by Alice Bishop
Although Sadie had never liked to encourage the obsession, or the need for control, Dave had been committed to clearing ferals: Sambar deer, rabbits and sometimes Indian myna birds—yellow-beaked and yellow-clawed. He’d spent weekdays working as a ranger for Melbourne Water, checking Sugarloaf Dam fences: made to keep deer and foxes out, and kangaroos in. ‘Imagine how many beautiful little native marsupials could be running around, Sadie-Sade,’ she remembers him saying one night as she pulled a tray of once-frozen wedges from the oven.
‘Spotted quolls, even?’ Sadie smiled.
‘I reckon.’ Dave winked, reaching for the sweet chilli sauce.
The council possum trap shone with promise the first time Sadie drove over dusty gravel to see it: the glare of summer sun rising over the bushfire-scarred ridge. Dressed in her new overalls, her breath still smelling of sleep, Sadie felt her chest clench as she walked closer. Faded police tape flickered from the few remaining letterboxes, a dull reminder of the frenzy: the pink-faced men pushing her away. ‘Nothing to see here, love,’ one CFA worker had said that smoky morning, assuming Sadie was a journalist in her pleated bakery pants and shiny loafers. He wasn’t to know she’d slept in her clothes, in her car, or that her husband, or what he became, anyway, lay in the ruins behind him.
Sadie felt guilty when putting her thin fingers through silver to comfort the mewling animal—ginger, yes, but burr-matted, with a docked tail and no collar. ‘Think of all the antechinus, the sugar gliders,’ Dave might have said, if he were there—the twitch of his left temple fluttering more than ever. He would have made sure the hissing trapped cat would be beneath the earth by now: quickly becoming just fur, an unread microchip and a set of small pointy teeth. Sadie might have placed a token flower on top of the buried animal: a bit of wattle, some dogwood or agapanthus weed.
Dave had held a jar of water—the Vegemite label peeling—when he’d looked at Sadie, that last day. ‘She’ll be right,’ he’d said, seeing her off at the top of the freshly gravelled way. Sadie can’t remember if she looked back at him in the rear-view mirror, or if she waved, or even if she honked the horn like she sometimes did. The days before the fire were blurred at the edges; everything but Dave’s face appeared as if on old taped-over VHS. It was the moment Sadie held that handful of ash, those three silver-dotted molars, that the world was in too sharp a focus.
‘Just a feral,’ a woman at the front desk mumbled when Sadie turned up—ginger cat still caged—at the valley clinic: only open every other day. The vet wore a striped uniform shirt, with a badge that read Marcia pinned to her large chest. Sadie wondered if the woman had someone to sleep beside, someone who’d roll over to hold her at two a.m.—something like muscle memory in the night. ‘We’ll take care of this one for you,’ Marcia continued, adding something about how they’d seen an increase in feral cats after the fire. No one really knew why.
The trapped cat panted pink with stress as Sadie remembered Dave’s light gait, his love of David Attenborough, his growing catalogue of small-marsupial sightings. He’d once rescued a mouse-furred antechinus from the back step, feeding it teaspoons of crunchy peanut butter before it died, wrapped up in one of Sadie’s old T-shirts. Later, after reading up on the species online, Dave had announced that the animal was on its way out anyway—that all the males die in late winter, after mating. Sadie remembers the dull sadness she felt upon hearing this fact, or perhaps it was of guilt for not saving it, despite the odds.
‘No charge for depositing vermin,’ the red-nailed vet announced, picking up the cage—cat cowering inside—and walking towards a steel-silver back door. Sadie noticed the glossy pamphlets shining from the clinic walls, advertising vaccines for feline AIDS, for puppy-anxiety treatments and for tailored dry-food mix, probably more expensive than her own morning muesli: sweet but dry. The sterile floor, its white tiles dappled grey, seemed to sway below Sadie as she reached out, seemingly desperately at first—but made more casual by a nervous laugh, then a roll of her eyes: ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Think I’ll actually be taking it home with me.’
‘Oh,’ the vet said, turning back to face Sadie. ‘Do you need some food, then? We have plenty on sale?’
The drive back up to the flattened block was punctuated by the cat’s small calls. Something between a meow and a question, its cries had lightened. For a moment Sadie even suspected the animal could read her, its eyes, slit-pupilled and bright, always watching for a sign. Sadie remembered the way Dave’s mother had looked at her at the funeral, her face fogged up with something new. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she had said as she put her hand on Sadie’s sunburnt shoulder. ‘I just wish he’d been with someone at the end.’
Crouched in the spot where their house used to be, Sadie looked out over the cinnamon paddocks of the valley. Dams shone like small silver coins and white farming trucks seemed as small as chewing-gum strips, floating along Steels Creek roads below. Wattle trees, recently sprouted, had begun to die off already, leaving short walls of browning leaves.
Sadie wondered what Dave would have thought as a pair of wedge-tailed eagles circled above, their shadows making the cat cower within its glinting cage. ‘Rabbits, young foxes, occasionally feral cats,’ Sadie remembers Dave reading to her from Wikipedia—surprised, himself, at the eagle’s vermin diet. He had loved the birds, with their six-foot wingspans and reddish-brown feathers.
The cat, no longer panting, remained quiet as Sadie unlatched the possum cage, her fingers acting automatically. Cautiously stepping out to survey its freedom, the animal’s coat glimmered in the crisping sun. It wasn’t until it had slunk twenty metres away that the cat turned to look back at Sadie, not up to the sky above—at the bird of prey diving down towards the russety animal, its padded paws beginning to stalk, quietly again, over ash-flecked earth.
Maps
It takes the satellites a while to catch up; our place is still there on Google Earth—months after. Every morning I reload the page, and there’s something calming when I still see—no blackened scar through green.
Valley Haze
We started eating at a restaurant I mostly remembered by the bill—spending our house-insurance payout as if it was a burden that needed lifting. La Vallee served all the things I should have liked—smoked hen eggs, hay-baked carrots and tiny honey-glazed quails—but, back then, I was always focused on your mouth. ‘Cigar box tones and cranberries,’ you’d note after swilling and smiling at me with cabernet-stained teeth, your lip gloss long dabbed off onto serviettes, yours and mine. ‘This is the life,’ you’d say, winking, then mentioning tomorrow’s work before insinuating that we should order a nightcap: something sugary, perhaps just coffee—lukewarm and milky.
Harvey Green—the valley restaurant’s silk-shirted manager—knew we were from the ridge, that we’d lost the house in the fire. ‘Ladies,’ he would acknowledge, as we passed through the foyer. Often he would kiss you on the cheek, hesitate, then reach out a soft damp hand to shake mine. Sometimes I would make an effort to look him in the eye—to lean in close enough to smell the cologne and sweat of his collar, kissing him, just lightly, on a freshly shaven cheek. Harvey wasn’t sure how to take my short-clipped curls, my boyish windcheaters the colour of clay. He could be certain, however, about our regularity. We began eating at the restaurant on what you called the odd days: Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays too.
‘D’you mind driving?’ you asked over our last dinner, though you always drove. I had to look down at my unfinished plate of a La Vallee special—buttered prawns and ricotta croquettes—for a second. I remember something in me softening, as I thought of the comfort of the gravel-road dust in our headlights, a gentler light, along with the possibility of you sleeping beside me on the way home—your powdered cheek pressed into car-seat cloth. I would take the long way round to our IKEA-curtained caravan—avoiding tape, the council kind, that marked the place where all the trunks lost their colour, where all the birds were disappeared.
Sunday mornings I’d start
ed hosing down the wasp nests that appeared during the week—under the caravan awnings, and along the crumbled brickwork of the fence that used to be. You’d go out to Doncaster, buying new cutlery and avocado-mint moisturiser which, when I kissed you, tasted unlike the plain sorbolene soap I was used to you using. ‘Love you,’ you stated with a new matter-of-factness that scared me—later coming home to unload ribbon-lidded jars of marmalade, boxes of macadamia nuts, silver pouches of dried figs. But when I went to hug you, you just pointed out of the dusty window. ‘Look,’ you said, ‘the currawongs are back.’ And I spent the rest of the afternoon watching for birds for you, the new binoculars we bought (another splurge) heavy around my neck.
A foggy-eyed waiter came over for coffee orders, that last night at La Vallee. I was still thinking of driving you, so recently, down the same road we’d taken, back when we first moved to the ridge—happy to leave the crowded coffee shops and netted lemon trees of Brunswick behind. You’d worn peppermint oil on your wrists back then, no pins in your hair. ‘The serenity, Juniper,’ you’d said, way back, winking as we stood on the deck of our new home. I don’t remember what you were wearing but I do remember you’d had bits of wattle in your dark hair. When I kissed you I’d thought we’d be in that house together for so much longer; I’d thought we’d found something finally right.
Then Harvey, the always freshly shaven manager, he rang up another couple’s dinner—the clunk of the old cash register bringing me back to my croquettes, and your face: glowing in low light.
‘Mocha, times two,’ you said, before smiling up at the semiprecious chandeliers, then back to me. I noticed that your mouth seemed pulled too tight at its corners, and that you were squinting slightly through layers of frosty shadow. My shoulders curled under the alpaca knit you encouraged me not to wear—but favoured over my other woollens, beige and faded. You’d held up one of your sister’s donated shirts that morning—doing your best version of a coo. ‘Plum,’ you muttered, ‘mauve, maybe?’ Whatever it was, it was always a shade of autumn, always smelt like your sisters—of cloves, ginger and something earthy that I could never quite pick.
Before the bushfires our favourite new neighbour, Elka, said it: that your restlessness was because you were chasing something tangible—a grey-flecked hound, a family perhaps. ‘June,’ you would say to me, too much hairspray glinting from flossy hair, ‘it’s okay to want the boxes checked.’ And I would pick at some kind of pastie, at whatever valley cafe we were in, and think back to my old Brunswick bedroom, Hickford Street—its faded floral carpet and that flannel shirt you’d always put on to go to sleep.
So that night—after our last dinner at La Vallee—I drove, the high beams lighting up the shiny caravan windows as we pulled into the drive. ‘Notes of pencil shavings, yeast, cookbook ash?’ I joked, thinking of the way you had swilled your wine, hours earlier, fingers pinching the glass by the stem. But your eyes stayed closed that night, under the interior light’s orange warmth. You only shifted, slightly, as I got my wallet from the glove box, my bag from under your tiny stockinged feet. I lay alone in the skinny bed that night, thinking of the way your breath would be fogging up the car windows outside, of the slightly sweet smell of alcohol filling the cabin, the must of it settling in the new linens, the layers, of your clothes.
‘Espresso?’ you asked the next morning, before you left in the car for a valley coffee run—your phone switched off—never to return. I remember you coming through the caravan door, cheeks still plastered with foundation, with blush, from the night before. And we weren’t down at La Vallee ever again—Harvey Green waiting for me to lean in, again, before telling us the day’s coffee blend: raspberry acidity, notes of plum, maple syrup, rum. ‘Can you taste that ash, that charcoal, babe?’ you never said, sipping your espresso, then sighing—foundation, like clay, gathering in the single crease across your brow.
Flight Path
Those morning horses, they’re floating: aluminium shoes glinting in Ron’s makeshift track light. Small Hanniah Reece, she’s leaning against the humming Ford Falcon—its training float looming behind her with paint cracked like her mum’s hard-boiled eggshells, always lacing the bench, the bluestone kitchen tiles, the sink. The girl’s fingers are rosy from Yarra Glen fog. Trainer Ron’s nose, it’s always that way, from months, now, of whisky-warmed evenings—spent alongside Channel 9, turned down low, for company. Go on, the woollen-fingered, leather-booted men call from frosty trackside, hands tensing around scratched-up flasks of Nescafé: Pull her up, or Use the whip, or Get some cool-down fleeces unfolded, young Han—quick sticks.
Hills of fire-stripped trees surround the track. Twists of limb and charcoal trunks, they glow—silhouetted by the climbing sun. Like their mounts in blinkers, though, those riders keep their eyes on the track—skinny limbs padded with Woolworths flannel, with fleece. Ron’s newest filly, Kodak Moment, has been put out to watch today, her bulky head strapped down by a PVC martingale, by a rusting snaffle. Her legs are bound up tight from recent falls. Want her to win big in the nursery race, this one, Ron says to Hanniah. Hanniah, though, hasn’t yet learned to always smile—she nods.
Valley ibis are already up, picking the turf for track workers’ breakfast scraps: crumb-lined microwavable pastie packets, crusts of the bakery’s first bread and staling Vegemite sandwiches made in bulk, nights before. Then the earliest McKenzie’s school bus—still empty—sails by in the trackside fog, making the young filly, galloping long, shy wide. Get her listening…Push her…The turn, Ron calls over the icy track—his voice scattering clouds of birds from the railings, from the tops of parked Falcons, one-tonners and rego-less trailers. Young Hanniah is startled, too. Her quickening breath blows morning fog like smoke while watching Kodak’s ears: not flickering to listen but flattening, further, with something like determination. The horse’s head lowers as its body stretches—long—picking up speed.
A strapper, unawares, somewhere calls coffee orders: Jack, Pinga, Bruce. Older horses in the filly’s path disperse, dancing, before getting pulled up by rein, by flashband. Then both track-bound horses and riders recognise the faint crackle in Ron’s voice—Pull her up now. Shit—the high-pitched hum that comes with contained breath, with tightening chest. Truck brakes squeal at a nearby intersection and Hanniah begins to feel that heady thrum—the sign of things to come.
The ridge above—stripped, blackened—shadows the fall. Cows in neighbouring paddocks turn their heads, slowly, towards the impending crack: of bone, of barrier. Hanniah doesn’t look up at the running of riders, or at that roan filly Kodak, landed, on her back. She tries to get up but is stuck, the horse, like a jam-jarred slater, an overturned silverfish, squirming, amid reeling jockey—amid all that tack.
Comfort Inn
Yeah, that roar came over the hill like nothing else. Don’t ask me more; I’m tired of describing the rest. The busted-up landscape that looked like it belonged on the news, on my TV that should still be working; in my lounge room, which I should still be sitting in; in my house, that blew away with the rest of the hillside—like how bonfire ashes float about your face at any eighteenth- or twenty-first-birthday bash around here. Kids are all into fire until they get too drunk and burn the hairs of their arms, or see a paint can burst blue and a little too loud. What’s the saying? Moths to a flame.
I’ve made room twelve at the Research Comfort Inn—all red brick and the smell of durries, long ago smoked—something like home. Ed says I can stay as long as business is slow. ‘Never sign up for a franchise, young Will,’ he says. But you won’t catch me going into small business again—not ever. And fifty-four’s not young, either (although to Ed’s eighty-odd years I’m sure it seems so). I felt the years in my bones before the fires, lifting hutches. Rabbit meat, organic, that was my bread. I tell you what, though: I got those inner-city types with too much money and not enough brains. For the first time in my life the cash came rolling in. But all that’s useless now, good as gone. My girl Melanie, she’s left too.
I remember the burnt things—the forgotten things—all the time. It all comes back to me in the middle of the night. You know, letters from old loves. Angry Rija, who loved her nail-polish collection and methamphetamines; short Christine, with her milk crates of old records and angry teenage sons; loud Hel and her bone-dry white-blond hair. Melanie too.
Lucky for them they’re not still hanging around. Especially Melanie. She would have just curled up after the fires came. She loved to be down-and-out, Melanie. Bipolar disorder was the term her doctor gave her. But I think she just liked the attention. Like the kids they thought lit up the ridge, she got pretty fucken high at any hint of disaster. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d come home to her burning incense sticks that’d been poked into the holes of pressurised Lynx cans; the times I’d find oil burners, used, beside the bed. It’s always men they get for lighting fires but I reckon if you looked around good and proper, we’d all be surprised.
The smoke hadn’t even finished blowing over by the time some clueless journalist came around, asking up on the rabbits I’d been farming—like it was the most horrific thing she’d heard. Don’t worry about all the people that burned, lady, I felt like saying—but of course I had a reputation to uphold. I saw her later, at one of the CFA sausage sizzles, and I stared her down. Holding a giant sausage in snow-white bread: she obviously wasn’t worried about what happens on an abattoir floor. Rabbit meat is actually better for the world than beef—a smaller carbon footprint, that’s what my friend Crystal from the health-food shop out Healesville way says. Protein bars or acid tabs, anything you want: she’s always got something good going on, that little Crystal. I like her.