16
For a moment I simply stare at Adam, trying hard to comprehend what he’s saying.
‘What happened?’ I ask gently.
Adam shakes his head. ‘Aargh, I feel so stupid after what you were talking about with Luca, Annie and Ed.’
‘Why?’ I continue in the same gentle voice. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’
I’m desperately trying to piece all these events together in my head.
What did we talk about that triggered this level of reaction in Adam?
This is obviously why he left the pub so abruptly.
I’m just trying to run through our conversation in my head when Adam says, ‘It wasn’t a Second World War bomb or anything dramatic like that. It was still an explosion, though.’
Ah, right, now it’s making a little more sense.
‘It was when I was in the band,’ Adam continues.
‘We were on a UK tour as the support band for another group. We’d played a huge arena gig in Newcastle the night before.
And I’d had this one-night stand with a girl I barely knew – pretty standard for me back then, I’m ashamed to say.
I’d met Kate the night before in a bar. I’d stayed the night at her house, which was in a quiet little place just outside of the city.
I wanted to get away as quickly as possible the next morning so I didn’t get in trouble with our management.
But right before I left, we had an argument … ’
He pauses to remember, so I sit quietly and wait for him.
‘She caught me trying to sneak out early. She didn’t see it quite the way I did – as a one-off – and quite rightly she was upset and angry. I was furious she’d called me out on my behaviour; I thought I was God’s gift back then because I was in a band.’
He glances at me to see my reaction, but I remain silent.
‘Anyway, I stormed out with the intention of catching a cab. I was used to London, where you could step outside and hail a taxi immediately. This was of course before the days of Uber.’
He looks at me again. I nod.
‘But I’d forgotten we were in a little village in the middle of nowhere.
So there was nothing, not even a bus back to the city, for a few hours.
Kate followed me, trying to make it up with me.
She said she was going to work soon anyway and if I came back inside, she’d give me a lift back to my hotel on her way.
I agreed and went back to her house. Kate went upstairs to get ready for work and told me to help myself to anything in the kitchen.
I was going to make some coffee, I wasn’t big on breakfast then.
But there was a smell in the kitchen that turned my stomach.
I thought I was just hungover so I called up to her that I was going to have a cigarette outside instead – I smoked then, but I was trying to give up. ’
He thinks for a moment.
‘But before I could light up, Kate called down to me from the upstairs window to ask if the kettle was on. When I said no, she said she’d pop down and put it on herself. So I headed to the bottom of the garden where there was a little bench. Her little dog had come outside with me …’
Adam stops again. ‘Sorry,’ he says after he’s paused for a moment. ‘This is the tough part.’
‘Take your time,’ I tell him. And I put my hand on his arm again. This time I pat it gently with my fingers.
This small gesture seems to encourage Adam.
‘But before I could sit down on the bench, there was this tremendous booming sound and I remember being thrown backwards against a garden shed. I hit my head and I think the glass from the shed window must have smashed, because I was covered in tiny shards of glass. When I sat up, I saw that the whole of the top of the house had disappeared in front of me; it had simply collapsed in on the ground floor, and there was smoke and flames beginning to come from the inside. I could hear a whining sound from under some of the rubble that was now in the garden, so I just went into a sort of automatic pilot. I pulled myself up and shook as much of the glass off me as possible, then I ran towards the whining. Somehow the dog had got trapped underneath some of the timbers that had been part of a wooden pergola attached to the back of the house. How he wasn’t crushed, I don’t know – they seemed to have fallen in a sort of crisscross pattern that had protected him instead of crushing him.
I began pulling the timbers carefully away from him – it was like doing a gigantic Jenga, but one that meant life or death if it collapsed. ’
He pauses, but I simply nod for him to continue.
‘I pulled away the last timber I could safely without it all collapsing on him and I was trying to encourage him to crawl out through a gap I’d made, when suddenly there was a second explosion and he was sort of blown towards me.
I remember grabbing him and shielding him in my arms like you would a child.
We fell to the ground and everything went dark around us.
The second explosion meant what little was left of the house had been blown out and now we were both trapped under the wreckage.
I don’t know who or what was looking out for us that day, but this time a steel lintel from the house had fallen over both of us and was holding a hell of a lot of bricks and rubble inches away from our bodies.
If the lintel had given way, that was it for us both. ’
Adam’s breathing has become fast and shallow, so he stops to take in a few deep and calming breaths.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask. ‘You don’t have to continue if it’s too much.’
‘No, I need to tell you everything,’ he says resolutely.
He takes a final deep breath. ‘As we’re lying stuck underneath the back of a house that is now on fire only metres away from us, not really knowing whether we were going to live or die, it dawned on me I might have saved a dog, but what I really should have done was try to save his owner.
I thought if Kate was lucky, she might be in the same situation we were.
Maybe she’d been protected in some way when the house caved in – but I knew if she wasn’t …
’ He swallows hard. ‘Then she was in trouble. But there was nothing I could do; the dog and I were trapped, and we had no choice but to stay there and hope help came quickly, before anything further happened.’
‘How long were you there?’ I ask quietly. I hate interrupting his painful memories to ask questions, but I know if Adam is to let everything out, which he clearly wants and needs to do, then I may have to prompt him occasionally.
‘Just over four hours. The rescue services turned up quickly, but it felt like for ever before I heard anything other than the scream of neighbours witnessing what was happening and the crackle of the flames from the house. The smell was rancid too.’
‘You mentioned a smell before – was it a gas explosion?’
‘Yeah, the smell was like rotten eggs. I should have realised, maybe if I had …’ He shakes his head. ‘Anyway, they got the fire under control first and once they’d got the right equipment to lift all the debris off us, they began what felt like an incredibly slow process to get us out.’
‘You must have been really scared.’
‘Yeah, it was pretty horrendous. Not so bad once people came, and they said everything was under control and we’d be fine.
But in those minutes before anyone turned up, it was just me and Lucky – that’s what I called him, the dog.
His name was actually Loki, but Lucky seemed more appropriate.
I adopted him afterwards, when Kate’s family couldn’t look after him.
Lucky lived with me for another five years before his luck finally ran out. ’
Adam looks down at the ground again.
‘There was photo of a hairy black dog in your flat,’ I say. ‘With the others on the mantelpiece. Was that him?’
Adam nods. ‘Yes, that’s Lucky. Great dog, he was. We had many good times together. He pretty much saved me when we were trapped together. Having him to focus on got me through it, when otherwise I think I’d have gone to pieces.’
‘It sounds like you both saved each other.’
Adam smiles. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Not only that day, but in the weeks and months afterwards too; we were everything to each other.’
I remove my hand from his arm and take hold of his hand instead.
Adam doesn’t look surprised this time; he only looks grateful again for this simple, but meaningful gesture.
‘Kate didn’t survive the blast,’ he says quietly.
‘No.’
‘The impact of both the first explosion and the top floor of the house collapsing killed her immediately. They tried to tell me she wouldn’t have suffered; it would have all been really quick. But how could they have known that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No one knows, do they? Not really. It took ages for the investigation to take place into what caused the gas leak. There had been some works on the gas mains further down the road a few days previously – I found that out afterwards. The final report said the gas board was at fault and they had to pay out compensation to all the residents in the street that were affected. They tried to give me some. To begin with, I refused, I didn’t think I deserved it.
But then I decided to donate it to a charity that looks after animals when their owners die and they have no one to take care of them. ’
‘Why didn’t you think you deserved it?’
Adam looks at me as though I should know this. ‘Really?’ he asks.
‘Yes, tell me.’
‘Kate wouldn’t have been downstairs turning the kettle on if it hadn’t been for me.
That’s what triggered the first explosion, they told us afterwards – the simple act of flicking an electrical switch on a kettle.
If I hadn’t gone out for a cigarette, I would have done it and she would have been upstairs. ’
‘Adam, you must know you can’t blame yourself.’