by Tim Parks
Help Me
‘You’re wanted in the lounge.’
I’ve barely turned the corner out of the cloakroom when I run into one of the church folk Shirley introduced me to earlier. The word ‘wanted’ frightens me. I would have washed my face if only the bathroom was empty.
‘Oh really. Thanks.’
I meant to hang around chatting in the hall at this point until the fire was discovered, then rush upstairs, save Frederick and report that Hilary’s room is already engulfed in flame. Can I spare a moment?
‘Hey, George,’ Charles calls through a group of talkers. ‘There you are. You’re wanted in the lounge.’
I’ll have to go. I cross the hall and start to walk across the parquet of the lounge, normally covered by carpets, where twenty or thirty people are dancing to African music I didn’t know we had. Who wants me? Is it a trick? All at once Shirley comes across from the window end and throws her arms round me in celebratory embrace. ‘George, where’ve you been? Everybody’s waiting for you!’
People dancing part about us. It’s like a scene from a film. Or a dream. It feels orchestrated. And Shirley has changed. She’s wearing a short black dress with glitter, the skirt pleating out high on her thighs, black tights with a zig-zag pattern, silver heels. Her hair is up with just two copper ringlets falling round each temple. A lot of make-up makes her look younger than I ever expected to see her again. I realise I haven’t really looked at her all evening. She must be mad at me.
She does a twirl, a pirouette, the motion lifting her skirt, then grabs me in a tight hug. Apparently this is prearranged because the music stops now and everybody cheers. But my ears are straining for some sound behind this sound. One of the school crowd, a small, smug, balding man in cord jacket and jeans, throws handfuls of confetti over us. Everybody’s clapping. ‘Give the girl a kiss,’ a voice shouts. But it’s Shirley kissing me, twining tight to me. I try to return some passion. Thankfully, the stereo crackles, starts, stops – somebody is having trouble with the faulty cueing device – then settles into ‘As Times Roll By’, or whatever it’s called. The appropriate guff, but loud enough to cover anything behind I think. Everybody is crowding into the room for the celebrations. Nobody will notice anything.
Tears glistening in her wide eyes, an extraordinary yearning look on her face, Shirley whispers: ‘Shall we dance?’ Her voice conveys infinite tenderness and irony. It’s a voice that says, ‘Despite everything, George, here we are, so we may as well celebrate.’ She begins to lead me in a slow lilting embrace.
Am I crying? I register such intense alarm. What am I doing? She hasn’t guessed the slightest thing. If she knew, if she knew even what I dreamt last night she might never touch me again. She might sense the lobster arms, the cancerous jelly protrusions.
Instead here she is being very sexy, pressing her whole slim body against me, her small breasts. The guests part into two lines forming an aisle down the lounge as we drift in slow and frankly clumsy rotation toward the fireplace end where a huge cake has appeared on a glass trolley. Behind it stands my mother, knife in hand, beaming almost tangible sentimentality. I recognise at once her Christmas cake recipe from Gorst Road days, it will be full of a pension’s worth of dry fruit and suet. Though instead of the usual Mary, Joseph and Jesus plus farmyard friends in adoration, another holy family are standing on the icing: three figures, toy figures, cuddly bears but dressed as human. There’s Daddy with a peaked railwayman’s cap, Mummy in an apron, and little girl. Us. Except that the child is standing up.
I glance at my watch. How long has it been?
A sudden hush. Mother pushes a knife into the cake. ‘Bless you, my dears,’ she says. ‘Many happy returns.’ Charles pops a champagne bottle. He says, ‘Good on you, George lad,’ in a fake downwardly-mobile voice. Shall I tell him that Peggy is having it off with Gregory upstairs? Around the happy figures on the cake, in rose-pink icing, Mother’s shaky hand has traced with how much love, ‘10TH ANNIVERSARY’. Loud cheers go up with the first splashing of champagne. Everyone crowds round to kiss and squeeze.
Then someone cries: ‘Speech, speech from the happy couple.’
‘Speech!’
A slow handclap begins: ‘Speech, speech, speech.’
My house is burning.
Shirley says: ‘Go on, George!’
I can feel the muscles in my face working. What is happening? Why has nobody said anything? Obvious. Because everybody is in the room here, looking at me. It couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. The jostle of glasses, plates of cake moving round, jokes, red faces, comments. Two or three flashes pop.
Frederick. I must hurry. Unless it has already gone out. Just say something and get it over with. Say something.
‘Oh come on, George.’
Why can’t I speak!
‘Tongue-tied by love.’
‘Give the man a drink.’
‘Spoilsport!’
My mother says: ‘Come on, love.’
And now I am perfectly aware that I am breaking down. This is what it is like, then. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. My whole body surges with damp nervous heat. My bowels are melting. I gaze at all these faces, eager, grinning. They find my bewilderment so touching. Probably all I have to say is thank you, thank you, for this wonderful surprise. But I feel my jaws locked, paralysed. They will not speak. I can sense tears rolling down numbed cheeks. Until finally I manage to croak, ‘Help me.’
But nobody hears; my whispered plea is drowned in a fierce yell from the door: ‘Fire! There’s a bloody great fire. Everybody out.’
An Act of Goodness
I should say, if for no other reason than not to appear ridiculous, that I always knew my plan was a risky one, that it could perfectly well have an entirely different outcome from the one I intended. Or, most probably, no outcome at all. At the time I reasoned that this was precisely why I was choosing it. In this sense: that no one with only moderate insurance and no financial problems could ever be suspected of arson against his own household; and second, that no one could ever be suspected of a murder attempt when the outcome was so spectacularly uncertain and in circumstances where so many people might, theoretically, rush upstairs to save the handicapped child who couldn’t save herself. That said, however, I felt fairly confident that in the selfish tipsy hubbub that is a party around midnight, the general reaction to a fire that in the secluded back study under cover of the thump of music and a haze of cigarette smoke ought to be well advanced before being discovered, would be to panic and rush to get out.
I was worried, of course, about Shirley and Mother. It was unlikely they would forget the little girl. Which was why I’d much rather Mother had never been invited, or had gone home early. But my idea was that I, being mentally prepared and well placed at the foot of the stairs, would shout commandingly to the others to stay down and dial 999 while I went up for the children. Given that Hilary’s room was directly above the study, given that both windows would be open, given that curtains are reasonably inflammable, and given above all that I would have the excuse of going for Frederick first, I very much hoped that on arrival in her room the child would be beyond saving, already liberated I liked to put it to myself, and why not for heaven’s sake?, from the prison of her body. I would rush down with Frederick only seconds before the staircase was engulfed in flames from burning varnish beneath, and by the time the fire brigade arrived all would be over.
Looking back now, I realise that this schoolboy-fantasy scenario was never really entirely probable, for who can know where or how fast a fire will spread? Nor in the end perhaps was it why I had decided to act as I did.
The voice shrieked fire, a voice I didn’t recognise. The reaction of this party crowd, these people we had sought out for this improbable celebration, was, as expected, first confusion, then a strong fast surge to the door. My problem was that I should have been at the foot of the stairs, ready. In the event, as I threw myself into the crowd, screaming, ‘The children, the c
hildren!’ it was to feel the whole house suddenly shudder; a deep crash rumbled the walls and a blast of hot air rushed to meet the fleeing party guests. Perhaps the place wasn’t as well built as the estate agents had led me to believe.
Desperately forcing my way, and being forced in turn, through urgent bodies out into the hall, I found the stairs already invaded by quick low flames. How could that be? At the same moment all electric light – this I had never even thought of – went out, throwing the whole scene into a lurid flickering relief that was simultaneously bright and dark. Looking up, aghast, disaster dawning, I saw my mother at the halfway landing where, behind candlestick columns of polished oak, the staircase turned. Incongruously she had lifted her long satiny party dress to hurry through fire licking across blue carpeting. As she scuttled round the corner out of vision, three or four stairs on the main flight crashed down in a fierce spouting of sparks and flame. The varnish, it seems, had been something of an excess of zeal. The armchairs must have been veritable incendiary devices. They shouldn’t be allowed. In any event, the scene, as I backed off from the heat, was lost in a billow of dark smoke and cinders, chokingly hot. And I paused.
Shirley grabbed me from behind in hysterics. She was shrieking. I didn’t turn to her. Now the drama had begun in earnest and so much was at stake, I found myself quite cool in that heat and thinking so rapidly.
The last of the guests were forcing their way out of the front door. Telling Shirley to follow me, I crossed the hall to breakfast room and kitchen, suddenly almost normal after the choking bonfire of the stairway. I sensed a curious adrenalin-filled togetherness as we dashed through the twilit spectre of our domestic life, a table laden with dirty dishes and party snacks, a black gleam from the door of the microwave. She reached for my hand. I pulled her along, shouting commands which she obeyed. So in just a few moments we were out through the side door, had opened the garage, pulled out the light aluminium ladder there and were stumbling to the house through flowerbeds and rockery to prop it wobbling against the wall below Frederick’s window. It will be quicker, I tell her, to cross the house once in, than to walk the ladder round to Hilary’s room.
How gloriously instinctively one acts. Without knowing where I’ve picked it up, I find, as I climb the ladder Shirley holds, that I have a hammer in my hand. Though it does occur to me as odd that Freddy hasn’t opened the window himself.
The top of the ladder is three feet short of the sill. Hammer clamped between my teeth I place my hands flat against the gritty brick, hugging the wall, and very precariously raise my feet to the second-to-top rung. Shirley shouts encouragement, begs me to hurry. ‘George, George, please!’ But her noise comes as if from a distant television. I am not listening to her. Extraordinarily lucid, what my mind is actually registering as my hand comes down with the hammer on polished glass, is that there is now a wavering glow sharpening the edges of the house to either side, that as yet there is no sound of a fire engine, that a group of guests are gathering at the base of the ladder.
The glass shatters. My hand reaches in for the catch. At the same time I’m shouting down that no one else should come up. I can handle it. And in the distance I distinctly hear Charles voice calling urgently for Peggy. Indeed. Where is she? Why haven’t they saved the kids? I heave myself forward over the sill, tearing my shirt on the pin that holds the bar.
The small room is acrid with a slow, almost leisurely grey smoke which flaps and curls as I open the window. Frederick is not on the bed.
My mind speeds up, spacily aware. Crossing rapidly to the door, I’m shouting for Frederick at the top of my voice. ‘Freddy, for Christ’s sake!’ No reply. Just the loudening roar of the flames. Through the door there’s laundry room, another bedroom and bathroom to the left, stairs to the right. I go right, towards danger, the fire; perhaps he tried to go down the stairs. I’m calling more and more urgently, Freddy, Freddy, fighting the urge to cough, to turn back; until, advancing into ever thicker, yellowish smoke which stings my eyes and makes me retch, I stumble over him, stretched on blue pile carpet, his slight body sprawled in red pyjamas, his blond hair, outflung arms.
In only a moment, less, I have snatched him back to the open window. He weighs nothing. He’s a feather. And I am sure he is alive, he must be. He can’t have lain there more than a minute. How long has it all been? Not more than a minute or two, surely. He must be alive. Suddenly I find I have faith. Am I breathing a prayer? No. I just know the worst can’t happen, it can’t. I race through the spare room and simply pass this dear child directly into the hands of the small balding man from St Elizabeth’s (my wife’s ex lover?) who, disregarding my orders, is standing at the top of the ladder looking in.
It’s so incongruous. As if I were living in my dreams. Or is that the key? For instead of throwing a leg over the sill and following Frederick down the ladder to safety, I stand at the window, filling my lungs, preparing to turn back, just as in my dreams I will insist on going back and back, looking and looking for that horrible thing that remains forever hidden. I turn back. And only now in this scorching, unbreathable heat, when I could perfectly honourably retire, do I begin to appreciate why I have acted as I have. It must have been, I see as I fill my lungs at the window, it must have been to force myself, in these precious seconds of action and drama, to truly decide once and for all, and in decision to find myself, that mutilated part of me I spend my nights seeking, that missing face. At the door to Hilary’s room presumably.
My chest painfully full of air, I grab the blanket from off the bed, gather it about me and run at the thickening smoke and flames at the top of the stairs, from where, forming a right angle, the other landing leads off to airing cupboard, our room, Hilary’s room.
I pass through flames. Screaming inwardly, breath fiercely held, I blunder, eyes closed, along the corridor, blanket tight about my head, legs scorching. The noise has become deafening, a rage of spitting, crackling explosions above a steadily booming roar. I pass through it. Weeping. Then suddenly there are no more flames, the landing beyond the stairs is clear, though the smoke here is dense as thick wool. Another sudden crash shakes our house.
How long can I hold this breath?
I turn toward the flickering quick orange light through an open doorway to the left which must be flames in the curtains of Hilary’s room (I planned for this). And I am just crossing that fatal threshold when I realise that they are already here, at the end of the landing. It was the smoke and my almost closed, burning eyes kept me from seeing them. My mother is slumped against the door to our bedroom. Her dress, her underskirt, are burnt up to the waist. Her skin is black. Despite the urgency, I experience a strange sense of revelation at the sight of her heavy vulnerable flesh. My mother. And the ragged bundle left to roll to one side, half in the airing cupboard, must be Hilary. She is motionless. I reach for the handle of our bedroom door, the only escape route, but even before I touch it I know what has happened. They locked it, Peggy and Gregory. Mother couldn’t get through to take the child out.
They locked it. But why didn’t they unlock it? For Christ’s sake. Can they still be in there? Surely not. The roar of the fire in Hilary’s room is ear-splitting. Why why why didn’t they unlock that door? This is mad.
My mother stirs and groans. I can’t see her face which is squashed against the angle of door and carpet. Hilary likewise is merely a mound in the swirling dark.
Has it been thirty seconds, forty, fifty, since I took this breath?
In the space of a breath, a single breath, I must decide who I am.
I look about me from stinging, streaming eyes. My generous mother. My hopeless, helpless child. My expensive, graceful, gorgeous house, burning. This is the moment of truth I have so expensively engineered. I look, but there is no revelation, no dream mirror to show me whatever my face may be, nor through the suffocating smoke do I miraculously see any missing part of me to be rushed off to that improbable surgeon. There is no help. Only unthinking, with savage violence, I beg
in to do my instinctive duty by these others.
Indeed my fury and aggression are their only hope now. For I cannot drag them both back through the bonfire at the top of the stairs. I know that. One perhaps, but not both. And though again I know that this is precisely the kind of situation I strove to bring about, nevertheless the simple solution of leaving that blurred bundle behind, is, for reasons beyond reason, immediately discounted now. I turn to the door, step over my mother and with the last of this interminable breath give the jerking kick I learnt long ago at karate.
The wood shudders but does not give.
Why shouldn’t I just pull my mother free, back along the passage through the flames, assuming it can be done? Why am I forever thinking one thing and doing another?
I’m shaking. To regain control I begin to breathe out, slowly, slowly, from squeezed and painful lungs. And kick again. This time I yell fiercely, expelling the last of that breath in an explosion of violence, springing the kick right by the lock.
Nothing.
So now I have to, have to, take this next breath, the beginning of the rest of my life. Which may be very brief. My lungs are crushed, skewered. My vision falters. In a frenzy of frustration, I take a few paces back to where the flames are darting in glowing beads across the carpeting and, head down, I simply charge the door with my thick stubborn skull. In a shock of pain, it gives.
I grab my mother. Heaving her dead weight across the room to the window, already flung open, I register that Peggy and Gregory are not here. Insanely they have fled through the window. Did they think somebody was trying to discover them? The roof of the side porch is only five or so feet below. I could lower mother down first, then follow her myself. Mission accomplished.
For a moment I pause. Leaning over the sill, I gasp the sweet air, taking in the dark garden scene, the crowd, the shouts, the halo of a tree in blossom, the silhouette of other chimneyed houses stretching away downhill under a yellow city glow, the sudden wail of sirens. Then, against my better judgement perhaps, like my mother so many years ago when she renounced her faith for me, I go back in there and lift that small soul clear.
