‘Do you think you’re going to get away with this?’ I ask, watching her as she moves behind some bales of hay.
‘Define “getting away with it”,’ she calls. A few moments later, she appears back in view with a jerrycan in her arms. I know she’s capable of doing some pretty extreme things. She has the same look on her face that she had before she stormed out of the caravan and savagely beat that dog. The look of determination, as if the red mist has descended and nothing on earth will stop her from doing what she’s about to do.
‘Jess, this is silly. Can we just talk about—’
‘Talk?’ she says, smiling. ‘What do you think we’ve just been doing, Daniel? We’ve just been talking. What more do you want to know?’ There’s a couple of seconds of silence. I can’t say anything. ‘There we are. The time for talking is over, Daniel.’ She unscrews the cap of the jerrycan and begins sloshing the liquid around the barn. It smells strong, the stench of petrol filling my nostrils as I fight for a clean breath.
‘Jess, stop. You don’t know what you’re doing,’ I say, moving towards her.
She throws the jerrycan to the ground, the petrol still gulping and glugging out of the neck of the can as she puts a hand out in front of her to stop me. With the other, she dips into her pocket and pulls out a lighter. It’s a cheap plastic one – not one she can just throw to the ground at any moment, which provides me some small semblance of relief.
That relief doesn’t last long, though. Before I can even process what she’s doing, Jess has knelt down next to a bale of hay, flicked the lighter on, and the blue flame has caught the dry grass, turning it a bright, glowing orange.
64
The dry hay starts to fill the barn with smoke incredibly quickly. It’s a deep, insipid grey with a touch of green. It almost mesmerises me for a few moments. I can’t believe how fast the whole place has taken light. There’s a thick black fog being provided by the burning petrol, too, and I’m disorientated. I haven’t moved, but I still don’t know for sure which way I’m facing. The smoke seeps into my lungs, tickling at my throat and making my chest flutter and heave.
The barn is lit up bright, but I still can’t see anything. My eyes burn, and I blink rapidly as I try to wash the smoke from them. The heat starts to affect them, too, and I feel myself pulling my eyes closed to protect them. The whole barn moves and shimmers in a haze of heat, the waves of smoke hitting me every couple of seconds as I flit between trying to stop the pain and fighting to keep my eyes open, fighting to see where I am.
I can’t see Jess, either. I don’t know whether she’s somehow got herself an escape route or whether she intends to go up in flames with me and the barn. Either way, she seemed very confident and sure of herself. She knew exactly what she was going to do. She will have planned this long ago. And poor old trusting Claude is sat in the farmhouse, completely oblivious to what she’s doing. By the time he works it out, it’ll be too late. The barn will have burned to the ground, and he won’t be able to do a thing about it. There won’t be anything he can do by now anyway. The whole place is alight and the flames are growing by the second.
I stagger around, trying to keep heading in a straight line. The only problem is I have no idea if I’m succeeding or not. I can’t see a thing. I figure that if I can reach one of the walls, I can feel along for the barn doors, one of the two sets, and somehow kick them in. I don’t know how I think I’m going to do that, but it’s the only hope I’ve got. Walking in a straight line is far more difficult than it sounds, though. I have no sense of direction, and my mind is filling with fear and panic as my lungs fill with acrid smoke.
I want to take a deep breath and yell, scream and shout at the top of my lungs in the hope that someone, someone out here in this vast French wilderness, will somehow hear me. I know there’s no chance of that happening, but it’s completely irrelevant as I’m barely able to breathe, let alone take in a lungful of air.
The darkness builds and I can scarcely see the flames for the smoke. It billows and rolls as the fire crackles. I hear a sound like a gunshot, the sound of part of the roof giving way overhead, and I instinctively cover my head with my arms as I hear it come crashing to the ground not far from me.
I remember something I read in a book once, and I drop to my knees, crawling around on the floor, trying to gulp down the remaining oxygen that sinks to the ground during a fire. The air down here is cooler, a draught rushes across my face as I slug at the air, trying to force it down into my lungs, replacing the thick black smoke I’ve inhaled. It’s not helping me much, as I’m moving more slowly, the fire slowly engulfing the entire barn. I look up into the heat haze and see the flames licking around the rooftop, just as another piece of wood cracks and lands a few feet away from me, a hole appearing in the roof as the flames soar upwards, reaching towards their freedom.
Crawling forwards, trying to regain some sort of traction and keep heading in a direction – any direction – I cough and splutter as the smoke and ash fill my lungs.
I see stars in front of my eyes and feel my chest burning, heaving with the lack of oxygen. There’s a ringing in my ears, and my limbs start to feel numb, heavy. I feel the heat burning at the surfaces of my eyes as I put my head down on the dirty floor and let the smoke envelop me.
65
I’m jolted back to reality by the convulsions of my body and the cracking of two of my ribs, my lungs burning as though they’ve been filled with acid. I cough; a deep, throaty cough which rattles and lingers as I spit blackened saliva onto the ground beside me.
I try to focus my eyes, but they sting as I fight to stop blinking, my eyes reacting to having been severely irritated by the smoke. As I roll my head from side to side, through the milky film I can see the vague outline of a big man with a big moustache.
‘Claude,’ I rasp, my throat immediately feeling as though it’s lined with rusty nails.
‘You are okay,’ he says, placing a hand on my shoulder. ‘The ambulance is on its way.’
‘But Jess,’ I say, forcing the sounds out through the pain.