Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

the side of Jeremy’s face with a crack. It hit him under the ear, across the cheek. His jaw seemed to dislodge from his face, giving him a wide-open look of surprise. Then the blood started pouring from his mouth. He dropped Katherine, who scrambled to Andy’s outstretched arm. Jeremy took two steps (pendulum jaw swinging) towards me.

He never reached me. He might have been surprised when the floor gave way beneath him, but his jaw couldn’t drop any further. He was gone, into the now fierce flames on the first floor.

Andy, Katherine and I literally hot-footed it out of the room. Katherine was between us, her legs pinwheeling the ground as we hauled her down the stairs. Erin stood by the entrance, waving for us to hurry up. Spot fires danced across the foyer, not yet an obstacle, but the paint on the ceiling was bubbling, fire crawling across the beams. The chandelier came down with an almighty crash just as we reached the door.

I collapsed at the bottom of the front steps. Crawling in the snow without gloves is like dashing across hot sand – it sears and bites the skin. Then I was lifted, and realised it was Erin holding me up, dragging me through the snow until eventually we plopped down in watery divots and watched the inferno, eyes glazed, coughing, astounded we were alive. There was my crackling fire from the brochure, at last.

The storm hadn’t ebbed. The wind was bracing and snowflakes still stung our eyelids and cheeks and for once I didn’t mind at all.

CHAPTER 40

It didn’t take long for the roof to collapse. The walls quickly followed, imploding inwards and sending a shower of sparks into the night with a hiss that, if this was a different hotel and this book a different genre, could have been a freeing of spirits.

Juliette turned to Gavin and said, ‘I think I’m ready to sell. Seeing as I’ve done the demolition for you.’

Some of us, those with energy left, laughed. People put arms around each other. Andy, for all my pithy remarks to this point, held Katherine like she was the only thing in the world. Marcelo and Audrey tucked Sofia between them. Juliette patted Gavin on the back in camaraderie. Erin and I didn’t do anything so clichéd, but we were near each other. I knew the fire was too far away to stand in for our flint, to reignite us, and that was okay.

‘What’s that?’ Katherine asked, pointing at the rubble.

There was a dark shadow moving across the white snow, backlit by the glowing embers. It made it maybe fifty metres from the blaze, then collapsed in the snow.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Andy said.

‘Is he moving?’ I can’t remember who said that.

‘If he’s hurt, it doesn’t matter who he is or what he’s done,’ Juliette reasoned. ‘We can’t just leave him here like this.’

‘I’ll go check on him.’ I was surprised to hear myself volunteer. There was a murmur of half-hearted dissent that didn’t overpower the relief that none of them had to go, so I hauled myself to my feet and staggered towards the shape. I had a vivid memory of another black shadow in a field of white, but I shut it out.

I reached the body. It was Jeremy. He was lying on his back, his eyes shut. His hair was burned, his cheeks cooked in places and ash-streaked in others. His chest was moving up and down, very slowly. I sat down beside him, because there was nothing else to do.

‘Who is it?’ Jeremy spoke slowly, with a lisp as his broken jaw slipped, his tongue slicked black with blood.

‘Ernest . . . your brother.’

It was quiet for a while.

‘Do you dream of choking?’ he asked.

‘Sometimes,’ I admitted. I understood the ash, the choking, the torture, now. That repressed trauma leaking through, of being trapped in that car. The things that he couldn’t remember but bubbled up to haunt him. I can’t breathe when I get angry.

‘Okay.’ He sounded pleased. That I was like him, perhaps. That was all he wanted to know.

He wheezed out a long time. His chest stopped moving.

Then, just when I was about to leave, it started again.

I looked from my brother back to Gavin’s big yellow tank. There stood a collection of people, only a few of whom had my blood and even fewer my surname, waiting for me. They were a collection of hyphens and prefixes and married names and ex-this and step-that. And there was one more Cunningham lying next to me, struggling to breathe.

I’d been so desperate to make a family, to force Erin to make me one, that I’d forgotten the one that had formed around me. Family is gravity. I realised then what Sofia had told me back at the very start of all this. Family is not whose blood runs in your veins, it’s who you’d spill it for.