Bonfire Night, in August. The incongruity bothered Kat. Not half as much, though, as the reason for the towering pyre taking shape before her.
All those years. Miserable. Lonely. Out-of-my-mind hangry.
She hurled into the flames her someday-jeans, eternally two sizes too small. Push-up bras that cut in like cheese wire. Suck-you-in knickers guaranteed to cause wind. They fizzled and spat at her. She spat back and laughed manically.
‘Fire, fire,’ sang a wavering voice.
Turning, Kat saw, above the trellis, a splash of glittery fuchsia – eyeshadow over a pair of watery eyes.
‘Hello, Mrs R,’ she greeted her neighbour.
‘What yer burning?’ asked Mrs Rogers.
‘The madness.’
The eyes blinked. Kat got back to work.
Onto the fire, crackling and hissing, went a tape measure. A set of kitchen scales. A set of bathroom scales. Women’s magazines, hundreds of them. A year’s salary in diet books. A stack of workout DVDs – they belched out black, acrid smoke.
Mrs R appeared above the fence, a disembodied, perm-topped head. In her eyes: the gleam of achievement of a seventy-nine-year-old woman who’d just scaled a compost bin.
‘Don’t mind me, love,’ she called.
Kat didn’t. There was no pausing now, no stemming the tide. One large box remained, labelled ‘Kitchen’. She threw on low-cal soups and sauces and yoghurts. The fire dwindled somewhat in the face of several litres of diet soda. A splash of lighter fluid soon rectified that, flames lashing at the dusky sky.
Burn, baby, burn!
The box was nearly empty. A handful of Count Yourself Happy cereal bars, sawdust flavoured, joined the party. Then:
‘Oooo, Kat, I don’t think –’
‘Last one, Mrs R,’ Kat declared, holding the item aloft, a sweaty, breathless Statue of Liberty.
‘But Kat –’
She threw it, the canister of You’ll Never Believe It’s Not Cream that she had never believed anyone could believe was cream. It spiralled right into the heart of the fire, and there was a moment of perfect calm: hazy heat, smoky-fresh air.
And then, Kat’s Life-After-Lunacy began. With a bang.
*
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Kat asked Mrs R again. They were sitting, side by side, on the rickety bench on the patio, Mrs R having tottered through the now sizeable gap in the fences between their gardens.
‘I’m more than all right, love. I’m having a blast.’
‘Mrs R, that’s not funny.’
‘It most certainly is. It’s bloody brilliant. Look.’
Kat did look. She looked at Mrs R, who was covered in fine ash and had a pea pod in her hair from the veggie patch that had broken her fall. She looked down the garden, at the soggy, smoking crater in her lawn surrounded by three burly firemen.
‘The size of that one’s hose…’ said Mrs R admiringly. ‘Ber-illiant.’
For the first time since coming round in a begonia bed, Kat quit worrying about her (apparently indestructible) neighbour and conceded that actually, it was pretty brilliant.
She’d done it, she’d burned the bloomin’ lot. And what’s more, she’d survived death-by-squirty-cream. She was victorious. Liberated. The mistress of her fate.
One of the firemen, he of the big hose, peeled away from his colleagues and clomped up the garden.
‘Fire’s out,’ he announced, eying the two ladies on the bench, both grinning inanely now. He held up a blackened aerosol can in his gloved hand. ‘You know, you really shouldn’t –’
‘I know,’ said Kat. ‘Aerosol – bang. It won’t happen again.’
The fireman’s lips quirked. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was going to say, you really shouldn’t eat this crap. It’s sacrilegious. An offence to proper cream.’
The way he uttered ‘cream’ said I am a foodie. The way he raised his eyebrow at Kat said hell-oh.
Kat felt a flush creeping over her that was nothing to do with the sultry night air. Blushing, fluttering – force of habit when faced with an attractive man (and he was attractive, at least what she could see of him beyond the uniform, all blue eyes and bushy eyebrows).
A sharp elbow in the ribs delivered by Mrs R reminded her where she was, in a gloriously smoky garden, and who she was: Post-Bang Kat.
A phoenix rising, she stood slowly, letting the blanket that had been wrapped around her shoulders slip off. On her feet (bare; her blister-making stilettos were toast) she came up to the fireman’s chest. She looked up at him, thrust back her shoulders and said:
‘If I take you out to dinner, you should know: I will order the steak, a big one, and I will devour it. With lashings of ketchup. And a mountain of chips. Washed down with Coke that is not diet. And even though I’m full, I’ll loosen the belt on my dress and order an ice-cream sundae with hot fudge sauce. And I won’t share so much as a single sweet, sugary sprinkle with you.’
When she finished, her chest was heaving with desire. For the sundae, frankly; she could practically taste it.
The fireman looked amused. ‘If you take me to dinner?’
‘Yes,’ said Kat, hands on hips. ‘So?’
‘Oi, Mack, gissahand,’ called a helmeted man from The Pit of Incinerated Idiocy.
Mack-the-fireman stared at Kat for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then he said, ‘To be continued…’ and turned and strode back to duty.
‘Ooooh, a cliff-hanger,’ breathed Mrs R. ‘Do you think he’ll…?’
Kat shrugged. ‘How about a cuppa?’ she offered.
Mrs R was already clambering off the bench, lips smacking. As Kat took her arm, a scrap of paper drifted past them, and reflexively she reached out and grabbed it. The edges were blackened, and only a few words were visible: ‘Diet… guaranteed… hook… man’. Snorting, Kat scrunched up the paper and surrendered it to the breeze. Then she led her friend into the kitchen, to smash the padlock on the biscuit barrel and work their way through the contents. Every. Last. Crumb.
