Flames

by Robbie Arnott

  Charlotte is waving, flagging down the approaching ute and its driver, a neighbour she knows but not well; and now the driver, this sheep farmer with strained belt and hairy neck, is taking her away from the little farm and towards, towards, towards…somewhere. Anywhere.

  Charlotte is thinking: Will I go to him? But even before she lets this thought finish she knows that she won’t, because if her brother wants her buried, what will her father try to do to her? The idea of him has turned her red and bitter ever since he left them, and the more she thinks about it now, watching the sun set over the dimpled banks of the Tamar through the grimy window of the ute, the more she understands that her opinion of him has not changed. She does not trust her father. The ute curls past Gravelly Beach and the window shows her the peeled tide and oozing mudflats of the river. She will not go to him in his big house on the high cliffs: with its timber walls and splintered ceilings, it is another coffin.

  Charlotte is stretching. The farmer has rolled out of the Tamar Valley and deposited her at the Launceston bus terminal, and she is leaning down to grab at her toes, wondering where she is going to sleep, because the sky is now the deepest shade of blue. She doesn’t know anyone who lives here. She doesn’t have much money. She knows only that she wants to walk the stiffness out of her legs, so she strides out, going nowhere in particular, and before long she is down on a humanless boardwalk by the waterfront.

  Charlotte is watching the waters of three rivers meet. The two Esks—one brown and slow, the other churned white—mix into the broad slate Tamar that pushes north, away from Charlotte, through the reedy wetlands. Beneath the water’s three-way face swim countless mud eels, but nobody is angling for them from the pontoons that hang onto the river’s edge—it is too dark. Earlier the sun would have dipped behind the cliffs of Launceston’s craggy gorge, brushing the waterfront with fingers of pale winter light, but now the docks have sunk too deep into the sky’s navy for anything to be visible in detail. Charlotte makes out the yellow lights of townhouse windows, twin looming wheat silos, the gaudy curves of Kings Bridge, black trees. Clouds crowd the moon and the navyness intensifies. Charlotte, now unable to see even the border between blunt gorge cliff and dark night sky, wanders to a low dock. Here she lifts the lid of an overturned dinghy and crawls underneath its shell, and minutes later, with a cluster of ropes and nets for a pillow, she swirls into sleep.

  Charlotte is dreaming. The thistled fields of her farm are melting into vast squares of green lava, flowing down to the pebbled beach. The gullies that rise up from the beach—the ones she tumbled through as a child, chasing her brother and mother, feeling ferns brush her knees with every wobbly lunge—freeze, shimmer and crack. Somewhere her mother is spraying water onto sunburnt shoulders, and then these shoulders sprout fronds, out of Charlotte’s sight, but there, definitely there. A forest raven is cawing, the fronds are crackling, and now Levi is beating his bony little fists against the sandstone cottage walls as he screams, a high cut scream, even though he is always so controlled…and then Charlotte is surging awake into a new, unwelcome day. A crack of light is shining under the edge of the dinghy; other than that it is black, silent and cold—although not completely cold.

  Charlotte is feeling a warm weight pushing against her stomach. In the gloom she fumbles her phone from her pocket and turns on its torch. Its bright field of light introduces her to this source of warmth: a ball of brown fur nuzzled against the concave curve of her belly. She unbends her knees. The fur twitches and a bald tail-tip slides out from underneath it, while a snout pokes up, whiskers tensing, dark eyes blinking. A rakali. A swimmer; a feaster; a bright thief; an oversized native water rat. Charlotte waits for it to flee or squeak or bite, but it remains still, sleepily regarding her, even when she lifts the boat and manoeuvres her body out into the morning. The rakali yawns, snaps its mouth shut and curls back to sleep, untroubled, as Charlotte lowers the dinghy and turns to face the stares being thrown her way by a family of doughy tourists on an early walk.

  Charlotte is rolling down a new highway in a new ride: a rickety, rust-pocked Redline bus. After leaving the docks she had bought a ticket from a bored teenager at the bus terminal, telling him only that I want to go south. The teenager had mumbled back We can get you as far as Kingston, so that’s the ticket Charlotte bought. Now she watches the green-blond fields whip past, and in the distance she can see the dark dolerite mountains and rising plateaus, hemming in the great plain of the Midlands. It is mid-morning, early winter. Above her an endless unbroken cloud is clotting up the sky, although there is no rain.

  Charlotte is sure, as she sees an empty speedway approach and then recede from view, that she is doing the right thing. Talking to Levi would have done zilch; he would’ve given her the same look he’s been giving her ever since their mother died, the look of pity and care and concern spiced with that skinny jut of resolve in his jawline—the jut that meant he would not be changing his mind, no sir, no matter what his unreasonable, uncontrollable sister said or did or thought. Charlotte knows he thinks she’s gone crazy—he’s been throwing that jutting look at her every time he’s caught her sobbing in the gullies, flinching at the wind and throbbing in the fields. This look of judgement. This look of control. This look of I need to do something; she needs my help, when really (as far as Charlotte is concerned) he is the one who needs help, because what is she doing but grieving? Their mother has died. What does it matter what form or sound her grief takes? Surely the help, if help ever arrives, should come screaming down towards her spine-straight brother who has shown no sorrow, no pain, no action other than to jut his chin, and plan to bury his own flesh and blood.

  Charlotte is sipping a watery lager in a Tunbridge pub. There is something wrong with the bus; the driver said something had happened to the engine or spark plugs or radiator, and that they’d be underway again in the morning. In the meanwhile, he’d told the milling passengers after they creaked into this worn central town, courtesy of the bus company they’d all be staying the night in the only accommodation available: the Tunbridge Standard. Charlotte was momentarily enraged, though she had nowhere to be, in no certain time. But the other passengers had taken the news with weary, bored acceptance, making her think that buses breaking down on the Midlands must not be uncommon. Her anger ebbed, and evaporated when she saw her neat, comfortable room; she did not want to spend another night with her only warmth coming from a water rat.

  Charlotte is listening to a pair of miners mutter into their pints. They’re sitting a few stools down the bar and pretending they aren’t looking at her every now and then, sneaky twisty little looks that she doesn’t mind; she just wishes they were honest about it. They’re talking about the things they’ve dug out of the ground: copper, zinc, ore, silver, even gold, all in the smashing winds and rain of the west coast. Charlotte is not interested in the west, but then she hears the compass shift south. There is a tin mine, she hears, as they gurgle words through their slopping beer, in a town at the bottom of the world. It’s called Mallacoota or Mantakoopa or Melanoma—Charlotte can’t be sure, exactly. But these miners have noticed her noticing; they have felt her ears jump at this southern talk and they are scraping back their chairs and tottering over to her, ruffling hair and straightening high-vis, all How’s it going and Mind if we sit and Want another drink?

  Charlotte is remembering: men aren’t always terrible. The miners are chatting her up in a lazy, innocent way, not asking personal questions, not probing at her short answers, saying Thank you and You’re welcome like they were raised by good stern mothers, and for the first time in weeks she is relaxing. They’ve figured out that she’d rather let them do the talking, so they are bouncing off each other in a two-man act, one sharp and funny, the other daft and kind. The sharp one has fluffy yellow hair and a dispiriting moustache, the kind of lip fur that makes your skin creep, but the daft one—and he isn’t all that daft, really—is tall and quiet and wearing a red beanie that should look terrible with his fluoro-y
ellow jacket but somehow looks great. At some point, around the third beer they have bought her, Charlotte has placed a hand on his shoulder as she laughs at nothing in particular and he reacts only by smiling shyly in her direction with the right amount of teeth. The bar crowd is leaking out into the night. Soon it will only be Charlotte and these two men. The lager has taken on a bubbling glow in her throat. A clock bangs somewhere, the sharp miner tells a flat joke, and last drinks are called by the aproned, stone-faced barman.

  Charlotte is worming her tongue into the mouth of the daft kind miner in the corridor outside her room, where she has him up against the wall. She can’t remember how she’d lured him up here, but it hadn’t been difficult; as soon as they turned into the dim light of the hallway her hands were on his chest, pushing back, and she was meeting his slow lips with her hot fast mouth. Now, with a bit of hip-writhing encouragement, his hands lower to grasp her arse, and she is lifted up onto the points of her toes. She pushes harder with her hips, feeling him, hard and welcome, and her hands are scrabbling at his scarlet beanie as one of his hands brushes firmly down her arm…but no—no, it doesn’t. Both his palms are still gripping the flesh in her jeans. Charlotte untangles their tongues and jerks her neck backwards to see the fuzz of the other miner’s lip fur, looming up close to her face. His hand is slithering around her shoulders, fingers firm and the rest of him firming too, his flesh closing off the gap between them. Charlotte looks to the first miner, her miner, and he is smiling that shy smile that she only now realises isn’t shy at all. And then he winks, first at his friend, and then at her, and they have done this before; they have rehearsed this; it was their plan all along. But the daft miner’s wink—and he truly is daft if he thinks this will work—does something else: it shakes off her shock. She roars back into the physicality of her body and can suddenly feel both of them crowding her, boxing her, four hands swarming all over her, lip fur bristling her ear, and then the soft warm vessel beneath their touch becomes a spinning top of knees and elbows and nails and teeth, and somewhere she feels a burst of heat that blazes for a volcanic moment before disappearing.

  Charlotte is shouting Go fuck yourselves! to the backpedalling miners and then Or just go fuck each other. She twirls into her room, buzzing with anger and fear and booze as the daft miner clutches his wrist. She can hear them whispering, and she shouts again—no words, just a loud, hard peal of rage. Their footsteps pound as they flee and now she just wants to sleep; this bed has been bought for her, and she will use it to its full pillowy power, but before she does she is writing something down on the complimentary notepad. It’s a name she stole from them while they plied her with beer, a name that reverberates through her somersaulting brain, the name of the tin-mine town: Melaleuca.

  Charlotte is snoozing, back on the bus heading south, her head jittering against the thin metal frame. Each tiny thwack against the glass sends an orange pulse through her hangover. It is the next morning; the bus was fixed overnight. She did not see the mining duo in tiny, dark Tunbridge when she rose, and she has already forgotten the particulars of what they looked like. (She hasn’t forgotten what they did, or how they treated her, but their features, their voices, their grimy little faces have all happily flown from her mind.) Now she huddles her hangover in the red-white bus under a dawning purple sky. As the sun rises on her left she can see the country in better detail. The world outside should be painted with the thickest of greens at this time of year, but it is not—everything has a look of hunger. From the denuded hills to the beige paddocks there is a sense of meagreness, of malnutrition. Only the bunches of hateful gorse are green, and even they are dry. Winter should be lending these farms and forests an uncontrollable lushness. To Charlotte’s wobbly eyes, it isn’t right. This dryness. This beigeness. But she can’t look at the flying fields for very long before she starts to feel sick, so she turns away, eyelids clenched, and tries to sleep.

  Charlotte is waking up and blearily noticing the suburbs of the island’s capital: how they bunch, how they are squeezed between the wide estuary and the rolling foothills of the city’s mountain. She hopes the bus is going to take her straight through this place; she does not want to stop here, where the buildings are tall and the streets are bright and the people swarm. And she is in luck—the bus chugs through the dull grey centre, past the dappled docks (no water rats in sight, not here), and up a four-lane mini-freeway onto an outlet that pours south, ten minutes later, into the satellite town of Kingston. Charlotte’s hangover is still there, but it’s more of a queasy tang than a throbbing pain. The bus has stopped at a polished station. She can see a yellow beach, and beyond that, over the estuary, lonely hills; but as she steps off the bus this seaside idyll is disturbed by the wafting wind.

  Charlotte’s neat nostrils are picking up a scent on the breeze: it smells of cleaning products, starch and artificial sweeteners. It is the smell of white-picket fences, of census-friendly families, of collared shirts at church, of people who gossip and chat and tell everyone everything, and she is marching back into the bus station and asking for a ticket that will take her further south. The desk jockey says The Franklin connection leaves in a half an hour, so she asks him to point it out on a map, and when his bony knuckle tells her it’s another forty kilometres towards the bottom of the earth she buys a ticket. Half an hour later she’s on a bus, this one smaller and smoother. She is swooping up hills and plunging into valleys. She is passing orchards and vineyards and forests. The towns are growing smaller; the fields are glowing greener; the sky is getting bigger. Finally, the knot in her gut begins to loosen.

  Charlotte is wandering the main road of Franklin and thinking to herself, more with pictures and feelings than words, that she is getting closer to wherever she needs to be. The weatherboard shops are humble and calm. The people drifting about by the waterfront are quiet and calm. The plumes of smoke that curl out of the chimneys are slow and calm. The wide river beyond the street is steely, placid and unstoppably…calm. And Charlotte is calm too, just for being here. She is so calm she walks into an antique shop and begins staring at a map. The mossy green ink of the land ends neatly when it meets the light blue colour of the ocean. She has spotted her destination on the edge of Bathurst Harbour, far into the remote forests of the southwest. But there is a problem: while she has found the dot of Melaleuca, there is no corresponding road that runs in or out of it. Charlotte finds the owner and asks: Excuse me, but I was wondering how to find the road to Melaleuca? And the shopkeep, surrounded by her piles of books and furniture and colonial trinkets, says without looking up: You can’t.

  Charlotte is tapping a fist against the wooden door on the cabin of a paint-peeling yacht, her calmness having flown away, up into the winter sky. No sound appears to respond to her thrumming knuckles, so she taps again, harder, insistent. No road to Melaleuca, the antique seller had said. Boat or plane. Only way in. Only way out. With a few more questions Charlotte had wheedled out of her the name of the boats that sailed there—or more accurately, the name of this boat, the one she is now attacking with both hands, rap-rap-rap-rap-rap, until finally a belching rumble emanates from inside the hull. The door opens. A face is there. It has grey hair, a grey beard, grey eyes and grey lips covered in strips of skin that are peeling away like the paint on the yacht. Charlotte begins her offer: she will pay, she will work, she will scrub decks, she will clean fish, she will de-cling barnacles and limpets, she will hoist sails and shimmy down masts, if this boat will take her to Melaleuca. The grey man lifts a hand to say something, but Charlotte won’t be stopped. She will lasso albatrosses. She will harpoon whales. She will re-paint the yacht whatever colour he likes. She goes on and on and her breathing becomes a ragged, shallow tide, until the grey man yells Shut up, for god’s sake, shut up. Charlotte stops talking. She is filled suddenly with deep regret: she has stuffed this up. She knows nothing about working on a yacht. She will have to walk through winter to reach Melaleuca. She looks up, staring at the hard fluff of featureless clo
uds—until a whistle snaps at her ears and her eyes are drawn down to an incoming threat…

  Charlotte is reaching out into the air, fingers spread to catch in her palm a long-handled brush that has been thrown her way. The grey man sniffs at her shoes, her clothes, her backpack, and says: We leave tomorrow morning.

  IRON

  The Esk God yawned at the sudden burn of light. Normally the rising sun fell over him in a yellow crawl, waking him slowly, but this morning’s brightness had been flashed onto his face by a female pale ape. He blinked up, seeing dirty jeans, cream skin, inky hair. If not for the gratefulness he felt to her—the warmth they’d shared in the night had provided him with the best dreams he’d seen in decades—he would have jumped at her throat and spilt her life onto the watery boardwalk. No creature can stare so insolently at the Esk God and believe they’ll walk away unbleeding.

  His mercy lasted long enough for her to escape. As he blinked again she lowered the boat that had sheltered them through the night, curtaining him again with darkness. He felt her footsteps knocking away through the wood and considered going back to sleep, but without her hot stomach there would be no return to the dreams. Instead he flattened his furry torso, slithered out onto the dock and slipped into his river, where the fading visions were washed clean out of him. In his freshwater kingdom he had no need to dwell on such dry thoughts—he had streams, rivers, lakes to fly through, endless tributaries that parted before his webbed toes and waterproof fur, and everything in it knew who was in charge, who their god was, who would live and rule and smite until the river itself was drained to dust.

  The thronging eels cleared out of his way, bending their backs and hissing their fealty, as he kicked under the twin bridges that hung over the mouth of his South Esk. Rakali, water rat, pest—the names meant nothing to him. He had been here longer than the loud pale apes, longer even than the quieter dark ones who had arrived earlier. He had seen them grow and die and spread, and he knew them far better than they would ever know themselves. With his blunt nose he could smell their foul industries; with the blanched tip of his tail he could feel their intrusions in the water; with his black eyes he could see the iron they sunk into his rivers, building dams, dropping anchors, hooking fish. He had learned the colour and the shape of their callousness, but he could not stop them, for his power was limited to the rivers, while they swamped over everything.