‘They say one of the pittosporums is the most resistant but I’ve never grown ’em.’
This is typical of the locals, she thinks, huffily. Full of a wisdom they seldom act upon. That night she trawls the net in search of further knowledge and finds that the casuarina is indeed a fireweed. It burns hot in a spangled dance of embers and is reborn from a white bed of ash. ‘Some Australian species respond to fire as others do to rain,’ she reads, and the casuarina is one of them. ‘There are instances of species, thought extinct, that fire freed from a near-fatal dormancy.’ Australia, it seems, is a land of phoenix trees: fertile in extremity.
…
One evening, Gil comes over to the house in an agitated state. He has been out walking in the wind and there are small twigs and dried leaves caught in his hair so that he looks like a scarecrow, or a figure from a fable. It’s clear that he is angry – more than that, incensed – for he has just heard that the consortium is soon to begin work on a vast tree plantation. The sheep are to be sold off and the grasslands will be ploughed into furrows for saplings, row after row of blue-gums, laid out in straight lines that will run all the way down to the lagoon. They will scour the land with bulldozers and then the spray trucks will come with their pale green tanks of poison and the men in their fluorescent orange jackets will walk the furrows with their rods of pesticide, and when it does rain, as eventually it must, the chemicals will wash out of the soil and foul the lagoon. The settlement of Garra Nalla will be surrounded on three sides by a toxic geometry of straight lines: an insult to Nature; a hideous symmetry.
‘In the middle of a bloody drought!’ fumes Gil. ‘It’ll be a fire hazard for one thing. And I’ll tell you another thing. It’ll suck up all the water out of the water table and eventually out of the lagoon. In five years’ time that lagoon will be a bloody mudflat. Them swans’ll have to find somewhere else to breed.’
‘How dare they!’ exclaims Anna. ‘How dare they come in and violate this place! What about the council? Aren’t there any planning guidelines?’
‘The council!’ exclaims Gil. ‘They’re in the bloody pockets of the developers, always have been, always will be!’
Anna is distraught. What is the point of this rural idyll if they are at the mercy of the consortium? Luke, too, is unsettled by this news, at least for a time, but after a few days he seems able to shrug it off, to imply that she is taking it too personally. There it is again, that infuriating detachment. See, she says to the boy. See, he doesn’t deal with things. But the boy skitters away from her and out to the veranda. True to form, he remains loyal to his father.
In the weeks that follow Anna begins to resent her husband. When she saw his fine, expressive face at the train station she had quickened with desire. How right he always looked; how looselimbed and at ease. How perfectly proportioned his body, the same figure as his father and yet without Ken’s stony awkwardness. No matter what he said, or how greatly he exasperated her, it was always disarming, this indefinable grace Luke had. But now it is not enough. For what kind of cul-de-sac has he led them into? He came here out of his protectiveness towards her, but now it seems that he has become complacent, has lost all ambition. No wonder his father is concerned. One of the things she has always admired about Luke is that he is, well, sharp; not just his thin, angular body and the short, spiky hair, but a cast of mind that sees through bullshit and gets to the point of everything fast. At least, this is how he used to be. Now he goes about with a happily bemused expression on his face, like he’s stoned, or sits cross-legged on the veranda drinking wine with Rodney. Yesterday she overheard them having an inane conversation about crows. Rodney spoke of a rare sighting on his property in the hills of the Hobby, a small but deadly falcon with slate blue wings, able to fly at great speed and catch its prey on the wing, and she listened as he described, almost gloatingly, how he had watched it ‘take out’ a parrot. ‘Awesome.’
Luke sat up in his chair, excited. ‘Haven’t seen a falcon round here,’ he said. ‘If he comes again, ring me.’
‘Why? By the time you got there, it’d be gone. Anyway,’ said Rodney, ‘why is it that nobody loves the old crow? He’s only a scavenger, he doesn’t kill other birds.’
‘Yeah, but he’s dead common,’ said Luke.
‘My old man used to say that the only thing a crow’s good for is target practice, not that you can kill one of the buggers.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Luke.
‘Never seen anyone manage to shoot a crow, not shoot it dead. You hit the bloody thing, feathers puff in all directions and the crow flies off.’ Rodney gave his hoarse smoker’s chuckle and Luke grinned inanely as if he’d just been let in on some tremendous joke. He had an expression on his face she had never seen before, like an idiot boy.
One afternoon, looking out the kitchen window, she observes his stringy figure meandering up the drive, his face wearing a dreamy, abstracted look. Around his neck hang the two objects that accompany him on all his walks, his field-glasses and his USB memory stick, and there is something strange about him, something beyond her. At that moment she falls into a spiral of panic; it is as if she is encountering a stranger. She finds she is looking at her husband in an almost impersonal way, as though at a figure in the landscape, or one of those birds he is always gazing at. Perhaps that’s all any of them are, figures in a landscape. In each era new figures come, others go, but the land remains and their sense of ownership is an illusion, a mirage brought on by too many days in the hot sun. So what is this pointless dance that they are engaged in, this dance where they whirl together in an endless circle, locked in the illusion that they are going somewhere, that what they do has meaning beyond their own day-to-day survival? At any moment they could disappear from this place and nothing would change, nothing of consequence, so vast is the land and so small are they. And the thought of this brings on a rush of vertigo, a dizzying sense of disorientation, as if she is about to fall, but that when she falls she will be weightless. She has lost her roots, her anchorage to the earth; she might float away into the blue of the sky and never be heard from again. When, finally, Luke walks through the door she wants to run to him, to clutch at him and steady herself. Perhaps it’s to do with the boy, for it feels like he’s abandoned them. Since she returned from the city he eludes her; she sees him nowhere, and this is making her unhinged. The world is spinning away from her. Something is dying, something is leaching away from them; some once vivid hue in the inner landscape of her consciousness is beginning to fade.
III
ON THE LAST SATURDAY in November Anna and Luke set out for the Brockwood nursery to buy she-oaks, accompanied by the Watts, who have suggested they detour into the hills to have lunch at the Wolga hotel, newly painted and restored with wide verandas and intricate wrought-iron railings. Tables are set out in the shade of the upstairs veranda and the food is good. There is no wind in the hills and for those few hours Anna feels she might almost regain her old equilibrium.
On the following Sunday, a day of baking heat, they plant their new saplings, venturing out in mid-morning with a bundle of stakes and the sheet of paper on which Anna has sketched her plan. Over breakfast Luke had remarked teasingly on the care she has taken to design a seemingly random layout that she hopes will create a true bush effect, a kind of formless beauty. She has put so much thought into the form of the formless, he says, but ‘a garden is a garden. It can never be the bush.’
‘I know,’ she replies, good-naturedly, ‘but we can meet the bush halfway.’
Afterwards they celebrate with Gil and the Watts, who join them for a long lunch of barbecued fish and the last two bottles of Margaret River white left over from Ken’s visit. The wind has dropped and they take this as a good omen, though the harsh light corrals them in the shade of the veranda.
Around four the visitors leave and Luke takes his wife by the arm and leads her into the house. There, in a shaded corner of the living room, they make love on the old bush settle, then r
ise languidly and return to the veranda to lie dozing on the cane lounges.
Late in the afternoon, Anna opens her eyes to find that the sky above her, a washed-out blue, is mottled with brown smudge. Beyond the yellow grasslands a cloud of smoke is billowing up from behind the hills.
Luke sits up and yawns. ‘Looks like a bushfire,’ he says.
She raises a hand to shade her eyes, trying to get a fix on where the smoke is coming from. It appears to be rising from deep ravines in the western ranges, a vast acreage of crown land that recedes into the interior. Meanwhile the smoke cloud is expanding, seeping out into the sky like a release of octopus ink.
‘I don’t like the look of that,’ she says.
‘Don’t worry. It’s a long way away.’
The gate creaks and it’s Alan, returning to retrieve Bette’s sunglasses. He gestures in the direction of the smoke. ‘That’s a hell of a conflagration they’ve got going back there.’
‘Burning off?’
‘Hard to say. I did see a Forestry chopper flying over a few days ago. Might have dropped one of those canisters they use to start a back-burn.’
Anna frowns. ‘I’m glad we live near the water.’
Alan is lifting the cushions on the veranda, looking for Bette’s glasses. ‘It wouldn’t be the first fire we’ve had in these parts,’ he says. ‘They never reach the coast.’
In the morning, when they wake, the bedroom reeks of burning eucalypt: pungent, sweet and weirdly intoxicating. Luke sits bolt upright, sniffing the air, then climbs out of bed to stand naked by the window. Raised up on one elbow Anna can see what he sees, a fug of pale grey smoke that blankets the landscape like winter fog, so dense they can only just make out the contours of Gil’s bungalow below them. It’s as if they are marooned. ‘The fire must be a long way away,’ says Anna, for she can see no flame, only the ghostly grey outline of the hills.
After breakfast Luke checks the temperature gauge on the veranda and already it stands at thirty-four. When Anna walks out into the garden the haze is thick and acrid and she is curious as to whether it will bring on her asthma. What if she were to have a seizure? In the linen cupboard they keep a nebuliser machine but she has not had to use it since they got here. Still, when she returns to the house she checks that the small plastic ampoules of Salbutamol are up to date.
By noon the house is stifling. All morning they have sat at their work-stations with the ceiling fans on full, but the futile whirr of the rotor blades does nothing to relieve their clammy discomfort. While she waits for her coffee to brew, Anna puts her head under the tap and rinses her singlet top in the basin so that it clings wetly to her skin. Her hair is slicked back behind her ears and the drips slide onto her shoulders and down into the crevice of her breasts. ‘I feel like a wet flannel,’ she says to Luke, who is working on his laptop at the kitchen table because the attic room is an oven. Every now and then he gets up and goes to the window but it’s impossible to see anything. The smoke is too thick.
In the late afternoon he drives to collect their mail and returns looking unhealthily flushed, his eyes red. ‘I just checked the gauge,’ he says. ‘It’s thirty-nine on the veranda.’
Darkness falls and they sit under the ceiling fan in the kitchen and eat a supper of cold chicken salad. Then they climb the let-down ladder to Luke’s attic, the better to see the fires burning in the hills. The eerie smoke pall that settled overnight has blown away and now for the first time they can see the flames, zig-zagging lines of flickering orange that look like the lighted streets of cities. And they stand at the window for a long time, because of the queer beauty of it, and because of how enthralling it is to watch a whole mountain range burn. First comes the plume of black smoke, rising up from behind the ridges and lit with a dirty orange light. The flames in the ravines, not yet visible, reflect upwards into a murky glow that hovers above the silhouette of the highest peak. Then with breathtaking speed the flames come racing over the summit, flaring on either side of its rocky face. Along the white ribbon of road that winds into the hills, tiny firetrucks, like toys, can be seen hurtling towards the front, their fixed lights blinking in a steady pulse.
At last they climb downstairs and prepare for bed, showering under a tepid trickle from the tanks. Mundane tasks like cleaning teeth take on a new weight. The air seems freighted with portent. Mentally they try to shrug it off; this is silly, and the fires are a long way to the west. Still, they sleep fitfully, limbs splayed across clammy sheets. Anna wakes around three and gets up to look out and check on the red glow in the hills. The moon is a hazy crescent and she has not seen the boy in weeks, not even a glimpse, not on the veranda, not in the canoe, nor in the garden or his bed. It’s a long time since she heard his stick clatter along the veranda, and now there is a fire burning on the rim of their world. Where are you? she asks. Is it something we’ve done, some oversight in our thoughts? Have we become too self-absorbed and careless? Have you decided, after all, to leave us? And the thought of this brings on a hollow sick feeling, and she crouches on the edge of the sofa, in the dark, and weeps, hoping that Luke will wake, will come and comfort her. But Luke is a heavy sleeper and she must sit through the night and bear this alone. At last, as dawn breaks along the eastern curve of the headland and the sheoaks are outlined in shadow against a pinkish yellow sky, she is spent from weeping, and hungry. She gets up to make tea and toast and as she potters around in the half-light of the kitchen she is comforted by the homeliness of this room. What a consoling space it is, with its sturdy iron stove, even if for weeks now it has been too hot to light and they have used the electric hotplates. She lifts the lid of the wood-box; there are still a few neatly cut logs stacked to one side and the sight of their splintery weft is reassuring. She rinses her cup and plate in the sink, and returns to bed to fall into a limp, dreamless sleep.
When she wakes, Luke is standing over her with a mug of steaming tea. He has been up since six, listening to the radio. ‘The fires have reached the foothills,’ he says. ‘We need to take precautions.’ She gets up and goes across to the window. Vast swathes of smoke are billowing up from the foothills but she can see the fire-trucks are there, and the radio tells them that earth-movers have been mobilised to cut a series of fire breaks.
‘What kinds of precautions?’ she asks.
Beside her muesli bowl is a printed sheet. Luke has downloaded a guide to fire prevention and from this he has compiled a checklist which they study over breakfast. By nine they are ready to set about their tasks. Anna begins by filling the clawfooted bath and stacking a pile of towels beside it. Luke fills their plastic buckets and sets them down by the front and back doors. Out in the hot, smoky air, thick with grit and swirling litter, he drags the hose to the empty wheelie bin and rests the nozzle against the edge, leaving the bin to fill while he unlocks the garage and carries the ladder out to prop against the side of the house. When the wheelie bin is full he climbs the ladder and sets to work clearing the guttering. In his pockets are old walking socks rolled into tight balls and when he has finished with the guttering he will use these to block the downpipes.
Anna has neglected to put on a hat and soon a fine black soot settles over her skin. Blinded by grit she stumbles into the house to fill a cup with warm water and as she leans over the sink to dribble it into her eyes she hears the radio go dead. Outside again, she shouts up at Luke atop the ladder: ‘The power is off!’
‘The fire must have burnt out the power station in the hills,’ he says. And it occurs to them both that without electricity to power the pumps on their tanks they will be helpless to defend the house. Still, the fire is some distance away. The thing to do is to get on and rake up the bush litter from around the property. Reluctantly Anna removes the mulch she had placed around her sheoak saplings just a few days before, shovelling it into a hessian bag while Luke takes the hedge clippers to a stand of dried-out bamboo.
‘This smoke is getting thicker,’ he says at last, breathing heavily and letting the cli
ppers drop to the ground. ‘I’m going down to Gil’s to see what’s happening.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘You should stay out of the smoke.’
‘It’s not affecting me. Really.’ But she takes a silk scarf, wets it under the tap and ties it around her nose and mouth. Then she slips her inhalant into her pocket.
A big swell is breaking in over the rocks and by now the air is a heady mix of smoke and salt. They find Gil in the kitchen frying sausages over a single gas ring. The rear porch and back wall of his cottage are overgrown with vines so that the kitchen is like a dark cave and the flame on the gas ring glows unnaturally bright.
‘Ever seen anything like this before?’ asks Luke.
‘Never. I’d hate to be up in them hills.’
‘Do you need a hand with anything?’
‘Don’t worry about me.’ He pokes a charcoaled sausage. ‘We’ve had fires in the hills before. They never reach the coast.’
Back at the house they prepare an omelette on their own gas ring and eat it with bread and beer that is still cold. Then they light up a packet of candles left in a cupboard by the previous owner and settle in for the night. Luke sits cross-legged on a cushion on the floor with two wrought-iron candelabra on either side of his knees, enough light to read by. After a long break he has returned to reading Sir Frederick Treves’ account of his pilgrimage to Palestine. When he returned from Sydney he took the book down from the shelf and began again where he had left off, for the story haunts him and he wants after all to know how the journey ends. Will Sir Frederick find the meaningful consolation for his daughter’s death that has so far eluded him, some revelation at the heart of the Holy Land?
Luke reads for an hour, waiting for a turn in events, though it seems that Sir Frederick is destined for disenchantment. But then, in the very last pages he arrives finally at a place that does not disappoint him. And it’s not Nazareth, it’s not Bethlehem, nor even is it Jerusalem; no, it’s the fragrant city of Damascus, ‘the oldest city in the world’. The road in, he writes, is a ‘delectable’ passage through outlying vineyards, orange groves, orchards of pomegranates and fields of new corn, through rustling walnut trees and gardens of sun-bleached roses. There are shady walks and reedy pools that link a network of small, peaceful villages until, finally, the traveller arrives at the walls of the city and the gateway of the great Khan. ‘There is some romance about the beginning of things: there is even a deeper sentiment about their ending. Here is the goal of the caravan, the end of the journey. Day after day, for weary weeks, the one object clear in the eyes of every tired man on the march is the gateway of the Khan of Damascus, the great inn or caravanserai of the city. Here at this gateway is a place where things end, and within it the shadow of great peace.’ There is more from Sir Frederick in this vein, lyrical descriptions of domestic courtyards with fountains and flowering gardens glimpsed along the way, of all-night bazaars lit by lamplight, of Damascus as ‘a city of dreams’. And how odd this is, for isn’t Sir Frederick a Christian? And yet the first encampment in which he finds himself happy – beyond even this, inspired – is a citadel of Islam. It appears to Luke that despite his stern lowchurch principles, Treves has fallen in love with the city’s exotica, and especially the Great Bazaar where he and his wife are intoxicated by the perfumeries. ‘The gardens of Damascus are full of roses; the damask rose takes its name from the city, while among the strange and ancient things still manufactured in the town is attar of roses. As my wife and I wished to purchase some of this perfume, we were taken by the dragoman to a certain merchant in the great bazaar who was to be found in a fragrant corner of that splendid labyrinth.’ Luke adjusts his position on the floor; his legs are beginning to cramp and his right foot is going to sleep. A gust of wind blows down the chimney and the candles flicker wildly. Still, he likes the candlelight; there is a lambent peace in this, a softly illuminated slowing of time.
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