Read by Jennifer Tan
She feels no communion with stoves or fireplaces; the fires there are tame things, anaemic and bland. It's not the patterns in the flames that draw her, though they twine into answered prayers and dreams as she watches. It's not even the way fire destroys, although there is a part of her that finds some satisfaction in that. For Phoebe, the thrill and the rapture come from freeing the beast. Its hunger is fed by her own, its wildness is joined by hers and she feels part of something ancient and primal as she wields its power. And, it consumes. At first, it consumed small things: the contents of bins, small patches of scrub, a sack of clothes left out back of the thrift store. In time, these weren't enough. It wanted more, she wanted more. A barge, half-sunk and abandoned in the shallows of the river. A pile of tires out the back of old man Tooley's scrapyard. Watching as the smoke rises in a dark column from a field of barley, she basks in the glow and the heat.
Fire reaches out to her, enfolds her in its intense embrace. At home there is no intimacy. Home is a train station where you can walk for miles and never meet another person. An empty platform where no one ever brushes someone's shoulder or makes accidental contact. Whole days go by without conversation. It has become easier not to break the silences that are woven deep into the texture of the house. Talk fails, falls flat. Hi Dad. Oh. Hello, is one day's prologue to the next day's Want a toasted sandwich while I'm making one? No, I'll eat at the game.
In the silence the phone rarely rings. When it does there is one conversation.
"When will you come home?"
"She needs me here."
"I need you here, Mom."
"Don't you think I want to be home with you?"
"No, I think you stay there to get away."
"Phoebe. Don't start."
Phoebe sometimes thinks it might have all been quite different if her father had been French or Russian or a Spaniard. Allergic to English, he speaks eloquently in code. Years ago, when his games were held at home, he would relax into the percussive rustle of cards and the back and forth of a distant language limited to numbers and rank. Three no-trumps. Double. Pass. Pass. Pass.
They perform dances in the shop, Jake and Frank, that never take place at home. The choreography of half a cow or a skinless lamb from truck to hook, from walk-in to counter. Standing shoulder to shoulder, or across the table, knives flick and banter flies through the air as smoothly as the blades slide through connecting tissue. Whole animals are pulled into steaks and chops, sides and shanks, through constant and effortless arcs and shunts.
At work Frank is content with the jingo of meat. Break down two sides then get on the hens. Ring up the orders. That's how Frank is, only finding comfortable expression in patois. Without the need to discuss anything more than the the hard realities of what and how much, Frank utters commands in white clouds that hang in the refrigerated air - sprung from smiling lips and shared only with Jake, who answers in kind. Jake is always eager to emulate him.
There is no place for Phoebe at the shop, but sometimes she tries. She comes to watch, to keep company. She lays claim to a corner and make it hers, to seem to belong. The staccato barks between the two men continue, excluding her, as she tries not to be in the way. Straightening when Frank emerges from the freezer without glancing at her, the conversation echoes that of home. It must be cold in there. I don't notice it.
When her father is busy she watches Jake as he works. He studiously refuses to return her gazes. Coquettishness: What time do you finish today? is batted back deadpan, edge removed: Five thirty, or when your Dad tells me I'm done.
At six, shivering outside his car, she sees him come around the corner, and the way she stops feeling the cold at the sight makes it all worth it. He gets angry that she waits at his car.
"What if your Dad had come this way?"
"Why do you think he cares?"
But soon she is in the passenger seat, driving back to his apartment. In the tumble of sheets, she forgets everything else - real flesh holds tight against hers, his lips pressed against her neck, her breast. She can lose herself in the frenzied bubble, the world shut out. At last she, has all of his attention.
Lying in his arms afterwards is warm milk, settled honey. It never lasts though.
"It's getting late, babe." The familiar refrain.
"I'll tell him I was out with Kirsty." She knows it won't work, but she has to try.
"Can't risk him cottoning on, you know that." He is resolute, and the note of temptation, of regret, in his voice that she so desperately needs to hear, is absent.
"Don't you want me to stay?"
"You know I want you to." She knows nothing of the sort, however much she wants to.
Gathering up her things, her whispered "maybe you already got what you wanted" is loud enough for him to hear. He pretends not to. He's right, of course, but that only makes it worse.
At home, Frank grunts at her excuses. He's up early for a fishing trip, didn't she remember him saying he wanted her home early? And why is she dressed like that, anyway?
When she sleeps after staying at Jake's, her dreams go one of two ways. Sometimes they are soothing glows, the fire more like a hearth, warming her through. Other times they are harrowing, piercing things where Jake ignores her, gets into a car, drives away, the possibility of an impossibly beautiful girl flicking her hair in the passenger seat. The fire rages up out of her like a burst hydrant. Her dream tonight is the inferno kind, and she wakes up curled at the foot of the bed, itching to burn something.
He doesn't pick up her calls the next two days, sends her straight to voicemail, doesn't call back. All the time, the tension rises inside of her, blooming like March blossom in fast-motion, filling her thoughts and making her temples throb. It is like needing to empty her bladder; after a time she can't hold it in.
The heat from the flames flushes her cheeks almost as much as the rush of pleasure as she watches the shed go up. She may only have a short time to enjoy the moment before someone comes along. Closing her eyes, she feels the fishing rods and tackle blacken and catch, feels the flames start to climb the roof supports. Flakes of burning pitch from the roof thicken the air as she exhales, feeling the energy rush from her. She'd never liked school much, but these moments make her recall Mr. Suggs' talks about thermodynamics. She is the entropic body, the heated body, and the entropy and the heat need to flow out into the world. She feels them flow; only then is she left calm.
That'll teach him to be so concerned about his fucking fishing trip.
At the end of the day, she doesn't dream at all. She sleeps like the bottom of the ocean.
Waiting at Jake's car, she is feeling much more positive. This time she dresses up, takes the time with her hair, puts on lipstick. She takes pleasure in the way the shoes make her feet look dainty. Her head is down, admiring them, and she almost misses him. He's turned the corner but walks the other way, down toward the bars. She picks him out by his pale hair and the bow-legged hitch of his stride. She knows him in that crowd, the same crowd he's run with since school. School, where she was invisible to him.
"Jake!"
She runs as she calls him, her voice hitching with the steps. They turn together, the crowd: all staring at her. Except him. He faces away, glancing sidelong eventually, when it would be rude not to. Then he lifts his chin in a grudging greeting: "Oh. Hey, Phoebe," before turning and moving on, not waiting for the group. But he snakes an arm across the shoulders of the girl at his side, bringing her along with him. The gesture is both proprietary and protective.
She is the ghost in the passenger seat made flesh; Phoebe admires her flawless profile darkly. Her colouring is as almost perfectly white as Jake's, she notices. The girl turns to him, motions back to Phoebe, and despite the distance the words carry.
"Who's she?"
Though the widening distance his answer cuts through the air, a sharp whisper.
"Just some girl. My boss's kid."
The ground around Phoebe broadens like a desert, the buildings and people moving away from her. She is alone and small on a vast and hostile plain. Feelings wash through her: loss, humiliation, perhaps most of all, embarrassment. In the fortress of her mind, she chose to ignore every hint, but the tapping on her shoulder has become a slap to the face and she can no longer ignore it. She thinks of her father. The expectation of his judgement plays on her frayed nerves, and the worst thing about it is that it will be passed without a word. She closes her eyes and sees the contempt in his. He knew it; he must have known most of it. He couldn't even break his precious silence to warn me.
And suddenly, It is rising like mercury, crawling like a base layer of skin, pushing at the layers that kept it in, raising welts and veins. It doesn't just want out, now. It wants to play somewhere where it can dance across walls and up into roofspaces. It wants to lick yellow and orange tendrils across wood, bubble and warp plastic, char and blacken flesh. It wants to rage, to leap towards the sky and make the night glow. It wants everyone to see, wants crowds to gather and watch in fear and awe as she unleashes the majesty of its fury.
She hesitates for a moment. She is on the cusp of something; a gate is about to open which cannot be closed again. An image flickers across her mind of the clutch of half-full oil cans at the back of the shop, and her eyes glaze over. As she turns and walks towards it, the smile that climbs her face is sharp as ice, but it flickers like fire.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics by Terry Pearce & Deborah Rosenblum was read by Jennifer Tan at the Liars' League Fire & Ice event at the Wheatsheaf in London on 8 December 2009.
Terry Pearce and Deborah Rosenblum were attracted to the Liars’ League because they both have issues with the truth. Deborah claims that everything she writes is biographical. Terry wants to clarify that any resemblance his antagonists may bear to people he has sworn revenge on is purely coincidental. Deborah lives in New York. Her recent work has appeared in The Legendary and Writer's Block. Terry lives in London, and his work has appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal and The Legendary.
Jennifer Tan trained at The Oxford School of Drama. Theatre includes A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pillars of the Community, Plasticine and After the Dance (OSD), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Shared Experience), Cinderella (Lyric Hammersmith) and Carless Talk (Momo Theatre). Voiceover work includes Smokescreen, an online educational game for Channel 4.
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