‘First, his speech will become limited to only a few words, until all intelligible speech is essentially lost. He will become doubly incontinent, both urine and faeces. He will lose the ability to walk independently and without assistance. You will have to help him move everywhere. Then he’ll become a dead weight and not be able to move at all. He will begin to fall over when seated unless he has armrests; you may need to start strapping him into chairs.
‘Next he’ll lose the ability to smile. Instead, he’ll grimace at you and you’ll think he’s constantly in pain. Finally, he won’t be able to hold his head up without assistance. His body will become rigid. His hands will curl over into claws; his joints will contract. It will look very painful to you. From time to time he will make noises that make him seem in agony and you won’t be able to help because he won’t be responding to anything. He’ll start to exhibit the developmental reflexes that are present in infants. Sucking and grasping movements. He’ll stop opening his eyes.’
Doctor Nash shifted a little in her chair. ‘In the end, most Alzheimer’s patients succumb to something other than Alzheimer’s: a stroke, pneumonia. Ultimately, though, he’ll die and it will be an ugly death. To be brutally honest, it’s not an experience I would wish on anyone.’
Pina became aware that she was still nodding.
Nod, nod, nod.
It wasn’t until they’d driven back through Boney Point and were on the road home that she heard the radio announcer say authorities had issued new alerts in regards to the bushfire situation. The danger had increased due to higher than projected temperatures, strong winds gusting up to sixty kilometres an hour, combined with the parched foliage from weeks without rain.
The spot fires at the Sol Petroleum site had spread into the Murrungowar National Park and were so far contained, but firefighting units were under pressure. Roads were still open, but Boney Point residents were being told to prepare for the worst and to activate their bushfire plans.
She nudged the accelerator so that the ute sat just above the speed limit. She needed to get home, collect their belongings, prepare the house against fire.
Coming down Wallangamba Road, not more than five minutes from home, they passed a dirt-streaked four-wheel drive heading the other way. It was going fast, too fast, but she caught a glimpse of the bare, hairless head of the driver.
That girl is a disaster.
As they arrived home, she noticed a cloud of smoke hanging over the treetops in the distance. She parked on the verge just outside the front gate, rather than attempting to park in the driveway. If there was a fire danger, she wanted to keep their means of escape as accessible as possible. When she got out of the car, the air made her cough. She opened Alan’s door, pushed her arm behind his back to raise him up and took most of his weight as they walked towards the front door. He whistled right in her ear.
‘Cut it out,’ she said.
‘I can’t turn it off,’ he said, scratching at his ears with both hands.
‘Can’t turn what off?’
‘The … you know, the … sounds.’
She could feel the muscles in her back straining as she held him up at the front door while she dug in her bag for her keys. That’s when she saw it: a package lying on the mat. How strange. She wasn’t expecting anything. The cockatoos screeched their alarm.
On her way back to camp, Arianna drove recklessly through the thick brush, the tips of twigs scraping the flanks of the car. The fingertips of one hand skittered over her bald skull bones. The air-conditioner hissed – rushing and tumbling cold noise around her ears. The sun was low and orange, aflame through the trees; the air a blue haze.
She could smell the smoke leaking in through the aircon, but ignored it and focused on the road in front of her. Her phone was ringing in the glove box where she’d stashed it.
Suddenly, a horn sounded – louder than her own thoughts. A fire truck, a blur of red and whirling light, was hurtling down the service road behind her. Almost too big to fit between the trees either side of it. She stared at it in the rear-view mirror. The horn again, screaming. She turned the nose of the Land Cruiser sharply into the scrub and felt the car rock from side to side as the truck passed by.
‘Fucking arsehole,’ she yelled. Her fingers were stuck to the steering wheel, her heart up in her throat.
About fifty metres down the road, the truck slid to a stop. Two men got out, dressed in yellow Country Fire Authority protective suits, and one marched back towards her. He looked like fury and violence.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ she said, lowering her window as he drew close. ‘You ran me off the road.’
‘What am I doing? What are you doing?’ he shouted at her. ‘Haven’t you seen the emergency vehicles? There’s a goddamn fucking fire.’
‘It’s still miles away,’ she said.
Her phone was ringing again – she could hear its muffled tones. Ring, ring, ring, ring.
‘It’s not miles away,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you been listening to the radio? They’re evacuating everyone. You have to get out of here.’
She noticed the roar of the wind outside the car now; could hear the whispers from the bush. ‘I can’t,’ she said.
The firefighter stared at her. ‘This is a forced evacuation zone. You don’t have a choice.’
‘I can’t leave.’
He leant through the window. ‘Listen, lady, we have thousands of hectares of parched scrub and eucalyptus forests between here and the blaze. Winds are at thirty-three knots, coming this way. You need to turn the fuck around and get back to town.’
She felt paralysed. She thought of the nesting boxes nailed to the heavy trunks of the gums. There would be no chance of getting the cockatoos back to their nesting area if all the nests were gone.
‘What are you waiting for?’ the firefighter shouted as he strode back to his truck and swung himself up into the passenger seat.
With shaking hands, she put the Land Cruiser into reverse and slowly performed a U-turn.
37
SHE’D MANAGED TO get Alan inside, past the corpses left at the front door, but now he stood in the lounge room wailing, his bottom lip trembling, his eyes wild. She was shaking from the horror, the violation. Those milky eyeballs, the feathers floating in liquid. But she needed to go outside and prepare the house against the potential bushfire.
‘Stay in here,’ she told him, as he continued whimpering like an injured cat.
She went through the kitchen and out the back door, shutting it behind her and testing it to make sure the latch had clicked.
How dare she? That’s all she could think about. How dare she?
She started picking up fallen sticks and leaves from the lawn and tried to fling them over the fence, but they were too light and blew back towards her in the fierce gusty wind.
The fucking bitch. Leaving those things on her doorstep, laying her problems at Pina’s feet. How much more was she going to be expected to give? Her husband, her life – wasn’t it enough?
She walked down the side of the house carrying a shovel, slid it under the birds’ bodies and slowly carried them to the back garden, where she threw them over the fence and into the bush, still inside the zip-lock bags. The rotting eyeballs, the liquid slushing around their feathers.
They landed in the thick layer of fallen casuarina needles. Deathbed. It was impossible for her to explain the rage she felt, that had been cracked open inside her.
But there was something else there, too. Relief. This new emotion had become a sort of reprieve from the last couple of years. The guilt, the resentment, the nothingness, the deadening grief, the unending mess of it all. Rage was new: it was sharp, and it was fresh.
I tell you this. I want it all to hurt.
She couldn’t remember where that line was from, but it felt like a part of her.
I tell you this. I want it all to hurt.
She did want it to hurt. She was tired of feeling nothing but guilt. She was tired of be
ing made to hate her husband while also grieving him. Because she hated him. Oh, she hated him. What he’d become. What he’d made her become as well.
I tell you this. I want it all to hurt.
Because hurting was better than where she was now, which was in a fucking dark, lonely hole.
She turned on the garden hose and tugged it around one side of the house, then the other, spraying the weatherboards with water and drenching the roof against floating embers. She hooked it into the sprinkler and left it running against the back of the house. The smoke was much thicker now; the haze made it difficult to see further than a few hundred metres into the bush. She ran back to the fence for the shovel she’d left there after tossing the bird corpses over, tried to pry up some of the drier grasses down the left-hand boundary line beside the shed, carted them out the front gate and right over to the opposite side of the road. They were the kind of flammable material that could really spell doom for a place if left too close to timber.
She propped the gate open with a rock as she went back through in case she needed to carry more stuff across. Before she returned to her tasks, she stared for a moment down the road and out into the bush. There was a strange stillness, despite the buffeting winds. There was little movement from animals or birds. She returned quickly to her back garden and glanced up into the casuarina. No cockatoos. They’d fled already. Gone. She leant her body into the shovel handle and thought the fury and the panic might make her faint.
As she drove back into Boney Point, Arianna noticed how the haze lay heavily above the tree line. Off in the distance, a huge column of smoke billowed up. She couldn’t even see the sun anymore; it was darker than dusk. The only real light came from the flashing emergency vehicles that were stationed at all the intersections, and that rushed past her now and again, headed towards the forest.
There was a traffic jam once she reached the main street. Cars lined up, full of anxious faces, belongings piled high around them and in car boots. At one junction, a policewoman was directing traffic to the left with a LED torch.
She pressed the button in her armrest to let her window down and immediately felt her eyes sting in the smog. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Roads are closed. You all have to move to the cricket ground. That’s the evacuation point.’
She raised her window up and followed the cars in front.
The cricket oval was surrounded by vehicles. People were piling out, carrying blankets, toys, pets and bags, heading either for the open expanse of grass or the pavilion.
She parked the Land Cruiser and walked onto the oval, drifted through the groups of people, saw that some were crying.
‘You right, love?’ A stout, older lady stood in front of her, holding a large container of water in one hand and a tower of plastic cups in the other. It was the woman who’d assisted them with data collection that day, one of the birdwatchers. The one who’d spotted the cockatoo hitting its head against a tree branch.
‘Yeah, fine, thanks.’
‘You’re the cockatoo girl, aren’t you?’ the woman said, staring at her head.
She realised she’d left her cap in the Land Cruiser – reflexively put a hand up to touch her scalp.
‘You want some water?’ the woman asked. ‘We all have to keep our fluids up and just wait it out.’
She nodded and took a cup, and let the woman pour the liquid in to it.
‘Here,’ the older woman said, setting her container down and tugging a bandana from around her neck. ‘You’re going to need something on that head of yours.’
The bandana was gritty and stiff between her fingers. She went to say thanks, but the woman had already moved off into the crowd, handing out cups. She tied the bandana around her head.
Families were huddled together, kids clutching at their parents. Some people had their dogs, one woman had a tiny kitten tucked into her shirt. Over on one side of the oval, she saw a group of firefighters standing together and staring out towards the gum forest.
She spotted Tim amongst them and called out his name. He turned and, for a moment, didn’t seem to recognise her but then rushed towards her.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he yelled before he’d even reached her. ‘Where were you all night?’
‘I needed some time to think,’ she stammered.
‘Are you kidding?’ he roared like an enraged beast. ‘That is the lamest bloody excuse I’ve ever heard. Didn’t you hear about the evacuation order? You abandoned me at camp with no vehicle. I had to call the CFA to pick me up.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I had to leave all the equipment out there. It’s probably all gone. I grabbed the hard drive but nothing else.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.
He rubbed a hand across his eyes. ‘I just … I can’t deal with you right now.’
He strode away from her and into the dark. She stood at the centre of the oval as the wind howled around them; felt the sting of the smoke in her eyes and throat.
On the other side of Boney Point, Pina came back inside the house to find Alan still in the lounge room, flapping his hands. His pants were slipping down on the right side from the heaviness of the cricket ball. She tugged them upwards roughly.
He yelped.
She stood in their house of thirty years and tried to decide which precious things to pack and take with them. All those times they’d asked each other: If we had to evacuate and you could only take one thing, what would it be? Useless now.
The phone rang.
A siren. An automated voice. Emergency! Emergency! The National Weather Service has issued a severe bushfire warning for the East Gippsland area. Fire moving towards the Boney Point township from a south-westerly direction is considered a severe bushfire. Evacuation to community safe zone is recommended.
She held the phone away from her ear as the siren and the voice repeated its message once more. She flung the receiver back in its cradle and went into the bedroom, snatched their overnight bags down from the wardrobe, threw in some clothes. Rushed back to the living room, to the bookshelf with the photo albums.
… and you could only take one thing.
The house felt strangely empty. She dropped the bags, went quickly to the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, looked out the windows. She ran laps of the house and then out into the back garden, checking every corner. Nothing.
She stumbled up the verandah steps into the house once more, running now to the front door. It stood wide open, along with the front gate beyond it. She’d failed to shut the curtain across the door behind her as she’d rushed Alan past the bird corpses earlier, and she’d left the front gate propped open after clearing the yard.
Gone.
‘Alan,’ she screamed into the smoke and the haze. ‘Alan!’
38
SHE STUMBLED ALONG the road, heading blindly into the strong winds, which were knocking the tops of the tall gums together, the trunks swaying as if they were saplings.
‘Alan!’ she screamed repeatedly, but her words were snatched from her mouth. Wind ripped at her hair, her clothes. There was something personal in its pull, something mean: the roar in her ears loud enough to dissolve thought.
A helicopter flew overhead, disappeared behind clouds then reappeared. Its low drone fading in and out of the wind’s roar. She tripped on the uneven grade of the road, landing hard on her palms and knees in the gravel. The thick smoke in her eyes and throat was worse than ever. Her husband’s name was a plea, a sob in her mouth. Alan, Alan.
She got back to her feet and kept going, made it all the way past Bruce Holloway’s hay paddocks, with their hulking bales like shadowed beasts in the haze. At the top of his driveway, the dog tree was ablaze, the flames tonguing up along the swaying corpses.
In the distance, she heard a sound like a freight train. Her exposed skin was already starting to feel the blister of heat. Each breath was agony; there was no oxygen. She stopped and stood in the middle of the road. Be
yond the spots around her that were already smouldering, a wall of flame reached above the tops of the furthest trees.
All she could think of was Alan gasping, his blistered and charred flesh.
Then flashing blue and red lights careened out of the haze towards her. A four-wheel drive with COUNTRY FIRE AUTHORITY emblazoned across the cab doors fishtailed to a stop close to her.
‘Get in,’ yelled a man from the passenger window.
She just stared at him.
‘Get in the bloody car,’ he shouted again.
But she couldn’t move her legs. He got out, luminous in his yellow firefighting gear, grabbed her right arm, and dragged her across the dirt and into the back seat. Slammed the door closed.
The first thing she noticed was the quiet: the wind’s roar was muted, replaced by the air-conditioner’s soothing whirr.
The driver spun the four-wheel drive around. She half lay on the back seat.
‘I’m Darren and this is Brigade Captain Bob Newman,’ the man in the passenger seat said. ‘You want water?’
‘Where’s my husband?’
The men looked at each other.
‘We haven’t seen anyone else on this road, sorry.’
‘I need to find him.’
A big eucalyptus tree to their right exploded, flames ripping up its side as if it were made from crepe paper.
‘Fuck,’ the driver yelled and swerved.
Grass fire on Wallangamba Road, west end, approx. 20.5 kilometres from town, over, blared the radio. Charlie One Zero, come in, copy.
They drove past the hay paddocks that lined the road towards town – the bales had all caught alight. She turned back to see flames in the bush behind them reaching higher than the tops of the trees. She could feel tears running down her cheeks; they prickled against her dirtied skin.
Dispatch, Dispatch, notify any unit that is in the Flechs Track area to evacuate immediately.
Waves of embers washed over the sides of the car. Burning pieces of bark cracked against the glass of the windows. She saw the shape of Alan’s body in the burning logs and shadows on the side of the road. What have I done?
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