Deborah Crombie: In A Dark House

The station officer, Charlie Wilcox, ripped the call slip off the teleprinter. “It’s just round the corner – warehouse in Southwark Street,” he told them. “Sounds like it’s well away – we’ll need sets on this one.”

Within seconds they were aboard the appliance and rolling into Southwark Bridge Road, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. A fine drizzle blurred the September night, slicking the tarmac and haloing the street lamps. As they swung round into Southwark Street, Wilcox called out from the front, “It’s showing.”

As the pump came to a stop, Rose saw a bank of smoke hanging heavily over the street, and in the lower windows of a brick Victorian warehouse, the telltale red-orange flicker of light. Acrid smoke stung her nostrils as she leapt from the appliance and pulled on her mask. She caught a glimpse of huddled bystanders as Wilcox said, “Rose, Bryan. It looks as though the worst of it is still confined to the ground floor. Take in a guideline and check for occupants.” He turned to his sub officer, Seamus MacCauley. “Check round the back, will you, Seamus? See what we’ve got.”

The other BA team from the pump ladder was already laying hose line as Rose and Bryan tallied in their breathing apparatus, checked their radios. “Door’s open,” she heard Wilcox shout as she pulled her visor down, and she registered a faint surprise before focusing again on her task.

They went in low, Rose leading, peering through the smoke, feeling their way into the dense blackness. The heat seared, even through their coats, and she could hear the groaning and cracking of a well-established fire. She fell against something soft and bulky, went down on her knees. Through a momentary thinning of the smoke she saw shapes piled above her like a giant child’s tower of blocks. The disjointed images suddenly coalesced.

“It’s furniture,” she said. “Someone’s piled up bloody furniture.” The polyurethane foam used in furniture cushions and mattresses was highly flammable – the thought of the devastating fire that had started in the furniture department of the Manchester Woolworth’s crossed her mind, but she banished it, concentrating on the job at hand.

Still on her knees, she moved forward, feeling her way round the obstacles, trying to find a suitable place to tie off the line. Suddenly, there was a loud crack, then a series of pops, and the heat bloomed as debris rained down on them.

“Flashover,” shouted Bryan. She felt him grab her waist belt. “We’ve got to get out of here. Forget the line, Rose.”

Even with Bryan ’s weight dragging at her, her momentum carried her another foot, her hand still outstretched with the line.

“I said forget the fucking line, Rose. Evacuate! Evacuate!”

Even though her stubbornness, her refusal to let the fire get the better of her, was one of the things that made her good at her job, she knew he was right. Going on would be suicidal, and nothing could have survived this blaze without protection.

Hemmed in on one side by a sofa, on the other by what seemed to be stacks of lumber, Rose tried to turn back the other way. As she maneuvered her body round, her gloved hand came down on something that yielded beneath her fingers. It felt malleable, like flesh, with the brittleness of bone beneath.

Rose looked down, blinking eyes burning and swollen from the heat, and felt the bile rise in her throat. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “We’ve got a body.”

On this morning there had been no drifting slowly into consciousness, no lingering in imagined wholeness, no savoring the memory of life as it used to be.

Fanny Liu opened her eyes and took stock, reluctantly. It was later than usual, that she could tell by the angle of light in the sitting room window, but still overcast, as it had been the previous day. She slept, as she had since she’d become unable to manage the stairs, on an old velvet-covered chaise longue that had belonged to her mother. For once in her life her small stature was a blessing – a few inches taller and her feet would have hung over the end of her makeshift bed. At night the arms of the chaise cradled her, offering a solid comfort; in the daytime her bedding could be tucked away, allowing her to maintain an illusion of normalcy.

Elaine had argued with her, of course, wanting to put a bed in the sitting room, but for once Fanny’s soft refusal had held sway over her roommate’s brisk efficiency. The wheelchair was bad enough. For Fanny, a bed in the sitting room would have meant admitting the possibility that she might not improve.

Her cat, Quinn, still lay curled on her feet. The only sound in the flat was his faint purring. It was the silence that had awakened her, Fanny suddenly realized. There were no footsteps upstairs, no sound of movement in the kitchen. Elaine was always up first, making coffee and puttering around the flat. Before leaving for her job as an administrative assistant at Guy’s Hospital, she allowed time to make Fanny tea and toast and helped her with her morning routine.

Perhaps Elaine had overslept, thought Fanny – but no, Elaine was as punctual as Big Ben. Could she be ill? “Elaine?” Fanny called out tentatively, pulling herself up by using the arms of the chaise. Her voice seemed to echo emptily, and a spark of fear shot through her. “Elaine?”

There was no answer.

Suddenly, Fanny remembered her dream, a jumbled nightmare of doors closing softly, and felt again the dream’s inexplicable sense of loss. It made her think of the deathbed watches she’d kept as a private nurse before her illness, of the way she’d felt when she’d awakened from an inadvertent doze and known instantly that her patient had died while she slept.

Just as she knew, now, as the silence closed around her, that the house was empty. The sound of the door closing in the night had been no dream.

Elaine was gone.

There was nothing Harriet Novak hated more than having to tell strangers that she attended Little Dorrit School. Grownups would smile and coo as if it were disgustingly sweet – which made Harriet wonder how many of them had ever actually read Little Dorrit - and kids looked at her as if she’d just teleported from another planet.

Not that the school itself was all that bad, she allowed, digging the toe of her trainer in the play yard dirt as she waited for the first bell. It was just that it sounded so God-awfully sickening – like telling people you were called Tiny Tim.

It helped to be prepared, Harriet had learned, knowledge a necessary defense against living in a Dickens-infested neighborhood. She’d read the biography in the school library and could tell people more about Dickens than most wanted to know. Charles Dickens’s father had been briefly imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison, just up the road, and twelve-year-old Charles had lived in lodgings nearby. This experience had stayed with him all his life, working its way into many of his books, and then his creations had come back to haunt the Borough. Not only did the area boast a Little Dorrit Court and a Little Dorrit Street, there was a Marshalsea Road, a Pickwick Street, and a Copperfield Street.

At least there was nothing named after Oliver Twist. Harriet thought Oliver a right little tosser, too sweet to be borne. Davey Copperfield she liked better. He was a bit soft on his dead mum, but at least he had bitten his horrid stepfather. Davey knew how to stand up for himself.

Harriet scowled, only half aware of the smoky tang in the air and the students straggling in the school gate. Her thoughts settled into a well-worn groove. Would it be better to have a wicked stepfather, like Davey, rather than a father who had walked out? He said he loved her, her dad, but if that was true, how could he have left them?