Fire Colour One Read online

  “I won’t leave this place if I can help it,” he told me. “Not if you’re in it. I don’t think I could.”

  “But you left me my whole life until now,” I said, and then I regretted it, because it sounded mean and bitter, even if it was true.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “Yes, Ernest. Do me a favour. Don’t say you’ll always be here and crap like that because it’s cheap.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t sugar-coat the tiny piece of you I am getting,” I said.

  “OK.”

  “And don’t make promises you can’t keep,” I said. “I don’t like it. It’s not right.”

  He leaned forward a little, closer to me. “Have I told you about Fire Colour One?”

  It was the first time he mentioned it. I’m sure about that.

  “Fire Colour One?” I said. “The Yves Klein painting?”

  “Shhh!” He put his hand out. “Not so loud.”

  “What about it?”

  “How much do you know? What have I said?”

  “Nothing,” I told him. “You haven’t said anything. I know what it is, that’s all. I know it well.”

  “You do?”

  Thurston had a thing about Yves Klein. I said so. Yves Klein was important, according to him, a visionary, daring and tragic, and ahead of his time.

  “For a start, he owned the sky,” I said.

  Ernest looked out of the window at the low grey. “He did?”

  “Yes. When he was a kid, he and his friends lay on a beach and divided the elements between them. He got the sky.”

  “Lucky boy,” Ernest said.

  “Proper genius, according to Thurston.”

  We’d got into the USC Library with fake ID cards (I was 107, Thurston was 93) and he read to me about Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. I didn’t get it. He had to explain.

  “Basically, he got people to pay him gold bullion for nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, no, for something, for a moment, for empty space,” Thurston said. “He gave them a receipt for it. But if they burnt that, he chucked half the gold bullion in the Seine for them too.”

  “And kept the other half,” I said.

  “It’s brilliant, isn’t it?” Thurston said. “It’s genius.”

  I grinned at him. “Not publicity-hungry commercialism then.”

  “You know what?” Thurston told me. “There was nobody like him. Not then. He couldn’t be copied.”

  “Surely everything can be copied.”

  “Well Yves Klein couldn’t,” Thurston said. “How could anyone copy him when he didn’t even touch his own canvasses?”

  “What?”

  “It says here, He kept a defined and constant distance from the works of art that he created.”

  “Who painted them then,” I asked, “if he didn’t?”

  Thurston showed me the book, old photos from the sixties.

  “His models,” Thurston said. “They were his brushes. They were his orchestra. He invited an audience. And he conducted.”

  “He got pretty girls to cover their naked bodies in paint and press themselves against things,” I said. “You’re right, Thurston. He was a genius.”

  “He looked into the void,” he said, and I rolled my eyes.

  “Whatever that means.”

  “He invented a colour,” he told me. “International Klein Blue. He trademarked it.”

  “I’ll bet he did.”

  “He covered canvasses with solid, uninterrupted colour. The same size canvasses, the same colour, with different price tags, because they were different moments of creation.”

  “Ha! How do you know the man wasn’t a charlatan?”

  Thurston smiled his most open smile that meant I knew half as much as I thought I did but he still liked me anyway.

  “Because he brought art out of the airless studio and back to life. He made it immediate. He made it into something more than escape, more than the prison window. He made it exciting and real. He used time and space and wind and rain and fire. He strapped a canvas to the roof of his car and drove to the beach and let the weather make his art for him.”

  “The prison window,” I said. “I like that.”

  “Look,” said Thurston, “here’s one for you. Fire Colour One.”

  The scorched outline of two women, their arms outstretched, like dancers, primitive and elemental.

  I looked at it for a long time. I turned the page and there were more photos, black and white and still bristling with something intense, and not thought of, and new.

  “How do you paint with fire?” Thurston said.

  “With a blowtorch to start with,” I showed him, “and then a bloody great gas-powered fire cannon.”

  I told Ernest that Yves Klein died suddenly in 1962 when he was only 34. His friends thought he had burned himself up and left nothing but a great vacuum. He was a comet, someone said, whose path through life was traced by the scorched empty space he left behind.

  Just before he died, he announced that he would only produce “immaterial works” from that point onward, and afterwards, people thought he must have known that he was about to become immaterial, about to join the ranks of the dead. They had no other explanation for it than that.

  Ernest listened to me intently the whole time I was talking. He didn’t take his eyes off me for a second.

  “I’m glad you know a little about art,” he said, “and the great man.”

  I shrugged. “I know what Thurston taught me.”

  “Imagine knowing when you’re going to die,” Ernest said to me then, and I swear there was a new light in his eyes, a quick glimmer. “Just imagine what you would do.”

  After I destroyed the closet, after the landlord had threatened to evict us, someone told Hannah and Lowell that I had to get a trip to the fire station. They marched me down there, barking like dogs, hauled me up in front of the first fireman they could find, whose name was Collins, the uncle of a boy I knew at school.

  “I made an appointment,” Hannah said, like that was a proper substitute for “Hello”.

  He shifted on his feet. “We usually do groups,” he said, “class visits, not individual children.”

  “She’s home-schooled,” said Lowell, which was a lie, but convincing enough, especially with the $20 bill he showed him. “Make an exception.”

  Thurston made beautiful banknotes with Miles Davis and Rosa Parks and Mark Twain on them, with Jenny Holzer slogans (PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT) and a Lawrence Weiner quote (THEY DON’T HAVE TO BUY IT TO HAVE IT – THEY CAN JUST HAVE IT BY KNOWING IT). He had this idea that they’d go into local circulation. He wanted to start a micro-economy, collective and anti-capitalist, something generous and better and new.

  “Even if it’s just a few streets,” he said, “it would be something, wouldn’t it?”

  At the fire station, I could see Andrew Jackson’s face on Lowell’s $20, the seventh President of the United States, a slave trader, by the way, who engineered genocide against the Native American people, and profited from the repossession of their land. Maybe it’s an honour a man like that doesn’t deserve, but then again sometimes I think the best place for him is stuck on the back of a twenty for all eternity. The guy must have really loved money. Lowell palmed it like a dealer and passed it over in a handshake. He got a kick out of doing that, I could tell.

  Officer Collins had a short brown beard, thick and blunt-cut like a doormat, and huge red hands like cuts of meat. At the sound of my mother’s voice, three or four other firemen had wandered out into the yard from the back room. They stood like his back line and watched. He took the money, pocketed it, looked at Lowell and nodded.

  “Five minutes,” he said.

  Hannah yanked me into place.

  “These men,” she yelled, “are going to tell you what’s what. So help me God, you’d better be listening.”

  They went to wait in the car
, Hannah’s sandals slapping across the yard like flat hands. Officer Collins kept his eyes on the ground. I’m not sure he appreciated my family’s feel for drama. Either that or he knew I’d just seen how much he cost. He smiled at me, smoothed his wire-haired face down from top to bottom, and sighed, “Let’s go.”

  I followed him down a lightless corridor that smelled of old trainers and rubber and sweat.

  “Fire is not a game,” he said over his shoulder and I nodded and tried to keep my face straight. I was too old for this. “A small fire can grow into a deadly fire in one or two minutes.”

  He told me these things the same way I used to practise my spelling from start to finish, without thinking, because I’d done it a thousand times before, because I had to. I could have been anyone. Officer Collins didn’t seem to care.

  “Never play with matches or lighters or petrol,” he said. I wondered why he thought I was playing with any of it at all.

  He showed me all the equipment, the suits and masks hanging empty, the idle flat hose, the stacked-up breathing apparatus, the parked truck. It was a disappointment, frankly. There was next to nothing going on. The firemen that I saw were watching TV, playing cards, killing time. I wondered if they ever wanted a fire to happen, the same way I did, just for something to break the monotony, just for something to do. I had my fingers crossed behind my back that the alarms would sound, that they’d leap up like superheroes, that I’d get to see them in action, but they didn’t, I didn’t. They stayed slumped at tables, catnapping on couches, scratching, smoking and eating. It smelled of burnt bacon and gas in there.

  Officer Collins gave me a bunch of sad leaflets. They said MEET BUZZY THE SMOKE DETECTOR! and I’M SPLASH THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER! They said NEVER COOK IN LONG SLEEVES! and WHY NOT PRACTISE YOUR OWN FIRE DRILL? I pictured myself putting a match underneath them. I imagined them flowering to ash in my hand. I’d have liked to give him some leaflets of my own. DON’T PATRONISE A PYROMANIAC!! DON’T UNDERESTIMATE A QUIET KID WITH A LIGHTER!!! DON’T SPEND THAT $20 ON FRIED MEAT, FATSO!!

  Back out in the yard, he put his face level with mine. Up close, I could see the tiny holes in his skin where the hairs grew, like wet clay pushing through a sieve.

  He said, “Young lady, I hear you had some trouble with a fire.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It was an accident. It was no trouble.”

  He looked at the sky and laughed. I could see where his teeth had gone brown, right at the back of his mouth.

  “I’m going to make a deal with you,” he said. “If you don’t strike a match or play with fire for the next two weeks, if you can come back and say you haven’t done it, then you can go with us in the fire truck, if you’d like to.”

  I didn’t say anything. I rolled my eyes at him. I wasn’t a stupid kid any more.

  “Wouldn’t you like to?” he said.

  I shook my head. “Not so much.”

  “Haven’t you ever thought about being a fire fighter yourself?”

  I stared him out.

  “You see a lot of fires that way,” Officer Collins leaned back a little, like a fisherman, reeling me in. “You get up real close. You do it again and again and again.”

  I kept my mouth shut. I wore my poker face and when Hannah and Lowell called me over, I walked slow and steady to the car.

  Two weeks is a long time to go without a thing when you have a proper thirst for it. The whole world was tempting me to fail, leaving cigarettes burning in ashtrays, matches on the sidewalk, dropping lighters from pockets, from bags. Everywhere I looked there was a trap someone had set for me, like they’d read the stupid safety leaflets and decided to do the exact opposite. But that fire truck was waiting, scrubbed and shined and gleaming, just around the corner. I told Thurston. I said it was worth trying for and I was going to try damn hard. I wanted to speed through the streets in that thing, its siren wailing, its bulk shifting underneath me, its lights flashing danger and rescue all at once. If I was one of them, I could get as close to a fire as I dared and it would be OK, it’d be my job. I’d get paid for it, and get up every morning and do it again. For two long weeks I ignored the matches and the cigarette butts and the naked flames. For fourteen days and nights I sat on my hands and didn’t try to find out what a box of dolls looked like on fire, or a shoe, or a stack of magazines left out with the trash, damp and mottled with bat shit. I walked past all of those things with my face turned away. And when it was over, I went back down to the fire station. Nobody needed to march me there this time. I was glad to go.

  There was still nothing much happening. They were all still lolling about like fed dogs, time-wasting, cooking sausages, dozing. It was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle in there. Officer Collins didn’t even get up off his butt and he wouldn’t look at me either, not straight on. He cleared his throat in his big old easy chair and said that they were extremely busy and they didn’t have time to drive one home-schooled kid around that day, no way.

  He said, “What’s your name again?”

  I glared at him. “Iris.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Iris. Did you get caught smoking? Was that you?”

  “No,” I told him. “I don’t smoke.”

  He shrugged. “Come by next open day and maybe you can climb up inside and take a look.”

  “What’s this now?” one of the others asked him.

  I told him. I said we had a deal that I could ride in the truck.

  He laughed, punching Collins on the arm. “You gotta stop that, Joe. How many kids you promised this month?”

  Collins grinned. “I lost count.”

  It didn’t matter what I said. He wasn’t keeping his promise, however hard I’d worked to keep mine. A ride in a fire truck didn’t seem to mean a thing to him, one way or the other. Like the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

  Thurston was waiting for me when I got home. He was sitting on the wall outside my apartment building.

  “How’d it go?” he said.

  I looked at him. “They lied to me,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I left him there on the wall and I went inside and sulked in my room. I could hear the neighbours’ washed sheets snapping outside like sails in the wind. It was a hot dry day and it hadn’t rained in a while. I lay on my bed and listened to the sirens in my head. Any minute, I was going to get up, get a few things together, sneak out and light the mother of all fires, fourteen days’ worth, behind the tiny parched yard out back. Nobody would see me. I was going to light three, starting in the far corner and moving in. The wind would pick them up and pull them together and I’d be back inside by the time anyone noticed a thing. Those sheets would be grey with soot before they could get them in.

  I was still lying there when Thurston came round the back of the building and threw a handful of stones against my window. The sirens in my head were suddenly real, suddenly outside. I looked out and he bowed, like a man on a stage, and offered me the view with a sweep of his arm. What I’d been thinking about, Thurston had been doing, quiet as a cat. That dried-out stretch of land was leaping, wild red and crackling, the heat coming off it like surf, flames lapping against the garages and summerhouses, pooling at the edge of the ground-floor properties. I don’t know how many people had dialled 911. Their phones must have been ringing off the hook. I stood at my window and watched the fire trucks come, more than one, sirens on, lights blazing, filled to the brim with superheroes dressed in hard hats and fat trousers and bug-eyed masks. I stayed out of sight and I watched those lazy, good-for-nothing, promise-breaking, bacon-crammed firemen as they battled with the flames. Nobody was hurt. They lost a couple of verandas to the fire, and an old disused pick-up, and someone’s trellis, someone else’s doghouse. They lost a few gallons in sweat, I’d say, as well, and maybe a pound or two in weight.

  Thurston stood behind the barrier, watching with the rest of the small crowd, blending in, wearing just the right mask of shock and awe o
n his face.

  THANK YOU, I mouthed at him through the glass when he looked up.

  He blew me a kiss. YOU’RE WELCOME, it said.

  Ernest said that the tree outside his window arrived years ago from Holland, on Margot’s twelfth birthday. A black pear, already twenty feet high, more than eight feet around, he said its root ball alone weighed almost three tonnes. The men stopped on the road with it strapped down like Gulliver in the bed of their lorry. Passing drivers slowed to make sense of what they were seeing, caught a glimpse of the felled giant, and then were gone.

  “We ran outside,” he said, “and there it was, a tree on its side, made from ravens and dragons, its thick bark crackled with scales, the buds of its leaves smooth and solid as claws.”

  They invaded the tree like termites. Their mum watched with her arms folded and her mouth in a thin straight line before she called them inside and scolded them for playing near the road.

  Margot fumed.

  “But it’s a lying-down tree,” she said.

  “And it’s Margot’s birthday,” Ernest added. “We thought it was for her.”

  She didn’t soften. She sent them upstairs to wash their hands and think about what they’d done.

  “What would you do with your own tree anyway?” Ernest asked.

  “Climb it,” Margot said. “Carve my name in it with a knife, lean against its trunk in the shade, eat its fruit.” She sighed. “So much better than a doll.”

  He said she’d slouched into the nursery that morning trailing the new doll after her, bumping it along the floorboards. She’d dragged the thing in by its long corn-yellow hair.

  “What am I going to do with this?” she asked.

  Ernest sniggered. “Tie it to some train tracks,” he suggested. “Shoot it with arrows. Gouge out its eyes and fill its head with birdseed.”

  Margot grinned. “Drown it in a cattle trough,” she said. “Set fire to its hair.”

  And then the tree came, he said, and the doll was forgotten, left on the floor with one eye shut and its polkadot dress pulled up over its head while the children pressed their faces flat against the windows to get a better view.