Dick Francis - 10 lb Penalty

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.

Amy was there, wringing her hands and weeping. Amy crying for the charity gifts lost to ashes, the ugly whatnot gone forever, still unsold. What’s a whatnot, Amy? An étagère, you know, an upright set of little shelves for filling an odd corner, bearing plates and photographs and whatnot.

And bullets?

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I left the bullet in my awful cardigan in the shop, and now I’ve lost it, but never mind, it was only a lump of old lead.”

Mrs. Leonard Kitchens patted my shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t you worry, boy, there was nothing in those old shops but junk and paper. Leaflets. Nothing! My Leonard’s here somewhere. Have you seen him? Likes a good fire, does my Leonard, but the fun’s all over now. I want to go home.”

Usher Rudd stalked his prey backwards, framing his picture, stepping back and clicking. He grinned over my blanket, took time to focus, aimed his lens.