The Professor of Truth (28 page)

Everybody except you, I thought, taking in the pale-blue shirt stretched over the enormous beer-gut as if it had just trapped it.

“That’s tough on Sheildston,” I said.

“Yes it is. There are two thousand people in Cobsville. And thousands of others in towns like it—right in the path of the biggest fires.”

“There are people in Sheildston too.”

“There
were
. Now listen, I’m not having a debate about this. You’re not going up there.”

“You mean you won’t let me past?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“What harm can I do?”

“What good can you do, more like? You’d better not be thinking you’re going to be some kind of hero.”

“I want to … check if the people I know are all right.”

“Which people’s that, then?”

I almost made a mistake at this point but, miraculously, names other than “Parr” came to my lips.

“Roger and Betty Dinning. And Maisie. Maisie Miller.”

“Oh. You know Maisie, do you?” My stock, I saw, rose a little in the policeman’s eyes. “Well, I can tell you, she’s all right. Pretty upset, but safe. I took her out this morning, her and the dog. Her daughter’s coming to collect them, if she can get through. And the Dinnings should be here any moment. I gave them an hour to get their valuables and that was forty-five minutes ago. Once they’re down that’s everybody and I’m closing the road.”

“Everybody? Are you sure?”

“Sure as I can be. You ring the bells and knock on the doors and use the tannoy to warn people—what else can you do? A lot of folks are away anyway, because of the holidays. If there’s anybody left, well—good luck to them.”

“It’s a hard choice,” I said, “to leave your home and everything you have.”

“Not if it’s that or burn to death. You can’t fight these fires, not when they’re this big and with this wind. You think
you’ve got clear space all round your place but the fire’ll just jump it. I’m sorry for those people, but you can’t sit there like a sausage on a grill and think you’re not going to cook.”

I acknowledged the truth of this with a nod. Reassured that I wasn’t going to give any trouble, the policeman became almost friendly.

“A lot of them up there have got plenty of money. They’ll have insurance. If it comes down to it, they can start again somewhere else. You know what the worst thing is?”

“No, what’s the worst thing?”

“Some of these fires aren’t accidents. I tell you what, if they catch the bastards …” He left the sentence unfinished, and gave me another hard look, suspicious perhaps that I might actually be an arsonist coming back to observe my handiwork. “How do you know Maisie anyway?”

“An old friend,” I said. “Long time ago.”

The policeman seemed satisfied by this vague reply. “I thought she’d take it bad but she’s a tough lady. ‘Neil,’ she says to me, ‘you just have to play whatever hand you get dealt.’ I guess she’s right about that. You staying in town?”

“In Turner’s Strand, yes.”

“You go back down the hill, then. You’ll be safe there.”

I nodded again. “I will be,” I said. He nodded back. I raised a hand in farewell and went round the corner. I heard the scrape of traffic cones being shoved across the road. Before the next turn I stopped and got my bearings. Then I stepped off the road, scrambled up the bank, and plunged into the undergrowth.

The dense tangle of branches and roots was in places almost impenetrable. There were thorns and burrs and sharp-edged stems, and everything was steep and hot and dry and dusty. I found a concrete channel, choked with leaves and other debris, a water run-off I guessed, and fought my way up it. I made a terrible crashing, cracking noise as I went, but even if the cop heard me he’d never be able to locate me in all the vegetation. My throat was parched, sweat poured down my face and my eyes itched and streamed. I paused, got out the water and took a long drink. When the wind dropped a little I heard rustling, creeping sounds in the undergrowth—reptiles, birds, insects and other creatures no doubt, moving away from the fire. I tried not to think about treading on a snake or being bitten by a spider, and toiled on. In a while either the going became easier or I became better at negotiating the terrain. After ten or fifteen minutes I emerged on to the road.

Almost at once I heard a vehicle approaching, and ducked back into cover. A car stuffed with luggage and with several items of furniture lashed to the roof rack came down the hill. I saw a grim-faced Roger Binning at the wheel, a woman next to him with a handkerchief to her mouth.

I was on a straight stretch of the road, almost at the top. A feeling of triumph seized me and I began to trot into the wind. A hundred yards or so brought me round the final bend and to the first of Sheildston’s houses. I slowed to a walk. The smell of burning was constant now. I found it hard to believe that everybody had fled, but there was certainly
no sign of life. Was I being a complete fool? This was not my country: I knew nothing about bush fires.

I passed the old part of the village, the church, the former school, Maisie Miller’s closed-up house. Nothing stirred, but to the west great streamers of grey and black smoke rose into the sky. Now it was a sense of urgency that forced me into another short run and brought me to the gates of Parroulet’s house for the third time.

I was going to press the buzzer, but then I ran on again, along the fence to where the road ended. I could hear something—chopping, cracking sounds, but also a deeper underlying noise, a kind of snore. I headed to the start of the trail into the bush. The snore grew louder, and curtains of smoke, like black storms rising, dimmed the sky. And then I reached the spot where I had stood with Maisie Miller, and I saw the fire.

It was hard to judge but I didn’t think it was more than a mile away, a ragged wall of flame stretching itself out to both left and right. Trees popped and curled and were consumed as if made of straw. And the snore was now a growl, and even at that distance I could feel the beat of the furnace against my face.

I ran back to the gates and pressed the buzzer. Three short bursts, one long.

There was no answer.

They had fled too, from the fire if not from me. How could I have thought that they would not?

But then I saw Kim Parr hurrying across the broken, weed-strewn tarmac. In a pair of white shorts and a black singlet, she looked like a young girl.

“You shouldn’t have come!” she cried. “I didn’t think you would.”

“It’s what we agreed,” I said. “And you are still here.”

“Martin won’t leave. The police came but he wouldn’t let me answer them. He said they would force us to go.”

“Haven’t you seen the fire? It’s coming this way.”

She had a remote control in her hand and used it to release the lock on the gates. “I don’t want to see it. I can hear it and smell it, that is enough.”

“There’s still time to escape, if you leave now.”

“We’re not leaving,” she said.

“Did you tell him I was coming?”

“Last night. He was very angry. Today he doesn’t speak to me. He’ll be even more angry if I let you in.”

“But you have let me in,” I said.

“You’re not going to go away, are you? You’re here. But that doesn’t matter right now. Only the fire matters.”

I followed her to the door, solid and white and framed by a portico. Inside was a cool, white-painted hall with huge ferns and rubber plants in great terracotta pots, and a polished tiled floor that could have been marble but probably wasn’t. A staircase led to both an upper and a lower level, and there were various doors around the hall. The house, I thought, was probably twenty years old, no more. Doubtless it had been considered luxurious, even opulent, when new, but to me it appeared tired, barren, a little tawdry, the kind of modern building that is not flattered by cracks when they begin to show.

“Where is he?”

“Outside. He thinks he can save the house. I don’t know. Maybe it’s impossible. Look.”

She had brought me to a window and from it we looked down on a swimming pool beyond which a short stretch of lawn ended at a fence. The bush grew hard up against—and in places, overreached—this fence, which ran along the south side of the property, then turned and continued on the west side, past the pool and house and up the incline to the road. Immediately below us, at one end of the pool, was a patio, on which were set out some loungers and easy chairs, a wooden table and a couple of parasols. All this I saw in a moment, but Kim Parr had not brought me there to admire the view. She was pointing to the other side of the pool. A lone figure was frantically hacking at the nearest undergrowth with an axe. The fence had been cut and pulled apart in one place so that he could get more easily at the foliage massing on the other side. He had made a lot of progress, clearing a swathe perhaps twelve feet wide along half of the western perimeter, but there was still much to do, and even if it could be done in time it seemed hopeless, the narrowest of boundaries between life and death. “The fire’ll just jump it,” the fat cop had said. From the window, the flames that I had seen a few minutes earlier were not yet visible, but I knew how fast they were approaching. I could also see the tumult being caused in the taller trees by the wind.

“I think he has gone mad,” Kim Parr said.

We hurried downstairs to the lower level of the house, into a large space that seemed to be a utility or storage room. For a moment I hesitated, putting my jute bag and its
contents on the floor, and Kim moved ahead, out on to the patio. “Martin,” she called. I saw other tools lying on the ground: wire-clippers, a bush-saw, a machete, a rake—all, surely, completely inadequate against what was coming. Parroulet turned. He was in long trousers and a loose shirt and gardening boots, and was wearing work gloves. He was completely drenched in sweat. He advanced a couple of steps towards us. Kim stopped.

“Who the hell this is?” Parroulet said, and at once I remembered his voice, his idiosyncratic English, his evidence. Parroulet looked furious, frightened, cornered. He held the long-handled axe up as if ready to swing it at us.

Kim said, “I told you.”

“Goddamn it, Kim!” Parroulet said. “This I don’t need.”

Something took me beyond my memory of the man. I said, “What you need is a chainsaw.”

Parroulet gave me a murderous look. “Nobody ask you nothing.”

I said, “Do you have one?”

“What?” Parroulet snapped.

“A chainsaw. Do you have a chainsaw?”

“No!” Parroulet shouted. “I don’t have no goddamn chainsaw. It broke. It hit metal post and the chain broke. Almost it took my foot off. See?”

There was a gash across the toe of the right boot, which had split the leather and exposed the steel cap underneath. And now I saw, discarded beside the fence, like the head of some fierce, dead, unknown beast, the broken chainsaw.

“You happy now?”

It was as if somebody else occupied my body. I walked quickly over to where the tools lay. I picked up the machete.

“What the hell he is doing?” Parroulet screamed at Kim.

I turned away and began to strike at the vegetation with the machete. I felt the heat of the day, the thickening heat of the fire on my neck. I felt rather than saw a swinging motion close to me, heard a cry from Kim, but steeled myself neither to turn nor to use the machete in defence. Whatever was coming was coming. I struck again at the trunk of a bush, severing it, and at the same moment heard the axe thud into wood a few feet away. Neither of us looked at the other. I lifted the whole bush and flung it away from the house. Something sharp tore at the palm of my left hand. I glanced at the scratch and the sudden stitching of blood that appeared.

“Gloves!” I called to Kim. “Do you have any more?”

“Get him gloves!” Parroulet yelled, and Kim ran indoors, and returned a minute later with some. By then, Martin Parroulet and I had made a kind of unspoken pact. We were working apart, saying nothing, barely acknowledging each other, yet somehow sharing a bond or purpose as we tried to clear as much space as possible between the house and the surrounding, swaying, jostling, as yet unfired undergrowth.

T WOULD NOT BE ENOUGH. IT WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH
. So I thought as we laboured. Both Parroulet and I were on the far side of the cut fence, hacking and sawing and hauling out branches and bushes. After a while it became impossible to heap the bush back on itself, and anyway such heaps would only cause a greater conflagration if the fire reached the edge of the space we were making. So Kim came behind us, pulling away the biggest pieces of debris and piling them in the middle of the lawn, beyond the swimming pool, as far as possible from the house. The three of us worked in silence, nobody giving instructions because it was obvious what we had to do—what we were feebly, ferociously trying to do—yet there was a kind of organised frenzy in the way we kept at it. I worked like a machine, methodical and repetitive, but I felt angry and joyous and powerful in my movements. Yesterday I had been sick and weak and done, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. Today I was alive. Sweat lashed from me like rain. Every muscle and bone ached, my wrists and arms were criss-crossed with weals and cuts and I could feel, under the thickness of the gloves, the blisters rising to cover my soft, academic’s fingers and palms. But I kept going, through the pain, through
the conviction that what we were doing was utterly futile. I had seen what was approaching. But why did it not come? The flames had seemed so close—an hour, two hours ago?—I didn’t know how long. Why had they not yet arrived?