10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [42]
It was.
Down the stairs there were fierce yellow leaping flames, devouring and roaring. Smoke funneled up in growing billows. Ahead of me the sitting-room blazed yellow with flames from the rear office underneath.
Gasping at once for breath in the smoke, I swiveled fast on one foot and jumped into the bathroom. If I switched on the taps, I thought, the bath and the wash-basin would overflow and help to drown the flames: I pushed the stoppers into the plug holes and opened all the taps to maximum, and I swept a large bath towel into the toilet bowl and pulled the flush, and, whisking the sopping towel into the bedroom, I closed the door against the smoke and laid the wet towel along the bottom of the door in a sort of speed near to frenzy.
“The window,” I yelled. “The bloody window’s stuck.”
The window was stuck shut with layers of paint and had been annoying my father for days. We were both wearing only underpants, and the air was growing hot. “We can’t go down the stairs.” Doesn’t he understand? I thought. He smoothly picked up the single bedroom chair and smashed it against the window. Glass broke, but the panes were small and the wooden frames barely cracked. We were above the bow windows facing the square. A second smash with the chair burst through the sticky layers of old paint and swung open both sides of the window—but underneath the fire had already eaten through the bay window’s roof and was shooting up the wall.
The bay window of the charity shop next door blazed also with manic energy. If anything, the fire next door was hotter and older and had reached the roof, with scarlet and gold sparks shooting into the sky above our heads.
I scrambled over to the door, thinking the stairs the only way out after all, but even if the wet towel was still holding back the worst of the smoke it was useless against flame. The doorknob was now too hot to touch. The whole door had fire on the far side.
I shouted with fierceness, “We’re burning. The door’s on fire.”
My father stared at me briefly across the room.
“We’ll have to take our chances and jump. You first.”
He put the damaged chair against the window wall and motioned me to climb up and leap out as far as I could.
“You go,” I said.
There were people now in the square and voices yelling, and the raucous siren of the fire engine coming nearer.
“Hurry,” my father said. “Don’t bloody argue. Jump.”
I stood on the chair and held on to the window frame. The paint on it scorched my hands.
“Jump!”
I couldn’t believe it—he was struggling into shirt and trousers and zipping up his fly.
“Go on. Jump!”
I put a bare foot on the frame, pulled myself up and leapt out with every scrap of muscle power ... with strong legs and desperation: and I sailed through the flames from the bay window and missed the front burning edge of it by terrifying inches and crashed down onto the dark cobbled ground with a head-stunning, disorientating impact. I heard people yelling and felt hands grabbing me to pull me away from the fire and I was choking with smoke and winded by hitting the unyielding ground and rolling, and also fighting to free myself from the firmly clutching hands to help to cushion my father’s fall when he jumped down after me. I had no strength. Sat on the ground. Couldn’t even speak.
Incredibly there were camera flashes. People were recording our extreme danger, our closeness to dying. I felt helplessly angry. Outraged. Near to sobbing. Illogical, I dare say.
Voices were screaming to my father to jump and voices were screaming to my father not to jump, to wait for the bellowing fire engine now charging across the square, scattering onlookers and spilling people in yellow helmets.
“Wait, wait,” people screamed as firemen released their swiveling ladder to extend it to my father, but he was standing up silhouetted in the window with a reddish glow behind him. He was standing on the chair—and the door behind him was burning.
Before the