Incinerator (17 page)

Susan had tugged on her jeans and the nearest T-shirt she could find and was pushing her feet sockless into tight boots, swearing under her breath, and I could hear her voice tremble. I too dressed as quickly as I could, pulling on trainers, picking up a jumper and then throwing it aside when I realized it was acrylic. If—when—acrylic catches fire it melts onto your skin, and when they take it off your skin comes with it. I found a woollen jumper full of holes and smelling of old sheep, tugged it on, and turned just in time to see Susan reach for the door handle.

“No—!”

The handle was already hot, and she snatched her fingers away. But she tugged her sleeve down over her hand and reached for the knob again but I pulled her back from the door.

“Don’t open that door! We’ll be dead in seconds!”

I realized I was shouting now, that the distant roaring had grown closer, and was now punctuated by the tinkle of windows exploding outwards and falling in fragments down to the street.

Dragging her by the hand I rushed into the bathroom, fumbled the plug into the plughole and turned the taps on full. The towels hanging off the back of the door hadn’t been washed in a few weeks, but that hardly mattered now. I grabbed them and threw them into the tub, calculating that soaked in water they would seal the door of the bathroom and keep the toxic fumes out for a while at least. But even as I pushed the towels into the water I saw the door wasn’t going to be the problem. The bathroom floor was covered in vinyl, but the air in the room was already hot and sharp and stung the eyes. I looked around and saw that smoke was seeping—no, gushing now—from around the bath. The floor directly underneath the tub, I realized, must have been bare boards, and the smoke from below was coming up through the cracks.

I tugged my mobile from my pocket and pushed it into Susan’s hand shouting, “Call nine-nine-nine!” As she stabbed the keys, blinking back tears of pain, I dashed to the window and unscrewed the latch. I knew there was nothing out there but a twenty-metre drop to the concrete pavement below, and
only Spider-Man could get out that way, but the fire brigade might have a ladder that could reach us—presuming they got in here in time. I heard Susan trying to talk into the phone, but coughing so badly she could barely speak, and that made me realize I’d been holding my breath. I tried to take air in slowly, through my nose, but my eyes immediately flooded with tears and the smoke seared my lungs. I stuck my head out of the window, but that didn’t help—flames were surging through the window frame directly below and the heat rising up was blistering the paint on the windowsill outside our bathroom.

Susan shoved the phone back at me, screaming something, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying, and from the look of terror on her reddened, soot-smeared face I guessed what she had said hadn’t made much sense anyway. I dragged her over to the bath, grabbed a soaking towel and wiped her face with it. She stopped coughing momentarily, but now I could see she was crying with fear, and I hugged her close.

“Here,” I shouted, grabbing the soaking hand towel, wrapping it round her face,
and fumbling to tie a rough knot at the back. “It’ll help you breathe,” I tried to shout, but my mouth and throat were so scorched with fumes I could hardly get the words out. I grabbed a wet flannel from the bathtub and clamped it over my mouth before turning to the door and touching the handle, praying it wouldn’t sear my hand. It was hot, but bearable, and I grabbed it, turned it and yanked the door open.

My bedroom was now so full of black smoke I could hardly see across it. The sodium light from the street lamps and the flames refracted from below lit black pillars of fumes that coiled and seethed like fat snakes writhing in a pit. The room was filling with toxic gas from the ceiling downwards, and the light from my bedside lamp was fading and faltering as the lethal black smoke crept closer and closer to the floor. Susan resisted as I pulled her through the doorway, as if she wanted us to turn back and lock ourselves in the bathroom, but I knew there was no hope for us in there. I had planned to try the door to the stairs again—maybe I had been too quick earlier to assume the stairwell was on fire. But without opening
the door I knew that if I’d been wrong then, I wasn’t wrong now. Smoke wasn’t just pouring under and round and over the door—it was leaching from the door itself. I could feel the heat coming off the wood in waves, and knew it would burst into flames at any moment.

Susan was sobbing through her towel, and her nails were digging into my arm again, in terror rather than passion. I stood there, lost, my head spinning, and I turned to look around, and I cracked my head on the sloping ceiling and cursed. And suddenly I knew what I had to do.

I dropped the wet flannel that had been over my mouth, threw off Susan’s arm and punched the plaster panelling in front of my face. It was as solid and unyielding as brick and it nearly broke my hand. I yelled in frustration, then realized I had been panicking—for Christ’s sake, think straight! I moved my aim a little to the right, and punched again, and this time felt the plasterboard flex under my fist. My first blow had hit a hidden rafter, but now I threw punch after punch, like it was my last stand, determined to go down all guns blazing, though by now my lungs
were burning and my eyes streaming and the strength was fading from my arms. Through the darkness and the thick, oily smoke I felt Susan push past me and start to pull at the edges of the hole I’d knocked in the plaster, bringing down cascades of ancient filthy dust and cobwebs that fell on our faces and got into our eyes. I clenched my eyes shut and clamped my mouth tight as I scrabbled too, ripping away horsehair padding and rotten felt until my fingers felt rough wooden battens running horizontally, and beyond them cool smooth slate. I slammed my fist into the slates and felt the thin stone shatter like glass even as it split my knuckles. But one hand was out, clawing in the cold clear air above the roof.

Frenzied now, we snatched and pulled and pushed and ripped, ignoring the dust and the splinters and the razor-sharp shards of slate, feeling the viscous, poisonous heat in the room gush past us into the night, as hungry as we were for oxygen. The draught grew stronger and stronger, sending the dust we had dislodged flying upwards until it felt like we were wedged in the chimney of an incinerator. I could feel the hairs on my legs curl and
singe, and the skin scorch, but I pulled back from the hole in the roof, grabbed Susan and shoved her upwards. The towel round her face snagged on the broken battens and she tugged at it. I grabbed it, pulled it up and free of her head, and manhandled her out into the night—only to see her sliding downwards, screaming hoarsely.

I scrambled after her, somehow gripping the roof’s rough edge with my stomach, and unthinkingly flinging something towards her—the damp towel she had worn over her mouth. She grabbed it with both hands, her knuckles turning white, and waited, eyes shut and face turned upwards, as I climbed after her, through the hole, one hand clenched on the towel, the other fumbling upwards to the ridge tiles of the roof. Now I could make out sirens boiling to a frenzy as the fire engines pulled up in the street below. The racket mingled with the roar of the inferno and the peal of shattering glass, and the tongues of flame in the smoke around us merged and fought with the flickering blue light of the fire trucks like demons at war. Finally my left hand grabbed the ridge of the roof, and my right gripped the towel so hard
my nails dug welts into my palm, and I folded my body together somehow, slowly pulling Susan up from the sagging gutter towards me. Ten centimetres from the apex she threw a hand out and grasped the ridge tiles herself, and her smooth-soled boots somehow managed to grip the slate, and she pushed herself upwards to straddle the roof.

We were more than twenty metres above the street, with nothing between us and the drop but a short slate ramp slick with moss, and we could feel the heat underneath us and the judders of the building as the inner walls tumbled and crashed through the blazing floor into the cauldron of molten plastic below. And Susan smiled at me, coughing, because now we could breathe, and we had won maybe sixty seconds before the roof we were perched on would start to burn. But sixty seconds was enough. We could creep like scorched slugs along the ridge towards the eaves, where the blank wall dropped two metres to the flat roof of the building next door.

And that’s what we did.

* * *

I’ve never liked hospitals at any time of day, but on this particular morning the local accident and emergency unit was empty, apart from a frazzled young couple fretting over a fat bald two-year-old who seemed perfectly happy to me. A nurse wearing spectacles held together with the traditional Band-Aid—he told me a drunk had knocked them off his face the night before—patched up the cuts to my hands, fed me sips of water and gently sponged me clean of grit, soot and scorched crumbs of slate. I sat there in a daze, gazing upwards through the skylight at dawn creeping through the sky, dissolving the stars and diluting the black to a pale, peaceful luminous blue.

The curtains around my cubicle were pulled back, but instead of the strung-out skinny doctor who’d checked me out earlier, Susan appeared, in a flimsy hospital gown that left little to the imagination. It seemed incongruous to get steamed up at the sight of a girl so soon after we were nearly barbecued, but I’d heard it was a common reaction to near-death experiences. It seemed to be true in my case, and hers, because she slid her arms around my
neck and her tongue into my mouth almost before the nurse had time to make a retreat. My arms went round her slim, firm waist, and I pressed her body against mine, and a shudder of desire ran back and forward through both of us like an electric shock. She pulled away and looked into my eyes. I never know which eye to look in when a girl does that to me.

“Thank you, Finn,” she said.

“No. Thank you,” I said. “For an unforgettable evening.”

“Will you do me a favour?” she said.

“Right now, anything.”

“Will you stop chasing after Nicky?”

I hesitated, not sure I’d heard her right.

“You know that fire can’t have been a coincidence. Nicky obviously found out something she shouldn’t—maybe about that policeman—and she ran. She’s not a coward, and she’s not stupid, but she left, and she doesn’t want to be found.” She grabbed my face with her hands. “Please, let her go, forget about her. You’ll get your compensation, you’ll get your life back. Keep asking all these questions—I’m scared you’ll lose everything.”

She kissed me, and the electricity ran tingling
through my body, and it went on and on, and I let it. When she pulled away her eyes were full of tears.

“Susie, I can’t,” I said. “Nicky was a friend of mine, and someone hurt her, and I’m not going to let that go. I have to know who did it—maybe it was Lovegrove, maybe it wasn’t—and I have to know why. Nobody else is going to try, so … I’m sorry.”

Her face showed a tumult of emotions—anger, exasperation, fear, and something else that I thought might be jealousy. And I could think of no way to persuade her to feel otherwise, so I didn’t try.

“I’m going to get dressed,” she said, turning to leave.

“I’ll see you later,” I said.

“No, Finn, you won’t.” With a bitter glance over her shoulder she pushed through the curtains and disappeared.

You rarely see burned-out buildings in London, so you don’t realize how much mess a fire makes, or how that mess is made a million times worse by the oceans of water firefighters pump onto it. My home and my business was
now a blackened shell, and I could see the sky through the charred timbers of the roof where Susie and I had felt so safe a few hours earlier. Long tongues of grime licked upwards from every window opening, and the empty frames were charcoal. Through them you could see the ground floor where my gym equipment was steaming gently—a scorched, worthless mess of metal tangled up with blackened sofa springs and flaps of wet leather. Burned plaster had been washed over the pavement into the gutter and across the road. It crunched underfoot, and it stank, with an acrid odour of rot that went right up my nose like a rusty bedspring.

The road nearest the gym had been closed, and red and white plastic tape cordoned it off from pedestrians. The Saturday morning traffic was beginning to build up, drivers parping their horns and saluting each other with single fingers as they jostled for precedence. They barely threw a second glance at the wrecked building where I and Susan had nearly burned alive.

“Sorry, mate, you can’t go through there,” said a lanky red-haired firefighter, as I ducked
under the cordon tape. He was wearing one of those dusky pink fire-resistant overalls and carrying his helmet under his arm. I wondered if male firefighters miss the huge yellow helmets and black woolly coats they used to wear. Surely they couldn’t pull the same number of groupies wearing gear that made them look like glorified plumbers?

“I lived here,” I said. “Top floor.”

“Oh, that was you?” he said. “How’s the girlfriend?”

“Not impressed.”

“She should be. You’re both bloody lucky to be alive.”

“Don’t think it was luck,” I said. “I think it was you guys.”

“You’re welcome. Made a change anyway—we haven’t had a good blow-up in weeks.”

“Can I take a look?”

“Long as you don’t get too close. There’s not much to salvage, if that’s what you’re after. Sorry.”

Someone called his name and he turned away. As I crunched over the muck and cinders that littered the tarmac, the other firefighters ignored me and carried on rolling up their
hoses and sweeping the crumbs of wreckage into soggy black piles. Even now I could see wisps of smoke and feel the heat from the embers through the soles of my trainers, and I suddenly realized that I too could have been inside that incinerator, a charred heap of bones and teeth mixed in with all that tortured metal and damp ash.

Of the four tenders I had seen hosing down the inferno when the ambulance took me and Susan away there were only two left, and now one of them was revving up its engine. I watched it move off with a quick ear-piercing burst of siren to cut a hole in the traffic. Nearby, a chunky four-wheel drive vehicle was parked half on the curb, splashed with the hi-viz red livery of the fire brigade, with some writing on the side. I didn’t bother to read it—I guessed it was the officer whose job it was to establish the cause of the fire. In fact, I could see him now, stooping at what used to be my doorway and taking photographs with a standard digital camera. On the tarmac behind him was another heap of rubble, and something glinted in it, something that didn’t look as if it had belonged either in my gym or in the furniture
store. I picked it up and peered at it: it was a circle of gold wire with a few purple beads on it. I scraped at them with a thumbnail.