Sister

On the playing field, Maisie arrived, her blue eyes sparkling, her face one large smile. Some people dismiss her as slightly eccentric in her fun shirts (long sleeves a different pattern to the rest), but most of us love her.

“Gracie,” she said, giving me a hug, “I’ve come to give Rowena a lift home. She texted me a little while ago, said the tubes were up the spout. So Chauffeur Mum to the fore!”

“She’s getting the medals,” I told her. “Adam’s gone with her to get his cake. They should be back any minute.”

She smiled. “What kind of cake this year?”

“A chocolate tray bake. Addie dug out a trench with a teaspoon and we took off all the candy and replaced them with soldiers. It’s a World War One cake. Which is violent but fits with the curriculum, so I don’t think anyone will mind.”

She laughed. “Fantastic.”

“Not really, but he thinks so.”

“Is she your best friend, Mum?” Adam asked me recently.

“Probably, yes,” I said.

Maisie handed me a “little something” for Adam, beautifully wrapped, which I knew would contain a spot-on present. She’s brilliant at presents. It’s one of the many things I love her for. Another is that she ran in the mothers’ race every single year that Rowena was at Sidley House, and she always came in last by a mile but didn’t give a hoot! She has never owned a piece of Lycra clothing and, unlike virtually every other mother at Sidley House, has never been inside a gym.

I know. I’m dawdling on that sunny playing field with Maisie. I’m sorry. But it’s hard. What I’m getting to is just so bloody hard.

Maisie left to find Rowena in the school.

I checked my watch; it was almost three.

Still no sign of either Jenny or Adam.

The PE teacher blew his whistle for the last race—the relay—bellowing through his loudspeaker for teams to get in position. I worried that Addie would get into trouble for not being in his designated place.

I looked back toward the school, thinking surely I’d see them coming toward me any moment.

Smoke was coming from the school building. Thick black smoke like a bonfire. I remember the calm most of all. The absence of panic. But knowing it was accelerating toward me, like a juggernaut.

I had to hide. Quickly. No. I am not in danger. This terror isn’t for me. My children are in danger.

It hit me in the chest, full-on.

There is a fire and they are in there.

They are in there.

And then I was running at the velocity of a scream. Running so hard that I didn’t have time to breathe.

A running scream that can’t stop until I hold them both.

Darting across the road, I heard sirens blaring on the bridge. But the fire engines weren’t moving. There were abandoned cars by the traffic lights blocking their path, and women were getting out of other cars just left in the middle of the road and were running across the bridge toward the school. But all the mothers were at the sports day. What were these women doing, kicking off their high-wedged shoes and tripping over flipflops and screaming as they ran, like me? I recognized one, the mother of a reception child. They were the mothers of the four-year-olds coming to do their usual pickup. One had left a toddler in her abandoned SUV, and the toddler was hitting the window as he watched his mother in this ghastly mothers’ race.

And then I was there first, before the other mothers, because they still had to cross the road and run down the drive.

And the four-year-olds were lined up outside the school with their teacher, a neat little two-by-two line; and Maisie was with the teacher, with her arm around her, and I saw how shaken the teacher looked. Behind them black smoke poured out of the school like a factory chimney stack, staining the summer-blue sky.

And Adam was outside—outside!—by that bronze statue—and he was sobbing against Rowena, and she was holding him tightly. And in that moment of relief, love flooded out from me not only onto my boy but onto the girl who was comforting him.

I allowed myself a second, maybe two, to feel gut-wrenching relief for Adam, and then I was looking for Jenny. Bobbed blond hair, slender. No one like Jenny outside. From the bridge the sirens wailed.

And the four-year-olds were starting to cry as they saw their mothers running full tilt toward them down the drive, tears streaming down their faces, arms outstretched, waiting for that moment to hold their child.

And I turned toward the burning building, black smoke billowing out of the classrooms on the second and third floors.

Jenny.

2

I ran up the main steps to the school and opened the door into the small vestibule, and for a moment everything was normal. There was that framed photo on the wall of the first pupils at Sidley House, smiling their baby-teeth smiles. (Rowena exceptionally pretty then, Jenny our gawky little duckling.) There was the day’s lunch menu, with pictures as well as words: fish pie and peas. And I was overwhelmingly reassured. It was like coming into school every morning.

I tried to open the door from the vestibule into the school itself. For the first time I realized how heavy it was. A fire door. My hands were shaking too hard to get a grip on the handle properly. And it was hot. I’d had my