Flames

by Robbie Arnott

  Charlotte started walking. Nicola followed. The track they’d taken the day before continued past the hut and around the southern edge of Crater Lake, carved into the cliff. Through the trees and over the boulders they walked, stopping every now and then to catch their breath and stare over at the cliffs and lake. Other than to warn each other about head-high branches and slippery rocks they did not speak—even though Nicola wanted to talk to Charlotte, she felt no words rise up in her. The track steepened, and after an uneasy climb they found themselves on the edge of the crater that gave its name to the lake. Now they could see beyond the cliffs, over to dozens more mountains, lakes, the road they’d followed the day before, and beyond it the great wide plain of the highland plateau. The road ended at a car park near another, bigger lake. Tiny dots of tourists were anting around its edge on a wide, flat path.

  And above all this, right in from of them: the twin peaks of Cradle Mountain, joined by a sagging, rough dent. White and black, high and low, harsh in its peaks and welcoming in its sling: a sight reserved for postcards, and galleries. They walked on, scaling a few more lookouts, where the air was even colder and the snow was shin deep and even the snowgums could not grow. They did not attempt to climb Cradle—they didn’t have the supplies or the gear, or any need to try something so daunting. They avoided the tourists at the lake, sticking to paths that circled icy tarns, before they agreed that it was getting late and they needed to eat something.

  On the trudge back Charlotte asked: So what’s the plan?

  Nicola’s first, automatic thoughts: hands wrapping, skin touching. But she swept those aside, and started mumbling out her plan: how as soon as Charlotte had gotten control of her… episodes, she called them…they would go back and sort everything out with the police and the ranger and whoever else.

  I thought they might lock you up or something, she said.

  Charlotte said: Yeah. Well. She pulled her jacket around her throat. What if I can’t? She kicked a rock off a ledge. Control it.

  Nicola didn’t know what to say.

  They descended on the track they’d taken earlier in the day, the lake and cliffs and hut all opening up before them. Nicola felt anxious, worried that Charlotte thought the plan was stupid, that she was stupid, but when they were inside the hut she showed no sign of it. She threw some old paper and kindling into the wood heater and lit it by hacking some sticky blue phlegm out of her throat. Nicola was fumbling around with the groceries, but Charlotte took over that, too, chopping and dicing and boiling for half an hour until two bowls of something like spaghetti marinara sat on their laps in front of the fire. After Charlotte ate, she had a shower and went to bed.

  Nicola did both these things too, straight after Charlotte. It took her a long time to get to sleep.

  The smoke found her nose sometime in the deep, ink-lined morning. She lurched up and out and into Charlotte’s room, where a small forest of blue flames was pouncing out of her toenails and feasting on the sheet at the end of her bed. Nicola ran forward and grabbed her ankles.

  Hot touch. Wild flicker. Cold fade.

  The fire stopped falling from Charlotte’s feet, but the established flames still burned, lapping at the skin on Nicola’s wrists. Charlotte woke up, shouted, swore, kicked off Nicola’s hands and leaped forward onto the flames. She smacked them out with hard hands, impervious to the heat.

  Afterwards she sat on the end of the bed, breathing heavily. Nicola held her wrists for a moment, then shuffled into the kitchen to run them under water. The burns weren’t bad. They’d heal in a day or two. Charlotte appeared behind her, swearing and apologising. It’s okay, Nicola mumbled. I’m fine. She lifted her wrists to show her, and through the darkness Charlotte could see the shiny patch of burn, and she swore even louder.

  Nicola followed her back into her room, where Charlotte was crouching on the bed, knees held up to her chin. It’s all right, it’s really all right, she said, but Charlotte kept muttering fuck, fuck, shit, fuck.

  Maybe I should stay in here. Charlotte looked up at her. Nicola’s throat cinched, her wrists stung, as she said: You stop doing it when I touch you.

  Charlotte turned away from her. No. She kicked her legs back under the doona. Look at your arms.

  I’m fine, said Nicola, with no conviction. She turned to leave the room.

  Wait. She turned again: Charlotte had pulled the covers back on the other side of the bed. All right.

  There were no more fires that night. None the following night, either, nor the third. Charlotte slept peacefully, lying on her side facing the wall, while Nicola lay on her back trying not to look at or touch her. During the mornings they walked along the trails, seeking out new waterfalls, peaks, tarns, fields of snow and heather. In the afternoons Charlotte would sit by the lake or in front of the wood heater, making odd noises with her throat and nose, and strange movements with her feet and ears. At first Nicola thought she might have gone mad, but then she realised Charlotte was trying to summon her flames. Trying to control them.

  It was hard to tell if it was working. Sometimes she could click her fingers and a perfect lick of fire would snap out of her thumbnail, like a fleshy Zippo lighter. Other times she would hack and cough for hours with no results, only to get the hiccups later on and accidentally spit fire all over her lap. Her pants had fibrous, brown-shined burn marks. It was a vague sign of progress, if not control.

  While this was going on Nicola lounged in front of the wood heater, reading her way through Oshikawa’s bookshelf. Other times she cooked—she was not as good as Charlotte, but she could bake scones, simmer sauce, sauté onions and potatoes. In the evenings they’d eat, wash up, play cards or attempt the board games and puzzles that Oshikawa had left stacked under the bookshelf. When they spoke about what had happened in Melaleuca they did so in broad terms, with relief and anger—Nicola saying At least most of the wombats would have survived and Charlotte saying I hope Allen didn’t. When they spoke about their families Nicola would give gentle, general descriptions of her mother and sister, along with shorter pictures of her father, his salted smile, how he’d become wrecked and hollow after the orcas took his seal. Charlotte wouldn’t say much at all, other than that her mother was dead, her brother was hard to deal with and her father had never known how to be a father. Then the conversation would falter, and they’d focus again on the cards or board game, until the fire burned low and they went to bed.

  They’d change in separate rooms, climb in each side of the shared bed and say goodnight. Charlotte, breathing deeply, would always fall asleep first.

  The next fire happened a week after they had arrived. Nicola was awake this time, staring up at the ceiling. Charlotte mumbled and turned onto her back, which drew Nicola’s attention, just as a rivulet of flames began leaking out of the side of her mouth. Without thinking Nicola leaned over and placed a hand on Charlotte’s chin. The fire didn’t stop, so she ran her hand down Charlotte’s neck, then back up the chin towards the flames, searching for the flicker within her body. Charlotte’s eyes opened. She sucked the fire back into her mouth.

  Do that again.

  Nicola withdrew her hand. Sorry—your mouth. I…

  Charlotte sat up. I know. Her hand found Nicola’s, pulling it towards her. Do it again.

  In the morning they slept in. Nicola was the first to wake. Just like their first night at the hut she was confused about where she was, but then she remembered. Charlotte’s body was bumped against her own. Their knees were locked together. A stiff muscle in her back prompted Nicola to roll over, and she tried gently to disentangle herself, which woke Charlotte up. Without speaking she reached one hand behind Nicola’s neck, dancing her fingers into her curls. Her other hand slid over Nicola’s side to grasp her thigh, a hard, pulling grasp, and then her mouth was on Nicola’s neck, and Nicola had somehow made it onto her back, just like she’d been trying to.

  Eventually they did get up—Charlotte first, walking naked through the hut to stoke the wood heater, whi
le Nicola tried to pull on her clothes and stared at Charlotte’s jutting angles and morning skin. They cooked toast over the fire, ate slowly, got dressed, and wandered outside as they usually did without talking about what had happened, though as they went out the door Charlotte rested a small hand on Nicola’s back, and Nicola, without thinking, pulled her in by her jacket and kissed her. Their teeth knocked, hard and cold.

  They did a short lap of Crater Lake and ended up sitting on a rock overlooking the small forest and duckboard trail that led down to the road. The air, already cold, was taking on an icier edge around them. They should go inside, Nicola thought, but her fingers were interlocked with Charlotte’s, and their heads were gently bumping together, and she did not want to move.

  Charlotte lifted her free arm and said: Look.

  Nicola followed the line of her arm. In the little gravel car park, next to the station wagon, was a car. It was too far away for Nicola to make out any of its features, other than that it was white. On the duckboards, bent into the mountain wind, was a person trudging towards them. Police, Nicola thought, or the ranger, or even Oshikawa, coming to check on his property in the middle of the tuna season. She felt Charlotte stiffen. It’s probably just a tourist, Nicola said. But she did not believe it.

  Neither of them moved. Soon they could see that the stranger was wearing a long grey overcoat. A city coat, nothing like the thermal jackets people wear in the highlands. The figure reached the treeline and disappeared, following the path as it wound past the stream and waterfall.

  Nicola shivered. It could just be a daytripper, wandering along the wrong path. But if it was someone who’d come to find them, she didn’t want to meet them. Her skin was chilled but her veins had never been hotter; Charlotte’s hand was resting on her knee, and she didn’t want all this taken away from her. She wanted it with an intensity that she couldn’t remember feeling before: a white-churned feeling of fear and sorrow and urgency.

  For so long she had been putting others first. Now, with this taste of want on her tongue, she surged with thoughts of herself. Hard desires. Sharp needs.

  Charlotte was staring at the trees that the stranger had entered.

  Ten more minutes passed, ten minutes of shivering in the wind with the grey dish of Crater Lake and the black walls of the mountain behind them. Snow was falling now. They needed to go inside. The stranger, so poorly coated, might not make it through the trees in this weather.

  But then, stomping onto the trail that led out of the trees was a pair of worn black boots. Rising from the boots were legs wrapped in old jeans, and above them a thin shirt. Around this shirt was the long coat they’d identified earlier, pulled tight with gloveless blue-white hands. And out of this set of ill-chosen clothes poked the neck and head of a woman. Short, slick hair. Cherry lips. Hard eyes, yet the lines around their corners leaked out a sense of relief when she straightened up and saw them waiting on the rock.

  At the edge of the trees, ten metres from where they sat, she stopped trudging. Charlotte stood up. The woman put her hands into the small of her back and stretched, before wrapping her arms around herself and shivering under the soft-falling snow.

  You girls got any gin?

  WOOD

  Levi is retching. He is standing in a small house, surrounded by a cloud of foul, rot-filled air. A corpse lies at his feet. Almost all of the exposed skin and flesh on the body has been ripped or chewed off, but Levi knows who it is: Thurston Hough. It must be. This is the address Hough’s publisher gave him. If the face was whole Levi would recognise it from the author photo in his copy of The Wooden Jacket, but a grey-red mess of stale meat, thick with flies and greenish slime, sits where eyes and ears, cheeks and lips should be. The rest of the body is clothed in khaki trousers and a flannelette shirt, except for the feet and fingers, which are as mutilated as the face. The smell is unbearable: a blanket of sour, rancid heat. White bone and yellow teeth glint up at him from the bloody wreckage. Levi retches again, feeling bitter bile gush up his throat and out onto the dusty floor.

  Levi is leaning on his knees, trying to breathe through his mouth, when he sees the pelt clutched in the skeletal fingers of Hough’s right hand. It is a rich shade of golden-brown, and is clenched tightly in the dead grip, as if the last of Hough’s energy went into holding onto it. It takes Levi a few seconds to peel back the stiff bones and release it. When it comes free it slides snugly into his palm, warm and plush, and suddenly he no longer feels ill. The stench becomes bearable; the horrifying corpse becomes mundane.

  Levi is filled with confidence and a renewed sense of purpose. His veins are buzzing; he is striding past the body now, forgetting Hough, clutching the fur and searching for the coffin he knows must be there, the coffin he had commissioned. He finds it, half-finished—polished and square at one end, hollow and sawdust-strewn at the other—in a creaky workshop behind the house.

  Levi is driving. The highway is snaking along the South Esk, pushing west, away from the slow streets of Avoca, and he doesn’t plan on going back there ever again, not unless someone puts a knife to his throat. The cop he’d spoken to about the body had been so ponderous, so kind, and Levi had no time for his meandering questions and glacial train of thought. Even worse had been the attentions of the old woman who had pestered him from the moment he entered the town, touching his back, offering him scones, nattering inane comments with every huffing breath. It feels good to be out of there, to have Hough dead and gone and forgotten, to have Avoca slammed permanently in his past. The half-finished coffin is rattling on the tray of his ute.

  Levi is stroking the pelt as he pushes his foot further down, taking the corners too quick; he’s lucky the road is dry and the traffic is thin. The prized fur is warm and lush beneath his fingers, and this heat is travelling up through his hand and into his head, his lungs, his stomach. He is beginning to understand why Hough kept ranting about it in his letters. The richness of its touch is shaving the edges off his anger, giving him room to think, and at the forefront of his thoughts is the snowgum coffin he is hauling. The coffin that is incomplete.

  Levi is leaving the eastern valleys and turning out onto the Midlands Highway, thinking: I’m going to have to finish it myself. But he has no skills of craftsmanship or woodworking. He has no friends with those skills (he has no friends at all, not in the true, call-each-other-for-no-reason sense); he knows no builders, no cabinetmakers, and besides, he is running out of the money his mother left him.

  Levi is reminding himself of his resolve: to show Charlotte that she wasn’t condemned to rise again, changed and ghastly, after she died. That her life needn’t end twice. That she needn’t suffer the same fate as their mother. That he had sourced this calming coffin for her and her alone; that in the face of their sorrow he had gone to great lengths to have it built; that he couldn’t go another day knowing she was in such pain; that he cared for her this much; that he loved her more than he could ever show with words; that the coffin represented all this.

  Levi is not well. Levi is not realising: he could have just spoken to her. In a mind like his, grand acts will always trump honest words. There was a chance he’d understand this—a slim chance, but a chance nonetheless—the moment he saw the coffin. An epiphany might have dawned upon him: What am I doing? Is she even worried about her eventual death? What if she just needs someone to talk to? What if she just needs time? But this chance was destroyed the moment Levi picked the golden-brown pelt from Hough’s nibbled fingers. Now, with his fingers tousling the fur, with the uncommon warmth spreading from his fingers to his scalp, he has never been more sure of himself.

  Levi is not safe. Levi is hurtling north, past the muddy fields and sad-eyed sheep of the lowlands, telling himself: Yes. I will finish the coffin. How hard can it be? It only takes tools, wood, nails and varnish—he can source these without too much trouble. Snowgums are plentiful in the high hills in the north of the island. He will find one out on the moors, chop it down, heave it onto the ute, haul it home and
saw it into planks. He is a man; he is capable; he can do this.

  Levi is skirting the docklands of Launceston, bumping over a bridge at the mouth of the South Esk, above the silt and eels and past the gaping gorge, and rolling on into the Tamar Valley. The light is dimming into a yellow smudge on the horizon. The broad salty river is blinking points of bright-white-deep-blue up at him, and he is forced to lift a hand to his eyes. He fumbles in the glovebox, eventually retrieving a pair of black sunglasses. They belonged to his father. He would wear them whenever he drove, regardless of the weather, and Levi always found this suspicious. It was suspicious: it could be pouring with rain or the valley could’ve been swamped with fog, but as soon as he got in the car his father would slide these sunglasses on, as if they were as necessary as a seatbelt.

  Levi is pushing the arms of the glasses behind his ears, and as the cool plastic rests on his skin he wonders: Will he be home? At this time of day? The ute is rattling past the bakery town of Exeter. The old man’s wooden mansion is only five minutes away. His father’s face bounces into his mind. The fur burns in his fingers, and then he is pulling the sunglasses off and throwing them back into the glovebox. He blinks at the dying light. The fur burns again, and the image of his father’s face is shaded dark red. Another image appears: the rubbing fronds and rising flames of his mother’s second death, and now Levi is bruising past the turnoff at a dangerous pace.

  Levi is pushing straight on into the dips and humps of the green valley, rising and falling with the heave of the land, his unshielded eyes blinded by the sun bouncing off the salt river, driving on memory alone. After twenty minutes he crests the final hill and drops down to the little farm. He parks beside the cottage and goes inside, where there isn’t much light and even less warmth, but there is, among the dusty shelves and boot-worn floorboards, the unmistakable pillowy feeling of coming home. Even in the midst of his rock-hard resolve, Levi cannot dodge this feeling. It reaches out at him from the faded floral curtains. It snags him from the sagging bookshelves. It rises through the chipped tiles behind the old stove. Through the windows of the front lounge he can see the dark ocean heaving against the rocky coast, and that, too, splashes him with this coming-home comfort. The waves are breaking white. The sun has fifteen, maybe twenty minutes left.