-Chapter 34-

The Things We Lost in the Fire (Part 1)

It’s thirty four minutes past midnight in England.

There is a girl in Denpasar, seven thousand miles away, sitting in sunlight with her arms cupped around a computer monitor to blot out the glare. It's early- morning lessons haven't even started yet- so she's in the library, the air in here close and sticky, checking Facebook updates.

Breaking News, says the feed of a friend of a friend. She sees the picture and clicks the link, scanning the page- stuttering over a few of the English words she doesn't know that well. The gist of it is easy enough though.

Urgent. Tragic. Fire. Deaths confirmed, Rushed to hospital. One Direction.

Her heart is pounding. She leaves a comment, and reblogs it. Goes on tumblr, on twitter, watches snippets of news footage on youtube. Though the posts and the retweets and the headlines are many, the actual information is sparse. A hundred thousand voices not really saying much of anything at all.

She adds her own to the mix.

Please be okay. Please. Don't let anything bad have happened to My Harry.

***

There is a mother in the living room of a flat in South London sitting in the darkness, not watching the television. Her daughter has fallen asleep on her lap and she idly fists gently through her curls, listening to the quiet sniffling of her breath. The girl should be in bed, but the mother hasn't the heart to move her.

It's good to feel her warm and heavy and here, her daughter. The mother thinks a lot about daughters these days. Of being one. Of having them. Beautiful bright eyed daughters who think and love and feel with such intensity it can break a Mother's heart. God, if she'd have only known at seventeen...

She’ll be getting a call soon. A panda police car will pull up onto the estate to be eyed warily by the neighbours. When she opens the door, it will not be good news. 

***

There is a boy wearing clothes that aren't his and a dead man's shoes. They want him to talk, but it isn't his voice to use. So many words coming at him and he just wants to shut them all up, shut his eyes- not his eyes- and tumble right out of this body.

Like she did hers.

For the first time it begins to feel like it doesn’t even fit him properly. Like a suit made for somebody else. Hands, arms, legs, cock and balls, liver, spine, toes and teeth. None of it is his.

At least I'm the person who's in love with you, he'd said. Now he doesn't even have that.

***

It's thirty four minutes past midnight in England and there is no Letitia Williams.

***

It's a staggeringly bright day the next time I'm alive, blinking my way back into a body that doesn't quite feel like mine. I can see, but it's still all a little blurry around the edges, I can only just make out the faint pips of machinery and the feel of the thin blanket over me is strangely dull . I can't smell anything- apart from the synthetic plastic scent of tubes shoved into my nose.

Where am I? What day is it? What's happened to me?

I remember a conversation with Harry, one from a while ago. Have you ever fallen asleep on a train? He'd asked. One minute you're in one place and the next it's like you just blinked and were in another...

Only I didn't just blink, did I? I'd felt the pain in my chest and the sensation of being dragged underwater. Too far down, to the kind of depths that people never come back from.

I stop wondering where I am and start to panic about just who I am.

Tonguing at my teeth, there's still a gap where I feel nothing but soft gums but it doesn't still the panic I'm feeling. Too easy. Too obvious. I try to think of something they wouldn’t know. Something small and insignificant like the first Harry’s little cut from a glass bottle. There's a small burn scar just on the inside of my left wrist that I remember;  got it rushing around trying to make breakfast once when I was late for work. It's just the kind of detail they might overlook, a scar Tish Williams earned but I don't know if I....

I try to pull my arm over and examine my hand, but the metal on my wrist snags and won't give. I'm handcuffed to the bed, trapped by the wrist, arms filled up with drips and wires as if I'm an ipod charging next to a plug. It's like being back at that place all over again, where they forced me to carve up my arm with all the other brainwashed girls. In a moment I'm certain that this is where I am,that I'll be brainwashed. If I don't get out now that's the only fate that awaits me.

With my free hand, I rip the tubes from my nostrils and start tugging on the drips, making my arms bleed at the incision points. The heart monitor rats me out, starts wailing and through the door a man's face peers in at me like I'm some animal before disappearing.

My chest hurts again, my left side is strangely numb as I swing around. All I've got is the needles in my skin for weapons and the only plan is to make a mess and hope for the best. Which has been serving me rather well so far.

Before I died that is.

A nurse rushes in, flanked by a doctor and a police officer like the start of a bad joke and I'm pushed backwards onto the bed, dizzy and exhausted already. The nurse puts the wires back in my arm, the tube goes back in my nose and the policeman leaves the room. He doesn't go too far; the tips of his shoes in the open doorway tells me he's parked up on a chair outside my door.

"Letitia. Letitia hello."

The doctor tries to calm me down. He's middle aged, very dark and smells like olive oil.

"Do you know where you are?"

A secret underground lab. A twisted research facility, I guess. Inside a body that isn't really mine but is mine because I'm not me, but I am me even though me me is probably dead in a freezer while I'm stuck here in a bed with wires and tubes and handcuffs. I really do feel extraordinarily dizzy, don't say anything and glare at the doctor.

"You're in Saint Bartholomew's hospital. You were admitted here the day before yesterday- you’d inhaled a frankly catastrophic amount of soot and smoke-"

I know the hospital. Chantalle was born at Saint Bart's hospital, I was seven and my Grandma took us for pie and mash, old school cockney style before we went to see the new baby . I took Joey to A and E there when he tried to ride his bike down the stairwell at thirteen and broke his collarbone.

"and suffered something called pulmonary edema-"

The doctor's just talking and talking at me and none of it is really sticking.

"-before your heart became so starved of oxygen that it went into cardiac arrest. Twice, actually. Technically you died twice and we brought you back."

Some things happened inside of my body. I know that. I felt it. That doesn't matter because I'm either better or dead and not much can be done about that.

"We had to drain a lot of fluid from your lungs and we're going to have to monitor you very carefully for the next few days.”

All I remember was my dad, Olivia with her neck wound, Trick dripping water and the sound of helicopters overhead. What happened in the time it took for me to blink my way back into existence? My brain is a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces missing and nothing I can do to assemble it into a picture that I recognise.

"Where's Harry?" I demand the minute he's stopped banging on. "And the others? What did you do with them?"

The doctor frowns at me.

"We’ve informed your next of kin that you're here, but I should tell you now that visitors won't be permitted.”

Clearly I'm not in St Bart's then. What kind of hospital doesn't allow patients to have visitors?

"What. have. you. done. with .Harry?"

The doctor blinks at me and then pulls out a slim tube. Olivia’s lipgloss is the first thing I think of, but it’s actually a small torch. He turns it on and shines it in my eyes, moving it from left to right slowly over my vision. "Follow this light."

"Suck my dick," I shoot back like a twelve year old.  

“I’m going to have somebody from neurology come and discuss options with you. You were clinically dead for a number of minutes. We need to make sure there’s no lasting damage to your brain," he says, looking at me like clearly there is. He turns off the light and puts it back into the breast pocket of his scrubs before drawing away from me.

At the door he pauses, turning around, his placid bedside manner disappearing momentarily. "And for what it’s worth...I hope, after they’ve locked you up, that they throw away the key,” he says, before closing the door behind him.

****

These are not exactly parting words to fill me with confidence about my situation. A little later,  I lie back on the bed, breathing in the oxygen being pumped into the cannula and really do feel like I've gone through watery lungs, heart attacks, dying twice and all the rest. And brain damage, whispers something nasty in my head. But I can't dwell on it.

As much as I want to sob throw my hands over my eyes and just let go.

Got to do like the sharks do and just keep moving forwards, have to run faster than them and keep fighting them.

A door. Handcuffs. Machinery. A window- how many floors up, I can’t be sure. Nothing I can use as a weapon.  I try to come up with the semblance of a plan, work out the times when the guard outside goes to the toilet- if there’s some kind of a pattern (there is not). My chest hurts, my head feels strange. More nurses. Don't take the pills.

A little while later I turn on the television for want of anything else to do.

After flicking through the channels and all the usual shit, something catches my eye. Something I recognise far too well. Shots of the Olympic Stadium, from the outside with police tape cordoning of sections and the interior, dripping wet and fire damaged. My free hand tightens on the remote as I listen to the voice of the reporter.

“....of tributes already carpeting the ground alongside the Olympic Stadium, with more and more arriving as each day passes. Last night there was a candlelit vigil for the young lives so tragically lost in the blaze….”

There are flowers around it, people in tears and posters in messy paint talking about Prayers and Love and all of the rest. The news segment cuts to a reporter standing there live and doing a piece to camera.

"Of course, what the fans are really waiting for is One Direction themselves to speak out publicly. Their representation insists that all are recuperating but silence and a total shut down of public sighting suggests that this was a traumatic experience for all involved, still too raw and too harrowing to even talk about"

My hand tightens around the remote, cold fingers turning white on the buttons. They flash a posed promotional picture to remind the viewers of what they think One Direction should look like. A Zayn who isn’t mad, a Louis who isn’t terrified, a Liam who hasn’t had to climb naked over broken glass and bodies to survive, a Niall who’s alive, unscarred and whole, a Harry with hair who’s smile comes without trouble lurking behind it and who isn’t mine.

"It's even halted the release of their newest single, set for just one day before the fire that killed and injured so many. Instead, the release date is set for next week with all proceeds going to a newly set up charity to aid those who survived this, the worst public catastrophe since The Hillsborough Disaster in 1989. The single will be--"

The voice cuts out and for a minute I wonder why. The remote isn’t my hands anymore and the television is cracked all up the screen, broken with the force of the hurtling remote after I’ve chucked it.

This isn't the story, It can't be the story. A song postponed for a week is not a victory. After everything we went through, after all the death and the fire and shooting the machine, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Stupid Tish. I should have never started to believe in beans on toast with Harry and dates to Pizza Express. Of course it was never going to fucking happen.

But we killed all the clones…

didn’t we

***

There must be a camera in the room somewhere. I can’t think of a single other reason why I’m still alive. This is the torture that they’re going to make Harry watch- nursing me back to health just so that I can last the maximum amount of time with the maximum amount of pain.

He must hate me. Because it’s happening like he said it would, that they’d torture me to get to him and force him to say yes to them. It would have been kinder to kill him, I realise. Killed him and then put the gun in my mouth and blown my brains out too, like father like daughter. Kinder than putting him through all that guilt. But he hasn’t said yes yet though….and maybe he won’t.

And for some reason it makes me feel better. Having an explanation, lying back and thinking that Harry can see me. Somewhere. And he’ll be thinking, she’ll be brave. My Tish is too strong to let the bastards grind her down.

So I pretend like I’m bored. Like I’m not bothered. And really, even being terrified of the prospect of dying does get boring when you’re stuck in bed all day and night. They say my breathing has come on leaps and bounds, but that my lungs are healing slower than they should be (probably because I’m spitting out the pills they give me) and I all I have is the sparse stream of nurses to entertain me because I smashed up the tv and am not allowed another one.

"Can I have a newspaper?" I finally crack one night and ask one of the nurses. He’s tall with scruffy black hair and a hunch in his loping gait when he comes round to ask if I need some water to drink or to use the toilet before checking over all of my wires and tubes.

“I’ll have to check with the officer if it’s allowed... but I think so,” he says softly.

His eyes are so kind and he looks so tired, like a real nurse on a real night shift that I can’t stop myself hoping, maybe, that I might find an ounce of compassion from somebody in this place.

“Where’s Harry?” I whisper. I don’t know what else to do. Just repeat the question over and over like a feeble prayer. As if prayers are ever ever answered.

“Who’s Harry?” he puzzles. “Your boyfriend or…”

The disappointment comes coupled with a heavy amount of frustration and I can’t help but snap, “Harry Styles…. Subject .001 or whatever you call him….where is he?”

“Hang on...isn’t he a pop star? He is, yeah. One Direction or something. My girlfriend reads those magazines sometimes, I’m sure he’s in them all the time.

“Yes. Of course you know what he is. Where is he?”

“I-I don’t know. Oh, there was that awful fire wasn’t there? So horrible, all those poor girls. Are you a big fan of the band?”

“No. Of course I’m fucking not,” I retort.

“But you just asked-”

“-Are you making more clones, is that it?”

“I’m going to get someone to test your blood oxygen levels again,” is all he says after that.

I do feel light headed all over again. And maybe I should start actually taking the pills so I can get strong enough to try and escape.

…..and don’t forget about the brain damage, whispers something nastily in the back of my skull.

***

There’s more news about the fire on page one. Saying how they’ve managed to work out it was an electrical fire. Liam’s being treated for lacerations from cuts from broken glass and apparently Louis was seen visiting his mum which doesn’t make any sense if all the clones died. And Niall I read, chest tightening when I see his name down on paper, came out of it quite badly. Inhaled smoke, is currently in hospital but set to make a speedy recovery.

Not sure how speedy. And I’m not sure how much I trust those doctors the papers are quoting.  Last time I checked he was suffering from a nasty case of being dead. Every incarnation of him.

I'm on page 2. Which is a giant punch in the gut that I didn’t expect.

Killer apprehended at long last, reads the headline. Any other time and I'd probably be front page news, but its been a big week. I look at the handcuffs, at the bloke outside of my door and think...shit, am I actually going to jail?

I can’t be. I’m here. Being tortured by the Spindle.

It’s actually difficult to read what the paper says, the words get a bit swimmy the further down I go. I’m getting headaches every day now too, sometimes my left leg jerks and twitches without warning. After a few questions, a little poking and prodding, the doctors decide it’s best I go in for an MRI scan.

***

It’s the first time I get to leave the room since I woke up in hospital and only adds to my confusion. They keep saying that I’m in hospital, that this is St Bart’s, but I’m still expecting the bland office decor of the research facility they brainwashed the girls in. This place is peopled though.

Nurses walk around with the remnants of the lunch trays, visitors sit with their loved ones, chatting and holding hands. I feel tears sting my eyes as I walk alone with the doctor and the officer guarding me, attracting a few suspicious glares. I want them sitting with me too- my mum and Joey and Chantalle. Like when we were here right after Chantalle was born and she was exhausted and holding the baby with this totally blissed out expression, pulling us onto the bed; all four of us together against the whole wide world.

As we shuffle on down to the oncology ward, we take the lifts near the intensive care unit. This is probably normal for the people at deaths door but as we wait for the elevator, two male nurses go hurtling out of the ward, running. “He’s trying to get out again!” they say to another who’s strolling down the

“Shit,” says the new nurse, dropping the files he’s carrying.

“And he made a shiv out of bed wheel. A fucking wheel,” pants the oldest of them. A rather handsome nurse with salt and pepper hair and grizzly stubble. He holds up his hand, and it’s streaming blood.

Wheel shiv. Why didn’t I think of that?

“I see his drip!”

They charge down the corridor as, through the double doors I can see the retreating figure shuffling away, he’s slow, attached to a drip but by god he’s giving it his all, back hunched, every muscle tense. He turns around to check how close his pursuers are and through the windows of the doors I’m able to see him a little better.

I get a flash of a burned face contorted into a determined sneer.

Niall. I plunge my hands into my hair and bend my head, squeezing my eyes tight. Wanting to scream. I don’t know why my brain is doing this to me still. I’m not dying anymore. I can’t live my life being haunted by everyone that’s died.

Brain damage...brain damage….brain damage...it goes off in my head like an alarm bell.

“I’m fine,” I mutter to the police officer as he frowns at me folding up on myself. Weird how this hallucination is lingering though. I can still see the droplets of blood on the floor.

Maybe that just means that I’m getting worse.

“We take the handcuffs off. It’ll interfere with the scan otherwise,” the MRI technician tells me when we’re in the room.

As soon as the police officer aqueuses  I yank my hand out and grab my wrist, staring down at it and letting out a breath of relief. The scar is there. The insignificant one on the inside of my wrist oh so faint against the redness that’s come from being chained for so long. It’s there. I’m me...I’m me...I’m alive and not a clone.

Well of course you’re not. Silly thing to think, says something in the back of my head.

The MRI scanner looks like a giant polo mint from the front which is almost funny if I wasn’t terrified of it. I could get swallowed up whole in that polo hole or it could show up things that I don’t want to think about right now.

About all the places where the dead people live.

***

"It's good and bad news time really,” the consultant tells me when the tests comes back a couple of days later. She shows me a picture of the inside of my head, jabbing at it with the tip of her pen and I can almost feel it jabbing away at the real parts of my grey matter.

"Right side, looks good. All functioning perfectly well. But on the left side, you see these little things, like freckles...it indicates some damage. Some of the lights we couldn’t get to switch back on so to speak. The brain is rather a slow healer but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible and even then, if this is permanent damage, once we know what the symptoms are they can easily be managed.”

I look at the freckles on my brain while not having the foggiest what a normal brain is supposed to look like. “Permanent? Holy shit,” I murmur weakly. “I’m a vegetable.”

“No you’re not,” says the doctor sharply. It was supposed to be a joke I want to tell her, she was supposed to laugh because of course it’s not a big deal. I feel a bit sick. “Not by a long way- the damage is only slight. It could just be a matter of being a little more clumsy on your left-hand side than before. Have you noticed any things that have changed?”

Okay now that is funny. Have I noticed any things that have changed since waking up? Well, for a start I’m stuck in a hospital wearing a handcuffs with a policeman permanently stationed outside of my door, I have no idea where anyone I care about is and two days ago I saw my dead friend in a hospital gown.

And then there are the things that haven’t changed. Which are probably even weirder and more fucked up than all the things that have. Take for example the fact that One Direction are still in the papers like they’re still a band and not secretly an army of clones, that the world isn’t over but it isn’t fixed and I’m not dead but I don’t know if you could call this fucking alive either.

“Like what?”  I ask her with a bitter laugh.

“Have you been seeing things?”

“No.” I say immediately. A total lie. I look at my brain photo and the little freckles and think maybe I should trust her...maybe I can’t totally trust my instincts anymore. “Well... somebody died and I thought I saw him and….” here my breath catches.

“And?” she prompts.

“Sometimes I’m not actually sure why I’m here,” I confess in a whisper.

“There was a fire. You remember that?”

“In the Olympic Stadium, I know.” I can still smell the smoke sometimes. I get dreams about the room and Harry hooked up to that machine with my hand on the trigger. Sometimes I shoot. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I get down there and he’s gone. Disappeared without a trace.

The consultant is frowning at me. “It was a house fire. “

“No….” I say eyes flickering from her to the police officer. He’s frowning at me too. But I think I would know what kind of fire nearly killed me. “ It was the Olympic Stadium. We were down in the basement too long, I breathed in all that soot and it fucked me right up.”

A soft expression passes over the consultant, and rather disconcertingly she stops standing and sits down next to my bed. I don’t want her to be caring, I want cool and detached. I want to be the murderer treated at arm’s length so I don’t have to be a seventeen year old girl who is...cracking.

Cracking like panes of fragile glass.

“You’ve been watching the news I take it?”

“A little...but then I smashed up my television,” I point to the broken evidence. “ I read the papers though.”

“Your brain has been through a lot of trauma. But it’s smart. It’s still working very hard for you, Letitia. Which means that all these gaps and little dark spots are being filled in with elements you’ve picked up on in the last few days- from the television and the newspapers mainly I think. You may genuinely remember being in the Olympic Stadium during the fire. But in reality, you weren’t.”

My mouth drops open slightly. Freckles filled up with bits and pieces clipped from the headlines- it’s fucking ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as finding popstars knocked out under your balcony, stumbling upon conspiracies to take over the world and falling in love with a boy who was grown in a tube of goo about two years ago. I know what I know and I know what I’ve seen.

“Bullshit,” I say with a sneer. “You’re trying to trick me!”

For all I know, the MRI scan is a fake and my brain doesn’t have freckles on the left side at all. That’s just them planting their seeds of doubt into my skull.

“It’s important for you to try and work things out logically. It will help your brain to recover. Ask yourself, Letitia….why would I try to trick you?”

“Because you’re with them….” I say. Don’t even have to think about it.

“With who?”

There’s a pen by the desk, I lunge for it with my left hand and my fingers can’t seem to pick it up properly. It doesn’t matter. I turn back to her and hiss, “The Spindle. You took Harry. And you’re doing this to me to get him to work for you again.”

“Who’s Harry?”

There’s nothing on her face. But she’s lying. I don’t know why I’ve started crying, I’m not frightened or starting to wonder if she might be on to something. Of course I’m fucking not. It’s just frustration, at all these arseholes sitting here and lying to my face and making me feel crazy.

“Harry Styles. Subject .001. You know...I know you know,” I should shout it. But it comes out as a frightened whisper.

“That’s the popstar isn’t it? Somebody noted that you’ve been talking about him on your chart actually.”

She leans forward and takes my hand, making me flinch visibly.

“Your name is Letitia Williams You’re from South London, you work in a supermarket and you’re going to prison for a very long time for killing your ex-boyfriend and three other people.  You do not know this Harry Styles person. And I think, deep down in there somewhere, you know that perfectly well.”

***

I’m getting better, no more water in my lungs and I don’t even need oxygen anymore. The sky outside is busy with birds at this part of the evening. I can’t see much of the view from my window here in the bed but I can see the colours in the sky. Pale red and navy blue sinking together to make indigo. I wonder if I’ll get a window in prison.  

Your name is Letitia Williams You’re from South London, you work in a supermarket and you’re going to prison for a very long time for killing your ex-boyfriend and three other people.  You do not know Harry Styles.

And ,deep down in there somewhere, you know that perfectly well.

The nice nurse with the kind, tired eyes and bad posture is back for his night shift. I feel bad for swearing at him so I smile, and he smiles back. “Do you want anything? Some water or…?”

He has a dimple and I don’t know why I feel like I’ve been gutted all along my belly all of a sudden. Throwing my hand over my eyes, I start crying. I need someone here with me. I can’t bear being alone anymore, it’s driving me crazy. “I want my mum,” I sob. And Joey and Chantalle too. No point asking for anyone else.

Who else would come?

***

And then a bloke in a suit comes. Brown faced bland brown bloke with a brown suit and nothing much about him that sticks out- but that could just be my facial recognition going to shit, they said that could happen. I’m supposed to be writing a list about it actually, so I know for sure what’s wrong with me. Right now it looks like this;

-Sometimes can’t pick stuff up with left hand.

-Bad headaches

-Trouble concentrating sometimes

-Have gone totally fucking batshit mental.

But facial recognition or not, he has a suit like either a plain clothes police detective or a contract killer and I’m not going anywhere with him. Because that’s what they say, that I need to go with him.

“Fuck off,” I say and fold my arms. Funny how a few weeks ago I was plotting all kinds of ways to escape this place, but now I have no plans to leave this hospital bed. Even if they set the mattress on fire  I won’t budge. I’ll just let it kill me the way it was supposed to have done in the first place.

I’m going to miss limbo. But it looks like I’ve got to move on down to hell.

Mr Brown looks amused.

“You've been discharged. Don't you want to get out of this bed, walk around a bit, breathe some air that doesn’t come out of a can?"

I grit my teeth and push out my chin, “I want a lawyer. I want a lawyer right here, right now."

Round of applause for the old Tish, she may have been a horrible shit but she’s managed to get me through more than my fair share of trouble. At least...I think she has. Maybe not. “I haven’t been questioned or charged or nothing. You can't put me in prison just like that. I know my rights, believe me I do.”

Mr Brown laughs.

“Why on earth would you go to prison? You didn't do anything. I've come to take you home.”

Well then it means I’m going to die. If I’m not going to prison then I’m going to die.

It’s important for you to try and work things out logically, says the consultant’s voice in the back of my head.  It will help your brain to recover. Ask yourself, Letitia….why would this man want to kill you?

Because of Harry and the other clones. Easy. But they have taken their fucking time about it to be sure. Why? Why go to the trouble of waiting for me to get better?

Try to work it out logically….

Your name is Letitia Williams You’re from South London, you work in a supermarket and you were supposed to be going to prison for a very long time for killing your ex-boyfriend and three other people.  You do not know Harry Styles.

Something isn’t real. Either it’s this...or everything that happened before.

Something isn’t real. It can’t be.

A/N: Next chapter is up too <3