I ripped at the bolts, at the smoking chain, I felt the skin of my hand give way under the heat and then I didn’t feel it. I grabbed the handle and pushed and we fell through the door and out of the apartment and out and out and out into the hallway outside. I slammed the door behind us savagely, and I heard her scream. I mean I heard her scream my scream, scream the way that I would have, long and with exactly my voice. She screamed the names of the children, of course she did. I would have.

A woman came running towards us down the hallway with a scratchy woollen blanket. She tried to take E and B from me but I wouldn’t let her, my arms were locked that hard around them, so instead she held the blanket around us all together and walked us outside and to an ambulance waiting in the car park, saying things I couldn’t understand in a soothing voice. We were safe she could have been saying, we were the ones that were safe.

18

E and B and I were tucked into the back of an ambulance and driven away. At the hospital, nurses peeled E and B off me gently. I was told that B was dehydrated, that he was sick, was perhaps quite ill, but would recover. That they had both inhaled a lot of smoke. My hand was the only thing keeping me there, nailing me into the room I mean. The pain in my hand was a white line so bright it stopped my thoughts. The nurses wrapped it in cling film and then in gauze. It was better not to look at it.

After my hand was taken care of, to the extent that it could be, I found B and E in beds next to each other, each fitted with little plastic masks that were held tight against their mouths with soft elastic bands. Miles and miles of plastic tubes wrapped around them like fishing lines that would pull them back to shore, to me, into my arms.

They looked so dirty in the clean hospital sheets. Their faces were smudged and crusted with old dinners and who knew what else. E’s hair was tangled, it looked exactly like a cloud of flies swarming around her face. What must we look like out here, I thought, and I wished for just one second that we were back inside the apartment where no one could see us. The red marks it turned out were only lipstick, were and had been only kisses after all. The nurses wiped them all away, all the kisses all the red layers of them, coaxing the new clean skin out into the bright hospital lights.

I was given a chair to sit on and this I positioned exactly equidistant between the two beds. I promised myself that I would leap up at any moment where leaping was necessary. B was asleep but it was a better kind of sleep now, a safe-at-last kind of sleep and not the kind of sleep he had been sleeping before. I put my bandaged hand near him on the bed and felt better. E looked severely at me as she almost always did, but took my other hand and held it as she drifted off too amid the beeps and bright lights. In her other hand she clutched her giraffe, another lone survivor. We were here, here we were.