for you to have matches. Burn the house down.”
“You can go and ask her if you like,” I say. “She’s out on the lawn.”
Rita rolls her eyes to the ceiling, as if consulting silently some deity there. Then she sighs, rises heavily, and wipes her hands with ostentation on her apron, to show me how much trouble I am. She goes to the cupboard over the sink, taking her time, locates her key-bunch in her pocket, unlocks the cupboard door. “Keep ’em in here, summer,” she says as if to herself. “No call for a fire in this weather.” I remember from April that it’s Cora who lights the fires, in the sitting room and the dining room, in cooler weather.
The matches are wooden ones, in a cardboard sliding-top box, the kind I used to covet in order to make dolls’ drawers out of them. She opens the box, peers into it, as if deciding which one she’ll let me have. “Her own business,” she mutters. “No way you can tell her a thing.” She plunges her big hand down, selects a match, hands it over to me. “Now don’t you go setting fire to nothing,” she says. “Not them curtains in your room. Too hot the way it is.”
“I won’t,” I say. “That’s not what it’s for.”
She does not deign to ask me what it is for. “Don’t care if you eat it, or what,” she says. “She said you could have one, so I give you one, is all.”
She turns away from me and sits again at the table. Then she picks an ice cube out of the bowl and pops it into her mouth. This is an unusual thing for her to do. I’ve never seen her nibble while working. “You can have one of them too,” she says. “A shame, making you wear all them pillowcases on your head, in this weather.”
I am surprised: she doesn’t usually offer me anything. Maybe she feels that if I’ve risen in status enough to be given a match, she can afford her own small gesture. Have I become, suddenly, one of those who must be appeased?
“Thank you,” I say. I transfer the match carefully to my zippered sleeve where the cigarette is, so it won’t get wet, and take an ice cube. “Those radishes are pretty,” I say, in return for the gift she’s made me, of her own free will.
“I like to do things right, is all,” she says, grumpy again. “No sense otherwise.”
I go along the passage, up the stairs, hurrying. In the curved hallway mirror I flit past, a red shape at the edge of my own field of vision, a wraith of red smoke. I have smoke on my mind all right, already I can feel it in my mouth, drawn down into the lungs, filling me in a long rich dirty cinnamon sigh, and then the rush as the nicotine hits the bloodstream.
After all this time it could make me sick. I wouldn’t be surprised. But even that thought is welcome.
Along the corridor I go, where should I do it? In the bathroom, running the water to clear the air, in the bedroom, wheezy puffs out the open window? Who’s to catch me at it? Who knows?
Even as I luxuriate in the future this way, rolling anticipation around in my mouth, I think of something else.
I don’t need to smoke this cigarette.
I could shred it up and flush it down the toilet. Or I could eat it and get the high that way, that can work too, a little at a time, save up the rest.
That way I could keep the match. I could make a small hole, in the mattress, slide it carefully in. Such a thin thing would never be noticed. There it would be, at night, under me while I’m in bed. Sleeping on it.
I could burn the house down. Such a fine thought, it makes me shiver.
An escape, quick and narrow.
I lie on my bed, pretending to nap.
The Commander, last night, fingers together, looking at me as I sat rubbing oily lotion into my hands. Odd, I thought about asking him for a cigarette, but decided against it. I know enough not to ask for too much at once. I don’t want him to think I’m using him. Also I don’t want to interrupt him.
Last night he had a drink, Scotch and water. He’s taken to drinking in my presence, to unwind after the day, he says. I’m to gather