Fire (28 page)

Wednesday, 30 December 1953

S
he felt his smooth, warm hand slip into hers and squeezed it gratefully. She had been dreading this day, and now it was here.

‘All right?’ he whispered into her ear.

She nodded and bit her lip, struggling to hold back the tears that had been threatening to spill out of her from the moment she’d woken up that morning. It was the day of the civic funeral for the forty-nine people who had died in the fire.

‘I’m going to miss them so much.’

He tightened his grip on her hand and murmured, ‘I know.’

She saw Louise in the crowd then, Rob pushing her in a wheelchair across the smooth, newly clipped grass of Waikumete Cemetery, and hurried to meet them.

Bending down to kiss Louise’s cheek, she said, ‘How’s the leg?’

Louise tapped the plaster cast that reached from her toes all the way up to mid-thigh, the top half concealed beneath the skirt of her black dress. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Not
too sore, but it’s itching like hell in this heat.’ She brushed away a tear that had escaped and was trickling down her cheek. ‘Oh, Allie, will we ever forget this? Will we ever put it behind us?’

Allie swallowed, the lump in her throat like a hot coal now, and found that she couldn’t reply. Sonny slid a hand around her waist and she leaned into the comfort and strength of his body.

Louise pointed and said angrily, ‘You know, I look at that and I wonder if God really bloody well does exist.’

Allie gazed at the neat arc of coffins laid out on the bright green grass next to the open graves and nodded.

The service had been held in town that morning, and the funeral cortège—forty-nine black, wreath-bedecked hearses followed by hundreds of private cars—had taken several hours to arrive at the cemetery. But they were all there now, and soon the final rites would begin.

Ted Horrocks appeared in front of them, his hat in his hand and his wife Natalie hovering close behind him. His face was still red from the fire and he was weeping but trying to pretend that he wasn’t.

‘Steady, girls, we’re nearly there,’ he said, as though he were addressing a company of young soldiers about to go over the top for the first time.

Allie hugged him, producing from him an exclamation of surprise, pleasure and grief. She had been delighted to hear that he’d survived the fire—it would have been so unfair if he’d died, after all those years of cheerfulness and loyalty he’d given Dunbar & Jones.

Ted plonked his hat back on, and reached for his wife’s hand. ‘This might not be the best of times to mention it, but have you seen him?’

‘Who?’ Louise said.

Ted nodded behind him. Allie and Louise turned and looked, their eyes narrowing as they spotted Vince Reynolds, standing beside his wife and looking suitably sombre and grief-stricken.

‘Bastard!’ Louise swore. Rob settled a calming hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off.

‘Right.’ Allie set off across the lawn in Vince’s direction.

Sonny exchanged glances with Rob, and they both shrugged, unwilling to interfere in something they both quietly agreed needed to be done.

Vince clearly hadn’t seen her coming, because when Allie parked herself in front of him he started in surprise.

Whipping off his smart black homburg, he began, ‘Miss, er, Roberts, isn’t it? I am
so
sorry about your friend Mrs Baxter. She was—’

But he was cut horribly short because Allie lifted her hand and slapped him across his face as hard as she could. There was a shocked gasp from the people standing nearby.

‘She was a fool for having anything to do with
you
, Vince Reynolds,’ Allie said loudly. ‘Because you took everything you wanted from her, didn’t you? But when
she
needed something, even just a word of comfort, you just walked away. You didn’t care and you treated her as though she was already dead.’ Allie was crying hard now, her words coming out with such anger that spittle was flying. She wiped her mouth. ‘And Irene knew that, you…you cheat! You
thief!
Irene
died
knowing that!’

She watched with some satisfaction as Vince’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously up and down above his black silk tie and his face turned a deep red. She spun around,
stumbling only slightly as her heel dug into the cemetery lawn, and stalked off.

Maxwell Jones stepped up to the lectern and cleared his throat. He spent a second or two shuffling the pages of the eulogy he had prepared, though those near him could see that he was struggling to contain his emotions.

‘We have all lost friends, family and work colleagues,’ he finally began. ‘They were taken from us only eight days ago, but we already know that we will miss them for ever. However, we must take comfort from the certainty that God…that God…’ He trailed off, and stared down at his papers.

The crowd waited respectfully for him to recover his composure, but it seemed that he couldn’t. Almost a minute passed, and finally he put his hands over his face and let out a single, strangled sob. He was led away then, and someone else took over.

But Allie barely noticed. She was too busy blinking back fresh tears as she surveyed the line of gleaming coffins. Irene was in one of them, of course, and poor little Daisy, along with her unborn child. Terry’s coffin lay next to hers, and Allie hoped that they would be together, wherever they were going. And, in a way, it had been right that they had been together when the stairs had collapsed beneath them. Miss Willow and Miss Button were there too, and so was Daisy’s friend Nyla from the millinery department, and Bev from cosmetics, and Simone from gloves, and Walter the lift boy. There were people she had known in the other coffins, too—workmates and friends, people whose families would never see them again. And at the end of the line were three
coffins that seemed the saddest of all, containing what everyone assumed were the remains of poor Jock McLean, and Mr Beaumont, and the girl from the cash office whose body had never been found.

A lone fantail swooped low over the coffins, as though looking for something, then darted off again.

Allie shuddered as she thought yet again about how close she had come to death. When she’d dropped from the ladder, she’d fallen until she had hit the verandah roof, exactly between the two waiting firemen, then bounced and skidded madly down the hot iron surface. One of the firemen had managed to grab her arm as she’d sailed past, which had deflected her trajectory out over the street and somersaulted her instead onto the mattress below. She had landed on her side and dislocated her left shoulder and badly bruised her leg, but otherwise had been miraculously unharmed. It had all become a bit hazy after that. She remembered Sonny looking down at her with tears running down his face, and then her father there crying too. Then she’d gone in an ambulance, after which a doctor did something horrendously painful to her arm at the hospital, and then she’d gone to sleep. The next morning had been worse, though, waking up to the horror of finding out who had survived and who hadn’t. In one way it had been the worst day of her life, because so many people she cared about had been lost, but in another it had been the best, because she was one of the survivors. She was alive, and so was Sonny.

After the graveside service had finished and the minister had sent the dead on their journey, mourners were given the chance to say their final farewells.

When Allie came to Irene’s coffin, she laid a red rose
above the brass plate that had been inscribed with her friend’s full name, Irene Esmerelda Baxter. She whispered ‘Thank you’, and left it at that, because, deep in her heart, she suspected that, whatever Irene had been looking for, she had finally found it. She gave Martin a quick, fierce hug and moved on.

At Daisy’s coffin, she knelt down and this time placed a white rose on the lid. She glanced around self-consciously, then decided she didn’t care who heard what she had to say.

‘I saw the queen, Daisy, I went to see her after I got out of hospital because I knew you’d want to know what she looked like. And she really was just like a fairy princess in her long shimmering dress and that fabulous purple velvet cloak you were talking about. And, Daisy, she had the most wonderful jewels at her throat and on her fingers, and a crown that sparkled like the stars.’

HarperCollins
Publishers

First published in 2009

This edition published in 2010
by HarperCollins
Publishers
(New Zealand) Limited

P.O. Box 1, Auckland

Copyright © Deborah Challinor 2007

Deborah Challinor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

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National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Challinor, Deborah.

Fire / Deborah Challinor.

ISBN 978 1 8695 0703 9 (pbk.)

ISBN 978 0 7304 0088 2 (ePub)

I. Title.

NZ823.3—dc 22

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