Afterwards

and replaced them with soldiers. It’s a World War One cake. Which is violent but fits with key stage two, so I don’t think anyone’ll 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 always came last by a mile but didn’t give a hoot! She has never owned a piece of Lycra clothing and, unlike virtually every other mum 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 towards the school, thinking surely I’d see them coming towards 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 towards 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 towards 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 flip-flops and screaming as they ran, like me? I recognised one, the mother of a reception child. They were the mothers of the four-year-olds coming to do their usual pick-up. 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 crocodile; 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 chimneystack, 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 blonde 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 towards them down the drive, tears streaming down their faces, arms outstretched, waiting for that moment to hold their child.

And I turned towards 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 realised 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 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 any more.

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 practice at my old school that this is where oxygen is found. By some small miracle I found I could breathe.

I crawled forwards, 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 coloured 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 break-time.

It was safe.

Another step.

All around me I heard and felt chunks of Jenny 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.