The Demetriou Ruling

Geoff Demetriou spat forcibly onto the tarmac and scuffed the phlegmy produce into the pavement with the sole of his boot. He unclipped his helmet and slung it onto the lawn, where it landed supine, rocking on its dome in the hopeless manner of an upturned turtle. His eyes were pink and swollen, his cheeks beneath streaked with some nondescript fluid. He rubbed his ribs, sorely noting at least two or three unnatural protrusions. Behind him, a crisp voice squawked robotically from the waist-held radios of several of his nearby colleagues.

‘Two adults retrieved, one male, one female. Critical condition. Excessive smoke inhalation and severe burns. Over."

It was a beast of a blaze, growing fiercer by the minute. The houses round here were like bundles of kindling; the messy, frantic lives of their working-class tenants the sparks that danced around them. In these places, the quiet anticipation of combustion stalked the rafters, the dry old wood ever-creaking with the potential for disaster. On this occasion, it was all down to some dodgy wiring; a DIY job that had saved a few quid. But this was the true cost: The flames swarmed and writhed, ever-hungry, feasting on the bones of the place, spreading through its incendiary innards like… well, like wildfire.

He’d been the first in. That was pretty much standard these days. Lead by example, and all that. His intuition was never wrong, and tonight it'd led him straight up the stairs. At the top, the staircase had collapsed beneath him, separating him from his squad. He’d pressed on regardless and found the young couple in the smoke-filled bathroom, both unconscious. Fluffy towels were stuffed beneath the door, the window forced open wide--although not wide enough--and smeared with desperate, frantic fingerprints. He'd wrapped them in what protection he could, hoisted the female over his shoulder, and was beginning to formulate an extraction plan when the floorboards gave way, plunging them into the lounge beneath, black with swirling smoke and violently aflame.

There was a time for formulating plans, and there was a time for instinct. He'd tossed a burning chair through the window and, with the man and woman tucked beneath his arms, launched himself after it. Toothy shards of jagged glass ripped at his arms and back, before a momentous crash landing propelled him across the lawn in a barrel-roll. Ignoring the punch of several broken ribs and the hot agony of a dislocated shoulder, he had leapt to his feet and patted out the flames, tending to the couple before he extinguished himself.

All in all, he was in a bad way. But he'd got them out. They were in the hands of the medics now.

Flames escaped through the windows, flickering and dancing in the night sky, a thick plume of toxic smoke bellowing from the charred roof. The squad and their hoses were doing everything they could, but they really had their work cut out tonight.

A stretcher wheeled by carrying the scorched figure of the woman, her clothes fused to her skin, her face a shining mess of garish reds and pinks. Her hair was blackened and charred into wild asymmetry, her raw scalp visible in great, barren patches. Things always looked worse under flashing blue lights, but this one was bad. Geoff sullenly noted that if her life were to end tonight, her parting would not be without it's mercy. Beneath a deeply furrowed, grimy brow, his bloodshot eyes glumly followed the stretcher.

He wouldn’t be telling the kids about tonight.

Unexpectedly, the lady's eyes fluttered open, weak and unstable, like a butterfly in the wind. Geoff stood to his feet and caught up with the stretcher.

“Hold tight. You’re in safe hands now.”

She croaked something indecipherable.

“Beg your pardon, ma’am?”

Her eyes widened; scanning, searching, finally finding his own. The look on her face wasn't the delirious panic that so often accompanied the realisation of one's own mortality; he was well accustomed to that look.

No, this was something else.

Geoff's heart pumped faster, his bloodstream dosed with a fresh surge of adrenaline. His intuition was never wrong.

“Amelia,” the woman choked, desperately. “My little… girl. She’s still—"

Geoff was gone, sprinting across the lawn, fumbling to seal up his jacket. He snatched his helmet from the turf, threw it on, and surged past his hose-wielding comrades, who held their line a safe distance from the house, their arms still raised against the heat.

Deaf to their cries, he burst through the doorway, back into the blaze, the pain in his arm and ribs quashed by the returning tide of adrenaline. In a heartbeat, the cries were gone, and the blinking blue lights of the firetruck; lost to the rage of the inferno, wherein there was only fire, fear, and darkness--and, he hoped with every fibre of his being, a little girl called Amelia, alive, unharmed, and not yet beyond his rescue.

-----

“You look,” Nathan Colleridge began, a derisive sneer stretched across his spot-pocked face, “like a cowpat that’s been trodden in.”

“Or, like, you know that clump of wax that’s left when a candle burns out?” Steve Surridge said, spitting out the word clump with exaggerated repugnance.

Another boy shook his head in disagreement, his eyes exploring her face as though she were a piece strung up in a gallery. “Nah, I reckon she looks more like mashed potato,” the nameless connoisseur decreed.

“No offence, Amelia, but we’re tryna eat our lunch here,” Lucy Pine added, her nose wrinkled, her fork held aloft from her plate.

“There’s nowhere else to sit,” Amelia muttered, perching as close to the end of the bench as she could, setting down her tray of lunch.

“Then stand,” Steve said. “You can't sit here.”

He slid his tray deliberately along the table, looking her in the eye slyly as he nudged her own over the edge. She caught it just before it toppled to the floor, reorganised its contents, and prepared to begin her lunch.

It happened twice more before they got bored.

High school was hell for Amelia. She intensely regretted her fanciful insistence on attending a state comprehensive; one that gave no special dispensation whatsoever for her condition, and where she was surrounded by a horde of the luckiest and yet most ignorant people imaginable. Her refusal to accept any kind of educational handicap was legacy to some determined resolve, one that was now a distant, misguided memory. On days like this, she craved only a place where she was ordinary, and where she drew no attention. On days like this, she wished for an environment where people were kind to her, saw beyond the scars, and respected her as much as they did anyone else. On days like this, it was more important than ever that she reminded herself why she put herself through it all.

She would visit him tonight.

When things got really bad, when she saw no worthwhile sequel to these years of humiliation and despair, she would visit. Sometimes it would help, sometimes it wouldn’t. It was always worth a try.

The sun was dipping over the horizon, ready to leave what was left of the evening to the deputy of the moon and stars, bathing the land in a swansong display of deep oranges and reds. She eased open a tall iron gate and followed the path, smiling silently at those she passed. In the usual place, she stopped, sat on a bench, and looked out at the purple beech tree beneath which his ashes were scattered.

Geoff Archibald Demetriou. That was what the plaque read.

She knew him only by a photograph, by stories of his actions, and by the kind portrayals of his wife and children, who had shown her nothing but unfathomable compassion. Behind closed doors, she knew, they must see her as the underwhelming spoils of a morbid exchange; a life for a life: one messed-up, lonely stranger at the cost of a loving husband and father--oh, and he just so happened to be a serial lifesaver. She understood—and fully accepted—that the Demetriou family could never truly cherish her existence, for its cost had simply been too high.

Courageous. Beloved. Heroic. Those were the words in the newspaper clippings. Geoff Demetriou had been a veteran, mid-40s, a long string of rescues under his belt. He knew the odds when he ran back into that building, already charred, battered, and exhuasted from pulling her parents from the flames. But he did it anyway.

Lucky. That was all she was. The papers glamourised it—miraculous, determined, impossible—but she was nothing but lucky: Lucky that her parents had thought to put her in the bathtub and pull shut the screen to keep out the worst of the smoke; lucky that only part of the bathroom caved through, and it wasn't the part beneath the bath; lucky that her mother’s dying words had led to her rescue. Lucky that Geoff Demetriou had been everything that he was.

Her life for his. That was bad enough. But it was worse than that, because how many more lives might he have saved? How many lost souls were her hands awash with the blood of? How many screams of pain and anguish pierced the night on account of his absence? If he could've seen that she was the beneficiary of their sacrifice, would he not have leapt back from those flames and saved his courage for them?

“Thank you,” she whispered, her empty words lost to the heavy silence of the cemetery.

She cursed the hollowness of her gratitude. But how could she be grateful for the life he’d saved, when she despised every moment of it? The conflict of owing her every breath to this man—of being humbled by his bravery, his sacrifice—and yet resenting him for forcing her to exist gouged at her conscience every minute of every day.

She was ugly on the outside, that she couldn’t help. But now, by her own volition, she had become revolting on the inside; twisted with second-hand regret and the hideous burden of hindsight, cursed with the certainty that the world would be better off if she’d been left for dead.

Thank you. Just words: a broken promise as they left her lips.

She couldn't keep living like this.

But she did. Because her life was a gift; unwanted, perhaps, but precious, extortionately expensive, and—pray as she might to be rid of it—it had come with no return address.

-----

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Our top story tonight: twenty years ago, a young girl was pulled from the wreckage of her burning house by a hero; the late firefighter Geoff Demetriou, who tragically lost his life to injuries sustained during the rescue. The girl herself, Amelia Duckworth—whose quick-thinking parents sheltered her in the bathtub whilst flames engulfed the house—suffered severe bodily and facial burns in the fire, leaving her partially disabled. Her best-selling autobiography “Once Burnt”—from which the lion’s share of the profits were split between the Fire Rescue Service and Demetriou’s family—details the long struggle she has since endured with regards to her physical and mental health.

Since graduating from Oxford University, Ms Duckworth has relentlessly campaigned for the reform of building safety legislation, her mission being to revolutionise the construction regulations around low-cost housing to ensure all materials are certified fire resistant. Today marks a landmark victory for Ms Duckworth--and indeed for society--as the House of Commons returned a vote comfortably in favour of the bill. When asked to comment, Ms Duckworth stated "this long-overdue bill will save lives, and it will save them without the brave men and women of our Fire Service having to put their own lives in danger."

The legislation is being informally referred to as the “Demetriou ruling”, in honour of her late saviour.

Amelia made her way to the cemetery and knelt in the place where the bench used to be. The sun was setting behind the beech tree, as it always did this time of year. Its backlit leaves burned scarlet, as though their tiny veins rushed with shining plasma.

Today was to be her final visit.

It was time to let go, she and Matthew had decided. They were moving away after the honeymoon, starting afresh. Geoff Demetriou would forever have a place in her heart, but for her life to ever truly be her own, she knew, she had to break this habit.

“I hope I did you proud,” she whispered, her eyes squinting against the light.

She sat for a long, long time, staring at the place that housed his spirit. When the last of the sunlight fell over the horizon, she stood and began to walk away.

Then, she stopped and fixed her gaze on the maple tree, her eyes glistening, her stare unerring.

“I’m truly grateful for what you did,” she breathed.

And, with a liberating sigh of relief, she was finally able to part with the pent-up words in blissful earnest.

 “Thank you, Geoff Demetriou.”