The noise of the fire increased, the smoke-filled sky turned pink and orange above the trees beyond our firebreak, and sparks and ash began to fall into the pool and on to the patio. On the lawn little explosions occurred where debris landed and ignited the grass. The fire, though it gorged on whatever new material it found, also brought food with it, carrying it high in the air and dropping it like crumbs as it moved on. I was a sodden, clumsy ogre, lumbering from one place to another, stamping out the spot fires before they could spread. Kim was doing the same on the paved area by the house, kicking burning sticks into the pool. And under the roar of the fire came another sound, a continuous sigh, a hiss, as the heat sucked the wetness from the ground where Parroulet was still spraying.
How long this strange masque lasted I do not know. Whenever I paused, breathless and parched, to see where I needed to go next, I saw the wrapped figure of the woman stamping and kicking, or working with a bucket, to the handle of which she had attached a rope and which she dropped into the pool and used to drown smouldering debris. And always there too, between the pool and the fire, was the man, stationary, or moving only slowly as he continued to play the hose, silhouetted against the smoke and flame like a blacksmith or a demon. And had those two, the man and the woman, paused to look in my direction, they would have seen a half-blind grotesque, beating at the ground with a spade, dispersing fire and killing it with plodding feet, a lurching solitary dancer. I felt almost as if I were asleep, dancing in my sleep, and in that odd half-conscious state I began to work my way back to the house, to see what I could more usefully be doing there. To save the house was surely the crucial thing. The woman saw me and screamed something, and I lumbered faster towards her, unable to hear what she was saying, until we were so close that her words came through the other noise.
“Your shoes! Your shoes!”
I looked down, and saw that the deck shoes had burst into flame. My feet were on fire and I had not felt it. I stumbled to the pool and threw myself in, and fell for a long second through air and then hit water, and realised that the level had dropped a foot or more. I kicked at my shoes to get them off but they would not leave me. Half-choking from swallowing smoke or water or both, I swam to the side, hauled myself out with the woman’s help, and tried to stand. Immediately I fell over, and began to pull at the mess of shoe on one foot, and she was beside me pulling at the other. The shoes came away and I yelled. My feet were dotted with bits of melted shoe that had stuck to the skin and burned it. The woman hurried to the pile of wet towels, seized a couple and wrapped my feet in them, and I lay exhausted on the slabs and watched the man with his hose, tiny against the fiery sky. I believed that we were about to die, all three of us.
Suddenly the man dropped the hose and came in a limping, bent run towards us. Between them they lifted and carried me into the utility room, and he shut the door. The roar of destruction was above us now, godlike and terrible. It passed over us, and I felt my throat closing, and my eyes, and everything was dark, and it seemed that no light could ever shine again.
11
HEN I REOPENED MY EYES, THE DOOR OF THE ROOM WAS open again. There was air coming in—cooler, and relatively free of smoke—but the darkness remained, and this was because night had come. I was lying on my side on the hard floor, and could see through the door to the outside. Something blinked, then something else, then more in twos and threes. The stars were returning to the sky.
I had a fit of coughing and tried to get up, but the towels round my feet prevented this. Cautiously I unpeeled the towels. At the last layer I felt the pull between cotton and skin and considered whether it was wise to continue, but all I wanted was to get the towels off so I kept going. I couldn’t see properly what condition my feet were in, but they didn’t hurt as much as I expected. I understood I was probably in shock. I badly wanted a drink. Whisky, wine, beer, anything. And before that, water.
I crawled outside on my hands and knees. The stink of ash and smoke was everywhere. The pump had stopped working and the wind had died away. All quiet. My stinging eyes picked out the shape of Parroulet, stripped of his protective clothing down to shorts and T-shirt, walking in the grey, black, glowing aftermath like a man crossing a battlefield.
I hauled myself off the ground and into one of the chairs on the patio. I couldn’t understand why none of them was damaged. The wooden table too seemed untouched by fire. Yet beyond the house and pool everything, as far as I could see, was scorched or broken or gone completely.
I heard movement behind me and saw a beam of light. Kim Parr came out from the house, guiding herself with a torch. In her other hand was a bottle of water, which she handed to me and from which I gratefully and greedily drank. She went back inside, then returned carrying something else, which she put on the table. It was a candle on a ceramic dish. She struck a match. It was almost miraculous to see the match ignite, her hand hold it to the wick, the candle flame grow. Even after what we had experienced, there was reassurance and comfort in the flame.
Kim looked as if she’d had a wash. She’d also changed into dry clothes. Mine hung on me, heavy and wet.
I said, “How long have I been asleep?”
“Awhile,” she said. “Forty minutes. An hour. I made sure you weren’t dead, then left you.”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nine, ten.”
“What happened? Where is the fire?”
“It missed us. It has gone that way.” She pointed vaguely to the north.
“Missed us?”
“By a few metres, yes.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“What about him?”
“He’s okay.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He is looking for the cat.”
“What cat?”
“We have a cat. We shut her inside before you came but now she’s gone. She must have got out again.”
She spoke very quietly, as if she didn’t want to disturb the search or the strange stillness. Everything was so quiet compared with how it had been before.
“The power is out,” she said. “I think so anyway. But there is water for a shower. You want a shower?”
“I don’t know if I can manage that.”
She helped me up. Between us we took off most of my clothes, leaving a sodden pile on the floor of the utility room. Then, gingerly, with her support, I made my way up the stairs. She showed me to a bedroom off the hall. There was an en suite, with a big shower cabinet, white towels, soap, shampoo—she lit more candles to illuminate the room. She said, “Be careful.” As she was leaving she said, “I’ll find you some clothes.”
I washed myself as well as I could in cold water. The smell of smoke, the scars of all that desperate work, would take a while to fade. There was a plastic stool, which I took into the shower to take the weight off my burned feet. When I was done I looked into the bedroom, and saw a polo shirt, a pair of boxers and loose cotton trousers of some dark colour laid out on the bed. No shoes. They were Parroulet’s clothes of course. I didn’t want to put them on, baulking especially at the underwear, but I had little choice. What were they? They were only clothes.
I blew out the candles in the bathroom and just as I did so the overhead light came on.
There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” I said.
“It is a miracle,” Kim said. “We have water and electricity.”
“Yes, it’s a miracle,” I said.
“Let me see your feet,” she said.
The bedroom was, I supposed from its pristine condition, a guest room for the guests they probably never had. I sat on the edge of the bed and she picked some remaining bits of shoe from my soles with tweezers, applied ointment and wrapped my feet in bandages. “You go to hospital soon as you can,” she said. “Tomorrow maybe.”
From a long way off Parroulet called her name. It felt conspiratorial, to be there in the bedroom with her while her husband wandered the battl
efield outside.
“You come down later,” she said. “I better go now.”
I thought about lying back on the bed but knew if I did I would instantly fall asleep. That was not what I had come for. I had to struggle to remember what I had come for. It was as if I had come to help put out a fire. I got up, hobbled to the stairs, and went down to the lower level of the house.
Parroulet had injured himself earlier. He was limping quite badly, but not apparently because of his encounter with the chainsaw. It was his other, left leg that was giving him trouble. Watching from the utility room, I saw that he could hardly put any weight on it. But I saw something else too: that this was not Parroulet’s priority. In fact he seemed hardly to notice that he was hurt at all. He had called Kim because he had found the cat.
At the last possible moment, it appeared, the wind must have shifted direction, enough to drive the flames northward, along the line of the break we had made. The fire was a contrary beast, a greedy but fussy eater, chewing up some things made of steel or even concrete but leaving others made of wood or plastic. It had, with just a few stray sparks, ignited and destroyed things not in its path, but had passed almost directly over others and left them more or less untouched. So it was with Parroulet’s house, and so it was with the pile of branches that Kim had made in the middle of the lawn. It had not escaped entirely: its outer covering was charred and ash-covered and it had collapsed so that it resembled some primitive dwelling with the roof fallen in. And it was from somewhere in that surviving heap in the middle of the devastated grass that Parroulet had heard the cat mewling. Now, holding in one hand the scarf that he had worn round his face during the fire, Parroulet was limping slowly and deliberately towards the sound.
I came to the outer door and found Kim, a few steps beyond on the patio, silently watching her husband. Without turning she motioned at me to be still. I leaned at the door on my bandaged feet, waiting for whatever was to happen.
With a grace at odds with his disarray and awkward gait, Parroulet moved forward. The further he went from the electric light of the house into the starlight and the shadows, the less defined and more ethereal he became. I could hear terror and pain and rage in the cat’s repeated whine, and as Parroulet closed in the noise grew louder and more distressed. But Parroulet seemed quite calm. He was whispering to the cat, coaxing and reassuring it. He crouched now, just a few feet from the heap, almost lost from my sight. The cat continued to mewl, and Parroulet to talk back, till the cat quietened and it was hard to distinguish the one voice from the other. Minute after minute went by. Neither Kim nor I moved. At last Parroulet slowly raised himself from the ground, turned and started the walk back to the house. He moved into the light. He had the cat, wrapped in the scarf and held gently against his chest, and was still whispering to it. I could see only the head, the huge frightened eyes, the singed and scarred fur. Parroulet came inside. He did not so much as glance at me in passing. I might as well not have existed, and something in me resented his refusal to acknowledge me even now. Yet at the same time I could not but be impressed by his single-minded tenderness towards the cat.
Kim followed Parroulet upstairs, presumably to help care for the animal. Left alone, again I had to resist the temptation to sit and close my eyes. I shuffled out on my bandages to the far end of the pool, to look at the sky, the garden, the house.
How much of Sheildston had escaped the inferno? This would have been the first house in its path, so it was possible that, with the change of wind direction, the whole place had been missed. But other houses might not have been so fortunate: burning debris flung out by the fire might have landed on properties where no one was left to extinguish it. If the fat cop had been right, only the three of us had remained in Sheildston.
And nobody, surely, would come up the road to view the damage till morning.
I couldn’t leave if I wanted to, even if Parroulet threw me out. I couldn’t walk a hundred yards, let alone all the way to Turner’s Strand.
The water left in the pool had a scum of ash and charred wood floating on it.
The sky was full of stars.
I am alive, I thought, really alive.
I remembered what Nilsen had said about that.
I remembered clearing snow around my house. Was that house still standing? Was Carol all right? Was there anything at all on the other side of the world?
I did not know. I knew only that I was where I was, and that I was alive.
12
IM REAPPEARED WITH TWO TINS OF BEER.
“Sit,” she said. “Get off those feet.”
“If I sit I’ll never stand again,” I said, but I came over and we sat at the table. The coldness of the beer was so sharp it took away all other hurt.
There was a neatness, a composure about her that was remarkable given all that had occurred. Was this how she had got through everything life had thrown at her?
“How is the cat?” I asked.
“The cat will live. Her paws were burned. We put cream on them, and bandages. Like your feet. She is a good patient, but very frightened. Martin is looking after her.”
“Is he? Or is he hiding from me?”
She shook her head, but not in answer to my question. “You are both the same. We have been through all this, we survive, and the first thing he says to me is, ‘I will not speak to him,’ and the first thing you say is, ‘Is he hiding from me?’ ”
“Then I’d say he was.”
“He says he has nothing to say to you.”
“He has everything to say to me. Does he know who I am?”
“Yes, I told him last night. He knows you and what you think of him.”
“I don’t think anything of him. I want to ask him about what he said at the trial, that’s all.”
“That is not true. You think that man who died went to prison because of him. You think Martin told lies for money.”
“Didn’t he?”
She looked as if she might take the beer back. “You are not very nice, Alan Tealing,” she said. “Why do you do this? After what has happened? After I have helped you?”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“No?” She flared up, as she had before. “Then why don’t you just leave now? Go on! He doesn’t want you in this house. I don’t want you. Go!”
“You know I can’t.”
“No, not unless I take you. So what, then? You want to go or stay?”
“I want to speak to your husband.”
“Yes.” Her voice calmed again. “So be a bit more polite, I think. Then maybe something can happen, okay?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She rubbed her eyes, shook her head again. When she caught me staring at her she said, still angry, “Smoke.”
“I know.”
She sighed. “He will see you,” she said. “He says no but he will. It is coming, that talk between you. It has to happen, for both of you. But first I will tell you who he is because you don’t know. You only know him from the trial, but that is not only who he is.”
I nodded.
“I said to you before, it is all chance that he was a witness. It is all chance that we are here, the three of us, still alive.”
“I understand.”
“To understand you must listen. So listen. When I first met Martin I did not think anything much about him. You know how we met? The same way I met you. He came to my shop, in Melbourne. He came with a coat to mend, a quiet, shy man. We talked. He came again, with some other things. Alterations. He had not been in Australia long and was not very confident. Because of this and the mending I never thought he was rich, even though he did not work. To me he was just lonely and wanted to have conversation. I liked him. We were good company.
“One day he asked me to go out with him. A drink, a meal. It took him a lot of courage to ask me, I could see, and because of that I said yes. And we became friends. For some weeks that was what we were, friends.
“Then another day came
when he said he wanted to take me somewhere, away for the weekend. It was separate rooms, very correct, or I wouldn’t have gone. I trusted him. He drove me in a big expensive car, a Mercedes, and that made me think, but it was not his, he had hired it. Maybe this was to impress me but I don’t think so. He knew me by then. He said when he had his taxi it was a Mercedes because it was comfortable and never went wrong. All the taxi drivers had Mercedes. And he brought me to Turner’s Strand, and then here. We stood outside the house. It was a beautiful day. The flowers, the trees, everything was beautiful. He said, ‘This would be a good place to live,’ and I agreed. Then he took out the remote and opened the gate. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘Come, I show you round,’ and we went in. The house was empty but all in good condition, not rundown like now. This is six years ago. He said, ‘Would you like to live here with me? This is my house.’ Well, I saw it must be true. ‘We could get married,’ he said, ‘if you want.’ ”
“He bribed you with the house.”
She made that shake of her head again. “You don’t want to think any good of him. It’s true I wished he had not shown me the house before he said about getting married. But that was his way and I knew right then that it wouldn’t have made any difference. I would still say yes. But I never say yes without time to think. So I told him, ‘I’ll give you my answer when we get back to Melbourne.’ ”
“You must have wondered where his money came from?”
“Yes, but I did not ask. He never said about the trial and I did not know anything about it. I decided to marry him because of what I knew, not because of what I didn’t know. I knew he was not cruel or bad. He was not clever enough to be a big businessman. He was not clever or stupid enough to be a criminal. Maybe he had won the lottery or maybe he had inherited money from his family, but he never said. He was old-fashioned, and I liked that. To ask me to marry him when we had not been in bed, that was something. He had not even tried to get me into bed. I knew where he was from and I knew he had come to Australia for a new life. That was his chance, same as me. What business was it of mine, his money? He said I would never have to work again. I said yes I would. It was my business, not his. He accepted that. So I said yes.”
The Professor of Truth Page 22