I sat down stiffly on the floral couch. I was totally spooked. My guts were churning. I was too scared to put the telly on, because I still wanted my ears at the ready. The folder I’d been given was lying on the couch next to me. I’d left it there last night, intending to read more of it, but had quickly got stuck – the few pages I’d looked at were quite dense and dry. But maybe trying to solve the mystery of who had sent it to me would be intriguing enough to take my mind off non-existent bad guys. I read the next page.
There are some environments – say, open box forest – where a single, moderate fire would be a level of disturbance that was relatively inconsequential for the habitat of the resident species. But a second fire too soon, perhaps an unnatural, out-of-season, human-instigated fire – the most likely form of disturbance here – could be quite catastrophic. A single fire could be survived by a resident population of various endangered species, although one would expect some dispersal. But an inappropriate fire, or two fires in quick succession, could render the area inhospitable to most bird, mammal and reptile species, possibly for years to come.
I had to read the paragraph five times to get what this Selina person was on about. It got me thinking about the fire. I hadn’t really thought about it since it happened, what with having to deal with everything else. No. That’s not exactly right. I had actively tried not to think about it, because I knew it would lead to thinking about the other thing that happened that night. But after reading this woman’s writing, I couldn’t really help thinking about it. Because I remembered how beautiful it was, how beautiful the fire was in the dark, how fast and bright and powerful. Despite how frightening it was, and everything it meant, and everything that happened after, it was one of the most impressive things I’d ever seen in my life.
I’ve never been scared of the boogey-man, but I’d always had a fear of bushfire, or ‘the fire’ as I used to call it when I was really little. So when Mum and Dad came and got me out of bed and they said, there’s a fire nearby, we’ll be alright but we probably shouldn’t be in bed, it was like if you’d said to someone my age, ‘You know that monster with the scales and the claws and the cold evil eyes that you used to think lived in your cupboard when you were a kid? Well it’s actually real and it is in your cupboard right now, and it can smell you and wants to come and tear you limb from limb, but look, you’ll probably be alright if you turn on the light and keep an eye on the cupboard door.’
So I got up and went outside, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. There was an orange glow behind the hills, so that their profile with the pinnacle was silhouetted. The smell was amazing – earthy and sharp at the same time. Dad went down to the dam to start the pump. Mum had a radio on in the doorway, turned up as loud as it could go.
I was scared, I’ll admit it. And then I really got scared: I saw it. No longer just a glow, I could see the bright line of flame creeping over the top of the hill. It was still a fair way off, but Mum said, ‘Shit.’ And Mum hardly ever swears.
She locked Penny and Mo in the house, and when she came outside she said it again – ‘Shit’ – and it was clear why. The fire was coming our way. And it wasn’t slow.
Dad said, ‘Okay,’ and turned the pump hose onto the roof of the house, and soon water had filled the gutters and was spilling off the roof in sheets onto the grass of the yard. Mum and I went inside and filled the bath with water and chucked in towels and blankets. I didn’t think I was showing how scared I was, but I must have been because Mum said, ‘It’s okay, honey, our house is good for this, it’s brick, and there’s nothing flammable too close to the house. And the radio says there’s a wind change coming soon which will turn the fire back on itself.’
But when we went outside again, everything looked different. It was much darker than before, the full moon had been blotted out, there was a strong wind, and the sky was all sparkly. It looked like there were little golden stars flitting about everywhere. It was utterly beautiful, and utterly terrifying.
Dad looked at the sky. He seemed to hesitate for a moment. He actually said, ‘Um.’
Then he said, ‘Right, Robin, inside, and put on jeans and whatever you’ve got that’s wool and covers your arms. And a beanie.’
I can’t believe I actually said, ‘But it’s hot.’
He yelled at me then, and I went, and when I came out again he and Mum were covered up too and he handed me a bucket with water in it, and a soaking towel. The yard around the house was saturated from the pump. The three of us went and stood apart in the paddock just outside the yard. I wasn’t sure what we were doing. Mum was about fifteen metres away, and Dad was around the other side of the house. I was about to shout out to Mum to ask what we were doing. But then the golden stars began to fall.
The effect was incredible. Golden streaks against a dark sky. It was mesmerising. They floated down to about a metre above the ground and then winked out. I was transfixed by the beauty of it, and then I heard Mum yell, ‘Robbie!’ and I looked over and she was beating out an ember on the ground with her sodden towel. I looked around at the house, and Mum yelled at me, ‘The house is fine, look at your patch.’
And so I looked at my patch. There was a tiny glow in the grass a few metres from me. The first tiny licks of flame. I whacked it with the towel, and it died almost instantly. I learned to watch the bigger embers as they fell because they were less likely to go out by themselves. I whacked and I whacked, and I actually started enjoying myself until after a while I looked up.
A large patch of the paddock was on fire. I couldn’t believe how quickly it moved. Grass fires may be less intimidating than forest fires, but they go quick. It was tearing up the hill and across the paddock. My towel was no match for that.
Then I heard Dad yell, ‘CFA!’ and Mum dropped her bucket and ran and opened the gate and the CFA truck trundled across our paddock and drove along behind the line of fire, dousing the flames.
And then, suddenly, like Mum said, the wind died, and then changed. There were no more falling embers, the fire in our paddock was out, and the big fire in the hills turned back on itself and died right down. The smoke cleared and the moon came out.
The CFA truck trundled off again and Mum and Dad and I separately took our buckets and towels and spread out across the paddocks, searching for small embers in the grass and snuffing them out. Mum headed up towards the top paddock, I went down to the patch of trees below the bottom dam, near the creek, and Dad went up alongside the road.
And this is the part I’ve been not remembering on purpose.
It was dark down near the creek behind the dam, so I couldn’t really be seen by Mum or Dad as I searched around the burnt rushes and fallen logs for hot spots. The best way to find them was to see their yellow light shining out of the dark grass, so even though it was still dark, I didn’t have a torch, and neither did Mum or Dad. I extinguished the small embers down behind the dam, and then I turned and faced back up the hill to see if I could see any live sparks against the grass of the slope. From there I could actually see both my parents. Halfway up the hill my dad was silhouetted against the lighter cut-away of the gravel road, and right at the top of the hill I could make out Mum’s small shape against the turquoise sky as she moved between the trees. And across the hill in the moonlight I could see our gravel road winding away to the west, towards the main road. And down that gravel road a car was travelling: slowly, quietly, with its lights off.
It drew closer to where Dad was damping embers along the roadside. He straightened up and watched the car, and when it reached him it stopped, and a woman got out. They stood looking at each other. They didn’t say anything, I would have heard them, but Dad gestured with both his arms, kind of moving her away through space, his hands pushing the air that should push her back into her car and back up the road. But she didn’t move, and I saw him look around, and then the woman ran at him and threw her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth.
And he kissed her right back.
> I’ve thought about it since, and about how she knew Dad would be up there on the road: Dad, not me or Mum. Did she know? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe that’s why she had the lights off. Maybe she just wanted to see him after the fire. Maybe she was scared and pathetic and took the chance. Pathetic – not like Mum. Not like my strong and powerful Mum, working hard, beating out fire, looking after us. But maybe she did know, this woman. Maybe Dad was up on the road on purpose. Maybe he had made contact with her somehow. Maybe they had arranged it. The thought made me sick. But there was no use thinking about it. Those were things I’d never know. But I did know what I saw: that he kissed her. That he didn’t just accept her kiss, he kissed her back.
Then he ushered her back into the car, and the car reversed quietly away. Once it reached the main road, it turned around, the lights came on, and it drove off out of sight. Dad looked around again and then went on damping embers. He had no idea that I had seen. And I wasn’t the only one.
From where he was standing, up by the road, he couldn’t see Mum among the dark trees at the top of the hill. But I could. I saw her against the deep turquoise sky as she stood immobile between two trees and watched Dad kiss that woman. And then she sat straight down on the ground and I couldn’t see her anymore, her shape lost against the dark hillside. And after the car had left, and with my stomach dropping inside me as I watched its headlights disappear into the distance, I sat down on the hard ground too.
In the tiny house in the city, as I sat thinking about that night and about that awful moment when my world changed, something happened. Sitting there on the floral couch, with the TV off and Selina Antonella’s folder of ecology notes about fire spread around me, and with my ears still straining for the sound of intruders, I heard a curlew. I really heard it. And no mistake this time.
I went to the double glass doors leading to the backyard and there, outside on the brick paving, a curlew stood in the moonlight, looking at me and calling. I opened the door and stepped out into the cool night. The bird stopped its cry, but it wasn’t afraid of me. It didn’t even step back. It stood there and watched me come towards it. In the moonlight the leg-tags were clear as day.
‘Hello,’ I said. And I don’t know what made me say it, but I felt like it was true. ‘Hello, you. I know you, don’t I?’
The bird stood still as I approached, staring at me with those beautiful eyes, an intention there, something I couldn’t grasp. It was still breathing with its beak open. And then I saw its wing. Hanging strangely, and with a dark stain across it. What had happened? Had it been attacked by a dog? Or maybe a fox – Dad said they were here too, in the city. I thought maybe it couldn’t fly – but then how did it get here? I thought maybe I could catch it, take it to a wildlife vet, and we could fix it up and take it back out to the bush somewhere and release it. I took off my school dress and, in bra and undies, prepared to throw it over the bird’s head. I took a few quiet steps towards it. It didn’t move. And then, when I was just metres away, it opened its beak wide and made that incredible call again. So close, so loud, so eerily beautiful. The sound of home. In reflex I shut my eyes – it was so loud. And then, with my eyes shut, I couldn’t help but listen to it, to listen with all of me and not just my ears.
And suddenly I was back there, at home, and on that night, the night of the fire. I was sitting on the ground, my head resting against a log down behind the back dam, my mind reeling – my home, my family, my life falling apart in my head – my dad, my mum . . . what had I just seen? The moon was turning the grass around me silver. I was curled into a ball, still and silent: frozen with fright and fear and foreboding. And from somewhere nearby, somewhere so close among the pristine unburnt trees of the low paddock, a Bush Stone-curlew was calling. There it was in my memory. A clear note, pure as a bell. I couldn’t question it. It was true. A true memory. An unseen curlew and I, sitting hunkered down deep in the valley of my home – of our home – while higher up in the hills everything we knew became so disturbed and so changed as to be unrecognisable.
In the tiny backyard in the city I opened my eyes and stared at the curlew in front of me. It stopped calling immediately, and stared back. And then, as if it had only been waiting for that forgotten detail to make itself clear, for that dropped thread to weave itself back into the tapestry of my memory, the bird took two steps and swept itself into the sky, flying off through the night, back towards the parklands.
Seth
‘Hey!’
Seth gets a jolt – a policeman shaking his shoulder, quite roughly. Seth is down by the creek in the parklands, slumped to one side. The policeman is speaking to him.
‘Hey! What’s your name? What’s in the smokes?’
Seth can barely answer. He is too hot. He is confused. He was supposed to be fixing something, for his sister. He giggles. ‘Smokes. Smmmokes.’
‘These, your cigarettes here – what’s in them, mate?’
‘Smoke. Smoke and fire.’
‘Alright then. Come on, mate. You’re not too well, are ya?’
‘Me? Man, I’m okay. I’m great!’ Seth tries to stand but he is not sure which way is up. He lies back down. He laughs.
‘We’re gonna get you to a hospital, just in case. That hand looks pretty bad too. What’d you do?’
Seth looks at the hand the man is pointing to. He barely recognises it as his own. There are dirty bandages, tattered and falling away. Fingers protrude out the top of them: red and yellow and glistening with pus. It is huge. It is as big as the policeman. As big as a tree. One of the trees that was on fire. The fire coming over the ridge towards them.
‘That’s not my hand, Mr Buddy. That’s a tree.’
The young policeman, only a few years older than Seth, nods to an older policeman a few metres away up on the path. He nods back and talks into his radio.
‘Well, let’s check if the folks at the hospital agree with you on that.’
‘No, no. No, buddy. Leave me here, that’s a good buddy.’
‘Can’t do that, mate.’
The policeman reaches down to take Seth’s arm to help him up.
‘No!’ Seth lurches upright, lunges at the policeman with his fist, and falls over.
‘Mate, I’m gonna pretend you didn’t just do that. Do it again and I’ll have to cuff you. How old are you? Sixteen? Eighteen?’
‘Seventeen.’ Seth giggles. ‘Sweet seventeen and never been pissed.’
‘Well, we’re not leaving you here, so it’s to the hospital, or we take you to the station to test those cigarettes: your choice.’
Seth manages to get onto all fours, his hand rubbing painfully in the dirt. It’s a hand again, not a flaming tree. ‘Hospital, yes,’ he says. ‘Someone needs to fix this guy’s hand. It’s hurting him.’ He holds up his hand in front of his own face, and tears spring to his eyes. And then he laughs. ‘But who’s going to carry it for him? It’s huge!’
As the policemen lead him off, Seth looks back at the clearing by the dirty water, at the little scorched patch in the grass, and he remembers: he did that. It was him. When did that happen? How long ago? He can’t think. He’s too hot and his head is full of the fire. Even now in the parklands he can still see them, the tiny embers, the little fiery sparks, looking so innocent, floating down around them, all around the policemen, flurrying like snowflakes, but red instead of white, and each one carrying death, bringing death down from the sky.
‘Look at all the pretty stars,’ he says to the policemen. ‘All the pretty stars falling.’
*
The young policeman knocks hard on the door, holding Seth’s arm, supporting him rather than restraining him. The older policeman stands a few metres behind with his thumbs hooked into his belt, idly kicking a flower pot with his foot. At the hospital they were keen to pump Seth’s stomach even though he told them he hadn’t taken any pills, he’d just smoked something – accidentally, he said, he only meant to smoke pot.
‘Uh huh,’ they said, sceptical, looking at hi
s scratched arms.
Finally they accepted that he hadn’t swallowed anything this time and gave him a sedative, and a while later when he told them his bed was still moving and asked could they bolt it down, they gave him a mild antipsychotic. They packed some ice bricks around him to bring his temperature down and re-dressed his hand, and when Seth proudly told them it was his sister who had bandaged it first, they complimented the tidy work, even though it was in tatters now. And when, after hours of calling home and only getting Delia, they finally got Seth’s dad on the phone and told him Seth was alright to go home, his dad refused to come and pick him up. So Seth was sent off again with the policemen who had found him – and with a handful of pamphlets on drugs, a list of contact numbers, instructions to see a GP in the morning about his hand, and a follow-up appointment at the hospital in a couple of days.
The young policeman knocks again hard on the door. Seth winces, hoping no-one will be there to answer. It’s late, how late Seth doesn’t know. After midnight. On the drive home from the hospital the streets had been abandoned. Seth had sat in the back seat of the car, clutching a cool ice brick to his chest and rocking slightly, comforting himself with the movement. The older policeman in the passenger seat had acted as though Seth didn’t exist, which in some ways suited Seth just fine, but also made him feel small. The younger policeman had been driving, and had been mostly quiet, but every now and then he’d looked at Seth in the rear-view mirror and asked him how he was feeling. Alright, mate? Sick?
As Stars Fall Page 15
