Loafing around like a pro on a Sunday night mulling over a Sunday night snack, the odour of some strong scented candle perused my nostrils. Looking down at my phone I saw a missed call from my neighbour. By the time I’d fixed myself said snack, hummous on a corncake with a touch of spicy calabrian paste, it was as if the candle was right under my nose. I looked in the direction of the corridor and saw a plume of whisp-like mist loitering like a spirit. Weird, I thought.
I walked over and opened the front door.
A wall of black smoke so thick I thought I’d lost my mind forcefielded into the room and I was blown back four feet like the guy in Backdraft. Well not exactly, I think I started coughing like an asthmatic. I pulled out my Ventolin and my life flashed before my eyes.
*
In an existence permeated by walks to M&S and romcoms for one it’s hard to explain what goes through the brain when one’s survival is suddenly tossed up in the air like half a dozen eggs. I legged it to put some shoes on.
I went back to the door and covered my mouth, opening it I shouted out. I could hear muted voices through the carbon monoxide wall. Are you guys okay? No reply. I thought immediately of my neighbours who had two boys under four. Before I knew it the black smoke was floodwatering my trachea and I slammed the door shut.
Fuck.
I thought of my neighbour’s missed call. Was it a warning or a cry for help. I tried ringing him but it was engaged. I had no idea what was happening. Emotions pulsed through me. I might’ve even got a semi. Was the building about to go up in smoke. There was no way I was getting down the stairs.
What to do.
From a first date that had ended by being mugged in the back of a Merc, I knew I could get into the flat by Tarzaning it up some scaffolding and through my bedroom window. Which meant I had an escape route.
I looked out of the window and spied the blinking lights of a fire engine. Fuck me. How long had this scented candle been burning? Was I the last one in the building. Was this some targeted arson for pumping out too much Coldplay.
When my mate LG packed up his whole fam as the wild fires raged two hills over in LA and drove them to a dystopian hotel in Palm Springs, I asked him what he chose to save…
See you and raise you fam.
Clambering down the scaffolding I gave a last look wanly back at the flat I might be exchanging for cinders, balancing myself with one hand, while in the other I grasped… of all things… secured snugly under my forearm… my laptop and my iPad.
I felt a swell of regret.
Why did I double-down.
The laptop was a strange call, what was I gonna do fire off a couple of spreadsheets as my world burnt to a crisp. But the iPad. Who saves an iPad from a fire. The insult to injury was having to loiter for the next five hours in the company of neighbours with two pieces of carefully chosen tech, a source of clamminess as I held them close, shifting my bodyweight listlessly, one foot to the other.
I left behind notebooks, trinkets, the priceless Jordan 3s my first girlfriend bought me in an attempt to lure me back. Nothing relaid the interior of my being more succinctly, the core of Domingo, than this kernel that emerged like an ember through the ashes.
Clutching my iPad, walking weirdly, averting eye-contact, a mirror triumphantly held up to the lowrentness of my personality.
By now fire engines were lining the little cobbled lane, as a crowd of onlookers gawped at the smoke billowing out of the windows of flat 46, two down.
Jumping gibbon like onto the roof of the bungalow opposite clutching my devices I peered into the roof vent. The owner looked up at me alarmed. ‘Mate can I help you?’ he said aggressively. Some ropey dude looking agitated in a pink beanie carrying two Apple products appearing on your roof, I had to say I was on his side.
Hi, I said. Yea… the building’s on fire, I just climbed over from my flat.
He looked over eyes doubling in size. Come in, come in, Jesus…
They gave me a glass of water, I thanked them, and making my way outside a fireman dragging a hose like a huge serpent almost cleaned me out. Get back! he shouted firmly but trustworthily, the father I’d never had. I looked up at the windows of flat 46. That ship was going down. Looking up at my flat smoke billowed through my bathroom.
Somerset Maugham wrote once…
I can think of no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.
When you clock your powerlessness, patting yourself down and realising you’re alive, you set to wonder how the hell it will all pan out. A strange resignation reigned in me. I’d miss my art, my journals, the half-opened tub of hummous I was enjoying that Sunday evening of late April. But I had my beating heart and my memories, my balls and my word, my devices.
I met up with my neighbours, gave them a big hug, the little ones were safe. Their dad was visibly shaken, had sprinted out in socks, now rocking some trainers the flat below had lent him. For five hours the five points junction was closed off as 8 fire engines and 70 firefighters tackled the fire. Huge puddles of water coated the pavement streaming this way and that, monsoon rains bringing life to parched earth.
The fire will burn off the deadwood.
And then the rains will come.
*
The Indian Dixie chicken lady offered us a haven in her shop and some boneless. The local pub gave out free pints. A group of seven of us, taking turns to carry the kids, me subtly shifting the iPad to the insides of my jacket, walked together through Hackney, picking up nappies and snacks, making jokes, keeping the morale high as we left the lights of the fire engines and smoke and puddles in our rearview.
You know that scene in Love Actually when the whole village turns out to watch Colin Firth propose to the Portuguese lady, it felt like that. The Blitz spirit was in the building.
Apparently once the war was over everyone went back to being arseholes. But walking through the Hackney night as the city wound down their weekend, I felt an affection for mankind I would’ve been blind to had I continued with my hummous smackdown on my tod, carbon-free, weighing up some YouTube.
My brother sent my mates the sweetest SOS on the planet, and as the water quelled the fire, moral support flooded in.
I bedded down at a Premier Inn, and after some key dog videos on youknowhat, snatched sleep til dawn.
*
And yet… somehow…
Sounds about right.
The next morning making my way through a Hackney carrying on as normal I approached the ashes of the previous evening. The corridor outside was a mess, the flat stank like a bonfire. My mate Rad commiserated.
But I had dodged a bullet, all my stuff was more or less okay. If the walls of the old school building hadn’t been built like a bunker I probably would have lost the lot.
Flat 46 was in cinders.
Ab the kid I mentor hit me up.
I checked myself in the mirror, I looked gaunt and tired but my vitals were in order. More than ten minutes in the flat and my chest would start heaving. Smoke caked the walls and ceiling. Walking down the lane that morning with a bag packed, feeling vacant and marooned, I saw a tile divider on the cobbled street, picked it up and put it in my pocket.
The next week was weird, I was emotional and found it hard to sleep. I suppose it was the complete unknowing, those fifteen minutes as I scanned the flat, wheezed out the smoke in my lungs, wondering if my neighbours were okay, knowing I had to jump out of the window, wondering what the fuck to save, my life was thrown into chaos, everything upended. That level of uncertainty was weird, a primal fear I had never come close to.
These things aren’t all bad. Down in the darkness is a light that can begin to shine from another source. But we have to go where we least want to, into the depths, and find an ember there on which to blow to cause the spark to light up once again inside us.
The Fire Brigade were something else.
Archangels in fire retardant Kevlar.
Can I ask you a question, I said to a blonde fire-fighter with soot on her face in a downstairs flat in the aftermath. Sure. Do you love your job. She crinkled her nose, let out this massive grin. Yea… she said. I went off into a reverie. As they marched in and out of the building in slow motion that evening, shouting to each other, they were straight out of Armageddon, I longed for this type of purpose, I thought, to be of service. I imagined the chief, at the end of the night, face caked in sweat and carbon, handing me a helmet in slow motion.
Your turn kid.
You’ve got what it takes.
*
In each moment the fire rages, it will burn away a hundred veils. And carry you a thousand steps toward your goal.
Rumi
So that was me, the last month of which I’ve spent in a part of town I have no wish to be in, suffering my mother’s tech quandaries, bemoaning my lot like a big bratty baby. Once I’d got over the excess emotion I’d been feeling, I gradually got used to the beigeness of my surroundings. Maybe it’s a nudge to finally leave your bolthole, said Euan. I wondered.
There doesn’t have to be a moral to every story! my mate LG railed down the phone. There does! I clamoured. Is there any silver lining to all this, I asked my neighbour the following week, moving through the building, still layered in soot, the insurers biding their time.
No, came his answer.
But I wasn’t so sure.
Nothing that happens is ever just one thing, the lady had said. There were different ways to field each situation. What was the saying, until you have a health scare you have loads of problems, and then you really only have one.
I’d told Guy how this weird fire situation had made me thankful for the life we hold in the hollow of our hands and take for granted every single day. Last year a skiing accident had totalled Guy’s back and he’d spent the last year, life turned upside down, trying to learn to walk again.
What was I grateful for.
Hummous and corncakes, the sway of the leaf, the sunlight on my pillow, oxygen, the simple fact of breathing in and out, me and my moms becoming new BFFs, the Big Man upstairs, walking in tandem with my neighbours through the Hackney night in the glow of the streetlamps, laughing and commiserating, the right side of something that could have gone so badly wrong.
*
I cycled back across town on Sunday last week to take Ab to the cinema. On the way I once again crunched through the cinders of my flat, mask on, watered my plants and waved the high-ceilinged oven goodbye for another week. Walking through the churchyard under the horse chestnuts I felt home. A brotha passed by me, 10am baked, telling his mate through earbuds he knew for sure we are in a simulation. A lime bike outside a newsagent told me JR had come and gone.
I love Hackney.
Things aren’t all that far from perfect, around the clock, I thought, you just have to find the right angle. I wouldn’t be back in the flat for another month at least, but back I’d be. With some learning to show for it. Something singed but regrowing. To decompose to reconstruct. No thing was ever just one thing.
Fire scourges the earth, nutrients abound, the ground replenishes.
Forests rejuvanate, the soil enriches.
The deadwood burns off.
And then the rains will come.
