reach the garden. John Creasy calls across the avenue, but his voice is lost in the churn of the engine and the punch of boots on the concrete. Dorothy peers through the dark towards the bottom of the road. Sheila Dakin is standing on the lawn, feeding her hands into her face, the wind whipping at her dressing gown, smacking the material against her legs like a flag. Harold tells Dorothy to stay where she is, but it feels as though the fire has a magnetic field, and everyone is pulled closer, drawn along paths and pavements. The only one who is still is May Roper. She stands in her doorway, held there by the light and the noise and the smell. Brian catches her as he rushes past, but she barely seems to notice.
The firemen work like machinery, forming links of a chain which drags water from the earth. There is an arc of sound. An explosion. Harold is shouting to Dorothy to get back inside, but she moves a little closer instead. She watches Harold. He is too interested in what’s happening to notice, and she edges her way next to the wall. She just needs to see for a moment. To find out if it’s really happened.
She reaches the far end of the garden, when a fireman begins sweeping the air with his arms, forcing them back like puppets, and they collect in the middle of the avenue, knotted together against the frost.
The fireman is shouting questions. How many people live in the house?
They all answer at once, and their voices are smeared, taken by the wind.
The fireman scans their faces and points at Derek. ‘How many?’ he says again, his mouth shaping around the words.
‘One,’ he shouts, ‘just one.’ Derek looks back at his own house, and Dorothy follows his gaze. Sylvia stands at the window, Grace in her arms. Sylvia watches them, then turns away, holding the child’s head against her skin. ‘His mother lives in a nursing home, but he’s taken her away for Christmas,’ Derek says. ‘So it’s empty.’ The fireman is already running back and Derek’s words are wasted to the darkness.
A roll of smoke unfolds towards the sky. It loses itself against the black, whispering edges caught against a bank of stars before it feathers into nothing. Harold finds Eric’s eyes, and Eric shakes his head, a brief movement, almost nothing. Dorothy catches it, but looks away, back to the grip of the noise and the smoke.
None of them notice him, not to begin with. They are too captured by the flames, watching the darts of orange and red that fasten and catch in the windows. It’s Dorothy who sees him first. Her shock is soundless, static, but still it finds each of them. It stumbles around the group, until they all turn from number eleven and stare.
Walter Bishop.
The wind slips inside his coat and lifts the collar. It takes spirals of his hair and tries to cover his eyes. His lips are moving, but the words aren’t yet ready to leave. There is a carrier bag. It falls from his hand and a tin skittles across the pavement and into the gutter. Dorothy lifts it back and tries to return it to him.
‘Everyone thought you’d gone away with your mother,’ she says, but Walter doesn’t hear.
There are shouts from the house, carried across the avenue, and one fireman’s voice lifts above the rest.
There’s someone in there, it says. There’s someone in the house.
They all turn from the fire to look at Walter.
‘Who’s inside?’ It’s the question in everyone’s eyes, but it’s Harold who gives it a voice.
At first, Dorothy doesn’t think Walter has even heard the question. His gaze doesn’t move from the slurry of black smoke, which has begun to pour from the windows of his house. When he finally replies, his voice is so soft, so whispered, they all have to lean forward to listen.
‘Chicken soup,’ he says.
Harold frowns. Dorothy can see all the wrinkles of the future pinch together on his forehead.
‘Chicken soup?’ The wrinkles become even deeper.
‘Oh yes.’ Walter’s eyes don’t move from number eleven. ‘It works wonders for the flu. Terrible thing, isn’t it, the flu?’
They all nod, like ghostly marionettes in the darkness.
‘We’d only just got to the hotel when she took ill. I said to her, Mother, I said, when you’re under the weather, what you need is your own bed. And so we turned around and came home again.’
And all the marionette eyes stare at Walter’s first-floor window.
‘And she’s up there now?’ says Harold, ‘your mother?’
Walter nods. ‘I couldn’t take her back to the nursing home, could I? Not in that state. So I put her to bed and went to ring for the doctor.’ He looks at the tin Dorothy handed back to him. ‘I wanted to explain to him I was giving her the soup, as he advised. They put so many additives in these things now. You can’t be too careful, can you?’
‘No,’ says Dorothy, ‘you can’t be too careful.’
The smoke creeps across the avenue. Dorothy can taste it in her mouth. It blends with the fear and the frost, and she pulls her cardigan a little closer to her chest.
*
Harold walks into the kitchen through the back door. Dorothy knows he has something to tell her, because he never uses the back door unless it’s an emergency or he is wearing his wellington boots.
She looks up from her crossword and waits.
He moves around the work surfaces, lifting things up unnecessarily, opening cupboard doors, looking at the bottom of crockery, until he can’t hold on to the words any longer.
‘It’s awful in there,’ he says, as he replaces a mug on the mug tree. ‘Awful.’
‘You’ve been inside?’ Dorothy puts down her pen. ‘Are you allowed to go inside?’
‘The police and the fire service haven’t been there for days. No one said we couldn’t go inside.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘We didn’t go upstairs.’ He finds a packet of bourbons she had deliberately hidden behind the self-raising flour. ‘Eric didn’t think it was respectful, you know, under the circumstances.’
Dorothy doesn’t think it’s respectful rummaging around in the downstairs either, but it’s easier to say nothing. If you challenge Harold, he spends days justifying himself, like turning on a tap. She had wanted to go in there herself. She even got as far as the back door, but she’d changed her mind. It probably wouldn’t be wise, under the circumstances. Harold, however, had the self-discipline of a small toddler.
‘And the downstairs?’ she says.
‘That’s the strangest thing.’ He takes the top off a bourbon and makes a start on the buttercream. ‘The lounge and the hallway are a mess. Completely gone. But the kitchen is almost untouched. Just a few smoke marks on the walls.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Not a thing,’ he says. ‘Clock ticking away, tea
