Beth wasn’t on the doorstep. Apart from a shiny new lock and hinges, the front door looked like it always did, today accessorised with an empty KFC box and a little sun-dried pool of vomit. A glance upwards at the black feathers around our boarded-up kitchen window told the real story. Fatigue hit me like a wave. I was running off caffeine and panic. I had not slept through the night since the fire, not because I was scared – it was still too early for that – but because there was something I had to do, a cold insistence that peaked in the small hours. Each night I lay awake on the lumpy sofabed in Adele’s spare room and vowed I would do it the following day, but days were taken up with hospital appointments, flat viewings and long, circular calls to our insurers and our landlord.
We opened the new lock using a new key. One of the first things Kit had done, almost immediately he was out of the hospital, was to get all our mail redirected to Adele’s house; I had transferred my morning post routine wholesale to her doormat. The only letters here in Clapham were the usual flyers and delivery leaflets. The stairwell stank of stale smoke and smut was thick on the walls. I held Kit’s good hand.
The carpet still squelched with filthy water. It wasn’t the staircase itself that had caught but the walls with their layers of ancient paint and paper. Everything in the sitting room had burned or, in many cases, melted. The television, Kit’s camera and laptop were lumps of plastic and wire, shot through with ribbons of silicone and glass splinters. He’d only lost a week’s work, having backed most of it up on his computer at UCL, where, for all I know, it still is, waiting patiently on some long-buried hard drive. (His department gave him sick leave, which I encouraged him to extend: I hadn’t told Beth where my new job was, but she knew where Kit spent his days. When I fell apart, Kit’s sick leave turned into indefinite, but unpaid, compassionate leave. I encouraged him to stay away; theoretically, he could still go back and complete his doctorate, but I have learned to stop reminding him of that.)
Both our mobile phones and our landline and answering machine had been destroyed, the latter a black pool of cooled lava on the table. We had already replaced them with new numbers. Almost all our books would have to go. The burning around the photo of my mum was so bad that I couldn’t even identify which bit of charred mess had once been the frame.
Kit’s coat had been hanging on the back of the bedroom door. All that remained were metal buttons, the skeleton of a Swiss Army knife and some blackened coins from his pocket.
He stood in front of where his eclipse map had been. My hand flew to my mouth. ‘Kit! All your memorabilia!’
‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘But actually most of it’s in storage at Mum’s. There’s only really the T-shirts here and they might be ok.’
Amazingly, he was right. The bedroom was smoke-damaged but not fire-damaged. I opened the wardrobe and sniffed the nearest dress. It looked passable but the smell made me retch. ‘We might be able to air our stuff, or wash it out,’ I said. In silence, we bagged up the clothes and the contents of a bookcase that had escaped more or less unscathed, blackened spines wiping clean to reveal the titles beneath and the pages only edged with soot.
Everything else we left to be cleared by the landlord.
We bumped our bags down the stairs. Outside, the kebab man was sitting on an upturned crate, smoking a cigarette.
‘It’s a bad business.’ He looked down at Kit’s bandaged palm. ‘Where you off to now? You staying local? Your mate was asking.’
‘Mate?’ My voice shook without my permission.
‘That girl with black hair, she was here the other day. She was in a right state.’
‘I’ll bet she was,’ I said under my breath.
‘If she comes back,’ said Kit evenly, ‘tell her we’re going travelling. Backpacking. Taking a gap year.’
‘Yeah.’ The kebab man nodded. ‘Do you good, get a break from it all.’
On the way back to Adele’s, we drove past Lambeth register office. We stopped at a red light. A bride and groom in shiny, round middle age laughed on the steps in a hail of rice.
‘Let’s do it now. What are we waiting for?’ Kit’s voice was musical with the thrill of uncharacteristic spontaneity.
‘You mean it?’ It was the first genuine smile I’d given in days.
‘I’d fly you to Las Vegas tonight if we could afford it. But let’s fill in the forms. Whatever step one is. I want you to be my wife. This has only made me realise how much it matters to me.’ Determination had momentarily wiped his brow clean of the deep lines that had settled since the fire. ‘Look; about the only good thing about the police not being able to charge Beth is that we’re not tied to her by another court case. We can make a clean break. We get married. We start again. Change our names. Go and live somewhere else, maybe up where Mac and Ling are.’
The lights turned green without my noticing; I only broke our kiss to pull away when the driver behind blared his horn. I’d made my decision before I was out of first gear.
‘Let’s go for it,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of a better way to disappear.’
The traditional red telephone box had the traditional stench of urine, and I had to breathe through my mouth. Outside, cars nosed along the still-unfamiliar neighbourhood of Green Lanes, past the Turkish bakery that never seemed to close and the forlorn jewellers that never seemed to open.