I lunged into the living room. Smoke swirled across the ceiling and hazed the rest of the room. Its source was the wall-map, where a patch of flame, centred on east London, was licking upwards and outwards. Its bright orange tongues snaked with easy grace through the dry kindling of the notes and clippings. With every passing second a score of new leaves curled, smoked and ignited. Many detached from the map, carrying fire down to the lower portions of the wall and the floor.

Pierce stood with his back to me, staring at what he had done. In his hand was a lighter.

‘Shit,’ I repeated. I twisted on the spot, torn between actions – get Pierce away, or combat the fire? It was immediately, instinctively obvious that he would not help. The blaze covered the entirety of the eastern borough of Newham and most of Barking, and had spread as far north as Walthamstow and Epping; flames were licking soot over the cornice and ceiling, which would soon be burning. Meanwhile the fire spread west, marching through the East End, where Pierce’s overgrowth of annotations was thickest. Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs were ablaze, and the inferno had reached Pierce’s home in Mile End – this was what had his attention, watching the fire creep towards the position of his house, even as his real house was on fire.

On fire, and perhaps only seconds away from being beyond hope of control.

I had seen the red cowling of a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. But when I dashed back there, all I found was a fire blanket, fixed to the wall by the stove – good for stifling pan fires, less useful for the kind of conflagration taking hold in the living room. Nevertheless I took hold of the release tags and pulled with such force that the whole affair, plastic cover and all, came off the wall. As I tried to separate blanket and container, I saw the jug of filter water on the side, left there when I gave up making my little cocktail. I grabbed it and ran, as fast as I dared without spilling the water, back into the living room.

It was bad, really bad. Returning to the living room I took a lungful of the smoke, which was thicker and nastier than it had been just seconds earlier, and hung lower in the room. It was as if I had tried to breathe water, polluted water – my lungs revolted, my eyes flooded with stinging tears, and I doubled over, only preserving the water in the jug by a phenomenal act of will.