Long Hot Summer

by Victoria Purman

  “You expecting a message?” Caleb craned his neck and tried to look.

  “Nope.” He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Okay, spill, bro.” He put down his beer. “Who is she?”

  Dylan pushed the phone to the side. It wasn’t her. It was one of his buddies from the station looking to swap a shift in the next month. He’d get back to him later, try to help out of he could.

  “What?”

  Caleb peered across the table at his brother. “You’re mighty distracted, mate. I was asking you, who the woman is.”

  Dylan felt the smile coming on before he could contain it. It was never a good idea to show too much enthusiasm for anything in front of Caleb, who had a way of ribbing him about any damn thing. He still brought up the time he beat Dylan in their year six one hundred metre race at their primary school’s sports carnival. But... fuck it. Dylan wanted to talk about Hannie and how he felt about her. How it had been so crazy so quick. How, when he was with her, he didn’t want to let go of her. And how it had been three days since he’d seen her, kissed, held her, and that he was about to go nuts from missing her.

  “You remember Hannie Reynolds, from Reynolds Ridge? From school?”

  Caleb thought on the question. “The one with the purple hair? The one who lived at the back of our place? The one you kissed at that party?”

  Dylan smiled at the memory. “Yeah, that’s her. Her hair’s dark now, you know, normal. And kind of long, which she pulls up into this bun at the top of her head. And she’s a jeweller.”

  Caleb looked around in amazement. “What the fuck? You’ve gone and got yourself a woman – and it’s Hannie Reynolds – and this is the first time I hear about it? You’re putting the bro code in serious doubt here. I want details. What’s been going on? How many times and where? Is it good?”

  Caleb was going to get far fewer details than he expected. This thing with Hannie was too important to be talking about while shooting the shit at the pub. “It’s only been ...” How long had it been? A couple of weeks? “Not that long.”

  “I know you. You’re looking all sooky la-la. This isn’t just some hookup, is it?”

  “Nope. This could be something good, Caleb. Hannie’s pretty amazing. She lives on that old cottage at her aunt Mandy’s place; you know, the one we used to think was haunted when we were kids. It’s been done up and she’s running her own business from there, in between looking after her Aunt Mandy’s place and all her animals while she’s in hospital.”

  Caleb held up a hand. “Whoa. You talking about Mandy, Alice’s mother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened to her? Why’s she in hospital?”

  Dylan wouldn’t normally have told anyone such personal information but since their mother had already called him to ask about it, it was clear the news was already out “She’s got Parkinson’s.”

  “Oh, shit. That sucks.”

  “She’s been pretty good for a while but she’s had a couple of falls and they’re running all kinds of tests on her in hospital. Alice wants her to sell up and move into some kind of care, which means Hannie will be kicked out of her house.”

  Caleb sat back. “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “It’s her life, Caleb. I care about her and what happens to her.”

  “Obviously.”

  Dylan glanced at his phone again.

  Caleb rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you just call her, you dipshit.”

  “Don’t call me a dipshit, dipshit.”

  “Go on. Clearly you’ve got a thing for this woman. Remember what that incorrigible cousin of ours said at our grandfather’s funeral?” Caleb lifted his beer and announced grandiosely. “‘To getting laid and fighting fires’.”

  Dylan didn’t clink his brother’s glass. “Fuck you. I’m not toasting to that.”

  “So this Hannie. Is this really something serious? Already?”

  “Yeah, it is,” Dylan said.

  Caleb smiled.

  “Wait a minute. You getting any that I don’t know about?”

  It wasn’t lost on Dylan that his little brother completely ignored his question.

  “Here’s cheers, big bro.”

  After dinner was over, Dylan drove up into the hills and home towards Reynolds Ridge. It was twilight, the sun setting in the west cast a warm glow through the trees and the valleys, and it was quiet. As he approached Mandy’s place, situated close to the road and on the high side, he saw something unfamiliar out the front.

  A For Sale sign. He checked in his rearview mirror that the road was clear behind him before slamming on his brakes and taking the driveway down to Hannie’s cottage. She was outside on the lawn, throwing a tennis ball a few feet for Ted to fetch. He pulled up, jumped out of the car, and strode over to her.

  She looked up. Her eyes were red and her face tear streaked.

  “What the fuck?” he called out. “I just saw the sign.”

  Ted dropped the ball at Hannie’s feet. She bent down to pick it up and rolled it across the lawn. “It went up today. She’s selling.”

  “She can’t do that. She can’t order her own mother around like a child. Mandy has to fight this.”

  Hannie looked up at him with the saddest eyes he’d ever seen. He fought the urge to take her into his arms and whisper words of comfort to her, to reassure her that everything was going to be all right.

  “It’s Mandy’s decision.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Dylan scoffed.

  “It’s true,” Hannie replied, wiping her eyes. “She told me herself, Dylan. I got a call this morning. She thanked me for the flowers I’d sent and apologised for not calling me. She’d been a bit too upset about everything to speak to anyone. You see”—Hannie paused, as if she was trying to take in the news as well—“the results from her tests aren’t good. Mandy has agreed with Alice that she needs to move into a place where she can get the best care. This place is available to the highest bidder.”

  Dylan’s mind was spinning. He was used to taking control, to running teams, to thinking of every possibility. He had to come up with something. For Hannie’s sake.

  “Can you buy this place?”

  Hannie shook her head. “I don’t have that kind of money. And anyway, it’s not what I want for my future.”

  “Maybe the new owners will let you stay on as a tenant?”

  “I got the place in return for looking after Mandy and her animals. The new owners will want full market rent and might even turn the cottage into a bed and breakfast. They’ll want me out. I’ll find somewhere else.”

  Dylan couldn’t hold back now. He went to Hannie, pulled her in close, tried to ignore Ted slobbering on his shoe, and held her. He kissed the top of her head.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do about Zelda and the girls. Do you want some chickens and a goat?” she asked.

  “Let me think. No.”

  “I’ll talk to Ted’s vet. She’s in the next town. She might know someone who’ll take them.”

  Hannie was going to be evicted from her home and she was thinking about a stinky, head-butting goat and the chooks?

  “Let’s go inside, Hannie.”

  When the moon was full in the sky, Dylan and Hannie made love. They barely moved from the bed that night and except for Dylan’s early morning trip to pick up Ted from Hannie’s place, they stayed between the sheets for the whole of the next day and night. Thirty-six whole hours of lovemaking, laughing, sleeping, watching movies, drinking wine, and eating. It was like the best holiday Hannie had ever had.

  It was definitely the best sex she’d ever had.

  He was a keeper. She just had to figure out how to tell him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dylan woke when his pager went off.

  It buzzed on the bedside table by the left hand side of his bed and he blinked his eyes open at the sound of it. Even though the buzzing was quiet, he swore he would hear it in the middle of the deepest sleep when he was on stan
dby during an Australian summer. Hannie was still tucked into him, her head on his shoulder and an arm across his chest, sound asleep. For half a second, only half, he wished he could ignore it and stay in bed with her all day like this, naked, sated, every inch of him still alive at her touch.

  He wanted to watch her while she slept, for just a moment longer. Her face was serene, which was a marked difference from what he’d seen in her a couple of days ago. Her pale skin, a smattering of faint freckles on her pert nose, her full lips parted slightly as she breathed. He almost couldn’t bear to look away.

  Two nights with her and he was gone. He wanted so much more of this he could barely find the words, and he would, soon enough, but now he had to answer this page. He slipped out of bed, slowly, and tried to noiselessly walk into the kitchen to call the Country Fire Service station.

  “It’s Knight. What’s going on?”

  “Mate.” It was Tim, the head of the incident management team at Dylan’s volunteer station. A local organic orchardist, a burly bloke with a long beard, he was exactly the kind of no-bullshit person someone wanted in charge when the shit was hitting the fan. “Arsonists. Bloody bastards. Someone’s lit ten fires near Uraidla on Range Road. The winds aren’t looking good and four of them are threatening to run out of control.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Dylan ended the call. He only had a minute to grab his fire gear, get into it, and get to the station.

  “What’s going on?”

  He spun around. Hannie was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, half asleep and totally naked, rubbing her eyes, yawning.

  He lost his breath.

  “Dylan?”

  “I’ve got to go, Hannie. Ten fires at Uraidla. An arsonist, they reckon.” He crossed the room, swept her up into his arms, and kissed her senseless.

  Her arms around him were like a vice. “Stay safe, Dylan,” she said. Her morning voice was still croaky but her eyes were wide and alert.

  “You’ll be okay?”

  “Of course. My car’s here. I’ll get dressed and head back now.”

  “I’ll call when I can.” He reluctantly let her go.

  She grabbed his hand as he walked away and kissed the top of it.

  “Hannie ...” He started but couldn’t finish.

  “Go,” she said. And he was out the door.

  Once she’d got Ted home, she sat in her kitchen, was glued to the radio. She’d lived through fires before, so many she’d lost count, but there was something about this one that seemed real bad, real quick. As the morning wore on, reports were getting worse.

  The fire front was getting bigger.

  It was burning out of control on all fronts, with a perimeter of more than forty kilometres and the fierce northerlies of up to ninety kilometres an hour were fanning the ferocious blaze south easterly – right towards Reynolds Ridge.

  Hannie had already changed out of her T-shirt and shorts and was wearing jeans and steel-capped boots. She had a protective fire coat on the stool at the end of the bench, and her most precious things – photos, passports and other official documents, her laptop, and the pieces she’d been working on for her clients – were already in the back of her four-wheel drive, collected in a plastic tub. Ted was inside with her, unsettled and anxious, pacing the kitchen, as he always did on severe weather days. She’d walked up to Mandy’s place and shooed the chooks into the henhouse and tied Zelda up closer to the house. Her mobile was fully charged and tucked in the front pocket of her jeans and she had plenty of water in the car. She’d checked the generator too, and the pumps to the water tanks.

  All she could do now was wait for the call to evacuate.

  She drank some water and had a turkey sandwich and some fruit for lunch. While she didn’t feel hungry in the slightest, if things got hairy it might be a while before she would eat, and she might need every scrap of energy she could muster to get out of there safely and head to refuge. She turned up her radio, tuned in to the national broadcaster, the ABC.

  There was an alarm sound which brought her to attention and then the grave newsreaders voice began.

  “This warning has been issued in relation to the current fire event southeast of Uraidla in the Adelaide Hills. There is a heightened level of threat in the townships of Uraidla, Woods Peak and Reynolds Ridge. Conditions are changing and you need to start taking action now to protect you and your family. If you live in the area but are away from home, it may not be safe to return to your property.”

  Hannie went outside and looked up into the sky. It was clear around her and all the way up to the top of Reynolds Ridge, but when she looked to the northeast, she gasped. Gigantic plumes of white smoke were looming in the sky, so white they might look like a billowing cloud to someone who wasn’t familiar with fires. They almost looked like a volcanic eruption. Closer to the ground, the clouds of smoke were grey and heavy, and Hannie knew what it was. The fire was fierce and huge and only getting bigger. The smoke must have been as high as a kilometre in the sky.

  She wasn’t going to take risks. This was the time to leave. Fires could get out of control in what seemed like minutes and, if that was the case, she had not time to spare. She ran to her shed and switched on the pump. Moments later, her sprinklers were on, and would soak everything around her cottage in the hope that it wouldn’t burn. She ran up the driveway to do the same to Mandy’s house. She’d prepared the property as much as she could and now hoped this emergency measure would do the trick. She stopped and patted Zelda, who was bleating in distress.

  “Don’t worry you old goat. I’ll be back for you. Give me a minute to get Ted. I’m afraid the girls are going to have to stay.”

  Hannie ran through the water exploding into the air like a fountain in front of Mandy’s place and made it back to hers, panting with the adrenaline rush of fear coursing through her veins. She grabbed her handbag and her car keys from the kitchen table and looked around.

  “Ted?”

  He wasn’t in his bed in the corner of the room. She ran down the hallway, calling his name, but he didn’t come. She pushed open the back door and looked across the yard. She whistled, called his name again, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “Ted!” She shouted this time, scared out of her wits, scanning all around her, and when she looked to the west, her heart almost stopped. There were flames in the distance, maybe one kilometre away, bright orange fingers of destruction on the top of the hill, licking skywards. Hannie smelt the smoke.

  She tried to breathe. She was ready. She had everything in motion. She knew how to get out of Reynolds Ridge. All she had to do now was find Ted and get out of there.

  At incident command, Dylan was pacing back and forth. The room, set up in an old stone building on the side of a road outside Uraidla, had a large shed to the side which housed the fire trucks when they weren’t out on the road, and a communications room where the fire response was coordinated. Next door, the volunteers of the local Country Women’s Association had already set up a food station, and were cutting sandwiches by the dozen, preparing to feed the hungry volunteers who would return to the station during the day for a break, for water, to prepare themselves to go back out there and fight the fire. Inside the station, there were people busily doing the jobs they’d been assigned to help protect the communities they lived in and loved, and the people who lived in it. With so many volunteers and trucks out fighting the blaze from their station and others all over the hills, plus coordinating with the police chopper overhead and the water bombers if they were needed, this was the centre of the response.

  Dylan had just arrived, five minutes after held got the message on his pager. “I swear, Tim, if you don’t let me out on a truck, I’ll—”

  Tim held up a hand. “Mate. My regular second in command got trapped at his place by a fallen tree and now he’s fighting to save his own property and his neighbours’ from going up. I need someone here I can trust and you’re it.”

  Dylan gritted his teeth.
“Fuck. Not Max and Shirley Norris.”

  Tim nodded. “Yep. Last thing I heard, they’ve lost everything. Home. Sheds. Even their bloody tractor.”

  Dylan’s resolve strengthened. “Okay. Let me know what you need.”

  Tim handed him a mobile phone. “Tell the bigwigs in the Emergency Management Council meeting down in Adelaide that we need the water bomber. Right now. The front has extended to fifty kilometres and we’ve got a whole lot of small towns in the path of it.”

  “Which towns?” Dylan followed Tim to the map of the local area pinned to the wall.

  “Uraidla. Woods Peak. Reynolds Ridge. Maysville.”

  It might have been forty two degrees Celsius outside in the blazing north wind, but Dylan felt ice cold.

  He looked up to the white board next to the map, scanned it for the number he needed and dialled.

  Five minutes later, Hannie was frantic. She scoured almost every inch of the property, from the road which almost met Mandy’s front door, to inside the sheds where she’d turned on the generators. Ted loved to rummage around in there hunting the scent of feral cats.

  The only place she hadn’t looked was the creek bed at the bottom of the valley, where Reynolds Ridge rose up, with Dylan’s place at the top of it. Damn it. Ted had been kept away from his beloved creek for a month while he’d been recovering and she could bet that was where he was.

  The smell of the fire burning was stronger now. It must be getting closer. Clouds of smoke wafted over here and brought with it a light ash, like snow. She had to move fast. She jogged down the incline towards the creek bed, which she guessed would be dry as there hadn’t been a decent rain in months, took care to navigate the shrubs and stones in the ground which could easily trip her. The last thing she needed was a sprained ankle when she was getting ready to get the hell out of there.

  Then she heard him.

  “Ted!” she shouted and waited.

  The wind had picked up and it was fierce now, frying everything it touched, tearing leaves from trees and flicking them across the gully into her face, stinging her skin. The noise was so loud she couldn’t be sure where his bark was coming from. She called again and he answered and she followed the plaintive sound until she finally reached the bottom of the creek bed.