‘Of course I’m alright,’ she says, crossly, for it is anger rather than fear that is going to carry her through this night.
By now it is dark. The sea is lit with an eerie orange light and the moon glows red over the water. Behind them are the burnt-out sandhills. In front of them they can see nothing but smoke, can hear only the muffled boom of the fire as it roars along the headland.
How long before the noise of the blaze begins to recede? Before police vans arrive at the other side of the lagoon and a man emerges from the smoky gloom and squawks at them through a mega phone? Rubber duckies are inflated and they are paddled across the narrowest stretch of water. Luke and Anna continue to look about for the Watts, and for Gil, but there is no sign. They stumble out of the rubber ducky and onto the opposite shore and there, in a dripping huddle, they learn that they are to be driven to a church hall ten kilometres down the road where they will be given dry clothes and spend the night. There is no possibility of returning to their houses, or what’s left of them, since the area has been declared a possible crime scene. In the morning it will be cordoned off and the police will move in to look for signs of arson. Arson? They saw the fireball fall out of the sky with their own eyes.
Inside the dusty church hall, blue camping mattresses are laid out across the floor in neat rows. Bedraggled-looking strangers mill around the side walls or slump onto the mattresses. An old woman limps past Anna, held at the elbow by a young fireman. Her hair has been singed to within an inch of her scalp and her eyebrows are burnt away. ‘I can’t blink,’ she says. ‘It hurts too much.’
Anna sits on the nearest empty mattress while Luke fetches them sandwiches and drinks from the kitchen at the rear of the hall. Here relief workers are distributing supper. She swallows the water he brings and sips at the black lukewarm tea, bitter with tannin. Luke takes only a single, half-hearted bite from his sandwich before easing himself down onto his elbows on the mattress. Suddenly the adrenalin has washed out of him; he pats his wife on the knee, rolls over onto his side away from her and within seconds is asleep. How typical, she thinks fondly, gazing down at his soot-streaked face; this man could sleep anywhere.
But she, of course, is wide awake, and can only lie on her back and stare up at the vaulted roof. Some kind of faded banner hangs from the central beam, something about a sesquicentenary of white settlement. On the far wall, high above the door, is a wooden notice-board inscribed with the numerals 1914 – 1918, and below this are the names of the dead, black-etched in the polished wood. She closes her eyes and begins to doze, waking with a spasm of pain in her shoulder. Somewhere in the hall a baby is crying and she turns onto her side, adjusting her arms to relieve the cramp. As she does so she brushes against a pillow of soft flesh, a child, and instinctively she knows who it is. At last, she sighs, for it’s the boy. Here he is, dressed only in his underpants and snuggled up beside her. And oh, she could weep with the relief of it. For weeks she hasn’t seen him and now, suddenly, he is here. And she no longer has any desire to sleep, to blot out the hideous night, but only to lie here and gaze on his angelic form. From time to time his open mouth sighs a warm breath and his eyelids flutter in deep sleep as all the while his humid body lies nestled in against her ribs. With her finger she traces the rise of his high forehead, brushing aside the unruly whorls of fair hair that cling damply to his skin. How fine his bones, how graceful the curve of his limbs. Ah, she says, so you have come back to us. I knew it, she murmurs. I knew you were indestructible.
Dawn brings an eerie, smouldering calm.
When they stumble out of the church hall into the smoky morning light, they are surrounded by the charcoaled remains of a holocaust. Across the lagoon, the southern end of the beach is a crust of glowing embers. Behind Rittler’s Point, sheets of corrugated iron are strewn on a carpet of ash. The trees are black skeletons with crowns of scorched foliage, a rust colour that is like a pale imprint of the flames.
‘You people are bloody lucky,’ says a young constable, striding up from the road with a cheery air of self-importance. ‘It’s a bloody miracle. Rittler’s Point is gone, burnt out, but the fire went right through Garra Nalla and only three houses lost. Only three.’ He is shaking his head. ‘You people must have done your homework, that’s all I can say.’
Yes, but which three, they ask? And he describes the position of two shacks, both uninhabited, and the home of a family on the edge of the reserve where the fireball hit.
But still they don’t believe it until they see it; see their house standing more or less as they left it, rising up, bald and charmless from the blackened remains of their garden, the greenhouse of shade-cloth melted, the bushy tomato trees lying in shrivelled fronds.
They open the back door and it’s as if they are on a film set; everything is coated in a thin layer of ash. Near the door is a dead bird, singed along both wings; it must have plummeted down the chimney and flapped its way across the floor. Luke is startled. With an expression of horror he kneels to examine the carcass, lifting the beak and turning the head toward him. ‘Oh no,’ he sighs, ‘that’s the bird. That’s the one I told you about, the bird in the banksia tree.’
‘Are you sure?’ Anna stares at the stiff form on the mat. He must be mistaken. It can’t be that bird. This is just a common wattlebird, one of the predators of the garden, no loss to anyone.
‘Yes, that’s it! That’s the bird. Wouldn’t I know it?’
She looks at him in exasperation, amazed to see that he is distraught. Untying the knotted handkerchief from around his neck he begins gently to wrap the bird in its folds and all she can do is turn away. Now she is angry again; with everything that has happened he is crazily upset about this … this one bird! She leaves him kneeling in the hallway and heads for the bedroom; all she can think of is how filthy she is, how much she longs to shower and change her clothes. Once she is clean again, everything will be alright; then she can begin to think clearly. But when she gets to the door of the bedroom she stops, and puts a hand to her mouth. There, on their bed, is the navy-blue sweater that Luke had discarded before running out into the yard. At the centre of its bunched folds is an ugly black hole where the wool had caught alight and burnt through to the thick cotton coverlet below. When she lifts the sweater, the coverlet is seared with a brown scorch mark. Somehow an ember must have made it into the house and blown onto the bed. But how? Where? She looks up at the small panes of glass high in the old sash windows and sees for the first time that the middle pane is open. It must have exploded outwards, leaving a clean hole, so neat she had not at first noticed it. The ember had blown in and landed on the bed, on Luke’s sweater. The wool had smouldered, and smouldered, but had not blazed, and the ember had burnt itself out. Anna stares at it, at the sweater that almost caught alight but didn’t, at the house around her that might have burned down and is still standing. It would be a relief to cry, but her eyes remain dry. Right now she doesn’t have it in her; she is too tired, and she is too dirty. She will cry later, she tells herself, and begins to unbutton her borrowed shirt. But then she hears Luke calling out to her. ‘Annie! Annie, come here!’ She finds him out on the front veranda, staring down to Gil’s house, which is now visible below them because the trees have been reduced to denuded sticks. And there is Gil, out in the yard, raking the charred embers from around his water tanks. ‘Thank God!’ exclaims Anna, and they jump from the veranda and break into a jog. As they approach the black spikes of what were once Gil’s gateposts, Luke shouts, and Gil looks up and waves. Such a casual wave, as if they had just been away for a trip to town.
‘Have you seen the Watts?’
‘They were on the rocks with me,’ he says. ‘They got evacuated to Brockwood. They’re probably back by now,’ he nods in the direction of the bluff. He takes out a neatly folded handkerchief and wipes the sweat from his eyes. ‘No-one dead,’ he says, ‘so there you are.’
The settlement of Garra Nalla has survived a perfect firestorm. A sudden descent of dry air
had combined with gale-force winds so precipitously that the fire-trucks were left stranded in the hills, unable to make it to the coast in time. Unknown to them, as they stood at the shallow end of the lagoon, the people of Garra Nalla were surrounded on three sides by burning bush; within a tenkilometre radius of the settlement the winds were blowing in four directions at once and the roads were impassable. The Watts had been driven onto the rocks below, and later, over a lukewarm beer in his kitchen, Alan describes the terror of clinging to those rocks, the disorienting sensation of radiant heat coming at him from one direction while the cold wash of ocean surf broke across his feet. He feared then that his children might slip from his grasp and be swept away, and at that moment his dread of the water had been greater than his fear of the fire. And there is a quaver in his voice now as he glances across at Zack, who is absorbed in playing with his Gameboy on the couch.
‘Hostages to fortune,’ says Gil, who has wandered up to join them. ‘It’s all different when your kids are with you.’
That evening, without a word to Anna, Luke slips out the back door and wanders alone through the wasteland of the nature reserve beside the highway. Here the fire had been at its fiercest. In other areas some green remains in the canopy, despite the swathes of blackened trunks and pale russet foliage, but in the reserve every tree has been torched. Not a blade or leaf has been spared. A series of thin stunted sticks that were once young trees jut up out of the ash like primitive totems. Where the fence had run he can see a line of blackened nails, and where the fence-posts stood, clusters of coach-screws. Further in, where the bigger trees had put up more resistance, broken trunks lie splayed across a carpet of ash, whispering thin drifts of smoke.
In all the wind-funnelled anarchy of burning bush, the tidal wave of flame and smoke, Luke had been fearful, yes, but not unnerved. But looking around him now at the charred ground, the blasted earth, the logs leaking smoke, he is gutted. It’s as if not just the land has been singed but his body with it. He stumbles, weeping, through the powdery ash, climbing over the still-warm charcoal of the fallen trunks, and he is back in the delivery room, two years ago, when Anna had given birth to the boy; his tiny, curled-up body with its grey translucent skin, his dark, wine-red lips, the pinkish white of his eyelids, closed to them for all time. This child of their loins, only seven and a half months old, dead in the womb; their dearest boy whose heartbeat had one day stopped, lapsed into silence, with his parents unawares, thinking that all was well, that nature was taking its course and that their lives were going along just fine. In those bleak hours after they had cleaned the sticky blood from Anna’s body and wheeled her into a pale blue hospital room, the hospital counsellor asked them if they wanted to give their child a name, and they nodded, blankly, and said yes, it would be a good idea. But in the numbness of their grief, no name presented itself and thereafter they had come to think of him as ‘the boy’. It seemed so much more intimate than any given name. And now all this grey ash, bringing it all back to him, that other day, the day he thought he had put out of his mind once and for all, a day on the harbour, just the two of them and the skipper of the hired boat, and the boy’s ashes in a tiny ceramic vial, and Anna collapsing onto the deck and he, alone, stepping to the edge of the boat and sprinkling the ashes over the white-tipped waves. It was a cold day, and he had worn the navy ribbed sweater, the one that at the height of the fire he had discarded on the bed, because he could not bear the thought that it might come to any harm, and because it reminded him too much of other damage. But the ember had landed there, and the sweater had burnt anyway, and in its thick smouldering resistance it had most likely saved the house.
Anna sits in the dark of the living room and frets for Luke’s return. Where is he? Why has he just gone off like this, on his own? The phone tower is still out and she has walked over to Gil’s and Rodney’s and up to the Watts’ but no-one has seen him.
‘He might be a bit shell-shocked,’ says Bette, who is standing in the kitchen, scrambling eggs on a camp stove. ‘Alan’s like a stunned mullet. He just sits on the deck and stares out to sea.’ She nods towards the deck where Alan is slumped in a canvas chair. ‘What about you, are you okay? Want to stay and have some supper?’
‘I’m fine,’ says Anna, ‘and I should go back. Luke might be there by now.’
She walks home through the blighted hamlet, the ground still warm beneath her feet. Inside the house the phone is ringing, reconnected at last, but it’s only her mother. ‘I can’t find Luke,’ she says, hearing the panic in her voice. ‘We were up at a friend’s place and he just disappeared.’
‘Why don’t you take the car and look for him?’
‘Mum, the car is burnt out. And the garage.’
‘Can you borrow a car?’
‘I don’t think so. Mum, people have got their own problems.’ She doesn’t want to talk about it now. Her mother sounds annoyingly distant and Anna says, abruptly, that she will ring back.
There is nothing to do but wait, and sweep up the ash.
It’s late in the evening when she hears him walk up the drive, and she drops the broom and runs to the hallway. Luke is standing there, just inside the back door, and she sees that he has been crying.
‘Is it that bad?’ she asks. She has never seen Luke cry, not even once.
He shakes his head. ‘Not the fire,’ he murmurs. ‘Not the fire.’
‘The boy?’
He nods, unable to speak, and stands on the spot, as if to take another step is entirely beyond him. She puts her arms around him, steadying herself because he is heavy, and she absorbs the shudder and heave of his body, clasping his back and drawing him into her. And they stand there, in the doorway of their home, and they hold one another for a very long time.
That night the boy comes to Anna in a dream. And this is odd, because she never dreams of him, but tonight here he is, at the back door. The garden is as it was before the fire, perfect in every detail, mellow and bathed in afternoon light, and the boy is in the open doorway, waving. But before she can wave back, the figure in the doorway has dissolved into the light. And she wakes, crying, silent tears that stream down her cheeks and wet the pillow. The tears go on and on, soundlessly, beyond her will, until, after a while, she turns over onto her back and lies there, dry-eyed and staring up into the dark.
*
On the third Sunday in December the people of Garra Nalla gather together on the bluff to celebrate their deliverance.
It’s just after five on a balmy evening when they spread their picnic things, their chairs and their tables along the blackened knoll that overlooks the sea. A barbecue is out of the question since there is still a total fire ban, but a feast of dishes is laid out on rough trestle tables that Bette has draped with white cloths. Beside this she has set up a small bush conifer for a Christmas tree and hung it with tinsel and coloured lights. Mercifully there is no wind.
Not everyone in the settlement has come. There are some who are still in shock, unable to go back to work; others, it is said, are too traumatised even to leave the house. But Bette is determined to have a party. ‘For the children,’ she says. ‘They must see that the adults are coping.’
The men are subdued but they do their best and set up an improvised cricket pitch on the old tennis court. After dinner many of the families walk home, but a few remain, the women lounging on the Watts’ sundeck. Anna is feeling a little drunk, and light-headed in the heat. She closes her eyes, and leaning back into the warmth of the wall, begins to drift off. Bette nudges her, laughing, and offers to fill her glass. ‘Wake up,’ she says, but Anna declines with a shake of her head. She smiles woozily, and looks over to where the men are clustered, like a flock of birds, at the edge of Alan’s unlit barbecue stand, their elbows resting on the warm brick. She sees how intimately they lean in toward one another, as if to catch what is being said, and this is something she loves, this intimacy when men are together, away from women; in sight but out of reach. And she is thinking that she
might go off the pill soon, that she is ready to try again. Life is so unpredictable: one cannot postpone decisions forever in the belief that things will be better down the track. What if, one day, there is no track? … and she begins to doze, drifting back into the warm slipstream of her reverie. Out on the horizon she can see a lone sloop, tacking across a stiff breeze. Its red sails are swollen in the wind, and the way they tilt against the sky is mesmerisingly lovely. Then she sees a figure on the lagoon, sitting upright in a small skiff and paddling out to sea. And the shape of this slight figure is familiar. She jerks her head upright, squinting into the sun, for it’s hard to see clearly and the glare off the water is blinding. And yes, it is him, it’s the boy, and she sees now that the sloop is for him, is waiting to carry him to his next destination. Ah, she says, so you are leaving us. So you are on your way at last. But it’s okay, it’s alright; yes, she thinks, I am ready for this, and she raises her arm in a soft salute. Thank you, she says. Thank you for staying with us all this time.
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