shirtsleeves rolled high up. I unrolled them and tugged them over my hand. Then I pulled the door open.
I screamed her name. Over and over. And each time I screamed her name, smoke came into my mouth and throat and lungs until I couldn’t scream anymore.
The sound of burning, hissing, and spitting; a giant serpent of fire coiling through the building.
Above me something collapsed. I heard and felt the thud.
And then a roar of rage as the fire discovered fresh oxygen.
The fire was above me.
Jenny was above me.
I could just see my way to the stairs. I started climbing them, the heat getting stronger, the smoke thicker.
I got to the first floor.
The heat punched me full in the body and face.
I couldn’t see anything—blacker than hell.
I had to get to the third floor.
To Jenny.
The smoke went into my lungs, and I was breathing barbed wire.
I dropped onto my hands and knees, remembering from some distant fire drill at my old school that this is where oxygen is found. By some small miracle, I found I could breathe.
I crawled forward, a blind person without a stick, fingers tapping in front of me, trying to find the next flight of stairs. I ought to have been crossing the reading area with the huge, brightly colored rug. I felt the rug under my fingers, the nylon melting and crinkling in the heat, and my fingertips were burning. I was afraid my fingertips would soon be too burnt to feel. I was like the man in Adam’s mythology book, holding onto Ariadne’s thread to find his way out of the labyrinth; only my thread was a melting rug.
I reached the end of the rug and felt the texture change, and then I felt the first step.
I began to climb the stairs up to the second floor, on my hands and knees, keeping my face down to the oxygen.
And all the time I was refusing to believe it could really be happening. This place was soft-cheeked children and fidgeting on the stairs and washing lines strung up across classrooms with flying pennants of children’s drawings. It was reading books and chapter books and beanbags and fruit cut up into slices at snack time.
It was safe.
Another step.
All around me I heard and felt chunks of Jenny’s and Adam’s childhoods crashing down.
Another step.
I felt dizzy, poisoned by something in the smoke.
Another step.
It was a battle. Me against this living, breathing fire that wanted to kill my child.
Another step.
I knew I’d never get to the third floor; that it would kill me before I could reach her.
I felt her at the top of the stairs. She had managed to get down one flight.
She was my little girl and I was here and everything was going to be all right. All all right now.
“Jenny?”
She didn’t speak or move, and the fire’s roar was getting closer and I couldn’t breathe much longer.
I tried to pick her up as if she was still tiny, but she was too heavy.
I dragged her down the stairs, trying to use my body to shield her from the heat and smoke. I wouldn’t think how badly hurt she was. Not yet. Not until the bottom of the stairs. Not until she was safe.
I cried to you, silently, as if by telepathy I could summon you to help us.
And as I dragged her, step by step, down the stairs, trying to get away from burning heat and raging flames and smoke, I thought of love. I held onto it. And it was cool and clear and quiet.
Maybe there was telepathy between us, because at that moment you must have been in your meeting with the BBC commissioning editors about the follow-up to your “Hostile Environments” series. You’d done hot, steamy jungles and blazing, arid deserts, and you want the next series to be in the contrasting frozen wilds of Antarctica. So maybe it was you who helped me envisage a silent, white acreage of love as I dragged Jenny down the stairs.
But before I reached the bottom, something hit me, throwing me forward, and everything went dark.
As I lost consciousness, I talked to you.
I said,
