And then, because stories are never about people staying still, I got on the road again, walked with nowhere to go. The sun was lower in the sky now at least, and the earth smelled damp because somewhere in the distance helicopters and planes had been dropping load after load of white and red clouds from the sky. I’d never been to a place where there was so much nothing. Just road. Road. Tree. Tree. Sky. Smoke. No shopping centres. I walked along the roadside in the spongy grass where I couldn’t feel the bitumen on fire beneath my feet.
It was a long time, I think (or maybe time feels longer in the sun?), before that police car pulled up beside me. I wasn’t running this time. Not here. When the officer wound down his window he had a face that was glowing red and sweat dripping down from underneath his glasses as though he was crying. Next to him, there was a younger woman in uniform too. They both just looked at me and stared for a while like they weren’t really sure if they were seeing me. ‘Are you all right, miss?’
‘Yeah. I just got a little lost.’ Behind him the sun was orange and glowing and something about it made me start to cry. ‘I was with my friend and then she left and I think she’s lost too.’
The woman got out of the car and handed me a bottle of water. ‘You’d better come with us. It’s not safe out here. You know, most of the people here, they’ve gone to the evacuation centre. Can we take you somewhere? Where’s your family?’
‘I’m too far away from home to go back,’ was all I could say, and the female officer got out and took my hand and helped me into the car, then got into the back seat beside me. ‘I’m Kate,’ she said.
I thought for a minute. Tried to bring my criminal mind into action. ‘Jeanette,’ I said and wondered what Nan would think of me using her name.
‘Do you need us to call someone for you, Jeanette?’
In the front of the car there was this walkie-talkie thing that buzzed with voices reporting people and things that were lost and towns that were on fire. It was like the one my dad always listened to at home in his garage. ‘I don’t know. No. I wouldn’t have anyone to call.’ Kate turned to me with the kind of question mark face that couldn’t do me any good. ‘I mean everyone I know has already evacuated. They’re just . . . everyone knows that I’m on my way.’
She stared at me for a little while longer, like she was trying to put a name to a face and said, ‘How about we take you to the evacuation centre in Cooma then?’
‘What about my friend? She’s out here somewhere.’
‘The police and the rangers and the fire department have been combing this area for the past twenty-four hours looking for people who haven’t been evacuated.’
‘So they’ve found her?’
‘I don’t know. I can try to find out. Let’s head to the evacuation centre to drop you off and I’ll check in over the radio.’
‘All right.’ I sank into the seat, feeling the particular relief that comes with not having to make any choices, and we drove. There were patches of spot fires at the side of the road. I watched a flame leap from the scrub and hit the grass and keep on going in a line as if those flames were running.
The policeman in the front described me into his walkie-talkie, said I was lost and disoriented, didn’t ask me what it was I wanted to say about myself. I listened as he enquired if they had logged anyone by the name of Asheeka, and I got sidetracked thinking about that word ‘logged’; it made me think of ticking people off on an Excel spreadsheet the way they account for inventory in the shops at stocktake time. I imagined Asheeka being ticked off and placed into a manila folder in a giant filing cabinet. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used her real name but I wanted them to find her, even if it got us in trouble.
We drove through smoke and patches of bluer sky. The horizon turned black sometimes. Nondescript brown birds screamed in V formations in the sky ahead of us. There were the odd houses and farms and pubs and letterboxes sitting out on the highway in places that had been left empty.
‘Did you find her?’ I asked Kate.
‘No one by that name has been accounted for yet,’ she replied. Then she tried to ask me more about myself and I didn’t know what to say so I looked out the window.
Near Cooma everything changed. There were traffic jams on the main street and queues of people down the block outside the supermarket. Kate interrupted the buzzing of voices over the radio. ‘Would you look at that?’ she said. ‘All those people trying to get out. Trying to get supplies. Never seen anything like it.’
We stopped at the local McDonald’s where Kate offered to buy me a hamburger and my empty stomach growled yes in response. Inside it was standing room only. I was waiting for my hamburger when a bus pulled up outside and a couple of dozen people wearing Rural Fire Service uniforms walked in. Everyone parted for them. Where there was no space before, suddenly space was made, as though God had just entered the room in need of chicken nuggets. A woman looked at them and started crying, strawberry milkshake bubbling out the sides of her mouth. A man went down the line shaking their hands and saying thank you.
The evacuation centre turned out to be a school gym at the back of a sportsground. Kate walked me in and sat me down on a chair. She handed me her card and told me to call if I needed anything. Then she approached the woman standing at the front door with a clipboard and whispered something quietly, her eyes darting occasionally towards me. A man in a nurse’s uniform approached me. He had this look that was kind and weary and he asked if there was anything I needed help with.
‘I’m all right,’ I said.
He ran his eyes over me and moved on when someone came in shouting something about a smashed foot.
On the wall there was a television which showed people running away from a mountain that was on fire. They ran across a sandy beach and jumped into the ocean, dozens of them, children, dogs, girls in party dresses, clinging to each other while the waves came in at their backs and the trees in front of them burst into flames.
We were all running. I was running. Asheeka was running. The whole country was running. My heart beat faster in my chest as though it might leap from my throat and start running too.
EVACUATION CENTRE
The school gym they’d set up as an evacuation centre was lined with the type of stretcher beds we used to sleep in at school camps. There were mismatched plastic chairs and a table filled with bottles of water and boxes and boxes of apples. People kept walking in with more things, cardboard boxes overflowing with clothes and packets of potato chips and children’s toys.
The volunteers left me alone eventually. I sat in a corner and watched the room. There were kids clutching stuffed animals and drawing pictures underneath the basketball hoops and women with their heads in their hands sitting huddled together on the benches. A boy of about fifteen was lying on a stretcher with giant headphones on, the rap music that leaked loudly out all around him creating a no-go zone that guaranteed him space. There were grandmothers and men in thick boots and neon vests walking the room, writing things down on clipboards as they spoke quietly to people, like everything they had to say was a secret. I did everything I could to keep away from the people with the clipboards and that sent me in circles around the room. That’s how I found her again, sitting at the computers in the corner.
It was her, unmistakeably, sitting in an oversized floral dress she’d probably dragged out of one of those cardboard boxes, her thick black hair falling perfectly between her shoulders. I felt so relieved I could have thrown up. I walked over to where she was and I stood behind her for a while, watching her flicking from one social media site to another. She paused briefly over a meme with her face on it and Bitch Stole My Car written all over her breasts.
I sat down in the chair beside her. I was trying to think of the right words to say but nothing came out. I tried to put my hand on hers and she turned to me, startled, and slapped it away. Then she did nothing. That’s how she played it. She just stared at me, then looked back at the screen where those pictures I had put up wer
e everywhere, and scrolled. She clicked on an image of herself with her breast falling out of her school shirt and opened it up so that it filled the screen.
‘I’m glad that you’re okay.’ It was the wrong thing to say at that moment but I didn’t have any other words.
‘Get away from me!’ She screamed it so loud that everyone in the centre turned and looked. A woman at the computer next to her looked up, stared at the screen in front of Asheeka and then put her hand over it so that the kid on her lap wouldn’t see the image there. I got up, walked across the room, and watched her from behind the tables of donated goods.
Two guys in their mid-fifties came over to one of the tables and rummaged through the odd assortment of food. They were both wearing these pastel-coloured trousers and collared shirts with wide cuffs, like they’d just walked right out of a vintage movie. One of them picked up a donated phone, looked it over, put it back. ‘Craziest start to a holiday ever,’ the one in the pink pastel pants said as he turned and sat beside me, chewing on an apple. He pointed at the Elvis shirt I was wearing. ‘You going to the festival?’
I looked down at my shirt as though it might give me some kind of clue about what he was asking, but it didn’t. ‘What festival?’
‘The Elvis Festival.’
‘There’s an Elvis Festival?’
He looked at me as though I had just claimed that the world was flat and held out his hand to introduce himself. ‘John,’ he said. ‘And there most certainly is an Elvis Festival. Best thing you’ll ever go to. It’s in Parkes, up north. We were driving there and then we got caught in all of this.’ He gestured to the rest of the room, grimacing as though he’d landed on an alien planet and didn’t know what to make of it.
‘Elvis Festival. I think I’ve heard of that before,’ I said, trying to look around his head to where Asheeka was across the room.
‘Yeah, Elvis, they have around 300 Elvises there every year. You know, and Priscilla too. Fat Elvises, skinny Elvises. Elvis at all stages of his life. Even dead ones. My friend Mark here, he goes as the ghost of Elvis.’
The ghost of Elvis picked up an apple and waved at me, even though I was right beside him. ‘Terrible. Terrible, all this,’ he said, and bit down.
‘My friend Asheeka, she loves Elvis. She and her whole family, they’re obsessed.’ I pointed in her direction as if they might know who she was. ‘She’s upset with me now, so we’re having some time apart.’
‘Well, life’s short. Go and make it up with her,’ the ghost of Elvis said.
A man in a fire fighter’s uniform walked in. His arms were speckled with soot. When he took off his helmet there was a line on his head delineating the pale clean skin of his forehead from the rest of his face, which was filthy and smeared with ash. He walked to a whiteboard at the front of the room and a dozen or so people followed him. I started to follow him too but then I held back, feeling like I didn’t have the right: whatever buildings were left standing, they weren’t my home, my school, the only shop in my town.
He started to talk about where the fire was moving, about no-go zones and stay and defend zones and houses that were no longer there. People stared at him, no one spoke, no one seemed to have anything else to say.
I picked up one of the phones that was lying on the table of donated goods and turned it on. I walked over to Asheeka and grabbed her arm.
‘One thing,’ I said. ‘Let me show you one thing and then you can never talk to me again.’
She stood, knocking over the chair, and stared at me, too angry to talk. No one noticed when I dragged her to the back of that hall and into the toilets. She came. She never really wanted to be alone. She didn’t want to be with me at that moment, but I guess I was all she had.
In the shower recess I handed her the phone. First, I took off my jeans and then my t-shirt. I stood there in the oversized bra that made my breasts look like small flabs of chicken fillet and those oversized grandma’s underpants. I thought about how I’d sucked my belly in for boys. I didn’t know where to put my arms or my hands so I leaned against the back wall, my hands tucked up behind my bum.
‘Take it,’ I said. ‘Go on. Take as many as you want. Post them wherever you want.’
Asheeka turned the phone on and held it up. I stared at the Elvis t-shirt on the floor. I’m trying to remember what her face looked like at that moment: not grief exactly, not anger, more like lots of things were rushing back through her. She came up close, pulled one of my bra straps down off my shoulder, took a picture. Came back closer again, put her arms around me and unhooked my bra from the back, let it slip to the floor. I put my hands over my breasts, each one a single handful.
‘Take them off.’
‘What?’
‘Your hands.’
And I let them fall slowly to my sides. Nice hair. Nice legs. I thought about Jake, the way I could look at what he was doing to my body from above. I thought about how good it made me feel but this wasn’t the same thing.
I sat down on the edge of the shower recess, folded myself up into a ball. Asheeka got up close to me, without looking at my face. She put her hand on the small of my back, made me sit up more, parted my legs slightly. Took another photograph. Put the phone away in her pocket and looked at my face this time. I felt like an object that could be folded into someone’s pocket and forgotten.
‘Yeah,’ she said, nodding. Like she was just thinking it through. ‘That’s exactly how he made me feel when he was taking those photographs.’
‘Like you don’t own your own body anymore.’
‘Like they can just take it.’
I was thinking about a time way after Jake had just stopped talking to me, when he brushed his hand over my backside while walking past. ‘Do you think I’m a slut?’
‘We’re all sluts, at least to them.’
GIRLS ARE COMPLICATED STORIES
Group counselling again. The looks on everyone’s faces. Again we are talking about what we did and how we could’ve done it differently and Maree is suggesting that maybe the world isn’t exactly the way that we see it. Jaleesa picks at her nails and stares at the ceiling. Tracey focuses on the orange cordial and biscuits on the cart in the corner. Paige argues that Maree isn’t listening to what she’s saying and the new girl takes her shoe off, thinks better of throwing it at someone else and puts it back on again.
Maree changes tack. She suggests that we go around the circle and talk about something we did right in our lives and no one, including her, gets to comment.
Kristina, an angry kid who never gets any polish on her nails because she is always being punished for something, opens her legs wide on her chair, leans forward like she’s a man or something and rubs the bandage on the hand she burned when she peeled back the aluminium foil on one of the dinner trays and stuck it in the electrical socket in order to light the cigarette she’d smuggled in somehow.
‘You know what? I don’t care what DOCS says,’ she begins, ‘I was a good mum. My kids were always loved and they loved me and we did great things together every day. We went to the park, we had picnics, sometimes we went to the movies. Gracie is only three and a half but she knows her numbers and letters and Nick, he’s just started to walk.’
She chews her nails and stares at Maree like she’s daring her to say anything different, and then Jaleesa starts to talk about how she was the one who used to take care of her grandmother, ‘I even helped her shower and that,’ and then Azadeh says, ‘I was a good daughter, you know. Worked to help my family out, did pretty good at school, read to my mum.’
I’m trying to think of the good things I did in my former life but I’m not so sure anymore. I was always a good kid. That’s what everyone kept saying at my sentencing hearing anyway, that I liked books, that I came from a good family, that I’d made good choices for the most part. None of that stuff seems like anything anymore when you meet all these girls who didn’t have good choices to make.
‘I . . . when my mum was depressed before my
hearing . . .’ I started to say. ‘Actually I think she’d been depressed for a long time but I didn’t really notice it. But before my hearing, I’d get into bed with her every morning with these old photograph albums she’d put together and I’d ask her to tell me about the pictures. I guess that was me trying to do right by her. I was trying to see that she had a story too, like I was trying, really trying to hear her story for the first time.’
After I say my bit I feel all good and bad at the same time. I think about my mum again and how weak she seemed when I returned, like someone had sucked all the muscle out of her. Unlike my insides, which are churning around, the general vibe of the room after the sharing feels lighter. We get to have the orange cordial and arrowroot biscuits that are our treat at the end of these sessions and everyone stands around looking out the windows. It’s the only room in the facility where the light streams in from everywhere and you get to see a glimpse of that park and its rose gardens across the road. It’s the closest thing you get in this place to being at a Sunday arvo barbecue.
Azadeh asks me how I’m going with One Thousand and One Nights. I’m still getting through it. It’s about this woman Scheherazade who is stuck with an evil king who’s already killed about a thousand women in his village because his first wife cheated on him and so, to get back at all of womankind, he marries a different woman every night, has sex with her and then kills her in the morning. But Scheherazade, she’s super clever, and she tells him most of a different story every night and leaves off the ending so that he has to keep her alive another day. So she keeps spinning these stories, again and again and again.
Azadeh crunches down on an arrowroot biscuit and gives me her opinion before I get a chance to answer her. ‘I think that book would be better if you got more of Scheherazade’s story,’ she says. ‘You know, like, she’s having to sleep with this guy every night and tell him all these fantastical tales about genies and flying carpets but like, how does she feel about that, you know?’
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