Up In Smoke

I knew Jared was trouble, and I hated Peter spending time with him. Peter didn’t have a malicious bone in his body, but he was pliable, like dough, and he attracted people who wanted to mould him into an accomplice for their mischief. Jared first appeared at a BBQ at Peter’s cousin’s house; he was a friend of a friend of a friend, but he was so entertaining that nobody really questioned his legitimacy there, even though he had arrived empty handed and consumed the majority of a bottle of rum in short order. After that, he was a regular feature in the group, and every time I saw him at a gathering, with his blonde corkscrew curls and his bug like green eyes, I felt uneasy.
+++“Why don’t you like Jared?” Peter asked me once, on the bus home from the cinema. It was a cruel November day, grey and biting, and I was feeling cosy, bundled up in my winter coat, protected from the outside world by the steamed up windows.
+++I couldn’t say I don’t think he’s good for you. Peter was fiercely independent; the result, I believed, of his parents having left him with social services when he was a toddler and disappearing from his world without a trace. He had been adopted when he was seven, but when I talked to my own mother about Peter, she always said, “a child has already lived an entire life by the age of seven.”
+++So I said, “He acts like everyone owes him something just for being himself.”
+++“He’s fun to be around,” Peter replied. “And his family doesn’t have much money. It’s easy for us to chip in for things, we both get an allowance.”
+++“He could get a job.”
+++“I think he has a hard enough time with his schoolwork as it is.”
+++I fell silent. Sometimes I wished Peter could be selfish. I wanted to hear him say something like, “my parents abandoned me, what’s your excuse?” He made me feel guilty, because I’d had an easy, untroubled life, but I had a spiteful streak that was always burning inside me.
+++That Christmas, Jared’s father left. Peter told me that he had been living a double life; he had another family in Manchester, a woman and two daughters, and he had finally decided that he would rather be with them.
+++I was horrified. I couldn’t imagine my father, who spent all his spare time pottering in our tiny garden with the radio perched on the edge of the bird bath, chuckling along to a Radio 4 comedy show, doing anything that would even border on deceptive.
+++“How’s Jared coping?” I asked.
+++“He says he’s fine, but I think he’s having a hard time of it.” Peter looked guilty. “I think he’s going to really need his friends.”
+++After that, we became a trio. Jared attached himself to Peter – perhaps because he felt that Peter could relate to losing a father, or perhaps simply because Peter would allow it – and since Peter was usually attached to me, I started getting to know Jared. There was still a side of his character that grated on me; that made me think of someone trying to see how far they could walk across hot coals, and, one day, I screamed him out of the house after he had cut a slice from a cake my mother had made for a church bake sale, but I was becoming accustomed to him. His shell just needed peeling back sometimes.
+++One evening the following summer, we were at Peter’s house. He and Jared were in the garden, preparing the BBQ. I was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for a salad. I remember all these things. The linoleum was warm under my bare feet. The skin on my shoulders and nose felt slightly taut from too much sun. I was listening to the sound of the knife on the chopping board as I brought it down through chunks of cucumber, tomato and avocado. If I picture myself at that moment, I see myself standing in a shaft of evening sunlight, dust motes swirling gently above my head; a picture of peace.
+++Then I heard a scream. I had never heard a teenage boy scream before, and, at first, it sounded comical. Dropping the knife, I ran to the back door to look into the garden.
+++A swaying pillar of flames was darting frantically back and forth across the lawn. It took me a moment to realise that underneath the delicate yellow tendrils and the mesmerising orange heart of the fire was a person. Peter. I screamed, too, then, and that seemed to wake up Jared, who was standing, gaping, a metre or so away from me.
+++“Get a blanket!” he yelled. “Get something to smother the fire!”
+++But I was paralysed. I was captivated by the flames. They danced across my cornea, enchanting me as they horrified me. Despite my terror, I found a tremendous beauty in the scene from which I could not disengage.
+++Then Jared ran inside, returning moments later with a duvet which he threw over the pyre that was Peter, forcing him to the ground. Once the flames had been covered, the spell was broken. I threw myself onto the grass, weeping, asking Peter repeatedly and hysterically whether he was alright. There was no reply from underneath the duvet, only the voice of Jared, calling an ambulance, and, some time later, the siren approaching.
+++In the hospital, Jared recounted the story to a hostile audience; me, my parents, Peter’s parents. The boys hadn’t been able to find any firelighters in the shed, and had been having trouble getting the BBQ started with only screwed up wads of newspaper. Jared had suggested pouring some spirits on. Yes, he admitted that, it had been his idea. But he didn’t think that Peter would empty out most of the bottle… or stand so close. And it didn’t help that Peter was wearing his prized England football shirt, the one made from that cheap polyester that was as flammable as dried out kindling. But whose fault was it? None of us could decide, so we directed our anger at each other; blame striking chasms so each of us was alone amongst the pale green walls and the antiseptic smells.
+++Peter was released from hospital eight days and two operations later, but he spent the remainder of the summer indoors. I took the bus to his house nearly every morning, and we sat together in the stale dim of his bedroom, the curtains drawn, the only light coming from the TV his parents had installed so that he could watch films while he recovered. His room had become a pharmacy, and every hour, I would dab his skin with sour smelling ointments whose odour permeated my hands, however hard I scrubbed them when I got home.
+++We didn’t talk. We simply sat, side by side, working our way through an endless pile of DVDs. Sometimes I would reach out to hold Peter’s hand, and sometimes he would let me, though he always withdrew when I started running my finger back and forth across the burned skin. I was fascinated by its tight, smooth texture, but he didn’t want me to remember what he felt like now; what he looked like.
+++Jared was gone, too. I never found out whether someone had asked him not to come over – maybe Peter; maybe his parents – or whether his conscience found the sight of Peter’s scarred face unbearable. I didn’t see him until the new school term started, and only then when I sought him out at the field the boys used for playing football. He was sitting alone, eating a bag of crisps, and I barely recognised him at first because he had shorn off those wild, trademark curls. Seeing him like that made my throat tighten. He was like a chimpanzee; he belonged in the company of others. I walked over to him, and sat down gently. He didn’t look directly at me, but he must have seen me out of the corner of his eye, because he said my name, softly.
+++“I haven’t seen much of you lately,” I said.
+++“I’ve kept a low profile.”
+++“I like your haircut,” I tried.
+++He shrugged. “I felt like a change.”
+++We sat in silence, watching some younger boys chasing a ball. There was a freedom in their movements and their cries that contrasted painfully with the heavy, damp air of the person beside me.
+++“Are you okay?” I asked.
+++“It hasn’t been an easy year,” he replied, and he said it with such grace and acceptance that I wanted fiercely to hug him, but I couldn’t. I still hadn’t worked out whether I hated him for disfiguring the boy I adored, or loved him for saving his life.
+++
+++
+++
+++
Emily Bamford graduated with a degree in Philosophy from Durham University in 2007 and went to work in Finance. After three years of too many spreadsheets and not enough sleep she escaped the city and is spending this year living in the French Alps, skiing, mountain climbing, and appreciating finally having the time to concentrate on her writing. When not getting sidetracked by ideas for short stories, she’s working on her first novel.