Beth
Beth
They walk the full perimeter of the park, talking and holding hands. She can’t remember a time she felt so content. So complete and safe.
But before long, the bitter November air begins to bite, and she starts to shiver.
‘You’re cold. We could go to a bar?’ Nick suggests. ‘Warm up a bit?’
What he’s left hanging in the air is the other option: that they could go back to one of their rooms at the Asylum. She’s too feeble to suggest it. The moment is so perfect, what if taking things further ruins it?
But she doesn’t want to go to a bar either.
‘Perhaps we could go back and just… talk for a bit?’ she says, her heart hammering. ‘I mean not that I don’t want to do anything else… it’s just…’
‘I get it,’ he says. ‘There’s no rush.’
She smiles.
‘Come on,’ he says, squeezing her hand again. ‘You’re absolutely freezing. I think I have some hot chocolate powder in my kitchen cupboard. My mum insisted on packing it for me, despite the fact I never drink hot chocolate. But I think that might be just what’s needed tonight.’
As they head back across the park, hands entwined, they hear a familiar sound.
‘The fire alarm,’ Nick says, shaking his head.
‘Not again,’ Beth groans.
Since Beth arrived, the fire alarm has gone off almost weekly. Just last week, some idiot left their toast under the grill for too long. Then another time a group of students on the 5th floor had a bong party and didn’t open the window.
There were even rumours that a lad in Block B set it off on purpose one time to ‘smoke’ his love interest out of her bedroom.
It’s the middle of the night. It will be a false alarm. Everyone will be furious and grumpy, forced to stand outside in the car park, in the cold, waiting for the fire service to turn up and confirm that the building is safe for them to all go back in.
It’s a huge building, housing 400 students. Once, it took the firemen more than an hour to work out what had caused the alarm to trigger.
But as they draw closer, Beth senses something is different about this alarm. And then she realises she can smell smoke.
She must be imagining it though. Or someone nearby has lit a cigarette on the way out. It can’t be a real fire, can it? It’s always a false alarm.
‘Can you smell that?’ she says, turning to Nick.
He frowns.
‘It’ll be a bonfire.’
‘At 2 a.m.? It doesn’t smell like a bonfire. It smells more… chemical.’
They start to pick up pace, hurrying towards the building. The siren grows louder the closer they get, its repetitive wail echoing across the park. A sound that’s impossible to ignore.
No one is ignoring it. Students are spilling out of the open doors, filling the space in front of the building.
They stop short, side by side.
‘God, Nick, look!’
There’s no mistaking the smell any longer. Something is curling out of one of the rooms on the top floor.
Smoke.
She frowns. It can’t be? Can it?
She counts the windows twice, going from the stairwell to the edge of the building, trying to work it out in her head.
Three, four, five.
‘Nick! It’s coming from our kitchen.’
There’s no doubt now.
‘Stay here,’ Nick says. And then, he breaks away from her, dropping her hand and taking a step forward.
‘Nick!’ she shouts. ‘What are you doing?’
He turns back and their eyes meet. A second’s pause.
There’s a scream as a loud bang fills the air. Beth’s brain struggles to catch up with what’s happening, where this has come from.
‘The window has blown out,’ she says, stunned.
Glass rains down and everyone looks up in unison, and finally the flames are visible, flickering inside the kitchen that just a few hours ago she was eating her lunch in, and licking around the outside of the window frame.
‘I should go back in,’ Nick says. ‘We need to make sure the others got out.’
‘Are you mad? It’s too dangerous.’
She thinks of Anna and Rosa. They will have heard the alarm, surely? They will have left ages ago, when it first went off.
But she knows what Nick is thinking. The joke they have all made time and time again, about how annoying the fire drills are. Always false alarms. Last week, three students stayed in their rooms during the alarm until the site manager came and found them and gave them a bollocking.
‘Of course they will,’ she says. Her heart is racing and she can’t seem to catch her breath. ‘It’s in our kitchen! They will have smelt the smoke. Surely…’
He shakes his head at her.
‘But we can’t be sure! They could’ve slept through it,’ he says. ‘Christ! Where’s the fire brigade? We can’t just stand here and do nothing.’
He’s serious.
‘You don’t even know if they’re at home tonight. Maybe they went out.’
‘No… I saw Anna in the kitchen this evening.’
‘But… Nick, you can’t…’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he shouts, staring desperately back at the building. Thick black smoke is now pouring out of three of the windows on their floor. The smell is acrid, suffocating. ‘I’m wasting time…’
‘Please,’ she says, clinging on to his arm.
She can only focus on one thing: I mustn’t let him go. I mustn’t let him out of my sight. We have only just found each other.
How can this be happening?
‘Please don’t. Please – it’s too dangerous!’
He pulls her towards him in a hug, wrapping his arms around her so tightly she feels completely enveloped. She’s safe here, in his arms. They are safe here, together. Thank God. Thank God they are together.
There’s another explosion. They both look up. The smoke clears suddenly, carried away by a gust of wind. And then she sees something. Someone. A face.
It’s the worst thing imaginable.
A face. Two hands. Waving for help in the window of one of the rooms.
‘Anna!’ she screams.
‘Get back everyone! Get back!’ shouts the site manager.
She turns slightly, away from the cocoon of Nick’s grip, and sees the site manager, his face stretched with fear, ushering everyone back towards the car park.
‘You don’t understand,’ Nick shouts at him. ‘One of my flatmates is still inside… I just saw her at the window!’
The entire kitchen window is now a blaze of orange.
‘Got a death wish, have you? Get back onto the grass now!’
They look up again at the building. The flames have strengthened and Beth watches as, in mere seconds, they spread to the next window. It’s all happening so quickly. She counts along the windows – one, two, three – until she gets to her own. She stares up at it. So close to the fire. It’s impossible to believe that less than an hour ago she was standing in that room, holding the record Nick had left for her.
‘Beth.’ Nick’s voice is in her ear now. Low, urgent. ‘I can’t just stand here. Anna’s trapped. I have to go back in.’
She understands how this is affecting him, how frustrated he feels.
‘Please,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Please. Don’t.’
They stare at one another and she watches as he grapples with his conflicting feelings. She squeezes his hand so tightly her fingers begin to go numb.
He closes his eyes. But he stays with her.
Then, there’s a different wailing sound, as four fire engines pull up on the other side of the building. Through the glass stairwell she watches the blue lights flash, and, with impressive speed, the firefighters run up the stairs, towards the top floor.
‘Get back! Get back!’ someone shouts, and then she sees the police, half a dozen or more, forming a ring around the building and pushing the shell-shocked students further back into the car park.
Despite how many trial runs of this experience they have had, there’s no organisation, no sense of calm. Just chaos, people milling around like lost drunks at a festival, wandering back and forwards, staring and shouting. Someone is taking pictures of the building. Another person is recording it on a video camera.
The seconds pass in a blur as the building is slowly consumed by flames. Pieces of the exterior cladding break off, melting into liquid fireballs and dripping down the side of the building.
Occasionally, chunks of molten material fly out, as though propelled by something, and land on the cars in the car park in front.
And even in the chaos, she can hear the sound of the people trapped inside, screaming for help.
But she can no longer see the face at Anna’s window. She can no longer see the window at all.
Where would Rosa have been earlier, when the fire broke out? She struggles to remember her evening plans – was she out? At a club? Or was she at home, asleep in her bed?
‘We need to find Rosa,’ Beth says.
She glances at Nick. He looks furious.
But they can’t find anyone they recognise in the car park. And whenever they turn to face the building, the horrifying orange blaze has grown larger, more powerful, and even from a distance she can see that the entire top floor flat – her flat, their flat – is now engulfed in flames.
How could it have spread so quickly?
Someone said there was a sprinkler system fitted to the building – so why hasn’t it gone off? It doesn’t make sense.
But surely the fire brigade will put the flames out quickly now they’re inside. Surely it’ll all be over soon, and they’ll be allowed back in. The kitchen will be a blackened mess, but apart from a little smoke damage, her room will be OK. Won’t it?
She starts to cry, somewhat ridiculously, for the small stuffed cat that she’s had since she was a child. Purrdy.
Purrdy who she brought up to university in secret and stuffed into a drawer so that no one else would find her, but who she regularly takes out and sleeps next to when she’s feeling homesick.
She wishes she had Purrdy now.
She wipes the tears from her eyes.
She knows, deep down inside, that it’s not Purrdy she’s crying for. That it’s not a toy cat she’s really worried about.
She glances up at Nick. His face is illuminated by the sickening glow from the fire and she can see now that his eyes, like hers, are sore with fear. That he’s thinking the same thing she is.
Rosa and Anna. Where are they?