Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [114]
He was like a puppy with two tails at the idea. I didn’t feel I was being reckless. The two rooms had their own locks and were separated by a corridor. He couldn’t get to us. And in any case, as I told him before I turned the lights out, ‘I’m pleased you seem to be over your obsession with us getting back together.’
Despite going to bed so early, being roused by the sound of ferocious banging on your bedroom door at four in the morning is a hell of a rude awakening. It took me ages to come round. Then the banging stopped and there was a crash. And Peter was standing in my room.
‘Get out!’ I screamed, but I realized he was already shouting.
‘Get up, get dressed – there’s a fire!’
It still took me a few more seconds to compute. For a while, I was just traumatized by the sight of my dangerous, clearly agitated husband. Only when I saw traces of smoke wafting in from the corridor did it sink in. Fire.
Suddenly I was in full self-preservation mode. Seconds later, dressed only in my pyjamas and clutching a still-sleeping Daniel, I staggered out of the room. The smoke was coming from underneath the fire door.
‘Thank God you put that up,’ I said to Peter.
‘Yeah, well, we can’t go that way,’ he said.
I agreed. I think we’d seen the same film. You never open a door with fire behind it because the oxygen sends it all up. We’d have an inferno on our hands.
It was late, I was tired and there was a fire in my house, but I wasn’t panicking. Not yet. I said, ‘We’re only on the first floor. We can jump out of our window onto the bay window below and get down to the ground.’
The lounge’s window configuration was the same as in every house in the street: one great pane of glass and three louvre panels above it. By the time I reached it, Peter was already there, frying pan in his hand. He looked at me, I think for permission, and I nodded. Then he took an almighty swipe at the glass – and the large metal pan just bounced off it.
‘Fucking hell!’ he shouted, then threw the frying pan as hard as he could at the window. Still nothing. By now the smoke was seeping under the lounge door fast. It reminded me of one of those Top of the Pops stages, where you can’t see the performers’ feet for all the dry ice.
Okay, I thought, now it’s time to panic.
I attacked that window with anything I could lay my hands on, but it was the same effect.
‘There’s no way this is glass!’
‘Glass or not,’ Peter said, desperation evident in his voice, ‘this will do it.’
I watched as he heaved the microwave onto his shoulder. Then he span round quickly and launched this bloody great thing at the window. And yet again it came straight back.
Peter was genuinely scared now. I’d never seen that before. If anything, that just made me calmer.
‘We’ll have to go out the louvres,’ I said and, reaching up to the higher windows, smacked at them with a rolling pin. They smashed first time, glass raining down onto the ledge below. Peter took over and, like a man possessed, knocked every piece out of the frame.
It was getting hard to see out of the window, but I knew my plan to land on the bay window below had just got much harder. Most importantly, how was I going to get Daniel out of there?
‘I’ll go first,’ Peter said. ‘You can pass him to me,’ and before I could answer he was already hauling himself through the small, rectangular window. That’s the moment when I admitted to myself that I could never trust Peter again. Not after the kidnapping. I was completely uncomfortable with the idea of letting Daniel out of my hands, not with his father on the outside and me trapped inside. But what else can I do? I can’t climb out with him.
That was when the miracle happened.
I nearly didn’t include this in my story because it sounds too fantastical. But just as I was agonizing about passing my child over to the man who had abducted and threatened him,