The Beautiful Fall

by Hugh Breakey

  In any case raisin bread for lunch wasn’t an option. I pulled Julie’s card out of the records box, dialled the number and explained the situation. She didn’t seem very enthusiastic about doing an extra delivery, and couldn’t fit it in today anyway. Eventually we settled on tomorrow before lunchtime, and I made myself a breadless sandwich, which tasted about as satisfying as it sounds.

  The afternoon’s work went well, but by three o’clock I found myself checking the clock. Despite my flagging concentration, I trusted the barriers to prevent the fallout from any accidents, and persevered. Four o’clock inched past, then at last four-thirty, marking the completion of my first nine-hour day.

  I sank back on my haunches and surveyed the day’s work. The best part of Monday’s disaster stood behind me: from the look of it, I’d recovered more than three-quarters of the fallen tiles. Only two or three thousand remained, but they’d have to wait until tomorrow.

  I made a simple dinner and headed out onto the balcony to eat. It was a while since I’d been out here. After a full day’s hard work, crouched and contorted to lay the dominoes, the relief at just sitting made me feel almost light-headed.

  I sat for a long while after dinner and watched the sun set over the mountains beyond the city. A soft breeze tugged at my shirt and ruffled my hair as the city lights flickered on and the day’s light faded into night.

  Tomorrow the last of the disaster would be erased; the only record remaining would be the one in my journal. That would be something.

  Day Ten

  6.00 alarm. My third early start in a row.

  I ROLLED out of bed, still half-asleep as I stumbled through the start of my exercises. On the best mornings—mornings like this—I felt like a sculptor chipping away at a block of marble. Every moment of exertion, every drop of sweat running down my neck, was carving out my future self.

  After a shower and breakfast, I washed the dishes and tidied the kitchen. Odd; I’d never tidied up for Mr Lester.

  Not that odd, perhaps. Until yesterday I had no memory of ever even talking to a young woman, far less inviting one into my home. My one actual encounter (if you could call it that) was about eight or nine weeks after my memory rebooted. I’d developed enough confidence to face the outside world and looked forward to a long walk each evening at sunset, down the winding path through the parklands to the boardwalk. When the sun disappeared and lights began to twinkle along the river, I’d turn and retrace my steps back home.

  I liked to watch the joggers. While the rest of the world trudged and stomped, the joggers skimmed over the track, vivid and full of energy.

  On that night, I’d only just set out when a jogger approached from the opposite direction. Over the weeks, I’d worked out the road rules used by the various recreational path-users and it wasn’t usually too difficult keeping out of the way, but that evening I must have been distracted. By the time I realised what was happening, we were about to collide.

  I registered a quick impression—skin glistening with sweat, slick strands of dark hair escaped from a ponytail to frame the face, sleek black runner’s sunglasses—and jerked out of her way at the same instant she tried to dodge me. We moved in the same direction. She veered sharply, her foot caught the edge of the path and in an instant, all her gracefulness disappeared. She fell forward, her ankle turning sideways under her.

  Almost without thinking, I moved to catch her. I could see it was possible. She was close enough and I was quick enough. But the sudden image of my hands grabbing her body to halt her fall pulled me to a shuddering stop.

  How would she react? Was it okay—permissible—to touch a woman you didn’t know? I hesitated and she tumbled, crying out, and her ankle caved and she crashed on to the grass.

  Mortified, I looked down at her crumpled figure. I wanted to help her, I did, but the sense of shame overwhelmed me. I backed away, praying with each step she wouldn’t look up to see me fleeing the scene. At the last moment, I turned on my heel and walked on, disappearing from her view behind a clump of jacaranda trees.

  Guilt nagged me about the whole thing for weeks afterward. I lay awake at night wondering if she had sprained the ankle or just twisted it. I stopped my evening walks altogether.

  No wonder I felt nervous now. There was nothing to be done but to soldier on. Julie would remain beautiful, and I would remain awkward. At least I could take some solace in her dismissive attitude and her one-earbud indifference.

  I turned my attention to something I could actually control in the world, and went into the livingroom to scoop up a new line of dominoes.

  By the time the knock on the door and cry of ‘Delivery’ echoed through the apartment it was late morning. Monday’s accident lay buried in the past. There was not a single fallen domino to be seen. If not for my journal record of the event, no one would ever know it had occurred. Apart from Julie, of course.

  I unlocked the door and pulled it open. One earbud, like before.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, smiling politely.

  ‘Thanks for coming back.’

  ‘No worries.’ She passed me two grocery bags. ‘Three loaves of multigrain.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Sorry about the mistake.’ She produced a clipboard and a pen. ‘Can I just get you to run through everything on your order form, to make sure we’re working off the right list? It doesn’t look like it’s been checked in a while.’

  ‘Yeah, no problem.’ My hands were full with the bags. ‘Um. Do you want to come in?’

  I carried the bags through into the kitchen. Julie waited in the livingroom. When I arrived back, she was looking from side to side and nodding.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘The barriers were a good plan.’

  ‘Hmph.’ She handed me the folder and the pen. I began to make my way through the list, ticking each item in turn. It all looked fine.

  ‘You’re using twice as many as you need to. That’s why you have those larger gaps.’

  I followed her gaze to the cardboard barriers.

  ‘See?’ With a tug, she popped the earbud out of her ear. ‘You’ve given every section its own barrier. So you’ve got all those double walls, taking up unnecessary space. If you just put down half as many rectangles, leaving a space in between each one,’ she pointed, ‘you’d get the same protection.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Relief flooded me as realisation dawned. Most of the dominoes could be protected by the barrier guarding the neighbouring groups. It was obvious now she’d pointed it out. ‘Thanks. That’s helpful.’

  ‘Hmph.’ She tapped her forehead modestly with the pen. ‘When I need to, I have a very strat—’ An electronic shriek drowned out the rest of her words, reverberating off the walls with heart-pounding urgency.

  ‘What is that?’ Julie yelled with her hands over her ears. ‘A fire alarm? Do you have a drill today?’

  ‘Not sure.’ My voice went missing in the din. I tried again, louder. ‘I don’t think so.’ I followed Julie in clamping my hands over my ears, but the sound was unrelenting.

  The dominoes seemed to be standing okay, but they wouldn’t hold for long if the vibration belting my ears carried through the floor. My heart squeezed. The barriers could stop a single mistake cascading through the entire structure, but they could do nothing in the face of a system-wide assault.

  I wrenched my right hand from my ear and placed it flat on the nearest wall.

  Nothing.

  Despite the racket, relief washed over me. Julie looked at me and then dropped into a neat crouch and placed her hand flat against the floor. She smiled up at me and nodded. It was a nice thing for her to do. I couldn’t help feeling a tug of appreciation. She had to be right about the noise. A fire alarm. It was coming from inside the building. It couldn’t be anything else.

  ‘We should probably get out.’ Julie had to lean forward and yell to make herself heard. ‘Do you need a hand grabbing anything?’

  She was right—the noise wasn’t the threat: the noise was meant to aler
t us to the threat.

  Fire.

  The whole building could be alight. Forget my dominoes collapsing, the apartment itself might be gutted. I stood there gaping, struggling to get my head around the idea. The apartment contained my whole life. Every memory I had, every clue to my past, everything I’d built for the future, it was all within these walls. I shook myself. What should I take with me? I charged into the kitchen, Julie following in my wake.

  I snatched up my backpack and rushed to the records box. Ignoring everything else, I grabbed the letter from my past self and the doctor’s certificate. Both went straight into the bag, pressed up against its hard back so they wouldn’t be crushed. Then I emptied the contents of my mementoes box into the backpack. Even in the rush, I checked to see I’d got them all: the little elephant made of dark wood, the beaded bracelet, the short but chunky crystal vase, the amethyst geode, the engraved copper medallion and…where was the key? I’d almost missed the filthy old thing half-hidden in a corner of the box, camouflaged by its grubby colour. Okay: wallet with my carefully saved hundred and forty bucks in twenties; apartment keys…and of course the new journal. I couldn’t forget about that.

  Done. My life in a bag. And barely full.

  I turned back to Julie. She was facing away from me, staring at the open apartment door, all the blood drained from her chalk-white face.

  She was saying something—or at least her mouth moved as if forming words. One word, over and over. But no sound made it through the siren’s squeal.

  Smoke.

  The smell tickled my nostrils at the same instant my mind recognised the word on Julie’s lips. As we watched, a thin dark cloud oozed through the open door, pulsing like a live thing.

  ‘I can’t—’ Julie shook her head. Her eyes flashed at me and then back to the intruding smoke. She looked petrified.

  A sheen of sweat glistened on her too-white skin. Raw fear washed out of her, although if anything, it seemed to me that I should be the one panicking. It was my home being threatened. Julie reached out and grabbed a handful of my shirt, her eyes still on the smoke pouring through the door.

  ‘It’s okay.’ I tried to sound calm while shouting: not easy. ‘The fire escape is right outside. It’ll be fine.’

  ‘Ro—Robert.’ She stumbled out my name. ‘I can’t go out there. I was in a fire.’ Wide eyes turned to mine, and she pulled me towards her. ‘It was the smoke,’ she said, as if that explained anything.

  I reached out and wrapped my arm around her shoulders. Her body pressed hard into mine. My heart started thumping.

  ‘It’s okay.’ I leaned in so she could hear me. ‘We’ll go down together. We’ll be fine.’

  With her face so close, I could almost breathe her panic. But she took a deep deliberate breath, her shoulders rising and falling. ‘Okay.’

  I wrapped my arm tighter around her and pulled her towards the apartment door and the writhing smoke. The clear path through the dominoes hadn’t been designed for two people walking side by side. I felt a bit guilty as I edged Julie in front of me. She was panicked, and I was worried about keeping her feet clear of my cardboard barriers. But we managed to cross the room without incident and squeeze through the door.

  Out in the corridor the smoke was thicker, stinging my eyes and throat. The heat was nowhere near as bad as I’d feared—maybe the fire was on the other side of the building (and please let that be true)—but I couldn’t see the green exit light on the door to the stairs. It couldn’t be more than a couple of dozen steps away. If I tracked along the wall there was no way I could stumble past the exit.

  Julie planted her feet, however, coming to such an abrupt stop I almost fell over her. Dammit. Maybe I would have to carry her out, fireman-style.

  ‘Shut the door.’ Her voice was a hard whisper. ‘Slow the fire…’

  I nodded and pushed the door behind us further open, loosening the wooden chock from the doorjamb. It tumbled to the floor, and the apartment door swung shut. We were plunged into darkness with smoke churning around us. It wasn’t hard to see how a previous fire could have left such a mark on Julie.

  There was still no heat in it, though, and my eyes were stinging less. ‘This way.’ Step followed step, further into the darkness. Fear started to bubble in my veins. Too many steps without reaching the door. My blood hammered through my neck, sounding in my ears, despite the alarm’s clamour.

  At last my hand glanced against a doorjamb, and the neon exit sign above it came into view. A cold flush of relief. The door opened without fuss, I pushed through it with Julie in tow and it clanged shut behind us, leaving us in a bright oasis of clean, fresh air and fluorescent lighting. Pale grey concrete stairs and whitewashed walls. I took a deep breath. Not a hint of heat. Not a sniff of smoke. The alarm still wailed, but the solid walls of the fire escape muted it.

  Julie laughed. A sound of pure relief, echoing in the stairwell. She released the front of my shirt. Her body straightened up, and a tiny invisible layer of distance appeared between us. I loosened my arm from around her shoulders; she shifted away.

  ‘Thanks.’ Julie looked down at her feet. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine. I was scared too.’ A weird feeling of emptiness remained in the space where she’d been a moment earlier. ‘We should probably keep going down.’

  Five floors up meant ten flights of stairs to get down—enough time for me to go back to worrying about my apartment. What would I do if the fire gutted my home? The hundred and forty dollars in my wallet was a lot of money normally; nothing if I had to find a new home. And the forgetting was only ten days away.

  We arrived outside, squinting in the bright midday sun. A cool breeze freshened the air, keeping the heat at bay. I looked back at the apartment block. It seemed fine. The alarm was audible, just, but there was no hint of smoke or fire.

  A few other tenants milled on the lawn in front of us. I followed Julie over to them. Some were smiling and chatting, the others just tapping at their phones. They seemed incredibly relaxed about it all.

  Julie plonked herself down on the grass. ‘First week on the job and there’s a fire. I should ask for danger money.’

  No one else was sitting down. But I couldn’t really stand towering above her. I shifted on my feet, then squatted beside her.

  Julie pulled out a pair of dark glasses and put them on. I wished I could have done the same. The sun blazed down ferociously. My eyes watered, still irritated from the smoke. I cupped my hands across my forehead and shaded my eyes as best I could.

  Julie rummaged briefly in her pockets, coming up with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

  I didn’t want to seem rude, but I had to ask. ‘You have a fear of fires, and you smoke?’

  Her mouth creased into a crooked smile as she held the cigarette between her lips. ‘The two are not unrelated.’ A deep breath, and it flared to life. She took a long drag, looking for all the world like someone taking their first breath of pure air after being trapped down a coalmine. ‘You know how they always warn people not to smoke in bed in case you drift off with a lit cigarette in your hand?’

  ‘I guess, yeah. Of course.’

  She grinned. ‘Well, they’re not kidding.’ She took another long drag and slumped backwards, half-sitting, half-lying on the lawn. ‘By the time the fire alarm woke me up, half the room was alight, but I could barely see the flames through the smoke. I got my butt outside pronto, but I lost all my gear. Scared the life out of me.’

  ‘So that’s what set the fire? Your own cigarette? You didn’t think to give up smoking after that?’

  ‘’Course I did.’ She took a final puff and stubbed out the cigarette on the grass. ‘Turns out thinking and doing are rather different. But I did give up smoking in bed.’

  I squinted upwards into the blazing blue sky. Not a hint of smoke. ‘I hope my place will be okay.’

  ‘We didn’t see any flames. Sometimes when there’s a lot of smoke, it’s actually because there isn’t an open fire.’r />
  I pursed my lips. That sounded like the sort of thing you would say just to reassure someone.

  ‘Did anyone see any flames?’ Julie raised her voice in the direction of the group. ‘Does anyone know what floor it’s on?’

  The group turned to her. One of the tenants—a woman from the first floor, I think—spoke up, and then the rest chimed in. It turned out no one had seen anything burning. It sounded as if the smoke was confined to the fifth floor. My floor. My insides clenched at the thought.

  One of the older men said idiot kids sometimes lit fires in rubbish bins for kicks. Lots of smoke, but only a tiny fire. It felt weird to hope all this havoc had been caused deliberately, but if that would mean it wasn’t a full-scale inferno tearing through my apartment, then I wished it with all my heart.

  Julie and a few of the tenants were still talking when a siren wailing down the street cut off their conversation. A fire truck appeared, its engines roaring and lights flashing red as it mounted the kerb and bounced its way to a halt on the grass. Massively built men in helmets and bulky coats streamed out from the vehicle. Our little crowd hurried out of their way. We settled in the shade of a large fig tree that overhung the front lawn. Barking sharp orders, and splitting into smaller squads, one group headed straight for the building’s front entrance. They had this.

  ‘I wonder how long they’ll be,’ Julie scowled. ‘My trolley’s still up there.’ She looked at me, and the scowl disappeared in a flash. ‘Oh, sorry. You’re worried about your place and I’m bitching about waiting for my trolley. Really, I’m sure it’ll be okay.’ She smiled sympathetically and then frowned. ‘Is that Mrs Davis?’

  ‘Who?’ I followed Julie’s gaze. A slightly built older woman stood on the footpath beside a box almost as tall as her. She was wringing her hands and looking about.

  ‘Second floor.’ Julie bounced to attention. ‘You’re not the only person in the building we deliver to, you know.’ She hailed my distant neighbour as I scrambled to my feet.

  From what I could gather from their conversation, Mrs Davis had organised the delivery of a new piece of flat-pack furniture: that was the box. The delivery people had left it on the footpath because of the fire alarm, and now she was stuck there with it.