“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.
Chapter 59
KIT
21 March 2015
On the Piccadilly line train the wheels hurl a repeated accusation at the tracks: Idiot, idiot, idiot, they chant, in a fast waltzing rhythm that seems to grow louder with each strike. Years crash into each other and lies leap over one another. I still don’t know how Beth found our house, or whether that’s significant. I don’t know what it is I must try to disprove. Five minutes from Laura and I still don’t know what I’m going to say to her. I’m dreading the look on her face but at the same time I’m hoping that I step through the front door to a stream of rage, that she loses her advantage of surprise by spelling out the unknowns that make it impossible for me to establish a case for the defence. Does she only – only! – know I slept with Beth, or have they, between them, worked out the full extent of my deception? However Beth made contact, it would have been terrifying for Laura and although that will now have been supplanted by rage, it doesn’t seem right. All those years of protection will have been for nothing.