He heard a man swear loudly outside.

‘What was that?’ Sarah asked, her eyes half lidded.

‘I don’t know.’

He got up from the bed and lifted the curtain and there on the grass was the old man, Moore, running, smoking, shirtless. Running from their shed. Orange flame licking the inside, smoke like blood oozing out of an artery escaping at the corners of the door. Heavy, black. Sidney moaned. He didn’t bother with a shirt, he ran out into the hallway half naked, banged on his brother’s door then ran to his parents’. He barged through it and his dad was up in a flash, eyes bright and ready.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

The explosion rocked the house. Sidney gripped the door. His dad was already moving.

‘The shed,’ Sidney said, running again.

Outside he beheld the building in the midst of its destruction. There were flames on the roof now. No telling how long it had been on fire; when Moore had started it. A red glow coated the sky. He stepped forwards, felt the presence of his brother and his father at his back.

His father swore. ‘How much was in there?’ he asked, and turned to Brendan, who was already running to the garden hose.

‘All that new crop.’ Brendan fumbled with the tap until their father shouldered him out of the way.

‘Give me that,’ he said, and tore the hose from Brendan’s hand.

Ernie cranked it on and ran towards the blaze, the meagre stream a cruel joke next to the colour.

‘Did you see what happened?’ Brendan asked Sidney.

‘No.’

‘You think it just went up? Light sparked or something?’

‘Maybe.’

Their father now turned to his boys and shouted, ‘Don’t just stand there bloody daydreaming! Get a wheelbarrow and fill it with dirt!’

‘Why?’

‘To smother the thing!’

Brendan hurried off but Sidney continued to watch as another small explosion sent a burst of orange out of the shed. It engulfed his father, who was inside this monstrous gout of flame for a moment, and then Sidney saw him with fire coating his arms and his face and he was rolling on the ground, screaming in agony, a scream such as Sidney had never heard before, that ripped at something in his chest. He rushed to his father’s side.

The hose lay in the grass, still flowing, so Sidney scooped it up and directed the stream at his father, the shed beside him searing his face, his arms. The flames on his father were dying out but the scream, the screaming. It hurt Sidney’s ears and was heart-rending, like a pig being gutted. Then Brendan was beside him and Sidney was afraid to look at what damage had been done to his father, this man who had always seemed immune to injury, now so unceremoniously torn down. There was the smell of cooking carcass, of pig on a spit. The smell of burned hair.

The women were all crowded outside the house, standing on the verandah watching the flames, their faces licking gold. Sidney turned to them, the hose still trained, and yelled, ‘Call Wilkie!’