The Professor of Truth (29 page)

Then I was at the end of the fence, where it joined the roadside fence. Parroulet was still hacking away behind me, and down on the lawn Kim was piling up more branches, but I had done as much as I could. My weakness had caught up with me. I was filthy, drained, shaking with exertion. Every inch of me seemed to have been bitten by insects or cut or torn or bruised by the bush. I turned to limp back towards Parroulet.

“We can do nothing more,” I said.

“Yes,” Parroulet said breathlessly, barely pausing. “Yes, we can do more.”

Somewhere out of our sight came a crash, a huge tree falling, followed by a shout from Kim. “Look!”

We both turned to where she was pointing. Beyond the clear passage we had made, above the highest point of the foliage that awaited the fire, a single tongue of flame was licking at the air. It leaped and fell, leaped again, and after it came a shower of sparks, deep red against the darkened sky.

Now we would see, I remember thinking. But I did not know what I thought we would see.

There was, all at once, almost no sky left, only the huge smoke clouds of destruction. And I realised that it was becoming harder to find breath, that the fire must be sucking the oxygen out of the atmosphere, and Pompeii and smothering ash suddenly came into my mind, and I wondered if
we would suffocate before we were burned, and how long it would take, and whether we would feel any pain.

Parroulet signalled me to follow, and we both retreated to the patio. Kim joined us. Parroulet went into the utility room, and brought out an assortment of outdoor clothes—long trousers, fleeces, jackets, hats, more gloves, scarves, even two ski masks. “Put on them,” he said, and began to dress himself, layer upon layer. We looked at him as if he really were insane. Then, arrayed like a cross between a scarecrow and some ghoulish figure from myth or nightmare, with a scarf wrapped round his face, he plunged into the pool, swam to the edge and pulled himself out.

“Now you, now you!” he shouted, and we saw that he was right, and we too made ourselves into scarecrows, and soaked ourselves against the heat that was now upon us and that would, if it got the chance, burn us without even touching us. And while we did this Parroulet took a pile of towels and dipped them into the pool, and left them lying where they could be easily reached.

“Help me now with this,” Parroulet said, and he beckoned us into the utility room. In one corner was a coiled hose with an adjustable nozzle at one end, and a small machine that looked to me like a vacuum cleaner. Parroulet removed a cap from it and fixed one end of the hose in its place. Then he pulled out the machine’s long electric cord and plugged it into a socket beside the door. “Wait here,” he told Kim. He handed the coil of hose to me. “Carry it.” He picked up the machine and we went back outside. It did not occur to me to ask questions.

“This is what more we can do,” Parroulet said fiercely. “I am right, you will see.”

The machine was a submersible pump. Parroulet lowered it on a nylon cord into the deep end of the pool until it settled on the bottom. I unwound the hose. Parroulet shouted at Kim, “Now! Switch on!”

There was a belching, gurgling sound as the motor kicked in. The hose lay dormant in my hands, then suddenly it spluttered and a fat spout of water flopped from it. Parroulet grabbed the hose from me and screwed the nozzle until it produced a continuous thin jet of water. He began to soak the space we had cleared, making a kind of wet corridor between the fire and the house. I looked at the pool, still lapping from our dives. It was about forty feet long by twenty wide. How much water was in there I had no idea, but even the contents of an entire swimming pool seemed inconsequential against what I had seen advancing on us.

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.

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 battlefield 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.