Perhaps I had lit the fire, because all of a sudden there was the sharp smell of smoke. Photo / File
Perhaps I had lit the fire, because all of a sudden there was the sharp smell of smoke. Photo / File
A couple of close calls prove life is a series of tests, writes Steve Braunias.
It was a winter's evening last July at about six, just gone dark, and I should have lit the fire. It was a cold night. But perhaps I had lit the fire, because all of a sudden there was the sharp smell of smoke.
I was sitting next to my 7-year-old daughter on the blue couch in the lounge. My fiancee had gone out for a brisk walk around the block. The two of us stayed indoors, lazy and companionable, to watch a really good episode of Disney comedy series Good Luck Charlie.
It's about the Duncan family of Denver. Bob is a bug exterminator and his wife Amy a frustrated actress. They have five kids. The gorgeous Bridgit Mendler plays the eldest daughter, Teddy, who films video diaries of their crazy life.
Sometimes I wish our lives had a laughtrack, like on Good Luck Charlie. A studio audience would be on hand to hoot at our brilliant and improvised dialogue, the things we say around the dinner table, at bath time, on the couch.
We were sitting directly opposite the fireplace. I got up and examined the fireplace. Smoke wasn't coming from the fireplace, on account of the fact it hadn't been lit.
I rushed to the kitchen. The oven wasn't on and neither were any of the elements, or the toaster, or the kettle. The smell was now very bad, and I was suddenly afraid.
Our house is designed for upstairs living; I rushed downstairs, on a kind of whim. I supposed the smoke was coming up from the garage, or the fusebox in the laundry, or the electric heater in my carpeted office - that heater had once singed my overcoat. I still wore that overcoat. I couldn't bear to part with it. Like all nervous wrecks, I am attached to old familiar objects; they work like a compass, they tell you where you are.
There was no fire downstairs, no smoke. I rushed back upstairs and there was smoke, thick and black and rolling in like a storm, in the hallway. I turned on the hallway lights. They didn't work. I couldn't see anything. I realised later that the lights were working, but the smoke had blacked them out.
I rushed down the hallway in search of the fire. It wasn't in the bathroom. It wasn't in the spare room. It wasn't in our bedroom. There was one room left to rush into: the fire was in our daughter's bedroom. I stared at the flames. They were nearly beautiful, definitely very pretty.
A few months later, I read Young Men And Fire, a terrifying book by Norman Maclean, which recreates the tragedy of 13 firefighters who were killed in a forest fire in Montana in 1949. Maclean had worked on fire crews. He knew about fires, about the speed of their apocalypse. He described the beginning of one insane blaze: "At first it was no bigger than a small campfire, looking more like something you could move up close to and warm your hands against, than something that in a few minutes could leave your remains lying with nothing but a belt."
The flames in our daughter's bedroom were bright yellow and blood red. I think I saw orange, too. The carpet was on fire, next to her bed, beside the oil heater. The flames were not quite knee height. The rest of the room was in darkness.
I rushed back to the kitchen and put a pot in the sink and turned on the tap. The water flowed at its usual languid pace. I yelled to my daughter, "Where are you?" She yelled, "Downstairs!" I yelled, "Good girl!" The pot had gathered maybe four or five inches of water. That would do. I rushed back down the hallway, and for a moment I was lost, didn't know where I was. The smoke had got darker, thicker. It was complete, you couldn't see anything except smoke. My eyes watered and it felt as though I was being strangled. I staggered into our daughter's bedroom and threw the pot of water on the pretty fire.
It went out.
I did everything wrong. But the things I did do weren't as bad or stupid and dangerous as the things I didn't do. I didn't take my daughter and evacuate the premises. I didn't call 111. I didn't even have smoke alarms. In fact, I'd taken them out. They were such a nuisance. I hated their pathetic wailings every time they responded to the slightest puff of smoke from a toaster.
I shouldn't have tried to put the fire out. It seemed like an important priority at the time. I was scared and in a state of panic and I rushed around like a fool, downstairs and upstairs, poking my nose into all the wrong rooms, but I had a job to do and actually I remained calm, deep inside. No fears for steady men. The interruption to Good Luck Charlie and the threat to home and life was something that called for action. The thing to do was find the fire and deal to it.
God only knows how I failed to electrocute myself when I threw water over the flames and the heater. It must have just missed the electrical circuits. And what was I thinking when I then calmly unplugged the heater? Whenever someone asks that question - what were you thinking? - the answer is always the same. You weren't thinking.
I took the heater downstairs, and tossed the wretched thing into the backyard. I opened all the windows. My fiancee returned from her walk, and saw enormous gusts of smoke pouring out of the house. "Everything's perfectly all right," I said.
Our daughter was thrilled. She had been very active. She said later that after she yelled out that she was downstairs, she got it into her head that she should call the fire service, so she raced back up the stairs for the phone - she also wanted to call her mum. She got as far as the top of the stairs and the smoke drove her out.
The cause of the fire in Steve Braunias' daughter's room: an oil heater. Photo / Brett Phibbs
There was a fish tank with two goldfish in our daughter's room. I carried it downstairs. After I started wiping down the walls with a broom and a wet cloth, I got it into my head that I should call the fire service. I apologised to the man for bothering him, and explained there had been a small fire, which I'd put out, but wondered if they might like to come over and check to see if things were safe.
"Christ," he said. "We're leaving now."
"Well," I said, "there's certainly no need for sirens or any of that drama." He'd already hung up.
The sirens bellowed as the truck turned into our street. Men in helmets tromped up the stairs and inspected the property and declared it was safe. They inspected the oil heater and declared it was faulty. The thing had melted, caught fire.
They said we were lucky. They said another 30 seconds in the smoke in the hallway or my daughter's bedroom and I would have been killed. They said something about carbon monoxide but I didn't really listen to the details.
One of them said, "You look a bit rough." I said, "No, I don't." He called an ambulance. They said we all had to go to hospital. Our daughter was ecstatic. Her good humour and intense curiosity wore off after a few hours of tests and waiting for results of tests. She and her mum got the all-clear about 10pm, and went to my fiancee's parents' house for the night. Because I'd inhaled a lot of smoke, I was asked to stay for further tests.
I got sick of sitting around with a needle taped to my arm so I fled about midnight. I went home. The house was freezing. The goldfish swam very low in the fish tank. The cats were hungry. I shut myself in the lounge and tried to sleep on the couch. I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking of how I had failed my family, that I hadn't got my daughter out of the house; and I also thought about what might have happened to her if the fire had started a few hours later, when she lay fast asleep in her bed, next to the oil heater.
From Norman Maclean's book, imagining how the 13 firefighters perished in Montana: "They did not die of burning. The burning came afterwards ... Heat and loneliness became the only remaining properties ... The heat even burned out fear ... You sink back into the region of strange gases where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink into the fire that consumes."
But we had survived. The house had survived. We were like the Duncan family of Denver in Good Luck Charlie: we had experienced adversity, but come to no harm. The man from the insurance company arrived the next day and set to work. It took a week for the cleaners to finish the job. I slept badly, and was frightened and ashamed and tearful, but a bit of mild trauma never hurt anyone.
I got a call from my quack to come in and discuss the results of the boring tests at hospital. I made an appointment. He said my heartbeat was a bit irregular.
Burning man, struck dumb - what to do, how to respond? I have long been preoccupied with the fairly humourless and probably Darwinian notion that life is a test. It tests your decisions, your nerve, your character, everything. The fire was a test. I kind of passed - I was the hero who saved the house from burning down. I kind of failed - I was the blunderer who risked his daughter's life. I wasn't up to the test of cancer. I gave in straightaway, admitted defeat.
I paid the appointment fee in silence. The receptionist looked away. I felt as weightless as smoke, and drifted across the road. I have always loathed the idea of bucket lists; they're grandiose, self-serving, predictable. It occurred to me that one thing I'd always wanted to do was take the bus to the shops in Glen Eden.
You never hear anyone talk about that obscure suburb in West Auckland, but I've always liked the look of it. It feels like a town on a volcanic plateau, somewhere remote, windswept. It feels deeply New Zealand - it feels old and familiar, and I wanted to cling to it like a favourite old overcoat.
A railroad passes through it. When the trains approach, bells ring, and there is a drone like a vuvuzela. The train station is at the top of a gentle slope, and looks over the main shopping street. Towering over the shops is a large billboard of barrister Greg Presland's face. He looks like he might be Glen Eden's hanging judge.
I had a cup of tea and a toasted sandwich at the Trocadero tearoom and bought a book about the Lockerbie air disaster at BE secondhand books. I mooched around. I was stunned, speechless, very tired. I was in hell. I waited for a train. A tough old broad sat next to me on the platform and started complaining that her partner had given her a black eye and wouldn't share his cans of alcohol. She pointed him out - a shambling figure drinking in the bushes.
Then she said, "Come with me to the toilet." I said, "No, I'm good, thanks." She said, "Let's have some fun." I said, "I'm sick. Leave me alone." Was I sick? I broke the news at home that night. "It might be nothing," I said.
I went to hospital for a CT scan. They said the results would come through in about a week. The days limped by. I focused on work. I interviewed a nice man called Andy Stankovich, a singer who was preparing to stage an Elvis tribute at The Civic. I wanted to say to him, "Help me, Elvis." Our daughter went very quiet. She asked questions about my health when I wasn't there. She stayed close when I was there. We were lying on top of the bed one day after school when the phone rang. I picked it up. It wasn't a long conversation. I put the phone down and she said, "What's wrong?" I had just been told that I was out of work. Revised budgets meant my position at Metro magazine was being "disestablished".
At least it took my mind off dying. Was I dying? "We'll get through this," my fiancee said. I was on fire, but I was lucky. I had love. We clung to each other. I felt I was disappearing from view. I've never much cared for myself, but I couldn't bear the thought of abandoning my family.
The hospital called. The results would be with my doctor in two days' time, a Wednesday. I interviewed Andy Stankovich again. He walked around his house singing to himself, "It's now or never ..." It rained very hard and was bitterly cold on Wednesday. I went to Metro in the morning for the last time to listen to some HR bore talk about redundancy calculations. The doctor's appointment was in the afternoon.
There were four workmen on the motorway wearing gas masks and protective orange suits.
We parked in the supermarket carpark next to the doctor's surgery, and there was a busker dressed all in black with a Texan tie. He sounded like he was playing a death ballad.
We held hands and waited in reception. The doctor stepped out of his office. He looked very grave. He didn't say anything; he beckoned me with his finger.
There were two glass paperweights on his desk. I could see over to the North Shore through his window. The sky was white. He made small talk, and he didn't look me in the eye. Obviously he was about to give me bad news. But then he gave a slow smile and said, "We're winning". It wasn't cancer. It was nothing, merely the presence of smoke from the fire. It had collapsed the lung, but only temporarily. I didn't know how thoroughly depressed I had been until I heard the good news and was finally, for the first time in a long while, happy. I was safe. My family were safe. The fire was out. At last, for good. For now, till next time. Life is a test, and the tests never end.
Editor's Note: This story has been updated to clarify that Steve Braunias was told revised budgets were behind his position being disestablished at Metro.
