Come on, hissed Ellen.
The Admin team scored a bottle of wine each. Holtz beamed at their captain and shook his hand with vigour, a mark, he had explained somewhere in his speech, of excellence in a man. The Admin team gave themselves three cheers.
The first individual award was man of the match, which Richard won. For this he received a crate of beer. Things had a natural blur by this time, and he tripped as he reached Holtz. He managed to remember the vigorous handshake, and staggered back to where Ellen stood, all to the war-dance of loud and drunken male applause. Dozens of eyes followed the crate.
For some obscure reason there were also awards in individual disciplines. Bowler of the match was Richard again, of course, for which he again won a crate of beer. Once more he stumbled up to Holtz, shook his hand, and once more he staggered back, reeling under the weight of the beer. Again the room roared with clapping and hooting. He felt like Charles Upham collecting his bar.
Batsman of the match for his fine 92 was the Admin ring-in, but some deft last-minute rule-shuffling had seen him disqualified for being absent from the after-match function. Some of the Admin players hissed. Next in line was Ewen Holbrook, but he too had departed early, a furtive absentee. An anticlimax loomed. After Ewen was Richard.
Under the bright glare of an audience, in spite of his drunkenness and earlier bravado, he was beginning to feel awkward. He'd been dining out on his bowling; anyone could have seen the extreme luck which had seen him blunder through his batting. Regardless, he had to repeat the whole sordid process yet again: endure the handshake, lug the crate back to put with the others, suffer the applause with its by now cynical edge. The beer was getting almost impossibly heavy for him, like it had been hung round his neck.
Worst of all, there was a bottle of champagne for catch of the match. What could he do? Turn it down? After collecting all that beer, with the happy Mr Holtz standing there measuring the excellence of his firm, and after all his flippant fabrications?
Hey, everybody, I cheated. I didn't catch it at all. Here, keep the beer too. Fuck the lot of you.
I think that would've been a great thing to do, says Sandra. If it's what you really thought. Change the channel, will you?
He tried to give it all away, made a big show of shaking the champagne and then opening it over everybody, gulped half of it down. Nobody wanted his beer. The bar was free.
Keep it son, said the man nearing retirement. It's yours. You deserve it.
He tried to drink it, but by now the entire room was circling him like a giant hula hoop, and despite the more and more insistent pleadings of Ellen to come outside, just for a minute, all he managed to do was stagger about inside from group to group slobbering confused raves, all the while staring wildly about the way very drunk people do, like parents who've lost a child at the railway station. He could hardly remember anything about this part of the evening; God knows what he'd said to who. Maybe he'd even admitted the whole horrible truth to someone; he hoped like hell he hadn't.
Sandra spreads herself out as if the TV is a fire.
I think you make too much out of it, she says, yawning. It's only a game. Nobody cares really. It's not like inflation or unemployment or dying. People only care at the time. But tell me this, and she turns to Richard to face him full on. Her face is teenage, with big eyes. Even when she's lying she can look sincere. Tell me honestly, Richard. What happened with this Ellen?
Richard had woken up in a Torana he didn't know, stretched out on the back seat with one of the doors open so his feet could stick out. His belt was undone, and his shirt was missing. He found it under the driver's seat.
The after-match was still going; he could hear the laughter and see the shadow of light spreading out onto the field. He couldn't have been crashed out for too long, because he still felt wickedly pissed. He needed to go to the toilet. It didn't occur to him to go outside.
He walked in almost random arcs and fell over a couple of times, but made it to the door. Ellen and Nigel were just outside, kissing. She had her back to the wall and was pulling his buttocks. He pressed hard against her.
Inside, travelling against walls, he made it round the whirlpools of faces into the toilet. Once in there he leant against the wall above the urinal with his forearm, his forehead resting against it. He spat into the urinal gutter. He felt incredibly hot and thought he might faint.
After a few minutes he realised someone had come in and was having a piss right beside him. It was Nigel. Richard was too drunk to remember they weren't friends.
Nigel, mate, he slurred out. Nige. D'you realise I never caught that catch?
Nigel stood looking down at his penis.
Christ, d'you think I was born yesterday?
What's wrong Nige? He spoke very slowly. Are you unhappy? Don't be like that. He groped towards him, his thigh sliding across the stainless steel.
With a practised rhythm, Nigel bowed his legs, flipped his penis back into his underpants, and zipped up his fly. He looked at Richard in disgust, stepping away.
I got man of the match, Nige. Aren't you pleased? He was almost sitting in the urinal by now, his head lolling forward onto his chest.
Yeah, said Nigel, I know. He bent his knees and leant back, looking carefully at himself in the washbasin mirror. He smoothed his hair with his hands and cleaned his front teeth with a finger. I know, he said again, softer. He turned to leave. He had to step over Richard to get to the door. For a second he stopped, looking down at the now unconscious body he straddled with its legs folded under it like a man stabbed, the bloodless face asleep. He stepped over him and out into the main room, pulling the door wide as he went so that it flapped right back into the toilet, almost hitting Richard's outstretched hand, then flapped out again, in and out, in and out, the rubber tongue on its edge thwacking the door jamb each time it went past, faster and faster yet diminishing in volume, like a dying laugh, or someone in jandals starting to run away down the spongy brown linoleum of a dark half-remembered corridor lined with grey metal lockers and high windows of wire and frosted glass.
THE GREAT FIRE OF TOTARA PARK
A petrol tanker and a car collide at a busy South Auckland intersection; the cause of the accident is unclear. The tanker lies on its side, blocking one whole side of the road. The car is crushed beneath it; people are trapped inside. A woman is calling out for help.
The tanker-driver and a passing motorist try to pull the people from the wreckage—there's the woman and a girl—but the tanker catches fire and the heat quickly becomes too intense, driving them back. The tanker-driver gets a fire extinguisher from his truck's burning cabin and despite the heat manages to stand close enough to aim it on to the car and keep the flames at bay, though the woman still calls out.
A crowd begins to gather, mainly shoppers from a nearby mall. Two teenage girls at the edge of the crowd light cigarettes. A taxi-driver tries to stop them—the risk of petrol catching alight, he later tells a circle of reporters—but they just laugh at him and draw on their cigarettes harder. There's traffic all over the place; drivers going the other way have slowed to a crawl. Some wind down their windows, try to catch a glimpse of what's going on, but the action's all on the other side of the truck. Burning petrol flows away down the road.
Emergency services arrive. Several fire-engines, police, an ambulance. Fire-fighters hose water onto the car, forcing the fire back further. One begins directing traffic. The muttering crowd is shuffled back behind a temporary rope by police.
The woman is freed within minutes. She is burnt on some parts of her body but she will be okay. The girl—she is the woman's twelve-year-old daughter—is still trapped. They are struggling to keep the fire back enough to allow them in with the jaws-of-life. So far as they can ascertain she seems quite badly injured but throughout her ordeal she says virtually nothing. A fire-fighter in heat-resistant gear gets near her and tries to reassure her. All he can see properly are her brown eyes and they fix on him. For an hour he talks
to her, saying it's okay, you'll be out soon, keep going, it's okay, the whole time looking into her eyes.
Burning petrol enters the South Auckland drainage system. Flames leap from drains many miles from the scene of the accident, and thudding underground explosions can be heard all over the city, as if South Auckland is caught up in a civil war. A man sees the drain out the front of his house on fire and tries to put it out with his garden hose; children walking home from school stand round another in a circle and warm their hands. Old rubbish stacked up around the mouths of drains is burnt off; some people even get more from their houses and throw that on as well. Several fires float across Manukau Harbour.
A day later the fire-fighter who sat near the girl and watched her eyes tells a reporter he already knows for certain that those brown eyes have changed his life forever, that you realise what's trivial and what's important in a situation like that, and maybe people should take a close look at their lives and decide what really does matter to them. Two days after that the woman in the accident admits to another reporter in the visitors' lounge of her ward that she feels a coward beside her daughter, at that stage still in Intensive Care, but able at least to correspond with her mother via a series of notes carried between their wards by nurses and orderlies.
We all, I suppose, have our own horror stories about terrible fires or people we know who've been badly burnt. I worked with a guy one summer about ten years ago whose uncle had been filling his car with petrol when the service-station attendant lit a cigarette. Everything went up, and in trying to get back from the sudden inferno my workmate's uncle fell back into a hedge and became trapped in the fire. He was so disfigured that only his brother—my workmate's father—was allowed to see him for the first six months.
My brother's girlfriend's sister-in-law who'd previously been a model was badly burnt in a light plane crash. The plane hit overhead wires only a mile or so from my brother's girlfriend's house; everyone knew the exact moment it hit because television reception was affected. She'd nearly been killed but somehow managed to crawl several hundred metres to a house. She'd survived, but that was the end of her modelling career.
My grandfather had a friend who'd been in a boarding-house fire as a young man. He hadn't been burnt, luckily, but he'd had to jump from an upstairs window and had broken his hip. For some reason he threw his backgammon set out the window before he jumped and as it turned out that was the only thing he owned to survive the fire. He still had the set many years later when my grandfather knew him—it was quite singed on one side—and it was something of an honour to be invited to play on it. He ended up with arthritis in the hip.
My own fire story, the one I tend to tell if the subject is fire or serious burns—and it's a topic that seems to come up often, especially when there's a group of you round a real fire—is not so splatter, not so harsh. I find it's a story that tends to get the talk away from burns and fire; maybe that's why I tell it. Of course I don't always tell it in such detail as here; I can relate the bare bones of it in less than a minute if necessary—I hope you'll forgive me on this one occasion.
I was thirteen at the time—maybe fourteen—I think it was my third form year. We lived in a crescent-shaped street of something like thirty-two houses. We'd moved in when I was about three; as long as I could remember I'd lived in that place.
All the streets in our neighbourhood were curved or winding and you could easily get lost if you didn't have an overall plan of things in your head. Often you'd see cars pulled over with the driver puzzling over a street map spread out over the steering wheel; nearly every week someone would stop and ask me for directions to a particular street. I remember that soon after he got his first bicycle my brother got lost one afternoon and wasn't found till nearly midnight. My parents thought he'd been kidnapped and called the police, but I knew he'd only be lost. They found him just four or five streets away, but he had no idea where he was. The moon, for all he knew.
Every Guy Fawkes there was an organised bonfire on an empty section down our street. It was quite an event; the whole neighbourhood used to go: there'd be piles of bicycles everywhere, and there were always a few parents who came along too, to watch from the footpath and make sure nobody did anything silly. One or two would keep the fire going and let off the really good skyrockets. A couple of times they even made a guy to throw on the fire. I have a strong memory of my father throwing kerosene from a can over the fire to really get it going but I suspect that comes from a few years earlier than the Guy Fawkes night my story is about. Today he would deny he ever did anything so stupid but the picture in my mind is vivid and like all of us he was himself once young.
Every year the owner of the section would come by about the time it was getting dark and the fire was just starting to get going and try and stop us from having it. He'd stand up out of his car—he drove a pale blue Volkswagen—but never come further than that. He'd yell out at us to get off his property or he'd call the police; a few times he'd even become abusive. After several minutes of this he'd drive away, screaming the gears, and that would be him for another year. People justified the bonfire on the basis of his language and the fact that he didn't look after his section properly.
The Guy Fawkes night in question my father was one of the parents looking after things. This put rather a dampener on the evening as far as I was concerned because he was continually getting me to do things for him—fetch this, hold that, mind these—and having him there cramped my style. I couldn't have as much fun with the fireworks as the other kids with him right there watching.
Still, it wasn't all bad. My next-door neighbour and best friend Glynn Richards hung round with me most of the night and even helped me with some of my jobs. And at least we were there: Sharee and Dianne Porter and their younger twin brothers were banned from coming altogether. Their cousin had lost the sight in one eye on Guy Fawkes night a few years earlier and the whole family had been banned from having anything to do with it ever since. It was bad about their cousin's eye, but even those of us in my position were still pleased we weren't Mrs Porter's children.
Glynn and I went way back. We had a lot in common: our fathers worked for the same company and we both followed soccer instead of rugby—Liverpool was his team, mine West Ham. We were in the same class at school and Glynn always got top in Maths and Science tests while I was always a close second. He and his father had an awesome model railway set up under their house, and as I say, we'd been best friends for years.
I don't know exactly what time it was, but it was dark and the man who owned the section had already been and had his tantrum. My father was getting organised to let off a few skyrockets; he had me watching the fire. It can't have been much after nine o'clock, nine-thirty, when someone came running down the street from the direction of our place, shouting at the top of their voice. I couldn't make out what they were saying at first but the idea got through to everyone soon enough: the Kemp place was on fire.
The Kemps lived only three doors down from us; Mrs Kemp was good friends with my mother. Mr Kemp was on the council—though most people found him hard to relate to—and I remember he used to mow his lawns very early on Sunday mornings. Their house was a big old two-storeyed place, wooden, and if you'd had to choose a place in our street to burn down from the point of view of value as a spectacle, you'd definitely have gone for the Kemp place, no question.
Within seconds of the news arriving everybody had started to run off up the street towards the Kemps'. I made to go too but my father stopped me.
Scott, you stay here and mind the fire.
But Dad—and I almost felt sick as the full horror of this responsibility dawned on me—I won't see the fire.
Well someone has to stay and mind the fire here, Scott. What if we put out the Kemps' place and came back and found all the houses round here on fire? That wouldn't be any good now would it?
I looked at the ground, kicked my shoe into a tuft of grass. Why can't you mind it? I said.
&n
bsp; Because they might need me there. Now listen, Scott, I want you to promise me you'll stay and look after the fire. No sneaking away down the street. Okay?
Okay.
Look at me. I looked up at him. Now, he said, promise?
I promise, I said.
He was supposed to have been an athletics champion at school, my father, but the night of the Kemp fire was the only time I've ever seen him run. He didn't seem that quick to me.
I'll tell you what happened, he called out. I half-waved to him but kept my head down. I thought if I looked up he'd somehow see I was crying, even though it was dark.
The cause of the Kemp fire was never fully established. The fire service and the police decided it was probably a skyrocket in the guttering but no skyrocket was ever found and people like my father who'd been running the bonfire openly scoffed at the suggestion it was a skyrocket or anything to do with Guy Fawkes. They felt the fire must have been caused by an electrical fault, although there was another rather shadowy rumour that Mrs Kemp herself had been responsible. Friends of Mrs Kemp like my mother were naturally angry at this suggestion, and because he'd been one of the ringleaders in undermining the idea it was a skyrocket, my mother held my father personally responsible for the rumours, even though he denied having anything to do with them. All in all the Kemp fire caused a lot of friction in our house. At the time I tended to side with my father—I felt it was unreasonable to blame the fireworks—but as I say, nobody ever completely resolved the issue.
I found that if I pushed it there was a point on the opposite side of the street and up the Trotters' drive a bit where I could still see the bonfire and also see the crowd on the street outside the Kemps'. I couldn't see the fire itself, but at least I could see something. It must have been going pretty well at that point because everyone's faces were lit up orange and red. Parents were arriving from all directions—people were running up the street past me—and looking through the gathering crowd for their children. Gradually the crowd seemed to unshuffle itself into family groups: I could make out the Baldwins, the Wilsons, my own family—without me of course and so much for my father saving the day—and even the Porters were there. It was as if they were all posing for family portraits: parents at the back, children the front, parents with their hands on the shoulders of the two outside children. I thought seriously about going down and refusing to mind the bonfire so that my father would have to do it himself, but in my heart I knew he'd kill me if I ever did anything like that. All the same, it was annoying to see him just standing there.
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