Reginald Hill - Singing the Sadness

He raised his right foot and stamped. The plasterboard cracked. He stamped again, harder. His left foot slipped off the narrow beam, his whole body hit the floor and he went through the ceiling in an avalanche of dust and plaster. And water.

He landed soft and noisy. The softness was a human body. The noise was the human whose body it was, shrieking.

He’d have felt pleased with himself if there’d been time. It was a shower room and the trapped man had sought refuge here. Only it wasn’t a man. It was a young woman. He knew that because she was naked.

She was in a bad way. She’d probably breathed in too much of the smoke which was gradually filling the cubicle for anything but incoherent shrieks to come out. Her arms were gashed like she’d pushed them through a windowpane, and her face and body were heat-blistered, but worst of all was her left leg which was both burnt and torn. Went through a burning floorboard, he guessed. If she’d headed for the back of the house she might have made it the way he’d come in. Instead she’d headed into the shower, back into the shower most likely, which would explain both why she had no clothes on and why she hadn’t heard any noise as the fire took a hold below.

Shoot, here he was thinking like a detective when what he should be doing was thinking like big Arnie. The heat in here was growing by the second and it couldn’t be long before the flames came licking through and all that the rapidly diminishing flow of water would do was let them boil before they burnt.

He said, ‘We’ve got to get out. Can you move at all?’

Her eyes struggled to focus. They were grey and he could see that her face, even though blistered, was the face of a pretty girl, late teens maybe.

The eyes had got him now. They registered puzzlement for a moment. Couldn’t blame her. Even if he had been Arnie, she’d still have wondered where the shoot he came from.

He said, ‘I’ve come down from the attic. We’ve got to get back up there. Are you ready?’

Stupid question. Her gaze went up to the hole in the ceiling then back to his face. She nodded. He could see that even that movement caused pain. He knew there was worse to come and he guessed she knew it too.

He stood up and pulled her upright with him. She let out what was a shriek in any language but she wasn’t a deadweight, not quite. She was giving what help she could. He looked up at the hole into the attic. Even with munchkin-level ceilings, this was going to be the impossible side of difficult. What he needed was a ladder. He looked down. Best he could find was a low plastic stool, presumably for Arnie-sized showerers to sit on so they didn’t bang their heads. He propped the woman up against the wall, which was getting hotter by the second. Then he squatted down, positioned the stool, thrust his head between her legs from behind, took her weight on his shoulders and stood upright like a weightlifter doing a lift-and-press.

He presumed she shrieked some more but he couldn’t hear for the sound of the blood drumming in his ears, or maybe it was the fire raging beyond the wall.

‘Try to pull yourself up,’ he yelled.

He didn’t know if she could hear or, if she could, whether she’d have the strength or the will to obey.

But she was brave, braver than he guessed he’d have been in like circumstances. And she had the resilience of youth. He felt her body move, and he stepped up on to the stool and grabbed her thighs in his hands and thrust upwards with all his might.

There was a moment when he thought she was stuck, and all his strength was gone, and there was nothing to do but subside into the cubicle and pray they suffocated before the flames got to them.

Then suddenly she was through, and the weight was off Joe’s shoulders.

‘Don’t come off the beams!’ he yelled, easing her legs through the hole.

Now it was his turn. He reached up, took a strong grip on the beams on either side of the hole, and hoisted himself through with the fluency of an Olympic gymnast on the parallel bars.

Gold medal? he thought. Piece of cake. All you need’s a fire under your bum.

But there was no time for the National Anthem. With a series of cracks like an old sailing ship taking a broadside, the attic floor burst open at half a dozen points and tongues of flame came shooting through to lick greedily at the ancient beams.

Suddenly Joe was back in his childhood schoolroom. If a nine-inch beam burns at one cubic inch every five seconds, how long will it be before the house collapses in on itself? Answer: doesn’t matter ‘cos you’ll have suffocated long before that.

OK, another problem. (Shoot! I must be dying. My life flashing before me, like they say in the books.) If a middle-aged, out-of-condition, overweight PI picks up an eight-stone woman and tries to run along a narrow burning beam in dense smoke which reduces visibility to nil and breathing to less, how does someone explain to his pet cat, Whitey, why he never came home again?

Answer: not applicable. Man would have to be mad to try it. Man would have to be very stupid indeed not to work out that one life was preferable to two deaths and abandon the woman to her fate.

Such was the verdict of rational thought. But Joe was a slow thinker and he’d been up and running before good old rational thought had even got out of its blocks. The woman was in his arms. He hit the slope of the roof at the point where he’d already removed the slates to make a breathing hole, erupted into the cold Welsh night like a comet, went straight over the edge, crash-landed on the lean-to roof, bounced twice, caught the edge of the water butt with his heels, twisted in the air to give the woman the soft landing, and found himself lying on the blessed ground, looking up at a sky so packed with stars, he felt he was trembling on the brink of eternity.

Earth beneath him, water pouring over him, fire behind him, and the bright clear air above. The four first things. It was right they should be the four last things also. He felt his whole being drawn up towards that starry infinity.

Then this peace was disturbed by the arrival of moving shapes and chattering voices, growing ever louder and calling his name, all trying to get him back to the world of here and now. But his wise old body knew that this world was full of pain and tribulation, so it gave commands.

Joe closed his eyes, and light and noise and thought and feeling all died together.

When he awoke he was still on his back and he still had a naked female body in his arms.

Only now it was Beryl Boddington’s and it smelled of wild strawberries and honey and she was sighing with pleasure, like a cello accompanying a Brahms love song. And, amazingly, he could see this marvellous body, every bit of it, even as his other four senses took their perfect pleasure.

Even their minds seemed twined. He yearned towards her, eager for consummation, and in his head he heard her laugh as she pulled away a little.

‘No need to rush, Joe, boy. Not here, this is for ever, this is the place where you can pick all the flowers along the way, and see them grow again even while you’re drinking in their scent.’

This was beyond anything Rev. Pot had ever promised in his most optimistic sermons. If Joe had known heaven was going to be like this he’d have paid a lot more heed to Aunt Mirabelle and never turned over and gone back to sleep on a Sunday morning. Let word of this get around, and there’d be queues forming at first light outside chapels and churches and mosques and temples and tabernacles and synagogues …

He looked at Beryl’s smiling loving face above his, felt her warm scented breath on his lips. He strained up to press his hungry mouth to hers, got so close that her beloved features blurred. He relaxed and blinked once, twice, and smiled as that lovely, loving, beloved visage slowly came back into focus, till once more he saw clearly those big brown eyes, so full of compassion and concern …