He Said/She Said(107)
Laura went quiet as my heart doubled its weight. I had to stop them talking. I flexed my foot to remind Laura what I’d gone through. When I brought it down, I trod on a loose wire and saw, quite spontaneously, how I could exploit this. The idea was like an EXIT sign flashing green in a dark cinema.
‘It’s just, dinner?’ said Laura to Beth. ‘After what happened last time. We hardly parted on the best of terms.’
I moved my foot an inch to the left, then hooked my big toe around what I was 99 per cent certain was the telephone wire. I could see even from here that the connection was loose at the socket.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Beth’s confusion was fast hardening into irritation. I trod down hard, waiting for the line to go dead.
‘Sorry would be a start,’ said Laura, matching Beth’s anger. Fuck. I tried to look at the wires without making it look like I was looking. I tried to move without making it look like I was moving. My pulse was so loud in my head I expected my neck and wrists to bulge with the beats.
‘Me apologise to you?’ said Beth. I moved my foot a little to the left and tried again.
‘She’s hung up on me!’ said Laura. There was no time to enjoy the relief. Before she could check for a dialling tone, I took the phone out of her hand under the guise of soothing her and set it gently down.
“Maybe you should calm down a bit first,’ I said. ‘Your hands are shaking.’
I had a poker face, a poker voice and a poker body, from the eyebrows I strained to keep in place to the toes I willed not to tap. I knew that Laura would not be able to let this lie for more than a day or two. I mentally replayed Beth’s mistakes – the gifts, the photographs, the constant fucking turning up at my house – and reasoned that all I was doing was building on foundations she’d dug herself. What she had started, I needed to finish tonight.
At three o’clock in the morning, London is as quiet as it gets. The world seemed soundless as I crouched on our third-floor landing with one of Mac’s old lighters in one hand and a fifty-quid candle in the other. Beth had been in our flat on her own at least once; time enough to copy a key from our spare and set the original back on its hook. Suggesting this trespass to Laura would surely persuade her it was time to cut all ties.
The gas hit the flint and the flame glowed gold. I crept upstairs with a heavy heart. If I could have thought of a way of getting away from Beth without hurting anyone, I would have done it. I would have done it in a heartbeat. But I had not had a better idea. I had the wrong kind of intelligence for this sort of thing, and this was the best I could do. I took one last look over my shoulder at the little flame on the third-floor landing, and then turned the corner into darkness.
I hoped that the smell of Blood Roses might waft up the stairs to wake Laura up. If not, I’d leave it half an hour or so – long enough to make seem as though Beth had long been and gone – and then together Laura and I would go down the stairs and find the candle. I was almost looking forward to it. We’d blow it out, talk it through, and together we would conclude that Beth’s campaign against us was escalating, and that we had to go. I thought we might stay awake, pack the important things, and be away before breakfast. I didn’t want to live with my mum but I didn’t mind spending a couple of nights there while I persuaded Laura never to muddy our clean break from Beth.
I was still so complacent I stayed a few seconds in my counterfeit sleep after Laura woke from her true one. I had not taken into account how deranged I was, in those sleepless weeks. I suppose that my temporary state of insanity drained the part of my brain that usually concerned itself with physics and chemistry. I’d been focused on the fact there was no draught in our stairwell, no soft furnishings to catch, and I’d overlooked the old-fashioned paint and peeling paper on the stairwell walls. An untrimmed wick burns high and the flames of a new candle double their reach. The heat alone must have been enough for that decades-old paint to bubble; the stairwell went up like it had been doused in petrol.
The acrid smell of both smoke and the burning paint filled the flat in what seemed like seconds and then it was too late; it was far too late. Laura was running away from the safety of the rooftops into the roaring heart of the fire. The injury to my foot had been deliberate but when I took the hit of the hot door handle, it was all instinct. The smoke and the fire and the destruction were so far from my intention that they barely seemed like my doing. If you’d asked me who had set the fire, in those burning moments – if I’d been able to think, if I had been able to talk – I would have told you that it was down to Beth, and believed it myself.
Fire changes everything. That night was the beginning of Laura losing her confidence; the start of her dependence on me. The paradox is uncomfortable that I am the cause of so much of her anxiety, but I have tried to see the good in it. I had to become her nurse as well as her protector and, while I hated to see her in pain, there’s no denying that in our new dynamic we regained the intimacy she never really knew we’d lost.
I didn’t see all that coming in the hour after our escape, as Laura and I sat in the ambulance and watched the windows of our flat exhale black plumes. Nothing rips you out of the future like pain; your world gets reduced to the searing moment. Instead of cooling, my hand felt hotter every second, as though it was still pressing down on hot metal; I would not have been surprised to see acid burn through the bandages. I tried to flex my fingers to see if the nerves were damaged, but even invisibly small movements tore at my broken skin. I could already feel the welts and ridges in my palm’s flesh. I took only small comfort in my observation that, in the future, if ever Laura forgot how close Beth had come to destroying us, all I had to do was hold her hand.