Holland Road by Lesley Whyte

The house is at the end of Holland Road. I pass by the street whenever I head to the newsagents to buy cigarettes. I know, I know, I shouldn't be buying cigarettes. Half the time, I'm going there for something else, I pass by Holland Road, I think about the house at the end and I have this sudden need to fill my body with something more toxic than my thoughts. Smoking is the easiest way to do it. And there's really kind of a poetic...thing to it.

Eleanor died in that house. My beautiful Eleanor with her bright blonde curls and her disgusting incense candles. Her books on French cooking and her hip-hop CDs. She never downloaded a song in her life. I don't think she even knew how to do it. We used to lie on the grassy slope in the back garden and look up at the clouds or the stars or just the clear sky. More often than not, we'd see the trails of aeroplanes and wonder where they were going. We'd make up stories about the people on board and then we'd plan where we would go once university was done and we had jobs that gave us enough money to travel and enough time to do it, too. It was supposed to be the beginning, that ugly old house in Holland Road. The warped windows and doors and the draughts they let in.

And then there was the fire. I wasn't there. By the time I got home, the fire was out. There was nothing but smoke. It filled the streets, it licked the other houses and clawed at my throat. They brought Eleanor out in a body bag. They wouldn't let me see her. They said it was the candles, those disgusting incense candles that she used to burn in every room of the house. They were probably right, it probably was the candles, but I like to think she was cooking. She was trying one of the recipes from one of her hundreds of books about French cooking. The girl couldn't so much as boil water, but she was going to study cooking in Paris. It was a nice thought.