The Block

All that rain has dimmed the fires now. On the opposite side of the road, a man wails, his hands holding his face. Sharon can’t help but notice one of his ears slipping down the side of his neck. No one to blame but himself. She looks away, and does up the top button on her cardigan. The arthritis in her knees is flaring up again. Like one of her husband’s old manual camera lenses, she tunes out the locals’ suffering, bringing those sharp flames of personal familiar pain into focus. You’ve prepared for this, Sharon.

She’d been here in Chiang Mai for seven hours when the blasts began. Before that, Sharon had been glued to her television, watching as the BBC World Service reported blast after blast in southern Africa. Then in northern Africa. Sharon didn’t have to see much of that before deciding to leave that very night. She booked a flight and rushed, luggageless, to the airport, expecting air travel to be grounded soon She stayed awake for the entire overnight flight, her eyes red and tacky from watching rolling news reports. The blasts were like bomb explosions, except that they were coming from thin air. Not an aircraft in sight, or on radar. Without warning, without explanation: an eruption of heat, light and fire. The news cycle, the markets, and daily life ground to a halt, the whole world watching. Civilians suffered extreme burns, their entire faces rearranged so graphically that the television stations wouldn’t show them. Sharon had had to google the incident locations to find images.

Sharon reaches Waroros market. It’s loud, hectic, skeletal. It would be unrecognisable if it weren’t for the number of times she had practiced her route from the airport to the block. Regarding the market, Sharon finds herself surprised – even sad. But loving something doesn’t make it last. Much of the corrugated iron roof has fallen inward, and hot stench of burning oil and cooking fruit seeps out with the smoke. Sharon thinks of the sai ua seller who she always haggles down to thirty cents for a week’s worth of sausage. Was he in there when the roof collapsed? She shakes the thought away. Focus. Burned palm beams block her route – a route she had had checked with two disaster experts, one of whom she’d flown at out in person. Should she stick to her plan and go through the market? It’ll be so much faster Many are taking the risk to enter, ducking under the twisting metal and carrying out armfuls of bagged rice, canned goods. The wailing, earless man has followed her here, or perhaps it is another man whose face has disintegrated from the heat. He cries out no, no, no, no, clutching his nose, eyes, cheeks. Could he be after her? Knowing where she’s headed? Sharon gathers her bag closer, pulls her cardigan tighter across her chest. She’s sick, she’s frightened. But safety – the block, and her bed within it – is within reach.

Thinking back on her long history of careful, intelligent plans, Sharon decides against the shorter, practiced route through the market. She knows the ring road, though not so well. Despite everything, her soul sings a little in her chest. She had been right, and her husband, not to mention everyone else, had been wrong. Sharon touches the sore mark on her chest, thinking of Ken, of Adelaide, their flat little house with its pruned jacaranda tree, the sounds of the nearby school at lunchtimes. Ken had given her the heart shaped locket there. She’d thought it was tasteless at the time, had said so, although it soon became clear that it was an uncharacteristic joke on his part: he was already leaving her. The burn has blistered over now. Her first thought in the blast was for Ken: she’d had to snatch the locket off as the metal heated. Where is he right now? How old are his daughters, now? Sharon has a sudden, impossible desire for facebook. That man wails again. The daughters. Were their hands holding their faces too, trying to keep everything intact and stuck together in the right place?

Again that little trill in her heart. The block’s safety looms. Sharon remembers the brochure’s aerial view, clean lines and new concrete. It wasn’t crowded in the pictures – in fact, it none of the photos had people in them. Right now the road is full of families, scrambling to find each other, speaking in fast Thai. Sharon pushes through, and people part easily enough, nodding respectfully to her – she is farang, a foreigner – even in this most desperate of moments. A glow of light spills out from within the block, hitting the dust in the sky. But there aren’t lights outside or in the road. The generator doesn’t power the street – why advertise itself? It’s a good design, and it would have worked the shield the place from a crowd, except that the locals know this place, they’ve been cleaning it for years. Even before that, they built it. But the unlit street doesn’t faze Sharon. She knows where to go, she has been here many, many times before, to visit her bed in the shared room. Where is that little man with the thin moustache, the doorman? He’s not at his post. Instead, there’s blur of crushed bodies around the entryway. Some are praying. One burned figure lays flat, its legs dangling over the edge of the little doorman’s desk. Sharon cannot make out the gender but from the size guesses a teenager. It’s one of the worst ones: its skin black, peeling off in chunks. Sharon finds she has walked over, the figure’s white eyeballs staring into hers, pure and afraid. Why didn’t you listen to the warnings? The government told us to stay indoors. White hands reach up and grip the figure’s arm from the other side of the table, and rock forwards and backwards in prayer or pleas. The mother, presumably.

“I’m sorry, I need to get through. I’m sorry?” Sharon tries her Thai, these are country people after all. A shirtless man steps in front of the door.

“You are going inside?”

“Yes.” The nearby people grow still. Heads turn in her direction.

“No one has got through,” the man explains, “locked.”

“I have a key?” She holds it up to explain that actually, she should already be inside? Obviously the doors were not just open. The block’s promotional literature, Sharon suddenly realises, had always assumed you would be inside the block when disaster struck. She wondered how many part-owners would be within – how many had gotten flights before the planes were grounded?

Behind her, muttering starts up. Then a conversation. Sharon doesn’t understand what is being said, but the shirtless man’s words sound tired. There is another man, white-haired, stooped even while sitting, and a woman the same age with a rag tied around her eyes. The burned figure’s mother is angry. She stays where she is, her hands around her child’s wrist, spitting quicks at the shirtless man, at Sharon herself. But the room is deferent to the powerful, and the shirtless man is winning the battle.

“Go through,” he tells her, stepping aside.

But the mother darts around him and clutches at Sharon’s arm. “Doctor,” she says breathlessly. “Doctor?”

“Go, now,” the shirtless man says, wrenching the mother off her. Sharon feels like she’s moving incredibly slowly, like she’s moving through sludge, not air, but she goes forward to the door she knows, and she scans the card, and the door slides open. It’s very bright inside – Sharon’s eyes have become used to the dark, she supposes – but she pushes herself onwards, she knows the way. As she closes the door she sees the whites of the crowd’s eyes lit harshly, the figure sitting up a little – someone propping him up from behind? And then with that black window is gone, she’s inside. Her sight adjusts.

The building is the busiest Sharon has ever seen it. At least a dozen people visible on every floor. The lift is not considered essential and has been deactivated – at least, this is what Sharon remembers from the literature. She takes the stair. Her floor is the busiest, where the shared dorms are. This door does not lock, although each bed has a locker beneath it instead of empty space. Her locker key is attached to her keycard. Inside are all her things. Her books, clothes. She exchanges her cardigan for a thick fleece, pulls out a blanket, and lies down. She shuts her eyes but she can hear people, the scrape of their drawers, the frightened muttering of families, the quiet hum of the generator. She is scratched by all this, she needs sleep. She would like a cigarette, although she hasn’t smoked since – gosh, since when? Since before she married Ken…

She dreams of melting faces. Noses slipping into mouths, the exposed white of eyesockets and bone. Thick chunks of peeling black flesh –

Sharon is wet. She wakes, spluttering – her neck is wet, her hair. She has vomited in her sleep. Disgusting. She wipes herself as best she can.

“Excuse me?” A woman nearby turns to face her and then, seeing her, recoils. She shuffles away, quickly, healthily.

What, no help?

Something sharp punctures something inside Sharon.

Even though it hurts, Sharon finds herself at the top of the stairs again, where she’s startled by a mirror. She avoids looking at herself too closely, especially in this light, at this age, and focuses on making her way down. She finds the metal of her necklace, and chews on it – a recent trick. It reminds her to step delicately, the flavour taking away from the pain. Had he known, when he gave it to her, that he’d have a whole other life? Was Ken’s plan clear to him – or was he just muddling through, the way he’d always seemed to with her. Sharon thinks suddenly and for the first time in years of her own parents, of their deaths in separate care facilities, how their minds had gone one after the other, years apart. How their eyes, too, had been white and wild at the end, searching for someone, although never for her. Sharon had just been there.

Finally downstairs, passing the palm trees, the centrepiece in the middle of the main hall, around which all the apartments were arranged. Above the palms, a square of blue-black open sky. Had Mum seen enough sky before she died? Sharon had never thought to wheel her outside. She hoped the carers had.

Without really deciding to, without really considering how each step would lead to the next, Sharon finds herself back at the door she came through earlier. Was it the same door? There were two, she remembers. Oh, well. Her knees are biting. She pulls the keycard up, and swipes.

The door opens. A crowd of dirtied faces looks up at her. The shirtless man, the mother, the old couple.

“Come inside,” she tells them. And she stands back to hold the door.

The shirtless man translates and the crowd spills into the entryway. Soot rubs off on the pale doorframe.

Behind them, the people on the road have noticed. They surge forward too. It is all Sharon can do to squeeze out against the flow of bodies, back out into the ante room, the little hut-covering.

The mother is yabbering at the body, but the boy – perhaps it’s a boy – his mouth is frozen. Only his eyes move, but they dart. And the mother moves with the current, calling back to her son, gesticulating in movements Sharon cannot decode. She goes.

Sharon sits down with her back to the wall, and reaches her hands up to the side of the desk – she is afraid to touch his burns.

“She’ll be back in a minute,” Sharon says. And the boy’s eyes close, to rest.