I lay back in the bed and blinked so there was the ghost of it on the inside of the curtain. I tried to imagine it was Susan’s face, but I couldn’t see that it was, I didn’t know what Susan looked like. I blinked some more and it faded. It was pale and it was going and the old lady came. I tried to blink her away, but she was standing up by her front door, looking at me and lifting her grey hair over her ear. I shut my eyes and she was still there, waiting for me, so I had to look. I looked at her eyes. They weren’t doing what I heard her saying, they were bright and lonely, telling me they weren’t in the same place as I was but they could see me.

I opened my eyes up and she wasn’t there any more. There was a flash in my mind. Now Susan was gone, the house wasn’t going to burn down. It was her doing the fires. She was gone and she wasn’t coming back. The lady was looking and telling me.

‘I was watching the smoke because I thought it was a witch coming under the door.’ It was Busola, I lifted up and looked across at the bunk bed – she was on her back looking up at me. ‘But the door opened and the man came in to rescue me.’

‘What?’

‘I was worried about the smoke of the witch coming under the door. But the man across the road came and lifted me out the bed. I thought he was saving me from the witch, I didn’t know what else he was doing there.’

‘What witch?’

‘It wasn’t, it was smoke. He wrapped me up in the blanket and I could see downstairs everything was smoke because he jumped over the banister and the stairs were burning. I felt the fire, but I didn’t think it was happening to me, I thought it was happening to Susan.’

‘They threw you out the window,’ I said, because it didn’t make sense what she was saying and that’s what I remembered.

‘You’re talking about the other fire,’ she said, and turned over to face me. ‘I’m talking about the one with Susan where she told me not to breathe. It wasn’t her it was happening to, it was me. I don’t want her no more. I want to breathe.’

I didn’t like the way it was going or the way Busola looked in the dark, in shadow at the bottom of the bunk bed. I wanted my mum to come in and turn on the light. So I said, ‘Where was Mummy?’

‘I don’t know, in hospital.’