Nothing is inflammable, p.15
Nothing Is Inflammable, page 15
The sudden softening of the noise of the wind and rain made the place seem even more desolate than she remembered it.
Keep going she whispered to herself.
She breathed in. Dumped her bag on the ground and slowly walked out and into the narrow main corridor. The tag art of previous tenants covered the walls, covered the once-expensive wallpaper, the once-glorious decorations. There were scorch marks where fires had been set. Chunks of plaster missing to reveal the support beams beyond.
The building a corpse, slowly rotting.
“This is my home,” she said aloud, because it didn’t feel like it and she needed that reassurance.
She listened to the sounds of the house, the plumbing, the floorboards, the click and hum of a defunct heating system. She listened within these noises, between them.
Her heart rate was steadily rising, she fought to control it.
He’d told her that she wasn’t ready to return but she hadn’t taken any notice. What reason was there not to?
She stood at the foot of the staircase, looking up. It looked like the entrance to another plane of reality, or a dream. Slowly she climbed, staring at her feet because she couldn’t bear to think of something waiting for her up there, in the shadows.
One by one by one by one.
Past two rooms nailed shut with biohazard flowers stenciled across them alongside lovers names.
Fourth door on the left.
Inside—the bare mattress, the tossed sheets. Empty bottles of water. Some CDs.
An upturned television, face down amongst the glittering fragments of its own screen.
She entered the room, tried to suppress the sensation of something behind her.
Perhaps it was too soon.
“There’s nothing wrong,” she said to herself. She was rubbing her wrist subconsciously, suddenly aware of the stinging there.
She lay down on the mattress, her muscles sighing with relief. She had to lie on one side because of the rods in her back that were all that was left of the spinal brace. Stared out towards the window.
At first the noise seemed like nothing more than the splatter of rain against the windowsill or the tree branches outside but it quickly became more than that. She tried to control her breathing, to soften it.
There was a sudden flare of light and the upturned television began to glow.
“No . . . ”
She heard the desperate whine in her voice and hated it but couldn’t help it.
The static hiss grew louder as if someone was turning the volume up steadily on the dead TV.
She wanted to sit up. She wanted to move or cover her ears or something.
Another flicker, this one filling the room like a quick explosion.
Something moved across the window, a shape.
She looked away suddenly. Told herself it wasn’t real.
She looked back and it was still there, a reflection lingering in the cold glass and panic swept through her in one guttural tremor. A figure, a man, grainy and broken like a bad television signal.
She got up and ran.
Everything in the medical suite was a bright headache-white as if to give the illusion of approaching Heaven.
Luca pressed the needle into her arm quickly and gently, prepped another one.
She looked over his shoulder, focusing her attention elsewhere. At the row of three beds, two empty, the other with the privacy curtain pulled halfway around it. At the glistening pieces of equipment that lined the walls and the small windows that looked out of the temporary structure to the construction site beyond. At this man, Luca, who touched her so softly.
“Have the rods been giving you any trouble?”
She had her arms crossed over her bare breasts as he lightly touched her lower back. “They ache a little sometimes.”
“The areas around them look a little swollen. We’ll have to watch that. But apart from that you’ve almost made a full recovery. How do you feel working again?”
“I couldn’t lie in that bed any longer.”
“I understand,” Luca said, touched her arm. “I’m lucky if I can get most of my patients to stay in for a few hours. Having you here for those weeks . . . well, it was company if nothing else.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared along to the closed curtain.
“How about otherwise, Ylena? Any other problems?”
She had already made up her mind not to say anything. The night had been long and hard, small snatches of sleep on park benches and doorways because she had been unable to go back to the squat. As the sun had risen, however, her apprehension had lifted. She had panicked, that was all. The painkillers were distorting everything . . .
“None.”
“That’s a good sign. For a fall of that size you’ve made a surprisingly quick recovery.”
“I can’t remember it,” she said. “Any of it. That night.”
“That’s normal,” Luca assured her. “You sustained a massive blow to the head along with everything else. Memory loss is expected.”
It looked to her like he was peeling his skin off as he removed his surgical gloves. She blinked the image away.
“I want to remember, though. I want to know what happened.”
She looked at him then, her greenish eyes wide and wet, brow furrowed as it always was. “I need to know.”
Luca nodded. “You’re due on in five minutes. How about you come back here after your shift, we can talk further. Maybe get a drink or something.”
The machines beeped and hummed over his shoulder and the patient behind the screen stirred.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
Another three floors had been started on since she had fallen, one of them almost finished. She had maneuvered to the top floor which was still just steel girders and support beams. Plastic sheeting had been pulled over the area to protect it from the rain, creating a deafening drone of noise that filled her head.
She used a nail gun to bolt into place a strip of iron then finished the work with a few deft blows of a hammer. There were a half dozen other workers that she could see, some attached to suspension cords, others relying on their own experience and balance. She had never worn a cord.
She left the nail gun and made her way to the outer edges of the framework. She pushed aside the plastic and was immediately battered by a strong blast of wind but instinctively she grabbed a pole for support. The only reason she could tell where the ground was far below was because of the red cross painted across the top of Luca’s portable hospital ward.
She closed her eyes and listened to the wind, imagined falling through it.
And she realized she didn’t even know where it was she fell from.
Once the shift was over she knocked on the door to Luca’s building and he smiled when he saw her.
“I could use some coffee,” she said.
“You’d become caught up in some of the weatherproof sheeting as you had fallen and it must have acted in part like a parachute to slow you down enough that you were still alive when I found you. I thought a bomb had gone off from the sound of the impact and then there you were, wrapped up in all that plastic.”
She stirred her coffee endlessly, watched her reflection swirl in the darkness.
“The wind carried you away from the building too. I’ve had a few that have been thrown into the construction rather than away from it and believe me, what’s left is no pretty sight.”
“How far did I fall?”
“About thirteen stories. You were on the top floor. Or, what was the top floor.”
“I’ve never fallen before. I never use suspension cords.”
“Maybe now’s a good time to start,” Luca said, smiled.
A waitress arrived with his order of soup. Her hair was teased into several foot-long Mohawk spikes, each one dyed a different color, a punk statue of liberty. She tongued her lip ring as she asked them, “Anything else?”
Luca waved her away and she sidled back to her previous position, slumped across the serving counter.
“I can’t remember any of it.”
Luca reached across towards Ylena’s hands, wrapped around the coffee cup.
“You said memory loss was expected, “ she said softly, not looking up. “What else?”
“What do you mean?”
“A blow to the head . . . what other side effects can it cause?”
Luca frowned, leaned forwards. “What do you mean? Have you had any other symptoms?”
In the cold coffee, Ylena’s face rippled as if her very being was becoming distorted. “I . . . can’t sleep.”
“Insomnia?”
She shook her head. “No.”
She withdrew her hands abruptly but Luca reached out to her again, pulled her back. “I’ve . . . seen things. And I’m not sure if they are real.”
“Hallucinations,” Luca said, not a question this time.
“I don’t . . . I guess so . . . They feel real.”
“Most do. Have you been having many headaches? Maybe I should take another look at you.”
“No . . . please. You’ve done enough already. I just . . . I feel . . . ”
“What?” Luca urged softly.
“Dread,” she said suddenly and looked him in the eyes for the first time. “I feel as if something awful is about to happen and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
“What do you think is about to happen?”
“That’s just it, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem related to anything, except perhaps the squat. But this feeling, it follows me.”
“You slept rough last night didn’t you?”
Ylena looked a little unnerved by the observation. Luca smiled. “I could smell the oil on your clothes. It just sits in the air down by the factories but you don’t stink that bad by just walking past them.”
“Oh . . . ” She wrapped the work shirt she wore around herself tighter as if suddenly self conscious.
“It’s okay,” Luca reassured her, still smiling. “But maybe you could do with a bath.”
Ylena seemed to soften. “There’s no running water in the squat.”
“There’s a tub in my apartment.”
Ylena held his gaze.
“I don’t think you should be alone tonight,” Luca said.
Washing her slowly, the candlelight reflected in each drop that sat like a pearl upon her skin. Nursing her scars, caressing them. Unraveling her limbs, unraveling her tension, reminding her that the blood still flowed. Gentle, sweet, the dread begins to fade, spilling into the bathwater, left behind when he lifts her out. The towel soft like his lips, then the heat of their bodies.
In the night, in the dull heat of Luca’s apartment, in the tangle of moist sheets.
She stared at a dream catcher hanging from the ceiling, mottled feathers swaying gently in the updraft as if the thing was currently working its way through Luca’s dream. She could almost see fragments of his subconscious mingling there amongst the shells and stones and bones.
His touch had been distantly familiar, her foggy memories of the time after the accident filled with it and that feeling had brought her some security, as if it attached her once more to that from which she felt had come loose. Yet now she lay apart from him, having slipped out from between his arms, a gutter of two inches of space between them.
Outside a storm festered, raising the temperature degree by degree, pressing itself against the window. Lightning flashed and Ylena sat up with a start, her breath coming quick.
Something had moved.
Most of the room was in shadow, sparsely furnished, shapes inventing themselves.
She gripped the bed sheets to her breasts, holding her breath so that she could listen into the silence.
Something there.
Another crackle of lighting and she jumped.
She had seen a figure in the corner. Gone now.
Her breath began to come in quick, sharp blasts. The air sparkled on her tongue.
A sound, a whisper.
She pleaded.
“No . . . .”
Luca stirred beside her.
Goosebumps patterned her skin. She had stopped breathing.
“Ylena . . . ”
She turned, looked down at Luca’s prone form next to her. His mouth was still yet her name slid from between his lips.
“Ylena . . . ”
She felt the primitive urge to close her eyes, to shut her senses down and escape the fear but there was no escape. She reached out towards him, hand shaking. His chest rose and fell with each breath.
“Ylena . . . ”
The word drifted from him again and she hesitated, her fingertips an inch from his arm. He lay on one side, curled foetally, sweat trickling from his brow.
“Luca.”
She touched him and it felt like she had been bitten, snapped her hand away and Luca shot awake suddenly. The room was lit by a lightning strike and he gasped for breath, something shifted across his face, blurred, static grain.
Not Luca’s face.
A scream escaped Ylena’s lips before she could stop it. She threw herself backwards away from him, off the bed, hitting the ground hard.
Another flash of lighting and there was someone standing in the corner of the room, hands crossed before them. The image jerked and spat as if distorted with interference. A radio on a table near the bathroom blared suddenly, screaming noise for one terrible moment before falling silent again.
“Stop it!” she cried out, and buried her face in her hands.
She felt someone grab her and screamed again but it was Luca’s voice she heard and when she looked up this time, his thin dark Soviet eyes were staring back at her.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
A mantra, soothing her towards calm again . . .
She let him embrace her, couldn’t help the tears that leaked out and down his back.
Her fingers found a rough patch and Luca hissed in pain when she touched it. He drew away from her and turned.
“What the . . . ”?
He moved into the light coming in through the window.
On his back, just beneath his left shoulder blade—a slim, inch long wound that he instantly diagnosed for he had seen it so many times on-site.
An electrical burn.
The low-level workers, the grunts and welders like Ylena, worked on a per-day basis, their knowledge of the building’s shape and size and structure limited to the next type of join they had to make or the positioning of a beam. Nothing more.
Builds such as the one she was currently assigned to often seemed infinite with more and more levels being piled on top of the existing ones as each week passed. There was now seventeen floors and the skeleton of more were being added above her. The sky beyond it seemed iron clad as if it were part of the same structure, ready to be joined onto. Ylena could almost see the rivets holding it together.
“Careful,” one of the others said as they passed her by. He held a heavy steel plate in his gloved hands, an oxygen filter dangling from his neck for use if he got out of breath at the high altitudes.
He was gone before Ylena could acknowledge him, a little stunned at the comment because it would normally be deemed offensive. Had he seen her lingering on the edges of the skyscraper, contemplating the fall? She had found herself uncontrollably drawn there repeatedly over the days following that first night at Luca’s, tantalized by the whisper’s breath between security and death.
She edged further along the girder, the high winds buffeting her. She held both arms out a little to steady herself. Luca’s building was a blur now, the red cross smeared with rainwater and mud. She closed her eyes as she had each time before and instantly her balance shifted. Arms raised. Heartbeat increased.
She thought that perhaps the fear that was still lodged inside her was left over from the fall for as she leaned over the very edge of the girder she felt nothing but peace. The first few times she had been drawn to the edge she had considered that the fall had been so fast that she hadn’t had time to become scared but now she thought differently. Now she wondered if she hadn’t been scared because it had been what she had wanted.
What if it hadn’t been an accident?
She caressed the fresh dressing on her wrist, working the wound that was refusing to heal despite Luca’s attempts.
A sudden noise made her jump and it took all her years of experience to catch her balance once more with nothing to hold onto. Behind her the radio of one of the workers had blared to life. Out on the horizon, an electrical storm was gathering, great spikes of blue light ricocheting around in a field of pylons.
One step, she thought. One step.
Ylena raised one foot and took it off the girder.
“I think I jumped,” she said suddenly, in the post-coital silence. Her sweat had cooled to a freezing sheen on her body as she paced from one end of the room to the other.
“Jumped? Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know. Why does anybody?”
“What kind of question is that? Lots of reasons.”
“So why is it so unreasonable to assume I couldn’t have had such a reason?”
“Okay, it’s possible,” Luca said, turning and sitting on the edge of the bed, his back now to her. “But I just don’t think . . . ”
“Well how would you know! I don’t even know!”
“Will you sit fucking down!” Luca snapped. “I can’t concentrate.”
“I want to go out,” Ylena said, still moving. Her arms were wrapped tight around herself as she had gotten into the habit of doing, securing herself as if parts of her might float away. “I want to go for a walk.”
“I’ve told you already, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You can’t fucking keep me here!” Her pacing became more frantic. “I want to go back to the squat. I’m ready to go back to the squat.”
