Night of Fire by Colin Thubron

Author:Colin Thubron [Thubron, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK

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Photographer

You cannot enter the basement rooms at will. Such flats are all but buried out of sight. Even the landlord can barely remember the layout. The tenant has changed the locks and does not answer the door. Yet dry rot or rising damp can undermine the whole building, and a musty fetor sometimes leaks into the house, seeping out of this underground obscurity into the upper storeys.

Occasionally the tenant’s music percolated up to the ground floor, but thinned to a faint throb of drums. Listen to such sounds under the spell of cannabis, and the individual notes become a hypnotic parade of dissociated chords and instruments. After the music from his old CD player stopped – cut off with the severed electricity – the tenant went on hearing the sounds of the sea. Infused by five smoked joints and a bottle of vodka diluted with Diet Coke, each fall and pull of the waves became a constellation of scattered water drops, endless and transfixing, so that he lay in the darkness for what seemed many hours, listening.

If he gave up smoking dope for more than a few days, an inchoate anxiety surfaced: the fear of some visceral loss, in which his whole body seemed to be drifting apart from him. But after four or five joints this no longer mattered. Nor did the smoke now drifting in his nostrils from another room. The vodka separated his head from his body, and hallucinations arose – images whose origins he could not have traced – beyond any control, into half-sleep.

But towards midnight the fear of some nameless deprivation returned. Steve dreamed that his memories were being extracted by forceps, one by one, from his surgically opened head, until he saw his own emptied body suspended, as if through a doorway, rotating to gaze back at him. Whatever experience this travestied might have been attributed to the impact of cannabinoids. But he never woke to explain it. When the flames entered the sitting room they found it full of inflammable furniture, old and now illegal. This fatal stuff – the landlord had never replaced it – had lain for years in the dimness, as if waiting.

The smoke was denser now than the stench from the spliffs that lay discarded by his head. Soon afterwards, his anxiety settled to memories so diffused and ungraspable that they would have eluded him altogether, had he woken. There swam into his mind’s eye images from early childhood: a forgotten beloved, more potent than any he would know as a man.

When he saw her again, he recognised her by her eyes: Cleo, the care worker who had helped his mother. It was from her that he had learnt of his mother’s death. She had thought at first that his mother was sleeping. But she had died sitting upright in her chair, with the arm of her record player oscillating at the disc’s end, where Elizabeth Harwood had been singing ‘How Beautifully Blue the Sky’.

But his mother could not really be gone, Steve knew.

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