Fox Fires

FOX FIRES

WYL MENMUIR

For Em

Fremd bin ich eingezogen,

Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus.

Wilhelm Müller, ‘Gute Nacht’

In many ways, O resembles the sea more than it does the land. We live at the mercy of the capricious Meret, and of the light that filters down to us through shallow waters.

Georges Formezt, A History of O

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

PART I:The Wind-up Girl

ONE

TWO

THREE

PART II:The Book of Maps

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

PART III:A Photograph of Wren Lithgow

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY WYL MENMUIR

COPYRIGHT

PART I

The Wind-up Girl

ONE

Wren Lithgow arrives in O in the golden haze of late September as the sun is setting behind the mountains of the interior. She observes the approach of the city sprawl from where she sits on a metal lifejacket box bolted to the ferry’s deck. Golds shift to red and, in this red glow, the city is all embers.

In many ways, the city state of O looks to her much like any other of the cities in which she has lived. The port is dense with derricks and cranes, with towers of containers. It is busy with stevedores anxious to be home. She tries to make sense of the confusion of buildings that stretches inland, but, beyond the port the hard lines of warehouses and steeples, the sweeping curves of grand buildings on which sit coloured and metallic domes seem impenetrable. In the furthest distance, beyond the city’s density, beyond the farms and the fields lined with charming hayricks, the slopes of the mountains, which comprise O’s land border, are in silhouette.

The setting sun catches the walls of a building that is taller than all the others, a glass tower that rises far above the rest of the city. Aside from the tower, this could be Antwerp or Rotterdam, Marseille, Athens, Trieste, she thinks. She hopes it might be in some way tangibly different to these other places. She has imagined it often.

She checks her watch. Cleo, her mother, will be, at this moment, starting her long journey up through the thick layers of tranquillised sleep.

O will be different, she tells herself. She tells herself the same thing about each new place. But it will be different. It will be different because O is the city in which she was conceived, the city in which her father lives, or in which he lived, she does not know which. Her father and O itself, like so much of her mother’s past, have always been off limits. She blames Cleo for the first of these taboos, though she can hardly blame her for the second; until a month ago, the borders of O were shut to the world.

Arrangements have been made for their belongings to travel separately. She can picture the process clearly, from the moment the well-groomed man from the removal company arrives at the apartment on Potsdamer Platz. She sees him appraise the uneven steps at the entrance doorway. They will cause the removal team some difficulties, though they are equal to the task. She sees his slight frown at the width of the staircase down which all the furniture must be carried, the tight twist that must be navigated. It causes him to pause, though he does not need a tape measure. He is a professional, after all. She sees him remove his shoes at the door and take out a notebook and pen. He will survey each of the rooms before itemising, wrapping and packing the smaller objects and trinkets. The photographs and concert tickets, creased and faded in their frames, the books from the shelves, the copper-bottom pans her mother insists they should have despite the fact she does not cook, the necklaces and scarves from Cleo’s dressing table. Each item wrapped in paper and placed in a small box, labelled, catalogued and stacked with the other small boxes by the door.

Later, a team will arrive to move the heavier pieces: the coffee table, her mother’s dresser, the Turkish rugs that they will roll and seal and stack in the hallway, the baby grand piano that requires the care of a specialist from the moment it leaves the house to the moment it is unpacked at the new house in O.

Wren is nineteen years old. She is more than half her mother’s age. At five foot four inches, she stands an inch taller than her mother, though people who meet them leave with the impression that Cleo is the taller of the two. Wren wears a black trouser suit and over that a black jacket and her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Around her neck, she wears a pendant, a loose diamond encased in a tiny box of sapphire glass on a long silver chain. The diamond tumbles incessantly as she walks. She feels in many ways she is like this diamond, always moving and never getting anywhere. Against the huge deck, she appears tiny. With her knees up on the box of lifejackets she takes up as little space as possible. She has a slightly rounded face and she bears little resemblance to Cleo who, despite her slightness, fills all spaces and makes herself the centre of them all. From the age of about twelve, men have been assessing Wren against Cleo often vocally and within hearing of both women. Several of them have commented on Wren’s peculiar beauty.

It is her eyes, one of Cleo’s admirers said before they left Berlin. Or her eyebrows. Or her whole facial structure. So unusual.

When men start to talk like this, Cleo steers the conversation back to music, back to herself, back to safer ground. It is one of the few ways in which she shows her protection for her daughter, though Wren suspects that she does this also to conceal a small jealousy.

Before O, they were in Berlin for three months and they have left under a cloud. It is a cloud of a similar formation to the ones that have followed them from country to country since Wren was a small child.

She has lost count of the places in which they have lived. Each of their moves follows a well-worn pattern. The early days in any new city are filled with expressions of love and of regret for the way things have ended in the city they have just left. Each new start fills Cleo with a sort of fervent light. Each new city represents hope.

Some places they stay for just weeks and others for months but never more than that. London, the place Cleo calls home, is most familiar to Wren, though they have not been there since her uncle fell out of favour. If she adds up the broken months they have spent in other cities, they have lived in Frankfurt, Rome, Paris and Venice for longer. Each move too brief for even thin roots to take hold. There are places through which they have passed several times briefly: Valletta, Riga, Timisoara, Odessa, and a small island in the Mediterranean, the name of which she has forgotten. Most recently there has been Berlin. At times the cities threaten to merge into a single, nameless metropolis.

The end of things in Berlin was about money. The end of things is almost always about money. Cleo keeps a meticulous list of restaurants and shops in which they can still get credit. Even so, their last days in Berlin felt like an exercise in risk. It seemed to Wren as though they walked along the edge of a cliff. She was aware that in places this cliff was undercut to the point at which it may collapse at any moment and she was unsure exactly where they were safe and where they were in danger of falling through to the rocks beneath. By the time they left, there were so many places, so many people to avoid it had become difficult to keep track of where they were still welcome. To make it worse, she was even more on edge and more distracted than usual.

The cause of this distraction was the prospect of O itself. Wren knows this. She watched her mother’s face carefully as she read out the invitation forwarded by Cleo’s agent, Anita. The letter was full of the usual flattery. It detailed the many ways in which her presence in O would enrich the city in this year, the first of the new millennium, a year the letter writer referred to as the Year of Hope. There was talk of borders opening and of a grand parade, a chance for the world to rediscover a small corner of Europe that once thrummed to the reverberations of its concert halls and opera houses, and that she, the recipient, the talented and fondly remembered, the much missed and now hurriedly invited, was to be at the vanguard of its rebirth.

At first she said no, they would stay in Berlin and wait for another offer to come through, until Wren revealed the fee. She hoped this news might lift Cleo’s mood, though, if anything, it seemed to Wren to send her into a depressive tailspin.

All she said was, Call Anita and tell her they must send an advance.

Cleo takes all her payments in cash. It is a habit she has cultivated over long years of promised money that has never materialised. Once she is paid, she stashes small rolls of bank notes in a wooden box they keep in the living room, which sometimes covers rent and food shopping and other times does not. Some evenings, she takes the money from the box to the casino and leaves Wren alone in their lodgings as she has done since the age Wren began to walk.

Depending on the way the night goes, the next day might be spent shopping in a department store or jeweller’s, where Cleo will pick out necklaces and earrings for both of them, clothes, rolls of material, or paintings for the house, and they will eat in the best restaurants. At these times, they make plans. They admire each other in their new clothes and they are the best of friends. If things have gone badly, Cleo will lock herself in her room for days on end or Wren might wake in the night to find her raiding her jewellery box or wardrobe for pieces to sell or to return to the shops from which they were bought only days before.

At Wren’s feet is a small case of clothes and essentials. The case contains a few clothes and a small mechanical toy, wrapped in a silk scarf. In her hand, she carries a copy of a battered paperback guidebook to O that she picked up at the Bodemuseum Buchmarkt long before she found out that she and her mother were to move to the city.

Cleo never flies and on the long ferry crossing Wren scanned the pages of the badly produced guidebook. The book’s title is O: An Illuminated City. Its binding is disintegrating and many of the pages are missing, though how many pages have already disappeared she has been unable to ascertain as they are not numbered. Those that remain are out of sequence and Wren spent the first few hours of the journey reassembling the book into an order that made sense to her.

O, she read in the guidebook, has been referred to as the Illuminated City since at least the time of Fyador Vary’s 1646 text of the same name, a manuscript that is now remembered by title alone. It is a city, according to the author of the guidebook, ‘practised in the art of devouring itself’.

It is not just this experience that draws artists to O, the book says, but the quality of the light, a result ‘of some indefinable purity of the air that is impossible to measure even with the scientific equipment the city’s university has set up around the place in order to quantify what everyone already knows’. She is under no illusion, though: what has attracted her mother is the money on offer.

It is a city beloved of artists, the book claims. Manet holidayed there, she read, and Turner too in later life when his eyes had started to fade. They came, they said, ‘to take in the healing light, much as Catholics take in the waters at Lourdes, and to experience the sense of disorientation that is an equal part of O’s charm’. Alongside these rhapsodic, floral passages there are a few grainy photographs of monuments and churches, photographs that do nothing to support the central theme of grand illumination, and the book contains no map.

Through the hours in which the few other passengers on the enormous ship slept, and throughout much of the next day, she skimmed through pages of poorly translated character sketches of architects, painters and photographers, through over-wrought descriptions of statues and parks, libraries, monuments and plazas. She checked her pager for messages several times, though there had been none. She mouthed O’chian phrases from a page of transliterations to her own skewed reflection in the ferry’s scratched windows and felt in the words the unfamiliarity of a language that is nothing like any of those she already speaks: English, Italian, German, French, a little Russian, a little Greek. It depends on Cleo’s mood, which of these languages they use. Often, Wren will ask a question in one language and Cleo will respond in a second, with neither willing to switch for the sake of the other.

Wren remains on deck as the ferry passes between the white salt-pillar lighthouses that mark the deep-water passage and is gathered within the outstretched arms of the breakwater. As she watches the city draw closer a thrill runs through her, a sensation that starts in her feet and radiates up through her calves, her thighs, up through her body to her scalp and out through her arms and legs. Whether it is the sub-aural thrumming of the ship’s engines that causes this or something else, she does not know, and as the sensation passes through her in great waves, she glad that she is alone on the deck.

It is a sign, she thinks, a sign of welcome from the city in which she was created, some latent recognition from the place in which half of her genes originate. She has imagined this moment countless times, just as she tried to picture the place her father calls, or called, home.

When the tannoy sounds for disembarkation, her mother appears on deck to observe the ship’s final approach. Wren stands and joins her and they lean side by side on the railings. The sea below is dark green, bordering on grey, and there is a chop to the waves. When her mother asks to see the guidebook, she passes it to her, though she holds on to the few loose pages for which she has not yet managed to find a home. Cleo looks at the cover briefly. She riffles through the browned pages and drops the book over the side. Wren watches in horror as the covers spread against the white walls of the ferry and when the book hits the water it floats briefly before the loose pages fan out across the surface and are sucked, one by one, into dark water churned white by the propellers.

How dare you, Cleo? she says. Why?

You know I don’t like it when you call me