Keats settles her chin. ‘Right. I’ve summed up what I found out. She was ill because her immune system was failing.’ This I know. ‘She was also seeing a therapist at the clinic—’
‘What?’ The word wobbles along with the astonishment running through me. ‘Why would Mum be seeing a therapist? Apart from the illness, she was happy.’ Mum visiting a shrink somehow feels like an attack on me, my childhood. Our happy home.
‘No she wasn’t,’ Keats tells me without ceremony. ‘That’s what her therapist and doctors concluded. They think she was sick because of some type of stress in her life. The stress, in turn, was causing her to become depressed. Her immune system took the brunt of this. It’s as if her own body was attacking itself.’
I open my mouth to deny this but the veil of a twisted memory falls over me, obscuring the café, propelling me back to my childhood home.
I was twelve. Dad had been away on business for five days, leaving me and Mum alone. I came in from playing outside with my neighbourhood friends to find Mum looking drawn and pasty as she stepped out of Dad’s office.
‘What’s wrong, Mum?’
The strain as she tried to smile in response dropped the sides of her mouth down instead of up. She looked so sad.
‘I’m fine, baby. Just fine.’
Her dragging footsteps told their own story. Then she wobbled and collapsed. Frantically I ran over to her screaming, ‘Mummy, wake up. Wake up, Mummy.’
I called for an ambulance which came quickly. I sat with her in the back of it, feeling helpless, sobbing my heart out.
When we reached the hospital, I didn’t want to let go of her hand, but the nurses and doctors told me they needed to take her away to make her better again. I’d never felt anything as cold as her hand. I called Dad on the payphone but all I got was an eternal dialling tone. When the doctor came to speak to me to assure me Mum was on the mend, I asked him what was wrong with her. He wouldn’t tell me.
I stood in the middle of the corridor shrieking at his back, ‘Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong with my mummy? Why won’t you tell me?’
I come out of the awful memory with a huge audible gasp, as if I’ve been underwater. My hand comes up to my chest to steady my breathing, to halt the shockwaves stunning my body.
Someone’s calling my name. ‘Rachel, are you okay?’
Keats. I look over at her. She’s worried, shaken, sunglasses lying discarded on the table. I grab her water bottle and greedily gulp like it’s the liquid of life.
With a gentle ease, I place the bottle down. Slide it back into her space. Know it’s time to face my own truths. ‘I think I always suspected there was more to her illness than Dad told me. Maybe he was trying to put a gloss on it for his child—’
‘Her therapist thought her problems stemmed from a troubled marriage.’
Keats’s interjection rocks me back in my seat. I frown so hard the skin above my eyes is twisted and raked with pain. ‘That can’t be right. They were happy. Loved each other. A more devoted couple you couldn’t meet.’
One of Keats’s hands spread across the table, her way of trying to connect physically with me. ‘I’m only telling you what I found out. It took me years to realise that my parents detested the sight of each other. Years later to find out they married because he got her pregnant with my sister.’ It’s Keats’s turn to fight for air to her lungs. ‘A child’s vision of the world is so innocent it often numbs the reek of rottenness around them.’
We both struggle to regain our composure before she carries on. ‘Your father, Frank Jordan, many believe grew his empire through sheer ruthlessness. There are lots of stories about him having the reputation of a man who will do anything to get what he wants. Anything.’
Keats’s solid gaze locks with mine. ‘People are scared of your father. Are frightened to speak out against Frank Jordan because he uses the law to take them out by threatening libel action. That seems to be an old trick of his, using libel to shut people up. There was another story where it was alleged a family was destroyed after Frank Jordan made a successful hostile takeover of their business which was in trouble.’
I should be shocked. I’m not. Not after hearing Dad threaten Michael and his mother. ‘My razor-sharp claws.’ And didn’t he himself admit to my very face, ‘Business associates aren’t your friends, Rachel; on the contrary, they’re more likely to be your enemies.’ Other memories and unspoken words cloud my mind. How, after Mum’s passing, Dad wouldn’t mention the words, ‘wife’, ‘mother’ or ‘mum’. And ‘Carole’. How hadn’t I seen, heard, that he’d also stopped using her name? I’d put it down to grief, but the plain and honest fact may have been he didn’t care about her anymore. My whole world’s falling apart and I sit here calmly as if it’s happening to someone else. Someone else’s dad. Someone else’s mother. Someone else’s daughter.
‘Do you think,’ my question is slow, ‘that maybe that’s why Michael has lured me to the job? He’s seeking some type of business revenge against…’ Dad. The word’s lodged in my throat. The muscles inside my neck won’t let it go. Instead I finish with, ‘Frank Jordan?’
Keats nods with approval and I realise that’s why she’s been mainly referring to Dad as ‘Frank’, trying to create a distance between him and me. I silently thank her for that.
‘Dad – Frank – told me that Danny is Michael’s father. Maybe Michael is a proxy of revenge for his father. I don’t get it. Dad said he and Danny weren’t friends.’ My brows come together, pulling the skin across my forehead, although I swear he said they were friends when he got me the job at Danny’s when I was eighteen. I shake my head in an attempt to clear the fuzzy memories of the past. The haze gets thicker instead of lighter. ‘I can’t be sure, but there must’ve have been more of a connection between them if Dad felt an obligation to financially help Danny’s family by buying one of his companies.’
Keats leans across the table with urgent intent. ‘I wouldn’t believe a word that came out of Frank Jordan’s mouth.’ She wets her lips and then capsizes my pitching world. ‘Your mother’s doctors believed there was something she wasn’t telling them. Something she was hiding about her life with Frank Jordan.’
Thirty-Eight
Something is tickling my nose. How irritating. I grumble, partially waking up. Swot at my nose. Sighing heavily I flip to my other side. The last thing I want to do is to wake. Opening my eyes means having to face the reality of my mum and dad’s relationship. Having to face the question of who my dad really is. After leaving Keats, I didn’t come back to the storeroom immediately. Instead I walked the streets of London for a time until I stopped by the river. The Thames at night is a beautiful thing, the rhythm of its nocturnal skin soothing and restful.
My groan turns into a moan. Whatever’s fussing with my nose I wish would leave. Me. Alone. Rolling over, a slight tang catches my throat. It’s acrid, nasty, followed by a cough that racks my body. I tuck my legs into my chest and curl into a ball. For a moment or two I can’t control the coughing. Finally it stops. I feel more exhausted as if I’d never gone to sleep. I open up one eye, then the other. The out-of-sync hands on my clock say it’s getting on for midnight. I sniff deeply. Scramble out of the bed in an extreme state of shock. I know that smell.
Smoke.
Smoke means fire.
In that moment of stunned terrible realisation, I’m incapable of moving a muscle. I’m paralysed both in this room but in another room from my past as well. I’ve been chased from pillar to post by images of fire and smoke. Move, Rachel. Move. I hear what my brain is pleading with me to do, nevertheless I don’t seem to be able to follow its instruction. Ironically, it’s the deadly smell that finally shoves me into action when it gives me the jolt of a bottle of smelling salts under my nose. I head for the light switch. Flick. No light. Do it again. The same thing happens.
Stumbling into the basement, no amount of flicking the switches in there can make those infernal blue strip lights come on either. T
he blinking red and white lights on the servers and printer won’t respond too. Even the hum-heartbeat of the wall is silent.
No light means no air.
No light means no–
I cut off the crippling chant. Refuse to allow it to conquer me. I head back into the dark of the storeroom. Use my outstretched fingertips and hands to feel and search my way to my rucksack. I find it. Drop to my knees. My hands dive inside. There. My mobile. I put on the light. A shattering wave of air escapes from my lungs when I’m back in the light. Air. I hadn’t even realised I’d probably been holding my breath since discovering there was no light. My head bows in a moment of defeat because I tried, I really did, to out-psych this connection between light and air. But it didn’t work.
I shake off my misery and stand up. My phone light catches Philip’s face in the photo, twisting him into an apparition ready to glide off the wall. I snatch it and collect the rest of my belongings and stuff them without a care into my rucksack, which I swing onto my back.
I rush into the basement. The reeking stench of smoke is stronger here. I flash my phone at the bottom of the steel door and gasp so loud it rocks my head back. What I see are wafts of ghostly smoke eerily blowing in the beam of light. It’s hypnotic, the way it coils, spirals, twirls, preparing itself for its deadly dance. This is actually happening. There’s a fire in the building.
22 garment workers lost their lives due to fire.
Am I going to become number twenty-three? Hell no! I move towards the smoke. My hand hesitates over the handle. What if there’s a ball of fire behind it and opening the door unleashes it all over me? I rush back into the storeroom. Grab the bucket of water, which is heavy in my grip. I tuck my phone under my chin so when I’m ready, both my hands are free to use on the bucket.
I wrap my hand round the steel door’s handle. ‘One. Two. Three.’
Mercifully the door opens. The water dives out of the bucket and into the tunnel. A lashing sound echoes off the walls as it lands on the ground. Through the thick smoke, I see no flames nor does my skin feel the heat of lurking fire. I choke, wretchedly cough as smoke hits me full in the face. This is when one of Keats’s bandanas would have come in pretty handy.
I cover my mouth with one hand and make a run for it. The smoke smothers me in its fog. Draws me into its noxious embrace. I keep running and running. My eyes burn, sting and stream water.
Finally I make it to the bottom of the steep staircase. Look up and see my saviour – the trap door. It’s hard to see but I make my way up. Nearly fall on a step midway that decides it wants to throw me over. Bent, I balance my free palm against the step until I’m steady. I restart my journey. The trap door gets bigger as I get closer and closer. I’m already smiling. The trap door is the gateway to heaven.
My palm reaches up to push it. It doesn’t move. I try again. And again. Use both hands. Push with a desperate strength I never knew I had. I can’t believe this; it won’t budge, even an inch. My hands roll into fists and I bang, shout… No-one comes for me.
I’m not defeated; I know another way out. My speed is much quicker through the smoke this time. I keep it up through the basement and storeroom until I’m in the cool courtyard in the rear. It’s unusually dark in this place tonight, almost black on black. An unease stomps down my spine, spreading throughout my body. I turn my face skywards to the grill. There’s not a speck of the outside world peaking through. My escape is blocked. A large car has been parked over the grill, its big wheels resting on the metal bars to prevent it being opened. It belongs to Michael, I know it does.
All kinds of disorientating horror spark through me like an electric shock. That shock you feel when you’re in a car spinning at high speed across a carriageway into the path of an oncoming truck. When you wake up in the middle of the night and you realise that one day you will awake no more. That shock that seizes your stomach when you realise that moment when you die doesn’t lie in some hazy and distant future but is staring you directly in the face and there’s no escape.
I drop my bag and climb up the rope, grabbing the bars of the grill, hauling myself upwards until my lips press against the callous cold metal.
‘Help. Murder. Michael’s killing me! Call the police. No, the fire brigade.’
My screams degenerate into gasps, the howls of a wounded creature. There’s no response on the back street. My helpless fingers slip and slide down the rope until I lose my grip and fall down in a heap to the cobbled floor.
I’m trapped.
I scream one final time. ‘Help. Me!’
Thirty-Nine
The smoke coming through the basement and storeroom brushes my face like an evil spirit. That’s what drives me back into gear. On my feet again. I head into the basement in a rush, clasping my phone and its light. There’s a way out of here. There has to be. I scan around. What to do? What to do? I pile desks onto each other, sending silent computers crashing onto the floor, the glass from their screens scattering everywhere. It’s a chaotic scene. I lunge up to the desk at the top. The tower of desks wobbles. Doesn’t fall.
Somehow, I have no idea how I manage it, I’m balancing unsteadily on the final desk. I batter and bang the ceiling with a keyboard. Of course it doesn’t give – it’s made of stone. I chuck the keyboard across the room. Gingerly climb down. I punch and kick the wall.
The smoke gets thicker. I’m choking. Why didn’t I wrap something over my face?
Stop, Rachel. Think. Think. Think. My head’s throbbing. Threatening to explode. My neck tips back as I remember how I found the door to the storeroom. What if…? Teeth gritted, muscles bulging and hurting, I pull and lug the photocopier away from the wall. No! No! No! There’s nothing unusual about this wall. I dip my head with abject soul-destroying defeat. Suddenly my breath stalls inside my aching chest as I see something on the floor.
Drop to my knees. In the light of my phone, I see a large shape with – I count the number of sides – eight outlined on the floor. A hexagon or a type of star. There are lines from the corner of each side leading to a point in the middle. For a moment I forget my terror. I’m curious. What is this? I’ve never seen anything like it before, certainly not in the ground. In the centre is a small piece of wood. I dare to press. The shape springs open like a star bursting open or a monster’s mouth with sharpened triangular teeth. It’s another trap door.
I peer inside. It’s a rectangular boxed-shaped space that leads away under the floor of the basement. A shiver sinks and expands into every pore in my skin. I don’t want to go down there. Down and under. But what choice do I have? I drop into it on my hands and knees. The space is soaked in chills and damp and smells bad. A mental peg over my nose, I crawl along it, followed by wisps of smoke. I reach a dead end.
Trapped. Trapped. Trapped.
The fear digs its sharpened claws in any part of me it can find without mercy. I’m crippled, can’t move. I’m going crazy. Losing my mind.
Gonna die. Gonna die. Gonna…
I look up, seeking deliverance. I gasp loud and ragged because there it is. Marked with faded paint is another star trap door. I lunge up at it, forcing it open. The passage continues upwards this time. The ancient rungs of a ladder fastened to the sides take me upwards through this cool musty and chimney-like structure. I’m shaking and terrified. My arms and legs hardly work anymore. My fingers barely grip. My heartbeat shakes my whole body in a continuous tremble. But I go up, banging limbs and legs against the wooden panels.
When I reach the top, there’s another trap door. It opens onto a miniature landing and another ladder. This must be on the ground floor of the tenement. I lay my hands on the sides of the landing but feel no heat. No crackling of flames either. But then the way fires burn is a funny thing. I know that from bitter personal experience. This passageway is longer than the others and something shines in the dark distance. I see no way out so I look up.
Another trap door. Another ladder. Another climb. Of course fire goes upwards too. There’s n
o choice but for me to keep going. I climb through another trap door. It slams shut behind me. There’s no ladder. When I pull on the trap door it won’t open. I kick at it. It refuses to help me. The light from my phone goes out. I’m in the dark. In the skeleton bricks of the building. Trapped.
No light means no air.
No light means no air.
It’s the end of the line. I’m in barely enough space to stand. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to avoid underground spaces and fire. It’s ended with my entombment in a casket-shaped box and a fire chasing me. Doomed, I slump against the side and weep. It’s over, my struggle is over; my whole ten-year battle is over. I never gave up. Not even in the darkest hours did that happen. Never surrendered; buckled but never broke.
My mum’s face suddenly is there with me, the only brightness in this hell dark.
‘Mummy?’
She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t need to. Her being there is enough. Her beautiful face is filled with such happiness, such kindness. I feel curiously light-headed and content. Intensively calm. I’m ready to go, knowing Mum’s arms will be waiting to take me. My head jerks. There’s scratching on the side of the box. At first I don’t believe it. It happens again. It shakes me up so much I bang my head. That’s when I hear it, a dog’s barks on the other side of the wood. It’s Scrap come to save me. Just like he tried to save the sweatshop girls.
That’s stupid. This is real. There’s more scratching. Clearer, more distinct. I push against the wood. It gives slightly. There’s not enough room for me to get any leverage against the wall but I make one final effort with what’s left of my strength and barge against the wood with my shoulder. It swings open and I tumble headfirst into a room on the other side of what must have been a wall. The dog scampers and leaps around my prone body, barking like mad. Then it’s licking my wrist and tugging at my clothes with its teeth. He or she seems to know me, although that’s obviously ridiculous.
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