Ash Mountain

by Helen FitzGerald

  Gramps was making noises. She grabbed the log book, retrieved a bottle of pills from the chest in the cupboard, and headed to his bedroom.

  ‘I don’t like this, Franny,’ he said, swallowing the pill she’d given him.

  ‘It’s sucky, isn’t it?’ Without thinking, she took her mother’s rosary beads, which were hanging on the headboard, and held them in her father’s hand. Her dad loved the rosary, but Fran hated it. Till tonight. It was soothing, chanty, and she was in a better mood by the time her dad fell asleep, which was during the second decade of the sorrowful mysteries – honestly, what a load of tosh.

  She went to her old bedroom to get the bed ready for Vonny (who was the messiest person in the universe). The wall was still covered in posters of Kate Bush and The Proclaimers. Fran had been nuts about the Scottish duo at fifteen. It was liberating to realise there were other people out there with funny accents. Plus, The Proclaimers wore glasses and were twins, and twins were sexy, specially in glasses.

  There was a huge space in the middle of the wall where her favourite Proclaimers and Kate Bush posters had once been, the only remnants being sticky-tape marks. The room needed a paint. The whole house needed a paint, she thought, as she walked back down the hall, adding it to her ‘Household Maintenance’ list of things to do.

  Lights, gravel, The Captain was approaching. Fran checked herself in the bathroom mirror and opened the door.

  ‘She’s tipsy I’m afraid,’ said The Captain, who was holding Vonny upright with his arm, his daughter Rosie just keeping it together behind them.

  One day in this town and Vonny was pissed. Fran had never seen her in this state before.

  ‘Mum! We found a room. I’m so sorry, my poor mum.’ Vonny was talking gibberish – she’d found a room or a box or something.

  ‘Shh, now,’ Rosie said to her new friend, ‘let’s not talk about it till tomorrow, yeah, you and me? I’ll come over first thing. I’m sorry Mrs Collins, we had some wine. It was all my idea. Is that all right, if I come over in the morning?’

  ‘Sure.’ This time, she did not insist on being called Fran.

  ‘Maybe I could bring some tortilla,’ said The Captain.

  Rosie obviously didn’t want it to be a family affair, and huffed back out to the car.

  ‘Sorry about my daughter,’ said The Captain.

  Vonny, sprawled on the sofa, dry-retched loudly, and Fran thought it best to see her guests off. When she came back inside, Vonny had reached the spin and vomit stage. Hair-holding was required for a good hour.

  ‘Never again,’ said Vonny.

  ‘But it’s so fun for both of us,’ said Fran, as her daughter heaved into the gross toilet bowl. She wouldn’t even bother cleaning it. She’d buy and install a new one tomorrow. Remember to put it on the list, she said to herself, still holding her daughter’s matted hair. Buy new loo.

  Vonny wouldn’t let her take her shoes or jeans off. She was stubborn, even when paralytic, a word Fran shouldn’t use now there was an actual paralytic person in the house.

  She put a large bottle of water on the bedside table, a bucket beside the pillow, and began reading The Faraway Tree to her baby girl. The children had arrived in the Land of Topsy Turvy.

  ‘I want to go to the Land of Do What You Want,’ said Vonny, words fading.

  ‘Isn’t that the land you’re already in?’

  But Vonny had fallen asleep.

  Fran unlaced her daughter’s boots and put them on the window ledge. She hadn’t seen these ones before; she must have borrowed them from Rosie. They were cute, cherry red Doctor Martens.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Nine Days Before the Fire

  ROSIE

  I shouldn’t have bought these because they’re made of animal, but I had to. I love them. They work with everything I own. I am never taking them off and I will always be thankful to the animal.

  Doorbell. I’m busy, not gonna get it, someone else should get it, why is it always me who—?

  Someone got it.

  It’s decided: tonight I’m wearing the boots and this dress.

  The little girls are kicking off at the door. ‘Dad! DAD!’ I put an apron over my outfit and head up the hall.

  A woman is wielding a chainsaw at our door. She might rip the chord and kill me but I’m not scared about that, I’m scared about the girl she’s with, her daughter I am told; another teenage fish left flapping in this town, who I am expected to get and befriend. Her name’s Vonny and she’s texting right in front of me with all her beeps still on, so I can’t get away from the conversation she’s having with her city pals, but I can’t be part of it either. Thankfully her mother is wanting to drop the chainsaw and run.

  ‘Fran! Fran Collins! Is that you?’

  Dad knows the woman and is forcing fudge on her. Worse, he is forcing the daughter on me. He knows I know what he’s thinking – that she should come to the dance with me tonight. But I don’t want to babysit a girl who refuses to make eye contact with me – luckily, probably, because mine are angry. I try to stare Dad out, but he’s practised this a lot, and wins.

  The healthiest mint is in the veg garden at the end of Tragedy Track. I act as tour guide with the intention of repelling this Vonny girl. By the time I’m done, she won’t want to go to the Blue Light Disco when Dad suggests it, and will therefore not ruin my evening.

  ‘Granddad Brian had a heart attack in the old meat shed there,’ I say to her. ‘There are still hooks in the ceiling where he tried to make Dad slit throats. I’m the only one who goes in now. I’ve seen chains swinging, all by themselves. Twice I heard a man saying “help”.’ I ask her if she wants to go in, but she doesn’t and we walk on. ‘Dad’s older brother, Uncle Martin, was supposed to shoot his sheep in that paddock,’ I say. ‘Shot himself instead.’

  She’s tearing up. She’s overreacting. She didn’t know Dad’s brother.

  I’m sorry about Uncle Martin, of course, but not as sorry as I am about the sheep. They moved north before I found out moving north was a euphemism. I’m telling her all this for some reason.

  ‘There’s a photo in the Free Press of four enormous trucks of fluff driving up the main street. People came out of shops to watch them leave, some men had hats and they put them against their chests.’ Somewhere along the line she’s lit a joint and I’m partaking. She’s tricking me and it will not work.

  ‘Better get the mint to Dad,’ I say. We pick enough to last a year, and I up the pace down Tragedy Track. ‘My horse died up there.’ I point to McBean’s Hill, and something about this Vonny girl’s reaction causes me to get poetic: ‘I saw Dad on his tractor. His hat against a sky that’d be a shepherd’s delight most other places, red on a rolling hill. Something warmed me that hadn’t done since Mum … Then I saw the rope attached. It was loose at first, and it ended somewhere over the hill. I was thinking a café would be nice on the top of that hill, just where that thing’s coming from, when I realised Dad was dragging a dead horse. Mr McBean was heading north too.’

  She’s hugging me: ‘You must never walk on this track ever again – find another route, go anywhere else, go on any other track.’

  Back in the kitchen, something has changed. Vonny’s mother just snort-laughed and is mimicking Dad’s body language; one elbow on the table, legs crossed. My father is saying her name all the time – Fran, Francesca, Fran – and whatever happened between me and Vonny on Tragedy Track is eclipsed. Neither of us want our parents to flirt. We’re both mad now. I don’t want her to come to the dance, definitely not. And from Vonny’s expression, she would rather stab herself in the eye than do dress-ups with little old me.

  And yet, somehow, that’s exactly what we end up doing.

  I do have plenty of clothes, it’s true. I’ve been gathering them from Op Shops on my city trips – mending, making adjustments, upscaling, and selling them online. So far I’ve raised $215, most of it from Maz and Ciara, the only cool people in town. ‘I need another three hundred at least,�
� I say to Vonny, but I don’t tell her what for and she doesn’t ask (it’s for a decent sewing machine). I’ve only known her an hour but it’s already an on-off relationship.

  She doesn’t wear dresses, she tells me, so I take out the other boxes. She goes for a crop T-shirt with MILK KILLS written on it and says, ‘Would this work with my jeans?’

  Anything would work with her jeans.

  ‘How much?’

  If I charge her, we will just be friends. If I tell her the crop top is free, something might happen. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I say, and she kisses my cheek.

  ‘Oh my God, I know it’s wrong but I love those!’ She’s wanting my cherry-red Doctor Martens boots, which are SO not for sale. I can’t believe what I do – I tell her she can borrow them if she wants, even though I don’t want her to borrow them. I don’t want to ever take them off. She says, ‘That’d be great!’ and watches while I unlace them. It takes ages.

  ‘I’ll cherish them,’ she says, ‘and I’ll give them back at the end of the night.’

  They look better on her. I can’t stop staring at them. I’m thinking about the cow that was skinned to make them. I can almost hear it squeal. I’m starting to think my boots have been stolen as punishment. By this girl. I fall in love easily, and have done it again. Which is perhaps why I choose a shorter dress than the one I’d picked out earlier, pairing it with home-knitted socks and Blundstone boots. I’ve been so unhappy, I’ve managed to reach size eight, and I look eighteen at least. I’m so hot, I can’t imagine she thinks I’m not.

  We have two hours till the disco and I have no idea how to fill it in this embarrassment of a madhouse. Dad’s got classical music on – oh my God, Tchaikovsky – and the twins are harassing Vonny with questions they shouldn’t be asking.

  ‘My dad’s Koori,’ Vonny’s saying to the brats, ‘which means I am too.’ She’s being very kind to them. ‘Yeah, they say my gran was stolen but it was much worse than stolen. She was playing in the front garden when some men grabbed her and put her in a car. She never saw her family again.’

  The little girls are horrified, but distracted. ‘What’s the meanest thing anyone’s ever said to you?’ Harriet asks. ‘Bridget O’Connor said I was a cross-eyed bitch the week before my birthday.’

  Amy’s got a better one: ‘And Rosie said to me that I shouldn’t have children, and probably won’t get to anyway, cos Australia’s getting hotter and hotter and soon we’re gonna be un-hab-able, and also city slickers are killing all the koalas.’

  ‘Oh sweetheart,’ Vonny says, giving Amy a hug, and exchanging suppressed smiles with Rosie. ‘Um … it’s not the meanest thing, but I don’t like it when people ask how indigenous I am, like they want a percentage, or a certificate. No-one ever asks anyone else that. But actually I suppose I’d rather people asked stupid questions than didn’t, long as they hang round to listen to the answer.’

  Oh no, the little girls are about to ask a lot of stupid questions.

  ‘So you’re vegan?’ I say, desperate to change the subject.

  ‘I am, I’m vegan.’

  She’s giving me an odd look and I’m wondering if vegan is code. Hope so. I tell her ‘I’m not a very good one. The Docs … and I had bacon and eggs in the city last Friday. Been thinking about it ever since.’ The twins have gone for their tea, thankfully, and we are as dressed as we can be for the disco.

  ‘What have you got to drink?’ she says.

  Dad banned booze in the house after Uncle Martin. We decide to grab the dinghy from her shed, which she calls The Shed of the Dead, and to sneak up into her brother’s water tank. He hides weed in there. I have a stupid smile on my face and mustn’t get too excited. Vonny, I prefer Veronica, might be indigenous, vegan, and from the city – but this does not mean she’s into girls. We walk down Ryan’s Lane towards her brother’s house and I have my fingers crossed the whole entire time.

  Vonny’s brother is actually a half-brother and his dad is The Boarder. No-one likes to talk about The Boarder, including Dante, who’s never met him, and who we spot kneading dough in the window of his shack. He looks too old to be anyone I know’s half-brother, but Vonny assures me he is hers; borne out of a Blue Light Disco in 1989. ‘We should be careful tonight,’ she says.

  I am fifty-two percent certain she is flirting with me.

  Vonny found Dante’s weed by accident, she tells me. The ladder up to the open-topped water tank is wonky and I’d rather not go up it. ‘Throw it up,’ she says, referring to the dinghy.

  I toss up the lump of rubber and make a wish: Please let me lie in this rubber boat and smoke all night.

  We take our boots and socks off and rest them on the top rung of the ladder. They look sweet together up there. There’s only a foot of water in the tank and once we’ve inflated the dinghy we realise how much it stinks in here, weed mostly, but not entirely. Vonny’s reaching for the ledge halfway up, which has an Esky cooler on it – Dante’s stash. She rolls like an expert. We forget the smell for a while, and stare up at the circle of sky, which is a deep, getting-darker-every-second, blue. ‘I’d kill for rain,’ I say, and she turns my chin in order to kiss me.

  This water tank is the best place in the whole entire universe.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Day of the Fire

  Fran removed the beanie but she couldn’t see anything from the top of the monument, not at first. Smoke burned her eyes and caught her throat, made her double over coughing. She could hear horns and alarms and explosions and pop-pop-popping: gas bottles, she supposed. When it was safe to stand again, she saw that the smoke had cleared a little to the north-west and that something round was coming into view. Something tall. It was the water tank at Dante’s. She scrambled for a one-dollar coin in her backpack, put it in the telescope, and homed in. There was something on the top rung of the ladder. It was hard to focus because she was shaking, and the water tank was at least three hundred metres away, but there was something on the top rung of the ladder, something red. Boots, it was a pair of boots; with melted heels dripping onto the steps below.

  She ran down the spiral stairs, scraping and burning herself as she negotiated the tight bends through dense smoke. Vonny had those boots. She had them ten days ago, anyway. Fran had put them on the window sill in the bedroom. Had she seen them since? Yes, on Rosie, but they had swapped clothes again since then. Had they? Was Vonny wearing them this morning? What was Vonny wearing today?

  She kicked the huge door at the bottom, but it didn’t budge. Several kicks later, she gave up and made her way up to the lookout again, peering over to check the entrance. Something large was obstructing the main door below. It took Fran a while to work out what it was because it was on fire.

  An ostrich.

  Ronnie Corbett?

  Fran ran back down and pushed against the door with her back until it opened far enough for her to get out. She threw her blanket on his back, patted at the flames with her gloves, but it was too late. She wanted to cry over the bird’s body, because she’d grown up with Ronnie Corbett, but also because he had got out. How? Had the fence burned? Yes, she told herself, the fence must have burned. Not the house. Her dad could still be alive. She couldn’t breathe, and there was no time for crying. She did an involuntary sign of the cross for Ronnie Corbett and his unrequited love, Dame Miriam McDonald, who was faster than Ronnie. Maybe she’d made it.

  Poor Ronnie. His death deserved to smell worse than barbecue.

  She had to get to the water tank, which meant going back down the way she had come. From ground level, the Mountain Ash trees that lined the path were the only things visible in the thick black smoke. Ominous, giant burning devils, they were, trunks and limbs fizzing and spitting and firing their bark missiles. The town must have been named after a fire in the early days of colonisation, but Fran didn’t know the exact details, and neither did the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  The smoke would be opening their pods now, freeing their seeds. They were giving birth wh
ile everything else was dying. Destroy, Repair. Destroy, Repair.

  A huge tree cracked and began to fall. Fran scrambled back inside the monument as it bounced and settled across the path. It wasn’t safe outside, and there was no way she could get to the water tank the way she had come, via Ryan’s Lane.

  Back at the top of the lookout, the sky had cleared a little. She could see that the firestorm had cut a stripe through the town from the north-west to the south-east, as if a gigantic, fire-breathing bulldozer had ploughed through Ash Mountain, leaving nothing in its wake but thick smoke and demon-trees.

  She looked through the telescope again, but her time had run out and she couldn’t find another coin. She did a slow 360. There was a wriggly line of red-and-white lights extending well beyond the town in each direction. When one of the lights exploded, she realised she was looking at the old northern highway – North Road – crammed with evacuees, the closest of whom would surely be dead in their vehicles.

  The back of the fire was roaring off towards unsuspecting towns in the south-east. What were the names of those villages exactly: Comrie, Brown Creek? To the north, the western side of the main street was on fire: was that the supermarket? The eastern side of North Road – including The Red Lion and the London Emporium and Gallagher’s Bakery – was thus far unscathed. The wide main street, made for the hefty horse traffic between Melbourne and Sydney, had served the town again at last.

  To the north-west, Ryan’s Lane was still obscured by thick smoke, bar the water tank. It was clear now that the only way was if she ran down the eastern side of the hill, which was treeless, and circumnavigated the town, finding a route to Dante’s via the college playing fields. She’d also be able to check the convent hall, as per the original plan. It was at the foot of the main street, beside the oval, and looked like it might have escaped the fire. Fran was supposed to meet Vonny at the convent at 4.00. And the oval was the place of last resort if the community siren went off. ‘Please Vonny, be at the convent. Please be there, please be there,’ she chanted as she raced down the hill.