Chapter 33 Damon
Damon
I am watching a twelve-year-old me, standing at the rear of the flats, staring up at the fifth-floor window where Mum’s bedroom is.
The first drops of rain begin to fall from a charcoal-grey sky, landing on my forehead and trickling down my cheeks.
I’m too transfixed by what’s happening to wipe them away.
Mum appears from behind the window’s net curtain, and even from this distance I can sense her panic. Her arms sway over her head as if trying to get my attention. Then she begins banging on the window with both fists, trying to break the glass. She is terrified of something.
She vanishes, only to return carrying a dining room chair that she hurls at the window.
It rebounds off the reinforced safety glass and falls out of sight.
It takes several more attempts before the window finally shatters, madly glittering glass showering to the ground in front of where I stand, as hard and fast as the sheets of rain now pouring down.
The sudden rush of oxygen from outside causes a plume of black smoke to swallow her in its rush to escape. Only then do I understand our home is on fire.
‘Mum!’ I scream and try running towards the stairwell that will take me upstairs to our flat. But someone grabs my arms, pulling me in towards them and holding me there.
‘It’s too dangerous,’ a man’s voice warns. I don’t look at him because I’m transfixed by Mum.
A flash of lightning illuminates the sky, swiftly followed by a crack of thunder so loud it pulses through me.
‘Help me!’ she yells again and again before more smoke appears, choking her. She has something in her hand that she holds to her ear. I assume it’s a phone and she must be talking to an emergency services operator.
Only then do I notice a crowd of neighbours gathering around us as others pour from the building while alarm bells ring, their end-of-the-world racket joining the thunderous rain to drown out the worried chatter of frightened tenants.
‘Let go of me,’ I yell to the man who has me in his grasp. ‘I have to help her!’
But he holds me fast.
I hear others shouting back to her, urging her to hang on, promising that firefighters are on their way to rescue her. I doubt she can hear them above the roaring flames.
Mum turns to glance behind her, then down below, before her gaze locks on to mine.
Another branch of lightning forks through the sky along with a second crack of thunder, and it’s in this moment when she makes the decision either to remain where she is and succumb to the smoke and flames, or to jump.
The next image I see is of her hands on either side of the window frame, pulling her body up and perching there, like a fledgling gathering the courage to take its first flight from the nest. Now her phone is again pressed to her ear, and then in the next moment she reaches out her arms and, to a chorus of screams piercing the cacophony around us, she lets herself fall.
The sky ignites as Bobbi Lister’s thirty-nine years on this earth are over in less than two seconds.
Those around me shout and wail, but I’m unable to move, speak, or react in any way.
Blood from a head wound has no time to pool before the rainwater carries it away in all directions.
Then I’m dragged backwards and my face is covered by their hands. A kind gesture, but too late.
Today, as I stand here reliving that moment, I feel my body wanting to fold in on itself.
I’ve spent many long years believing Mum left me because I’d let her down.
That she chose death over me because I wasn’t good enough.
But now I know the truth. That in her final moments, and in a life blighted by depression, she was finally able to take charge.
Perhaps it’s selfish of me, but I’m awash with relief to know she didn’t leave me through choice.
Suddenly I become aware of the old man on the landing yelling at me again. It returns me to the present.
‘I know what I saw!’ he yells. ‘They didn’t listen to me then, but I know!’
The sky is now clear, the people dispersed, and Mum’s body vanishes from the ground. And I, too, leave with haste.