Currawalli Street

by Christopher Morgan

  ‘Does your brother know about this?’ Rose asks.

  Janet begins pulling at the foxglove she has picked. The petals float down to the ground. ‘Oh yes. He knows very well. I keep nothing from him. I imagine that my non-attendances at those dinner parties will eventually work the bishop into a frustrated fury. And then he will send Thomas somewhere far away as punishment. The bishop will blame me for the way he feels.’

  Kathleen thinks, how much further could far away be?

  Rose thinks of her vision, and of the grass next to the church.

  Looking out the window of number twelve, Nancy sees Rose chatting to Kathleen and the reverend’s sister and decides to join them. She walks across the street to Rose’s front fence, leans over and smiles at the three women. Each is happy to see her, in varying degrees.

  For Kathleen it is only a little, for although Nancy brings with her a sense of Britain that Kathleen has not otherwise been able to find this far away from London, she talks too much and too loudly about things that aren’t really important.

  Janet is a little more pleased to see her, because Nancy evokes a kind of earthy sensuality that isn’t common with the other women of the street. Except Maria. But if Janet is ever going to confess her adventures to anyone it will probably be Nancy, for she feels that Nancy will understand without needing an explanation whereas Maria will need one. And she sometimes thinks that Nancy already knows, which is a sort of comfort.

  Rose is the happiest at Nancy’s presence, because the Scottish woman knows how to allow life to throw itself at her and never loses her resolve in the face of it. It is good to have someone like that close by.

  ‘Will you come over for dinner tonight?’ Rose asks her.

  Nancy doesn’t have to consider for long. Eric is going down to Station Pier tonight to have dinner with an old friend of his whose ship is in port for only one day. He will spend the night on board. She accepts.

  ‘Good. These two are coming also.’

  Nancy promises to bring over a bottle of Eric’s apple brandy, as long as the other women agree to drink too much of it. After all, this will be their first dinner together. She claps the top rail of the fence with both hands and heads home with a sense of purpose. The things that she was going to do tonight will need to be done now instead.

  Janet takes her leave soon after. Kathleen walks around the garden with Rose for a while longer, without speaking. Both women are happy in the silence. When Kathleen turns out the front gate, Rose goes inside.

  That evening, after Thomas has ridden off down the street to have dinner with the bishop and his minions, armed with a plausible excuse for his sister’s absence, Janet closes the front door of the manse behind her and walks down to number nine. Kathleen is already sitting at the table, laughing at something Rose has said. By the time Nancy arrives with the brandy, Janet is laughing too. And that is the way most of the night goes.

  There is a freedom in the atmosphere, not because of the liberal drinking of the apple brandy but because there is no man there to pour it. Standing in the hallway beside the front door at the end of the night, they all agree men are to be banned from the following dinners. As they say goodnight, they all sense a change in the air. A man might dismiss it as a sudden sea breeze sprung up, but to these women it is something else. A twisting, of sorts. Alfred returns through the front gate but goes straight out to the stable and listens to the women’s receding footsteps.

  The next morning, Alfred walks slowly down Currawalli Street and along the little road to the store opposite the railway station and buys a copy of the daily newspaper. He is planning to scour it in case there is any news of his wagons but he doesn’t get past the front page before forgetting about them. Rather than returning straight home, he walks across the road, greets the stationmaster, sits down in the station waiting room and reads through the whole paper.

  He reads every article concerning the front-page story. War Ahead. Conflict Coming, says Prime Minister . . . Europe has gone quiet as if preparing herself . . . He is alarmed by what he reads. Previous news of the potential crisis in Europe has always stressed just that: its potential. This is the first time he has seen it presented as an inevitable event. And not just as a small ‘colonial’ type war but something bigger; something that might drag in the whole world. Even though Alfred is a mapmaker, the concept of the whole world is still unimaginable to him.

  And no politician in Europe seems to be talking anymore about a way to stop it from happening; they are now asking how its effects can be minimised. That is unnerving because it means an acceptance has already been reached that many people are going to die. Things like war seem such an easy thing for certain people to accept. Alfred turns the pages and reads more.

  Relationships between many countries in Europe are in tatters, the damage is irreparable and so a war beyond anything ever seen is going to occur. England is beating its chest loudly, confident that young men from all over the Empire will answer her call to arms. And that means Australia. That means Melbourne. That means Currawalli Street.

  Alfred folds the paper closed and puts it down on the seat next to him. He is old enough not to go but of course he will. Men of his experience in making maps will be needed. Rose won’t try to stop him.

  He leaves the paper on the seat at the railway station and walks home. His feet are suddenly heavy. He doesn’t know why. He wishes his wagons were home. Turning into Currawalli Street he can see the church at the opposite end. In front of the church is a manicured garden and beside it is a square of lawn. In the centre of the lawn is Rose, standing still and looking down the street towards him. He looks at her and, for a moment, remembers how far they have come together. She has said he’s become distant in recent years but that is the exact word he would use to describe her. He laughs to himself then walks along the street towards her. He calls out a greeting but still she doesn’t respond. It is only when he is a few steps away that she seems to emerge from her oblivious state and see him. She smiles.

  He smiles back and says, ‘You look good standing there. Very pretty. Standing still like a statue.’ He knows how to lift Rose out of these black holes she falls into.

  ‘There will be a statue here. It will be put here soon.’

  ‘And who will it be of? The mayor? The bishop? The prime minister? Me?’ He stops laughing when he sees the effect his words have on her. She has stopped smiling. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I hope it’s not of you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just don’t know. That’s the thing, Fred. I just don’t know.’

  ‘Let’s go home and have a cup of tea. I should have made you one before I went out. I don’t do that for you these days. I don’t know why. I’m sorry. I only wanted to get the paper. I forgot to bring it home, after all that.’

  ‘A cup of tea would be good. Let’s go home. I wish Elizabeth was back,’ says Rose, already tired.

  ‘So do I. So do I.’

  Eric Dunold walks jauntily home from the railway station. He always feels good after sleeping onboard a ship. The rhythm of a ship tied to a wharf sends him into different type of sleep, different from on land and different from at sea. It has been good to see Jacob. Last time they ran into each other, they were both rushing to leave Hong Kong harbour and neither could spare any time for real conversation. So last night they talked into the small hours and then started again when they awoke. The train left from a platform opposite the wharf and the smoke from the steam engine mixed with the smoke from Jacob’s ship as it manoeuvred away from the wharf to begin its journey back to Portsmouth. Eric hadn’t bothered waving from the window at first; he assumed that Jacob would be concentrating on the logistics of leaving the harbour and wouldn’t be looking at a train steaming off into the distance. But then he saw a capped figure emerge from the door on the side of the bridge and raise his hand, and he leaned o
ut the carriage window and did the same thing in return.

  And as he walks into Currawalli Street, he sees Alfred and Rose Covey standing together in front of the church. As they begin to walk away from the church towards him, he raises his arm again in a half-wave. Alfred waves back.

  Eric doesn’t know Alfred that well yet; shore life is not like being on a ship where friendships are forged very quickly. On land it is different; everything gets soaked up by the earth or blown away by the bushfire wind and friendships are slow to grow. But Eric has seen Alfred’s maps and they are clearly made by a man who knows the mechanics of travel, even though land maps to Eric have always seemed crowded, overblown, and overly detailed. However, one of the reliable ways to judge a man, besides whether he can pack a bag and sit still on a journey, is whether he knows the workings of a map.

  Nancy opens the door when she hears his footsteps on the front porch. She embraces him long and hard as if he has returned from sea. He comments aloud on this and she pulls back and looks at him.

  ‘You silly man. It is because you are not coming home from sea that I hug you so. It makes sense, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it does. Perfect sense. What shall we do today, my sweet? Anything you desire.’

  Nancy thinks for a moment. ‘Well. I do believe I would like to spend the rest of the morning lying in your arms in our bed, and then I would like to go into the city and have lunch at the Savoy Hotel.’

  ‘I can do all of that.’

  That is how they spend the morning. Eric thinks that there are two kinds of light that a woman’s body looks best in: candlelight and morning light. Through the open window, they can smell distant smoke. A bushfire somewhere miles away.

  Johnny Oatley watches his horse sniff the air. He knows what it means. He looks for a gap in the trees by the side of the road, and when he finds one he steers the horse off, lets her wander away through the bracken. Then he looks ahead to the horizon and sees a line of smoke. Bushfire.

  It is his second day on this track and he is well into the rhythm of travel. His mind works better in a setting like this. He watches the smoke for five minutes to see how quickly it is being lifted away from the flames and whether there is any irregular movement. He decides to continue, knowing that he will have to be alert from now on. Many times he has seen a bushfire at this distance; the first time was when he and his father sat on the big hill above their home and watched a line of fire eat its way through the scrub; he stood with local Aboriginals and watched another, knowing he wouldn’t have to retreat until they did. He and bushfires aren’t strangers. The fire is about twenty miles away but the tiniest change in the wind direction or speed can amplify a fire’s passage and alter its path in seconds. Fire has a mind of its own: that’s what his father told him on that hilltop. People of that generation knew it was best to stay away from these fires. They could never be tethered or fenced in or cut down or controlled.

  He is glad now that Kathleen hasn’t accompanied him. He doesn’t want her to see him frightened. Of all the things in the bush, it is bushfire that scares him the most. You can sense what a wild horse or an angry snake will do. You can estimate how much water is around when you’re going to need a drink under a relentless sun. You can see where the high spots are when a flood is coming. But the only thing you can know for certain about a bushfire is that it will burn. You can’t tell where, or for how long, or at what speed. But you can be sure that it will be absolute and without mercy.

  Suddenly he sees a carriage travelling quickly along the track towards him. It is pulled by two horses and another two riders are behind it. Johnny doesn’t like this. Even from a distance, he can see that they are fleeing something. He decides to go no further and wait to hear their story.

  The retreating group is upon him in a few minutes. He lifts his hat to them. The carriage, loaded with furniture, is being driven by a woman in her forties with a child on either side. The pair on horseback, an older man in his fifties and a youth, ride over to the gap in the trees at the side of the road to look back at the smoke before turning their attention to Johnny.

  ‘The fire’s coming,’ the older man says. He waves the carriage and the boy on and they continue up the track.

  ‘It doesn’t look too fast.’

  ‘We have been travelling for two days now. This is the furthest it has been behind us. It burned through our land and has been chasing us ever since.’

  ‘Maybe it will burn itself out soon,’ says Johnny.

  ‘You would think so. There’s a railway line up the track, is there not?’

  ‘It’s at least a day away, probably two with a carriage.’

  ‘I know. It can’t be helped. We can’t go in any other direction. We’re going to leave the carriage behind and catch a train to the city. I’m not confident that this fire will burn itself out.’

  The man looks exhausted and frightened. He knows and Johnny knows that there is nothing that any human can do to help. A bushfire answers to no one’s logic. It burns down cathedrals and orphanages as readily as brothels and sly grog shanties.

  It is not the first time that Johnny has heard of a bushfire chasing a person or a group of people. It is a tale of horror that he remembers being told around the kitchen table at the farm. Then, when Johnny was a boy, his father took him in the middle of the night to a lonely crossroads in the deep blue-gum forest. They travelled for two hours to get there and stopped in the undergrowth back from the road. Johnny smelled smoke. It was summer. The horses were uneasy. Suddenly there was the sound of hooves on the road coming quickly towards them. A rider tucked into his mount galloped past. Johnny glimpsed the look of terror on the rider and horse. The sweat from the horse glistened in the moonlight. Johnny and his father waited until the sound of the hooves had disappeared, then they wheeled about and galloped in a diagonal direction back towards home. Johnny saw out of the corner of his eye the red glow that they were riding across the face of.

  They had ridden out of the path of the fire and slowed down. Still they did no talking until they had unhitched the gate to the house paddock.

  Johnny asked his father, ‘So who was that? He looked scared.’

  ‘That man was chosen by the fire. It is the worst thing that can happen to a human being. He has been riding for over a week. The fire is catching him. It will consume him.’

  ‘Could we not have helped him?’

  ‘No. There is nothing anybody can do. The fire has selected him and nothing is able to stand in its way. We could do nothing.’

  ‘Why did the fire pick him?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘No one knows why. Every man hopes it is never him. That man we saw tonight is a dead man.’

  ‘That’s why we went to see him?’

  Johnny’s father looked down at his boots before he spoke. It was something Johnny had never seen him do before. When he lifted his head, he looked fully into Johnny’s eyes. ‘We went because it is something, I hope, you will never forget all your life. You will remember the look on his face, the sound of the hooves, the smell of the smoke, the strange light. If you do forget, then I’m afraid your life is not worth living. Not that you will know.’

  For a few years, Johnny didn’t understand what his father meant by this. But when he did understand, it made the sort of sense that he had come to expect from a man who had seen the powerful drama of midnight thunderstorms brewing, the beauty of soft running rivers, the sudden excitement of hundreds of kangaroos hopping over the crest of a hill, the views of miles and miles of gum trees, as an unremarkable matter of course.

  His father added, ‘Of course, the horse will throw him soon. Its own survival instincts will take over from any control that man may have over it. The fire won’t come after it.’

  ‘Will it be alright?’

  ‘Yes, we’ll go and find it in a few days. It will be somewhere close, probably
down in the gully near where we were.’

  ‘How did you know that he would be riding along that road? How did you know that the fire would be chasing him?’ Johnny persisted.

  ‘I just knew. I don’t know how. You live in this land long enough, strange things start to come into your head. You’ll find that out,’ his father said quietly.

  Johnny sees again that man’s face from long ago as he watches the older rider talk to him now, eyes darting from side to side. They are not the furtive looks of a man expecting danger but the exhausted glances of a man expecting death. There is resignation in his voice, only a hint of it, but Johnny can tell that he has almost given up.

  Johnny asks, ‘Is the fire after you?’ Their horses move in a very subtle, fluid dance.

  The man looks at him, evidently finding some comfort in knowing that Johnny understands what is happening. ‘I don’t know for sure. We have been travelling as a group. I assume it is me because my horse has been growing tenser. Normally she is calm around fire. It could be my wife or one of the children but I don’t think so. They know nothing of this element of fire. My understanding is that a fire only ever comes after someone who is aware of what it is doing. But, who knows?’ He smiles grimly in the reddening light.

  Johnny leans forward. ‘Then you must keep travelling. I hope you reach the train line.’

  ‘I hope so too. I’ll put them on a train and then ride the other way. Maybe I will be able to find a fresh horse at the station. Hopefully the fire will follow me and not the train.’ He wheels his horse about and looks at the carriage that has thundered up the track ahead of him.

  ‘Good luck to you,’ Johnny says softly. The man nods even though he could not have heard the words. He and his horse are bathed in the red light of the distant fire. They disappear into the dust.

  Johnny quickly turns off the track and heads out across the line of flames that he can now see clearly in the distance. There are bushes and trees for a few miles but then he comes onto a sandy embankment that runs the same way he is headed. This is a riverbed, usually dry, that periodically fills with water and appears as if the river has been running strongly for years. He follows it past the skeletons of tree trunks and large rocks that look like the smooth skulls of giants. The line of flames is now behind him, headed away, and so he slows the horse to a walk.