10 lb Penalty (14 page)

“We’ll have to take our chances and jump. You first.”

He put the damaged chair against the window wall and motioned me to climb up and leap out as far as I could.

“You go,” I said.

There were people now in the square and voices yelling, and the raucous siren of the fire engine coming nearer.

“Hurry,” my father said. “Don’t bloody argue. Jump.”

I stood on the chair and held on to the window frame. The paint on it scorched my hands.

I couldn’t believe it—he was struggling into shirt and trousers and zipping up his fly.

“Go on.
Jump!”

I put a bare foot on the frame, pulled myself up and leapt out with every scrap of muscle power ... with strong legs and desperation: and I sailed through the flames from the bay window and missed the front burning edge of it by terrifying inches and crashed down onto the dark cobbled ground with a head-stunning, disorientating impact. I heard people yelling and felt hands grabbing me to pull me away from the fire and I was choking with smoke and winded by hitting the unyielding ground and rolling, and also fighting to free myself from the firmly clutching hands to help to cushion my father’s fall when he jumped down after me. I had no strength. Sat on the ground. Couldn’t even speak.

Incredibly there were camera flashes. People were
recording
our extreme danger, our closeness to dying. I felt helplessly angry. Outraged. Near to sobbing. Illogical, I dare say.

Voices were screaming to my father to jump and voices were screaming to my father not to jump, to wait for the bellowing fire engine now charging across the square, scattering onlookers and spilling people in yellow helmets.

“Wait, wait,” people screamed as firemen released their swiveling ladder to extend it to my father, but he was standing up silhouetted in the window with a reddish glow behind him. He was standing on the chair—and the door behind him was burning.

Before the ladder reached him there was an outburst of bright, sunlike flame in the room at his back and he stood on the window frame and threw himself out as I had done, flung himself through the climbing fire of the bow windows below into the darkness beyond, knowing he might break his neck and smash his skull, knowing the ground was there but unable to judge how far away: but too near. Break-your-bones near.

A camera flashed.

Two men in yellow suits like moon suits were sprinting, heavy-gloved hands outstretched, dragging as they went a circular trampoline thing for catching jumpers. No time to position it. They simply ran, and my father crashed down into them, all the figures sprawling, arms and legs flying. People crowded to help them and hid the tangle from my sight but my father’s legs had been moving with life, and he had shoes on, which he hadn’t had upstairs.

I was covered in smoky dirt and bleeding from a few cobble-induced scrapes and grazes, and I had tears running down my face, although I didn’t know I was crying: and I was dazed still and was coughing and had blisters forming on my fingers and feet, but none of it mattered. Noise and confusion filled my head. I’d aimed to keep my father safe from danger and I hadn’t even
contemplated
a smoke alarm.

His voice said, “Ben?”

I looked up woozily. He was standing above me; he was
smiling.
How could he?

Men in yellow suits unrolled hoses and poured gallons from the tanker onto the killing bow fronts. There was steam and smoke and unquenched flame: and there were people putting a red blanket around my bare shoulders and telling me not to worry. I wasn’t sure where they had come from, or what I didn’t have to worry about.

I wasn’t actually
sure
of anything.

“Ben,” my father said in my ear, “you’re concussed.”

“Mm?”

“They say your head hit the ground. Can you hear me?”

“No smoke alarm. My fault ...”

“Ben!”
He shook me. People told him not to.

“I’ll get you elected,” I said.

“Christ.”

People’s familiar faces loomed into my orbit and went away again. I thought it extraordinary that they were walking around fully dressed in the middle of the night but at one point learned that it was barely twenty minutes past eleven, not five to four. I’d gone early to bed and jumped out of the window wearing only my watch and my underpants and got the time wrong.

Amy was there, wringing her hands and weeping. Amy crying for the charity gifts lost to ashes, the ugly whatnot gone forever, still unsold. What’s a whatnot, Amy? An
étagère,
you know, an upright set of little shelves for filling an odd corner, bearing plates and photographs and whatnot.

And bullets?

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I left the bullet in my awful cardigan in the shop, and now I’ve lost it, but never mind, it was only a lump of old lead.”

Mrs. Leonard Kitchens patted my shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t you worry, boy, there was nothing in those old shops but junk and paper. Leaflets. Nothing! My Leonard’s here somewhere. Have you seen him? Likes a good fire, does my Leonard, but the fun’s all over now. I want to go home.”

Usher Rudd stalked his prey backwards, framing his picture, stepping back and clicking. He grinned over my blanket, took time to focus, aimed his lens.

Flash.

The cameraman from the local TV station arrived with his brighter light that was still outwatted by fire.

Mervyn wrung his hands over the lost heaps of JULIARDS. He’d barely been home half an hour before someone had phoned to warn him the charity shop was on fire.

Crystal Harley knelt beside me, dabbing bloody trickles with tissues and said worriedly, “Do you think I’d better come into work tomorrow?”

Paul and Isobel Bethune illicitly drove into the pedestrian-only precinct. Emergencies made new rules, the local councillor said, bustling towards my father, presenting a surface of urgent concern, all camaraderie for him and with hail-fellow greetings individually for the firemen.

Isobel asked me weakly if I was all right.

“Of course he’s not,” Crystal snapped. “He jumped through fire and hit the ground. What do you expect?”

“And ... er ... his father?”

“His father will win the seat,” Crystal said.

God bless politics, I thought.

“Paul was out at a meeting,” Isobel said. “He came home to collect me when he heard about the fire, to see if there was anything I could do to help. It always looks better if I’m with him, he says.”

Water plumed out of the huge appliance and sizzled on the flames and ran out of the building again, soaking the cobbles. I and my red blanket dripped and chilled.

Another vast tanker in the car park at the rear raised soaring fountains above the roof so that the two arcs of glittering Niagara met and married and fell together as monstrous rain. Leaflets and junk a fiery furnace; two vulnerable organisms shivering outside.

The yellow-helmets prodigally aimed their hoses at the still-dark buildings next to the blazing shops and, in time, inevitably, the ravaging tongues of fire ran out of fuel and began to diminish, to whisper instead of roar, to give up the struggle and leave the battlefield so that what fell from the sky into the square was no longer sparks but hot, clinging ash, and what assaulted the senses wasn’t heat but the acrid after-smell of burning.

Someone fetched the doctor who had seen to my father’s ankle three days earlier; he peered into my eyes with bright lights and into my ears and felt the bump on my head and bound up blisters in huge padded dressings so that they wouldn’t burst and get infected, and he agreed with my father that all a healthy boy needed was to see him in the morning.

My father solved the interim by enlisting the sympathy of the manager of The Sleeping Dragon, who gave us a bedroom and whose wife found me some clothes.

“You poor dears ... you poor dears ...” She mothered us, kind, but enjoying it, and both she and her husband happily welcomed the reporters from the London dailies who thronged through the doors the next day.

Usher Rudd’s admittedly brilliant photograph of my father in mid-leap with the flaming window behind him made the front pages, not only of the
Hoopwestern
Gazette and the next edition of the
Quindle
Diary (“Juliard Jinx”) but of every major paper in the land (“Juliard Jumps”) and hot on the heels of the factual news came endless comment and criticism and picking-to-pieces.

People will always tell you what you should have done. People will tell you what
they
would have done if they had woken in the night with fire underneath them. People will say that absolutely the first thing to do was call the fire brigade, and no one could be bothered to say how do I call the brigade when the only telephone is downstairs, surrounded by flames? How do you call a fire brigade when the telephone line has melted?

Everyone can think logically afterwards, but in the heat and the smell and the noise and the danger, analytical reasoning is more or less out of the question.

People tend to think that wildly unreasonable behavior in terrifying circumstances can be called “panic,” and forgiven, but it’s not so much panic, a form of ultimate illogical fear, but a lack of time to think things through.

Perhaps my father and I would have done differently if we had been presented with the situation as a theoretical exercise with a correct and an incorrect solution.

Perhaps we should have thrown the mattresses out of the window as a possible way of breaking our fall. Perhaps, if we could have got them through the window. As it was, we both nearly died and, as it was, we both lived, but more by luck than reason.

Don’t waste time with clothes, they’ll tell you. Better go naked into this world than clothed into the next. But they—“they,” whoever they are—haven’t jumped in front of the media’s sharpened lenses.

I thought afterwards that I should at least have dashed into the burning sitting room for my jacket and jockey’s helmet, instead of bothering with the taps. Also I should have wrapped towels around my hands and feet before grasping the window frame.

But I don’t think my father ever regretted the near-to-lethal seconds he spent in putting on his shirt and trousers. He knew in some way even in that life-or-death split second, that a photograph of him jumping half-naked from the flames would haunt his whole career . He knew, even in that fraught moment, that an orderly presentation was everything. Not even the worst that Usher Rudd could dredge up in the future ever showed George Juliard as anything but a fast-thinking headliner who was at his very best—
who put his shoes on
—in a crisis.

 

The police investigation sauntered upwards from Joe, whose mother drove a school bus, to higher ranks at county level, but the firefighters couldn’t swear the two bow-fronts had been torched and no one found a .22 rifle to match the lost-again bullet, and Foster Fordham’s report on wax in the Range Rover’s sump was judged inconclusive.

George Juliard
might
have been the target of three attempts on his candidature, if not on his life, but again he might not. There were no obvious suspects.

In the August doldrums for news, London editors gave the puzzle two full days of wide coverage. George Juliard shone on television nationwide. Every single voter in the Hoopwestern constituency knew who
JULIARD
was.

While my father dealt with publicity people and Mervyn Teck drove around like an agitated bluebottle searching for inexpensive substitute headquarters, I spent most of the Sunday sitting in an armchair by the window of our Sleeping Dragon room, letting bruises and grazes heal themselves, and looking across the square at the burned-out building opposite.

From somewhere up here, I thought, from somewhere here among the many hanging baskets of geraniums (her Leonard, the nurseryman, had designed them, Mrs. Kitchens had told me with pride), from among all these big clusters of scarlet pompoms and little blue flowers whose name I didn’t know, and from among the fluffy white flowers that filled and rounded the bright living displays decorating the whole long frontage of The Sleeping Dragon, from somewhere up here someone had aimed a .22 rifle at my father.

The marksman probably hadn’t been in this room given to us in the night, which was much farther along towards the Town Hall than the main door of the hotel from which we’d walked. A shot from where I sat would have had to take into account that the target wasn’t walking straight ahead but moving sideways. A stalker’s shot, but not a stalker’s gun.

A ricochet could of course take a bullet anywhere, but I thought it unlikely that a ricochet from where I sat would have turned and hit the charity shop.

At one point, shuffling on the padded blisters, I explored the length of the hotel’s second floor, glimpsing the square through an open doorway or two and coming to a little lounge area furnished with armchairs and small tables that I reckoned lay directly above the front hall and main door, accessible to the world. Straight ahead through the window from there was the unmarked path I’d taken with my father across the cobbles.

Anyone ...
anyone ...
if one had the nerve, could have stood among the floor-length curtains, opened the window, rested the barrel of a .22 on the windowsill and shot through the geraniums and the warm night.

My father, interested, asked the manager for the names of the people sleeping in the bedrooms on Wednesday night, but although the register was freely opened, no one familiar appeared.

“Nice try, Ben,” my father sighed; and the police had the same nice try in due course, with similar results.

 

By Monday morning Mervyn had rented an empty shop in a side street and borrowed a desk for Crystal and some folding chairs. The campaign hiccuped for two days while he cajoled his friendly neighborhood printer into replacement leaflet and poster production at grand-prix speed and near-to-cost prices, but by late Tuesday afternoon the indefatigable witches, Faith, Marge and Lavender, had turned the empty shop into a fully working office complete with teapot and mobile phone.