Fireweed Read online

  Marco’s face lit up when he saw us. ‘Amici!’ he said. ‘Marco worries for you. You no come, I think you go caput! You hungry, no? I get you good food, good coffee …’ on he went, babbling away as usual. Julie afforded him a smile.

  Sitting opposite her, at one of Marco’s little tables, I saw a bruise on her lip.

  ‘I hurt you last night,’ I said.

  ‘But I can still hear you say so,’ she said, smiling. ‘Does it look awful?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not too bad. Take more than that to make you look awful.’

  ‘Thanks!’ she said, laughing.

  ‘Julie, would you mind very much if we went back home, when we’ve eaten?’ I asked.

  ‘Back to your aunt’s house? No, I don’t mind. Do you want to see what’s happened there?’

  ‘No!’ I said sharply. ‘No, not exactly. I just want to see somewhere that I know. I think I’d feel better for it, somehow.’

  ‘Oh, I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘All right, let’s.’

  I still felt a bit guilty about it, as though I was putting something off that would sooner or later have to be tackled.

  ‘Cheer up, Bill,’ she said. ‘We’ll buy you a new shirt if it would cheer you up.’

  I pushed the guilty mood away.

  But of course, my aunt’s house wasn’t there any more. They had cleaned up some of the mess, so that the street was in use again, but where our houses had been there was nothing but a hole in the ground. And even worse, somehow, all the houses around were smashed; the views out of all the windows of our house had been swept away. It made me feel sick to the pit of my stomach.

  ‘Bill,’ said Julie, tugging me by the hand, ‘don’t keep looking at it. Don’t keep looking like that!’ I still just stood and looked.

  ‘Come on, Bill, there must be something round here you know, something still here. Come on.’

  ‘There’s a park I used to go to,’ I said at last.

  We wandered away down the street, towards the park. When I was much younger my father used to take me there, to get me out from under my aunt’s feet, as he put it. I used to ride on the swings, and he used to smoke his pipe. The swings were still there, everything was the same there, even the familiar mist of an autumn afternoon, with the paint on the roundabout glowing against the whitened air.

  Inside the palings we put down the rucksack, and then she sat on the roundabout, and I pushed it faster and faster, and then jumped on. There weren’t any other kids there, but then it was so cold that wasn’t surprising, and I suppose a lot of them had gone, now that so many houses were wrecked.

  On the roundabout we laughed again, both of us.

  ‘Make it go faster, Bill!’ she cried to me. Jumping off I put my shoulders to it, leaning hard, and spun it faster and faster. Then I jumped on again for my own ride. The world whirled past so fast that it was just a blur; green and blue, smeared out of the sky and the grass, and men red and black, made of houses and fence. I looked round dizzily at Julie; since she was moving with me she was the only thing in the world in focus, laughing, with her hair flying out sideways, still heavy with damp from the shower. Green and blue, red and black … A smudge of khaki, seen and then not seen, as the roundabout turned. A soldier was walking along the road, behind the palings. And my heart jumped. We were turning a little more slowly now, and even though he was blurred by speed, even though the glimpse of him walking was snatched away and then shown again, I knew him. I jumped to the ground. And the twist I had given that damned machine seized me by the head, and my head spun, and I stumbled blindly.

  ‘Oh, don’t stop, Bill!’ cried Julie, disappointed.

  ‘Oh, Julie, Julie, get off!’ I cried in agony. ‘That’s my Dad, that was my Dad!’ It was already nearly too late. He hadn’t seen us. He was walking swiftly away, and as my vision steadied I could see that it was a long way to the next gate in the fence, and he was already nearly at the corner. I took a running jump, and landed on top of the fence, balanced precariously on the top, between the spikes.

  ‘I’m going after my Dad!’ I called to her, still sitting on the slowly revolving boards.

  ‘Goodbye, then, Bill,’ she said, and gently the roundabout turned her face away.

  At the sound of emptiness in her voice I stopped. I froze there, suspended. And it came to me very clearly that if I went after my father it was goodbye; it was just another way to Wales for me, and Canada for her. Or somewhere else for both of us, but wherever we went, not together. And there was Dad, hands in pockets, walking away, so far that I could no longer see anything of him but a figure in the crowd at the far end of the street, and if I looked away for a single minute I would lose him, and unless I jumped and ran now, now …

  And there was Julie, in the park, all by herself, with a grubby rucksack, and two blankets, and nowhere to go, and nobody to go with …

  I jumped down from the fence. I jumped back into the park.

  I went and put my arms round a tree, and leant my forehead against it, pressing against the bark till it hurt. I was shaking, and bitterly ashamed of myself for that, and I didn’t want anyone to see me, not anyone. So I stayed there a good while after the shaking stopped. She sat on the roundabout with her head bowed down, and it went very slowly and stopped, and she just sat there.

  Then after a long while she came up and spoke to me. She said, ‘I didn’t mean it, Bill, really, I didn’t mean to stop you, I didn’t mean …’ There were tear-marks smudged on her cheeks.

  ‘You didn’t stop me,’ I said, as brightly and firmly as I could. ‘Of course you didn’t. I wanted to stay with you.’ And after all, that was true. But my mind kept throwing up a picture of my father’s back, receding down the street, and my thoughts bounced back from it, wincing.

  It began to rain, then. First small heavy drops, then a downpour. We ran for a little wooden shelter on the far side of the swings, and sat in it, watching the rain make sulphurous yellow puddles in the sandpit, and dimple the undulating sand. We sat at either end of the bench in the cold little shelter, each separately looking out, silent. We listened to the busy noise of falling rain. And I was plunged into misery, and fear.

  I wanted the houses I knew to be back up again; I wanted grown-ups to be there, I wanted to be told what to do; I wanted to be worried about, I didn’t want to have anyone else to care for, I didn’t want anyone to need me at all; I wanted to be back in Wales being yattered at, and given hot buns for tea; I wanted to be safe; I wanted my own father, I wanted my father, my Dad.

  I couldn’t bear to be responsible for anyone. But there I was, there we were. And I couldn’t leave her. And we had nowhere to go. I couldn’t think where it would lead to, our being like that. I had thought I had come back to London to wait for my Dad; and now it seemed I hadn’t been waiting for him at all. So what were we doing, and how would it end? Would I have to look after her for ever; would I never go back home? And where in hell were we going to sleep tonight?

  ‘Oh, Bill,’ she said, in a husky, choked voice, ‘Bill, please, please don’t be so miserable.’

  I didn’t answer. Did she expect me to be pleased about it?

  ‘Oh, go and find him, then, go away, but don’t stay and be so miserable!’ she cried.

  ‘I did stay, didn’t I?’ I said sullenly.

  ‘I don’t want you to, if you can’t do it properly. I don’t want to make you do things if you don’t want to …’

  ‘Oh, shut-up, can’t you?’ I said. ‘It hasn’t anything to do with you, bighead! Can’t I feel miserable, if I bloody well want to?’

  ‘Well, if it isn’t me, what is it about?’ she said, hanging her head.

  ‘It’s all right for you, isn’t it?’ I said savagely. ‘You haven’t seen your own house turned into a hole in the ground!’

  She didn’t answer at all.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ju,’ I said, after a while. ‘I expect it’s because I’m worried. I don’t know what we’re going to do. We shall have to spend som
e of your cash on new clothes sooner or later, and we can’t possibly afford to stop working, and that means we’ve got to go back to the middle of town, and I don’t know where we’re going to sleep, or anything. We’ll finish up getting ourselves killed.’

  ‘Look, Bill, don’t worry. I know where we can go. We’ll be all right. We might get killed anywhere, you know. I might have gone to the bottom of the sea on that boat.’ I felt too oppressed to ask questions.

  ‘Right ho. Let’s go to the place you know,’ I said. We trudged away in the rain.

  It was nearly dark when we got there. It was still raining, and it was cold. It was one of those London squares with four rather grand terraces of houses around it and a garden with railings round it in the middle. They hadn’t pinched the railings for gun-metal yet. One side of the square had been badly bombed; the houses were in various stages of ruin, and it was here that Julie took me. She stopped on the pavement outside a house of which the front wall was still standing. The front door was still there too, but the windows were gaping holes, and through the upper ones we could see the sky. Broken glass and plaster littered the steps up to the door, and where there would have been steps down to the pavement there was just rubble, half covering the closed shutters of the basement windows, and burying the steps.

  ‘Here?’ I said incredulously.

  ‘Come and see,’ she answered. She walked up the steps, and produced a key from her purse. She gave it to me. It turned in the lock, but the door was a little stiff, and took a shove to open. I put my shoulder to it, and we stepped through. We stepped through into the open air.

  The back of the house had collapsed; there were no floors and ceilings over our heads, and beyond the half-fallen walls of the hallway the debris rose in a crazy, rickety heap, leaning on broken timbers and slanting beams. The dividing walls between this house and the houses on either side still stood, bearing several different wallpapers and a number of fireplaces facing into the drop. And on our left the stairs still climbed from level to level of vacant space. Some of the banister-rails were broken. A chill wind blew through it all.

  ‘Over here,’ said Julie. She scrambled over the mass of broken banisters and glass which littered the hallway, and opened a door under the stairs. Steps led down. It was pitch black. ‘I haven’t been down here, but I think it might do,’ she said.

  ‘How the hell are we going to see?’ I said, blinking.

  ‘Wait a bit,’ she said. She fumbled around in the dark. After a minute she found a cupboard, and opened the door. She put something into my hand, and then struck a match. It was a candle she had given me. The cupboard was a fuse cupboard, and it had a bundle of candles and a box of matches in it. By candlelight we descended the steps.

  They led down into the basement of the house. There were two rooms there, back and front. All the windows were shuttered, and only two were broken. We knew that the front shutters were jammed up against all that fallen rubble, but I opened one of the back shutters all right. It was dusk outside, but a little grey light came in, and showed me a kitchen with sink, and oven range, and table like the one in my aunt’s house, only bigger. There was even a dusty dresser, only most of the china had fallen off it and broken on the floor. The other room was a sort of shabby sitting-room, with a sofa, and armchairs, and a fireplace, and a window-seat with cushions on it running along under the shuttered windows. A little passage ran between the two rooms and the stairs, with a lot of cupboards built along it.

  ‘Julie, how did you know about this?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s my aunt’s house,’ she said, ‘or was. This bit was where the servants lived.’

  ‘Why ever didn’t you tell me about it before?’

  ‘Well, we were all right in the shelters, before those teachers came, weren’t we? And safer.’

  ‘Look, when you told me you had come here to look for your mother, and there was nobody there, you didn’t say it had been hit.’

  ‘It hadn’t, then. It was quite all right, though the one on the corner had gone. But we came right past here the other day, and I saw it was like this.’

  She hadn’t said a word when she saw it. Girls are different, I suppose.

  ‘Bill, do you like it? It’ll be all right, won’t it?’

  ‘It’s marvellous!’ I said.

  ‘So you will cheer up now, won’t you?’ she said, shyly.

  ‘You bet!’ I said. ‘Let’s have a good look round.’

  ‘You look; I’ll sweep,’ she said. She went and got a broom from the cupboard, and started to sweep up the broken glass and china.

  ‘You can’t see much by that candle,’ I said. ‘I’m going back to the shops we passed, to buy a lantern:

  ‘Try if the electric light works, first,’ she said. It didn’t, but the cold tap at the sink did.

  It was getting cold as well as dark when I got back, with a paraffin lamp, and a can of juice for it. I stood it on the table, and lit it, and it made a bright warm light. Julie had found some unbroken cups and plates, and had set them out on the table.

  ‘I’d better go out again, and see if I can find some food,’ I said. ‘Everything will be shut soon.’

  ‘There are a lot of tins in the larder,’ said Julie, ‘We could try those. Come and see.’ The larder contained masses of food; to me, used only to my aunt’s thrifty housekeeping, it looked like a shop. There were tins of dried eggs and dried milk, some raisins in a jar, several sorts of tinned fruit, a large square unlabelled tin of lump-sugar, and four packets of tea, and lots and lots more. We felt like pirates finding Spanish gold. Rather cold pirates, with noses blue with cold.

  ‘We could do with a fire,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘but I suppose the chimneys are all knocked to hell:

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘there are all those fireplaces still hanging on the side wall. We could try.’

  I went up into the hallway, and brought down a handful of banisters, and sprinkled them with paraffin. We made a fire in the front room grate, and it drew beautifully, and the warmth and light it made were as welcome as summer. There was even a scuttle of dusty coal still standing beside the grate, with which we kept it going while we boiled a kettle on it. Then we pulled the armchairs up close to the warmth, and ate chunks of corned beef from a rusty tin, and drank cocoa made with hot water and dried milk, and lump-sugar, thick and comforting, and we drowsed there in blissful comfort.

  When the fire began to die down, I got up and covered her with her blanket, and then curled up tightly in my chair under my own.

  6

  There was nothing to wake us the next morning; no light save a crack or two filtered round the shutters, and there were none of the disturbances as other sleepers woke and left. Julie woke me at last, pulling my blanket off me and letting the cold air sting me to life.

  ‘Help me make a fire, Bill, and I’ll get you something to eat!

  I rose and stretched. She lit the lamp and we looked around. It all looked dirty and cold.

  ‘I’ll get some more wood,’ I said.

  In a little while we had a new fire going in the grate, and the kettle warming on it. I pulled a stool up to the windows, pushed down the top pane of the sash, and pulled away a broken slat in the shutter. The first one I tried let in a shower of pinkish dust, and I hastily jammed it back again; but higher up I managed to make a couple of slits which let in daylight. Then I went to the back room, opened the free shutter there, and opened the door between the two rooms.

  The more light we had, the worse it all looked. It was incredibly filthy, with heavy deposits of white dust everywhere. The back room, where there was a usable window, looked pretty uninhabitable in every other way. I opened the door of the stove that warmed the oven, and the grate was choked with fallen brick and plaster. Not much hope of getting that going. And an icy draught blew under the broken back door. There was a huge damp patch on the ceiling, with the cracked plaster coming away, and dark wet marks on the floor beneath showed that the rain was coming through
there heavily.

  ‘This doesn’t look much use,’ I said to Julie.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going to move all the things that are any use out of here into the other room, as soon as we’ve had some grub. Help me find something we can eat.’

  We found a tin of dried eggs, and some biscuits in a tin. There was a green mould on the biscuits, but it brushed off, more or less. The dried eggs were pretty nasty, but then they always are. We made more cocoa without milk. The kettle got so hot on the fire that we had to lift it off with fire-tongs, and it scorched the cloth we put over the handle to lift it and pour it out, but the water inside wasn’t really quite hot enough, and so lumps floated on the cocoa.

  ‘How far from here is Marco’s?’ I said, looking miserably at my plate. Still, however awful food tastes, it makes one feel stronger when it is safely tucked away.

  ‘Look, Julie,’ I said, pushing my plate away. ‘It’s two days since we did any work. We’ve got to keep earning money. I’m going back to the market. You coming too?’

  ‘There’s a lot to do here,’ she said. ‘Why have we got to keep on earning? Haven’t we got any left?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve got lots left. But even lots won’t last for ever. We ought to keep it for special things, and try to earn every day what we spend on food. Then it won’t get less so fast. After all, when it’s gone …’ I left the thought unspoken.

  ‘All right, you go and earn some. You’d better leave me the rucksack money, because I’m going to need a primus stove. When shall I expect you back?’

  I was disconcerted at being pushed off like this: I had wanted her to come too.

  ‘Will you be all right here by yourself?’ I asked, hopefully.

  ‘Of course I will. I’ll be too busy to worry. See you later.’

  So off I went. As I went out through the shattered hallway, I saw the smoke from our fire, coming out of the first floor fireplace on the side wall, and drifting upwards. I wondered if it showed from the square enough to give us away. I crossed the square and looked back. But the smoke was so spread out by the time it rose above the façade of the house, that I thought one would only see it if one knew it was there, especially in the soft hazy weather of autumn. All the houses on our side of the square were gutted, and abandoned. We didn’t have any neighbours. I was glad of that; I thought we had better try not to be seen.