suggest.
Malcolm swung round, pulling his arm free in the same movement. The three boys looked intently into his face, each one grinning openly. Were they going to mug him? Did they think he had been to collect his pension and that this was their chance for an easy theft? Malcolm heard stories every week on the local radio. It was his turn to make the news, it seemed.
The gang leader put his hand in his jacket pocket, feeling and then finding what his fingers were looking for: a knife or a bicycle chain, presumably. He stepped toward Malcolm, his hand emerging from the pocket simultaneously, and Malcolm held his breath. He wouldn’t go down without a fight.
‘You dropped this, mate,’ the boy said, ‘the other day, at the library.’
Malcolm looked down at the boy’s hand to find his library card pointed at his stomach.
‘Thank you,’ he said in a husky voice, taking the card.
But when he looked up into the boy’s face his breath froze in his chest again, for there was no face. The young man’s head was a tight bundle of flames with no discernible traces of hair, skin or bone to be seen.
‘No trouble,’ a voice answered from within the mini conflagration. ‘Oh, and nice stunt with the fire alarm, granddad. Classic!’
Malcolm turned on legs of melting butter and his front gate suddenly seemed very far away. He lurched towards it, his head light and thoughts disjointed. He felt sick and breathless, his heart squeezed as if beneath the weight of the ocean. When his trembling hand fell on something wooden he was relieved to find it had the number 33 on it.
He got his key into the lock and fell through the threshold, slamming the modern world firmly out behind him.
For a few minutes all he could do was lean against the door and let his heartbeat and breathing return to some kind of normality. When he opened his eyes again it was to see the reassuring dimensions of his English castle. Home at last, once and for all.
The living room door was still closed, keeping its secret. Genuine fear of what he was preparing to do stole into his bloodstream for the first time. But this was no time for faint hearts. Malcolm slipped off his coat and shoes, and remembered the sideboard, where the matches were kept.
Irene was still breathing slowly but regularly. The tiniest hint of a smile tickled the corners of her mouth. She was at peace. This was how he had imagined it. Everything was going to plan.
The matchbox lay among a dozen unpaid bills. He slipped out a single match, and brought it towards the side of the box. Hesitation overtook him once more. Kneeling before the woman he loved, Malcolm remembered the day he had proposed. But what he was proposing now was love in eternity.
‘Irene?’ he sighed. ‘It’s time we were on our way, girl; before things get any worse. You in a hospice, me in a home: what kind of idyll is that?’ Malcolm wiped away a tear. ‘But I’ll tell you this, girl. There isn’t a single day that I’ve been married to you that I haven’t loved you from the soles of my shoes. And I wouldn’t think twice about doing it all again, in spite of how things have turned out with this illness and all. I love you, Irene.’
There was nothing left to say and he could not have said it even if there had been. Malcolm lent forward and kissed his helpless wife lightly on the lips. She did not stir, but that was not important. All that mattered was that they were here together right at the end. Looking into Irene’s face he brought the match head to bear against the side of the box and struck it…
The memory of a passage he’d read from a library book stole into his thoughts. When you drop two and a half thousand tons of explosives on a relatively small area over a relatively short space of time the heat generated rises quickly, creating a vacuum at ground level. Surrounding cold air rushes in to fill the empty space, is heated and then rises in turn. This creates a scenario similar to an enormous pair of bellows stoking a cheerful coal fire. Only in a firestorm it isn’t just coal that burns but cars, grass, lungs, paint, telegraph poles, hair – everything. In Dresden even the bricks ignited, and if bricks can burn, what happens to thirty-five thousand portions of human flesh?
The match burned down into his fingertips and expired in a tendril of smoke. Irene slept on, oblivious. Malcolm frowned. There was to be no final inferno; no atonement for him, after all - and no liberation for her. Perhaps the gas company had cut him off.
An awkward cough from the kitchen doorway staunched his tears. A young man in blue overalls was wiping his thick hands on a tea towel. ‘Are you all right, mate?’
Malcolm was speechless, aghast at this invasion of his privacy.
‘I came to read the meter, see, but as soon as I got through the door I could smell it. Perhaps your missus tried to light the fire and sort of… well, you know,’ he halted, nodding in the direction of Irene’s limp shape. ‘No offence meant, but should she be left alone like that?’
Malcolm struggled to comprehend what had happened, how his careful planning had ended so disastrously. He found his voice but barely recognised it. ‘How did you get in?’
‘Your missus. Didn’t say a word, mind, just opened it and sat back where she is now. Like I said, I could smell the gas…’
The specialist had told him there might be odd moments when Irene’s condition improved, but not dramatically and it would be unwise to expect the improvement to persist beyond an hour. But there had been nothing now for months as she became totally dependent on her care-worn husband. He should have asked for more help, of course, but dreaded that she would be taken from him. Now that seemed inevitable.
‘You can go,’ Malcolm said. ‘I appreciate what you’ve done.’
‘All right,’ the young man said. ‘Best open a few windows, though, hey?’
Malcolm smiled woodenly, not taking his eyes from his wife’s face. ‘Sure.’
The door slammed, leaving Malcolm and Irene Zimmerman alone. Once more Malcolm turned on the gas fire again, but this time to alleviate the cold that filled the room. After lunch he would phone social services, get whatever help - under whatever terms - they offered. A wheelchair to take her to the park would be nice. And maybe she would need to live somewhere else; not all inevitabilities were dreadful. Maybe God had made Irene answer the front door. If God could forgive him, could he not forgive himself? Yes he had burned children, but was he any different from the millions of ordinary people thrown into that moral maelstrom where evil was not so much an adversary as a double agent conspiring against all humanity? He had not started the bloody war, merely helped finish it. A weight was slipping from his shoulders.
‘In the spring there will be peace,’ a wartime politician once promised. He knelt beside Irene’s chair again, even though it made his knees hurt, and nestled his balding scalp against the warmth of her bosom. Tomorrow would be Valentine’s Day. They had always looked out for each other, and that was a good thing to be guilty of.
‘Irene? It looks like I’m really home for good this time,’ he whispered. ‘It’s been such a long war.’
No Laughing Matter
There was a kid we knew who had this dodge of swallowing coins: sixpences, farthings, you name it. Better than that, he could regurgitate them back in any order you asked. It was a neat trick, so my brother Fred accused him of showing off. Nothing could be further from the truth, the boy explained. Turned out he was swallowing the money because that was the only way he could keep it; otherwise his old man would have had it for beer or the older boys for cigarettes. That’s what life was like for kids like me in Paddington in the nineteen-twenties: tin baths, head lice and resoling your shoes with tyre thread.
Fred passed away a few years back, and I’m waiting in this care home to join him. In a funny sort of way I’m still the entertainer at ninety-five. I play the piano, sing songs, tell jokes. It’s in my bones; it’s all I know. Mucking about, making folks giggle. I’ll have the last laugh, too, just like I did with Dad.
I remember my last visit to try to patch things up, his booming voice haranguing his new bird for letting me in, then the living r
oom door bursting open and there he stood, the king in his castle, and I knew straight off from his expression what was coming.
‘Out!’ he boomed, pointing towards the door. It was the last thing he ever said to me.
There was no use arguing; never was. I stood outside, cold and miserable, with nowhere to go - but I was used to that by then. It was his way of saying goodbye, and like everything else he did and said it was brutal, punitive and unfeeling.
That door at my back slammed like the stage trapdoor. It made it clear he never wanted to see my face again. Truth is he hated me. My very existence was an irritation to him. And the only way I can explain it is jealousy.
He worked away a lot, which was a blessing for his family. Sometimes he would be gone for months at a time and in-between he would drink. Couldn’t drink at work, see, because he used to chauffer for a living. I was nine when my parents divorced. She walked out - or ran if he’d been drinking - and moved somewhere even his right hook couldn’t reach, leaving us boys to fend for ourselves.
I don’t know why we didn’t see much more of Mum. I imagine she was scared of him, like we were. I remember she bought me a bicycle one Christmas. It was painted red with a bell and everything gleaming brand new. As soon as he saw it he got a hammer out of the shed and smashed the bike into pieces, each piece a tiny