by Alice Bishop
In the following months the wattles flowered, powdery and gold, more than ever—all around the small sections Theo had cleared. Wendy started to think about fire more often. When Theo came to the door after a day’s work, she saw ash in his eyelashes instead of the yellow powder that it really was. His shoulders and his grey hair were also covered in pollen. It started getting in with the washing and covering their sheets. Showering at night, Wendy noticed roots—as thin as daddy long legs’ limbs—growing down through the showerheads but, again, kept quiet. She hid her damaged clothes from Theo too—the collars of her folded shirts and the edges of her new silk scarves disintegrating over the weeks. Wendy had blamed moths at first, until late one night when she woke to see a scattering of silverfish, emerging through a fresh crack in the hallway floorboards.
Following the weather maps closely—the fire-danger risk, rain radars, UV levels—Theo began talking about the possibility of another bad fire season, and of Roundup, before starting to work later into the evenings. Wendy would sometimes have to scream his name at teatime, the echo of her voice sending dogs barking through the valley below. After they’d eaten, Wendy would count the minutes before Theo would put down his napkin and sigh. ‘Well, Wen,’ he’d say. ‘Time to get back into it.’ She would watch from the decking as Theo measured the newest saplings against his own height; she’d see his flattened hand against the wattle tips—his face creasing into a frown.
Wendy stopped wondering when others would come back to the ridge. The For Sale signs—constant reminders of the places where houses used to stand—slowly bleached and peeled. The council workers who Wendy had sometimes noticed about, picketing and photographing, seemed to disappear—the odd abandoned work glove or piece of orange twine the only evidence that they’d ever been there. Even Pam and Mirco’s Sunday visits petered out, replaced by a weekly phone call. Pam would ring Wendy for her pavlova recipe, or to talk about a forthcoming trip. Wendy stopped being able to keep up. Listening to travel itineraries and baby names, she would forget to gush in all the right places. ‘Are you okay, Wen?’ Pam would ask, her voice full of relief when Wendy assured her she was fine. Wendy would listen for what seemed like ages then, picking at the silt that had gathered under her uncut fingernails.
Sometimes Wendy would remember back to Theo’s promises of a huge housewarming, or house cooling, as he had once joked—with chicken skewers and Coronas—out among the tallest, blackest trees. She remembered making a mental guest list: old friends and work acquaintances, the neighbours who had escaped the fire, and the handful of family that the pair still had left. Theo had even said that they should take a photograph with everyone upon their arrival, to fill a new album—one to put up on the empty study shelf. Yet Theo’s days spent clearing got longer—sometimes eight, even nine hours—and Wendy knew the party idea had faded.
As the days got shorter again, Wendy grew more restless. She found herself driving out to the supermarket just to walk the well-lit aisles. She’d fill her basket with all the things she used to buy—beer for the weekend, frozen pasties, ice cream, butter—before realising that most of it would go to waste. All Theo could stomach these days seemed to be tinned baked beans, maybe his morning tea and toast. And as Wendy was the one who did most of the cooking, she’d begun to eat the same. Remembering this, Wendy would then push the brimming basket underneath the specials table on her way out of the shops, leaving empty-handed and more flustered than when she had walked in. The town had become foreign to her, most of the people they had known having long since moved to safer, neater parts of the world—the roads made from bitumen and the night sky purplish from petrol-station light.
Wendy woke up clammy that last morning—her face damp and the small of her back prickly with heat. It didn’t take her long to realise that Theo wasn’t beside her and he hadn’t been all night; there was no mug on his bedside table and the sheets beside her lay creaseless and cool. She left the bedroom to get a drink from the water filter, maybe a wet face washer for her chest. Walking down the hall she heard the dog whimpering in its sleep. The air was humid and thick, and Wendy thought she could smell mould, earthy and heavy. She stubbed her toe on the sideboard, the pang of pain waking her up enough to realise that Theo wasn’t in the house. She switched on the kitchen light. The new dog, roused by Wendy’s shuffling, followed her—first as she struggled with the sliding doors, then out into the night.
When Wendy went onto the patio for the cooler air she felt it—the wooden boards wet with condensation beneath her feet. Before she had made it to the tree line, she looked back to the lit kitchen and the terrariums, shiny in the night. Even from afar, she could see that the wattle tips had far outgrown the glass necks of the bottles. She noticed that young curls of fern fronds and bits of vine had appeared in the crack of the windows—that the expensive fire-resistant weatherboard shone too white and bright in the dark. Wendy thought about calling out to Theo as she tried to steady herself against the deck railing, but part of her already knew he wouldn’t hear—no matter how loud she yelled out through the thickening wall of trees.
‘Get inside,’ Wendy said, shooing the shaggy dog from its place at her feet—her voice hanging in the humid air about her, before disappearing into the night. She noticed pockets of shiny earwigs, milling about in the dents of the softening decking rails, eggs the colour and shape of tiny kidney beans too. The moon cast small patterns across the thick covering of grass below the house, making Wendy look up to see that the sky was almost invisible through branches and leaves.
It was then, standing still enough, that Wendy could almost hear the faint whine of the Stihl chainsaw, floating up from the valley below.
Float Glass
I try not to think about how it used to be, much. But it’s the time of year, again, when the bush outside is burning. Turn on the TV and you’ll see women huddled under faded fluorescent beach towels, along with footage of ash-cheeked kids getting brand-new-used bikes from the Red Cross tent. But that’s not our story: Dev, he had one hand on the wheel, and the other, white-knuckled, over my own. We stayed at my parents’ house that night, their faces pale with worry. It’ll be okay, my mother said, her head nodding like the kids were—already—part of some long-forgotten dream. It’ll all be okay, my mother said, and I remember the way her familiar face scrunched, afterwards—reflected back at me, in the fogged bathroom mirror, when she thought I couldn’t see.
Teeth
They had planned to celebrate her sixtieth at the blackened block and now here they were: their dirt-dusted Lexus backed up against the new wall of wattle and the warming champagne poured into two plastic flutes. Lindsay had made a Nigella almond flan for the return. She’d tried adding raspberries to the recipe but the frozen fruit had bled through the mixture in the rented oven, making the dessert fake-pink: the colour of musk sticks, of her beach-holiday lipstick.
‘Looks good enough to me, hon,’ Tesfey had said as he walked by the kitchen the day before, his height filling the door frame and his hair, still mostly dark, picking up morning light. Good enough: Lindsay had spent the last years of her fifties trying to realise this phrase. Now she had stopped searching for the perfect texture of mousse, stopped trying to achieve the right consistency of dinner-party-ready creme brulee: crackable with the tap of a teaspoon, maybe a forefinger. She had a reinforced understanding that everything was fleeting, haphazard; there was no point to stressing over every little thing. Lindsay’s hair, once straightened daily into a sharp-edged bob, now floated in wispy whorls about her face.
‘You can’t even tell the berries’re frozen, promise,’ Tesfey reassured her the morning they drove the long gravel road back to the block. He didn’t wait for Lindsay’s response before taking another bite of the crumbling flan. Closer to seventy, Tesfey liked to rest more than he used to. He was most at ease propped up against the car, one long arm hooked over the open door. Retired from his orthodontist practice, Tesfey often woke at night since the fires—from dreams of mix
ed-up dental records and melted gold crowns. Filmy from half-sleep, he’d walk through to the city en-suite bathroom, to check his own straight teeth in the mirror: a calcified glow in the dark.
The pair had paid all kinds of people too much money not to have to go back, at first: capped bulldozer drivers and straight-faced land surveyors, suited insurance officers and smiling claim assessors. Now, years on, Tesfey finally watched Lindsay walk towards the place where their house used to stand—how she held the unwrapped picnic rug under the bend of her soft white arm. He hadn’t wanted to feel the concrete base below his feet like she had; he had felt it that Sunday after the fires—the carpet of ash above it still smouldered, auburn, in patches.
Not small at all, Lindsay looked tiny to Tesfey below the stripped-back bush. He watched as she walked over the concrete pad in her crumpled cotton shirt and her espadrilles, standing beneath the blackened gums and looking up to the bony limbs of bald-barked trees. He remembered their first night in the temporary Carlton rental, how they’d sat in the bluestone courtyard under the city’s too-bright glow. ‘Where are all the stars?’ Lindsay had asked, her breath sharpened by Chivas, her face swelled up from the news. Tesfey had reached out to put his hand on Lindsay’s thigh, her white skin sometimes still a shock to him—even after all the years.
‘They’ll come back, Linds, honey,’ he said, voice soft against the murmur of Friday-night traffic. ‘We’ll make sure.’
Returning, Tesfey was reassured that the undergrowth had taken off, and that you couldn’t quite tell where their bedroom used to lie. He also liked that the heat-crumpled tin of the dog kennel was almost hidden by the same thick scrub they’d backed their car up into. Tesfey’s breath didn’t quicken when he thought about the old house now, about the years they spent there: the thirty of them had seemed to have stopped mattering anymore. He didn’t think of the photo albums—proving they were once young, always together—in the quiet of four a.m. Both the years and the albums had almost ceased ever to have existed: small anchor points of the past now ash.
It happened swiftly—the fire, years ago, and the decision to come back. Tesfey knew where they’d soon call home again, just by watching Lindsay pause, quietly, before going for a walk over the rise. He hadn’t seen her so relaxed in a long time, as she wandered about, glass of warm bubbles still in hand and left arm loose at her side—before disappearing out of sight for a time. Tesfey, not used to being alone much anymore, could suddenly feel the grittiness of raspberry seeds between his teeth. He thought about the weather report, about the northerly, those years ago, which had felt like the rush of air from a just-opened oven door. Lindsay’s familiar teeth, her silver fillings when she laughed: he thought about them too before he felt the chalkiness of his joints as he readjusted his weight. He bit his lower lip, pushed his toes into the ends of his unbroken RMs—distracting himself with a more regular kind of discomfort until she came back into range.
Lindsay came back over the slight rise with a length of bailing twine trailing behind her—flushed cheeks almost matching the swirly, freshly hennaed hair of her head. Tesfey didn’t ask her where she’d found the orange string. He stayed quiet as she strung up a little line between the charred husks of two eucalypt trunks. ‘For our clothes,’ she said, looking over to Tesfey while cupping the sun from her eyes. The smoky quartz of her Bülow-Hübe wedding ring—one of the only things left from before—caught the April light.
It was quiet except for the creak of leaning, fire-husked trees. Tesfey—for the first time in a long time—felt a little hope for the future: standing by the dusty new car, with the peaks of his prominent cheekbones also warming up in the midday sun. He thought about the remains of their greyhound, Ruhus—a charred nametag, maybe a collar buckle—bulldozed under familiar earth, about the powdery-pink calcium tablets Lindsay took diligently every morning now, about the floury enamel of her familiar front teeth.
‘What, we’re leaving the city—good Sunday-morning croissants, no floods or fires—for this mess?’ Tesfey said, smiling.
Lindsay looked up at the sky again. ‘Tesfey,’ she said.
‘Yeah, honey,’ he answered, noticing how beautiful she looked in the mountain light, her shoulders loose and the smile lines of her eyes returned.
‘I think it’s time to come home.’
Saltwater
I never thought I’d be the last-minute-holiday type, or that you’d find me alone, drinking duty-free vanilla vodka on a balcony overlooking aquamarine water: ocean the colour of the faux-turquoise jewellery we all used to wear when we were fourteen. I didn’t know about the burns-unit blur back then—about septic wounds and fluid resuscitation, about sooty septum checks and nasogastric tubes. I didn’t know about respiratory failures, or how burning flesh smells in hospital halls at night. Acetylcysteine: I didn’t know what that was, either.
There was a time I hadn’t heard about the bushfire roar, the thunder-like rumble that one of my patients talked about in her sleep (she also mumbled about the smoke turning things dark, then the heat). I read that it would’ve been like a huge kiln door opening. They say that most animals burned where they stood; that the fire came so quickly that all that was left was blackened statues. The article made me think of paddocks of cows, of the fences that’d held them in.
I guess when something like a bushfire’s all over the news—worst in history—people like to think they’re able to help, somehow. Self-care is so important, my good friend Mae had said, handing me a giant card caked in glitter, after it all—a return airfare inside, along with thousands of CFP francs. Friends whose names I’d almost forgotten had signed their distant well wishes: Sarah, Jess, Fatima, Uri and Dean—Dean Dawson, the first person to ever call me baby. I still wonder if that money should’ve gone somewhere else. I only got to know the fire through the aftermath: the smell of burnt-up skin and betadine.
Seat 22B flies me to Nouméa—just a couple of hours off the gaudy or golden (I can’t decide) Brisbane coast. I guess I like the island straight off, with its palm-lined town squares, tropical flowers and bright front-yard fences. I like how the coffee shops don’t have soy. All the people seem happier here, calmer.
Bonsoir, I say to the hotel receptionist, maybe a little too eagerly, on arrival—but that’s pretty much the extent of my leftover high-school French. Almost too pretty (the kind of pretty that makes you uneasy, you know), she wears a linen dress, yolk-yellow, and a frangipani behind her ear.
Bonsoir, madame. She smiles back—probably out of pity. I haven’t looked after myself since our ward got so busy, the busiest it’s ever been. Look at me: all puffy from vending-machine dinners and eleven-hour shifts. Madame: the salutation makes me feel embarrassed. Like I’m seen as a proper adult, a woman, and that I have no excuse to be wearing stretched Cotton On trackies.
Just the one set of keys, ma’am? The hotel receptionist smiles again, showing those clear braces that aren’t really see-through at all. I imagine her name is Danielle or Lorde or Francesca, and that she has a house she bought on her own, and a partner who runs her baths on the weekend, who loves the way she looks, always—even when she’s just woken up, mascara smudged into the pillow marks across her perfect cheek.
Oui, just me. I shrug and nod. Oui is one of the only other words I’ve held on to, apart from baguette. I can smell tinned tomatoes, maybe red soup; a microwave beeps from somewhere behind the desk.
Great, the receptionist says.
Yes, just me, I repeat—to be sure she understands.
Very warm, the woman replies, and before she shakes her head I—for just a moment—am unsure what she means. Very hot in Australia lately, she says. Climate change, fires. Very serious. Very worrying.
The microwave in the office beeps again.
Yes, merci, I say.
Enjoy your stay.
We were told that the radiant heat and smoke—if not shock—had killed most people as the bushfire hit, that the only cases we got would be either severe or minor: the
re was never much in between. The worst cases would die during transport, mostly. But even the ones that made it to the unit could be quite bad: Be prepared, we were told in hushed but stern voices by the unit manager and the nurses who’d been there a while.
Before my holiday leave was approved the other nurses in the unit had been distant; or maybe they were just tired, too. I’d got a shock when I caught my reflection in the gleaming hospital door—my hair was so dirty it looked damp and my dark roots had all grown out, but not in that fancy balayage way. Tiredness had made me grittier: my eyes cupped by big shadows and my scrubs almost a size too small, smeared with a muddy mark of makeup at the neck.
On my breaks I’d eaten too many muesli bars while reading cases about people dying near their soon-to-burn houses, the emergency warnings never reaching their phones. After the fires whole families had been found metres from their open-doored cars. I read about a woman got by carbon monoxide poisoning near her front-yard chair. ‘Local Teacher: Her Peaceful End’, one obit heading read.
Peaceful: that deceptive word was used a lot in our unit, especially when talking to families of the dead. I usually made sure there was a distraction between us and the jumpier types—a clipboard of nothing, an offering of lukewarm lattes in paper cups. People do unexpected things when grief finds them. It’s good to have a buffer, we were taught.
Topical antimicrobials, grafts and skin substitutes, sepsis treatments, mechanical ventilation and renal support—the ward lists of things to monitor went on. But you can’t do enough, really, when severe burns are involved. I’d read up on bad cases, sure, but you can’t imagine what happens to flesh in fires strong as two Hiroshima bombs. There are things, I reckon now, you can’t unsee. Things you can’t forget the smell of.