East of the City (44 page)

Then I coughed, really hacking now. Smoke.

I put my ear to her mouth, rested my hand behind her head. Useless. Then I slid my hand down to her chest, feeling for her breathing. One second. Two seconds. Could I feel movement?

‘Come on, Katy. Please.’

And then I felt it, her ribcage rising, shallow. Tears of relief welled up in my eyes. She was alive. Alive. But when I wiped my eyes, I felt something like oil on my hand, and when I looked it wasn’t oil, it was blood. It was on Katy’s chest too, on her pink sweater where my hand had been. Half-delirious now, I thought stupidly that I’d killed her.

But her chest still rose and fell. My hand went to the back of her head again, where I’d held her. There was blood. And down the back of her neck, and on the rug underneath. I propped her up, rested her head in my lap and parted her hair. The lump was like a golf ball. When I touched it, she moved for the first time, and moaned.

More ceiling came crashing down in a fiery ball beside us, spraying flame. I shook my head, and flicked a burning stick off Katy’s sweater. We had to move.

Putting an arm round her back, I got up on one knee, slid my other arm under her legs. Then heaving, I staggered to my feet. I took three steps before I knew it wasn’t going to work. I sank to one knee, gasping for air. I couldn’t breathe, standing up like that. And I couldn’t see either, not even the little I could make out from down nearer the floor.

Katy moaned again. I tried to say something, to reach her. I told her we were going to be fine, that she was safe. All around us now the building was collapsing in flames.

Grabbing her under the arms, I hauled, sliding back on my arse. More ceiling dropped, burning beams falling like felled trees.

I thought maybe I could get us back to where Pike had fallen. With the fire-door jammed, that was the only way out, the place I’d come in. Maybe, I prayed, if that wall of fire had died down, we had some kind of chance to get through. I was on my knees, hauling Katy along beside me. Then I stopped and looked round. I had a moment of sheer panic, a sob came up in my throat. If Katy hadn’t been there, I might have gone off my head.

The fire wasn’t dying, it was swelling, the separate fires joining into a solid blaze. I couldn’t even make out the walls of the room, couldn’t see where we were. Should I go forward? Back? In the middle of a roaring inferno, I was lost.

Then Katy moved in my arms.

Forward or back, it just didn’t matter. I had to get her away from the flames.

I grabbed her wrists, took a few quick breaths of rotten air near the floor, then I stood up and hauled her. I got half a dozen paces, then suddenly the world broke in two. One second I was on my feet, the next flat on my back, and there was this ripping, buckling sound, louder than the fire. I sat up, shaking my head. I still had hold of Katy.

It felt like she was shuddering, then I realized it wasn’t her, it was the whole floor. And the fire. I couldn’t believe my eyes, half of it was gone. It was still roaring away on our right, and in front, but to the left it was gone. The smoke seemed to be clearing too. Then it did clear, and I saw the stars, and my heart slammed against my ribs.

The top floor of the stand had collapsed. Not all of it, just the central section, and the front of the section where we were. Out to our left, there was nothing but fresh air and a hundred-foot drop to the concrete tiers of the stand. Ahead of us, fire, and another drop. To the right, more fire. Behind — I turned. Now that the smoke had cleared I could see it quite clearly. I could see it, but I didn’t know what to feel. The fire-door.

‘Katy, can you hear me?’

She didn’t answer or move.

I let go of her. Bent double, I hacked up gobs of black phlegm.

Then looking round me again I tried to get a grip. We were perched on a ledge. The ledge was burning, the edges crumbling as the fire ate its way towards us. From the track below, the concrete stairwell must have looked like a giant chimney-stack, with just our ledge and the roof above us jutting out from it, suspended over air.

It was the fire-door or nothing.

I pulled my sleeve down over my hand, grabbed the handle and shouldered the door. It didn’t budge. I tried a few more times, then I stepped back and kicked it. The bloody thing was jammed solid. In a frenzy I charged it again, hit hard, and felt something in my right shoulder tear. Pounding with my left fist I slumped to my knees, then I heard that ripping sound again and I turned just in time to see the front half of our ledge disappear. It dragged most of the ceiling down behind it. But the ceiling didn’t collapse completely, it lodged like a cage of fire around us, around what was left of the floor.

I knelt down by Katy and held her. That was when I knew for certain we were going to die.

I wasn’t scared then. Christ knows, I was angry, fucking furious, but the fear seemed to have worn itself out, become irrelevant somehow, and with my left hand I pulled Katy’s legs back from the flames. I stroked her hair, I remember that. And I talked to her.

They say your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that didn’t happen to me. I just remembered things. Mum and Dad, and Katy when she was a kid. Things just kind of rose up and went by me as I breathed in the smoke. Hallucinations? I saw Lee Chan. My hand felt Katy’s hair. It was softer than silk. I told her what I saw, but when I looked down at her I could see she didn’t hear me. When I said her name, she didn’t answer. I was glad she was safe. The fire was flaring now, soon it would be burning our skin. She was sleeping.

There was another ripping sound, loud and close. Katy’s sleeping, I thought. I thought, She won’t feel a thing.

The flames were beautiful. Then my body jerked to one side, I held tight to Katy and out of the fire someone whispered, ‘I’ve got you.’

‘I’ve got you. You’re okay, we’ve got you.’

My body rolled in slow motion. The fire-door was under me, lying flat, torn off its hinges, and someone had hold of my arms. He was dragging me. I breathed. Breathed again. There was air. Pain exploded in my shoulder and I screamed out for Katy. Tubs’s face came out at me like a mask.

‘She’s okay. We’ve got her. She’s okay.’

I reached out for the mask, pain ripped through my shoulder, and that’s when I slid away into the dark.

N
OW SELLING.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, head in my hands, I stared out at the sign across the way. It was morning, the sun rising into a cloudless sky, and I felt awful. Worse than awful, like death. My mouth and throat were caked with gunge, my whole body ached, and the slightest movement of my right arm sent a whiplash of pain over my shoulder and on down my back.

I looked at the clock. 7 a.m. If I started now, I could probably get myself showered and dressed in time for a taxi to get me to the hospital by nine. The start, so they’d told me the night before, of visiting hours.

God, I wanted to sleep. Just an hour. I closed my eyes but it didn’t help. Groaning, I eased myself gingerly off the bed and headed for the shower. The shower. So ridiculously normal. And less than twelve hours earlier, I’d been ready to die.

Katy wasn’t in danger. They’d told me that before I'd left the hospital. Out of danger, sir, but you can’t see her now, come back in the morning. This was at 2 a.m., well after the last of the journalists had gone. The nurse had strapped up my shoulder by then, and the doctor had checked my lungs and shone his little torch in my eyes. They'd wanted me to stay in for observation, but I hate hospitals, so when they told me it was my choice, I up and checked out. I told them to make sure Katy got a private room, I signed the payment guarantee. Then Tubs took me home. He watched me get myself into bed, then he had to get back to his place to check on his mum. One last time he told me not to worry about Katy.

Showered and dressed now, I took an overnight bag and went into Katy’s room to pack some fresh clothes for her. Stuff she might need in the hospital. On the way through the lounge I hit the answer machine. Three messages.

‘Ian, it’s Lee.’ I sat down on Katy’s bed and opened her dresser drawer left-handed. ‘Are you all right? What was all that at the airport? I didn’t know what I should do so I just got on the plane. I don’t want to talk on this thing, can you call me? I’m at the Phoenix Hotel, Dublin. The number here-’ There was a pause, then she read out the numbers. ‘I’m in and out all day, but I’m here for a week, so call. Hope you’re okay. Bye.’ Another pause. ‘Katy, if you get this message instead of Ian, can you call me? Bye.’

Socks, underwear, and a few hankies. Next drawer down, some shirts.

Out in the lounge a beep, then the second message came on.

‘Ian, it’s Pam, at the office.' She sounded embarrassed. ‘Mr Mortlake asked me to call you.’

Rummaging in the drawer, I muttered, ‘Tell me the worst, Pam.’

‘There’s some personal things of yours down on the box, and up here in the office, he wants them taken away. He says tomorrow.'

Tomorrow, I realized closing the drawer, meant today. Today I’d been invited to empty my desk. My suspension had become permanent. I was fired.

I took the bag through to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Toothbrush, toothpaste-

‘Mr Collier.’

Kerry Anne Lammar, her voice cut through the air like a chainsaw. I stopped, my left hand on a brown bottle in the cabinet.

‘It’s Ms Lammar from Lonnigan’s, about the Coopers Dock penthouse? There’s no point drawing this out, Mr Collier. Under the terms of your contract, your failure to make full payment on the property, as I’m sure you remember, triggers clause seven.’ To refresh my memory she read out clause seven in full, detailing the five thousand quid a week penalty. She was ringing to inform me that she’d just made the first deduction from my deposit. She was getting a real kick out of all this. ‘To avoid any misunderstandings we’d prefer it if you could come down to the office. I’ll be only too happy to run through it all with you in person then, Mr Collier. Thank you.’

She rang off. My hand still on the pill-bottle, I stared. Awake for just twenty minutes and my day was on an accelerating downward slide. I finished packing, then left for the hospital.

‘Anyone home?’

Katy looked up. ‘Hey,’ she said, dropping her magazine onto the floor. She shuffled her pillows behind her back and tried to sit up.

Going in, I said, ‘I brought some clothes and stuff.'

She pointed to the chair. I put the overnight bag down there, then I perched myself on the window ledge. She seemed surprisingly normal. Her face, like mine, looked badly sunburnt. And there was a carefulness in how she fixed the pillows that wasn’t like her. But apart from that, and the bandage around her head, she really seemed okay.

I said, ‘They reckon you’ll live.’

‘You didn’t see breakfast,' she told me, her voice rasping a bit.

‘You feeling okay?’

She put out a hand, tilting it from side to side.

We seemed to stall then. I found myself looking at her, wondering what it was I’d expected. Tears? An emotional scene where we bawled our eyes out about how much we loved one another?

‘How’s the head?’

‘Sore as hell.’ She bent forward, running a finger down the bandage. ‘No stitches but they reckon I’m lucky my skull wasn’t fractured.’

‘More bone than brains.’

She slumped back into her pillows. She was knackered. I saw now why the nurse had only given me fifteen minutes.

I said, ‘Do you remember much?’

‘Nope.’ She reached out to the side table and picked up a sheet of paper. ‘The cops just left. That shit, Fielding. I gave him a statement. He left a copy.’

Taking it, I asked her what happened when Fielding came to the flat. ‘Did you see him plant that brooch?’

‘He didn’t plant it,’ she said, surprised. ‘It was just sitting on the dressing table in your room.'

I frowned.

She said, ‘He went straight to it, like he knew where it was. I was with him. He didn’t plant it, Ian.’ She looked at me curiously. ‘Whose was it?’

Shaking my head, I sat down on the edge of her bed and read the statement. She watched me in silence.

Katy, in the statement, claimed to have gone to the Stow to watch the dogs. She’d bumped into Tubs and they’d sat together in the stand, where they’d been joined later by Fielding. She’d left them to go to the Ladies, but she found that the Ladies was full. There was a queue. Not wanting to wait, she’d gone upstairs to the staff toilets which she knew were off-limits to the public, and probably empty. They were empty. She didn’t remember if she’d been hit. All she remembered after going into the staff toilets was waking in hospital with a severe headache. She didn’t remember anything about a fire.

Underneath all this was her signature. I handed the statement back to her and she placed it on the side table.

I said, "They swallowed that?’

She ignored the question. She said, ‘Were a lot of people hurt?’

I didn’t say anything: the nurse had warned me not to get Katy too stirred up.

‘Ian, I’m not gonna throw myself out the window, am I? Come on. What happened?'

‘There was a crush in the stand,’ I said. ‘When the fire started, people panicked. No-one died.’ Then remembering Pike, I added. ‘Not in the crush.’

On the way over in the taxi I’d seen the banner headlines at the news stands. ‘Dog Stadium Blaze: 1 Dead. 27 Injured’. For the first time in fifty years the dogs had made the front pages. Around the kennels, no-one would be cheering.

‘A big fire?'

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Big.’

She waited for more, but when it didn’t come she screwed up her face. ‘You’re worse than the bloody cops, you are.’

‘How about I tell you, then you tell me.’

‘Tell you what?’ she said warily.

I pointed to her statement. ‘The truth?’

She mulled that one over. Finally she nodded.

So I went first. I took it from me and Tubs arriving at the Stow, the edited highlights of my talk to Pike, and on to the fire. I told her that Pike died in the fire, but not the details. And I told her that I’d dragged her from nowhere-near-the-Ladies, over to the fire-door. Again I glossed the details. I really didn’t feel like reliving the whole thing over, right then.