Rain Birds

by Harriet McKnight

  About ten metres ahead of them, more emergency trucks and firefighters appeared out of the smoke, and the driver swung the four-wheel drive to a halt. The two men jumped out to speak to their colleagues, slamming the doors behind them.

  Earl. She recognised his wide shoulders and dark hair. She wanted so badly to get out, to talk to him. Some of the men were examining a map, all holding down a corner. She was struck by the thought that the map held the secrets of what was coming for them; the trajectory of the flames, the static water supplies of dams and swimming pools to direct the choppers to, the blueprint of everything that trembled in the balance.

  She sat in the back seat, the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles casting red and blue light across everything. From the car radio, there was the unending chatter of voices, layering one on top of another.

  Spot fires on Banksia Court – it’s getting pretty hot down here.

  Jesus Christ, where’s the road gone, mate?

  Darren and Bob ran back and jumped into the four-wheel drive.

  ‘You okay?’ Darren asked, and she nodded. ‘We need to get away from here.’

  Flames were starting to appear beyond the ridge – they had a clear run down through the desiccated bush towards the emergency vehicles and the town beyond. The sky was full of a low roar: the fire sucking the oxygen out.

  Suddenly there was a call on the radio.

  ‘Charlie One Zero,’ a woman’s voice cut in. ‘We’ve got a fire front ten metres away, it’s jumped Banksia Court and is getting into the house, over.’

  Pina recognised that voice.

  ‘That’s Tracey, ey,’ Darren said. ‘Cann River crew.’

  Tracey, Alan’s nurse. None of this seemed real.

  ‘Ok, what do you need?’ Bob asked.

  Nothing but crackle.

  ‘Charlie One Zero,’ Bob yelled. ‘Come in, Charlie One Zero.’

  ‘That didn’t sound good,’ Darren said next to him.

  Constantly the roar of the flames alongside them.

  ‘All units, we need a pumper at the junction of Banksia Court and Kathleen Drive,’ Bob commanded. ‘Fire front has moved into urban area; repeat, fire is impacting urban properties.’

  He dragged the wheel heavily and spun the four-wheel drive around and sped towards Banksia Court.

  ‘Charlie One Zero, coming to your position,’ Bob called into the white noise.

  Smoke curdled and pushed up against the windscreen. There were flashes of spot fires in amongst the trees at the road’s edge, creeping closer to the bitumen the further down Banksia Court they drove. Houses started to appear through the smoke. The streetlights were on; small domes of static, yellowed light through the smoke. They didn’t flicker the way a blaze did. Rivers of low flames rushed across the top of the road like grasping fingers, spilling onto the grass on the other side.

  Bob drove them straight through.

  The windows of the four-wheel drive did nothing to keep the heat out, so Pina slid down until she was lying behind the front seats; the windscreen was awash with embers being funnelled up the bonnet and over the roof of the car. Bob was radioing the head communication team overseeing all operations.

  ‘Dispatch, I’ve got numerous houses alight here. Red message for the house on the corner of Kathleen and Banksia. Dispatch, two houses alight. Dispatch, three houses alight.’

  She saw whole trunks of trees encased in flames, their outlines against the black smoke.

  ‘Dispatch, we’re on Banksia Court with an unoperational vehicle,’ Tracey’s voice yelled into the radio receiver. ‘The engine light is on, but we are stranded. I repeat, we are stranded.’

  Bob crunched the gearbox of their vehicle and drove right into a river of embers.

  ‘Where abouts are you, Charlie One Zero?’ Bob shouted.

  Then they spotted the fire truck. Bob braked hard.

  ‘Get in,’ he yelled.

  The door opened, and three firefighters started to climb in. Yellow jackets streaked with ash. Pina shuffled across to the far side of the seat.

  ‘Everyone in?’ Bob asked.

  The two male firefighters were speaking over the top of each other.

  ‘Is the tanker’s door open?’

  ‘The tanker’s fucked.’

  One whooped. ‘It’s enough to make you feel alive.’

  Tracey got in last, slammed the door and noticed her friend on the other side of the truck. ‘Pina!’

  ‘We picked her up from out Wallangamba way,’ Darren said as they sped back towards town.

  ‘Where’s Alan?’ Tracey asked, her eyes alight with worry.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She was overwhelmed with panic once again. Her voice shook, tears filled her eyes. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  Tracey reached her arm across the other two firefighters, took her hand and squeezed hard. ‘He’s bound to have been picked up by another crew. I’m sure that’s what’s happened.’

  They drove Pina to the Boney Point cricket oval, where Tracey walked her onto the grass. Everywhere there were people, hunched over, staring out at the flames beginning to lick the tops of the trees along the horizon.

  She saw Harley sitting on the grass with his grandmother and aunts and cousins. He’d never seemed so young; his swollen features were covered in ash. The state of his face was shocking; it was the first time she had seen him since he’d returned from hospital. His handsome cheeks were puffy and grazed; his eyes ringed purple.

  ‘Are you all here?’ she asked him.

  ‘We had to leave our dogs behind.’

  Lil was there, too, with her arms around one of the youngest kids.

  ‘Are you ok?’ she asked her friend, whose skin was sallow in the floodlights of the oval.

  ‘I just have this feeling that there’s nothing left, Pina,’ she said. ‘I think it’s all gone.’

  ‘Are you Peppina Marinelli?’ She felt someone touch her shoulder and turned to see a young policeman. ‘We’ve been looking for you – we found your husband.’

  ‘Is he alright?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was overcome with relief, tears streaming down her face.

  The policeman told her how a patrol car had found Alan on the roadside not too far from their house, just before everything became really dangerous. He’d suffered respiratory problems and minor burns.

  She felt the ground give out beneath her, sank to her knees and sobbed.

  Lil put her hands underneath her armpits and lifted her back up.

  The young officer was frowning at her exasperatedly. ‘There are plenty of others who haven’t been as lucky as you,’ he said. ‘Your husband will be fine.’

  They’d taken him to Bairnsdale Hospital with the first lot of ambulances before they closed the roads. He was safe, and away from the smoke and the flames.

  Suddenly it was all clear to her: it was over; she couldn’t care for him anymore. Everything had changed.

  ‘Come and get some water,’ Lil said, linking arms with her. She steered her into the pavilion where tubs of drinking water had been set up on the kitchenette’s bench. There were people sheltering in the change rooms at the far end, in the club’s offices; wherever they could find a place. There were cricket team photos all along the walls of the pavilion: years 1995 through to 2010.

  As Lil went to get her a cup of water, she walked towards Alan’s team’s photos. Once there, she traced his face with her fingers, watching him get older and older from one image to the next.

  39

  SHE AND TIM left the pavilion and sat on the cool grass of the oval. In the stark dawn, it was quiet. An ash-soft soundlessness. The wind had changed direction, and a gentle southerly had replaced the apocalyptic winds of the night before.

  Sometime in the early hours of the morning, the CFA had moved everyone inside the hall. Through the windows on one side, she had seen the eucalyptus trees that ringed the far boundary of the grounds aflame; their tall trunks wrapped in fire. Embers drifti
ng upwards like fireworks. Shadowed outlines of firefighters were silhouetted against the glowing backdrop. It was the closest the fire had come: about six hundred metres from where they were all sheltering.

  Tim had sought her out in the corner of the dark hall.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she told him again, and he’d said nothing, just patted her shoulder.

  Now, as morning broke, people staggered shakily past them and wandered around the oval. Lost souls. No one seemed able to speak. Smoke hung dense in the air; tree trunks nearby were still smouldering. She could see that the houses closest to the oval were gutted.

  ‘We made it through,’ Tim said, staring at the ground.

  A CFA representative was standing in the centre of the oval and announcing that the Murrungowar National Park and Gippsland State Reserve fires were now safely behind containment lines.

  She ran her fingers across the grass where they sat, thinking how unbelievable it was that it had stayed so green after the heat of the night before.

  At the edges of the oval, she could see the ambulances. The CFA had told them that paramedics would be doing health checks, concerned about smoke inhalation and other injuries.

  ‘We should go get checked out, Arianna,’ Tim said, nodding in that direction.

  She followed him across. Inside the ambulance, she was overwhelmed by exhaustion. Suddenly all she wanted to do was lie down and sleep. A female paramedic made her lift up her shirt at the back, placed the head of a stethoscope onto her skin and listened to her lungs.

  ‘You’re fine,’ she said.

  ‘How long do we need to stay here for?’ Tim was asking a firefighter standing beside the ambulance as she climbed out again.

  ‘The roads are still closed. We don’t know when they’ll reopen them. I suggest you just make yourselves comfy.’

  She walked away from the two men – wanted a little privacy. She took out her phone, held it to her ear, listened to the sound as it rang, the click before the ‘Hello?’

  ‘Caro,’ she whispered, and listened to her sister screaming her name down the line.

  It was afternoon by the time they were allowed to leave.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ Tim said.

  She didn’t argue with him. As they joined the steady stream of cars heading towards the highway, she was shocked by the decimation around them. On either side of the road were piles of twisted tin and dust where buildings once stood. Only two streets away from the oval, the firefighters were standing in ash up to their ankles.

  The Boney Point Hotel had collapsed in on itself: half the roof hanging like a lopsided, grotesque smile.

  It takes longer to fix something than it does to break it. She heard her mother’s voice in her head.

  ‘Shit,’ Tim said quietly.

  She stared out at the smoking town and couldn’t imagine how the Boney Point residents would go about rebuilding.

  ‘All our work,’ she said.

  He was silent for a while, then said, ‘It will be ok.’

  ‘How can it be?’

  ‘What I mean is the cockatoos will be ok. Animals are more adaptable than we give them credit for.’

  He kept talking, as they drove slowly; spoke to her of what would happen now, how they’d go back and see which cockatoos had escaped the flames. Quite often birds fled bushfires and returned to the area later. They’d retrieve any remaining, unburnt nesting boxes, and they’d build new ones, put them up in the casuarina grove those birds seemed to like. There were plenty of birdwatching groups around who’d be happy to get involved, who could help; they could do a community, volunteer-run monitoring program. Earl could send photos and updates to the university to let them know how the birds were doing. She was going to take some time off, right? Maybe she could apply for more funding, return later to see how the birds had progressed. Hell, if she wanted to, she could just head back and visit without the funding.

  She listened to his voice and wanted badly to believe him.

  But she knew what happened to animals during bushfires. Birds and bats falling out of the sky; wallabies found with their ears singed off; kangaroos blistering their feet on scalding-hot ground; wombats left without food turning skeletal; koalas with burnt lungs and throats unable to swallow.

  She shifted a little in the passenger seat. All night, inside the hall, her crotch had stung from the sweat and the smoke trapped in her clothes. The hair on her arms prickled.

  As they drove out of the smouldering town of Boney Point, she was chased by a thousand ghosts – their voices unintelligible above the air-conditioner’s hum. She listened to them fade away as the four-wheel drive picked up speed once they were through the road blocks and wondered if they’d ever rest.

  It was Tracey who came to break the news to her: she wasn’t allowed to return home.

  ‘How bad is it?’ she asked.

  Tracey pulled a face. ‘Pina, it’s bad.’

  So instead Lil drove her back to stay at her house, which had survived. As they passed through Boney Point it looked as if it had been at the centre of a bomb blast. On the car radio, police announced an initial estimate of three fatalities.

  ‘Let’s hope it’s no more than that,’ Lil said as she stopped her truck in her driveway.

  She’d been told that Lil’s place had come through unscathed but, after the annihilation of the rest of Boney Point, the house seemed shockingly upright. Once inside, everything smelt of smoke; stale and gritty.

  ‘I’ll put you in the single bed in the spare room, if that’s ok,’ Lil said to her.

  ‘Any kind of bed is a step up from the couch,’ she replied, trying to make light of it all. In fact, now she didn’t even have a couch left to sleep on.

  She took a shower but still couldn’t get the scent of fire from her skin. Then she slept.

  The next day, Lil drove her to Bairnsdale Hospital. Alan was lying in a narrow bed with his legs straight out in front of him; even beneath the hospital blankets, she could see his toes were pointed like a ballet dancer’s. He was propped up with pillows behind his back, hands clasped over his belly, watching the staff move around the ward warily.

  He looks so small. Fragile.

  ‘Your husband has first-degree burns to his forearm,’ the doctor told her as they both stood next to his bed, ‘and some respiratory issues that we’re monitoring. Other than that, he’s fine.’

  ‘Burns?’

  ‘They’re nothing to worry about. Comparable to sunburn. You’ll notice some redness on the epidermis.’

  There was a nurses’ station a couple of metres to the right of Alan’s bed, back towards the entrance to the ward. A small television was positioned behind it. On the news, police were now confirming there had been five fatalities. Unimaginable. Boney Point was such a small town; she was bound to know the victims.

  She sat down in the chair beside Alan’s bed, but he didn’t turn his head. She put her hand on top of his folded hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Have you come to take me out of here? These people are up to something, but I haven’t figured out what yet.’

  ‘I can’t today. But soon.’

  At the end of visiting hours, it was easier than she expected to leave him behind.

  It was three days before she was allowed to go and visit her property. Earl and Harley came over to Lil’s to pick her up. Lil was going to stay behind – Toongabbie had suffered smoke damage and lots of nursery stock had been lost; Lil was already trying to sort her insurance out. Pina realised she’d have to start getting her own affairs in order, too; Alan would be discharged from hospital soon. Where would she take him? It’s over.

  As she got into Earl’s car, she saw him take Lil’s hand and hold it for a second; saw the look that passed between them, how gentle they were with each other.

  ‘Gross,’ said Harley, sitting in the back seat, following her line of sight.

  ‘Shut up,’ she told him, smiling.

  At the house, the air was sti
ll blue-tinged and hazy with lingering smoke. Everything was destroyed: fence posts burnt to the ground, wire singed, the roof collapsed and lying on the pile of charred wood where the walls should have been. Twisted, blackened fingers of trees reached up to scratch the grey sky.

  She got out of the car alone and stood in the ashes of the lawn and stared at the cremated house. Walked past the body of their ute on the verge, buckled and twisted in the ash, tyres melted. The driveway gate was still standing, the chain and charred padlock still linked around the post.

  She walked the perimeter of the now-vanished verandah. She’d seen this kind of footage on the news, when other fires had affected other places and other people. The pacing in the dust, the turning over of burnt materials to discover partly destroyed treasures beneath. The grey-coloured landscape. But what the TV didn’t convey was the acrid smell of burnt rubber and tin.

  She stood there and considered the disappearance of the last thirty years. All gone.

  To her left, she spotted Harley loping around the collapsed tin of the shed. She started moving again, put her hands on the blackened posts of the fence, traced the garden path, turned over nails and wire with her feet. Nothing, no treasures.

  She came to an edge in the dust, a line between what was burnt and what was saved. The casuarina grove. It stood there, untouched. Silver-blue needles shimmering – not even an ember spot on the trunks. The bone-dry, fire-fuel needles that littered the ground below lay unburnt. Beyond the grove, she could see glimpses of green, of scrawly ferns.

  She turned and gazed back at where her house had been. The ash and the dust. She lifted her face upwards, closed her eyes. A cool breeze washed over her and feather-light rain began to mist her face.

  She replayed what she’d heard on the car radio on the way over: police now confirming seven fatalities, over sixty-five properties lost with estimates of two thousand livestock dead and untold numbers of native animals. Unimaginable.