by Bowes, K T
He appeared small and hunched as though insignificant. His body stood perfectly still and his face didn’t move as he watched the fire. He looked like an ordinary rubber-necker watching a road accident being cleared away, not someone whose brother’s house burned in front of his eyes.
Hana wondered if he knew Miriam was in there too. Perhaps he only just arrived. She cast her eyes around the watchers, not wanting to be the one to tell him, but as she focussed on him for a moment longer, instinct told her he had watched yet another of Miriam’s betrayals and let her get on with it, just like he always had. The stiffness in his back was forced and shocked. He knew.
Hana made herself turn back to the fire. It gleefully ate the rest of the house and licked towards the outbuildings, wanting to satiate itself completely in a feast of wood and human flesh. The grass and bushes up to twenty metres around the house glistened with droplets of water in the dancing light.
Logan once explained bush fires to Hana, on a picnic in the mountains above the hotel. It was a cold day on a weekend visit and as they cuddled together on their blanket high above the valley, she found it hard to imagine any kind of warmth at all outside the soft skin of her husband and the heat of his kisses. “If you can’t put a fire out in the bush, you douse as much as you can around it, to prevent it ripping out of control and going for miles,” Logan said. “But I hope it never happens here, because it’ll eat this mountain alive.” He pressed his lips to hers and Hana giggled as he undid the button on her jeans. It felt like a lifetime ago.
Hana wished she were back in the damp grass, undressing for her husband in an ecstasy of lust and not watching Reuben’s house burn and Miriam die. In the unreal scene before her, Michael became the family rock, trying to comfort Liza and Tama at the same time. They clung together as everyone else retreated from the fire. Logan sat in the dirt on his backside and two of the stockmen hauled him to his feet and led him away, dazed. Hana wanted to run to him but felt like a complete outsider, her compassion an unwelcome intrusion. She felt useless and paralysed with indecision and her heart ached for her husband, for the thing he didn’t know and now never would.
Agony for her unborn child surfaced, having felt only a single touch from her grandfather and responded so willingly through the walls of her mother’s womb. She would never know him, never feel his rough, scarred hands lifting her up, smiling that lopsided smile which he gave to Hana before he walked out of the room and out of her life forever. She wished she had done more, instead of hiding out and running into herself like she always did. Surely a row, an argument with Logan would have been better. Better than this. “Logan, I should have told you,” she sobbed into her hands.
Hana had no valuable contribution to make to those still dealing with the fire as it crackled and hissed and swallowed the last of the house. A couple of utility vehicles from the township struggled up the developer’s new roadway, cutting through the fence onto Rueben’s awful drive and hauling trailers with barrels and plastic tanks of precious water.
Nor did Hana have any helpful contribution to make to Logan’s family. They huddled together, their backs towards her, a dark knot of bodies against the backdrop of disaster and death; shutting her out of their misery and their combined safety.
Hana turned slowly, focussing on the steep bank and dreadful walk back down the mountain in the darkness. The climb was hazardous and Hana slipped countless times, bracing herself against anything which came into her grasp. The supplejack vines did their worst, tying up her legs and tripping her continually until she was reduced to crawling. Her hands, knees and chin bled from scrapes and scratches in her desperation to protect her stomach. At the top of the bank, Hana realised the futility of her lengthy climb as she faced a rock face she couldn’t defeat. On the way down it was a stumbling slide and she’d come down on her bottom. On the way up, it was insurmountable. She lay on her side, clinging to a tree root and sobbed, knowing she needed to let go and face the bone breaking slide to the bottom. Redheaded stubbornness prevented her fingers releasing and she fought for breath and prayed for a solution.
As she was about to give up, a hand appeared in her eye-line. “Take hold, girl!” a male voice called.
Hana grasped the hand gratefully, allowing herself to be hauled upwards. Her feet scrabbled for purchase to no avail and it was the vice-like grip around her fingers which brought her over the rock and let her sink into the soft earth beyond it. The barbed wire fence lay underneath her, biting into her clothing with hungry teeth. Hana groaned as she tried to sit up.
“Steady, steady now. Just rest a while,” Alfred said. His chest heaved with exertion and his grey eyes looked wild. He folded his body in half and rested his hands on his knees. His face had aged considerably that night and dark pain glinted, oozing out from a damaged soul.
“I’m so sorry,” Hana said and a flurry of tears poured over her lower lids and cascaded down her smoke stained cheeks. “They all tried to stop her.”
Alfred shrugged. “I could never stop her so how could they? Nothing ever stopped my Miriam going to him. She knew it was where she was born to be.” His voice choked back smoke and emotion. “She got what she always wanted, dint she?”
Alfred pulled Hana to her feet and waited until she felt confident enough to walk. She kept hold of his hand and they slipped and slithered down the mountain, following the lights of the hotel which appeared and disappeared through the trees as the path wound towards it. Alfred was surefooted, knowing the ground like the back of his own hand and he opened and closed gates as they went, ever the farmer. They passed the Jeep and the quad bike, ignoring them as they stumbled blindly down. For that miserable hour as they walked home, Alfred and Hana were united in their isolation from the Du Roses.
Hana felt devastated and cut to the quick, focussing only on the path ahead to stop her thinking. She wanted so badly to get back to the hotel and the normality which it seemed to offer, she fixated on it continually to help her keep walking. Everything will be ok once I’m in my room, she promised herself, the futility of the lie not yet acknowledged. Yet once there, the hotel’s complete desertion, lights on and the doors open to the night, unnerved her and hit her with the reality of Miriam’s betrayal.
In the mudroom at the back of the house, Hana stood helplessly while Alfred took off his boots, watching his rough hands undo the zips and kick them away. When he removed his hat a black line of smoke ringed his head, with clean, olive forehead above it and black, filthy soot below.
Hana knew she probably looked the same and the snort of hysterical laughter bubbled out. It was a never ending nightmare from which she felt desperate to escape, her emotions unpredictable and erratic. “I’m sorry,” she whispered into Alfred’s startled silence, clamping her fingers over her lips. Sorry we both look like weirdoes. Sorry your brother is dead and sorry your wife just committed suicide in front of her family.
“It’s ok, kōtiro,” he soothed. “Let’s take care of you and tepēpe for now. The rest will work itself out.” He smoothed his hand across her stomach with sad longing in his eyes and Hana burst into tears.
Alfred behaved kindly, soothing her as he knelt down and unlaced Hana’s trainers. It seemed an age since she struggled to do them up, tripping over them on the stairs because she hadn’t done them tight enough. They were blackened and ruined and she would never get the stink of the acrid fire off them. Hana rested her hands on Alfred’s broad, bent shoulders as he knelt on the floor and helped her off with them. Then they stood looking at each other, neither of them knowing what to do next.
Hana’s tears coursed down her cheeks like a river bursting its banks. Through the haze of salt water, she saw the grime lining the wrinkles in Alfred’s cheeks and around his eyes as he came close and put his arms protectively around her. “It’s too horrible,” she sobbed. “I don’t know how to deal with this.”
“I know, I know.” He held her tightly as she cried. Hana felt his chest hitch and quietly, sedately and with complete
release, forty years of heartbreak finally made its way out of his soul as Alfred’s tears soaked the back of Hana’s shirt, drenching her hair, mixing salt and fire soot into a sticky, black paste.
When they were both done crying and stood holding each other for a time, Alfred pulled away awkwardly. “Come,” he said. He took Hana’s hand and led her up to Logan’s bedroom. In the middle of the night, she let the door go and in her shock, she had forgotten the keypad number. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she sniffed, the tears threatening again from an empty well.
“It’s fine, can’t be helped,” Alfred told her gently and propped her up against the landing wall. He went back downstairs to the reception area to fetch the master list. When he got back, Hana looked pale and sick, her hair matted and stained.
“I messed up the wall,” she sobbed, pointing at the grimy mark outside the bedroom door.
“Don’t worry about that now.” Alfred opened the door and led her inside, flicking on the shower. “Get in. I promise I’ll come back.”
Hana didn’t want him to go, frightened he might do something stupid and feeling responsible for him now. She clung to the sleeve of his dirty shirt. “I won’t go far,” he promised again, frightened by the physical and emotional fragility of the woman before him. “I just need to get myself...clean.”
The irony of his words hit Hana like a train. None of those who watched Miriam run into the fire would ever feel clean again. Hana stripped off her ruined clothes and dropped them onto the bathroom tiles. Stepping into the hot water, she felt instantly guilty. The hotel took its water supply from an uphill stream. Even in drought, it was plentiful and clean, the mountains providing with never ending generosity. Rueben’s house was devoured for lack of electricity to pump the water and there she was, using it to wash instead of saving a life, two lives, maybe even more.
Hana washed her hair four times to remove the soot and the acrid smell and still didn’t feel it was clean. She scraped the black gel from her arms and face and watched the water run black down the plughole. She finished but still felt unclean and started all over again with the soap.
Finally, she emerged, her skin painful from rubbing. She wrapped herself in a towel, surprised to find it was six o’clock in the morning. The day felt surreal and Hana dressed in the only clothes she could find. The trusty old black leggings came back out of the suitcase with a clean bra and knickers, but she had nothing left to wear over the top. Hana pinched a shirt of Logan’s, looking for comfort in his masculine scent and folding herself into it with a sigh.
The leggings no longer covered her belly but slid down uncomfortably beneath it, pinching tightly and leaving her round pink stomach exposed. Logan’s shirt fit over it, but the stitching on the back of the lower buttons hurt the fragile skin, so Hana left them open. She knew it looked horrible but didn’t think today, anyone would care. The scrapes on her knees and palms stung against her clothes and the one on her chin wept transparent liquid.
Hana heard no noise around the huge house and figured everyone else was still up at the fire. With nothing left to occupy her, she set about tidying and cleaning their bedroom and then took the dirty laundry down to the huge washroom and put two loads on, one coloured and one white.
Her sooty clothes she balled up, including her trainers and put them in a black bag in the cavernous rubbish skip outside the back. Her trainers made a sad ‘clang’ as they hit the bottom. Hana didn’t know where to go or what to do. She fought the violent urge to do the wrong thing, to take the car and go home, readily absenting herself from the grief which threatened to surge down the mountain at any moment. There was no doubt in her mind that Miriam was dead, but a tiny flicker of hope refused to be quashed and Hana held onto it with the last of her reserves. Her mother’s death and then Vik’s, banged on the doors of Hana’s heart, reminding her what the pain felt like and taunting her with the threat of yet more.
Back upstairs she found Alfred looking for her. Clean and changed, his face held a sickening greyness that soap and water would never wash away. “You ok?” he asked her, the smile not reaching his eyes.
Hana shrugged. “No. You?”
The man who had been old the day before looked positively ancient as he made Hana sit down and brewed tea for her in the kitchen. She was neither hungry nor thirsty, but recognised his need to perform any task that would keep his brain busy. She shut her eyes and imagined herself standing on the edge of the red rug in the living room at Culver’s Cottage, looking out of the bay window over the trees at the dark green, flat river on a calm clear day. She yearned to be there, to be away from here.
“Who’s this?” Alfred disturbed her, responding to the sound of gravel shifting under heavy wheels. He stood on tiptoe and peered through the huge sash window and then left the room. The automatic closer hissed the door shut behind him. Hana heard voices in the foyer and waited for the onslaught.
Three policemen followed the old man back into the kitchen, acknowledging Hana with respectful nods of the head. “Ma’am,” they said in turn. Two wore uniforms like Bodie’s and the other was smart and plain clothed.
Alfred indicated the table and fetched mugs from the cupboard. “I’ll make us a drink,” he said, his hands shaking uncontrollably. As he pulled out a patterned flowery mug that was Miriam’s favourite, he leant his head against the side of the door. He slid the delicate china out and withdrew his hand clutching the handle and a silver packet of tablets fell to the floor making a metal skittering sound on the open blisters. It lay there, curled upwards, some of the small beds occupied and others lying opened and vacant.
Hana went to him quickly, glancing back at the cops in a silent plea for them to leave, but they didn’t. “This isn’t a good time,” she implored but they remained seated, observing her through eyes wired to detect unusual behaviour. It angered Hana, making her feel like a freak show.
Alfred’s eyes were dry and squeezed shut and Hana stood at his shoulder and rested her forehead against his hairy arm. “What can I do?” she pleaded, desperate to help. Alfred stood for a while, collecting deep breaths and trying to get control, his knuckles white against the china mug. The cops watched silently.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
Hana replaced Miriam’s mug back with the others, but she left the pills on the tiled floor, not able to bend down even if she wanted to. She put cups in front of the policemen and pushed the tea pot towards them, indicating the milk jug with a jerk of her head.
She stood, redundant, her tummy peeking through the bottom of the denim shirt. She felt embarrassed by it and knew she reddened as one of the uniformed officers stared at her openly. Hana looked to Alfred, feeling guilty for wanting his help now and he waved his hand at her. “You go,” he said kindly, his voice wobbling, “go and lie down.”
Hana nodded and left the room, needing no further excuse to get out of there. The heavy fire door clicked shut behind her and she set off towards the family room, not knowing where else to go. The smell of fire seemed to have permeated every available space at the front of the house through the open windows and she needed to escape it.
“Ma’am?” The voice sounded behind her as she reached the first bend in the hallway. Hana turned and saw one of the uniformed cops following her. His notebook flapped in one hand and a small pen was poised in the other. Hana stopped and turned towards him questioningly. “Sorry to have to do this now,” he sounded genuinely guilty but would do it anyway. “I need to ask you some questions.”
Hana nodded and led the officer to the big wooden panelled room. The windows were closed and the substantial door had kept the smell out. The TV was on, playing quietly to itself as though someone had left in a rush and Hana searched around for the remote. When she couldn’t find it, she turned it off using the switch on the wall. Then she sat down on the squashy old sofa, feeling its cool security under her bottom and legs. She overrode the compelling desire to straighten the throws and cushio
ns and break out the vacuum. Irrational thoughts, she decided, hauling the shirt over her stomach to the stop the man staring.
The cop took a statement, such as it was – her waking up knowing something was wrong, her ride up to Reuben’s house with Liza - the smell of charred wood - watching Miriam run into the fire - her walk down the mountain with Alfred - him taking care of her - their combined misery.
The cop was gentle and kind with her, apologetic for pressing her about Miriam’s death, keeping his voice neutral and steady when Hana asked, “Is there any possibility someone could have survived, even badly burned?”
Her voice held such hope, the policeman’s face fell in sadness at the naive, vain thread of optimism. “No survivors,” he told her bluntly but firmly. “Two bodies, one male, one female.” He was careful not to say their names. “I need to talk to you about your husband’s legal action against the owner of the house, Reuben Jacob Du Rose. What do you know about that?”
Instinct told her where he hoped his questions might take him, but she wouldn’t be the one to help. “Logan’s lawyer has a surname like...White or Wright. I know Logan met with his uncle a few nights ago. He came back and said it was all sorted. It was amicable and they shook hands. Logan agreed to call the legal action off and it was all over. From memory, Reuben relinquished his hold on the land and they were going to negotiate over the loan still owing after Christmas. Logan wasn’t that bothered about the money and was inclined to let it go.”
“A hundred grand!” the policeman spluttered. “He was going to let it go?”
“They’re family. You wouldn’t understand,” Hana sighed. “It was never about the money. There was a principle involved somewhere.”
“You’re right! I don’t understand,” the cop sounded incredulous. Hana looked exhausted. You think I do?
“My husband didn’t burn his uncle’s house, if that’s where you’re hoping to go with this,” Hana said, squaring her jaw and feeling the skin on her chin smart. “Everything was fine and they all had what they wanted. He had no reason to hurt anyone.” The irony of her own words came back to bite her hard. Reuben didn’t get what he wanted. He wanted his son’s acknowledgement.