The Bricklayer's Son Owns The Desert

CHAPTER NINE: THE FIRE

The fire started a little after three in the morning, at the back of the house, where someone had poured a line of petrol along the foot of the wall and thrown a match.

Zane woke to the smell before the sound. He was on his feet and on the landing before he understood why, and by then the back of the house was roaring. Smoke rolled up the stairwell thick and yellow. Somewhere below, glass burst in the heat.

"Out!" he shouted. "Everybody out, now!"

His mother's door was the nearest. Rosa was sitting up in bed, coughing, groping for her glasses on the nightstand. Zane didn't wait for her to find them. He lifted her off the mattress in her nightdress, wrapped the blanket round her and carried her down through the smoke with her face pressed into his shoulder. The heat at the bottom of the stairs was like an open kiln. He kicked the front door wide and set her down on the pavement, then turned straight back.

Maren and Kwame were already halfway down the stairs with Ivan between them. Kwame had arrived from Kessara the day before and had been sleeping on the sofa, and he had been the first to reach the old man's room. But Ivan was fighting them. He twisted in their grip with his plaster arm swinging, dragging them sideways toward the cellar door under the stairs.

"Let go of me!" he croaked. "I need to get down there. Let me go!"

"Dad, there's nothing down there worth it!" Zane shouted.

Ivan didn't hear him or didn't care. He wrenched free of Maren and got a hand on the cellar door handle, and the brass was so hot it hissed against his palm. Zane reached him in two strides. He took his father round the chest from behind, lifted him clean off his feet and hauled him bodily down the hall and out into the night, with Ivan still reaching back toward the door over his shoulder.

They were all on the pavement, coughing and blackened, when the roof went in.

It went with a long groan of timber and a rush of sparks that climbed into the sky like something set free. Rosa cried out once. Ivan stopped struggling and simply stood there in Zane's arms, watching.

The glow had lit the sky over the whole of the old quarter, and people had seen it from across the river. Within minutes, they came running down Tannery Row in coats over their pyjamas, the old neighbours who had once crossed the street to avoid the Whelans. They came with buckets and kettles and garden hoses dragged from the building site taps, and they formed a line up and down the row and threw water at the flames until their arms shook. Nobody asked them to. Nobody stopped them either.

But the old timbers were already gone.

By the time the fire engines arrived, there was nothing left to save. The house Ivan Whelan had built with his own hands burned down to the bricks, and the bricks stood black and roofless in the dawn, smoking quietly in the rain that came too late.

An ambulance took Ivan away before sunrise, with smoke in his lungs and an oxygen mask over his face.

By eight o'clock in the morning, Superintendent Mortlake had come and gone. He had walked once around the ruin with his hands in his raincoat pockets, sniffed the air and decided that it was an electrical fault in an old house. He didn't look at the scorched line along the back wall. He didn't speak to anyone who had been inside.

By noon, a council surveyor had declared the ruin unsafe, and the council had signed an emergency demolition order for the whole plot. The notice went up on the blackened gatepost before the bricks had even cooled. Hatherley crews would move in at seven o'clock on Monday morning.

Sundrift's lawyers filed to block the order within the hour. The earliest hearing they could get was on Tuesday.

Rowland Hatherley came down in the early afternoon to look at the smoking shell. He came alone this time, in a navy coat, and he stood at the broken gate with his hands in his pockets as if he were admiring a view. Zane was sifting through the rubble by the front step. He straightened slowly when he saw who it was.

Rowland glanced at the neighbours still drifting around the edges of the ruin. Then he leaned in close, close enough that nobody else could hear.

"I did warn you," he said softly. "Six years ago."

Zane took one step toward him.

Maren caught his arm. She didn't pull hard. She only held on, and when he looked at her, she shook her head.

"That's what he came for," she said in a low voice. "Look at him. He wants you in handcuffs before Monday."

Rowland smiled at her, slow and pleasant, the way he used to smile across the breakfast table when he had won something. Then he turned and walked back to his car without another word.

Rosa and Maren sat together on the kerb for the rest of the afternoon, wrapped in blankets the neighbours had brought. Neither of them said much. At some point, without either of them seeming to notice, Rosa had taken the younger woman's hand and wrapped her own around it, and she didn't let go.

That evening, Zane sat beside his father's bed in the hospital on the hill. Ivan's face was grey under the oxygen mask, and his breathing rattled. His plaster arm lay on the blanket, scorched black at the elbow, and his left palm was bandaged where the cellar door handle had burned it.

When Zane leaned closer, that bandaged hand shot out and closed around his wrist. The grip was so tight it hurt.

Ivan dragged the mask down off his face. His eyes were wide and wet and frightened in a way Zane had never seen, not when the men broke his arm and not when the roof came down.

"Don't let them dig," he whispered. "Whatever happens, son, don't let them dig."