“Yes. Thank you.”
“Always set the alarms carefully, and disable them and start the vehicle from a distance, however short a time you’ve been away.”
I’d followed his instructions faithfully, but our sump-plug merchant had tried no other tricks. I ferried my father safely from the church hall back to the bow-fronted headquarters and left him there with Mervyn, the two of them endlessly discussing tactics, while I housed the Range Rover in its lockup and finally ran a pizza to earth in the local take-away.
Mervyn and my father absentmindedly ate half of it. Mervyn laid out dozens of stickers and leaflets in piles, ready for distribution. Yes, he said when I asked him, of course by-elections were wildly exciting, they were the peaks in his busy life. And there were the final touches to be arranged for the fund-raising fete organized for next week — such a pity Orinda wasn’t in charge of it this time...
I yawned and climbed the narrow stairs, leaving my two elders to lock up: and I woke in the night to a strong smell of smoke.
Smoke.
I sat bolt upright in bed.
Without much more than instinct I disentangled my legs from the sheets and violently shook the unconscious lump on the neighboring mattress, yelling at him, “We’re on fire” as I leapt to the half-open door to see if what I said was actually, devastatingly true.
It was.
Down the stairs there were fierce yellow leaping flames, devouring and roaring. Smoke funneled up in growing billows. Ahead of me the sitting-room blazed yellow with flames from the rear office underneath.
Gasping at once for breath in the smoke, I swiveled fast on one foot and jumped into the bathroom. If I switched on the taps, I thought, the bath and the wash-basin would overflow and help to drown the flames: I pushed the stoppers into the plug holes and opened all the taps to maximum, and I swept a large bath towel into the toilet bowl and pulled the flush, and, whisking the sopping towel into the bedroom, I closed the door against the smoke and laid the wet towel along the bottom of the door in a sort of speed near to frenzy.
“The window,” I yelled. “The bloody window’s stuck.”
The window was stuck shut with layers of paint and had been annoying my father for days. We were both wearing only underpants, and the air was growing hot. “We can’t go down the stairs.” Doesn’t he understand? I thought. He smoothly picked up the single bedroom chair and smashed it against the window. Glass broke, but the panes were small and the wooden frames barely cracked. We were above the bow windows facing the square. A second smash with the chair burst through the sticky layers of old paint and swung open both sides of the window — but underneath the fire had already eaten through the bay window’s roof and was shooting up the wall.
The bay window of the charity shop next door blazed also with manic energy. If anything, the fire next door was hotter and older and had reached the roof, with scarlet and gold sparks shooting into the sky above our heads.
I scrambled over to the door, thinking the stairs the only way out after all, but even if the wet towel was still holding back the worst of the smoke it was useless against flame. The doorknob was now too hot to touch. The whole door had fire on the far side.
I shouted with fierceness, “We’re burning. The door’s on fire.”
My father stared at me briefly across the room.
“We’ll have to take our chances and jump. You first.”
He put the damaged chair against the window wall and motioned me to climb up and leap out as far as I could.
“You go,” I said.
There were people now in the square and voices yelling, and the raucous siren of the fire engine coming nearer.
“Hurry,” my father said. “Don’t bloody argue. Jump.”
I stood on the chair and held on to the window frame. The paint on it scorched my hands.
“Jump!”
I couldn’t believe it — he was struggling into shirt and trousers and zipping up his fly.
“Go on. Jump!”
I put a bare foot on the frame, pulled myself up and leapt out with every scrap of muscle power... with strong legs and desperation: and I sailed through the flames from the bay window and missed the front burning edge of it by terrifying inches and crashed down onto the dark cobbled ground with a head-stunning, disorientating impact. I heard people yelling and felt hands grabbing me to pull me away from the fire and I was choking with smoke and winded by hitting the unyielding ground and rolling, and also fighting to free myself from the firmly clutching hands to help to cushion my father’s fall when he jumped down after me. I had no strength. Sat on the ground. Couldn’t even speak.
Incredibly there were camera flashes. People were recording our extreme danger, our closeness to dying. I felt helplessly angry. Outraged. Near to sobbing. Illogical, I dare say.
Voices were screaming to my father to jump and voices were screaming to my father not to jump, to wait for the bellowing fire engine now charging across the square, scattering onlookers and spilling people in yellow helmets.
“Wait, wait,” people screamed as firemen released their swiveling ladder to extend it to my father, but he was standing up silhouetted in the window with a reddish glow behind him. He was standing on the chair — and the door behind him was burning.
Before the ladder reached him there was an outburst of bright, sunlike flame in the room at his back and he stood on the window frame and threw himself out as I had done, flung himself through the climbing fire of the bow windows below into the darkness beyond, knowing he might break his neck and smash his skull, knowing the ground was there but unable to judge how far away: but too near. Break-your-bones near.
A camera flashed.
Two men in yellow suits like moon suits were sprinting, heavy-gloved hands outstretched, dragging as they went a circular trampoline thing for catching jumpers. No time to position it. They simply ran, and my father crashed down into them, all the figures sprawling, arms and legs flying. People crowded to help them and hid the tangle from my sight but my father’s legs had been moving with life, and he had shoes on, which he hadn’t had upstairs.
I was covered in smoky dirt and bleeding from a few cobble-induced scrapes and grazes, and I had tears running down my face, although I didn’t know I was crying: and I was dazed still and was coughing and had blisters forming on my fingers and feet, but none of it mattered. Noise and confusion filled my head. I’d aimed to keep my father safe from danger and I hadn’t even contemplated a smoke alarm.
His voice said, “Ben?”
I looked up woozily. He was standing above me; he was smiling. How could he?
Men in yellow suits unrolled hoses and poured gallons from the tanker onto the killing bow fronts. There was steam and smoke and unquenched flame: and there were people putting a red blanket around my bare shoulders and telling me not to worry. I wasn’t sure where they had come from, or what I didn’t have to worry about.
I wasn’t actually sure of anything.
“Ben,” my father said in my ear, “you’re concussed.”
“Mm?”
“They say your head hit the ground. Can you hear me?”
“No smoke alarm. My fault...”
“Ben!” He shook me. People told him not to.
“I’ll get you elected,” I said.
“Christ.”
People’s familiar faces loomed into my orbit and went away again. I thought it extraordinary that they were walking around fully dressed in the middle of the night but at one point learned that it was barely twenty minutes past eleven, not five to four. I’d gone early to bed and jumped out of the window wearing only my watch and my underpants and got the time wrong.