was saying now. “He’ll juggle with flames and make your blood disappear into his skin.”