Fire in Summer

by JH Fletcher

  While he waited for his big chance he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Julia to move in with him. They grew closer, then apart, finally broke up altogether when she moved to Melbourne. The next thing he heard, she was married.

  Shortly after that cataclysm, he went with Susan Johncock and the technicians to Renmark, to cover the opening of a new school. The State Premier would be there; there was the chance of an interview.

  The Premier was coming to the end of his speech and Susan was sharpening the questions with which she hoped to skewer him, when there was a phone call from Adelaide. Someone had chucked himself off the Paringa Bridge into the Murray, a mile upstream from Renmark. He’d been dragged out, wet as a cod but still breathing, and it turned out that there was more to it than a simple suicide attempt. The man was a Greenpeace activist, making a point about the state of the Murray river and the use to which the water resources of the Murray-Darling basin were being put. Back in Adelaide Deborah smelt a story.

  ‘Get on to it,’ she instructed.

  Susan liked to run her own show. ‘No chance. I’m interviewing the Premier in five minutes.’

  ‘Who’ve you got with you?’

  ‘No-one. Craig Warren.’

  ‘He’ll do.’

  Susan, no lover of Deborah Gold, protested. ‘Darling, you’re out of your mind. He’s never done a broadcast in his life.’

  Deborah reciprocated Susan’s feelings in full measure and knew something Susan didn’t. She wasted no time arguing. ‘Just do it, okay?’

  Despite her star status, Susan did not have Deborah’s clout in the studio. She surrendered ungraciously, even spitefully. ‘Your funeral, sweetie.’

  ‘Damn right. Let me speak to Craig.’ Who listened with gaping mouth and within minutes was in the studio car, heading towards Paringa and either fame or catastrophe.

  It turned out to be fame. Mike in hand, he rediscovered the knack that had attracted the studio to him in the first place. It was a good interview, amazingly so for a first, and the phone-in comments were enthusiastic. Devoran Clancy, the boss man at the studio, picked up the vibes and called for the tape of the broadcast. Four months later, when Susan Johncock’s contract was not renewed — the secret that Deborah Gold had known — Craig Warren became the studio’s latest voice behind the microphone.

  He was a hit from the first. Melanie, his new girlfriend, said his voice sounded creamy; the listeners agreed and the creamy-voiced Craig Warren was soon established as one of the top radio broadcasters in Adelaide.

  He received a couple of huge offers from the eastern cities but turned them down.

  ‘Why?’ Melanie, obsessed by the things that money could buy, pouted. ‘Sydney would be great. And all that lovely loot …’

  Craig had nothing against Sydney, but preferred to stay where he was.

  ‘What’s so great about Adelaide?’

  ‘It’s not Adelaide itself …’

  It was its proximity to the land; he laughed even as he acknowledged its power. These days he seldom went back to the mid-north, but it remained home. So long as he stayed in South Australia, he felt he was still in touch with the farm.

  Melanie sulked, but in a day or two came round, as she always did. There were times when Craig wondered about her. She was avaricious beyond belief, yet fun and extremely decorative. She projected exactly the right image as partner of someone whose face, these days, was often in the papers. She was also as hot as fire in bed, which suited Craig fine, no slouch in that department himself. So they stayed an item, in part because neither could be bothered to do anything about ending it. It was a game, his heart unengaged, a froth-and-bubble affair that suited them both. As a serious commitment … Never.

  He was still in love with Julia, saw no prospect of ever being anything else. But Julia was married, and Melanie as good a substitute as he could bother to find.

  A year later, on a hot January day, his mother phoned to tell him that his father had been killed in an accident. The shock was savage; they’d got on well in a quiet, undemonstrative way and, although they had inevitably drifted apart after Craig’s move to the city, he had still thought of him with affection. Walter had been a slow-speaking man, but strong, someone who would always be there. Now, at the age of fifty-six, he was there no longer. Craig went home for the funeral, and the world changed.

  The Lord giveth …

  My only son’s death, Kath thought. One more thing that, somehow, I shall survive.

  Simeon Smiles, priest in the newly-established Ministry District, had offered to come and sit with her. She knew his offer was kindly meant, but she had been exposed to his empty prattle before and declined; she had never found consolation in the ritual utterances of religion.

  Nor was it to be found in the sharing of grief with her husband, with whom for years she had found it impossible to share anything at all. That is what love gives, she thought, the ability to share bad things as well as good, to receive consolation as well as joy from each other. Sharing and consolation were not words that featured in Hedley’s vocabulary; nor, she had come to believe, in her own. Some things get beaten out of you: by adversity or indifference, by an endless and all-consuming regret.

  She did what she could to help Glad, her daughter-in-law, but found it hard. A daughter-in-law didn’t rate. If she blubbed when her husband died, she was soft: just what his family would have expected. If she did not, she lacked feelings: just what his family would have expected.

  Glad blubbed.

  At least she has her children, Kath thought. Although she might have been better off without them. Craig was a honey and had always been her favourite, but she found it impossible to feel any affection for Rebecca and precious little for Michael or Danielle, whose goings-on weren’t the secret they imagined.

  Kath looked around at her fellow mourners. Everyone had expected her to sit up front, but she had refused; she liked to see what was going on, while Hedley didn’t give a damn one way or the other. Two rows in front of her sat Rebecca, polished to a high gloss as always, expensively dressed. Michael sat by himself. He’d found a suit from somewhere, but still looked as though he’d hung one on last night, as he probably had. Danielle, in a dress for once, silent and attentive, sat with expressionless face, with Craig beside her. At least he looks the part, Kath thought. The only man in the church who’s at home in a suit.

  Hedley, too, was silent, as he had been since they had-received the agitated phone call to tell them of Walter’s death. Kath couldn’t read his feelings, now or ever, and did not know whether he was grieving for his son or not. His hair was wispy, almost white; he didn’t look right without a hat. His mottled scalp seldom saw the sun and made him look old, as indeed he was, and vulnerable, which he had never been in his life. Kath didn’t like to look at it; it reminded her that she, too, was coming to the end of things. She was more comfortable looking at the skin on her husband’s face and hands, which was the colour of old leather, seemingly indestructible.

  She thought, it is nearly fifty-three years since he came back from the war and Walter and I met him at Adelaide station. Hard to believe. So much of the past is lost now; there are days, even weeks, when I never think of Jeth at all, yet he, more than any other being, was my life and love.

  Endurance, Kath thought. That’s what it is. We endure from one day to the next until at last there are no more days. In a million years, or five million, we shall all be gone. Shall we really have made any more difference than the dinosaurs? Because if we haven’t, nothing — neither suffering nor joy, hatred nor love — means anything at all. I would not like to think that, although how we are supposed to believe in all the priests’ mumbo jumbo I do not understand, either.

  The congregation was getting to its feet; she struggled to join them. Not so nimble on my pins nowadays, she thought. Nothing like a funeral to remind you of your age.

  Kath stood alone in the pew, in the church, in her life, with her old husband like a lump of wood washed up on the sho
re beside her. There was something terrible about burying your child; more than bereavement, it was an affront to nature that death should take the young while leaving the old to moulder on alive.

  The nasal bleating of the priest punctured the stagnant air within the church, but in Kath’s head was a silence peopled by images. Upon the inert coffin ran a child, not yet three years old, pushing aside the constraints of the adult world in order to discover, to seize life in glad and eager hands. There were animals, and people, a universe of discovering.

  She could see that same child returning hand-in-hand with a stranger who, from the moment he spoke, was a stranger no longer; someone known to her before they met, who had been there for her from the beginning.

  There were images of the secret hoardings of a boy’s life, pebbles and feathers and pieces of coloured glass — mementos shuttered from the eyes of women: even, or perhaps especially, his mother.

  Oh, the magic of another being, confirming and consolidating her own.

  One of Walter’s yarns that stood out above the rest was his claim to have discovered a Japanese warplane, a bird tangled amid a web of trees in the Queensland forest. At the time Kath hadn’t known what to believe. ‘Why didn’t you tell someone?’

  ‘Because I’d have got into trouble.’

  He had never mentioned it again. He had told his shining story; when she had doubted, he had hidden it away, something too precious to be tarnished by disbelief. Even now Kath did not know whether she believed what he had told her; she knew how easily a boy’s fantasies could acquire the texture of truth. I hope it was true, she thought now. He led a pretty ordinary life; finding that plane may have been the only romantic thing that ever happened to him.

  Even now Kath was unable to think of Walter’s marriage as having anything to do with romance, yet in truth he had married the landless Glad Sutcliffe in the face of Hedley’s bitter opposition, which might have been a romantic gesture. Or perhaps simple defiance; Walter and Hedley had never got along.

  Now she watched as the weak-spined widow blubbed. Try as she might, she was contemptuous, could have shaken her daughter-in-law for weeping so openly, so soggily. Kath had preserved her own memories by locking them away behind the battlements of her will, but Glad seemed to have no will at all. No pride, either: a fatal flaw. It was pride that had protected Kath from a censorious world, from the man standing beside her now.

  The rasp of Hedley’s breath was the only sign that he was still alive. If he has ever been alive, Kath thought. If flint — of heart, face, will — has not been the total of his being. Even after all these years, I know scarcely anything about him. He, too, inhabits a world of secrets. We have spent our lives behind barricades, sharing our existence with no-one, least of all each other.

  Hedley had been in a black rage when Walter had made up his mind to marry Glad not because she was a ninny, but because she had no land. That is the one thing I know about him, Kath thought. His obsession with the land has consumed him and all of us.

  Even their own marriage had been to get his hands on Kath’s eight hundred acres. She had known it at the time, had even accepted it. It was the mid-north way; besides, she had believed that love would grow. It hadn’t; not that Hedley had ever indicated that he missed it, or was even aware of its absence. Her land he had wanted and he had got it, in fact if not in law. Some instinct — for self-preservation, for the land itself — had prompted her to keep it in her own name. Hedley had been furious; over the years he had tried a hundred times to get her to change, but she had always refused.

  He had even dragged his damned accountant into it. Horrie Marsh had talked of trusts and tax savings, of the consolidation of land titles, of the benefits to later generations … She had listened to none of it.

  I, too, am of the land, Kath thought. I would not sell it, after Jeth died, to support myself. If I give it away now, I shall surrender a major portion of myself. I shall not give up one inch.

  Horrie was here today, in the white shirt, tie and black trousers that was his uniform in even the hottest weather. Like a spider in a corner of the town’s life, gorged on secrets that he would never reveal. As it should be, of course, but she had never liked him. Had liked him even less after she discovered how he had treated Dulcie Sweet.

  It was fifty-one years since Dulcie and Wilf had got married, yet she still thought of her by the same name. She was not here today, unless you believed in spirits: Dulcie had joined her Wilf in the grave five years ago and no doubt Paradise would be in a mess because of it.

  The times seem to be back to front, Kath thought as, finally, the drawn-out funeral staggered to its conclusion. So many people dying before their time: Juniper Harris the first one, then Wilf, then Dulcie herself, whose kidneys had gone back on her when she was only in her sixties. Now it’s Walter’s turn. While Hedley and I seem to go on forever. Although his heart isn’t what it might be, either. What will happen when he goes?

  She watched her grandchildren as, with grudging enthusiasm, they churned out the final hymn. Battle royal looming when that happens, she thought. I hope I’m still around to see it; it was one of the few pleasures age provided, to watch people losing their rags over something that didn’t matter to you in the slightest.

  I reckon there’ll be blood spilt before it’s over, Kath thought.

  At her side Hedley held his thoughts within his heart, as he always had. I never got close to Walter. Never discovered the knack of handling him right. By the time I got back from the war I was out of the way of dealing with kids, of thinking about them, even. Another side to life that I have never understood. I don’t care. I have done what I had to do. If people don’t like it, that’s too bad.

  But losing your son … Like losing your future. Not that I was doing anything for him. A nuisance, all the same. Now I’m going to have to deal with his damn children. By rights that should have been his problem. What was he doing, anyway? Didn’t he know enough not to walk behind a header on a slope? He can’t have known anything, if he didn’t know that. And now I’m expected to pick up the pieces.

  It leaves a gap, all the same.

  So Hedley thought of his dead son, and told himself he did not truly care and, in his heart, bled. But denied it to himself, most fervently, because once you admit that the lost future mattered after all, you call into question the purpose of your life.

  Kath, with his grief-sodden mother in tow, got hold of Craig outside the church. ‘How long are you here for?’

  He had time owing to him and was not due back behind the mike until next week. All the same, he had intended driving straight back to the city. Now he hesitated. He ought to spend a day or two with his mother; it might be his last chance for a while. She had told him, between sobs, that she intended going up to Leigh Creek to stay with her sister. Neither of them had two pennies to rub together, but it was probably the best solution; she had never been at home in the mid-north, which had never accepted her.

  There was another reason for staying. He looked about him with pleasure. On all sides, the land spread as far as he could see. It felt good. He changed his mind. ‘Couple of days. Why?’

  ‘I want you to sort through your father’s things.’

  The last thing Craig wanted was to stir up any aggro. ‘That’s Michael’s job.’

  ‘Michael won’t want to be bothered.’

  Which was quite likely. Craig checked with him, all the same. As Kath had said, he was only too happy to have Craig do it for him. ‘Be my guest …’

  Rebecca, being Rebecca, was not so obliging. ‘What are you looking for?’

  There were days when she was hard to handle. ‘Gold bars, of course.’

  To Rebecca, even the theoretical prospect of finding money would always be a serious matter. ‘I’d better give you a hand.’ She gave him her sulphuric acid smile. ‘In case you’re tempted to pinch anything.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  There were no gold bars; not much else, either. A desk
stuffed with old bills, some of which had been paid, correspondence with the bank, an income tax assessment for 1993.

  ‘Gripping stuff,’ said Craig.

  Rebecca stared with distaste at her hands. ‘Filthy …’

  ‘Dunno why you bother.’

  She was not ready to give up so easily. ‘I’ll stick with it.’

  A stack of Stock Journals, some notes on artifical insemination. In the pocket of an otherwise empty briefcase, two aluminium discs. Craig turned them over. They were about the size of ten cent coins, smooth, a little worn around the edges. On one side, symbols engraved in what seemed to be …

  ‘Japanese?’

  Rebecca snatched them from him, but as loot they were disappointing. ‘They look like the dog tags soldiers wear.’

  ‘Perhaps Grandpa brought them back from the war?’

  Neither was game to ask him, knowing his views on Japs.

  ‘What about that plane Dad was supposed to have found in Queensland?’

  Rebecca stared. ‘Everyone said that was rubbish —’

  ‘Perhaps they were wrong.’

  ‘Either way,’ Rebecca said, ‘they’re not worth anything.’

  Not to us, Craig thought. But to someone else … and slipped them into his pocket.

  He spent time with Glad, comforting her as much as he could. She made it hard but he persevered, keeping his own feelings out of sight. Two days later, when he got back to Adelaide, he phoned the Japanese Embassy.

  It took three months, far quicker than he would have expected.

  Craig stared at the letter.

  The tags had been issued to Petty Officer Hideo Fukuda, a naval pilot reported missing on active service during the final days of the war. His wife and only child, a daughter, were deceased; however, his granddaughter Yukiko Fukuda was currently employed in an executive capacity with a merchant bank in Singapore. If Mr Warren cared to forward the discs, the Embassy undertook to return them to the family.

  No, Craig thought, I don’t want to do it that way. He read on.