‘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.’
She nodded.
‘And I don’t believe in coincidences.’
She nodded again, but Tom couldn’t tell whether it meant she didn’t believe in them either or whether she was just humouring him.
‘Someone runs us off the road. The fan disc’s stolen. The fire. All in the space of a few hours.’
‘If we hadn’t …’ She tailed off and her eyes overflowed with tears that left silver rivers down her cheeks under the harsh white light.
Tom reached for her unthinkingly, then hissed in pain when he touched her, and snatched his hand back. ‘Ness …’ He stopped. There was nothing he could say to make it better because it wasn’t getting any better. Anything he said would be meaningless noise.
To his surprise, the boy got up and sat on the oak bench beside Ness, awkwardly putting a consoling arm about her shoulders, even as he slid ice across his brow and lips.
Tom nodded his thanks at him, then carefully put his hands back into the ice and sighed in relief.
Ness snuffled quietly into the boy’s shoulder, then palmed her eyes hard and sat up straight again. The boy got up and left the room. The dog sensed him go, woke up and tottered after him.
‘This ice is melted.’
