Fire Damage: A gripping thriller that will keep you hooked. Kate Medina

not. A nice garden makes both our cottages look beautiful, adds value.’

      She smiled. ‘You sound like a Home Counties estate agent.’

      ‘And it gives an old man something to do, some exercise,’ he replied. ‘Oh, and before I forget, your mother dropped by a couple of hours ago.’

      ‘My mother?’ Jessie was surprised. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother had popped around. Years ago, it was – three at least.

      She rolled her eyes. ‘She seems to think that I don’t actually have a job. That I’ll be here in the middle of the afternoon.’

      ‘It’s a mother’s job to believe that their child is forever too young to be gainfully employed and to worry about them constantly. I offered for her to wait in your house – I thought that you wouldn’t mind – but she said that she needed to get home for six.’

      Jessie nodded, took a sip of tea. ‘Did she want anything specific?’

      ‘I don’t think so. I think that she just wanted to see you. She said that it has been a long time.’

      Jessie bit her lip. It had been a long time, eight months – her mother’s birthday. The weather had been unseasonally hot and she’d been wearing a T-shirt and jeans. She remembered her mother asking if she couldn’t have dressed up a bit for lunch – even though they were only going to a pub on Wimbledon Common. Chafing against each other even now, fifteen years later. None of the life-changing events they had lived through talked about in detail. Nothing resolved.

      ‘You should go and see her, Jessie, whatever has gone under the bridge.’ And when she didn’t reply, he continued: ‘The mother–daughter relationship is …’ A pause as he searched for the right world. ‘Irreplaceable. Difficult, challenging, of course, but irreplaceable.’

      Jessie shrugged. ‘It was always more mother–son for my mother.’

      Ahmose took a biscuit from the plate, chewed in silence. Jessie watched him warily over the lip of her cup.

      ‘Alice and I never had the chance to have children,’ he murmured, dropping the half-finished biscuit into his saucer. ‘It was before all that IVF was widely available.’ He waved his hand towards the window, as if encompassing all the modern inventions of the last thirty years. ‘It broke Alice’s heart. She never got over it. I saw it in her eyes most when she smiled, when she was happy …’ A pause. ‘There was always something missing, as if sadness was sitting right behind her eyes, taking some of the light from them, even when she was smiling.’ Reaching across, Ahmose laid a hand on Jessie’s arm. ‘Losing a child must be worse than never having had one at all, because you know what a fantastic human being they would have made, how incredibly unique and wonderful they would have been. That is what your mother lives with every day.’

      Jessie felt tears prick her eyes. ‘It’s not so great losing a brother.’

      She had spent fifteen years dodging memories. How much longer could she maintain it?

      ‘Go and see her,’ Ahmose said gently. ‘Please. If only because I have asked you to.’

       13

      The morning of Jamie’s funeral, she had risen at 4.30 a.m. – pitch-black outside, even though it was nearly mid-summer – and tiptoed downstairs. She had expected to be alone with her thoughts of Jamie, the burden of her guilt, but her mother was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table in her towelling robe, clutching a cup of coffee that had grown a milky film it had sat so long, untouched.

      She was holding Jamie’s school jumper, pressing it to her face, drinking in his smell. Jessie was surprised how small it was. The images she retained of Jamie, despite his illness, were larger than life, a personality that occupied a vast, fizzing space. Looking at her mum clutching his jumper, fingers stroking the balled wall, she realized how young he was, how little. Seven years, gone in a heartbeat. A life snuffed out before it had properly begun.

      ‘I thought you were asleep,’ Jessie murmured. She couldn’t meet her mother’s gaze.

      ‘How could I?’ The words barely audible.

      Distractedly, her mother took a sip of coffee, her face wrinkling in surprise at its coldness. How long had she sat here, cradling the cup?

      ‘I’ll make you another,’ Jessie said.

      She padded over to the kettle. While she was waiting for it to boil, she pulled back the kitchen curtain expecting, for some reason, to see dawn breaking; startled when all she saw was her own pallid reflection. Though she had been in the kitchen for barely two minutes, each second had elongated until it was nanometre thin, filling an hour of memories, of self-recrimination. The ticking of the kitchen clock sounded like a hammer on steel, the dim overhead lights, half the bulbs missing, interrogation-chamber bright. She was hypersensitive to every movement, her mother’s every tic.

      Filling two cups, Jessie moved back to the table.

      ‘I’ve been trying to remember Jamie before the illness.’ Her mother’s voice wavered. ‘But all I can remember is him without colour, pale and sickly. He used to have the most beautiful complexion, the most vibrant look about him.’ She plucked at her own sallow, papery skin. ‘You both did … do. Perfect Irish roses. Your father’s look.’

      Leaning over, she cupped Jessie’s chin in her fingers, their first physical contact since Jamie’s death. ‘You’re so like your father. Beautiful, like him. He was … is beautiful … on the outside, at least.’

      ‘Will he … will he be there?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Dad? Will Dad be at …’ Jessie’s tongue felt like a wad of cotton wool in her mouth. ‘At the funeral?’

      A vague shrug. ‘How would I know?’ Her mother’s hand moved to stroke her cheek. Her touch like a chill breeze. ‘Yesterday, in the supermarket, I imagined holding Jamie when he was just an hour old. I was in bed, in hospital, my knees bent, and he was lying in the dent between my thighs. I closed my eyes, standing in the middle of the aisle, and I could feel him. Actually feel the warmth of him. The shape of his skull under my fingers, that duck’s fluff of baby hair. He clutched my hand with his tiny fingers. I remember studying his nails in wonderment. They were so perfect, every nail a perfect crescent. It always amazes me that something so small, a baby’s hand, can work at all.’ Her words ran out, her face closed down. A single tear squeezed from her eye and ran down her cheek.

      ‘Mum?’ Jessie bit her lip to stop herself from crying. ‘It’ll be all right.’

      ‘No. It won’t be all right.’ Her mum rose, turned towards the door. ‘I’m going to get dressed.’

      ‘Mum. Please.’

      To stop talking meant that time would start ticking again, the unstoppable slide towards the inevitable: a black car at the front door, the slow journey down the A3 to the crematorium, the impatient flow of traffic cutting around them, brake lights flashing as drivers caught sight of the little coffin smothered in flowers and slowed to stare, the black-garbed crowd waiting outside the crematorium, children and parents from school, children who had teased and taunted Jamie when he couldn’t run any more, couldn’t play football – Thought your sister was the Jessie, jessie.

      Jamie’s body being interred in fire.

      ‘Mum.’

      Her mother paused at the door; her dead eyes found Jessie’s. ‘When your dad left us, I thought that the unrequited love I had for him was the hardest I’d ever experience.’ Her voice cracked. ‘But I was wrong. When someone dies they can’t love us back. However hard we love them, they can never, ever love us back.’