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.
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 alright. All alright 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 till the bottom of the stairs. Not till 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 forwards, and everything went dark.
As I lost consciousness I talked to you.
I said, ‘An unborn baby doesn’t need air at all, did you know that?’ I thought you probably didn’t. When I was pregnant with Jenny I found out everything I could, but you were too impatient for her to arrive to bother with her prologue. So you don’t know that an unborn baby, swimming around in amniotic fluid, can’t take a breath or she would drown. There aren’t any temporary gills so that she can swim, fish-like, until birth. No, the baby gets her oxygen from the umbilical cord attached to her mother. I felt like an oxygen supply attached to a tiny, intrepid diver.
But the moment she was born, the oxygen supply was cut off and she entered the new element of air. There was a moment of silence, a precipitous second, as if she stood on the edge of life, deciding. In the old days they used to slap the baby to hear the reassuring yell of lungs filled with air. Nowadays they look closely to see the minute rise of a baby-soft chest, and listen to the whispering – in and out – to know that life in the new medium of air has begun.
And then I cried and you cheered – actually cheered! – and the baby equipment trolley was wheeled out, no need for that now. A normal delivery. A healthy infant. To join all the billions of others on the planet who breathe, in and out, without thinking about it.
The next day your sister sent me a bouquet of roses with gypsophila, known as ‘baby’s breath’, sprays of pretty white flowers. But a newborn baby’s breath is finer than a single parachute from a blown dandelion clock.
You told me once that when you lose consciousness the last of the senses to go is hearing.
In the darkness I thought I heard Jenny take a dandelion-clock breath.