I tumbled out of bed, tripped and caught myself on the banister. It felt light on my feet jumping down the stairs, two, three, four at a time. Again on the next flight, I missed my footing and had to stop from falling too far by putting my hands out in front and waiting for my legs to catch up.
It was strange because they were my stairs, I knew every creak. There was the feeling of being alone and upside down, and the strangeness of the smoke swirling everywhere. Through the door of the front room I saw a thin column of flame spurting up to the ceiling from the dome of the paraffin heater and spreading outwards. It had so many colours in it – blue, rose, orange, red, black – it was only as I burst out into the night air in my pyjamas I could grasp the reason I woke up was the house was on fire.
I didn’t know I could fall out the bed like that, and there’d be nothing to stop me as everything flashed past. It was like it was happening to someone else – only my mum’s face in the hospital made me realise it was us. Fire engines came and ambulances, hose pipes, helmets and flames leaping up out the windows. I saw a man drop Busola from the top window where we slept now the Carthys were gone and lots of people rushing to catch her. Later, they said it was Mrs Ralf’s son who’d gone in to find her before the firemen came, which was odd because his mum hadn’t liked us making noise and we avoided her.
My dad said if ever he came home again to see the house on fire and his children being thrown out the windows and crawling around in the street, he’d turn on his heels and never come back.
‘This has set me back,’ he said, pointing to the damage done by the firemen’s axes. They hacked away at all the wood of the door frames and the wooden mantelpieces over the boarded-up fireplaces. There was black smoke damage on the walls and ceilings and it smelt horrible.
‘Never, ever let me see you playing with matches.’
It was one of lots of fires – the frying pan fire, the spilt paraffin fire, the playing with matches fire – the choking fire that landed us all in hospital when we thought there was nothing wrong with us. But the fire we always came home to was that mess of tar and soot and pools of water before our dad put it all back together.
‘You get back on your feet, you think you’ve recovered, and look what happens.’ There was a look in his face at seeing the blackened walls, gutted rooms and smashed-up doorways that was like he’d been killed but kept coming back.
‘We’re all safe, thank God, we have our lives,’ my mum said. And I saw him crying as he walked out the room.
He gave up what he was studying in Liverpool and came home. ‘I have no choice,’ he said, because he couldn’t sleep any more worrying what could happen. He was going to live with us all the time and not go back to Liverpool or Nigeria. ‘From now on, we are all under the same roof. I am making sacrifices and all of you will have to buckle down and work hard. If we have to stay here, so we have to make it work.’
‘Bedtime,’ my mum said.
We weren’t allowed out so much any more. We had to be home by the time he got in from looking for a job and go to bed when the news came on. You heard the bong of Big Ben as you climbed the stairs, and got a glimpse of the clock on television looking like the moon, then you heard it coming again faintly over the river. My mum wasn’t saying anything, but she was cooking for him and it was what she wanted. ‘Go to sleep,’ she said, and I drifted off in the bunk bed beside Busola while my mum went back to talking with my dad.
I got caught in the sheets and woke in the middle of the night. Busola was bunched up asleep beside me and I was sweating. There was no noise anywhere in the house. I heard a lorry going past on the main road, and then the sound of a train echoing along the embankment.
I lay back and thought about what woke me up. The man who was killed, Martin Luther King. But I couldn’t see his face, only his name in chalk on the blackboard. I blinked, and saw the girl falling slowly in her sari, floating down through the air, with me watching from the ground, only it was snowing and she was shaking her head. I wanted to lift my arms to catch her, but she saw me sweating from the burning cold of the snow, and turned away and vanished on the pavement.