Read Online Puccini's Ghosts by Morag Joss - Free Book Online

each time to the door for breath and returning to find that the flames had encroached further. Her eyes were almost blinded by streaming tears and when she coughed she doubled over with stinging, zig-zagging pains in her chest. There was now heat coming off the fire and she could hear ominous crackling noises from deep inside it. Licks of orange brightened the gloom of the smoke. She ran to the outside tap on the back wall of the house and found a watering can already half-full of rainwater, filled it to the top and lurched back with it, water slapping over the sides and drenching her. With the first canful the fire hissed and collapsed a little. She came and went from the tap several times, dousing the flames until all that was left was a wet, burning stink in the air and a sulking heap from which trickles of water snaked out into black pools on the concrete.
    Lila went back outside and collapsed breathless onto the grass, rubbing her eyes and shaking. She was shocked and cold and wet; her legs and arms were soaked and scratched, smeared with black, her nose and eyes sticky with smoke. Her hair and clothes reeked of it and she could taste it in her mouth. She lay for a few minutes with her eyes closed until the ground felt so cold against her back that she had to move. She struggled to her feet, paused, and looked round. All was quiet again. There was no sign of her mother. The door of the shed beyond her father’s vegetable patch stood open and was moving gently in the wind; she could see that the shed was empty except for the usual gardening tools and the laden, chaotic shelves where he kept his weed-killer, pesticides, turpentine, brushes, half-empty tins of paint and sinister, unlabelled jars. Her mouth dried. How much poison stood on those shelves? Just then came a clatter and a loud cry from the driveway in front of the garage, and she started running.
    Her mother was standing in a pool of red. Red ran down her flailing arms and dripped off the ends of her fingers, casting a ragged circle of splashes all around her. So it
was
happening. As Lila gazed, the world seemed to halt and stretch and fall away and everything became very quiet and flimsy, as in a slow-moving dream; her mother receded into silvery white air, the ground between them swelled and disintegrated, leaving her weightless in empty sky. She looked like a statue in a fountain although far-off and less solid, her red drapery shimmering and transparent, her form fluid, scintillating, as if Lila were staring across a bright, distorting distance or catching glimpses of her through water. Then her mother stooped to pick up something—a paintbrush—from the red pool, and when she straightened up and turned, the world dropped back in place. Shapes resumed boundaries and substance, colour flooded in. Time righted itself and began to tick along again, passing with the swift ease of a nightmare. Lila and her mother were back on the driveway under a rainy sky, their clothes stirring in the breeze, faces stained. A pair of seagulls gloated from the ridge of the garage roof.
    With a quiet grunt, Fleur pushed one foot at the overturned paint tin and with the hand holding the brush she lifted the hair from her face. Behind her Lila read, in scarlet letters seven feet high across the left garage door,
    BAST
    Shining beads from the letter B were already glopping off the bottom of the door and staining the ground. From the tin—Lila recognised it as one of the colours her father had used for the kitchen cupboards—a red ooze was still spreading around her mother’s feet. If it hadn’t been spilled there would have been ample paint left for the
    ARD
    that she guessed she was planning for the right door to welcome her father home.
    It was so nearly funny—the day’s havoc ending in such a spectacle as these foolish giant letters, her mother dripping in paint, not blood—that for a moment it seemed impossible that anything serious could be happening. But Lila was too