don’t waste your time sticking up for him. He’s been a terrible father to you.”
“And he’s going to be a better one when he’s dead? Is that the logic?”
Hannah hooked the phone between her jaw and her shoulder, and poured herself just an inch or two of vodka. Morning measures, Thurston called them. Breakfast of Champions.
“Get what you can out of Ernest Toby Jones,” she said. “That’s my advice to you, free of charge.”
Nothing is free of charge in my mother’s world. She never gave a thing away without making somebody somewhere pay for it. I knew her well enough to know we weren’t in this together, not for a second.
“Is that what you plan to do?” I asked her. “Get what you can?”
“You’ll feel the same way,” she said, “once you see the pictures he’s got on his walls.”
“What pictures?”
“Priceless ones,” she said.
“Which artists?”
She waved the question away with a flip of her hand and rubbed her fingers and thumbs together, the way people do when they can smell money.
“You’ve got me all wrong,” I said. “I’m not interested in how much they’re worth.”
“You will be,” she said.
“And how do you figure that?”
She smiled. “You think you’re immune to the dollar,” she said. “You think you’re above all that, but you’re not.”
She knocked the vodka back with a quick snap of her head. I watched her swallow it, watched the mechanism working in her throat like rocks in a sack. Mother’s little helper.
“To Ernest,” she said, recalibrating her smile as the drink hit her bloodstream. “You and me and his millions are all he’s got.”
Hannah and Lowell stayed up later than ever that night, getting reckless, lurching towards triple-strength cocktails and dancing in the living room. Neither of them had to be up for work in the morning. They probably thought they’d never have to work again. I could hear them talking about cruise ships and second homes in the South of France and film financing and cosmetic surgery. They were celebrating their sudden, soon-to-be fat fortune, counting their chickens, peaking too early, as usual.
I thought about the time Thurston and I talked about what we’d do with a vast, Forbes Top Ten Rich List, silly, unforgivable amount of money.
Change the world, Bill and Melinda Gates style.
Live on another planet, but only on weekends.
Get $10 bicycles for 4 million of the world’s poor.
Buy United Technologies (or Fox or Walmart or all three) and close them down.
“Give it all away to strangers,” he said, “face to face, in random, life-changing acts of generosity.”
“Set fire to it,” I said, “and enjoy the look on my mother’s face.”
He said that if by some miracle I ever got that kind of rich, I should be sure and let him know, and that he would help me decide.
“You’ll be the first person I call,” I said, even though I knew he didn’t have a cell phone and never would. Tracking devices, Thurston called them, and he refused to be tracked.
A fine principle, I told him, an interesting stand. Worse than useless, it turns out, when you’re trying to find somebody, when you want to tell them where in the world you’ve disappeared to, when you need to see if they’re anything like even halfway to OK. After we left in such a hurry, I realised I didn’t even know where Thurston lived. I never went there. He never told me. It just didn’t come up.
I rolled on to my side and pressed a pillow over my head to shut Hannah and Lowell’s noise out. I tried to think about Ernest. I’d only ever seen photos, one or two, of a serious, comb-haired, indoors sort of a guy, a bit of a geek, startled by the camera. They were yellowed and faded with age those photos, like they came from a different time, like they had nothing at all to do with me. I wanted to feel something about him dying, I knew I ought to, but really he was no more than biology to me. We had nothing in common, unless you’d count a total lack of interest in one another. His silence my whole life kind of spoke for itself. I grew up hearing it, as loud as any of Hannah’s yelling ever got to be.
I’d taken a couple of pills from my mother’s well-stocked bathroom cabinet and I lay there waiting for the day’s sharp edges to blur into sleep. The sheets felt rough beneath me like thin cotton over sandpaper and my pyjamas twisted tight around my legs like a trap. I closed my eyes and imagined random objects in my bedroom bursting obligingly into flames, something Thurston taught me, a tailor-made way to relax. It wouldn’t work for everyone, he said, but it sure as hell worked for me. Behind my eyelids, everything was torched and blasted with fire. My shoes smouldered, my alarm clock warped and melted, my bedding was ablaze. I felt like a superhero on a day off, like a plume of smoke, cloud-wrapped, buoyant. I couldn’t move but inside I was flying. The skin on my palms seethed and bubbled. I was a burning candle, I was a pool of hot wax and then I was gone.
Some days inside my head there is nothing but fire. Most nights I sleep deep inside its bright, fast blooms. I have longed for it in random places – the old baths near our flat on Grafton Road, the vacant Embassy Hotel on South Grand, that copse of larch and ash beyond Ernest’s garden, the painted house downtown where my mother went to therapy for a while and left me in the waiting room willing the fish to broil in their gravelly, weed-wrapped tank. My fingers itch constantly for the length and neck and strike of a match. My heart swells and soars at a column of smoke against the sky. I pine for the flame’s lick, the sharp scorch in my lungs, the same way an addict pines for the needle. Thurston said once that I had the sweet moment of surrender all tangled up with love, and maybe he was right, but that didn’t mean I knew the first thing about how to untangle it.
I tried to keep my fires small after we moved back here, small and secret. Hannah was watching me like a hawk, keen to ship me off to some correctional centre or other, now that she could do it on the good old National Health. I couldn’t let her see me. I needed to be cleverer than that. A wastepaper basket, some old clothes, dry leaves, a length of rope, everything has its own flame. Everything burns at its own pace, with its own particular smoke and smell. I made fires every day because I had nothing better to do; little heaps of dry matter assembled and lit before breakfast, after lunch, behind buildings, on wastelands, on walkways and under bridges. I was fast and precise. I could start one in seconds, get up and walk away, my mind a little emptier, my breathing easier. Nothing got damaged, not by the small fires. They were actually pretty useful in their way, a kind of tidying up, an imposing of order and neatness on things. They didn’t do any harm.
I was twelve, my first proper fire, and I was alone. I hid in a hollowed-out oak in a quiet dip in Griffith Park, dragging in gathered sticks and strips of bark like a worker ant. I was careful about building it. I took my time. I had a rolled-up old magazine of Hannah’s in my back pocket for starting it, hungry looking ladies with tight trousers and tight smiles. I had to twist the pages just so – too loose and they’d flare out before the wood could catch, too much and they wouldn’t burn at all. I’d watched Lowell do it often enough in the cramped, weed-choked yard of our apartment. Now it was my turn.
I only had one match. I don’t remember where I found it. I held it up and even I could see how small and pitiful it looked, how unlikely it was to start anything worth bragging about. I breathed in and ran the match across the gritted bottom of my shoe, felt the stroke of it, heard the little pucker of air when it caught.