Djinns

This hot Summer has been one of fires. The Summer of 1976 was the same.

I was sharing an attic flat with a married couple and one other in '76, then the other moved out and the married couple allowed a homeless and idiotic hippy to move in for a while. I could not be bothered to talk to him at all, other than say 'hello' every now and then.

I had a young Iranian friend at the time, and he would come round to the flat and sit talking with me, drinking tea and smoking dope. One day we were chatting in my small room, when he pointed to one of the huge trees outside and exclaimed that it was on fire.

I looked, and indeed saw smoke drifting in and out of the leaves on the branches, but saw no fire. I thought that it must be pollen, but he was an imaginative fellow, and was convinced it was a djinn.

He explained that in his home town near Tehran, the temperatures would sometimes rise so high, that columns of fire would spontaneously appear in the streets, then spiral along like tornados before burning themselves out in a few moments. He - and everyone else - thought they were djinns too.

I spent quite a bit of time on the flat roof of the building, watching the city shimmer in the heat. On four consecutive days, a fire broke out about a quarter of a mile away, and each fire was on the compass point of North, South,East and West. Our house was in the middle.

On the fifth day, I was walking back to the flat when the hippy burst out of a phone box close to it. He hysterically shouted, "THE FLAT'S ON FIRE!" before going back to the business of dialling 999.

I ran up the stairs and opened the door to the married couple's room, finding a fire so large that it was out of control. The hippy could probably have put it out earlier, but obviously panicked. I went back downstairs and waited for the firemen. When they arrived, one of them asked me to show him the source. By then, the upstairs had a heavy pall of hot smoke on the ceiling, and the fireman and I crept around in the clear spot three feet off the floor.

I pointed to the metal door handle of the room, and when he reached up to open it, a puff of smoke came from his bare hand. He took one look, then we went back downstairs and they began pumping hundreds of gallons of water through the upper windows.

It took three engines about half an hour to put it out, and when we went back up, the place was bone-dry. The black charcoal of its contents tinkled and pinged as the room cooled down.

As the firemen had fun throwing the charred furniture and mattress out of the window to the street below, the lady occupant carried a large blackened fish tank which had been in the middle of the room to the bathroom. It contained a goldfish they had won at a fair the night before.

She put her hand in the water but it was too hot to touch, so she poured it into the sink. Out flopped the goldfish, seemingly already cooked. She poured cold water on it and - miraculously - the fish came back to life and started swimming around as if nothing had happened to it. She was on the front page of the local newspaper the next day, holding up a new bowl containing the miracle goldfish.

Of course, the couple could not live in the flat any more, so they went to a friend's house who lived close by.

On the first night, their friend's cat ate the goldfish.