Peter Corris - Beware of the Dog

I untied the parka, soaked it and held it over my head as I rushed along the front deck where the heat was less fierce. I kicked in a window and went through it into a big room that was filled with acrid, lung-searing smoke. I saw movement over towards a half-open door and lunged forward. The woman was in the full regalia-black neck ribbon, bra, suspender belt and stockings and all of it, like her cloud of blonde hair, was on fire. I grabbed her, beat at the flames with the wet parka, but she pushed me away.

‘Patrick!’ she screamed. She moved towards the door which was gushing smoke and fire.

‘Don’t.’ My chest filled with smoke as I yelled and I almost collapsed. I grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the door. She fought me. She was frantic and incredibly strong. Her mouth was open and she was gulping down smoke as she sobbed and screamed. The roof beams were on fire above our heads, steaming and spitting out hot liquid, and the seagrass matting was burning under our feet. I clubbed her with a roundhouse swing and she went limp. I extinguished the last of the burning hair and dragged her towards the window and the deck. She was big and a dead weight. Things were exploding into flames around me. I took a blow across the neck and something seared my right shoulder.

The deck was burning. Its paint was blistering into bubbles and spurting little yellow and red flames. I dragged her through the fire and smoke and staggered blindly down the steps onto firm ground. The heat coming from the house was like a huge, white hot brick wall, threatening to fall on me. I couldn’t see or breathe. I coughed and felt that I had expelled my lungs. Somehow I got to the running hose and sprayed water over the woman and myself. The shirt was burning on my back and I screamed as I felt the flesh being grilled. The water cleared my vision. The hose came away from the tap and I rolled under the gushing water, wallowing in the mud.

The woman lay on her back. She was naked now with bits of smouldering fabric sticking to her. Her eyes were closed. My hands were raw and felt useless as if I was wearing giant, flapping rubber gloves. The burnt skin on my fingers was splitting. I tried to move her arms, to expand her chest. My strength was going and I could scarcely move my limbs, let alone hers. I willed myself to do it-lift and open, lift and open. I thought about giving her the kiss of life but her mouth was wide open, locked in a rictus of agony.

I flapped her arms and felt the burnt skin on my back peel and tear. She moaned and jerked, then went still.

I could hear the flames roaring in the trees around the front of the house. I looked up; a light wind was fanning the blaze and the fire leapt from the house and caught on the canopy of the Land Rover. The interior of the vehicle filled with a bright red glow. I tugged at the woman and slid her through the mud, trying to get some shelter from the water tank. The Land Rover went up like an incendiary mine. Bits of metal clanged against the water tank and flew past me into the bush. The heat blast drove the air from my lungs, deafened and blinded me. I felt my hands slide from the woman’s arm, the ground dissolved under me and I disappeared into the middle of a blazing sun.

I drifted around timelessly in a country full of pain but devoid of responsibility. Only sensations registered-warmth and cold, dryness and damp, sound and quiet, hard and soft. I was acutely aware of my body, of its shape and size, its texture, and nothing else actually mattered. There were visions-faces, voices and vague feelings of happiness or distress- but they were nothing to do with me, not really. I was out of it all, floating. Sometimes it seemed that I might be going to land and the pain in every part of my body would rise to an unbearable level and I would feel outraged that this could be happening. Not to me, not to the floating man. Then I would go aloft again, up into the stratosphere where everything was clean and cool and soft.

‘Cliff, Cliff, darling. Can you hear me?’

It was Cyn’s voice; no, Ailsa’s; no, Ann’s. No. It was Helen Broadway, and I hated her because she was pulling me in like a hooked fish. I wanted to stay out there in the cool cottonwool country, where nothing hurt and no-one ever asked any hard questions like, ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Of course I can hear you,’ I said. ‘Go away. Let go, Helen. You didn’t want me, not really. Don’t…’

A woman’s voice I didn’t know, not quite, said, ‘Helen?’

‘Helen Broadway,’ Frank Parker said. ‘Girlfriend. Before your time, Glen.’

‘Better be,’ Glen said.

I opened my eyes and saw them standing beside my bed. Frank Parker was wearing a blue suit. Glen had on a green dress.

‘Colours,’ I said.

Glen leaned down and touched my face. ‘What?’

‘I can see the colours.’

Glen looked at Frank. ‘Should we get the doctor?’

Frank shook his head. I wondered what it would be like to shake my head but it seemed like an impossibility. ‘They said he’d be vague for a while. He’s taken an awful lot of dope.’

‘Who’s a dope?’ I said.

I felt something touch my hand and looked down. I supposed I had a hand, but just at present it looked like a bundle of white cloth. ‘You are,’ Glen said.

There were tears in her eyes and I gathered something pretty important must have happened. Nothing seemed real. Little bits and pieces of my life and times came back to me in tantalising snatches. I felt hot and I itched all over. My mouth was dry. Then it hit me, all at once, just like that. The mountains, the house, the fire and all the questions.

‘How long?’ I said.

Glen said, ‘Ten days.’

‘The woman?’

‘She’s dead, Cliff,’ Frank said, ‘along with the man who was in the house. You bloody nearly went with them.’

Glen seemed to sense what I needed. She poured some water from a carafe and held the glass to my lips. My hands were bandaged and I could feel dressings on my face, shoulders and back. ‘You had bad burns on your hands, face and other bits,’ Glen said. ‘Also severe smoke inhalation. You had a temperature of a hundred and four.’

‘I was sick beforehand,’ I said. ‘Where am I now? Hospital at the Bay?’

Frank laughed. ‘You think you get freshly painted walls, TV and young nurses there? You’re in a private hospital in Petersham, near Glen’s place.’

I looked at Glen. She was pale and had lost weight. The last words I had heard from her were angry but there was no sign of anger now. Something else. The look in her big eyes soothed me. Her mouth was slightly open and I desperately wanted to kiss her. ‘All I can see is cops,’ I said. ‘Where’s the young nurses?’

I fell asleep after that. This happened a few times over the following days. Glen would come in, tell me a little bit of the story, I’d feel better, then drop right back into nowhere land. It wasn’t a bad way to live, all things considered. I was in a private room; the treatment I was getting was healing me fast and Glen and I were getting along well in a quiet, foundation-building kind of way. But as I got a better grip on what had happened, the feeling of irresponsibility dropped away. When you feel you have to do something, your time as the pampered patient is at an end.

Patrick Lamberte had died in the fire. The woman who I had tried to save was Karen Livermore, a dress designer aged thirty-eight. She was the sister of Verity Lamberte, my client. Patrick’s wife. She was dead by the time the fire brigade arrived. The house had been completely destroyed and I had been found near death and delirious. The police had discovered the Land Cruiser, identified me, and had questions to ask. I tried to contact my client but her home number didn’t answer and all I could learn from her business associates was that she was ‘on leave’. Glen and Frank fended their colleagues off for a time with the aid of the doctors, but eventually a Detective Sergeant Willis arrived with a policewoman carrying a lap top computer.