Fire in Summer

by JH Fletcher

  Hedley should be okay at Edgemont, she thought, but Kath, alone in the homestead, was a worry. The transporter didn’t have a radio, and she’d had no luck on the mobile. Get this lot safe, I’ll go and see how she’s making out. If I can get through.

  After running the gauntlet of fire and smoke on the Kapunda road, Julia Anderson drove into Hunter to find that Emergency Services had set up a temporary headquarters in the school. Everything was in chaos: people yelling and running, bells ringing. She set up her casualty station in the head teacher’s office, clearing the desk by dumping all the papers on the floor. A number of people were waiting for treatment: a couple of superficial burns, two more suffering from smoke inhalation, one — more serious — who’d had sparks in his eyes.

  ‘When we’ve sorted this lot out, I’d better have another look at them,’ she told him after she’d cleaned them out.

  ‘They’re sore as hell,’ he said. A hulking youth, one of the stars of the local footy team, but scared of eye damage, for which Julia did not blame him. ‘They’ll be all right, won’t they?’

  She patted his shoulder; in training she had been taught how consoling for the patient physical contact could be. ‘You’ll be fine …’ Fortunately it was the truth.

  Bert Ogle stuck his nose through the door. ‘The chopper’s saying the town’s cut off …’

  ‘All we need …’ But was concerned, despite her casual tone. Were they in any danger? Surely not. There were dozens of houses in the town, hundreds of people. Three shops, a post office, roadhouse, grain silo, pub … It seemed monstrous even to contemplate the possibility that all of it might be at risk.

  She tried to visualise the town overwhelmed by flame, of people dying … She stared through the window. The sky was twilight dark. Clouds of smoke billowed high above the streets. The reflection of flames spilled gutters of orange light through the smoke. Hell come before its time, Julia thought, and was annoyed with herself for being so melodramatic.

  Concentrate on what you’re doing and leave the drama to other people, she instructed herself. It wasn’t easy; with nothing to do for the moment, her mind was open to fear. What you need, she thought, is a steady stream of patients to take your mind off things.

  As though in answer, a man came stumbling into the room. She recognised him as a patient, one of the hippies who had recently arrived in the district. He was cradling a baby in his arms and had a young woman with him, presumably the mother. Julia gained an impression of freakish clothes, of terror stark upon both their faces. The child was still.

  ‘What seems to be the problem?’

  Knew, even as she took the child from the father’s arms and laid it on the desk, as she bent over it, exactly what the problem was. Had a fraction of a second in which to remember what she had been saying to herself only a minute earlier.

  A steady stream of patients …

  But not this, she thought. Dear God, not this.

  Hedley watched the flames’ fiery chariot bowling down the distant slope of the western range and saw everything he had worked for being consumed by fire. Rage pulsed beneath his skin: rage against the fire, against fate. The fire would never reach him here; in places the rocky slope below the farm was almost vertical. Commonsense told him to stay put, but commonsense had nothing to do with it. He had to move, was physically and mentally incapable of sitting and doing nothing while fire destroyed everything he had built up in his life. Whether or not he could do anything to defeat the flames, he had to try.

  There was only the one track but, as far as he could tell, it was still open. I’ll give it a go, he thought. Stay here and I’ll go nuts.

  He climbed into the ute, slammed the door behind him and drove down the hill. The smoke made visibility tricky, but he had driven this road too often to be worried by that. The cab was heating up, the wheel almost too hot to hold, but he took no notice.

  I shall not permit fire to destroy what I have made. I shall fight it and win, as I have always won.

  He rounded a snaking bend. Now there were patches of orange flame on either side of the track. He drove on. A shower of glowing embers spattered across the bonnet. A tree went up in a roar of flame. Even with the windows wound up, he could hear the crackle of burning timber, sense the fire’s threat as it closed its fist about him. He drove on.

  Another bend, and another. Close to the bottom, now. He rounded another corner and found himself faced by a towering wall of flame, orange, red, black-tipped, that had jumped the track twenty metres ahead of him and now formed an incandescent arch through which, if he wanted to escape, he would have to drive.

  Faced with the reality of what it meant to drive into the fire, Hedley lifted his foot from the accelerator. His eyes darted to the mirror, but he saw at once that it was too late to go back; now the flames had crossed the track behind him as well.

  Jaw set, he slammed his foot down on the accelerator. Crashing and bouncing, the ute went roaring forward into the blaze.

  The world was flame. He could see nothing else. The fire was on either side of him, ahead, behind and overhead. It streamed like Guy Fawkes along the sides of the ute; a close-up of hell, it filled the windscreen.

  Hedley thought, Any second now and the tank will blow. One tree across the track and I am dead. And kept going.

  It was one thing to say he knew the track well enough to drive it with his eyes shut; to do it, now, with the world dissolving in fiery ruin about him, was another game altogether: He cannoned off a burning tree beside the track, ducked as a cascade of sparks smashed into the windscreen. He scraped around another bend, caught a momentary glimpse of what might have been a hare sprinting ahead of him, its fur blazing. Once again he scraped past something, slammed against a second tree that he had not even seen, and felt a band of pain flare and tighten in his chest. Tighter and tighter. Still he drove on. And was suddenly clear.

  Not knowing if he were alive or dead, Hedley drove the ute, blackened and blistered by heat, across the concrete bridge that spanned the river.

  Michael, hand still clamped about Jo’s wrist, saw that they were cut off, utterly. Whirling dervishes of fire, fifty feet and more in height, confronted him whichever way he turned. The heat puckered the skin over his cheekbones.

  ‘No way out that way‚’ he told her. Nor any way. ‘Let’s get back indoors.’

  He expected Jo to protest, but she was beyond protest. Inside the cottage, he slammed the door and asked himself what the hell they were to do now.

  Water, he thought. Water will save us. Not for a second did he doubt it. Safety was a road through terror; find it, and they would live. Water would bring them through. He turned on the taps in the bath. The supply came from a bore a few yards from the cottage. Confident or not, he knew a second’s terror, but it was all right: the pipes were still intact and water came gushing out.

  ‘Get in!’

  Jo stared dully, without moving.

  No time to waste; he gathered her up and dumped her in the bath, clothes and all. She screeched.

  ‘Shut it, for God’s sake.’

  There was a bit of hose inside the back door. He rammed the end over the nozzle of the tap, turned it on and pointed the jet at the walls, the ceiling. Managed to give it a good dowsing before, all of a sudden, the flow petered out; the pipe from the bore must have gone. Which meant that the fire was upon them.

  He had no idea whether the cottage would withstand the flames or not, knew only that he had done the best he could. If the bastard wants us, it’ll bloody well have to have us.

  Suddenly weary, he clambered into the bath with Jo. Water slopped. ‘Shove over, sweetheart.’ From somewhere, found a grin. ‘Always wanted to try it in the bath …’

  Her teeth were chattering, eyes unfocused, face the colour of clay.

  ‘Keep yourself as low as you can in the water,’ he told her. ‘It’ll make it easier to breathe.’

  Breathing had certainly become a problem; the air was blue with smoke; he reached out
a hand to test the temperature of the wall, snatched it back at once. He grimaced. ‘Hot …’

  And waited.

  Jo was mumbling.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a judgment, that’s what it is. For what we’ve been doing.’

  He thought, What crap! Said, ‘Seems a bit much to wreck the whole valley just for our benefit.’

  ‘We’re going to die. Going to die. Going to —’

  He grabbed her and shoved her head under the water. Yanked it out by the hair. Shouted into the eyes staring fixedly through the water that was running over them. ‘Shut it! Okay? Shut it!’

  Miraculously, she was silent.

  ‘We’ve done everything we can. Now we’ve just got to wait. All right?’

  A patch on the wall above their heads darkened and turned black. Horrified, Michael stared at it. It’ll go any minute. He slopped water into the bucket by the bath, flung it at the wall. Which hissed and bubbled and was at once dry.

  He turned to Jo, cowering beside him, slid his arm around her. ‘I’m not sorry,’ he said. ‘Not for any of it. I’m glad we got together. When all this is over, I reckon you should give Steve the old heave-ho and move in here with me.’

  For the moment he meant it. Even if he had not, he knew how important it was to talk as though the future were as close as tomorrow, that all this was no more than a temporary inconvenience through which they would pass together.

  At this minute it was possible to dream anything. Get things right with the old man, get the land back … Anything.

  He grinned down at her and slipped his hand into the front of her shirt. Talk about the right time and place … ‘Like that, would you, the two of us getting together?’

  A little way up the slope, a blazing tree, rotted by fire, collapsed in ruin across the cottage roof. Smashed it.

  Michael and Jo jerked their heads, staring up in horror as the flames fell upon them.

  ‘It was the asthma,’ Julia said. ‘He couldn’t breathe.’ She stared in commiseration at the bereft parents who now were parents no longer. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  At the last minute, Kath got it wrong. She had everything ready, the car standing outside the door, but the speed of the fire caught her by surprise. Old fool, she scolded herself, you always said you couldn’t wait to get away from the place. People talked about galloping horses, but this was more like a jet plane, sweeping down the hill so fast that it created its own wind ahead of it.

  She was on the back veranda; she walked around the side of the house, and the wind slapped her full in the face. She looked up the slope and knew that she wasn’t going to make it.

  The flames were still half a kilometre away but coming fast. Even in the car, she had no hope of outrunning them. She stood, hands clasped beneath her breast, and watched as the wall of fire, twenty or thirty feet high and a kilometre wide, came down the hill towards her.

  Within the framework of seconds, time was endless. Time in plenty to be awed by the speed and ferocity of the flames. They were a manifestation of the primal vigour of the Universe, a demonstration of life and the death that was a part of life. She did not feel terror; did not feel anything. The fire came down on her; she wondered whether it would hurt, knowing that even that did not matter. Seconds — five, ten at the most — and it would be over. She would bear it because she must. The thing to do was accept it, even embrace it, become one with the flame. Immolation …

  Accept‚ she told herself, accept.

  While the flames roared, and Kath stood facing them, her eyes wide.

  Dust clouds flew before the gusting wind. The fire wall was halfway down the slope. A rabbit appeared, sprinting in terror. The flames rolled over it, there was a pin-thin scream, lost at once beneath the furnace roar, and it was gone. The fire reached the line of trees along the edge of the paddock. One by one, they exploded in a tattered frenzy of flame.

  ‘Half a minute,’ Kath said. ‘Maybe less.’

  She did not think how in these last moments she should be remembering her past. She did not think at all, did not feel, simply stood and waited, at one with the flame. It collided with the corrugated iron fence of the sheep yard that lay across the fire’s path. Driven by its own energy the wave of flame hurled itself skywards, like a thrown pebble skating across water. Sparks cascading like meteors, it cleared the roof of the house, came down on the far side and was at once gone.

  A moment of absolute disorientation. She had been dead, and now was not. She had been accepting; now the terror that had been dammed up inside her burst forth. She was crying, shaking, sinking in a wretched and impotent heap upon the veranda, while all around her the paddocks burned.

  ‘I am alive,’ she told herself, over and over again. ‘Alive …’

  She experienced a sense, not of relief, but of something closer to indignation. It was impossible that she should be alive, a disruption of the natural order of things, yet she was. Slowly her racing heart quietened, the sweat dried beneath her clothes, a sense of where and what she was returned. She got slowly to her feet, tried to take in what she could see about her. The sheds were gone, the hill stripped bare. The spinney of trees that for all her life had been beside the house was also gone, as was the orchard, but the mulberry tree outside the kitchen door remained, as the house itself remained.

  So close, she thought. She had read about fire doing such things, but … She stared with wondering, wandering eyes. There were tongues of flame everywhere, diamond-bright amidst a grey wilderness of ash. So close.

  Kath touched herself, as though doubting her own existence. She tried to walk, but swayed and almost fell. After a minute tried again, this time succeeded. From the far side of the house, she watched the passage of the fire as it roared away down the hill. Disorientation increased. The inferno no longer had anything to do with her. The fire crews would handle it. Or not. She was tired; tired, she thought, to death. Understood for the first time how such near misses could literally kill you.

  Feet dragging, brain empty of anything but bewilderment, Kath went back into the house. When, an hour later, Danielle arrived in a swirl of ash and cinders, she was asleep.

  47

  JULIA

  2000

  By the time the fire was under control Julia had been on her feet for sixteen hours, had long lost count of the people she had treated for cuts, burns, respiratory problems, shock …

  It could have been worse, she thought. At least there were no premature babies or axe murders.

  ‘I’m off,’ she told Bert Ogle. ‘How about you? You’ve been on the go even longer than I have.’

  ‘Reckon we’ll keep hosing down a tad longer. Don’t want it starting up again.’

  In the next room a phone was ringing. The sound stopped as someone lifted the receiver. ‘You’ve done miracles as it is,’ she told Bert.

  ‘We contained it. It was the second wind change killed it, not us. When it turned back on itself, there was nothing left to burn.’

  A man stuck his head around the door. ‘Doctor Anderson, telephone …’

  Julia went through and picked up the receiver, trying and failing to keep the weariness out of her voice. ‘Doctor Anderson …’

  A man’s voice said, ‘I gather we have a heroine in our midst.’

  She had wondered how it would be to meet Craig again. The things that had happened since they parted … In less than two years, she had been married and divorced again; Craig had been a nobody, now was a radio personality with a state-wide reputation. It made her wonder whether the new people they had become would have anything to say to each other, at all.

  Yet now, hearing his voice, recognising every syllable and inflexion, the diminutive catch of his breath, she felt a shock of identification with this man whom she had known so well. The voice said that nothing had happened, they had never parted, everything was as it had always been.

  There was a time when I took it for granted that we would get married, she thought. Perhaps that was
the problem; we took each other so much for granted that, when the crisis came, neither of us had the strength to stand up to it.

  Rebecca, Michael and Danielle, united against the interloper. Craig failing to stand up for her as she thought he should. Her own furious words: ‘I’m sick of all this Romeo and Juliet crap …’

  Such little things, she thought now, the telephone clasped in her hand. Little things that changed our worlds. Yet perhaps not; it was two years since his father had died. That was the last time they had spoken. Now, after two years, she was listening to him again.

  I gather we have a heroine …

  Only now did she realise how much she had missed his voice, how it had energised her in the old days. It was doing the same thing now; she remained tired, but the bone-sick weariness was gone.

  Craig had not phoned just to be sociable. ‘I wondered if I might interview you about the fire?’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Now. If you can bear it.’

  ‘I’m out on my feet.’

  ‘The best time. While the impressions are fresh in your mind.’

  ‘I’m not the right person to talk about it, in any case. All I did was patch up the bumps and bruises.’

  ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘You’re the right one, no doubt about that.’

  ‘Will it take long?’ She was surrendering. Nothing new about that, she thought. Always, in the past, he had known how to win her. Almost always.

  ‘A few minutes.’

  It took half an hour. He caught her on the hop with his first question. ‘Is it true that to reach the fire you had to drive through a tunnel of flame?’

  ‘That’s overstating it a bit.’

  ‘But there was flame?’

  ‘Some, yes.’

  ‘Across the road?’

  ‘In places.’

  The laugh, warm and sympathetic, that she remembered so well. The memory tugged her, unexpectedly painful.