The Fire Child (27 page)

I put one hand on Jamie’s sleeping head, and I gently stroke the hair, his lovely, soft, glossy hair is caressed by my hand; he is still sleeping and peaceful, I have to lift up the head, and then slip the knife across.

Slide it. Cut it.

Draw it. Like drawing a line, like slicing a line in snow.

I hold it. This moment.

The knife is a millimetre from his innocent skin. In the soft, sad light I can see where the blood pulses in his artery, a tender beating of blood. Start there. Yes.

Put the blade there.

Knife. Child. Voice.

Song. Cold. Dark.

Star. Pain. Air.

Eat. Love. Kill.

Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.

Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

Man engine man engine man engine. He hugged me hugged me hugged me. At the mine with the man engine.

Stop.

I cannot breathe.

Appalled, knife in sweating hand, I stare down in the gloom at my rough, bare knees: what am I doing here, crouched by this bed? I look at my sad white hands, badly scratched, I keep scratching myself, hands clutching a knife.

I am mad. This is madness.

It is all in my head.

Scratches are part of the psychosis. Because I am in a psychosis. And if I know I am in a psychosis, there is hope.

Swaying left and right, kneeling on the cold, bare, polished oak floorboards, I shut my eyes, hard. I know this process, this swinging in and out of rationality, like a wave that crashes, then retreats – revealing the sparkling rocks, only for the surf to come ravaging back.

Pulling myself by my own hair, I drag myself away from Jamie’s bed, drag myself into the furthest corner of this dark cold room. The knife falls from my hand as I crawl. I don’t care where it falls. In the opposite corner of the bedroom, back against the wall, I hug my knees to my chest and I cry, and I sob, and I rock back and forth, weeping for me, for Jamie, for this, for the sadness of a small girl terrified in her bedroom, terrified of the footfall on the steps, coming to see his trembling Rose of Tralee. For that mother who lay on the bed, crying, as they took her daughter away, the baby she never saw, the premature child.

And then you died, my darling. They told me there was something wrong with you, they told me that you’d died. I believed them. It made it easier.

For unto us a son is given.

How long do I remain here, scratching and rocking, scratching and rocking? I will never sleep again. Yet I fall half asleep. Sitting on my haunches. Inert, unable to move, not letting myself move. In case I look for the knife.

When I stir from my dusty muteness, I open my mouth like a cat. Here I am, here I am. It is still Christmas Day.

There is a faint greying at the edge of the funeral black paper, out there, beyond the frosted windows, so dawn may not be far away.

The knife. On the floor. Do what I say.

I put my hands over my ears and I whisper my song. If I can stay sane enough to make it to daylight, then I will call someone, call the police, call everyone, it doesn’t matter any more. I nearly killed Jamie. Let the police lock me up, for ever, I deserve it.

But death is the price we pay for beauty.

‘No!’ I am talking to no one and to all of them. ‘Leave me alone.’

Sing, Rachel, sing the song.

The Virgin Mary and Christ were there,

On Christmas Day in the morning.

Stop. And stop again. I am startled by a brightness; it is like I can see in the dark, like the power is back on.

Virgin.

I gaze around. The bedroom furniture gazes back: gloomy shapes that do not move. Jamie’s breathing is the only sound. He doesn’t know what I nearly did, what I might still do. Yet I won’t do it. Because I can see by the light of the mind: through a window of logic. See answer.

The Virgin Mary.
Say your prayers to the Blessed Holy Virgin, Rachel Daly.

It’s his birthday at Christmas. His special time. When his mummy will come back to claim him. His special day.

I hugged her at the mine with the man engine. I hugged her at Levant. That’s where I hugged Mummy. Don’t you see, don’t you see, don’t you see—

I see the light of Christmas morning. I see a woman hugging a boy, I see the light of the Levant.

Grabbing my phone, I turn on its torch. It has a few minutes of power left. It is enough, enough, enough. Jumping up, I run out of the room, past the sleeping boy, downstairs into the Drawing Room where the fairy on the tree is hidden in the dark, but she cannot mock me any more. Only I can see. I am trembling on the edge of a beautiful truth.

Here it is: the magazine, with the photo of David and Jamie and Nina, perfect and elegant in their lovely home. Picking up the magazine, I
shine the torch on the image and I realize why it stirred me now, all those months ago. And I try to fight the tremendous choke of emotion, as I do.

It’s nothing about the content of the photo: it’s the style – the barely seen face of the baby. I recall one particular photographer who used to do that, it was his modest trademark. Desperate and trembling, I flick to the end of the magazine, using my dimming torchlight – and I read the credits, in the tiniest of type: this trivial information of interest to no one but the subject. And me. Photographer, Kerthens, page 27–31:
Philip Slater.

Philip Slater.

Philip Slater.

I see his face quite vividly. The guy who wanted me to get into Goldsmiths. The freelance lecturer, a friend of the photographer I assisted. He used to come round the studio: flirtatious, manipulative, older – talking of uni. He liked my work, maybe he liked it too much, looking back. But he spoke so smoothly, that day he made his suggestion.
I know a way you can make some money, have a baby, a sperm donation. A rich couple. She is barren. She’s trying to find someone to have a baby for them.

How did Nina know Philip Slater? Maybe she knew someone who knew him? And why do I even care? It doesn’t matter – she chose me, Jamie, chose me for you: because I was perfect. I even looked like her, like beautiful Nina Kerthen. And she must have kept it discreet, kept my identity from David, so he never knew. Maybe she never knew the details herself, never knew who I was, to preserve the distance, to insulate them from the truth.

But she chose me.

The snow has stopped falling, I can see the last stars through the window. Dawn is here.

I was poor and pretty, desperate to pay my way into college; I was a girl desperate to get her mother out of the refuge, so she could spend her last years in a decent house; I was a girl who wanted to escape her father, even if it destroyed the family. And why not, when he had destroyed the family years ago? It didn’t matter any more:
just give me the money. Save my mother. Let me escape.

The starlight glimmers. The night is dying, christmas morning is upon us.

You were so premature, born late December, not early March: not what it says on the birth certificate. I remember when the nurses whisked you away – made you disappear, like a magic spell, like you never existed. And it was so easy, too easy: I’d never seen any of the scans, I didn’t touch you when you were born, didn’t hold you, kiss you, look at you. Nothing. Because I didn’t want the bond. And then they told me you were dead, and it made sense, you were born so premature: deformed, they said. And then they gave me the money, anyway, like they felt guilty, too: paying me off, for carrying a baby that died.

Yet my daughter didn’t die, because she never even existed. I had a boy, not a girl: they lied to me. We all lie, all the time. Grown-ups lie.

The magazine trembles in my hand. All the lights are trembling. I wonder why I am not crying. Perhaps this is too much for tears.

And all the souls on earth shall sing,

On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day

The answers have come so fast, so brisk and glorious in my manic mind. A fast-spreading crack in thawing ice. That day I first saw you, when I thought I fell in love with David? I didn’t, Jamie, I fell in love with
you.
I fell for my own child. And the woman you hugged at Levant mine, when you sensed your mummy: that was
me.
And the face you saw in St Just? That wasn’t Nina, that too was
me:
reflected in the car window. I invented the rest, the woman on the bus, in the beginnings of my madness. And the portrait David drew on that summer day, that wasn’t Nina, either, that was also me: he made me look like Nina, because he couldn’t help it. Because I look like Nina. Because I look like your mother.

Because I am your mother.

And now Nina lies in the mine at Morvellan, and your real mother has come back.

Oh, Jamie. My own child. I have been haunting you, and you have been haunting me. We are the two ghosts in Carnhallow, scaring each other, but now the darkness is dimming to light. And I am trembling with a frightening kind of happiness. I want to wake the world and tell this secret.
Then let us all rejoice again. On Christmas Day, On Christmas Day.
But I know I have to be careful: Christmas isn’t over yet, the madness is not over. It won’t go away just like that, I have to think this through.

I’m not going to disturb Jamie: he will have to be told in the gentlest way. I will maybe tell Jamie in the morning. Then I will hug my son, properly, for the first time in my life. But maybe I can call David. I have to call David.

But how?

There is one phone left in the house that might have power. Jamie’s. In his room. As I stand, I see that the house is filling with the first and slanted light of Christmas morning. Up the Grand Stairs I go, and there it is. The phone, under the pillow. It is dormant but not dead: I click it into life. The phone has no password. I see he called his father at 11.30 – that was the call I interrupted.

I press redial.

The phone rings: and goes to voicemail.

Where is he? Asleep? Coming here? What?

He’s coming for you, he’s on the way.

I shout at the voices. The madness is still there. But I have a weapon now.

The truth.

I speak to voicemail. ‘David. I know it all. The truth. I know it.’ I can’t help my triumph. I can’t help my exultation. I beat this house. I beat the voices. I worked it out, in the most impossible way.
Unto us a son is given
. ‘David. Listen.’ I hesitate, deciding how to phrase it: this incredible thing. ‘
Listen.
I’ve seen the body. I saw Nina’s body in Morvellan. But, David, I know the truth now. She’s not Jamie’s mother because she
couldn’t have a baby, could she? And yet you were so proud, you wanted a surrogate, you pretended—’

The voicemail clicks: I’ve run out of message space. But who cares, I’m going to call him again.

‘David—’

‘Rachel?’

I look up.

‘Rachel?’

It’s Jamie.

‘Mummy is in the mine. You said on the phone, she’s in the mine. She’s in Morvellan?’

His bewilderment is palpable. He must have woken, alone and frightened. Perhaps I woke him with my excitement. My shouting.

I sit here on the bed, stunned, muted, gazing at the face of my son – who disappears from the door, running down the landing.

Let him go
, I think
, let him run to the bedroom, let him cry, let him be, for the moment. There will be time enough
. But in this moment I am still teetering on the edge of madness. I have to do this calmly, or someone will still get hurt.

What can I do? Call David again, maybe, or call the doctors, sort myself out, take no more risks.

Silence overcomes me. I sit here, emptied and exhausted, staring at the miracle of Christmas, the child in the crib, the son beneath the star. And then a sharp wince of conscience wakes me. Oh God.
Jamie.
What would he do, where would he go, armed with the information I gave him?

Jesus. The mines.

Of course.

I rush to the window that gazes on to the rear garden, that slants down the valley to the mines, and the cliffs, and the sea. The bright light is startling: a blue Christmas day is dawning, and the sharp winter sunlight is intensified by the snow. Those beautiful slopes of pristine snow across which my son is running, down to the great black mines of Morvellan.

Morning

Boots on bare feet, coat over dressing gown, running along the landing, through the hall, the kitchen. As I race to the kitchen door I look at the high cupboard over the freezer: the cupboard is shut. Jamie doesn’t have the key to the Shaft House. At least there’s that consolation.

The door is wide open. I run into the cold. The sun is bright in a spangled blue sky and its icy warmth is sharp on my face. I am panting as I tramp down the gardens, into the trees, scrunching the impacted snow.

‘Jamie!’

The woods are rustling with ice. Jingling. A crystal world of merriment, the rising sun making the icicles glitter.

‘Jamie, stop!’

Tamarisks and rowans, oaks and hazel, ice and snow. The woodlands surrender to open space, now I can see the chimneys of the mineheads above the trees, and the blue-grey ocean heaving beneath.

My eight-year-old son is nowhere in view. He must be over the crest of the clifftops. I am out of the woods, sprinting to the edge.

‘Jamie, come back!’

I hear no response, except the crash of waves and the shhhh of surf. The freezing air is a physical pain in my throat and my lungs. Should I even be doing this, pregnant? Of course I should: it was my fault, shouting down the phone, triumphant. And he is
my son.

On to the paths that hug the cliffs, I see Jamie at the entrance to the Shaft House. He is hammering at the padlock with a rock: my desperate little boy, looking for his dead mother. The image is intensely distressing. Because his mother is
here
. I am alive, and trying to save him, even in my madness.

From this distance I can see the size of the rock, it would easily be chunky enough to snap that padlock – if clattered with sufficient force.

And Jamie is strong for his age. Climbing all the rocks and beaches, roaming on his own. My child of fire.

Black-headed gulls circle ignorantly overhead, the brilliant sea stares beyond us, towards the snowy moors and carns. Our drama is dwarfed by the mightiness of the landscape.

I am close enough to hear him now. A few hundred yards along the cliffs. I can hear him banging at the padlock.

‘Stop it, please – Jamie.’

He turns, looks at me as if I am a stranger. He is in his pyjamas, with a coat thrown over them. But he is barefoot. He ran down here barefoot, across the grit and the snow and the ice, through the thorny woods. He returns to his awful and determined task.

Bang, bang, bang.

And then, with a graceful bow, the door swings open as the chain falls to the ground.

The door to Morvellan Shaft House is ajar. Where Nina Kerthen floats. I imagine the winter sun slanting through the glassless windows. Perhaps falling as far as her face. Haloed by black water and silver hair. Forever smiling and forever cold. He will see her and he will fall and I will lose him again.

And now he goes into the Shaft House and I am running down the path.

I hear him scream. He has seen her.

The door yawns in the wind, stirred flakes of snow melt in my mouth.

I stumble as I run, falling to my right, my sprained ankle giving way so that I can barely walk. But for Jamie, for Jamie, I can walk, I can run, I can do anything.

Dragging myself to my feet, I see Jamie coming out of the Shaft House. The gulls and guillemots circle overhead, gazing at us.

‘Jamie, it’s not her.’

He stares at me.

‘Jamie, that’s not your mother.’

The sea goes quiet, the sunlight shines, the close-packed snow glitters like vicious diamonds, designed to cut.

‘Jamie,
I’m
your mother. It’s me.’

The tears are pouring down my face. They will not be stopped, not now.

‘I am your mummy, sweetheart. I’m your mother. Jamie darling, it was me all along. You know when you hugged me, at Levant mine, you sensed it then, didn’t you?’ I can’t stop crying. ‘It’s me. I’m here. I was here all the time, only we didn’t know. Your spell with the fire came true. Mummy came back. I’m here.’

Jamie stares at me. I hadn’t wanted to tell him like this: it just happened. He frowns, and his eyes widen, as if he is beginning to recognize me, but then I hear a man shouting. ‘
Jamie!
’

Jamie stares past me over the edge of the grassy clifftop, down to the shivering little beach, Zawn Hanna. The Murmuring Cove.

Don’t move
, I think.
Please don’t move. Don’t be frightened.

The ledge around the Shaft House is dangerous enough at the height of summer. Today it must be hideously slippery, a skating rink of hard ice over polished granite.

But I need to see what has caught his attention. I clamber up a boulder and look down at the cove.

His father is there. On the sand, in the clear pure air of this cold, glinting Christmas morning.

‘Daddy,’ Jamie shouts. ‘Daddy!’

His father is running towards the bottom of the cliff.

Jamie starts to climb down the cliffs. The seagulls circle above him, searching for fish in the freezing sea.

I call out, ‘Stop, please—’

We are both shouting at him. ‘Stop, Jamie, stop!’

But he has seen his dead mother. And then been told his mother is alive. He is as frightened and as confused as any child can be.

He falls.

One slender moment he is clambering eagerly down the rocks, a terrible second later he has fallen. He plunges into the sea: a direct descent, twenty feet or so.

The splash he makes is tiny. He is only a small child, despite the grandeur of the emotions surrounding him. The sea swallows him with unconcern.

‘Jamie!’

But he is gone already, I can’t see him. Or maybe that is him: surfacing, spitting, struggling. He can swim, but no child could fight that grasping cold and those brutal waves, not for a minute. The waves shrug and buck, wondering whether to drown my son, or smash him against the black rocks. Or steal his body away.

My voices are silent. The only voice I can hear now is
save him, save him, save him.
But I have a child inside me. My second child.

‘Jamie!’ I run to the cliff edge.

But his father is even quicker. The parental reflex. I retrace my steps, my ankle shrieking with pain. I do not care. I do not care if I die, as long as I can save my son. I take the only path. It is snowy but not treacherous. It follows an old stream that once guttered into Zawn Hanna. Stumbling over boulders, I scramble down to the beach, throw off my coat and dive in.

I am your mother. This is what mothers do.

The terror shudders through me as I go deep into the freezing waves, water cold enough to stop a heart, but not my heart, not this love. Through the lash of salt-spray, I can see you, struggling, drowning. Your father is in the water too. Swimming desperately to save you.

I go under. The seawater is too cold. But I mustn’t die yet. I have to save you. Yet I cannot. We are all going to drown in this Christmas sea, under that singular blue sky. I am upside down, sideways. I am drowning, gulping, thrashing.

‘Mummy!’ you shout, surfacing. I realize I am close to you, I can reach out, touch you. I grab a wet hand and haul, a fistful of damp pyjama top; I pull you towards me. You flail, panicking, and push me under. I fight towards the air, fight to gasp the freezing air, to keep us both alive, lifting you up.

I have pulled you from the rocks. Now your father is here, and he has you: stronger than me, he shoulders you and swims, saving you. I watch, battered by the waves, treading water, spitting frigid brine. There is a slippery rock here, jutting granite at the foot of a cliff; it gives me some support, but my arms are weakening, the cold is devouring me. The appetite of the sea is unquenched and it will take me.

I go under. Cold water engulfs me. My nose fills with burning liquid and I swallow half a pint. I surface, retching. I am staring out to sea, somehow turned about. But still here, still alive. Perhaps I can survive, drag myself from rock to rock, along the bottom of the cliff, until my feet touch pebbles and sand. Perhaps not. I am going under.

I feel a hand on my trembling, aching shoulder. It is David, your father. His face is white with the numbing cold, but his movements are strong. He takes my arm, he is taking me, he is saving me. Swimming away from the waves, and the rocks, we start to swim outwards.

His eyes are red from the salt, his face white from the cold. As I gulp saltiness, I sink, and his hand reaches for me.

I am falling too far, inhaling salt water. I make a final effort, gasping water, reaching for David’s hand, reaching for the shimmering daylight, but then a vast and conquering wave drags me down, churning me, turning me over, and I feel myself break. I cannot fight this. It is over. It is done. I am spiralling deeper into the blue, and then the black. Yielding to my fate, sinking into darkness. And the thoughts descend as the cold overcomes. What does it matter anyway, Jamie? I am only me. I am struggling to swim yet already letting go. Let the sea dissolve my foolish memories, that non-career, the years of sadness and of shame. Maybe I would only confuse you if I lived. I never really mattered. And you wouldn’t understand. Let the sea take me away.

Yet the world is beautiful beautiful beautiful. And I am crying as I die, in the darkening cold. The sadness is sublime. The intricate yielding. I just wish I could tell you how much I love you. I am your mother. I never knew you. But, oh, Jamie, my baby boy: the love.