Jim Crace - Being Dead

Whatever the initial cause, whosever fault it was, whoever volunteered to take the blame, a tongue of flame could hardly wish for more dry wood.

The three sleeping men were lucky: their door was closed so when the first flame dipped and reached for fuel and oxygen, stretching its neck for sustenance like a little orange chick, they could not hear the flexing of the floorboards or smell the scorching timber and the melting paint in the adjoining room. They did not wake at the explosion of the lamp with its shallow reservoir of kerosene or sit up startled as the kindled wood finally ignited and combusted with the detonating crackle of musketry.

The fire seemed to have two speeds, the thorough and methodical, and the racing. First there was the toasting of the wood, the snacking, fervent torching of everybody’s coats, the melting of their boots, and then the sudden, tindery conflagrations — a cereal packet left out on a kitchen surface, their books and lecture notes, the pile of magazines. The tongue became a sheet became a wall of flame.

But even when the fire had spread across the common-room floor and reached the men’s door, it could not slip into their bunk room and race across the mat and their abandoned clothes to wake them in their beds. The door lips were too good a fit. Wood swells. The flames could only climb to singe and blister the outer, painted surface of their door, then set to work on the soft joists, the panels of the ceiling and the timbers of the roof.

The fire and smoke were drawn instead by their love of space towards the light and towards the open door on to the veranda where Festa slept. They sent their roasting thermals and simooms out of the furnace through the unprotected door to rape the cooler air with singed and pungent breath. If Festa woke before the flames reached her or the smoke suffocated her, she’d either have to squeeze her plump and warmly brimming self through the too-small window-panes or make her escape through the fire into the common room and out into the yard. She’d not get through the common room: within five minutes of the toppled cigarette, the overheated coffee pan, the spilt kerosene, the common room was an inferno, a box of bluing flames, containing all the gaseous wastes of burning wood. Hot walls. Hot floors. And a furnace ceiling returning its white heat on to itself until it broke through into the open air beyond the roof and sent its celebrating fireball up to the sky to glut on oxygen. Now all the self-consuming blues within the study house leaped up, five metres high, to liberate their reds and yellows on the roof.

This — the bang — was when the three men woke. Their door had lost its middle panel and the bunk room was already filling with smoke. The whole house sounded like a grounded ship, protesting timbers and collapsing joists, the fire as swelling and as rolling as the sea. It didn’t take them long to spot the one way out. One of them smashed the bunk-room window with a stool then knocked out the centre struts to make a hole big enough for them to squeeze through. It didn’t matter that they cut their hands and chests and didn’t have time to dress or rescue any of their clothes. The flames were catching up with them and torching the two bunks and their bedding. Their oxygen had disappeared. Their lungs and legs were scorched.

It wasn’t warm outside. Their naked backs were cold. Thank goodness for the flames. They stood and watched the study house blaze and carbonize. They watched the fusing and the melting of the metal pipes, the draining-board, the door handles and locks. They listened to the tom-tom of the exploding window-panes in the house and its veranda. They watched the fire attempt — and fail — to cross the remains of that once-fine garden to the outer walls and bid for freedom in the undergrowth.

It was not long before the study house was a charred and branded frame containing embers, cinders, charcoal, bone ash. All that remained (apart from a protracted claim from Festa’s family against the Institute for neglect and damages) were concrete steps, foundation bricks, a sink, a seared and smelted fridge, charred and wheezing wood, the blackened metal corners of Joseph’s fussy suitcase, a pall of drifting, marinating smoke and the deep, nostalgic smell of boys and bonfires.

No one could say exactly when Festa had been kippered and cremated or whether she had even had the chance to try to save her life. At first, it did not occur to the men that anyone had died. They themselves had slept too late as usual. The world would have breakfasted and gone to work before they woke. Their three missing colleagues would be where they always were by that time in the morning, down on the coast pursuing doctorates, up to their knees in flame-consuming sea.

Syl took the Friday train down to the coast, a seven-hour journey of mostly sleep and fields. It ended, late afternoon, in heavy rain, then heavy traffic during the cheap, unlicensed taxi ride to the hillside neighbourhoods in a moonlighting student’s car. Her pirate fare, he said, would help to educate an architect. ‘No tip for that,’ she muttered to herself.

They reached the family home in fading daylight. The house, one of only three on an unmetalled side road above Deliverance Park, was dark and silent from outside, no light or radio or music. The window shutters had not been lowered but her parents’ car was missing from the rattan-covered port. Syl was relieved. No car, no bodies in the house, at least. If her parents were not at home, there was still the probability they would return intact from their field trip, from their untypical delays, so that the squabbles with their daughter could begin.

Syl was nervous, nevertheless, of the empty rooms. A family home is always full of alarming corners and portentous doors, and places that are frightening to pass or face. She’d have to overcome her contempt for student architects. She asked the taxi driver — he said his name was Geo and that he was in no hurry — to come with her to check the house. And then to have a coffee or a beer, if he had the time. Who knew what she might find inside? Whatever happened, she wouldn’t want to find it on her own, or have to open doors, or have to spend the evening alone without the usual comforts and distractions. Geo was convenient, as well as reasonably presentable, already mesmerized, and (she realized at once) doggedly compliant. She’d put him to good use. She might even require him to stay all night. He could prove to be a bore. His Zappa underlip, his drystone necklace and his little self-regarding name were evidence of that. But at least his car would be useful.

They parked at the bottom of the garden steps and ran up to the porch through splashing rain. Syl’s hands, she was surprised to find, were trembling. She blamed it on the shaking tensions of the journey and the night of drink and dreams. She could not credit herself with any family feelings but she could hardly put the key into the lock. Geo had to do it for her. He was tense and shaking too, but for lesser reasons.

Syl took deep breaths. What had become of her? Where was the irritated, stalwart girl who only yesterday had dumped the MetroGnome in what seemed at the time like the shedding of a straitjacket? Now she felt as if her skin was too tight, that she could split and burst at any moment. This was a familiar sensation. She’d often trembled in this porch, and at this door. She’d often failed to fit the key into the lock. It was the outer chamber where, as an adolescent, she’d always had to sober up, compose her hair and clothes, rub the wildness and the chemistry from her euphoric and expanded pupils, hide her habits and her purchases, and try to reach her bed before her father, book in hand, could peer out of his room to say, ‘You’re late,’ or ask, infuriatingly, if she had had ‘an interesting evening’. To cross this threshold was to cross the Styx. Sins were discovered there, and questions asked. She would be judged. Now, no longer adolescent, in this brief shelter from the rain, the image of the Styx was doubly relevant and chilling. Something ancient and intuitive was telling her that she was entering the chambers of the dead. This was the gateway to the underworld. Geo was her ferryman. She’d have to call him Charon from now on.