Flames

by Robbie Arnott

  He tried to plead his case. He tried to show his love. He begged her to admit she loved him too.

  Stern-faced, strong-legged Edith was having none of it. She turfed him out in the night and, besides allowing him to come say goodbye to the children the next day, told him to never return. Never again, she said through clenched teeth. Never, ever come here again.

  For years he kept appearing to her, leaping out of every fire she walked past, begging and wheedling and apologising, but she did not relent. With another tiny spark he convinced an ageing, childless insurance magnate to leave him a great wooden house not too far from Edith’s farm in his will, and when the old man died he moved into it, although he didn’t really need anywhere to live. He just needed an address—something physical to show her that he was not going anywhere. For fifteen years he haunted her. He haunted Levi and Charlotte, too, but Edith had forbidden him from going near them, and he thought it best to win her forgiveness before reconnecting with the children.

  She never told him about her illness. In the past he might have discovered it for himself, but he had sworn never to intrude upon her privacy again, so he had no idea how sick she was, how she suffered, how quickly it overwhelmed her.

  How he learned of her death: in the moment he crackled to life around her funeral pyre.

  As he consumed her stern face, her still-strong legs and everything else of her that he had loved so fiercely, he suffered his biggest death of all, greater than any brought about by rain or floods or storms across the millennia of his existence. In the end he could barely summon the energy to finish her cremation. He only managed it because he knew that it was what she wanted.

  And when she returned for that brief moment, standing on the lawn before his great wooden castle, he could barely meet her gaze, because this time he was forewarned; he knew she was about to leave the world forever. She stared at him with an unknowable look on her face—was it sadness? Anger? Regret? Or was it forgiveness? Had she come here to tell him that at the end of it all, despite all his wrongs, she still loved him?

  He couldn’t tell. Not even when her rasping ferns blazed her into a bonfire, and he dived into the flames to try to catch her final thoughts. She burned out, bright and loud and then gone. Gone forever. And she took with her the most human parts of him.

  He returned to a life of burning, leaping and drowsing, only now he had no purpose, no resolve, no reason for doing anything but to feed his hunger. After all these years he was reduced to the same state he was in at the moment the woman, crouching by the riverbank, had first summoned him with the clash of two smooth stones.

  So when Charlotte began leaking the fire he’d given her, he did nothing more than watch. When his son started unravelling, he intervened with only half of his flaming heart.

  Just like their mother, they would eventually die. And he did not want to be close to them when they did.

  GROVE

  I don’t trust the detective. There is something brittle behind her hard face, her smirked words. Something breakable. I can see it, even as she leans against the wall of the hut, unshivering in the mountain air. It’s in the pace of her blinks. In the heave of her breaths. In her crossed arms, crossed too hard, as if she is guarding something precious against her chest. I can see it scrawled all over her: she is not as tough as she would have us believe.

  Along with this mirage of toughness I can see the reasons for it. The hurt in those blinks. The frustration in those breaths. The flames of rage and loneliness that burn through her smirk: flames that can’t be put out.

  She is just like me.

  But Nicola trusts her. I can feel her wanting to spew out our story—and as I feel it I realise that yes, the story is ours; it belongs as much to her as it does to me. It is not mine to hoard or guard. So as the detective says Look, girls, I’m on your side and starts talking about how much she can help us, how running is not a long-term option, I don’t follow my instincts. I don’t stand up and roar her out of the hut. I don’t give in to the heat that is huffing beneath my nails. I just nod at Nicola. Her shoulders fold with relief, and I am swamped with shame. Those shoulders should be straight; she shouldn’t be going through this. I have yanked her off her shiny straight tracks and dragged her somewhere dark and jagged. And yet she stays.

  Nicola tells our story, from the moment I reached Melaleuca to the minutes before the detective arrived. She omits my flames, and that we’re sleeping together. She says we came here after the farm fire, that we didn’t know who to trust. We just wanted to get away from people for a while, she says. To be alone.

  The detective smooths a palm over her hair. She stretches her arms behind her neck, cracks a knuckle and congratulates us on our decision. Then, as if our story needs a partner, she starts telling us how she found us—how she spoke to police, how she saw pictures of this hut in a photo album at Nicola’s house, how she found Oshikawa deep in the cream of his stout—but I don’t listen closely. I am staring at Nicola and wondering how I am going to tell her that we have shared a bed for the last time.

  It will rip and wreck her. But she will recover. And I will burn every shade of blue before I give her wounds that won’t close.

  The detective is still talking, saying that we should hit the road, that if the ice melts we can make it to Beauty Point by mid-afternoon. I drag my eyes across the room. The windows glint in the cold. Beauty Point?

  Nicola looks at her as well. My parents live at Hawley. Shouldn’t we go there?

  Your parents didn’t hire me. The detective breathes into cupped hands before angling her head towards me. Her brother did.

  I have met siblings with almost unconscious understandings of each other. Of what the other will say, how they will react, what they will choose: as if they are adhering to a plan that only the two of them are privy to.

  It is like meeting aliens. Levi and I have never understood each other.

  But I know that between us there is love. Not warm love, not vocal love, but love nonetheless. Love built with his stubborn resolve, with my hot temper, with all the care our mother poured into us.

  So when I ran after I found his notes, I did not do it out of fear or anger; I did it out of love. Our mother’s ash was still floating before my eyes, great black wafts of her, everywhere I looked, and his plan to make me a coffin was too much death for me to deal with. I could have spoken to him, but he would not have listened. I cannot express myself properly to him—it always comes out in shouts or fumes or the grinding of my molars—and he, with his calm face and placating gestures, treats me only with condescension. Our talk would have ended with my high screams and his soft words, and nothing I could say would stop him from buying that coffin.

  I would have ended up hating him. And he is the only family I have left. I wasn’t ready to give up on the love our mother built.

  So I left, making loose plans to come back once the ash clouds had blown from my vision, once I could trust myself to speak without screaming. Once winter had given way to the weak heat of spring. He would understand, or he wouldn’t—it did not matter. He would have no choice but to wait, and through this long winter wait his coffin plans would ebb out of his mind as surely as the coming heat of spring would thaw my rage and sorrow.

  But there is more. I should be honest. Even before I found what he’d written, I was dreaming of leaving. Of streaming away from our mother’s farm, away from her possessions, her clothes, her wafting ash, her twin deaths, away and alone and unknown; because, while the flames only began leaking out of me in Melaleuca, I could already feel them crackling inside me back at home. Every scratch caused a spark; every breath held smoke; every naked step singed the floorboards. Levi couldn’t see it, but I could. I’d been burning ever since our mother had.

  Maybe the flames have always been there.

  The detective’s sedan peels over the road ahead of us. The station wagon is smooth and solid beneath Nicola’s hands. We are coming down from the highlands, leaving the fields of rock a
nd snow behind. Everywhere the trees are growing taller, growing in pairs, then gangs, and then in thick, brown-green-mottled forests that crowd out the sunlight. I am a coast person. I don’t like being hemmed by these trees. Nicola senses it, and her hand falls onto my knee. Warmth spreads from under her light grip. I am going to tell her. On this drive, or when we find Levi, or when she looks at me in my mother’s hall and asks what happens next: I am going to tell her to turn and leave, and to forget.

  But her hand is staying still, warm and firm, while her eyes are trained on the black road, and I’m not saying anything. Not yet.

  On she drives, down to the flatlands and dairy farms, then skewing through a narrow road that links the Bass and West Tamar highways. As the land opens my kinks begin to loosen, and my thoughts turn to what lies at the end of this drive. Levi has gone to the trouble of hiring this detective; he’s probably mad with worry. And this worry might have driven him away from his coffin plan—he might have abandoned it. It might only ever have been a loose idea, one that he gave up as soon as I left. He might be making tea and wanting nothing more than to know that I am safe.

  Or there could be a coffin, with my name carved in its lid, sitting in the living room.

  Whatever happens when we arrive, he will start by lecturing me, and as his condescension drips and thickens I will need to stay calm. Not just to keep the peace; not just to allow room for us to forgive each other. I need to stay calm so my flames don’t spark.

  If I am to leave Nicola, I need to control them without her touch.

  I focus on an image: me, standing firm in our kitchen as Levi frowns and explains, not a drop of blue leaking out of me. Just the two of us. No detective. No Nicola. The remains of my family in the unheated kitchen, fumbling for a way to be and talk and stay together. The farms keep rolling past and I hold on to this image, keeping it tight between my eyes, as Nicola keeps her hand on my thigh, and it’s not until we are spat out onto the West Tamar that I realise this image of my family is not whole. This spot on the road holds huge views of the valley—of water, hills, orchards, forests, jetties and houses. One house stands out to me more than others. A house of amber wood and sharp shadows. A huge house, mostly unused. A house I’ve never entered. A mansion for one man.

  The image in my mind barely holds enough room for Levi and me. We are stretching against the frames of it: his frowning lips and shaking head, my shifting feet and rising heat, all pushing at the boundaries of the kitchen. There’s no space for anyone else. And if there were, I wouldn’t let him in. I don’t think Levi would, either. We are so different; yet, in this, we are the same. I am sure of it.

  Who would welcome a father who leaves? One who skirts around the periphery of your life, giving you just enough contact to believe that one day he will return for good, enough tiny thrills, enough hour-long visits, enough cut-short adventures to put constant doubt in your mind about the truth: that he will never come back, not in any way that matters.

  Who would welcome a father like ours? He didn’t even come to her funeral.

  But now the image is shimmering between my closed eyes, curling at the edges and bursting with flares of ultraviolet. We do not need him; we do not want him; and yet the thought of him still sags with that doubt.

  Our mother’s door was closed to him. I won’t let it open.

  We reach home around three in the afternoon. The sun is biting down on the hills behind us. Nicola turns into the driveway, both hands back on the wheel. So this is where you grew up?

  Yep. I nod.

  It’s beautiful, she says, though her Hawley home is less than half an hour away and must look very similar: it must have the same blue-white water, scrubby bushes and thin grass crawling in all directions. She still says that it’s beautiful, and now I am thinking of how I am going to hurt her. Bile-rich anxiety floods through me, but I don’t have time to let it sink in: I have noticed something.

  The ute isn’t here. Which means Levi isn’t here.

  The detective parks behind us and gets out as we do, stretching her back, chewing grunts. Nobody home, she barks across the gravel.

  I’m walking towards the house. The detective keeps talking. Anyone he might be visiting? Any friends?

  I grab the spare key from under the kitchen windowsill. No. The three of us go inside, and the house hits me like an icy August wave. The grain of the table. The lacquer of the floorboards. The photos on the walls, the people in the photos: me, Levi, our mother, our grandmother, aunts, older women I never met but whose blood is my blood. In the hall I breathe long, I breathe deep, and soon I am leaning hard into the sandstone wall. Then Nicola is there, her hand in the curve beneath my shoulder blades. Her touch is natural, easy. I can’t trip or curse or sweat without her popping up to support me. I keep my breaths deep. If she were to ask me what’s wrong I would snap, I would wrench my body away from her, but she never asks. She knows not to. I don’t know how she knows it, but she does.

  Then the house lets me go.

  We sit on the stools in front of the kitchen bench. Nicola is staring around the house in a surreptitious kind of way. The detective starts wandering in and out of the rooms, drumming her fingers against the walls. After poking her neck into every corner she comes into the kitchen and starts looking in the cupboards. Soon she finds a dusty flagon of sherry, something my mother would pour into stews and gravies. She turns to me and raises an eyebrow. Go for it, I say. Then you can leave.

  She takes a mug from the rack by the sink and lets the sherry rise to its lip. No, I don’t think so. Her arm rises. The mug tilts as she takes a long draw, then says: When I finish a job, I get paid. I’m not letting you out of my sight until the money hits my hand. Her lips take another lunge at the mug. If you want to get rid of me, we should find your brother.

  Somewhere on my lap, my hands are clenching. I don’t know where he is.

  Well. Another draw of sherry. We had better find out.

  Money. I don’t have enough, or any—Levi and I never got around to splitting up the inheritance—but if I did I wouldn’t give it to her. I would grip the cash, let my sparks loose and bring her smug high eyebrows down as the notes smoked and the coins melted. Now the house grabs me again: my blood is rushing hotter, my lungs are pumping faster, and I am trusting her less than when she’d found us. The fury is building so fast, it always comes so fast, and I want her out of my mother’s home. Levi has probably told her about me and my anger—how I’m unpredictable, how I’m uncontrollable—because I know that’s what he thinks: that I am weird and wild.

  The detective is crossing her arms. Her eyebrows are staying high, and her fake toughness is leaking out, and she is lucky she left the mountain unburnt. She is lucky she left the mountain at all. If I wanted it, her ash would be dusting over the ice of Crater Lake. My ears are throbbing, not scarlet but violet, from the drums to the lobes, and then Nicola is standing up and walking to the fridge.

  He must be somewhere. Her thumb skates over the flyers and magnets sticking to its door. I watch her eyes follow her thumb, then flick to the bench, then to the wind-whipped fields through the window.

  Now she studies the inside of the fridge. Now she pulls a receipt from the bin and studies its tiny lines. Now she is hosing down my heat without even touching me. Now is when I need to tell her. Now, again, I say nothing. I just get up and help her pick through the rubbish. The detective gulps down the rest of her sherry before going to the dining table and riffling through the papers on its surface.

  There isn’t much in the house to look through. While my mother was messy and I am even messier, Levi has always been obsessively tidy. With neither of us here he’d straightened everything: rigid curtains, right-angled furniture, dustless surfaces. Not even a stray mug on the coffee table in the lounge. After ten minutes of looking at a too-clean, sanitised version of my home I turn to the windows and look instead at the fields and rocks and water.

  Then I hear Nicola call my name. I find her standing in front
of the hall table. A small foldable map I hadn’t seen on my way in is lying next to a yellow pad. A pen is there too, although nothing is written on the paper. Nicola is frowning, trying to figure something out, and her tense concentration draws me to her. I don’t like touching people—I dislike it almost as much as when people touch me—but my hand is on her neck, the back of her neck where her hair gives way to soft skin, and my fingers are climbing into her rusty curls as her fingers are rubbing over the yellow pad. Look, she says, taking my hand from her head and placing it on the paper. He wrote something.

  I run my hand across the page. She’s right. Grooves have been pressed down, but there is no ink. I look up, and behind Nicola I see the detective leaning against the wall.

  The page before it, she says. He wrote something and took it with him.

  Nicola turns around. Can you tell what it was?

  The detective takes the pad from the table and lifts it to her eyes, holding it in the light. Maybe. She trails a forefinger over the lines. Probably not. She closes her eyes. Although the lines are short. It’s probably directions. She looks back at the desk, indicating the map with a nod of her head. Is that any help?

  I hadn’t paid any attention to it when I’d walked over; I’d been coming for Nicola, for her skin and hair, things I wanted to touch again before I sent her away. Now I grab the map, and as soon as I look at it, I know. It should have been obvious.

  What, I hear Nicola say: What is it? I hand her the map and walk back to the kitchen, where I lean on the bench. My breaths start coming fast again; my palms slip with sweat; something crackles in my chest. I watch Nicola and the detective peer at the green shapes, the blue shading, the red and yellow lines that all come together to draw a picture of the Tamar Valley and the roads that snake through it. Roads that lead to towns, coves, cliffs, forests and other roads, roads going everywhere, but one road in particular stands out more to them; I can see it as their eyes home in on its path. The only road marked with handwritten notes, small neat pencil marks designed to be erased, the notes of a compulsive tidier. Notley Fern Gorge.