Read this original contemporary non-fiction-style extract.

By four in the morning, the library had become a rest centre. The picture books had been pushed behind folding screens; the tables were covered with paper cups, foil blankets and forms. We volunteers wore yellow bibs and carried clipboards. As residents arrived from the burned block opposite, we turned them into neat entries: Flat 12, family of four; Flat 7, elderly couple; Flat 19, one adult, no injuries.

Outside, water ran black along the road. Inside, everything had a label.

Mrs Kaur came through the doors in a green dressing gown and outdoor shoes without socks. She carried a round biscuit tin beneath one arm and a blue woollen blanket over the other. Unlike the donated blankets, which bulged from split plastic sacks, hers was folded into an exact rectangle. It seemed a small square of order carried out of the smoke.

I offered to take it.

“No, thank you,” she said, tightening her arm around both objects. “I have them.”

At the registration table, I asked for her name. When I pronounced it wrongly, she repeated it, slowly but without apology, until I managed it. I began completing the form for her, but she took the pen from my hand and signed in narrow, upright letters. The nib pressed so firmly into the paper that her name appeared faintly on the sheet underneath.

In the box marked NEEDS, I wrote BLANKET.

“Needle,” she said.

I thought I had misheard. Behind her, a man was asking whether anyone had found his cat. A child was crying because her feet were wet. The fire officer had just announced that nobody would be allowed home that day.

“A sewing needle,” Mrs Kaur explained. She lifted one corner of the blue blanket. A dark burn had opened the wool near its edge, leaving a ragged mouth. “And blue thread, if there is some.”

I brought her a new blanket instead. It was clean, thick and sealed in plastic. She thanked me, opened the packet carefully and spread the new blanket across her knees. Then she placed the damaged one on top of it and began joining the burned edges with the white thread somebody had found in a drawer.

Her stitches were uneven. Each time the thread snagged, she stopped, breathed out and began again. Around her, the room grew louder: phones rang; names were called; chairs scraped across the floor. Yet the patch of space beneath her hands seemed to contract until it contained only the needle, the torn wool and the next place the thread must enter.

A photographer from the local newspaper arrived after sunrise. He asked several residents to stand together beside the piles of donated clothes. When he raised his camera, Mrs Kaur stepped away.

“Could you hold up the new blanket?” he asked. “It shows how people are helping.”

She looked at the silver packet on the floor and then at the blanket she was repairing.

“You may photograph the blankets,” she said. “I will sit here.”

He took the picture without her.

At half past seven, buses arrived to take the residents to temporary accommodation. I went to help Mrs Kaur stand. The repair was obvious: a pale, crooked scar against the blue wool. She examined it for a moment, folded the blanket so that the scar lay on top and placed it over her arm.

On the chair beside her, the new blanket remained open. A boy from Flat 12 had fallen asleep under it, his damp trainers sticking out at one end.

Mrs Kaur picked up her biscuit tin. I picked up my clipboard.

Before she left, I returned to her form. In the box marked NEEDS, I drew one line through BLANKET and, beneath it, wrote NEEDLE; BLUE THREAD.