Rosamund Lupton - Afterwards

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.

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.