The Last Firework by Philippa Holloway
Maria is ironing in the soft warmth of the apartment when the first car pulls up across town and shots are fired into the city crowds. At the other end of the lounge the television is on, but low, tuned to a satellite channel that broadcasts English language cartoons in American accents. The soft hiss of the iron as she lifts and presses provides a background of white noise for the explosions on the screen. This is her indulgence, a chore she enjoys only once a fortnight when it is her husband’s turn to go out and drink with their mutual friends. She is lulled by the repetitive actions, the right to left of the weight in her hand, the steam that rises in fragrant ghosts from the white material.
Her daughter, Amelie, is sleepy too. Still young enough to sit on the floor to watch TV, to clutch a ragged toy rabbit at bedtime, or when she’s scared. Maria folds a shirt she knows will soon be creased with wear and pats its down onto the pile, the fabric still warm. She takes the next item from the basket, a single, Egyptian cotton sheet, still mostly white. Shaking it out ready to fold and put away with the other items she doesn’t think warrant the smoothing touch of her mum’s old iron, she pauses. It’s getting late. She advises Amelie that it is almost time for bed and receives a plea in response. One more episode, please, mum. It is the weekend. And Maria smiles and acquiesces, too content to change anything. With extra minutes to spare she lays the sheet over the ironing board as if she is dressing an altar, lets the steel plate ease out the frowns and wrinkles in dreamy sweeps.
Harry has been gone for a few hours now, taking his turn to eat and drink with friends in the heart of the city. It is years since they have done this together, without their child. This is the price they pay for living in another country for work, for moving so far away from willing grandparents, aunts and uncles. Maria has come to relish these evenings alone with her daughter. They don’t do anything special except share the same air, inhabit the same space, but that’s enough.
As she rests the iron down to shift the sheet a little further over the board, she remembers that it isn’t really hers. Them memory brings a rush of heat to her cheeks. How long has she had it now? She borrowed it when she was at University, for a Halloween party in a house she shared with people she doesn’t know anymore. They’d decorated the shared and cluttered kitchen with cotton wool webs and cheap plastic spiders, dressed up and drunk vodka. The sheet had been her friend’s idea. He’d draped it over her as she lay on the scarred kitchen table before the guests arrived. Beneath its musty weave she’s felt her own breath return, hot and warm, as she waited for the signal of her housemate before slowly sitting up and letting it slide to reveal the fake blood and plastic fangs to the guests, to the boy she barely knew and would one day marry. Nobody had screamed, but a few had clapped. Years later she’d found it stuffed in box of old lecture notes and photos, teddy bears and trinkets. She’d felt too guilty, too distant from the friend who had raided their mother’s linen closet for the prop, to hand it back.
Gentle pressure forces the creases out of the cloth. The TV set trills a theme song that their daughter knows by heart, a final tune that will linger on loop in Maria’s head when she finally gets chance to watch the news later. When she’ll see the city fragment into flashing flights and repeated images on the screen. She’ll search for a sign, the shape of building or the colours of a shop front to help her get her bearings in the shaky footage. She’ll try and listen through the trivial tinkle of the theme song stuck in her head for a place name she can pick out amid the rush of a learned language.
Maria and her husband have lived in this city of light for almost two years, and the novelty has yet to fade. When they walk to school or the shops, or for the simple pleasure of walking, she can glance in any direction and see something beautiful. The sun ricocheting off a window and shooting gold into the crowds, architecture that sags and soars, the permanent flux of the crowds. She doesn’t take photographs anymore, has given up trying to capture the moment. Instead she finds moments to sit by the window and watch the people below. They are all so different she feels she is allowed to belong here, despite her faltering accent and incomplete vocabulary.
But tonight, although the curtains are open, she can only see the apartment reflected back to her in muted tones. She can see herself ironing, smoothing out the borrowed sheet that hasn’t been on a bed for years. It only made the laundry basket this week because Amelie had pinned it with pegs to the dining chairs to make an indoor tent two days ago, because Amelie had spilled her chocolate milk across the corner.
Maria slides the hot metal over the final corner and stands the iron down. She is finished, and raises the white cotton from the board to fold as Amelie rushes to the window to see the fireworks stuttering in the street below. Maria is still holding it when she walks to stand behind her, sees the bright white flash at the muzzle of a gun and the people running, shouting, falling. She pulls her daughter into the fabric to shield her eyes, wraps its clean scented warmth around her and turns her away from the glass. Somewhere in the weave of the yarn there is safety. Her child’s protest is muffled and white but Maria holds her tight, hoping she is still young enough to misunderstand, to forget.
Maria lies to her as she watches a man wearing a suicide vest explode in the road, his black silhouette flaring into sunlight before it’s gone.
There is a moment of absolute silence, the only silence she’s heard in the two years they’ve lived here, before the shouting begins and the sirens draw in.
Maria pulls Amelie away from the widow, wraps the still warm sheet around her daughter and tries to smile. She is shaking, trying not to glance at her phone too many times as she ushers the child into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Amelie is sulky because Maria won’t read her a story, because she missed the last firework and felt instead her mother’s nails clutch at her collarbones through the white fabric. She rubs the stitched up ears of her toy rabbit against her nose and asks if she can sleep beneath the sheet tonight, if Maria will drape it over furniture and the bedposts to make a den, but Maria pulls the quilt over her and takes the sheet away, needing to hold it and fold it again to calm her trembling hands. She leaves the night light on but closes the door.
In the lounge she switches off the lights and picks up her phone, holds it like a rare egg in her palm. She stands at the edge of the window and glances between the dancing lights below and the black screen, scared to call him, scared he won’t answer. While ever she waits he is okay, he is in another bar, another café. When her phone vibrates in her fingers she cries out, a bird noise she’s never heard herself make before. She fumbles the buttons and cries at her husband’s message. I’m ok, are you? As she taps the screen she hears the beat of the cartoon theme song in her fingers. Harry won’t be home for hours, she knows him well enough to accept he will be helping someone, once he hears they are safe in the flat. He will squeeze and stroke the hand of a stranger while they wait for an ambulance, or hold someone up as they sag in the street.
She moves away from her reflection towards the TV, flicks through channels until a voice she can understand with ease tells her what is happening across the city. She searches the shaky phone camera footage on the TV screen for the shape of Harry’s shoulders in the crowd, for a movement of muscle she can recognise. She sees people running where she and Amelie had shopped the day before, the footage trembling in time to her heart.
She looks around the room and sees the sheet in a crumpled heap beneath the window. As she picks it up and holds it she can see herself in the glass, alive, her reflection breathing faster than she realised. She leans forward and slides the window up, leans out into a street made safe by flashing lights and hi-vis coats. On the pavement below there are people lying down instead of sitting or walking. It takes a moment for her to realise why. Either side of her, and across the road, she can see her neighbours leaning out of their windows, all trying to translate the shapes on the ground into something other than the word dead. But there is too much blood and indignity. They lie like babies, arms and legs flung wide and abandoned to sleep.
Maria isn’t the first person to throw a sheet down to the gendarme and paramedics to cover the bodies, but she isn’t the last either. She shouts down first, not a word, but a sound, to get someone’s attention, and then lets it go.
The fresh linen billows and twists before it is caught. A ghost, a petal, a wisp of smoke.
She looks away to where her husband’s shape might emerge from the crowd, deliberately choosing not to see the mud soaking into the edges of the borrowed sheet, the half footprint on one corner, the way it is contoured like a winter landscape. Already something is seeping through, black in the streetlight, purple in the lights from the police vans, red in flash of the cameras.
From the corner of her eye she can see more sheets falling, hands reaching out into the night to offer and receive. Maria never wants to leave this city. Answers the phone to her distant family to tell them she is safe, her husband is safe, her child is sleeping. To tell them no, she is already home.
………………..
Philippa Holloway has been a zombie in a b-movie, once brought someone back from the dead, and spent three days in Chernobyl’s Exclusion-Zone researching her novel. Her short fiction/non-fiction is published in the US, Australia, Africa and Europe in publications including Ascent, Bukker Tillibul, New Contrast, Litro, and Nightjar Press, and has won prizes in literary awards including the Fish Publishing Prize and The Scythe Prize. Her short memoir ‘Energy Crisis’ was highly commended in the New Welsh Writing Awards 2015, and from this she was commissioned to curate a special feature for the New Welsh Reader on artistic responses to nuclear power stations and landscapes entitled ‘Power in the Land?’ which drew on collaborative work undertaken with visual and digital artists and poets. She visited Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone as research for her PhD, and is Writer in Residence at Hack Green Nuclear Bunker.
Twitter: @thejackdawspen