Sam hobbled forwards, closing the distance between us with one hand gripping the knife and the other hand clenching his thigh.
He was sweating, writhing, his clothes and hair grubby and unkempt. Blood coated his nose and jaw. His breaths were ragged and hoarse.
‘You’re so messed up,’ I told him.
‘Me. You. Same as everyone else.’
‘I’m not afraid of you.’ I reached down to my side and felt my fingers splash in something wet. ‘I’m not afraid of anything any more.’
Whirling sideways, I picked up the tray of developing fluid and slung it at his eyes.
He howled and arced backwards, snatching his hands to his face.
I let go of the tray and pushed him aside, driving my fist down against his bad leg, then bursting past him and streaking across the half-landing into the other room at the front of the attic.
It was dark but the walls glowed blue in the stutter of emergency lights from outside.
A pair of warped, timber-framed French doors were ahead of me, opening onto a small balcony that matched our balcony next door.
I could hear Sam blundering after me from behind, his footfall pounding in an arrhythmic tempo.
I didn’t stop.
Didn’t slow.
I just rushed towards the doors, raised my right foot in the air and stamped my heel against the lock.
The doors split apart like a log struck with an axe.
My heel ached as if I’d stamped on a spike.
I staggered outside, wheeled left, heaved air, grabbing hold of the crumbling brickwork of the parapet and looking down.
My upper body lurched forwards.
The front pathway to John’s house spun beneath me.
I could feel the heat raging from next door.
The house was a gathering inferno.
Windows had smashed outwards on the ground floor. Flames were billowing skywards, mingling with the bright flickers shining out from the front bedrooms. Sparks spiralled on the air.
I shielded my face with my hands and peered towards the ghostly outlines of the emergency vehicles that were parked slantways in the road. I could see two fire engines, a pair of ambulances, police cars. A team of paramedics were rushing Donovan towards one of the ambulances on a wheeled stretcher, holding padded medical dressings against his wounds, an oxygen mask over his face. Bethany was shouting at a duo of police officers in hi-vis jackets, urging them towards John’s front door.
A short distance back from them, scores of our neighbours and other onlookers were now gathered in the lighted doorways of their homes, on the pavement, in the street.
Beneath me, a chain of fire officers jogged up our front path wearing breathing apparatus. Two more fire officers were being lifted into the air on a ladder hoist attached to the back of the nearest engine unit. The articulated platform jerked and arced. They had a fire hose propped over their shoulders.
‘Help!’ I yelled. ‘Bethany! Up here! Help!’
People stared. Some pointed. Bethany looked up at me, stricken, then immediately directed the police officers’ attention to me as another woman screamed.
One of the fire officers on the platform tapped the shoulder of his colleague and pointed to me, then motioned to an officer on the ground.
I waved my arms crossways over my head.
Stray roofing tiles crunched under my feet. John’s balcony was in poor condition. The felt material I was standing on was sagging in places. The brickwork on the parapet was fragmented and loose.
‘Help!’
I screamed so loudly it tore my throat. I was choking on the fumes from the fire.
Then I heard a scuff of grit and a grunt from behind me as Sam stumbled out onto the balcony.
His hair and face were drenched. His eyes were red and sore-looking. His nose and mouth were bloodied.
He shook his head and banged his ear with the heel of his hand, as if he’d just dunked his head in a swimming pool.
He then tottered forwards and contemplated the street for himself, the wash of blue lights and vivid flames staining his skin and glistening off the blood on his shirt and trousers.
‘It’s over,’ I told him.
He bit back a sigh and looked up at the sky, the knife dangling from his grasp.
‘Sam?’ Quieter now. ‘I said, it’s over.’
He looked sideways at me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, Lucy, it can never be over for us.’
As his gaze swept my face, I felt the weight of everything that bound us. It seemed to weave an invisible tether out of the baked air.
This man knew every part of me.
He’d known more about me than I’d known myself.
And meanwhile he’d been a stranger to me.
But not completely.
Because I knew his mannerisms, his tics, the thousands of intentional and unintentional signals he gave out.
So I knew, perhaps only fractionally after he knew, that he’d made his decision about what to do next.
Which is why I was already spinning off my heel with my heart in my throat, already turning from him and driving with my thighs towards our home, striding forwards as he set off after me and dropped the knife, his arms unfurling, extending, ready to shove me off the balcony, the same way he’d pushed Oliver, pushed Mary.
Except I jumped instead.
Into the whirling darkness and the whipping flames.
My legs treading nothingness.
My arms outstretched.
I thumped into the brick parapet on the balcony of the house that had doomed me, my arms scraping stone as I desperately wedged my elbows and upper body over the top lip of the low brick wall, the heat raging beneath me just as I felt a violent tug and a drag on my waist, my vest top stretching, fingers scrabbling, a yell and a rip and a tear, and then a brief startled cry followed by nothing . . . nothing . . . until a ghastly wet thud and then the noise of everything else rushing back in.
I found that I was staring sideways with my face pressed against the heated bricks as one of the fire officers on the hoist snatched off his mask, looking horrified for a second, then thrust out his gloved hand, shouting, ‘Hold on, just hold on, we’re coming, hold on.’
‘Don’t let go!’ Bethany shouted.
I locked my elbows over the brickwork.
I clenched my right hand over the scar on my left forearm.
I dug my toes into the wall.
I don’t know how long I clung on, exactly, but then gloved hands grasped me and hauled me onto the raised platform and laid me down and patted my back and side.
I lay there, barely exhaling, not listening to anything that was being said to me, not able to process it yet, just gazing down over the edge of the platform at Sam’s broken body draped over the railings between our house and John’s, and nearby, the ‘For Sale’ sign that had been knocked sideways, snapped free of its bindings, lying crossways on the ground.