God.
There was so much smoke and fire that he wondered if this might be an animal, strung up. But then, with a sensation that felt very close to a stomach punch, his brain assembled the shapes and colours together. He saw something clearly discernible in the haze, suspended a metre from the grass. He was looking at bare human feet, dangling and motionless apart from the sizzling and popping of the skin. Every toe was curled.
‘They’re still alive!’ one of the boys jabbed a finger. ‘Check out the head!’
There was movement, he was right. Because in amongst the flames Matt could see the oddly misshapen outline of the head, with some sort of bag or sack over it. It was twitching left and right. The squealing came again, only now it was very quiet. A sort of low moan that made his gums tingle.
A throb of insane hope exploded in his gut in a flicker of Channel Five TV shows he’d idly watched, when he was supposed to be writing lectures. Of people who’d suffered horrendous burns but had been given plastic surgery. They’d sort of turned out okay. They lived a life.
He had to get them down.
He looked across at the gazebo. Two homeless guys were lying in there, covered in blankets, surrounded by crushed cans of cheap lager. One of them was sitting upright and looking at the fire like this was his version of TV, mouth gawping at a particularly absorbing show tonight. The other one was snoring in a heap.
Matt blundered up the steps. Grabbed the blankets. ‘Move!’
‘We’ve as much right to be here as—’
He yanked the man’s blanket hard and rolled him completely out of it. The guy thumped a shoulder against the wood.
‘You bloody, cheeky bugger.’
‘Move!’ Matt barked again and pulled both stinking blankets from the men. The sleeping one started shouting abuse, loudly.
They say that in moments of extreme pressure the brain reverts to tunnel thinking, and Matt had no idea if this would work, but all he could think of was the simplest of physics. Fire hates water, fire hates water. So heaving exhausted breath through his body, he ran to the edge of the small lake where he’d spotted that family of swans yesterday. Then he plunged the foul-smelling blankets into the ice-cold water. He hauled them back out and rushed back to the dangling shape. Amazed at how heavy the material felt, like a body itself.
Somewhere in the distance, sirens were howling.
‘It’s going, it’s going,’ someone said and immediately the rope snapped with an audible crack. So loud he thought the entire, fiery tree was going to come crashing down onto their heads, and spark up the entire gazebo. But only the fire-lump plunged to the floor. It collapsed into a mad, flashing heap.
Matt ran towards it and opened up one of the wet, heavy blankets. Just as he went to fling it over he called out to the others. ‘Somebody! Grab the other one!’
Nobody did and that was the first time he noticed the smell of petrol in his nostrils. It was also the moment that he was fully aware that the lump on the grass was a woman. A large, burning woman with her blackened skin on fire. The misshapen, now unmoving sack on her head still covered her face, but as soon as he saw the shape of her body, single shots of memory flashed across his mind, in a swift flickering parade: of Jo Finch hugging Rachel on the steps of the gazebo station, of her resting her chin in her hand, beaming out smiles at a photoshoot.
He couldn’t see her face, but he could see that her arms weren’t arms any more.
– No.
‘Help me!’ he called out. ‘Someone.’
They ignored him. Totally oblivious to the concept of involvement.
‘What is wrong with you people?’
He threw the sodden blanket across the top half of the body and yelped when a tongue of white light flicked out of her belly. It slashed across his wrist. His eyes flooded with instant water and he pulled his hand to his chest, the extreme heat bubbling into the flesh of his thumb. He took a breath and grabbed the other towel, throwing it across her legs. He noticed, just then, that her head, still covered, had finally stopped moving.
The blankets were so thick and wet that they managed to put most of the fire out. Now masses of smoke and steam swept past him in huge billowing plumes. His first, foolish hope was this: that Jo Finch’s soul was real and was rushing past him right now, through him and up into the tangled branches of the tree. Then there was silence, apart from the sound of rain. Though he quickly realised it wasn’t really rain at all. It was the sound of her skin, still cracking, still snapping.
Somehow the smoke stole all the moisture from his eyes and he felt the inside of his chest filling with wasps and bees and anything else that stings. The grass under his feet began to pulsate, the grass no longer bright orange now, but a shadowy, smokey black. He sank to his knees by the steaming girl.
Retching out a bone-shaking cough he looked back up at the boys and the homeless men and at the young women with kebabs. The homeless ones were the only ones watching all of this happening with their eyes. The rest of them were holding up their phones, filming it all, their faces lit by an electronic glow, expressions somewhere between horror and mouth-watering delight. More, he feared, the latter.
Amongst them, like any other local, he saw Rachel Wasson emerging, holding her side and out of breath. Only she staggered forward, further than the others, straight into the cloud of billowing smoke that wrapped itself around her like tentacles. She was staring at the steaming lump on the grass
