They’d driven through Lambeth, he said, then Kennington and Stockwell. He didn’t remember grazing Clapham Common, so he assumed they’d driven to the east of it, towards Streatham Hill. He remembered a church and sought out a cross on the map that would mark the place. There were several, but only one close to the other landmark he remembered, the railway line. At this point, he said he could offer nothing more by way of directions, only a description of the place itself: the corrugated iron perimeter, the trailers, the fires.
“You’ll find it,” he said.
“I’d better,” Gentle replied.
He’d so far told Estabrook nothing about the circumstances that had brought him back here, though the man had several times asked if Judith was alive and well. Now he asked again.
“Please tell me,” he said. “I’ve been straight with you, I swear I have. Won’t you please tell me how she is?”
“She’s alive and kicking,” Gentle said.
“Has she mentioned me at all? She must have done. What did she say? Did you tell her I still love her?”
“I’m not your pimp,” Gentle said. “Tell her yourself. If you can get her to talk to you.”
“What am I going to do?” Estabrook said. He took hold of Gentle’s arm. “You’re an expert with women, aren’t you? Everybody says so. What can I do to make amends?”
“She’d probably be satisfied if you sent her your balls,” Gentle said. “Anything less wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“You think it’s funny.”
“Trying to have your wife killed? No, I don’t think that’s very amusing. Changing your mind and wanting everything lovey-dovey again: that’s hysterical.”
“You wait till you love somebody the way I love Judith. If you’re capable of that, which I doubt. You wait until you want somebody so badly your sanity hangs on it. You’ll learn.”
Gentle didn’t rise to the remark. It was too close to his present state to be fully confessed, even to himself. But once out of the house, map in hand, he couldn’t suppress a smile of pleasure that he had a way forward. It was already getting gloomy, as the midwinter afternoon closed its fist on the city. But darkness loved lovers, even if the world no longer did.
II
At midday, with his unease of the previous night allayed not one jot, Pie ‘oh’ pah had suggested to Theresa that they should leave the encampment. The suggestion wasn’t met with enthusiasm. The baby was sick with sniffles and had not stopped wailing since she’d woken; the other child was feverish too. This was no time to be going away, Theresa said, even if they had somewhere to go, which they didn’t. We’ll take the trailer with us, Pie replied; we’ll just drive out of the city. To the coast, maybe, where the children would benefit from the cleaner air. Theresa liked that idea. Tomorrow, she said, or the day after, but not now.
Pie pressed the case, however, until she asked him what he was so nervous about. He had no answer to give; at least none that she’d care to hear. She understood nothing of his nature, nor questioned him about his past. He was simply a provider, someone who put food in the mouths of her children and his arms around her at night. But her question still hung in the air, so he answered it as best he could.
“I’m afraid for us,” he said.
“It’s that old man, isn’t it?” Theresa replied. “The one who came to see you? Who was he?”
“He wanted a job done.”
“And you did it?”
“No.”
“So you think he’s going to come back?” she said. “We’ll set the dogs on him.”
It was healthy to hear such plain solutions, even if—as now—they didn’t answer the problem at hand. His mystif soul was sometimes too readily drawn to the ambiguities that mirrored his true self. But she chastened him; reminded him that he’d taken a face and a function and, in this human sphere, a sex; that as far as she was concerned he belonged in the fixed world of children, dogs, and orange peel. There was no room for poetry in such straitened circumstances; no time between hard dawn and uneasy dusk for the luxury of doubt or speculation.
Now another of those dusks had fallen, and Theresa was putting her cherished ones to bed in the trailer. They slept well. He had a spell that he’d kept polished from the days of his power, a way of speaking prayers into a pillow so they’d sweeten the sleeper’s dreams. His Maestro had asked for its comfort often, and Pie used it still, two hundred years later. Even now Theresa was laying her children’s heads upon down suffused with cradle songs, secreted there to guide them from the dark world into the bright.
The mongrel he’d met at the perimeter in the predawn gloom was barking furiously, and he went out to calm it. Seeing him approach it pulled on its chain, scrabbling at the dirt to be closer to him. Its owner was a man Pie had little contact with, a short-tempered Scot who brutalized the dog when he could catch it. Pie went down on his haunches to hush the creature, for fear its din brought the owner out from his supping. The dog obeyed but continued to paw at Pie fretfully, clearly wanting to be loosed from its leash.
“What’s wrong, buster?” he said to it, scratching behind its war-torn ears. “Have you got a lady out there?”
He looked up towards the perimeter as he spoke and caught the fleeting glimpse of a figure stepping into shadow behind one of the trailers. The dog had seen the interloper too. It set up a new round of barking. Pie stood up again.
“Who’s there?” he demanded.
A sound at the other end of the encampment claimed his attention momentarily: water splashing on the ground. No, not water. The stench that reached his nostrils was that of petrol. He looked back towards his own trailer. Theresa’s shadow was on the blind, her head bowed as she turned off the nightlight beside the children’s bed. The stench was coming from that direction too. He reached down and released the dog.
“Go, boy! Go! Go!”
It ran barking at a figure slipping out through a gap in the fence. As it went Pie started towards his trailer, yelling Theresa’s name.
Behind him, somebody shouted for him to shut up out there, but the curses were unfinished, erased by the boom and bloom of fire, twin eruptions that lit the encampment from end to end. He heard Theresa scream, saw flame surge up and around his trailer. The spilled fuel was only a fuse. Before he’d covered ten yards the mother lode exploded directly under the vehicle, the force sufficient to lift it off the ground and pitch it on its side.
Pie was blown over by a solid wave of heat. By the time he’d scrabbled to his feet the trailer was a solid sheet of flame. As he pitched himself through the baking air towards the pyre he heard another sobbing cry and realized it was his own, a sound he’d forgotten his throat could make but which was always the same, grief on grief.
Gentle had just sighted the church which had been Estabrook’s last landmark when a sudden day broke on the street ahead, as though the sun had come to burn the night away. The car in front of his veered sharply, and he was only able to prevent a collision by mounting the pavement, bringing his own car to a juddering halt inches short of the church wall.
He got out and headed towards the fire on foot, turning a corner to head directly into the smoke, which veered and veered again as he ran, allowing him only glimpses of his destination. He saw a corrugated iron fence, and beyond it a host of trailers, most of which were already ablaze. Even if he’d not had Estabrook’s description to confirm that this was indeed Pie ‘oh’ pah’s home, the fact of its destruction would have marked it out. Death had preceded him here, like his shadow, thrown forward by a blaze at his back that was even brighter than the one that lay ahead. His knowledge of this other cataclysm, the one behind, had been a part of the business between himself and the assassin from the beginning. It had flickered in their first exchanges on Fifth Avenue; it had lit the fury that had sent him to debate with the canvas; and it had burned brightest in his dreams, in that room he’d invented (or remembered) where he’d begged Pie for forgetfulness. What had they experiencedtogether that had been so
terrible he’d wanted to forget his whole life rather than live with the fact? Whatever it was, it was somehow echoed in this new calamity, and he wished to God he could have his forgetfulness undone and know what crime he’d committed that brought upon innocents such punishment as this.
The encampment was an inferno, wind fanning flames that in turn inspired new wind, with flesh the toy of both. He had only piss and spittle against this conflagration—useless!—but he ran on towards it anyway, his eyes streaming as the smoke bit at them, not knowing what hope of survival he had, only certain that Pie was somewhere in this firestorm and to lose him now would be tantamount to losing himself.
There were some escapees, a pitiful few. He ran past them towards the gap in the fence through which they’d escaped. His route was by turns clear and confounded, as the wind brought choking smoke in his direction, then carried it away again. He pulled off his leather jacket and threw it over his head as primitive protection against the heat, then ducked through the fence. There was solid flame in front of him, making the way forward impassable. He tried to his left and found a gap between two blazing vehicles. Dodging between them, the smell of singeing leather already sharp in his nostrils, he found himself in the middle of the compound, a space relatively free of combustible material, and thus of fire. But on every side, the flames had hold. Only three of the trailers weren’t blazing, and the veering wind would soon carry the flame in their direction. How many of the inhabitants had fled before the flames took hold he couldn’t know, but it was certain there’d be no further escapees. Theheat was nearly unbearable. It beat upon him from every side, cooking his thoughts to incoherence. But he held on to the image of the creature he’d come to find, determined not to desert the pyre until he had that face in his hands or knew beyond doubt it was ash.
A dog appeared from the smoke, barking hysterically. As it ran past him a fresh eruption of fire drove it back the way it had come, its panic escalating. Having no better route, he chased its tail through the chaos, calling Pie’s name as he ran, though each breath he took was hotter than the last, and after a few such shouts the name was a rasp. He’d lost the dog in the smoke, and all sense of direction at the same time. Even if the way was still clear he no longer knew where it lay. The world was fire on every side.
Somewhere up ahead he heard the dog again, and thinking now that maybe the only life he’d claim from this horror was the hound’s, he ran in search of it. Tears were pouring from his smoke-stung eyes; he could barely focus on the ground he was stumbling across. The barking stopped again, leaving him without a beacon. There was no way to go but forward, hoping the silence didn’t mean the dog had succumbed. It hadn’t. He spotted it ahead of him now, cowering in terror.
As he drew a breath to call it to him he saw the figure beyond it, stepping from the smoke. The fire had taken its toll on Pie ‘oh’ pah, but he was at least alive. His eyes, like Gentle’s, streamed. There was blood at his mouth and neck and, in his arms, a forlorn bundle. A child.
“Are there more?” Gentle yelled.
Pie’s reply was to glance back over his shoulder, towards a heap of debris that had once been a trailer. Rather than draw another lung-cooking breath to reply, Gentle started towards this bonfire but was intercepted by Pie, who passed over the child in his arms.
“Take her,” he said.
Gentle threw aside his jacket and took the child.
“Now get out!” Pie said. “I’ll follow.”
He didn’t wait to see his instruction obeyed but turned back towards the debris.
Gentle looked down at the child he was carrying. She was bloody and blackened, surely dead. But perhaps life could be pumped back into her if he was quick. What was the fastest route to safety? The way he’d come was blocked now, and the ground ahead littered with burning wreckage. Between left and right, he chose left, because he heard the incongruous sound of somebody whistling somewhere in the smoke: at least proof that breath could be drawn in that direction.
The dog came with him, but only for a few steps. Then it retreated again, despite the fact that the air was cooler by the step, and a gap in the flames was visible ahead. Visible, but not empty. As Gentle headed for the place, a figure stepped out from behind one of the bonfires. It was the whistler, still practicing his craft, though his hair was burning and his hands, raised in front of him, were smoking ruins. He turned his head as he walked and looked at Gentle.
The tune he whistled was charmless, but it was sweet beside the stare he had. His eyes were like mirrors, reflecting the fires: they flared and smoked. This was the fire setter, he realized, or one of them. That was why it whistled as it burned, because this was its paradise. It didn’t attempt to lay its carbonized hands on either Gentle or the child but walked on into the smoke, turning its stare back towards the blaze as it did so, leaving Gentle’s route to the perimeter clear. The cooler air was heady; it dizzied him, made him stumble. He held on tight to the child, his only thought now to get it out into the street, in which endeavor he was aided by two masked firemen who’d seen his approach and came to meet him now, arms outstretched. One took the child from him; the other bore him up as his legs gave way beneath him.
“There’s people alive in there!” he said, looking back towards the fire. “You’ve got to get them out!”
His rescuer didn’t leave his side till he’d got Gentle through the fence and into the street. Then there were other hands to take charge. Ambulance attendants with stretchers and blankets, telling him that he was safe now and everything would be all right. But it wasn’t, not as long as Pie was in the fire. He shrugged off the blanket and refused the oxygen mask they were ready to clamp to his face, insisting that he wanted no help. With so many others in need, they didn’t waste time attempting to persuade him but went to aid those who were sobbing and shrieking on all sides. They were the lucky ones, who had voices to raise. He saw others being carried past who were too far gone to complain, and still others lying beneath makeshift shrouds on the pavement, blackened limbs jutting out here and there.
He turned his back on this horror and began to make his way around the edge of the encampment. The fence was being torn down to allow the hoses, which thronged the street like mating snakes, access to the fire. The engines pumped and roared, their reeling blue lights no competition for the fierce brightness of the fire itself. By that blaze he saw a substantial crowd had gathered to watch. They raised a cheer as the fence was toppled, sending plagues of fireflies up as it fell. He moved on as the firefighters advanced into the conflagration, bringing their hoses to bear on the heart of the fire. By the time he’d made a half circuit of the site and was standing opposite the breach they’d made, the flames were already in retreat in several places, smoke and steam replacing their fury. He watched them gain ground from his new vantage point, hoping for some glimpse of life, until the appearance of another two machines and a further group of firefighters drove him on around the perimeter, back to the placefrom which he’d emerged.
There was no sign of Pie ‘oh’ pah, either being carried from the blaze or standing among those few survivors who, like Gentle, had refused to be taken away to be tended. The smoke issuing from the fire’s steady defeat was thickening, and by the time he got back to the row of bodies on the pavement—the number of which had doubled—the whole scene was barely visible through the pall. He looked down at the shrouded forms. Was one of them Pie ‘oh’ pah? As he approached the nearest of them a hand was laid on his shoulder, and he turned to face a policeman whose features were those of a boy soprano, smooth and troubled.
“Aren’t you the one who brought out the kid?” he said.
“Yes. Is she all right?”
“I’m sorry, mate. I’m afraid she’s dead. Was she your kid?”
He shook his head. “There was somebody else. A black guy with long curly hair. He had blood on his face. Has he come out of there?”
Formal language now: “I haven’t seen anybody of that description.”
Gentle looked back towards the bodies on the pavement.
“It’s no use looking there,” the policeman said. “They’re all black now, whatever color they started out.”
“I have to look,” Gentle said.
“I’m telling you it’s no use. You wouldn’t recognize them. Why don’t you let me put you in an ambulance? You need seeing to.”
“No. I have to keep looking,” Gentle said, and was about to move off when the policeman took hold of his arm.
“I think you’d be better away from the fence, sir,” he said. “There’s some danger of explosions.”
“But he could still be in there.”
“If he is, sir, I think he’s gone. There’s not much chance of anybody else coming out alive. Let me take you to the police line. You can watch from there.”
Gentle shook off the man’s hold.
“I’ll go,” he said. “I don’t need an escort.”
It took an hour for the fire to be finally brought under control, by which time it had little left to consume. During that hour all Gentle could do was wait behind the cordon and watch as the ambulances came and went, ferrying the last of the injured away and then taking the bodies. As the boy soprano had predicted, no further victims were brought out, dead or alive, though Gentle waited until all but a few late arrivals among the crowd had left, and the fire was almost completely doused. Only when the last of the fire-fighters emerged from the crematorium, and the hoses were turned off, did he give up hope. It was almost two in the morning. His limbs were burdened with exhaustion, but they were light beside the weight in his chest. To go heavyhearted was no poet’s conceit: it felt as though the pump had turned to lead and was bruising the plush meat of his innards.