by Erina Reddan
I know all your movements on the day of the bushfire; from the window I stare into unrevealing darkness, all but seeing your ghost stride through our backyard, clutching your sketchbook to your chest. In my mind’s eye, I see you push your bicycle along Damper Creek Road to our house, heading for the dry creek bed and the old fossicker’s hut beyond.
This is the closest I’ve come to despair. Questions peck my consciousness, throwing me into a fluttering panic of denial. How can I learn about you? I should know everything. Could I be wrong? Could you be responsible? – I can’t let myself wonder. I can’t stop wondering. When did this impossible distance erupt between us? Did you look out on the sunburned paddocks whose dryness frightened everyone and decide to…
If you won’t defend yourself, then I have no choice but to defend for you. Beyond my lifetime of mother’s griefs – the losses of your forceful baby mouth suckling, your skinny arms clinging to my neck, your little hands waving as your bus slid off to school, the moments when kisses better stopped working and Santa slipped quietly away – I have lost my idea of your infinite, magical future. We imagine we can control time like we imagine we control fire but both flames and time consume everything they touch. Time leaves a fine layer of ash over what it leaves behind, a fine cloud of the past haunting the present, a reminder of our current global state of flux and change. I’m haunted by all those losses felt, the sting once eased by equally precious gains. The sight of you in your school uniform, the wisdom revealed when you whispered, Mum, can I have two dollars now instead of waiting for you to play tooth fairy?, your muddy-faced pride at kicking a goal, your first shave and first whiskery kiss. (God, I love you.) But now all is loss, nothing gained. Out on remand, you hang around the house, surly, unemployed and unemployable. You play computer games and eat too much pizza. My own life has become lost in the need to clear you. As Brunton Primary principal, once I had a standing in the community, but that’s gone. Parents who once asked for advice don’t speak to me anymore. Once, I spent evenings planning classes with colleagues, attending parent meetings. I performed some of my own songs in the front bar of the Brunton Hotel. I filled in many meaningless Education Department forms. Sometimes I mulled over the meaning of life and the vastness of the universe. I dated a couple of men between my divorce and meeting my current partner, those memories are fuzzy now. The empty universe isn’t a problem anymore, no more than the forms or dates. At least, they aren’t my problem. My drive now focuses on my overwhelming need to clear your name, to understand you, to prove everyone wrong. You are not a firebug.
CALEB
He lay, bare, in sheets Mum kept changing like that might make a difference. She worried too much. His soft fingers, charcoal-stained, picked at each other over his bloated stomach. Sometimes all he wanted in the world was to escape the metronome sound of her footsteps in the hall. His new suit hung, a headless man, over the open wardrobe door. In the morning, he’d put it on, prepare for his own hanging. In a few days, it would be over. He’d made Mum a promise that he would not confess, at least not this week. Once this farce was over, she would have to see how ridiculous it was to fight and to understand the guilty plea he needed one day to make. The teeth of his guilt monster gnawed mostly on his gut but caused pain everywhere – from his hands to his feet. He raised one scarred arm, so much fatter than when he used to come here to visit Gran. His increased size still surprised him. He was taller, fatter, generally bigger than he felt. From year to year his relationship with the world changed, the ground receded from his eyes, the distance between things shrank.
One summer, not long before Gran left the house to him, Caleb slipped over in Damper Creek, where moss grew over ash and the ground was least likely to hold. He remembered crashing into shallow water, his ankle twisted, knees grazed. The world splashed, mocking him – that earlier drought broke with a string of deluges. He’d felt like a giant upturned insect, a beetle that couldn’t right itself. Except his arms and legs then were more fitted to a spider, a daddy-long-legs that shivered from the cold. He’d been thin then, as skinny as his empty suit. Damage wasn’t always from fire. Now his body showed the corpulence of overeating, the scars of being burned. He should have an old man’s voice, to match his old man’s hands, hands he had already, though he wasn’t even twenty. If he kept his voice really, really low, then maybe he could tell the truth without screaming.
He had spent a lot of this time in his room, drawing charcoal versions of Brunton’s trees in their black funeral dresses. On later sketchbook pages, the seared valley moved out of mourning. With his watercolour pencils, the grey-toned world on his pages gradually developed hints of a single shade of bright green. It was inevitable. One thing led to the next. The world was aging. Time blew through their lives, as destructive as a northerly wind in a firestorm. Mum did nothing but prepare for the committal hearing. Caleb had been to all the meetings she demanded. He knew what was coming. He’d face the people who’d been hurt and the people who loved them and, if justice existed in the world, he’d finally go to jail.
But even if the court would only let him get as far as Dad’s place in Hawthorn, he had to escape the sound of Mum’s pacing.
PART ONE
1
JUNO | Queen of Heaven
Goddess of both love and beginnings.The mother of the god Mars, she protected all women and in Roman iconography she often looks as warlike as her son.
FOURTEEN MONTHS EARLIER
PHOEBE
A magpie woke me early, its warbling carried on waves of heat that sat on my chest like a nightmare. My curtains hung limp and open, like patterns painted around a sky shimmering with heat and foreboding. Beside me rested the manuscript pages of an amateur History of Brunton I’d promised to look over.
Even before my clock radio turned on, the premier’s warning message, delivered yesterday, was constantly replaying in my mind:
Victoria’s weather will be extremely dry and hot, reaching well into the 40s. There’s a total fire ban. Any fire that begins could quickly become lethal. Warning signs will be set to catastrophic. Be prepared and survive.
The premier’s advice amounted to one commandment: stick to your plan. Which meant leave early, if we planned to leave, and be prepared to defend our home – possibly alone – if we stayed. As far as I was aware, Caleb and I were safe. This area had never burned before. I didn’t know then how long it would be before the sky was blue again, how long before the sun would lose its smoky orange haze, or I’d hear another magpie. I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. Time to wake him.
Before we moved here permanently, this had been the location of long summer holidays. His room was still at the back of the house. Ten years previously, I’d find him in there, sleeping with his head at the foot of the bed so he could keep a closer eye on the door, and on me. Six years before that, I’d be summoned by the banging of a Fisher Price activity centre against cot bars. The past irretrievable, I paused and let myself imagine that the sunny infant Caleb had once been, or the eager boy he’d grown into then out of, might be behind that door.
But… the smells. The adolescent stench leaching vaporously around the doorframe. Body odour, dirty clothes, something male, young, offensive. It was six months since Caleb stopped resenting the man I was dating, Jack Laskin, and instead took Jack’s advice and volunteered with the Country Fire Authority. Today, Caleb would be with Jack and I’d be worried.
I pushed his door open and walked in, collecting discarded black clothing. Sometimes I found him moving his legs, restless as a dog’s dream of running, beneath the mess of bed coverings. His sleep was often unquiet. Today everything was as I expected – the sketches of his first girlfriend, Penelope, complete with long yellow and pink hair, a very short, full skirt above bare thighs and long white socks; Caleb’s laptop open to a Facebook page with the cover image of two dark-lipsticked girls in black lace dresses, headed Goth Chat – except that, for the first time in what would be a pattern, Caleb wasn’t there. His bed was
empty.
Could he be outside? His window revealed an overgrown yard fringed with bush. That dry, hot morning, every plant was dead, kindling. Damper Creek traversed my view like a vein on the back of Caleb’s hand. This was Taungurung land, cleared in the nineteenth century by Gold Rush fortune-hunters, subdivided into town lots fifty years later. Gold dust is sprinkled over our lives here, mixed with the detritus of mining: mercury and arsenic poisoning the soil. If my former flame, archaeologist Marco Ossani, excavated here, he’d find creek bed beneath creek bed beneath creek bed, the lower ones transfigured into fossilised reefs that hoarded gold for millennia, awaiting discovery by heavy machinery or humble panning.
Just as hints of Caleb’s previous life existed in the young man he’d become (the limp from his accident, his knee scarred by primary school asphalt, his shoulder marked by chickenpox), the landscape contained traces of its history. His grandmother left an old Hills Hoist and a brick barbecue, now falling to pieces. The fossicker, our neighbour across time, left a few tools and a collapsed tin roof near the creek at the end of our garden. Cutting away the weeds, we saw the remains of a hearth where he kept fire tamed and safe. Caleb once found a spearhead, and remains of a rusty pan.
Here, the Earth had given us gold to mine, native trees to feed sawmills and nutrients for our orchards. We imagined the world exists for our purposes. Decades after the rush ostensibly ended, alluvial gold was still fossicked with spades, tubs and cradles. Even trees seemed purposeful: Eucalyptus globulus were cultivated for paper production, for pages in my files and Caleb’s sketchbooks. Last century, the Great Depression forced Melbourne men into jobs in deep-forest sawmills. Sixty-nine of those sawmills were destroyed in the Black Friday bushfires of 1939. My schoolhouse survived but was constructed of timber cut and milled by men who did not. Dozens of them, men who that year seemed destined for another kind of war, were killed.
And there, near the fossicker’s hut, I spotted Caleb. An awkward dark figure shadowing the white manna gum that shed its bark each year in bundles like an old miner struggling out of his overalls. In earlier years, we’d go down there together. We’d sit on the creek bank. After checking the grass for snakes, I’d help Caleb roll his jeans and we’d splash through dappled water that covered our ankles. Sometimes my mother-in-law, Caleb’s gran, would come, too.
‘He’s so much like Stephen!’ Claire would exclaim, as though my genes contributed nothing.
She would bring fragrant fresh-baked scones wrapped in a red and white checked tea towel, and a little dish with scoops of butter and jam. After eating, I’d encourage Caleb to crouch in the water while I splashed melted butter and jam from his face. He resisted. Perhaps the painted-face goth had always existed, one layer of skin down, waiting to be born.
‘Caleb!’ I called. ‘I’m making breakfast!’
Over the months before the fire, a skinny pale Caleb had been carved out of the outdoorsy, clumsy boy I loved. He had metamorphosed. His earphones routinely buzzed; Kafka’s insect turned electronic. As though he knew what I imagined, he took to reading books about people who had got into strange trouble. Kafka, of course. Bram Stoker. Horror novels in illustrated form, as graphic as possible. He borrowed my black eyeliner and purchased white face powder. Magically, I had to be blind to the cigarettes he puffed.
I called through the flyscreen. ‘Caleb! Do you want coffee?’
He turned. Carefully, with the heavy sole of a black boot, he stubbed out his cigarette. Stubbed it out, carefully. I remember that. I can’t answer for every moment of his time that day. But he did stub the butt out. He was vigilant about embers. He understood the danger. Then he shook out his too-long, black-dyed hair, and stomped through the fallen bark and sun-baked leaves to our house. He burst through the door and slid into a kitchen chair. Its solid legs creaked over slate tiles. Across the breakfast table, black rimmed but pink with the ghosts of tears, his eyes met mine.
‘Mum, you look angry.’
‘I was thinking, you have your father’s eyes.’ Stephen’s eyes, but clear of Stephen’s promises and betrayals.
Caleb slouched; refusing to eat was one way to wound me. Then he spoke. ‘That’s not surprising. We know he’s my father. How many other kids he has is the mystery.’
I chose to ignore that. There was something new and shocking about Caleb’s face. His lower lip was bloody. Two rings punctured its full redness. The piercings could have been designed for attaching to wires, to pull him along. Unlike the pale powder and the eyeliner, the cigarettes, I couldn’t pretend the lip rings didn’t exist. I held his gaze and touched, with an extended fingertip, my own lip.
Caleb scowled. ‘It’s called a snakebite, Mum.’
‘Will a law firm take you on, with a snakebite?’
‘Who says I want to be a lawyer?’
I was careful. ‘You applied for a law degree.’
‘That was last year. I was just a kid. I always preferred art.’
Lips are so sensitive! Once again, I remembered the grazed knees and tears. When had he become so brave? ‘Won’t they scar?’
His upper lip twitched. I always said the wrong thing.
‘It won’t matter. As long as the hardware stays in.’
How could scars matter? He was eighteen and emo and unhappy, and imagined he’d be eighteen and emo and unhappy forever.
‘You were in my room,’ he said. ‘I saw you in the window.’
‘I was looking for you. It’s nearly time to go.’
After moving food around his plate for a while, Caleb pulled a hair straightener through his fringe until it hung flat over his kohl-lined eyes. He was increasingly like one of the anime characters from his bedroom wall – black-haired, white-faced boys, and girls with long hair the shades of feathers. Wide-eyed and startled, they gazed in disbelief at his mess.
‘Do you think we’re ready?’ I asked him, my beautiful, strange child. ‘I’ve checked the water pump.’
‘And blocked the drains? Jack said that was the most important thing.’ Caleb looked thoughtful, trying to remember the rest of the advice he’d received. He always took Jack Laskin seriously.
‘Tennis balls. Yesterday.’
Every water-safe vessel in the house, even Caleb’s old blue plastic baby bath, was full of water. My hose was attached to a tap at the side of the house, with an extra one on standby.
‘Fire won’t come here. It won’t reach our house,’ Caleb said.
‘You’re very sure.’
He began to smile, but when the expression reached his new piercings, pain washed over him. Dots of blood appeared around the hardware. Speaking, he slurred. ‘Remember three years ago?’
‘Yep.’ He’d been fifteen. We’d just moved here the last time bushfire came near. I’d discussed preparations with Grade 6 at the school where I taught, brainstorming the importance of fire, of humans first domesticating flame, of the Aboriginal use of fire to hunt, for agriculture, for bush regeneration.
‘Fire didn’t reach us then.’ Caleb looked out at our neighbour’s house, and dropped the straightener, then sprang after it, perhaps more anxious about seeing Rosie than he would admit. ‘We should check on Sean and Rosie.’
Maybe he was sick of me staring at his injured lip.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, dialogue and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, organisations, events or locales is coincidental.
First published in 2021 by Pantera Press Pty Limited
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Text copyright © Erina Reddan, 2021
Erina Reddan has asserted her moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.
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Thank you to the literary estates of Audre Lorde, Katherine Anne Porter and Nadine Gordimer for the use of their words in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), Ship of Fools (1962) and ‘A Bolter and the Invincible Summer’, London Magazine (May 1963).
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A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry for this work is available from the National Library of Australia.
ISBN 978-1-925700-73-2 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-925700-74-9 (eBook)
Cover Design: Alissa Dinallo
Cover Images: Holii Carmody/Creative Market, Fleckstone/Shutterstock,
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Project Editor: Lucy Bell
Editor: Kate O’Donnell
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Table of Contents
About the book
Title Page
Contents
Epigraph
Dedication
Part 1 Buried 1968 The Beginning