The Burning Read online

  For Evie

  When I was eleven, my English teacher told me that fire is like a tiger. He was teaching us about similes, I suppose. He said a tiger is orange and fierce and leaps forward, and it can be beautiful but also deadly.

  Mr Watson was wrong. Fire is a thousand times more deadly than a tiger. It can’t be stopped with a bullet, or a fence. It destroys everything in its path.

  A single tiny spark gobbles up oxygen and burns hotter and hotter, growing bigger and bigger. Everything it feeds on becomes part of it, like a monster that bloats and swells as it devours its prey.

  But fire isn’t evil. It isn’t good. It just is.

  I’m not saying I know better than Mr Watson or anything, but in my opinion it would have made a lot more sense if he had said that fire was like a rumour.

  Because fire is sneaky. You might think you’ve extinguished it, but one creeping red tendril, one single wisp of smoke is enough to let it leap back to life again. Especially if someone is watching, waiting to fan the flames.

  CHAPTER 1

  Hairbrush. Tampons. Toothbrush. Toothpaste.

  The front door opens with a shudder and an ominous creak. Dark blue paint cracks and peels above a tarnished brass knocker.

  Deodorant. Watch. Shoes.

  ‘Come on,’ Mum pants, heaving two bulging suitcases over the threshold and into the dark hallway.

  I’m a list-maker. Lists give me grip. You can hold onto a list. Doesn’t matter what’s on it. Today it’s everything I had to remember to pack at the last minute. The things I couldn’t put in the car last night because I’d need them this morning.

  The list has been helping me to breathe. Like a spell to ward off evil. I’ve been chanting it under my breath since I woke up and I haven’t been able to stop. Because, as long as I keep repeating the things I need to remember, somehow I can distract myself. Pretend that I’m not really walking out of my bedroom for the last time. Not really stepping into a car loaded with everything we own. Not really driving past the park where I fell off my bike for the first time. Not watching the swimming pool where I trained three nights a week disappear in the rear-view mirror.

  Hairbrush.

  Passing the chippy.

  Tampons.

  The library.

  Toothbrush.

  The pet shop where I bought my ill-fated iguana. RIP, Iggy Poppet.

  Toothpaste.

  But now we’re here. And even the list isn’t powerful enough to blot out the new house in front of me.

  I hesitate. Somehow, stepping through the door will make it real. I look back to the car, parked a little way down the street, its doors standing open, more luggage and overstuffed bin bags threatening to spill out. Through the back window, I can see a tatty box labelled ANNA’S ROOM: DIARIES, PHOTOGRAPHS, DAD’S BOOKS.

  Nothing left to go back to anyway. I take a deep breath, adjust the bulky cat carrier under my arm and step inside.

  The hallway has a musty smell, its whitewashed walls and wooden ceiling beams lit by one naked bulb. The removal van which whisked away most of our earthly belongings the night before we left has arrived before us and piles of labelled boxes teeter precariously on all sides. Mum’s already bustling through into the big, airy kitchen, which also serves as the living room. There’s one of those big Aga cookers radiating warmth and our new brick-red sofa, still covered in protective plastic sheets.

  A massive old fireplace dominates the room, empty but framed by a handsome wooden mantelpiece. I empty my pockets, shoving my journey rubbish on top of it. Soggy Costa cup. Crumpled crisp packet. Half a Mars bar. It looks a bit less imposing now.

  Gently, I set down the cat carrier and one very grumpy black cat unfurls out of it like a puff of smoke, letting out an indignant yowl to tell me exactly what he thinks of being cooped up in the car for so long.

  ‘Sorry, Cosmo,’ I whisper. I bend down to ruffle his soft fur with my fingertips, craving the comfort of his familiar warmth, but he turns tail with an angry hiss and disappears through the kitchen window into the back garden. I sort of wish I could follow him.

  I shrug off my jacket and half slump onto the crackling, plastic-covered sofa. ‘Don’t even think about it!’ Mum warns. ‘We’ve got hours of unpacking ahead of us and the car’s not even empty yet.’

  Suddenly the trees outside shake with a gust of wind, causing an eerie, shrieking moan that sounds like it came from the bones of the house itself.

  I try to sound sarcastic instead of freaked out. ‘Are you sure this place is fit for human habitation?’

  We only looked round the house once on a rushed, blustery weekend at the end of March, driving up from home and haring round Scotland in a whirl, viewing five or six different properties a day, each less inspiring than the last. At the last minute, we squeezed in an extra stop in a tiny fishing village called St Monans, where Mum instantly fell in love with the quaint, crooked streets and peaceful old harbour lined with pastel-coloured cottages.

  The cottage was one of those looking right out over the water, a neat, cream, square front snuggled cosily among the blues and yellows and pinks. Four sturdy wooden windows gave it a welcoming, symmetrical expression and a bright red roof peeped down from above, a few of the tiles higgledy-piggledy as if they’d been knocked awry by clumsy seagulls. I could tell Mum was smitten before we’d even stepped inside, but Linda, the estate agent, clearly still thought she had to convince us.

  ‘It’s historical!’ she said brightly, through a lipstick smile, as she struggled to force open the sticking front door.

  Upstairs we had to duck under sloping ceilings and I practically twisted an ankle tripping over the uneven floorboards.

  ‘Imperfections add such a sense of personality to a house, don’t they?’ Linda trilled, rushing onto the next room without waiting for an answer while I rubbed my ankle crossly. I’d happily have traded a bit less ‘personality’ for a bit more health and safety, thank you very much.

  I shiver and look up the winding staircase, remembering how I traipsed upstairs after Mum that day, bored and fed up.

  We whizzed through three bedrooms, one looking out over a jungly back garden and the other two tucked under the front eaves of the house, with views across the street and down towards the harbour, where a few brightly painted fishing boats bobbed on the tide. The bathroom offered a dripping tap and a green stain around the plughole. The ceiling beams were riddled with tiny woodworm holes and even the large stones around the doorways were scattered with deep, uneven scratches. (‘Witches’ marks! Don’t they add a lovely touch of character?’)

  The house was chilly and several of the walls were flecked with mildew. (Still there, I notice, casting a critical eye over the paintwork in the hall.)

  We didn’t have time to look in the attic, which Linda airily assured us was both ‘spacious’ and ‘cosy’. Call me cynical, but this made me suspect it might be neither. (‘The last owners never touched it and it was used for storage before they arrived, so it might need just a teensy bit of a tidy out, but rest assured there’s plenty of room up there.’)

  We’d been in a mad rush to move in two weeks, though, and, as Mum had pointed out over a plate of limp chips in the service station on the drive home, beggars can’t be choosers. ‘Got to get you settled in time for the start of the new school term,’ she said, with a smile that was just a little too wide. ‘It’ll only be a half-hour drive into St Andrews for school and I can drop you off on my way to work.’

  Two weeks later, here we are.

  The front door bangs in the wind and I hurry out to help unload the car. As we heave the last few boxes into the hall, the sky begins to rumble and the first drops of rain splatter on the pavement. Mum slams the door shut and puts an arm round my shoulders. She smells of
Daz and vanilla essence. I breathe in her smell as deeply as I can, clinging to its familiarity. ‘It’ll soon feel like home, love,’ she says with a reassuring squeeze.

  I make an mmm-hmm noise and wriggle away to escape up the creaking staircase, muttering something about unpacking my room.

  Upstairs, I shove the box of diaries and photographs as far as possible under my new bed without looking at it. I sling my backpack on the duvet, letting the contents slither out: hairbrush. Tampons. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Deodorant.

  I try to breathe.

  My laptop slides out on top of them, the green power light winking at me. My stomach does a weird sort of wriggle. I turn my back on it and tug the heavy sash window open with a complaining squeal and a cloud of dust. Outside the wind rustles the too-long grass and ivy sweeps like a tidal wave over the crumbling garden wall. In the far corner of the garden, a squat shed crouches like a toad in the gathering dusk. Rain is drumming steadily down now and the evening air smells wet and earthy. The hair on my arms lifts as a cold gust blows in. I pull a baggy black jumper out of the nearest bag and shrug it over my head, then pull my hair out of its ponytail so it falls round my shoulders, warming my neck.

  Mum has already hung my new school uniform over the door of the wardrobe. I frown at the bottle-green blazer and kilt and picture myself arriving at St Margaret’s Academy, a flat grey building I’ve only seen pictures of online, standing awkwardly on my own while gaggles of students push past me, chattering excitedly.

  ‘Anna! Dinner!’

  I sigh and head downstairs, leaving the window open.

  In the kitchen, Mum has already unearthed a few lamps and a tablecloth, giving the room an air of familiarity. A pan of hot water and spaghetti is bubbling away on the stove. Spaghetti wasn’t on my list of last-minute things, but Mum shoved it in the glovebox, realizing we wouldn’t have anything else to eat on the first night. The modern cutlery with brightly coloured handles and the tall highball glasses look out of place in this creaky museum of a house, which Linda proudly assured us originally dates back almost four centuries. It’s like the cottage has dressed up in our old house’s clothes, but the trousers are too short, revealing a weird patch of bare ankle.

  ‘It doesn’t look like much yet.’ Mum shrugs apologetically, and I feel my heart constrict. Mum has uprooted her entire life – job, friends, everything – and here she is apologizing to me. I don’t know what to say, so I shrug too, in a way that I hope looks like ‘I don’t mind, Mum, I love you’ but I’m afraid actually looks like ‘whatever’.

  ‘We’ll get there,’ she smiles. ‘It’s a fresh start and that’s what matters.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Sunlight glows on the other side of my eyelids. I lie looking at the rosy haze, disorientated. My hand shoots out automatically to grope for my phone on the bedside table. The phone isn’t there. Nor is the bedside table. My knuckles graze the chalky whitewashed wall instead. I startle, eyes flying open, reeling at the unfamiliarity of the room. And I remember. You don’t have a phone any more, Anna. Not after what happened. I close my eyes again and collapse back into my pillow, letting the pink engulf me.

  There’s the strangest noise. It panics me. The sound of quiet. No low, permanent thrum of traffic. No sudden scream of sirens, stopping as abruptly as they started. No clattering of bins being unloaded into the lorry. No screaming of next-door’s baby through paper-thin walls.

  The shock of the change hits me all over again.

  There’s something heavy on my legs. Cosmo must have forgiven me at some point during the night because he’s curled up like a pool of liquid fur on top of the duvet. I slip one foot out and stroke his silky head with my toes.

  ‘Toto,’ I whisper. ‘We’re not in Kansas any more.’

  I let the sound of my own heartbeat thud in my ears. As I lie there, other sounds creep in, so much softer than the morning chorus I’m used to. A trill of birdsong, repeated a few moments later in a deeper key. The gentle whispering of the wind around the eaves. And something faint, rhythmic, as reassuring as the tick of a clock. Like someone catching their breath and then blowing out gently through their nose, over and over again. It awakens something in the back of my mind, but I can’t pin it down. I lie there, listening.

  Huh-aaah. Huh-aaah.

  It’s water. Slapping against the wooden-boarded harbourside and slipping back with the tide. I breathe in time with the water. In. Out. In. Out. Fresh. Start. Fresh. Start. Fresh start.

  I throw on an oversized plaid shirt and a pair of leggings and head downstairs, running my hand along the unfamiliar, smooth wood of the bannister. Mum is already busy in the kitchen, pulling mugs out of cardboard boxes, digging in the bottom of a suitcase for spoons.

  ‘I popped out to see if I could get any fresh milk, but shops don’t seem to open here on a Sunday before eleven,’ she says apologetically.

  Sunday. Only one day before school starts. We haven’t exactly left a lot of time for settling in. The thought of school makes my heart flutter in my chest and I try to ignore it.

  ‘Yes!’ Mum triumphantly produces a box of cornflakes and a carton of UHT milk from a box labelled store cupboard.

  ‘Knew it was in there somewhere!’

  The table has been covered with a garish plastic cloth that must have been sitting in the bottom of a drawer at our old house since my sixth or seventh birthday party. On it is perched a rinsed-out baked-bean can full of yellow dandelions and blue forget-me-nots, some with roots still attached. A scattering of earth surrounds the base of the tin and the paper label has been roughly ripped off, but I can still see the top of the word Heinz.

  Mum watches nervously and follows my raised eyebrows as I take it all in.

  ‘Just thought I’d cheer the place up a bit,’ she says.

  ‘It’s nice.’ The bowls haven’t been unpacked yet so I pour cornflakes into a mug and try not to pull a face at the cardboard taste of the milk.

  After breakfast, I wander into the village. It’s a cold day, but braving the icy breeze outside is better than watching Mum pretend to unpack while she anxiously watches my every move. It’s like she’s already looking for the ‘new me’, as if moving into the new house will flip some kind of switch and suddenly I’ll be the new girl with the happy face and the squeaky-clean slate that she’s come all the way to Scotland to find. My cheeks ache with forced smiles. Being in a different place doesn’t mean it never happened. Why doesn’t she understand that? It doesn’t mean I’m not still hurting.

  The sky is like metal and the surface of the harbour bristles with choppy little waves. I walk down ‘West Shore’, the long road next to the water, passing a series of little wooden boats nestling like birds under the shelter of the harbour wall. In the distance, a great concrete pier zigzags out into the water like a solid lightning bolt. I make a sharp left away from the shoreline and follow a narrow street that twists and turns into the heart of the village, through snug rows of ice-cream-coloured houses with white net curtains fluttering at the windows. A little wooden noticeboard opposite the cafe proudly announces local news and events, with fliers for a pub quiz night, a community picnic and a talk on gardening at the town hall.

  I come across sudden, unexpected smells of coffee and freshly baking bread that are as alien to me as the morning birdsong. It’s a far cry from the exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke of my old neighbourhood.

  In a small playground, three girls who are really too big for it are whizzing around on the roundabout. They take it in turns to run wildly round the edge, pushing it until it screeches in protest, then jumping on and shrieking, hands clasped in the centre, heads thrown back, hair streaming in the wind as they twirl round and round.

  And suddenly I’m watching three other little girls, in a bigger playground far away, like a flickering home movie I didn’t choose to play and can’t look away from. One with straight blonde hair whipping round her face. One with a long, shiny black plait bouncing on her back. One with light brow
n curls tangling wildly in the wind. I can’t look away from her face. She’s smiling so widely.

  A car flashes past, interrupting my view of the playground and snapping me out of my reverie. I put my hand to my cheek and find to my surprise that it’s wet.

  ‘No use crying over spilled milkshake,’ I mutter to myself. That’s what Dad would say. Then he’d laugh uproariously, slapping his thigh like it was the most hilarious joke in the world. I’d roll my eyes, but his laugh was so infectious I’d end up giggling in spite of myself.

  It hits me like someone’s stuck their hand right through my belly button, grabbed my stomach hard and twisted. I slump onto a bench, wondering vaguely if I’m going to be sick.

  I never imagined what it’d be like to lose my dad. Of course I didn’t. No normal teenager does. You don’t think it could ever happen to you. It’s something for sob stories and sad movies. And, even if you did, you would never imagine the actual details. The weird sensation that he’s leaving a little bit each day, not just in one big, dramatic go. The way he’s so tired towards the end that the pain takes him somewhere else and it’s an effort for him even to remember that you’re in the room with him. The way you never really get the chance to say goodbye because, by the time you do, it’s not quite him any more.

  But, if I had thought about my dad dying, I’d have bet every pound of the money I earned babysitting Mrs Reed’s nightmare baby next door that I wouldn’t have been going through it alone.

  If I’d ever pictured that moment, I wouldn’t have imagined myself sitting, lost, on a peeling bench in a playground in a tiny fishing village in the middle of nowhere. I’d probably have seen myself on a different bench, in the garden of our old house, somewhere safe and familiar. There’d have been two hands holding mine and a head resting on each of my shoulders. Straight blonde hair and a long black plait.

  I guess things don’t always turn out the way you think they will.

  I round a corner into a narrow alleyway that runs between two rows of small back gardens. There are low garden walls on both sides, some with little wooden doors or gates set into them, some with bushes and fruit trees growing on the other side to shield the houses from view. There’s a small, yappy dog running in circles on one lawn, its owner standing in the back doorway with her hands cupped round a steaming mug, waiting for it to do its business. A couple of the gardens are overgrown with straggling weeds and moss-covered, mouldering patio furniture, but most are cheerful and well cared for, in keeping with the bright, seaside feel of the rest of the village.