Fire (27 page)

She turned back. Nothing happened for a long minute, then a helmet appeared above the edge of the verandah. The helmet tilted and, through the smoke, she could see a white face peering up at them. A hand waved: Allie waved back. The fireman continued to climb, then another one appeared on the second ladder.

One of them shouted something.

‘
What?
’ Louise yelled back.

‘
How many of you?
’

‘
Three!
’ Louise replied.

‘
Anyone hurt?
’

‘
No!
’

The firemen climbed further, but it was becoming obvious that the manoeuvre wasn’t going to work. Allie felt sick. The men were getting higher all right, but they weren’t getting any nearer; once they’d climbed past the verandah, they just kept on going straight up, the six-foot gap between them and the side of the building barely shrinking at all. In fact, they looked quite silly balanced on top of their tall ladders, which only reached up to the ceiling of the first
floor anyway, swaying in the wind of the fire like small flowers on particularly lofty stalks.

Allie burst out laughing. She could feel herself beginning to lose her grip. Her head felt light and dreamy again, her heart was racing and she found herself wondering what it would be like just to jump, to stand on the window ledge with her arms outstretched like a picture of a white, radiant, burning angel she’d once seen, and just let go.

Louise turned away from the window and, apparently in slow motion, slapped her.

Allie’s hand flew to her stinging cheek. ‘You can’t slap me!’ she exclaimed, and slapped Louise back.

‘Stop it, you two,’ Irene said. She walked over to the window.

Below, the firemen had retreated back down to the level of the verandah roof and were now standing on it. They seemed to be performing some sort of odd dance, stepping carefully and gingerly placing their booted feet here, then a little to the left, then further to the right.

‘What are they doing?’ Allie asked, her stinging cheek forgotten. She felt a little better now.

Louise and Irene didn’t reply, they were too busy watching the firemen below. Eventually they seemed to be satisfied with whatever they were doing and bent down and began to haul up one of the ladders. Slowly more and more rungs appeared, until the entire ladder had been dragged above the verandah. Between them, the firemen managed to wrestle it up against the building’s façade, its base planted squarely on the corrugated iron roof of the verandah. Allie realized what they’d been doing—looking for places where there were struts beneath the iron, for support.

One of them started climbing again, right to the very
top of the ladder, close enough for the girls to see his dirty, heat-reddened face and his white teeth, and the look of anticipated victory in his eyes.

And then a fireball exploded out of the second-storey window in front of him and he disappeared completely, the remaining bottom half of the ladder cart-wheeling slowly out into the air before clattering down onto one of the fire engines in the street.

Allie screamed and they hurled themselves away from the window. Louise, on her backside on the floor, tentatively touched her face.

‘Have I been burnt?’

Picking herself up, Irene said, ‘No, but the front of your hair’s gone frizzy.’

‘It feels like I’ve been burnt,’ Louise muttered, her fingers still examining the planes and hollows of her face. ‘It stings.’

Allie said in a quavering voice, ‘That poor fireman.’

Irene went back to the window. ‘There’s two more coming up onto the verandah. But they’re not pulling the other ladder up. And one of them’s waving. And yelling, but I can’t hear what he’s saying.’

They leaned out of the window again, ready in an instant to throw themselves backwards if there was another explosion.

One of the fireman was indeed shouting.

‘What’s he saying?’ Louise demanded.

They strained to hear him.

‘Is he telling us to climb down?’ Allie suggested after a moment.

Louise said, ‘Right-o, I’ll just get my emergency ladder out of my handbag.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ Irene said. She had turned away from the window and was staring across the room at the doorway into the corridor.

‘What?’ Allie asked, then she followed the direction of Irene’s gaze.

Thick black smoke was pouring in under the door, curling gracefully upwards, meeting the ceiling and rolling down again, putting out blind, sooty fingers that seemed to be searching and reaching out. For them.

L
ouise lunged for a bolt of cloth lying on the heavy wooden cutting table in the middle of the room. ‘Help me!’ she cried, tugging at the end of it. It was a rather fine wool, destined for Dunbar & Jones’s new autumn collection of suits and coats, due on the runway in about two-and-a-half months’ time.

Allie snatched up a pair of fabric shears and started cutting into the material, then simply tearing it when she had enough purchase. Louise took the cloth and wedged it against the base of the door. The smoke slowed, but still trickled inexorably through the tiny gaps at the sides and at the top.

Irene stood at one end of the cutting table, looking thoughtful.

‘Could you give us a hand, Irene, if you’re not too busy?’ Louise snapped.

‘You said emergency ladders. Isn’t the display department in the room next door?’

‘So?’

‘Well, won’t there be ladders in there? For putting up the displays?’

Louise stopped what she was doing.

‘If there’s more than one,’ Irene went on, ‘we could tie them together, hang them out the window, then climb down and drop onto the verandah roof.’

‘We’ll need rope,’ Allie said.

Irene pointed at the cutting table. ‘Use lengths of material. It’s wool, it’ll hold.’

‘It’ll still be a bloody long drop,’ Louise said. ‘And there’re flames coming out of the windows just below us.’

Irene shrugged. ‘It’s better than waiting here to die, isn’t it?’

They looked at each other, wondering how they would get back down the corridor, thick with noxious smoke, to retrieve the ladders from the display room. If there were any. But Irene already had the answer.

‘I’ll go,’ she offered.

Allie and Louise stared at her.

‘I’m fit,’ Irene said. ‘I’m fast and I can hold my breath for ages.’

‘But what if there isn’t just smoke in the corridor? What if it’s on fire out there now as well?’ Louise pointed at the bolt of cloth still on the table. ‘Couldn’t we just make some ropes and climb down those?’

‘The flames coming out the windows will burn through them,’ Irene replied flatly. ‘We’ll fall.’

Louise’s shoulders slumped.

‘I think we should draw straws,’ Allie said, wanting to be fair even now, but hoping like hell that she wouldn’t get the short one. She didn’t know if she had it in her to be that brave.

‘Look, I’ve said I’ll go,’ Irene repeated. ‘And I meant it.’

‘Then you’d better have this.’ Louise held out her piece of tablecloth.

Irene took it.

‘You’ll need to wet it, won’t you?’ Allie said.

But there was no sink in the workroom, not even a cold cup of tea left over from someone’s lunch.

‘We could pee on it,’ Louise suggested.

There was a moment of silence. Then Irene said, ‘Not if anyone had asparagus for tea last night.’

Allie snorted violently, and a string of snot shot out of her nose, making her laugh outright. She wiped it off her top lip with her sleeve. ‘Sorry.’

Irene smiled faintly. ‘Forget the pee. I’ll just hold the cloth over my face and breathe shallowly.’

‘What about when you come back?’ Louise said. ‘If you’re carrying ladders you won’t be able to hold it in place.’

Irene ignored her and moved over to the door. ‘When I say go, pull the material away from under the door and I’ll run through, then shove it back when I’m out. And
don’t
open the door again until I bang on it, OK?’

Louise caught Irene’s gaze and held it. ‘Are you sure?’

Irene nodded. ‘It’s only a few yards up the corridor, isn’t it? It won’t take me long. And it might be our last chance.’

And then her hand was on the door knob and she said, ‘Go!’

As Allie yanked the material out of the way, Irene opened the door and slid through the gap. A great billow of smoke rushed in, and then the door shut again and she was gone. Coughing, Allie slid the material back into place.

‘Christ,’ Louise said. ‘I hope she’s all right.’

They waited, and waited. Louise looked at her watch. Five minutes had passed since Irene had gone: it was too long.

Then something banged against the door, and Allie
and Louise both lunged to open it. Allie got there first, pushing the material out of the way again with her foot. She wrenched open the door and staggered back from a wall of black smoke and flames so bright she couldn’t look at it. But Irene was there, with the ladders. She cried out and thrust them through the doorway. Louise grabbed them, then yelped and let go, her hands burnt. Hooking her foot through the rungs, she flicked them backwards through the doorway into the room.

Allie reached out to pull Irene inside, but then a strange, shocking thing happened.

Irene’s mouth stretched wide open and she gargled, ‘Tell Martin I really did love him.’

There was nothing for the shortest of seconds, then her hair burst into flames and a moment later her shoulders ignited, and suddenly she was a black silhouette inside an incandescent ball of fire. Then the fireball doubled over, and collapsed almost gracefully onto the warping floorboards. The smell was revolting.

Louise slammed the door shut and started screaming. She went on and on and on until Allie clapped her hands over her ears and started screaming herself, just to keep Louise’s shrieks out.

Then Louise’s screams tapered off and she took a deep breath, hoicked and spat out bloody saliva; it landed on one of the ladders and sizzled there.

Allie took her hands away from her ears, realizing only then that she was sobbing hoarsely. Then, as an image of Irene ablaze broke into her mind again, she gave one last shriek herself, and stopped. Her heart was thudding and she knew she was about to faint, so she sat down on the floor.

Louise stared at her, her face deathly white and her eyes still impossibly wide with horror. But she spoke lucidly. ‘Get up. We can’t give up now. Not after that.’

Allie nodded. Slowly, she got to her feet again.

‘Start cutting lengths of material,’ Louise ordered, some of her self-control returned now. ‘We’ll open the ladders and tie them together, then knot the material around the rungs at one end and the legs of the cutting table. It weighs a ton, it shouldn’t move.’

Allie set to, tearing strips of the woollen fabric to make ropes, and when the ladders were cool enough to touch, they opened them out and tied them together, effectively making one ladder that was about twenty feet long. It would take them down about one-and-a-half storeys, leaving a gap of another storey to the verandah roof, still a very long way to drop.

They made the next set of ropes about ten feet long once they were tied to the ladder and the table, hoping that would reduce the drop by a few more feet. They could have made them longer but were frightened that if the ropes were too long, the wind would start the ladder swinging and they would be thrown off.

Then, as they manoeuvred the ladder over to the window, they realized that it wasn’t going to fit between the wall and the cutting table, so they had to lift it over the table and into place. The workroom stank now—of chemicals as the paint on the walls started to blister and the varnish on the floorboards heated up. There was another smell, too. It started them coughing again and made their eyes sting and stream.

They poked the end of the ladder through the window, then pushed it out as far as they could and let gravity take
over. It plummeted ten feet, then bounced back up a few feet as the ropes stopped playing out, and settled against the side of the building. They couldn’t be sure, but were heartened when they thought they heard the crowd below cheering and yelling encouragement.

Allie breathed a huge sigh of relief. She had been terrified that the ropes would untie or simply tear, but they hadn’t. Not yet.

Looking down, she saw that the firemen were positioning a mattress, or something similar, alongside the verandah, just beneath where they would probably land if they jumped. Or fell. It looked the size of a postage stamp, but even the thought of it being there was reassuring.

Just then a figure darted out from the crowd, leapt the police barrier, and raced over to the mattress, waving its arms madly. Allie smiled. She knew who it was, even from up here, and understood that everything would be all right now, no matter what happened. She drew in a deep breath and turned to Louise.

‘Ready?’

‘Are you?’

Allie nodded. ‘You go first.’

‘No, you go.’

‘No, Lou. You’ve got Susan. It should be you.’

Tears welled up in Louise’s eyes. ‘Well, don’t wait until I get off, don’t leave it too late.’

‘I won’t,’ Allie promised.

They hugged quickly, then Louise tucked her skirt firmly under the elastic of her knickers, took off her shoes and stockings, and climbed up onto the window ledge. She turned her back on the crowd below, then slid her legs out over the ledge and down until she found the ropes. She
twined her feet around them, let go of the ledge with one hand and grasped the rope just below it. Then she took her other hand off the ledge and began to slide down the ropes, letting herself descend jerkily as she opened and closed her hands. She didn’t dare look down, but, after what seemed to be at least an hour but was probably only a minute, she felt the warm metal of the ladder beneath her feet. She paused for a moment to catch her breath and ease her aching arm muscles, then continued on down. It was easier on the ladder, although it was swaying alarming, and she started to pray over and over that the ropes wouldn’t break.

From the window, Allie could only see the top of Louise’s head as she descended, and occasionally the flash of her pale calves as she extended her legs to feel for the next rung. On the ground, the firemen turned their hoses onto the windows Louise would pass, trying to dampen down any flames that might leap out for her. There were also two firemen on the verandah roof now, stationed on either side of where Louise was likely to land when she dropped the last dozen or so feet. Allie wondered if they were hoping to catch her: if they didn’t, or at least slow her fall, she could easily crash through the corrugated iron and tear herself to pieces.

There was an almighty bang behind Allie, and for a terrifying second she thought it might be Irene, her hair aflame and her beautiful face melting, not dead yet and come to beg her for help. But it was the door to the dressmaking room exploding inwards in a great gust of flame and smoke, and she knew that if she didn’t go now, she never would.

She tore off her own shoes and stockings, hoisted her skirt and scrambled up onto the ledge. She hooked her legs
around the ropes, frightened almost witless, but knowing that unless she did this she would never see Sonny or her family again.

Her eyes squeezed shut in terrified concentration, she allowed the ropes to slip slowly but steadily between her hands and feet until she reached the top rung of the ladder. Untangling her feet, she let her weight drop onto it, then screamed as she suddenly felt everything—the ropes, the ladder and herself—plummet. Her eyes flew open and she saw the plastered façade of the building blur past, then part of a window, before everything jolted to a halt and the ladder swung wildly before it righted itself again. But she knew what had happened—under her and Louise’s combined weight, the cutting table must have been dragged across the floor until it hit the wall beneath the window, its momentum suddenly stopped. Then came another sharp little jolt and she risked a downwards glance just in time to see Louise roll off the edge of the verandah roof and over the side.

Taking several deep breaths to calm herself and slow her thumping heart, she counted to five, then began to feel her way down the ladder. Another quick look down told her that every face in the crowd was tilted up towards her, following her progress. She could make out Sonny fairly clearly now, waiting at the edge of the mattress on the ground with his arms stretched up as though he could catch her if she fell.

She kept going, whispering ‘Good girl’ out loud with every new rung she reached. Above her, flames were flickering at the window of the workroom, and she knew it would be a matter of only seconds before the ropes burned through.

Then she was on the bottom rung, gazing down at the huge, dizzying gap between the point where she hung suspended and the roof of the verandah. And suddenly she lost her nerve, physically felt it draining from her. She shut her eyes again and started to pray, straining to remember the words of Irene’s prayer.

And then, through the roaring and crackling of the fire above her and the groans and shifting of the crowd below, she heard Sonny shout, ‘
Let go, Allie, I’ll catch you!
’

It was ridiculous of course—if she landed on him she’d kill him. But somehow his words made her feel better, and suddenly she knew that she could do it.

She turned herself around so that she was facing outwards, slipped her feet off the bottom rung of the ladder and let go.