“Which way did he go! He doesn’t know his way!”
“Bernie told him,” Todd explained. “Bernie told him, his place.”
“Which way, Todd? Which way did he go?”
“I didn’t see. Honest. I couldn’t stop him.”
“Did he go with Bernie?”
“Not likely!”
Where was he? They should have seen him. He knew his way to the store, nowhere else. Driving slowly, searching every small group of children, they turned back to the Cooper house where Harriet shook her head. “He’s not here. We haven’t seen him, have we Flo?”
“Could he have come in with your son?”
“Bernie’s in his room.”
“He came in alone,” Flo added. “Harriet gave him a plate of cakes and sent him off to his room.”
She hurried back to Fran and Todd, waiting in the Ute.
“I’ll bet they enjoyed that.” Fran jibed. “They’ve been waiting for trouble with Sean.”
Increasingly alarmed, she re-questioned Todd, “Are you absolutely sure he’s left school? He could still be there.”
“Sure I’m sure. He said he was going to find you.”
“Todd doesn’t make things up, Mrs McClure.”
“We’ll see,” she snapped. “Thanks for the help. I’ll get the bike and check out the school.”
“We’ll drive you.” Fran Marshall doggedly drove back to the school gate. “I’m sorry I can’t help more right now. Cathie’s waiting. Please – phone if there’s anything I can do.”
The school was locked, the building apparently empty. He could have fallen asleep again and been missed. She peered in through the uncurtained windows. The rooms were vacant and silent. She knocked on windows and doors, called out, shouted, hysteria threatening. He slept heavily; he could be there in some hidden nook. Unless Todd was telling the truth. His mother believed him. Where was he?
Gone to meet her. Wanting to surprise and please her and test himself, exactly as he would do. Knowing his way to town he would probably have started off all right, possibly presumed Mrs Cooper’s house to be somewhere between the school and the shopping centre and got lost in a side street. Or had he started off by waiting for Bernie and following him? That, too, would be in character.
Unless he’d gone straight to the shop. He knew where the shop was. But she couldn’t go there yet. Rory would be furious. Systematically, she pedalled through the burning grid of surfaced main streets and unsurfaced back lanes.
The sky was overcast, the dull bronze of the lowering sun threatening and the premonition of the dense air acute. He could be asleep somewhere. He’d be hot. He’d be tired. He’d be afraid. How safe was the township? Summer’s end tourists driving through. Harvest end’s labourers driving through. How safe…? ‘Holy Mother.’She must get to a telephone. John Lane would check the school building. First she must check the shop and face Rory.
“There you are, Mrs M!” Tom was behind the counter. “Looking for Sean? He’s in the office.”
Her heart stopped.
“Mummy!” Sean raced from the office. “Daddy wants you!”
Quailing, she entered the office.
“Where the hell have you been?” Rory was apoplectic. “Sean came in on his own. Where were you? Were you late?”
No way to protest. She’d scold Sean later, when his father wasn’t listening. He was safe. Obviously, when he hadn’t been able to find the Cooper house, he’d successfully found his way to the store from an unfamiliar direction. Resourceful and sensible. Well done. What else mattered? Her sanity mattered. They’d sort it out later.
The phone rang. Answering it, Rory thanked Fran Marshall for her concern, reported Sean’s safe arrival and thumped down the receiver.
Fran Marshall deserved better. “I met her at the meeting. She’s been very kind, Rory.”
Again, the phone rang. After listening, he stiffly replied, “You’re very kind, Mrs Cooper. There’s no cause for concern. My son is quite capable.”
Because she had to get away from him without more probing interrogation, she led Sean upstairs to the cramped attic. Divided into a small en suite with shower and toilet and bed sitting room, it was barely twelve foot square and had a low ceiling. Though mainly used for its en suite facilities, it had been an advantage to Rory after late night meetings.
She should have it out with Sean now. She couldn’t, not when Rory was still within earshot. Besides, she was too exhausted to strike the necessary balance between praise for resourcefulness and chastisement for sneaking out of school early. Instead, she rested in the single lounge chair while Sean happily played with his toy cars. Until, at five-thirty, Valda called, “See you tomorrow,” and Tom, “Goodnight all!”
Descending the stairs with Sean, she followed Rory from the shop. “We’ll be glad to get home. He’s been very patient.”
He walked to the car, unlocked it, watched her get in, lifted the bike into the boot, settled Sean in the back seat.
He took his place in the driver’s seat but did not start the motor. The sky was bronze, the air smoke-ridden and the searing stench of burnt bush intense.
“There’s a fire!”
“In the mountains. No need to worry.” Still he didn’t start the motor.
She wound up the window but the car was already full of bluehazed smoke and Sean was already coughing. Why was he waiting?
“We have to go! We have to get Sean out of the smoke.”
His mouth tightened. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”
“Please,” she begged. “Can’t we leave the questions till we’re home?”
He started the motor, engaged the gears, but his foot stayed on the brake. He was testing her. Why? What had she forgotten?
“Please, Rory. We have to go.”
“Suit yourself.” The car moved into the thin evening traffic.
Though the windows were closed, Sean’s coughing didn’t abate. She located Rory’s emergency water bottle in the glove box, passed it to the back seat. “Here, love. Keep drinking. We’ll be home soon.”
The car did not pick up speed.
“Please, Rory. He should be home.”
Slow…slow…
The car stopped. The rear door opened.
“Sorry, Dad.” Beth climbed in beside Sean. “The bus was late. There’s smoke everywhere.”
Beth! She’d forgotten Beth!
The car gathered speed, turned onto the highway. Erratic patches of dense sun-burnished smoke smothered the road ahead. Slowing, they turned into McKenzie’s Track.
“Look!” Beth screamed.
On the distant horizon, above the peaks, the bloody sky reflected unseen bushfire. Still confined to the mountains, the flames were not yet at the skinny forest and the vulnerable farms. But a rising wind was stirring the summer tees and the sun-dried pampas.
“Dad! Stop!”
He ploughed on. “It’s nowhere near us. We’ve got to get to the house.”
A police car shrilled past, a fire wagon followed.
“Please stop!” The wind was strengthening, shaking the car.
“We’ve got to get to the house.”
“Rory! Stop!”
“Daddy!” Sean jounced excitedly. “It’s a fire!”
“Shut up!” Beth was terrified.
Wind-blown ashes spattered the windscreen.
“Rory…please…it’s too dangerous.”
“Rubbish! We can get to the house. It’s cleared. The hoses are ready.”
“Take the children back first.”
He accelerated. “We’re coming through it.”
Roadside rubble bombarded the flying car.
Beth screamed.
“Rory! Stop!”
Slowing, he eased grimly forward.
A helmeted fireman, suddenly alighting from a parked fire truck, barred his way. “No further, Rory. It’s far too risky.”
“We have to get to the house!”
“Bloody hell, Rory! Turn
back!”
“I can help.” He climbed from the car. “Tess – get back to the shop.”
The fireman waved him through to the fire truck.
U-turning the Holden, she raced for Heatherfield.
“Where are we going to sleep?” Beth was very frightened.
“In the attic.”
“We can’t! The fire’s coming!”
Parking the car outside the store, she led the way to the attic where Rory kept supplies for his overnight stays. After turning on the radio, she scraped together a meal of cheese, butter, bread, tinned fruit salad and ice cream. Beth found a book to read, Sean happily played with his toy cars and she anxiously sat by the upstairs window and concentrated on the irregular bursts of local news. Fire had reached the broad plains, a farmhouse had been lost, some well-prepared locals had dug in, some were fleeing. Rain was on the way. Meanwhile constant lightning was wreaking havoc.
Several times she tried the telephone, but the line was inevitably busy. Sometimes joined by Beth, whose distress had not abated, she kept watch on the sky. Thankfully, the fiery glow and the jagged lightning remained reassuringly distant. The street was empty, the other shops unlit and the hooded streetlights eerie in the smoke-hazed silence.
By midnight, Sean and Beth, squeezed into Rory’s single bed, were finally asleep. An hour later, the phone rang. Ever since the fire had first broken out, Fran Marshall had been trying to make contact. The women and children were at the R. S. L hall. There were beds and food and company. She should be with them.
Waking Beth, she carried Sean, still sleeping, to the car and drove the half mile further down the road. Set back from the road the hall was brightly lit, its car park overflowing. Fran was waiting in the entrance hall. While Beth and Sean were ushered to a back room where beds had been made on the floor for the children, she joined the women preparing equipment and food in the main hall. No one asked if she needed to sleep. There’d be no sleep until the fire was beaten, the men were safe and their homes accessible.
For half a week, the men fought the rampaging fire, rested in brief rostered breaks and returned to the battle. The women made sandwiches and hot meals and hot drinks, fed the refugees in the hall, ferried food and drink out to the men, rested in brief rostered breaks and returned to their work. Each night the children slept uneasily in the back rooms, each day the older children helped their mothers and the younger children attended ad hoc school lessons in adjacent homes. At first fearing for Sean, she’d been reassured by Fran who, with the primary school teachers, was responsible for setting up and supervising the cluster of makeshift schools.
By the end of the week the fires were finally beaten. Two firemen suffering severe burns were in Roland hospital, seven farms had been wiped out and acres of grasslands, foothill scrub and mountain trees were black. Losses of farm animals and wildlife had been significant. Men, women and children were exhausted, but alive. Thanksgiving services, attended by believers and non-believers, were held in every church. Prayers were said for the recovery of the two firemen and for recovery from the fire’s devastation. And for the rains that were so desperately needed.
She and Rory had been extraordinarily fortunate. The timbers of the house were singed and the roof thick with wet ashes. Next time, and there’d surely be a next time, they might not be so lucky. How could they have been so blind? Reared in the high rain forests and accepting the constant threat of summer bush fire, they should have foreseen the different risks of the sunburned inland mountains and the vast stretches of sunburned pampas. They’d foolishly chosen isolation over the risk they’d been too desperate to acknowledge. No longer. The bleak view from their windows, darkened by childhood experience, was harrowing evidence that it would happen again. Next time luck might not be with them.
They put the house up for sale and started to transform the attic over the shop into a fully prepared emergency flat.
Chapter Ten
Four and a half years since the disastrous fires. The plains were winter green, burgeoning saplings and lush new undergrowth reviving the foothills. Life after death. Out of the ashes. Resurrection. Believe… The only light was from the dying coals in the tiny sitting room fireplace, the only sound from the blizzard howling outside.
Four and a half years since they’d put the house on the market and still no one was even tentatively interested. Four years since the renovations to the attic over the store had been completed. He stayed overnight often, late meetings and distant trips his excuse. Or reason. Who knew? He always planned ahead, unless things unpredicted caused a late change; and then of course there was a plan in place, then he telephoned to a planned schedule. No surprises. Tonight he’d be home, drink the single glass of port he now permitted himself and go to bed.
He remained a devoted Catholic. In another man, ‘things unpredicted’ could possibly be interpreted as ‘things secret’; affairs, or even a single significant affair. Who knew? Maybe Rory was enjoying a secret life. She didn’t know him, probably had never known him. Though times had changed and divorce was not the crime it once had been, maybe his adherence to church rules was ruling him. Simpler to confess regularly, repent appropriately and sin again than to overtly offend the church. Simpler? Or less challenging? He deserved better. Certainly, the promising young man she’d made her vows with in the high mountain church deserved better.
Sometimes, times like this desolate winter night when Sean was asleep and Beth was out, she pondered on how her absent husband really felt. A middle-aged man, predominantly solid and dependable and bland; a caring father, an aloof but fair husband. Though not always. Sometimes, disturbingly evident in a sudden brief flash of temper, a prolonged outburst against a defaulting customer and even once in a drunken-binge reaction to red tape frustrations, she glimpsed the nightmare man she feared. How did he really feel? Deep down, what was happening? What had happened? She didn’t know him.
In the same four years, Beth had made new friends and Sean had grown physically stronger. Happily oblivious, he’d attended school, survived punch-ups and failures, tolerated the accelerating antagonisms of his class companions and apparently remembered only the successes and the friendships. Especially his friendship with Todd Marshall. Overcoming the significant obstacle of the doddering old priest’s doubts, he’d also participated in the ritual first communion ceremony. Dressed in his Sunday best grey suit, white shirt and blue tie, the only differences between him and the other children had been physical. In everything else he’d been the same. His behaviour had been faultless, his reverence admirable.
Katherine and Monica, who’d travelled from Melbourne together and stayed overnight, were proud and happy and maudlin. As was his father. Witnessing Sean’s acceptance of the wafer and the wine had once been too impossible to begin to hope for, a celebration of faith impossible to comprehend. A celebration of faith? Did Sean have faith? Or was he, as possibly were most of his companions, formally accepting the gifts of a traditional coming of age prize?
Heresy! Heresy – and faith. She’d heard them, at odds, all her life. Maybe for some, unquestioning faith was possible. It hadn’t been for her; she was her father’s child – though she’d coveted the prizes, the beautiful white dress, the fine veil, the new shoes, the curled hair, the presents, the attention and the photo that was now in the precious family album. And she’d coveted the fine azure cloak that signified her to be a ‘Child of Mary’.
Mary, Mother of God. Mother and victim. Victim of man’s brutality to man. Victim at the foot of the cross, at the feet of her martyred son. ‘Hail Mary full of grace…Pray for me Blessed Mother. Pray for my child.’ At the first communion ceremony she’d compulsively threaded the beads of her rosary as she’d done all her life.
Who knew the mysteries of faith? Certainly not Sean, whose world was school and toys and television and music and friends and family and food. How could any child, especially Sean, make the improbable leap that faith demanded? He didn’t have to. He’d been born into it;
he’d heard no questions being asked, no doubts expressed. Surely, unless exclusively born into it, faith wasn’t possible.
‘Unless you become as a child…’ Sean was his father’s son. She didn’t know him, any more than she knew Rory. Both were private, their inner life a mystery – like father like son. As for Beth, like father like daughter. Stop thinking…
How could she? Her beloved sister was a cloistered nun, who could never be told the truth of her marriage. Fran Marshall was a treasured friend who, though she might guess part of it, could never be told the truth. Her mother…
Don’t scream! Sean will hear. No, Sean won’t hear. She’d hear.
Katherine’s death had been sudden. There’d been no protracted illness, no warning, no time to prepare. Katherine was invincible, had always been there, always been reliable, always – always Katherine. Complex. Unique. Monica’s telephone call had broken the news. She’d been unable to answer. Monica had waited on the dead telephone line until finally Beth had come home and rescued them.
While Rory had stayed home with Sean, she and Beth had travelled to the high mountain funeral where they’d sat with the polite strangers who’d once been family and friends. Most had asked about Rory, none about Sean. Her relations and Rory’s, hostile strangers who’d volubly disapproved their choice to keep Sean, had pecked her cheek, hugged Beth and mouthed pious platitudes. The old have to go she’ll be sadly missed she didn’t suffer thanks be to God amen.
Beth had cried and prayed.
Monica, her single ally, had tearfully comforted, ‘Death is our destiny, Tess. She’s with God.’
Her pious mother was with God – in heaven. Where was her father?
Don’t scream.
Though each day had been interminable and each night longer, the years had sped. Beth was in junior management at the Roland Bank; the store was busy and turning a profit; Sean had advanced to Grade 6 at Heatherfield Primary School and was happy.
By the faint light, she looked at her watch. The hour was late and the room chilling. The howling storm raged as erratically as a child’s tantrum. She reached for another log. The familiar sound of clinking glass from the kitchen alerted her. Rory was home and getting his nightcap before bed.
Autumn Music Page 14