Here is that runaway storm, and we are in its path.

Lou.

What they saw, when they turned into Cliff Street, did not immediately penetrate Gordon’s consciousness. There were road blocks. Ben wove around a hastily marked detour to the top car park. Sirens tore the air. Gordon perceived this dimly. And even when Ben pulled into the overflowing car park, Ron directing him into an illegal space because ‘Who’s going to book you anyway?’, Gordon felt detached, as if what was before his eyes was the dream and he was impatient to wake into the reality he had to deal with. When he heard Ron speaking, he thought about the permanent realignment of his father as a man. Was this why Ron and Norma were, despite Ron having worked mid-level jobs and Norma not at all, pretty damn loaded? Had Ron been on the take the whole time? Was he a career blackmailer as well as a career forger?

Academic questions he might get back to one day.

Once he found Lou.

Dusk was falling. Some in the crowd gathered on the grass slope at the top car park, while others on the beach used the torches on their mobile phones for illumination. Most stood in nature’s darkness, lit only in gold and silver, taking a primal appearance, like cave dwellers at a sacrifice.

Fire was the paramount element, Kelly was thinking. Here was the cataclysm that their lives had been hurtling towards, the thing they most feared, and yet her honest feeling was elation. Her arms tingled as if the blood was returning to them after a long blockage. The knot of anxiety that had taken up residence at the base of her sacrum was dissipating through her chakras, shattering into a thousand stars. Her heart was filled with a formless hollow bliss. Her brain felt alive as if given a shot of painkillers, stimulants, euphorics, tranquillisers, a cocktail of love chemicals. Inside, she was dancing.

She was not allowed to dance in front of the hundreds who had come to Bluebird to see the fire so they could say they were there. Faces floated out of the dark and nodded their condolences. Disbelief; numb shock; anger and outrage; Kelly felt like a cyclone’s motionless eye.

‘Nobody was in there, right?’ she asked a random policeman, who didn’t have enough information to confirm.

Then she saw Gordon. His stricken face intensified her almost indecent joy.

‘My poor darling,’ she said. ‘For some reason, I thought you might have had something to do with this.’

‘Lou.’

‘What?’ For an instant she thought he had lost his mind and was misrecognising her.

‘Lou,’ he repeated. ‘She and Jude came back to get the coffee machine.’

‘Have you tried to phone her?’

‘Phone?’ He looked at her mutely. She took her own phone from her pocket.

‘Fuck. I don’t have her number. Gordon, where’s your phone?’

‘Phone?’ he said again.

‘Lou’s number!’