by Justin D'Ath
There’s a faint crunching sound as the woman puts out her cigarette against the partition between them. ‘What are their names?’
‘Whose names?’
‘Your mother’s and your brother’s.’
‘Jasmine and Lachlan.’
‘Would you mind if I said a prayer for them?’
‘A prayer?’
‘It helps sometimes, pet, even if you aren’t a believer.’
Zeelie’s parents aren’t religious; she has never heard them say a prayer in her life. But Zeelie is old enough to make her own choices.
‘Okay,’ she says.
‘Dear Lord,’ says the woman, ‘please watch over Jasmine and Lachlan and keep them safe. And please watch over – what’s your name, pet?’
‘Zeelie.’
‘And please, Lord, watch over Zeelie, too; unite her safely with her mother and brother, and give all her loved ones the strength to face whatever obstacles might lie ahead.’
Zeelie waits a bit, in case the prayer isn’t over – obstacles? she worries – then, very softly, she says, ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome, pet. I just hope everything works out for you.’
Zeelie thanks her again. She’s relieved when the woman finally leaves her cubicle, washes her hands splashily in one of the stainless-steel troughs, and then says good night.
‘Good night,’ Zeelie responds, wishing now that she had asked the woman her name.
She stays in her cubicle a bit longer, wiping her eyes and face with more toilet paper. The prayer thing embarrassed her and felt a bit weird – this isn’t exactly a church! – but she’s glad it happened. She says nothing about it to her father as they make their way back to the van, where she makes up a prayer of her own:
Hi God, please watch over Mum and Lachy and Rimu – and Tahlia and her family, and Cody’s aunty and his cousins, and Millie Crawford and Juniper and all the other horses, and all the wild animals, too, and everyone from Flowerdale and Kinglake and Marysville and Strath Creek and all those other places they said on radio – and make everything be all right tomorrow and nobody’s house be burned down.
These are the last thoughts Zeelie has before she finally drifts into the welcome oblivion of sleep.
14
UNPRECEDENTED LOSS OF LIVES
‘Good morning, sleepyhead. Would you like a drink?’
It’s light. Her father stands outside the open passenger-side window, holding two white polystyrene cups. He passes one in to her. The cup is warm from his hand and from the lumpy brown liquid inside. Zeelie takes a sip. Milo.
‘Thanks,’ she says. The Milo is really sweet – someone has put sugar in it – but she’s too thirsty to care. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘Elise brought them back from the relief centre for us,’ says her father. He’s wearing a clean shirt and his hair looks damp. ‘Are you hungry? They’re giving everyone breakfast over there.’
‘Have you had a shower?’ she asks.
‘No. I just freshened up a bit under one of the taps.’
Zeelie is still wearing her clothes from yesterday. They feel stiff and horrible. There are dark lines in the creases of her knuckles and her fingers leave grey smudges on the cup she’s holding. It must be ash. It’s settled on everything. Yuck. She looks around. ‘Where’s Fly?’
‘Your friend took him for a walk.’
‘What friend?’
‘That boy,’ her father says. ‘Colby.’
‘Cody,’ she corrects him. ‘He was here? Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘You were dead to the world, sweetie. We didn’t want to disturb you.’
Zeelie processes these words. We didn’t want to disturb you. OMG! Did Cody stand outside her open window, where her father’s standing now, and look in at her while she slept? She touches her messy hair. ‘How long since he went?’
‘Which time?’ asks her father. ‘He’s taken all three dogs now, one at a time. I hope he’s not going to charge us walking fees.’
‘Did he say when he’d be back?’ Zeelie asks.
‘No. But I don’t imagine he’ll be long.’ Her father grins. ‘I don’t think it was the dogs he came to see.’
Zeelie’s face grows hot. Behind her father, the sun is just rising above the trees on the other side of the oval. It feels a lot cooler than yesterday, but there is still smoke in the air. The sun looks brown, like a big gingernut biscuit in the tea-coloured sky.
‘Have you heard from Mum?’
‘Not yet,’ says her father. He looks down into his cup, which he’s holding in both hands as if he’s trying to warm them. ‘Let’s go and get breakfast.’
The atmosphere in the relief centre is different from last night. Only the volunteers handing out toast and bowls of cereal are making any effort to be cheerful. Everyone else just looks tired and sad and worried; the reality of their situation is finally sinking in. Someone has placed a little television on a chair over near the wall, and a small crowd is gathered around it. Zeelie can’t see properly, but she hears a grim-voiced man talking about bushfire victims. She thinks about her mother and Lachy as her father leads her quickly away.
She didn’t even realise they were holding hands.
There are different people at the Red Cross table today. A red-haired woman whose name badge says ‘Heather’ asks if they are here to register.
‘We did that last night,’ says Zeelie’s father. ‘But I was wondering if there’s any news about my wife and son?’
He gives their details and Heather opens a thick folder and flicks through the alphabetised pages until she gets to ‘r’. Sliding her finger down the list of names, she stops at Royle.
‘Here we are,’ she says. ‘Daniel Laurence and Zeelie Taimana?’
‘That’s us,’ he says.
‘You are the only Royles here. It doesn’t look like you wife and son have registered yet.’
‘They won’t have registered,’ says Zeelie’s father. ‘They’re down in Melbourne somewhere.’
We hope, thinks Zeelie.
‘Do you have your wife’s phone number?’ asks Heather.
Zeelie’s father shakes his head. ‘That’s the problem. She left her phone at home. Are there any details yet of people who …?’ He leaves the question unfinished.
Turning to Zeelie, he gives her hand a quick squeeze. ‘Go and get something to eat, sweetie. I’ll be along in a minute.’
Zeelie is annoyed. He’s still treating her like a baby. Whatever he has to say to Heather is Zeelie’s business, too. It’s her mother and her brother they are talking about. Instead of going to the food tables, she makes her way back to the television.
The crowd is so big now that Zeelie can’t see the screen at all. ‘Is there any news about Flowerdale?’ she asks a woman holding a little girl on her hip. Both the woman and the girl look familiar.
‘Nothing yet,’ says the woman. ‘You’re Lachy Royle’s sister, aren’t you?’
Now Zeelie recognises her – she’s Rikki Tikki-Tavi from her brother’s Cub group. Rikki’s family lives on one of the small farms just past the Flowerdale store.
‘He fell off my horse yesterday morning and had to go to hospital,’ Zeelie explains.
‘That’s no good,’ says Rikki, looking concerned. ‘Is he going to be okay?’
‘I don’t know. We haven’t heard anything because they got stuck in Melbourne.’
‘That’s no good,’ Rikki says again. She’s only half-listening to Zeelie because a man on the television has begun talking about Kinglake. It sounds like he’s in a helicopter.
Rikki is tall enough to see over the shoulders of the people in front of them. ‘Oh my God!’ she murmurs.
Zeelie wonders what Rikki can see, but she doesn’t dare ask. Kinglake is where her mother’s friend Lily Carrington lives. It’s where her mother and Lachy might have gone if the road to Flowerdale was closed. Now the man on TV is saying something that Zeelie can’t hear properly because the background h
elicopter noise is too loud.
All she hears is: ‘… unprecedented loss of lives.’
Could that mean Mum and Lachy, too?
Hardly aware of what she’s doing, Zeelie wheels away from the television watchers – and the volunteers handing out free breakfasts – and walks quickly towards the open door and the brown, smoky sunshine outside.
15
BAD NEWS
Cody is tying Fly’s lead to the van’s front bumper. He looks up and sees her. ‘Hi, Zeelie.’
‘Hey,’ she says, trying to seem glad to see him – and she is glad; well, partly. ‘Here, I’ll take him.’
Cody is wearing a different T-shirt today, a white one with a big yellow Tweety Bird on the front, and thongs instead of sneakers. ‘Did you sleep okay?’ he asks.
‘Not really. I kept waking up.’ Zeelie bends to fuss over Fly, so Cody won’t see that she’s been crying again. ‘What about you?’
‘Same.’
‘It was nice of you to walk the dogs.’
‘That’s okay,’ he says. ‘It was kind of cool, actually. Everyone wanted to pat them. This one lady gave Holly a bit of bacon … I hope that’s okay?’
‘Sure,’ says Zeelie, although bacon isn’t good for dogs. ‘I wish I’d been with you.’
‘You like bacon, do you?’
‘Ha-ha!’
‘Anyway, your dad said you were still asleep.’
So he didn’t actually see her sleeping. Phew! ‘Have you had breakfast?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Me neither.’
There’s an awkward silence. Well, for Zeelie it’s awkward. Part of her is hoping that Cody will suggest they go and get breakfast together. Another part of her doesn’t want to go anywhere near the relief centre, where the television is.
‘Don’t you think it’s amazing how kind everyone is?’ she asks, just to say something. ‘All that food over there is totally free.’
‘I know.’ Cody looks up as a pair of black cockatoos flaps slowly overhead. ‘And when we went to the supermarket yesterday afternoon – before you guys came along – they wouldn’t let Mum and Dad pay for anything.’
‘That happened to us at a bakery,’ Zeelie tells him. ‘And a man from the pet shop gave us free food for the dogs.’
Cody places his hands on his hips and swivels his upper body from side to side, like an athlete warming up. There’s one subject they are not talking about, and it’s the biggest subject there is. He says, ‘I saw two kids from our school.’
‘When?’ asks Zeelie.
‘When I was walking the dogs.’
‘Do you know them?’ she says, looking at Tweety Bird, not at Cody.
‘Not really. They’re both in Year 9. A guy called Zach, really good football player, and a girl called either Shenayah or Carly.’
‘Those names aren’t even alike.’
‘I know. But there are these two girls in Year 9 – you might have seen them – they look almost exactly like twins, but they’re not. So I don’t know which one I saw.’
Zeelie smiles, her first one today. She hopes her eyes don’t look red, but she can blame it on the smoke. ‘Short, kind of stocky, black hair with greeny-blue tints?’
Cody nods. ‘They even do their hair the same. It’s freaky.’
‘I thought they were twins,’ Zeelie says.
‘They aren’t even related,’ Cody tells her. ‘Last year they used to hang out together all the time, everyone called them Thing One and Thing Two. Then something must have happened, they must have had a fight or something, because now if one’s coming down the corridor or crossing the quad, the other one turns and goes in the other direction.’
‘But they still do their hair the same?’
‘Yeah. It’s freaky.’
As she and Cody are having this conversation, part of Zeelie looks on like an observer. It’s as if there are two Zeelies: one talking to this good-looking Year 8 boy who obviously likes her, and one thinking about other things.
Things that matter.
Quietly, she asks, ‘Have you heard from your aunty?’
Cody’s face changes. All at once he looks younger, and he shakes his head. ‘Nothing. Mum and Dad have gone round to the police station to see if they can find out anything.’
‘Where’s the police station?’ Zeelie asks. Maybe she and her father could go there.
‘Just around the corner,’ says Cody.
She looks where he’s pointing, and her eyes fill with tears again. But this time she barely notices. ‘My mum and brother are missing,’ she hears herself say. ‘Dad’s really worried.’ Then it all comes tumbling out, just like it did with the prayer-woman in the toilets last night.
And the next thing Zeelie knows, Cody is hugging her.
They are still standing like this, Zeelie wrapped in Cody’s arms and Fly bumping against the backs of her legs, when a man’s voice interrupts them: ‘Cody.’
It’s Mr Holland. Cody and Zeelie jerk away from each other. She nearly trips on Fly’s leash and bangs her shoulder hard against the van’s side mirror. Oh my God! This is the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to her!
But when Zeelie sees Cody’s mother, she stops thinking about herself. Mr Holland has one arm wrapped around his wife, he seems to be holding her up. She’s sagging against him, as if all the bones in her body have turned to rubber. But it’s Mrs Holland’s face that shocks Zeelie the most. It’s a total mess. Zeelie has never seen an adult crying like this before – crying like a little kid cries, making no attempt to hide it. A series of horrible choking sounds come from somewhere deep inside her. Mrs Holland’s distress is so visible, so distressing, so raw that Zeelie has to turn her head away.
‘Cody,’ says Mr Holland, ignoring Zeelie completely, ‘I’m afraid we’ve had some bad news.’
16
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WORD
Zeelie is sitting in the front of the van with the door open, waiting for her father to return from the police station (and biting her nails for the first time in nearly three years), when Cody comes looking for her. His eyes are red and puffy, and it looks like he’s spilled something on the bottom of his T-shirt – there’s a crumpled, damp patch just below Tweety’s feet. Zeelie slides out of the van and, without giving it a thought, puts her arms around him. A few hours ago, she would have been amazed at herself for doing this, but now it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ she asks.
‘Okay.’
Neither of them says another word, they just go. Walking out onto the road, they turn left and follow a tree-lined street that takes them away from the crowded sportsground and away from the centre of town. It’s Zeelie who chooses the route. There will be fewer people in this direction. She doesn’t want to have to stop and talk to anyone, even just to say hello, and she particularly doesn’t want to meet her father coming back from the police station.
She isn’t ready yet for what he might have to tell her. She will never be ready. Look what happened to Cody.
They have left the dogs back at the van. Fly wanted to come, but he would only be a nuisance, Zeelie decided. This is about the boy walking next to her – Cody, who she only met yesterday, but that seems so long ago now. Neither of them are the same people they were yesterday. Their elbows bump. Zeelie wonders if she should take hold of Cody’s hand. She decides not to.
How are you supposed to act around someone whose aunty and cousins have just died?
Nobody has actually told Zeelie that this is what happened, but she and her father talked about it when she found him in the relief centre. What other bad news could the police have told Mr and Mrs Holland to make Cody’s mother so upset? There are lots of rumours going around today about Marysville, and that’s where Cody’s aunty lived.
There are rumours about Flowerdale, too. Some of them aren’t just rumours – it’s been on TV and on the radio. Finally the outside world seems to have remembered th
ere’s a place called Flowerdale, a place that lots of people call home. Or used to call home. Someone camped in one of the cars not far from their van told Zeelie’s father that the whole town has been destroyed. Someone else said that more than 20 people are dead or missing.
Zeelie stayed behind when her father went to the police station. If he comes back and says, Zeelie, we’ve had some bad news, she doesn’t know how she will react. Mrs Holland’s wrecked, red face is something she will never forget.
It’s Cody who finally breaks the silence. ‘Have you heard from your mum yet?’
Zeelie doesn’t look at him; it’s easier not to look. ‘Dad went to the police station.’
‘Did they know anything?’
‘He’s still there, I think.’
Now Cody takes her hand in his. ‘She’ll be okay, Zeelie.’
‘And my brother,’ she says.
‘Yeah, I meant your brother, too,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’
On the other side of the road, a family who must be bushfire survivors like her and Cody is camped on the front verandah of an old house. A man kicks a red plastic football to a little boy, who drops it.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Cody says as they watch the boy kick the ball back to his father. ‘We stayed with my aunty and cousins at Christmas.’
Zeelie remains silent. Cody hasn’t told her anything about his cousins – she doesn’t know how many there were, their ages, or whether they were boys or girls, and it isn’t something she can ask.
‘They reckon the whole town is gone,’ he continues after a short silence.
‘I’m sorry, Cody,’ Zeelie says. Not knowing what else to say, she squeezes his hand.
A big tear slides down beside her nose. Her thoughts loop back to Flowerdale. She knows now that Rimu must be dead. But the tears are not just for her horse. They’re for Cody’s aunty and cousins, and for everyone else who died in yesterday’s bushfires. And for all the dead birds and animals, too.
The world is such a sad place today.