17
IT SEEMED DE Rust had no fire department. But it had plenty of people who were apparently well qualified to stand on the wide sidewalk in their PJs and gape at a house burning down.
‘Water!’ Tom yelled, as he scrambled out of the car. ‘Water!’ His original intention – to rush into the blaze – was snuffed out instantly: the heat was a physical wall that bounced him back and kept him at bay with the rubberneckers. The fire was a raging, living thing that roared and screamed and cracked wooden fire-knuckles in its blazing fury as it consumed the clapboard house. Tom could feel the air around him bulge and sway as the flames sucked greedily at the oxygen-rich sky; it was as if they might decide at any moment to escape the confines of the guesthouse and tear hungrily up the main street, leaving blackened homes and residents in their hungry wake. The little wooden wagon on the front porch was blazing like a prop in a John Wayne film.
‘There are people in there!’ he yelled. ‘Where’s the fire crew?’
An elderly man in a T-shirt and baggy Y-fronts held up his palms expressively. ‘No firemen here, baas.’
‘What about water?’
‘No water here,’ he replied sadly.
‘Did anyone get out?’
The old man shrugged. ‘No one, baas.’
‘Fuck!’
Tom was vaguely aware of heads turning towards him disapprovingly. His language had offended, while the fire that was incinerating six people provoked only interest. ‘Fuck you all!’ He shouldered his way past them and ran round to the back of the house. ‘Pam! Paul!’ The names of the other members of the team died on his lips. He’d hoped to see a way in to them, or a way out for them, but the fire at the back burned even more fiercely. If they weren’t out already, they weren’t getting out now.
In the backyard a large brown dog barked hysterically as sparks floated down around it. It was straining at the end of a chain attached to a stake driven into the ground not twenty feet from the back porch, crazy with terror and pain as bits of debris caught and smoked in its shaggy coat.
Tom ran to the dog, intending to release the chain from its collar but it went for him, and he felt sharp teeth sink into his left hand. He yanked himself free and scooted away from the animal, which came after him in a frenzy of flashing teeth and self-defence, yelping in surprise as its tether yanked it backwards off its feet and it landed on its side, scrabbling for purchase.
Tom stood out of range, nursing his bloody hand, already thinking of the rabies shots he’d need, and wishing the dog dead, while knowing he’d have to try again.
A tall, skinny boy with a pudding-bowl haircut was suddenly beside him. The kid was maybe seventeen, with a prominent Adam’s apple, flaming acne and a bicycle. He spoke quickly in Afrikaans, then read on Tom’s confused face that English was called for. ‘We’ll go to the stake, ja? Behind this, ja?’ He tapped the bicycle.
Without thinking it through, Tom followed the boy back towards the flames.
The dog came at them with renewed vigour, but every time it launched itself at them, the boy parried with the bicycle, knocking it back, sometimes clear off its feet. Tom thought, This is nuts. Why are we trying to release a fucking mad dog? But the plan was in action now – a plan that meant he could save something, even if it was only a dog – so he ducked his head away from the heat and kept close behind the boy as the dog hurled, snarled and yelped.
They reached the iron stake and Tom grabbed it. It was hot enough to make him howl and leave a layer of skin behind. In a fury of anger, pain and helplessness, he kicked at the stake with his heel while all the time he could hear the boy covering his back with the bicycle. The stake finally popped free of the sun-baked earth. The dog was skulking warily now, having taken a few good blows from the bike. It wasn’t crazy then, thought Tom. It had the sense to back off when it was beaten.
Tom and the boy retreated slowly. A chunk of burning wood popped off the house and fell in a shower of sparks near to the dog, and it turned tail and ran, the chain and stake clanking along the asphalt behind it.
‘Jesus.’ Tom sank to the high kerb and the boy sat beside him, staring at his bicycle and coughing into his fist.
‘Broke the … things,’ he said mournfully.
Tom looked. ‘The spokes,’ he offered.
‘Ja. Spokes.’ He coughed again. ‘Broke them.’
Tom felt the heat of the burning house on his back. It was making his hands swell. His lungs were stifled with heat and smoke. A disjointed air of unreality settled drunkenly upon him. Pam and Paul, September, Rian, Clint and Lettie Marais were all dead. And he and Ness would be dead too, if they hadn’t driven back to the wreckage.
What would it be like to die in a fire like that? To feel the pain he felt now in his hands but a dozen times worse, all over his body, searing his throat … His elbows on his knees, his hands splayed in the cool night air, Tom hung his head between his legs and stared at the little bits of desert grit between the flat gravel of the blacktop as he coughed up what felt like a lung.
Suddenly he was on his feet, pushing through the little circle of onlookers who had gathered to stare at a real-life victim, however low on the scale.
Pam’s truck was parked across the street. Tom’s hands flared with pain as he opened the door. Surprise registered, and somewhere in his mind was the mental image of Pam locking the car after they’d parked. He couldn’t be sure, but—
‘Tom, what are you doing? Your hands …’ Ness hovered beside him.
Tom waved her away, coughing, then gritted his teeth and pulled open the glove box. Inside was the paperwork on the suspect parts. Tom pulled the forms out carefully, every finger protesting now, and looked at them.
There were only two dockets: one for a rudder servo and the other for a flap track.
‘Tom, what is it?’
‘They’ve taken the paperwork on the fan disc.’
*
The boy with the bicycle was called Johannes Jonker, and his mother ran Tom’s hands under the cold faucet and a guttural barrage of what sounded like severe chastisement for not getting there sooner. They were ballooning and blistered, and felt like he’d plunged them into the heart of the fire and not yet taken them out.
Ness sat quietly at the opposite side of the old oak kitchen table.
Mrs Jonker emptied the freezer of surprisingly heart-shaped ice cubes and made Tom dig his hands into a bowl of them. The relief was fleeting but welcome. The boy sneaked an ice cube and sucked it, his face red from proximity to the fire.
‘I always said she’d die in a fire,’ Mrs Jonker pronounced smugly. ‘All that smoking. All that wood. It was bound to happen.’
‘But it happened tonight.’ Tom’s voice was dull, and husky from the smoke.
‘And that’s a new bike too, domkop! Nou is it verklapte!’
The boy nodded morosely in acknowledgement of his own stupidity at braving a fire and a mad dog with only a bicycle for protection.
Mrs Jonker sighed at him and turned to Tom. ‘Better?’
‘Yes. Thanks.’ His hands were no better, but Tom wanted the woman to stop fussing and talking. He wanted to think.
Ness was quiet. He liked that. Her face was streaked with smoke-black, and her hands and arms were dirty from where she’d helped the boy to get him here.
The boy seemed to understand. He took another ice heart and ran it carefully over his own face, his eyes distant.
‘Look at you in a dwaal!’ his mother chided him, as though he’d done something to be ashamed of. ‘I’ll go get Dr Viljoen.’ She bustled out noisily.
Quiet descended on the little kitchen with its wooden drainer and its 1960s lino, worn and torn in a half-dozen places.
A small black dog had fallen asleep on Tom’s foot. Now its hind leg twitched and half scratched at its belly as it dreamed of fleas.
The window was open, but no air stirred through it. Instead, insects whirred out of the blackness and into the light, like homing spacecraft. Moths clattered against the bulb and hard, shiny brown beetles hummed and dropped onto the table on their backs, their barbed black legs waggling robotically. A long green mantis sat on the dirty shade and cocked its alien eyes at the free meals orbiting its head.
‘You think it was deliberate?’
The boy – Johannes – didn’t look up at Ness’s question, but continued to run ice around his raw face. Tom figured he was in low-grade shock, so he discounted his presence. He nodded slowly at Ness. ‘Yes. Maybe.’ He winced. ‘I don’t know.’ The ice was melting fast around his flaming hands. ‘If not, it’s a major coincidence.’
