Chapter 44

CHAPTER 44

Sam finds the shelf with the baking powder, then picks up some orange juice as well, and a pack of heavily discounted salmon, and a Kit Kat. Queues for the self-check machines. Reads his phone while he waits.

There's a new bakery across the road from the supermarket, with a big sign reading, perkily, That's Loaf! , which he is not at all sure about, but it's good to see something open instead of close. He should have gone in before he went to the supermarket; then he could have had a coffee and a little sit-down. But now he's got to get the salmon back to the fridge . A brownie, then. And a cinnamon swirl for Lauren.

Past the closed carpet shop. Past the bus stops. Past the dead tree.

Birds are shouting to be heard over the traffic, and a train is screeching, and he hears as well the rising and falling murmur of people outside the pub, and the beep of a truck reversing, and sirens as a fire engine pulls past him, and the shouts of the kids outside the filling station.

Past the turn at the top of the road,

and

smoke, which is unexpected; a couple of the neighbours have working chimneys but it's not cold yet

and it isn't a barbecue because the smell is wrong

and it's thick; thick grey smoke against the pale-grey sky, too much of it, and around the curve of the road there's a fire engine parked halfway down, and its lights are flashing like a disco through the haze; and he cannot, immediately, identify the smoke's source but it almost looks like it's coming from their house, so he lengthens his stride and thinks it must be a mistake, surely, he'll realise that it's fine, any moment he'll see that it's a fire in a bin, or a compost heap alight in someone's garden; but with each step it becomes clearer that the smoke is billowing from his own roof, water arcing on to it from the ground, and that his roof is burning.

The flames, just visible; orange, bright.

And smoke. So much smoke.

"What's going on?" he calls out, as if maybe it's still a misunderstanding. "What's happening?"

"Stand back, please," a firefighter is saying, "could you stand back."

The kids from across the road are lined up behind their front wall, staring, the older ones filming. Adults are standing in their doorways too, swearing, watching, coughing. The smell. Birds furious in their trees.

Lauren's not in there, right? She can't have got back in the ten minutes he was away, she must still be at Nat's looking after the kids? He pulls his phone out and calls.

The coat rack that took him three and a half hours to put together. The blanket his mum knitted for Lauren that he just got down from the attic for the colder days. The black-and-yellow plastic bag he got in that supermarket in Denmark that says Netto Netto Netto . His computer, shit, Lauren's too. Their passports. Their everything. The clamour, the way the curls of smoke move but the outline, the wider shape of the billows, barely changes.

Lauren hasn't picked up.

He steps back, towards the moving van that was hidden behind the fire engine, and Toby is there, standing by a pile of boxes, staring at the building. "It's on fire," he says.

"Yeah," Sam says. He tries calling Lauren again. He is not letting himself feel scared when it rings out: Caleb's got the phone and he's watching videos, or Magda's got it and it's straight in the bin, or Lauren's taken them to the playground. It's definitely fine. It's fine.

Well, not fine , the flat is on fire. His jug shaped like a pineapple, it was so expensive, he spent two years wanting it and then deciding he didn't need a pineapple-shaped jug until Lauren got it for him for a wedding present, and it's pottery, right? Maybe that'll survive? Pottery is meant to get really hot?

Wait, why is everything on fire? Did he leave the stove on? A battery charging? Is this him, did he do it?

"Do you know what happened?" he says to Toby.

"It started in the attic," Toby says. He sounds shaky.

"Shit. Fuck. I was just up there." He was only getting the blanket down, though. You can't start a fire by getting a blanket, can you? "Maryam's okay, right?" he says.

"Yeah," Toby says, "she's at the new place."

Sam tries calling Lauren again. She doesn't answer. He tries again. He leaves a voicemail this time, which he doesn't think he's done since maybe 2015. "Hey, where are you, can you call me as soon as you get this. Uh, the flat's on fire. Uh, let me know you're definitely not in it." He can hear in his own voice that he is not as certain of this as he'd like to be.

"Oh," Toby says. "Lauren's around."

"What? She's at Nat's." Around like what? Around like in the flat?

"No, she's over there somewhere." Toby gestures. "She was in the flat, she says the smoke alarm went off. She called the fire engine."

Sam's chest clears; then he feels it clot again but this time it's just the smoke, of course he's not breathing well. He steps back around the moving fire engine, looking for her, the terrible dense light of the air. Then he sees her, sitting on the kerb, in her sequinned jacket for some reason, legs stuck out into the road, two overflowing plastic bags beside her, and her giant plant, as tall as he is, sitting in the gutter.

"Fuck," he says as he runs over. "Lauren."

She looks up, face blank, then she focuses on him. "Hey," she says. And then, after a moment: "Sam."

"I thought you were at Nat's," he says as he kneels down in the gutter to hug her.

"I came back." She looks dazed, diffuse, half-smoke herself.

"Are you okay? Has someone checked? You were in there, did you breathe any of the smoke in?" She hates being looked after but she's just been in a fire, surely one of the fire engine guys should look her over?

"I'm fine," she says. "No, really, I'm fine. I'm just glad I was there to raise the alarm." She's looking at him; touches his cheek, then his nose, then her hand in his hair, a moment's gentle pull, and then another tiny tug on his scarf, like she's checking he's still there.

"It's going to be pretty bad, I think," she says. "I was—it looked like the attic might just burn but I think maybe it's gonna be quite a lot of the flat. Because of, you know, the nature of fire. But maybe we should move anyway, right? Walthamstow? Sydney? Berlin? I hear Bordeaux's nice."

He clambers up from his awkward squat-kneel-embrace to sit next to her on the kerb and look at the house. The pavement is gritty through his trousers, which are, he guesses, his only trousers—he's got nothing to change into, this is it, he is wearing all his clothes.

"You shouldn't have—" He looks at the things she's brought, papers, insurance, their computers, and of course, of course she shouldn't have gone running and grabbing things in a fire, but he feels simultaneously the joy of seeing that some of their things have survived, and the shock of seeing that this is it, this is everything they own.

New thoughts keep striking him, new things that this means.

"Nat's going to be unbearable," he says.

"Fuck, she is, isn't she?" Lauren says. "I hadn't even thought of that."

She leans her head on his shoulder, and he's still trying to absorb it all.

Start with the simple things. His bag of groceries. He will not be cooking the cut-price salmon today.

He pulls out the cakes instead. "Cinnamon swirl?"

"Oh," she says. "Thank you." And she takes it, and starts crying, big rolling tears, chest in and out, loud and urgent and coughing with it, and he hugs her and says, "Don't get snot on your pastry," and "It's only stuff," and "I can't believe you saved your large awkward houseplant, obviously the single most important thing we own."

"I got the passports," she says, sniffling. "And the computers. And the mug that says ‘Coventry: Capital of Fun,' if that's any use to you."

"Well, then," he says.

Then she starts sniffling less, and he feels his own ability to pretend to be okay pass away from him, and the breaths through his chest start juddering, and he lies back on to the pavement and now the back of his only jacket is wet as well, and he looks at the sky and it's his turn to cry. He says, "I can't believe our fucking house is on fire."

He feels her lie back next to him, her hand reaching out to take his. Clamminess, his hand or hers or maybe both.

"I think it's raining again," she says. "Maybe that'll help."

She always feels raindrops first.He watches, upside down, a magpie on a gutter.

"Fuck," he says, just remembering things, the detritus of their lives. "Toothbrushes. Phone charger. Your wedding dress. The score sheet from that time I beat you at Scrabble."

She laughs. "Yeah, what a fucking mess."

The sounds of the road, the water, Toby in the background. The kids from the filling station, who have come down from the main road and are awestruck, delighted, aghast.

"That peach jam I got at the fancy market," he says. He didn't even like it much but he'd only just opened it. "Oh god, Gabby's not going to be happy."

He feels Lauren stiffen next to him. "Gabby," she says.

It had been a mistake to let the blackbird realise he could see it from the kitchen. Sometimes you just want to make a coffee and not have a bird tap irritably at the glass until you give it raisins.

"She'll be fine," he says, trying to reassure Lauren, "she'll just go back to eating worms instead, it's probably better for her," but he can't stop imagining the little blackbird trying to fly up to a burnt-out window and tap tap tap , and nobody there to see her. And he'd just opened a new bag of raisins. And the dish he always laid them out in, which his little brothers pooled their money to get him from the bargain homewares store when he moved out and which he never had any use for until the dickhead blackbird started coming to visit.

He closes his eyes but he can't shut out the sounds, the shouts, the water, the clatter, the crackle. He tries to feel every part of his body, his toes, his calves, his knees in a triangle before him, his back against a shirt that is beginning to get wet as the damp soaks through his jacket. Lauren next to him, and it could have been so much worse.

The smell. It's hard to accept that this is the smell of everything they own, on fire.

His hands are wet and gritty as well, he can't even wipe his face clean. "I'm so glad you're okay," he says. "I was so scared when you didn't answer your phone."

"Oh, yeah," she says, and she's still crying as well. "Sorry, I can't believe I did this but I actually left it in the flat. Who needs a phone when you have"—and she sits up for a moment, pulls something out of one of her bags—"when you have a jug shaped like a pineapple?"

"My jug!" he says as she waves it in the air, then sits up and takes it. She saved it. Of course she saved it.

"So you…like that jug?" she says, as he nestles it back in the bag, and she laughs again and hugs him sideways, and he finds a tea towel in the bag as well and wipes his face with it, and hands it over to her.

The flat burns before them. He lies back again so he doesn't have to see it; Lauren twists to look at him for a moment, and squeezes his knee, and lies back as well.

"Would you rather," she says next to him, "that we were married with a burning attic, or that we'd never met but you still had all your stuff?"

"What sort of a question is that?" he says.

"A hypothetical one."

"Can I just have, you know, the world where we're together and the attic isn't on fire?" The smoke above him and through the air is indistinguishable from the clouds.

She squeezes his hand. "I know it doesn't sound fair," she says, "but you actually can't."

"I guess I'll take this one, then," he says after a moment, and they lie still on the pavement.

"Okay," she says. "That's lucky. Because this is the one we've got."