Extract: Fire by John Boyne

The twins’ names were Arthur and Pascoe, traditional Cornish names, and to this day I don’t know which of them came up with the idea of burying me alive, but, as they coexisted in a strangely symbiotic state, it’s possible they devised the plan together through some unspoken telepathic power without either taking the lead.

When I think of that night, there are three things I recall above all else.

My frantic longing for water. The sound of the earth as they flung spadefuls down upon my improvised coffin. And my desperate need for air as I sucked what I could through the small breathing tube they had left me with. Only one of the four elements was missing that night, but its time would come.

Growing up in Norfolk with my grandmother, Hannah, I had been starved of the company of children my own age as she didn’t like me to socialize. Although she seemed ancient to me, Hannah was only thirty-two when I was born and thirty-three when my mother, Beth, moved to Cornwall, leaving me in her care. She preferred me to call her by her given name, insisting that ‘Gran’ made her sound like an old lady, just as my mother made me call her by hers because she didn’t want people to think that she was old enough to have a child. Both had become pregnant when they were teenagers and, thinking this was the natural order of things, I assumed that I would be a mother myself at sixteen, but, thankfully, I knew better than to bring a child into this world.

My first task when I got home from school every afternoon, regardless of the time of year, was to light the fire in the living room, a job I rather enjoyed, clearing out the ashes from the previous evening’s blaze before sweeping the grate clean and re-laying it with crumpled-up pages from yesterday’s newspaper, a few sticks of wood and pieces of coal, artfully arranged, and then taking a match to it all. I became proficient and could set that fire so it would burn all night.

For two months every summer, however, I was despatched on the train to Cornwall to spend July and August with Beth, who threw her arms around me and wept when she collected me at the station, wrapping me in her cigarette-scented embrace, telling me how deeply she’d missed me and how much I had grown, but quickly becoming irritated by my presence. By the time we reached the small cottage she rented by the sea, the tears with which she’d greeted me had been replaced by eye-rolls and muttered asides if I asked too many questions, spoke too loudly, sang along with the radio, breathed too heavily, sniffed, coughed, scratched, opened the window, closed the window, did anything, in fact, to remind her of my existence. Instead of feeling welcome in her home or being over-compensated for her lack of maternal affection across the other ten months of the year, I always went to bed on my first night aware that she was counting down the days until I could be despatched back to Norfolk.

With each passing summer, the cottage grew shabbier, while Beth grew skinnier and more wide-eyed. Her drinking and smoking, along with her habit of just picking at her food, made her increasingly gaunt, but this seemed to attract men, rather than turn them away. Every year, there was at least one new boyfriend for me to acquaint myself with, few of whom showed any interest in me, and in return I barely acknowledged their existence. There was little point, after all, in trying to build a relationship with someone who would be long gone by the time my next visit came around. There was a Derek, who sat on the sofa plucking impotently at the strings of his guitar. A Roger, who chewed his nails and spat the pieces across the room. A Dave, who told me that I’d better hope I grew into my face or no one would ever want to fuck me. A Nick, who was a Mormon, but, he insisted, a bad Mormon. A Chris, who took me for long walks along the beach with his enormous husky in tow. A Jonathan, who swore that he could have been the greatest actor of his generation, only other people were jealous of his talent and they’d ruined it for him. A Joe, who always had a can of cheap lager on the go. A Daisuke, whose family came from Hiroshima, ‘where the bomb went off ’, but who had never travelled further east than Exmouth or further west than Penzance. A Gethin, who taught me how to spell and pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, the village in Anglesey where he had grown up. A Jasper, who read voraciously but rarely got past page fifty of any book. A Tom, whose conversation always seemed to return to the death of Princess Diana, which he insisted was a murder covered up by the Establishment. And these are just the ones that I remember. I didn’t begrudge their presence in Beth’s life. Each new addition, each throwaway, seemed as much part of who she was as the clothes she wore, the cheap make-up she applied every morning, or the roll-up cigarettes that always protruded from her right hand like a withered extra finger. She wouldn’t have been Beth without any of them.

As uncomfortable as these visits could be, I enjoyed being in Cornwall. I liked the sunshine, the fresh air, and the screech of the seagulls in the morning. I liked the local curiosity shops and the winding lanes, some of which I ran quickly down, then struggled to ascend on the way home. But most of all I liked the beach, and that summer, the summer I was buried alive, I liked the fact that I made, or thought I made, some friends. Beth’s cottage was rented to her by a local man named Kitto Teague, who also owned the much larger property next door, having inherited both from his parents. The Teague home was probably five times the size of Beth’s but had been in a state of bad repair for a number of years, and Kitto was in the process of making renovations.

Enormous glass windows had been installed facing down towards the sea and the garden had been dug up and was due to be replanted. Beth’s that-summer-boyfriend, Eli, who was friendlier to me than most of his predecessors, was site foreman and said that Kitto was ploughing hundreds of thousands of pounds into the makeover.

‘He wants it to look like one of them Grand Designs off the telly,’ he told me. ‘And it might do by the time we’re finished.’

Beth liked to complain about the lorries that gathered outside, the delivery skips and large wooden boxes that brought new furniture in and took away the old, but there was nothing she could do about it. Her home was on Teague land, after all, and she lived in constant fear that her rent might be raised, or the cottage knocked down entirely to extend his property.

Aware of my interest in the house, Eli asked whether I wanted to see inside, and we waited until Mr Teague had gone into town for the day, and I followed him in, studying the shiny new stove and the granite marble of the kitchen island. Some of the workers lit cigarettes as soon as their employer had left and Eli shouted at them, saying they were causing a bloody fire hazard, and if they wanted to smoke, then they could bloody well do it down by the beach on their breaks. Even though he was younger than most of them, it impressed me to see how seriously he took his job and how attentive they were to his instructions.

Upstairs was more of a mess, but he explained the layout of the bedrooms and bathrooms and it was obvious that when all the work was finished it would be a beautiful home. I developed a fantasy that Eli would marry Beth, become my father, then divorce her and take me to live with him instead. He would build a home just like this one, only better, and I would never have to see either my mother or my grandmother again, but when I asked Beth whether she thought he might propose she just laughed and shook her head, saying she had no intentions of shackling herself to one man from here to eternity. Men, she told me, were like knickers. You needed to change them regularly.

We never talked about my real father. There was no point, as Hannah had already told me all that I needed to know. That he was a lad from the year above Beth in school, a wrong ’un from a family of tinkers who were no better than they ought to be, and he’d just shrugged his shoulders when Beth told him that he’d got her up the spout, saying it was nothing to do with him if she was the town bike and how did she know it was his anyway? Half the school first eleven had had her.

‘Which they hadn’t,’ she insisted. ‘Not half, anyway.’

He left Norfolk before I was born and that was the end of that.

Before I met Arthur and Pascoe, I would spend my afternoons strolling up and down the beach, paddling in the water, and, on sunny days, changing into my swimsuit beneath a towel before swimming as far out as I dared, which wasn’t far, as although I loved the water I had a terrible fear of sharks. (Hannah’s favourite movie was Jaws and whenever it was on television she made me sit down to watch it with her, even though she knew that it gave me nightmares.)

Sometimes, I would observe other families on holidays, fathers, mothers and their children splashing around in the waves, building sandcastles, eating picnic lunches, and wished that I could be among them. I would have liked a brother or sister, someone for me to take care of, or someone to take care of me, but when I asked Beth whether she might ever give me one, she said that she’d sorted that problem out years ago because being a mother was the hardest job in the world and she didn’t intend doing it twice, even though, to my mind, she had barely done it once.

It was only a few days after Eli let me see inside the Teague mansion that I encountered the twins for the first time. I was walking down the path that led from the cottage to the beach and they were making their way simultaneously from the other side along a carefully constructed set of steps towards the end of their garden. I watched them carefully. Two boys. I would have preferred a boy and a girl, but I’d take what I could get.

‘You’re the Petrus girl, aren’t you?’ they said when our paths crossed, and their voices were like nothing I’d ever heard before. Posh, refined, condescending. Their family roots, I knew, were here in Cornwall, but they’d been brought up in Kensington, in West London, which Beth said was where the swanks lived.

‘Them Teagues,’ she told me, ‘have more money than they know what to do with. He’s a bigshot in some bank. Probably nicks it all from the vault.’

They stood tall, both of them, although they were still growing into their looks and needed haircuts. Almost in unison, they would blow air up from their lower lips to brush their fringes from their eyes, which was when I would see the scatter of pimples dotted across their foreheads. When they declared me ‘the Petrus girl’, it made me feel like they were talking to a member of staff, and, although I didn’t like their tone, I longed for their company, anything to ease the isolation, so I said yes and told them they could call me Freya.

‘He’s Arthur,’ said Pascoe, pointing towards his brother.

And, ‘He’s Pascoe,’ replied Arthur, pointing back. ‘Don’t mix us up or we’ll kill you.’

There was no chance of my doing that. They weren’t identical and Arthur had a pronounced birthmark on his neck, just beneath the jawline, that looked a little like the map of the Thames that I saw at the start of EastEnders. I stared at it, wondering whether it was in fact a birthmark or he had been badly burned when he was younger. As I studied it his face reddened a little, which only emphasized the deformity.

‘How old are you?’ I asked, and they told me. Fourteen.

‘And you?’

‘Twelve.’

‘Just a kid,’ said Arthur, laughing and shaking his head, and Pascoe joined in. I got the impression they were trying to mock me, but I was just a kid so I couldn’t quite see how this could be considered an insult. What was wrong with being twelve? They’d been twelve themselves not so long before.

‘Your house,’ said Pascoe, nodding in the direction of Beth’s cottage, ‘belongs to us.’

‘It’s not mine,’ I told him. ‘I just stay with Beth for a couple of months every summer, that’s all. I live in Norfolk.’

They rolled their eyes, as if this cast me even further down the proletarian ladder than they’d imagined. They asked about my father, and I told them, verbatim, everything that Hannah had told me, even using her terminology. Wrong ’un. Tinkers. No better than they ought to be. Up the spout. I said that I’d seen their father come and go over the last week but not their mother, and when I asked whether she would be coming down to Cornwall soon, their smiles faded. Arthur looked away, his glance directed towards the waves. Pascoe watched him for a moment, appearing equally troubled.

‘Mother died,’ he said at last. ‘Just after Christmas. That’s why we’re here now, doing the bolthole up. Dad says he needs a project.’

‘What’s a bolthole?’ I asked, and Arthur pointed back towards the house.

‘That’s a bolthole,’ he told me.

I felt bad for them over the loss of their mum. The mother of a girl in my class at school had died a few months earlier in a car crash, along with the father of another. Everyone had felt sorry for them at first, but then it turned out they’d been having an affair, and, with the casual malevolence of children, our sympathy dried up instantly and the two grieving daughters, half-Sisters in adultery and tragedy, became sworn enemies.

‘How did she die?’ I asked, and, to my astonishment, Pascoe told me that his father had murdered her, but that the police hadn’t found out because he was very clever and they weren’t supposed to tell anyone. Arthur remained silent throughout this exchange but didn’t seem surprised by it. I didn’t know whether Pascoe was having me on, but I rather liked the idea of the story, so encouraged him to tell me more. How did he kill her? I asked.

‘Well, he didn’t do it himself,’ he told me. ‘That would be asking for trouble. No, he hired someone. A trained assassin. Used to work for MI5 or MI6 or one of those places. Someone who knew exactly what he was doing.’

‘But why?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t he love her any more?’

‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘He loved her too much. So, when he found out that she was sleeping with someone else, he had to act. You do know what that means, don’t you? Sleeping with someone else? Or are you too young yet?’

‘I know what it means,’ I declared haughtily, holding his gaze until he turned away. We’d started studying biology in school that year, and bodily parts, both male and female, their functions, what went where, and what happened when they did, had become the most common topic of conversation in the schoolyard over the past year as we offered both accurate and absurd explanations to each other.

‘You can’t tell anyone though,’ said Arthur, squeezing my arm so tight that his finger marks remained there for some time.

‘If you do,’ added Pascoe, ‘then Father will murder you too.’

‘And us.’

‘All right,’ I said, uncertain whether to believe them or not but unwilling to take the chance.

‘You should be grateful we even told you,’ he said then, folding his arms and looking me up and down as if he was considering the price he might get for me on the open market. ‘The only thing better than knowing a secret is having one of your own.’