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anchor. ‘What about the traditional owner?’ She was still screaming out her esteemed rights. Maybe she did not register the carnage. The woman who looked like the white cliffs of Dover, whom the fighting had carried some distance away, picked up the voice of Angel Day screaming, and looked over at her with a perplexed look, then walked out of the fight, straight back over to where she had originally challenged Angel, and wrestled the statue away from her.
    The children, their bodies twisting in and out of the maze of adults at war, were wondering what was going to happen next. They rushed in like frantic butterflies to be next to kinfolk bleeding, or to others falling on the ground and not moving again. Young Will Phantom was running with his brothers and sisters to protect his mother from the big woman whose eyes were protruding, as she wrestled with the statue splashed with blood. The woman acted like she was possessed by a demon, whose body continued to use all of its strength on one thought alone: to secure the statue into a position to slam Angel Day off the face of the earth.
    Young Will Phantom thought quickly. He ran home as fast as his ten-year-old legs would carry him, rushed into the kitchen and grabbed the cigarette lighter left lying on the kitchen table, then ran back to the dump. Any stack of papers he could find, he lit. He lit the dry grass around the edge of the dump so there was fire spreading over the claypans in every direction. Black clouds billowed straight through the dump. The smell of burning grass and debris was suffocating, and everywhere people were coughing. Very soon, people could be seen moving through the dense smoke, helping others through the burnt grass and back along the path with smouldering smoke on either side. Nobody spoke as they limped by as fast as they could, passing others, helping to cart injured relations home. Then, when the alarm was rung in town, they scattered.
    Seeing the black smoke rising from the dump, everyone started to hear about the big fight going on. They all wished they could have killed Angel Day, walking with her statue and surrounded by her kids, following her home. The fire brigade, already moving slower than a month of Sundays, became bogged on the muddy road to the dump just two minutes out of town.
    The Pricklebush around the Phantoms’ place was silent when the policeman arrived to investigate, followed by half of the Uptown Town Council on foot, after they came through the waterlogged road. They claimed it was their business to find out what caused the fire. It was a wasted trip at the taxpayer’s expense, because nobody living around the swamp had seen a thing. Maybe, the fire was just some old log smouldering over the weekend and caught alight . It was a strange thing to say. All the same, the young cop Truthful said he could not help noticing a lot of injured people everywhere he went. He got to asking: ‘What happened to you then?’ While his entourage waited in anticipation for a different answer. ‘Just an accident, sir, no problem.’
    ‘No?’
    ‘No, there is no problem here.’
    ‘What happened then?’ he asked, just to show the Council men he was on top of the job.
    ‘Ah! I fall over.’
    ‘How did you fall then?’
    ‘I fall over.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Fall over?’
    ‘What?’
    Everywhere Truthful asked the question, he received a grand demonstration of hand movements. ‘Hmmm! Oh! My. I am feeling no good! No good at all today! If you had any sense you’d run us up to the hospital like a good boy.’ Truthful had the woman with what was left of the white dress with him. Angel came straight up to her with outstretched arms, and hugged her, but it was full of hate.
    The Council men and women too, following Truthful into every household in the camp, looking on in mock silence, gave knowing looks to one another of a familiar: Nudge-nudge! Wink-wink! If you please! What’s he been up too, jumping over the back fence at night