fire, water, burn
Dublin 1998. I was living just off O'Connell Street in an area where every second house was a brothel and people were shooting up in the supermarket doorways. The night I moved in, three people were stabbed in an amusement arcade around the corner. Still, it was cheap, although my ex-fiance preferred it if I didn't go outside alone at night. That was fine by me - it meant he had to do the Spar run for extra Custard Creams.

One night we arrived home from a pretty good party in another part of the Fair City. We staggered to our cheap single beds and pulled the wafer thin duvets over us. It was 2am and the sound of sirens lulled us to sleep...

...until 3am. As I awoke from my semi-drunken coma I could hear an unbearable high-pitched noise and some frantic banging and shouting. I was preparing myself to shout abuse at the source of the racket and fall back into slumber when our flatmate burst into the room dressed only in a pair of novelty boxers.

"Fire!" he yelled. "We've got to get out!"

We blinked at him, fairly uncomprehending.

"The. Building. Is. On. Fire." he gulped.

Sure enough, that explained the alarms and the shouts. Convinced that it was a tiny little birthday cake candle-sized flame somewhere I lackadaisically pulled on some jeans and shoes.

We assembled by our front door. I could smell smoke too, and was getting cross that my night's sleep had been interrupted by this sorry excuse for an inferno.

I've done Health and Safety training. Hell, I was a Brownie. I know about fire. Why, then, did it not occur to me to feel the back of the door before opening it?

We opened it. The corridor was dim, glowing and filled - completely filled - with smoke. It was also a little too warm for comfort. Warm in a kind of a flamey way. There were flames in the middle of it. We shut the door again and looked at each other, panic rising.

"Er, crawl?" was my suggestion, and so we did - we opened the door, dropped to the floor and inched our way along the wall until we reached the stairs. The stairwell was less smoky, and we sprinted down three flights to the ground floor where a burly Dublin fireman was holding his breath, a hose and the door open.

We reached the street and watched as it filled up with a selection of Dublin's finest nightwear and novelty slippers. In half an hour the fireman had extinguished the blaze and were able to tell us that some complete shit had brought bags of rubbish into our apartment block, set one on fire and sent it in the lift to our floor, and then blocked the main exit with more burning rubbish.

"Could've been bad, lads, but yez are fine" they announced, not worrying about details like the rasping coughs that half the street had suddenly developed.

When we returned to our flat everything was covered in soot and smoke - the white walls were streaked black and grey, the carpets stank, the acrid smell of burning plastic hung in the air for days.

No one witnessed the arsonist. No one seemed to know why anyone would torch the only semi-decent building in the street. I got a half day at work the next day when I mentioned to my boss what had happened. That was good, because I was nursing an enormous hangover, though in retrospect it probably would have been better to not have been in an arson attack.

Length? One of those really big hoses.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Fri 15 Feb 2008, 12:56, Reply)