Flames

by Robbie Arnott

  So he spent much more time in his natural state, cooking, warming, crafting, aiding, keeping a few plains clear of trees so the wallabies would graze unhidden from their spears. He never tired of this life, if life is what it was—not even when the paler people came, changing the land in ways he could not have imagined. They brought pain to the people he’d been helping for centuries—pain that he initially responded to by burning down their buildings, their docks, their great bird-like ships—but they also came with a vast multitude of new purposes for him. With them he was not merely cooking marsupials, sharpening spears and burning scrub; he was exploding black powder and flinging balls of metal through the air faster than any bird could fly. He was devouring viscous, rich liquids in squat glass containers, while throwing yellow light onto muddy streets. With their clever cruelty he helped them brand cowhides on farms, melt wax in dining rooms, chew strange logs in strange houses. And best of all: with these pale, overclothed people he learned how to burn hotter than ever before, as they moulded him into infernos that could crack rock and melt the ores he hadn’t known hid inside them.

  The pain was still there, the loss and fear, fury and sorrow, etched into the faces of the people who were being hunted in their own homeland. As he learned more and burned hotter he began to make excuses for not helping them. It wasn’t his place to interfere in human lives, he told himself. Nobody had asked him, nobody had called for him, nobody had appreciated him. Who was he to dictate who and what was right? He couldn’t make these decisions or impose his ideas on these short, flickering human lives. He was only fire, and he could only burn. Yet he knew, even if he wouldn’t admit it to himself, that he was acting selfishly; that he liked learning from the pale people more than he wanted to help the ones he’d known for centuries.

  More pale outsiders arrived and he became more entranced by the tricks and toys that they had shown him. When he wanted to know more he walked among these new people, using the flesh body that resembled the skinner, but they reacted poorly to his dark appearance. They insulted him, chased him, occasionally tried to hurt him. Rather than change his body—for as enamoured as he was with the pale technology, he could not extinguish his love for his mother’s people—he tinkered with lighting tiny sparks in their minds, sparks that persuaded them to look upon him favourably. It usually worked, but when it didn’t he lit other sparks, deeper sparks, ones that meddled with their ability to perceive him clearly. In this way he could speak to them whenever he liked, which wasn’t very often. Once he had his answers he lit a final spark in their minds, one that burned out any memory of him, and left.

  If he had been closer to being human, he would have realised that these little sparks were a greater source of power than even his hugest land-scouring flames. But he wasn’t human, and he didn’t think this way. His way of thinking was much like his way of living: blaze and sleep, climb and fall, burn and learn. As long as he felt he was serving a purpose, he was content to flick into the humans’ lives whenever necessary, and to flick out just as quickly. It was all easy, and to him it all made sense. Life continued at whatever pace he felt appropriate. Up and down the land he burned, powerful and trouble-free. He could’ve gone on like this for years, decades, centuries…

  In the green-dappled gloom of Notley Fern Gorge he found a reason not to.

  He’d been savouring the well-aged remains of a toppled whitegum, deep in the fern-filled gorge, when from the depths of the green she came towards him. Her face was pale; her legs were strong; her hair was dark; her hand carried a bottle of water. He didn’t realise he was staring at her until the cream-sweet flavour of the whitegum faded from his mouth. He’d accidentally left the stump behind, and was moving across a dry, tasteless twig. Footsteps crunched nearby and he looked up to see her standing right in front of him. Her round, dark eyes were centimetres from him; he recoiled, fluttering his flames away from her face, filled with a sudden plume of fear, a fear that made no sense—how could she harm him? Her eyes narrowed. Her hand lifted the bottle. Water fell, his coals fizzed, and the last thing he saw before this little, latest death was her hand rising to her stern, sharp-boned face.

  Minutes later he roared back to life in a pub fireplace. Sparks shot; flames leapt; logs were hurled across a crowd of beer-swillers. And then he went looking for her.

  What was it about her? Her sure, strong strides? The way her milky face was framed by a black mass of hair? Was it her sternness, the matter-of-fact way she dealt with a stump fire in the fern gorge? And why now—why did love bloom in him, so many centuries after he first met a woman?

  A wanting fire. A sharp face. An obsession born and chased. If he’d stopped and pondered it all, down in his brightest, oldest coals, he would’ve realised nothing good could come from such a pursuit; that he should let the sharp-faced woman live out her life in flameless peace. But he pondered nothing. He was too busy wanting her.

  He found her by the ocean.

  Her name was Edith McAllister. She lived on the north coast, on a little farm that had been owned by her family for five generations. He knew her family well—or, at least, he knew the women. Whenever they died their brothers, sons and husbands asked him to turn their dead flesh to ash: a service he dutifully provided. These women had the odd habit of coming back to life after that, infused with whatever environment their ash had mingled with, but he didn’t think much of it—he’d seen every wild and mild thing that had happened on the island for the last thousand years. A few short-term reincarnations didn’t pique his interest. But now he was remembering these changed, returned women, and the moss and leaves and shells and fur that they had brought back with them.

  He realised: the day would come when it was her turn to burn. He told himself this connected them.

  On the farm she herded goats, fed chickens, tended crops and pulled an endless stream of thistles from the soil. He began watching her do it, driven first by his obsession, and then, once he had studied every one of her habits and behaviours, by his desire to know how she might come to love him back.

  What he knew about building love: very little. But he had seen generations of humans fall in and out of love with each other. It had something to do with attraction, he knew, and kindness and care and devotion. A true kind of love was in itself a version of what he knew best: it was a purpose. So he began following his greatest purpose yet: to make her love him.

  After a year of studying her he began revealing himself. The first time, he wandered into one of her fields and posed as a lost traveller: a naïve, foolish ploy. He’d given himself fair skin, sandy hair, an absurd name—Monty—but he never got to introduce himself. She saw him trudging across a paddock, tall and strange, and chased him off the property from the back of a four-wheeled motorbike before he could say a word.

  The next day he changed his face, lowered his height and walked into a Beauty Point fish-and-chip shop at the moment she was ordering a flake and potato-cake special. He loudly ordered the same and paid for both meals before she could open her wallet. His intention was to impress her with gentlemanly gallantry, but the result was a hard stare and a storming out of the shop, plastic fettuccine straps parting before her fast legs as she muttered bugger off. The smell of fry-oil hung in his nostrils as he watched her depart. His despair was huge, but his resolve did not change.

  When he showed himself to Edith the third time he finally experienced success—though not in the usual manner. At an Exeter pub he found her drinking beer with a group of farmers’ sons and daughters. They were singing, chanting, knocking glass against glass and carousing like sailors, and from the roaring fire grate he could not take his glowing eyes off her. When their faces were turned to the bar he strode out of the fire, this time in the skin of the man he’d first imitated, and made his way straight to her side, where he offered to buy her a drink. A loud offer. A kind offer, or so he thought. An offer she pondered, staring up at his proud assumed face, before she rejected him with a scornful scowl and Thanks, but I can buy my o
wn beer.

  The farmers’ offspring smirked.

  His fresh skin burned, and in that moment of rejection he made the worst mistake of his long life.

  Edith turned from the bar, the scowl sliding from her face as she looked back at her friends, and though he knew he shouldn’t do it, though he knew it was wrong, he couldn’t stop himself. With a hot snap of his fingers he threw a tiny spark deep into the crinkles of her brain.

  Edith stopped turning. Her expression was replaced by a placid frown. He cleared his throat, and she turned back to him with nothing but polite confusion on her face.

  Such a tiny spark! And all it did was burn out the ill feeling she’d formed of him. He didn’t make her think he was handsome, or smart, or irresistibly charismatic. Nor did he make her fall in love with him. He simply gave himself a second chance.

  When that didn’t work, he did it again. Five times. Five chances.

  By the fifth spark she had drunk three more lagers, and through a fluke of humour he somehow made her laugh. He’d toned down his enthusiasm and stopped offering to buy her things, restricting himself to soft words and small smiles. To his delight, she smiled back. Half an hour later she told him she had to leave, and as she slid off her stool he cleared his throat again and quietly asked: Do you like bushwalking?

  A nod. Another smile.

  I’ve been told there’s a gorge around here I need to see. A gorge full of ferns.

  Her smile climbed high.

  His voice fell low. But I have no one to show me where it is.

  The following day she took him to the glens of Notley, a place he pretended to marvel at despite knowing it better than anyone. As they walked he steered the conversation to things he knew she was enthusiastic about—ocean swimming, spring lamb, historical novels—and, in doing so, created the false atmosphere of them having a lot in common. By the end of their circuit she was quietly convinced that he was worth seeing again.

  So she saw him again. And again. And each time they met, during robust outdoors activities, he perpetuated the myth of himself as an easy-going man with values and interests akin to her own. He had her believing that he was a traveller ready to settle down, that he wanted to make a living from the earth, that his name was something as honest and simple as Jack. He never again lit a spark in her mind—though he did throw some into the thoughts of her friends and family whenever they asked too many questions about where he’d come from.

  After a few months he was spending so much time on her farm he was more or less living there, so it became a permanent arrangement. He was a huge help to her in the fields and there was nowhere else he would rather have been. And after spending so much time in the skin of a human he had begun to love her in a human way, not just as an obsession. And she, despite all his false starts, loved him too. This love had grown between them, hard and fast, and the strength of the feeling was so strong it sometimes had him spurting fire from his eyes and nose and fingertips, fire he would quickly slap dead before Edith noticed anything.

  When she took him back to Notley one afternoon, under a clear bright sky, and lowered her knee to the ground and asked him to marry her, he said yes, yes, and only yes, and he did not stop to wonder at the folly of this answer.

  Their first child was a boy with hair as black as hers, and no resemblance to him. For this he was glad—he wanted his children to be wholly human, like their mother, and not cursed with the eternity of whatever he was. All that his son had inherited from him was his love of purpose and his strength of resolve. The boy grew into a skinny, serious youth, with little sense of fun but a huge sense of responsibility. Jack—by this stage he was so human he had even begun to think of himself with his assumed moniker—loved him, tremendously, but this love was tempered by a degree of confusion he could not shake. Levi was like him in duty, but not in face or soul or any other way. As the boy grew, Jack found less and less that he could relate to. He tried; and his fatherly love, however tempered, was real and strong; yet he could not stop himself feeling an unbridgeable gap between them.

  He never realised that this distance grew not because they were different, but because they were so alike—flames or not.

  He had no such troubles when their daughter was born. Charlotte emerged into the world looking so much like Edith he nearly fainted. His feelings for her were of the purest, awe-blinded kind of devotion. Instead of seeing himself and recoiling, he saw Edith, and surged closer. Even when Charlotte grew into a loud, hard-to-handle blur of a child, he could feel nothing but love. Take, for instance, what happened when he tucked her into her blankets, the first night she was brought home from the hospital.

  He was leaning over the side of the cot, watching her sleep, feeling something swell inside his chest. He leaned closer. The room went foggy; a father’s tear fell. A tear of clean, unvarnished love, and because it was brought about by such pure emotion—and because it came from him—it was not a tear at all. From his right eye a drop of fire descended, globular and hot, straight into the gurgling mouth of his daughter. He saw it falling at the last moment, but it was too late—straight onto her fat tongue it landed, sizzling against the saliva. Charlotte blinked. She swallowed. Another sizzle sounded, deep from her throat, as the fire worked its way down into her chest. He grabbed her by the shoulders, terrified, and held her in the air. He began shaking her, filled with horror. Charlotte stared at him, and after a few moments he realised that the drop of fire didn’t seem to be hurting her. If anything, she seemed happy. He stopped shaking her. Charlotte burped, and a small cloud of blue smoke shot out of her mouth, bringing with it a gurgle of babyish delight.

  It brought another noise too, although not from his daughter. A strangled moan rumbled out from the doorway. He turned to see Edith standing there. How much she had seen: he didn’t know. Not until the look on her face and the noise grinding through her teeth made it clear that she had witnessed the fire in his eye, and the smoke in their daughter.

  And did this end it all between them? Was this why Edith ended up, at the end of her short second life, burning on a green lawn in front of a wooden castle?

  No. If anything, it brought them closer. Once he had explained who he was and where the fire came from—and once, after a few days of suspicion and a lot of beer, she believed him—it began a new phase of their life together. After the children were in bed he would begin showing her exactly what he could do with fire—or, as the nights went by, what he couldn’t do with it. He had never performed for anyone before, so he’d never witnessed the wonder he could draw from others. Fireworks danced in their lounge; fireworks bloomed in the sky, if he wanted them to. All his mysteriousness began making sense to his wife, and though she was a solid, sensible person, she could not help but feel lucky, even special, to be married to such a creature.

  They watched Charlotte carefully, waiting for signs of the fire growing within her, but they saw nothing. She was a normal, if belligerent, child. Little Levi marched on, duty-bound and serious as ever. Things would have continued this way for who knows how long—decades?—if it weren’t for a school parent–teacher night gone wrong.

  Jack and Edith had sat in the fluorescent gloom of Charlotte’s grade-three classroom, listening to her teacher drone on about their daughter’s difficult attitude. Jack wasn’t built for sitting still. Even after a few years of humanity he could not escape his true nature, and he could not bear this dowdy woman mouthing criticisms of his perfect daughter. In the twelfth minute of her sermon he raised a hand and clicked a finger, flicking a tiny spark into her mind with centuries-practised accuracy.

  The teacher stopped. The teacher blinked. The teacher shook her head, rubbed at her face, and began telling them that Charlotte was one of her best, kindest and hardest-working students.

  They left soon after. Jack shuddered pleasantly in the open air outside the classroom, but Edith, who had noticed the teacher’s sudden change, did not.

  What was that? she asked. What did you do?

 
; Oh. They were walking towards the car. Nothing.

  In the front seat, Edith glared at him. Yes, you did.

  I just convinced her she was wrong about Charlotte.

  How?

  I can…well…it’s hard to explain.

  Then you’d better start now. I’m tired.

  On the drive home he told her about what he could do with fire in its smallest forms. He hadn’t mentioned it before, he told her, because he didn’t do it very often, and hadn’t thought she would have found it very interesting—especially when compared to the other truths about himself (controlling fireworks, shape-shifting, being a creature of pure flame, and so on).

  When they arrived at the farm Edith seemed to have accepted his story—after all, she had just seen him do it to the teacher. It was only when they were in the house, after boiling the kettle, after taking off their coats, after checking on the children, that she asked him: Have you ever done it to me?

  He would have lied, if he’d been fast enough. But the pause before he spoke was enough for her to know the true answer.

  She didn’t even want to know what he’d done, exactly, or the specific ways in which he’d influenced her. She just wanted him gone.