As Stars Fall

by Christie Nieman

  Seth

  The road is longer and dustier than he imagined from the map. He’d imagined open space on either side, burned clear. But the bush has recovered and, it seems, is lush, dry and ready to burn again.

  He is driving down the fire track. The roughness and loudness of tyres against the rocky road and the noise of his engine feel like they are exposing him. Like he is attracting attention in some dangerous way, even though there is nothing but silence and stillness and isolation. So when he hears the telltale bang of a burst tyre and he has to abandon the car and continue on foot, he feels almost relieved. He can be quiet now. He can go under the radar.

  But walking is hard. He staggers and lurches. He is dizzy, but it’s not only that: the track itself becomes more difficult. It’s almost like it is working against him. The trees stand silently on either side of the trail with their scorched and blackened trunks. He is an invader here. He is suddenly aware of everything, of everything being alive. The trees are not dead. They are wearing furred shawls of new growth, hugging them close to their scalded bodies, clothing themselves again after having been stripped of their leaves. They have imperceptible life-processes going on inside. He is intruding on something private. He shouldn’t be here.

  He is thirsty. There is no water. The jagged rocks grab at his shoes, and the heat in his body is no longer keeping gravity at bay – the lead in his bones is drawing him down to the earth, towards the malevolent gravel. The crunch of his feet and the labour of his breath are giving him away. He will be found out, hunted down. A large bird, black with white on its wings and tail, lands heavily on a branch at his back. He wheels around. It surveys him with a large yellow eye. It makes a noise that sounds like language as it flies off through the scrub. He turns back to the track and loses his footing, lurches off the gravel and into the ditch. He falls. He lies still, the eucalypts looming above him. They lean and lurch and he feels like he will vomit. He breathes hard through his mouth, steadying himself by looking past the strangely round leaves growing from the tree trunks and instead watching the clouds pass behind.

  Seth can’t imagine getting up. Finally the nausea retreats and he turns his head away from the sky. A beetle, grey and spotted with a long nose, climbs busily towards the top of a blade of grass, right beside his head. Seth watches. When the beetle reaches the top, there will be nowhere else to go. What will happen? What will it do? The beetle reaches the top of the grass, feelers waving in the air in front of it, and then turns and heads back down. Seth watches as the beetle climbs up and down three times. The fourth time it turns around on the top of the blade, one way and then the other, like a cat on a cushion, and then instead of turning back down the stalk, the beetle stands still, antennae waving. And then, like a little hydraulic machine, it lifts its two rigid, shiny wing coverings, snaps out its translucent wings, and whirs away horizontally through the patches of light.

  Seth can’t believe it.

  He can’t believe there is so much life here. It doesn’t seem possible. It doesn’t seem right.

  And it hits him hard that what seems possible and right to him doesn’t matter even minutely to all the things living here. They are unaware of him. They are unaware of this place and what has happened. They are just here because the place made them.

  For a moment this feels like a remarkable thought. A noteworthy thought. Seth tries to take note of it, to feel the weight of it, to shine a light on it and look at it clearly. But he can’t make it stay still, or see again that glimmer it gave before. It means nothing. In fact, it makes him angry. The place should care, should know, should remember. It should feel how he feels. It’s insulting that grass should grow, beetles fly, birds sing and trees come back to life. It is especially insulting that the trees, who were there, who lived through it all – no, who died through it all – should be allowed to come back to life.

  His anger lifts him up so he is standing. He needs a smoke. He imagines flicking one into the undergrowth and seeing the whole world go up in flames. He pulls out the tin from the back pocket of his jeans, the stolen photo coming with it – that girl, that man, this place. And standing, facing back the way he came, he can see what he couldn’t see before, looming over them all: the granite peak standing sentry, not seeing, indifferent.

  He nearly falls again, and as he steps to catch himself he turns his back on the rock and stumbles into the clearing.

  He was wrong. The place has remembered. There is a monument to the event. And the place is embracing it, using it, swallowing it. The blackened, hollowed-out four-wheel drive stands half buried in a tangle of new grass.

  Delia

  They park the ute at the top of the track. Robin says it is the firewood track they all get their wood from in winter, and that Andy knows better than to take anything less than a four-wheel drive down there because it is really rough – and that was before the fire, before they put all those Vehicles Do Not Enter signs about the place.

  Andy, Amber and Robin start walking the track down the hill with all the ease and familiarity in the world – they know the place and the place knows them – but Delia hesitates at the top. She doesn’t want to leave the curlew in the back of the ute. Robin stops and looks back up at her.

  Delia says, ‘Will she be alright up here by herself?’

  Robin walks back up the hill and joins her at the ute. She pulls the cover back a little, stands back, looks at the curlew from a distance. The curlew is sitting up, looking back at them, bright-eyed and closed-beaked. ‘I think so,’ says Robin. ‘I think she’ll be fine here for a bit, get some bush air back into her lungs, and then we’ll take her straight to my house. My dad knows a good wildlife vet. Don’t worry, we’ll fix her right up.’

  Robin starts walking back down the track but stops again when Delia doesn’t follow. ‘You sure you’re up to this?’ Robin says. ‘You don’t have to, you know. No-one’s going to think anything bad if you don’t want to go down there.’

  ‘Yes. I want to. It’s just . . .’ Amber and Andy seeing the indecision on Delia’s face walk back up the hill towards her and she turns to them. ‘It’s just . . . Is it okay if it’s just me and Robin?’

  She is worried about offending them, but Andy actually stretches out his hand and tousles her hair. ‘Well of course, little button. Scruff and me will go for a walk over to old Bennie’s place –’

  Amber protests, ‘Old Bennie? No way, brother – he stinks.’

  ‘Shut it, squirt, he likes visitors, so we’ll go visiting. Meet you ladies back at the ute in a half hour or so. Synchronising watches . . . and . . . go!’

  Andy drags Amber off up the road and Delia turns to Robin. ‘That was okay, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Of course. Amber loves old Bennie really.’ Robin smiles to herself, and Delia catches it and almost smiles too.

  Delia walks down the fire track in silence, and Robin follows a step behind. The track is difficult. Delia stumbles, but every time she does, Robin’s arm is there to steady her. It is solid. Robin seems to have an ability Delia lacks, an ability to keep her feet while the track buckles and shifts and changes beneath them.

  Delia walks in silence, but the silence is also in her. It’s not the quiet calm of that morning, more that she feels like she’s been waiting, and the waiting has found its rhythm in the uneven beat of her footfalls on the track. She’s been waiting for the end of things, the end of this tightness, the taut string inside her which has been her life since the day her mother died.

  When Robin finally speaks, Delia has her head down, trying to get sweat out of her eyes, trying to concentrate on her feet, holding on to her silence.

  Robin says, ‘Some idiot must have come down here trying to get firewood.’

  Delia wipes the sweat from her eyes and looks up. There is a car stopped in the middle of the track, one dead tyre sagging sloppily over a sharp rock. Robin steps ahead of her down the track and kicks the tyre. ‘Must have abandoned it,’ she says and starts to walk past the car, but De
lia stands and stares at it. Robin stops. ‘What is it?’

  Delia is puzzled. ‘The car.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s my dad’s car.’

  ‘Your dad’s car?’

  ‘My brother was driving it this morning.’

  And they hear a noise coming from up ahead in the distance. Metal on metal. A repeated clanging sound echoing through the blackened trunks of the bush. Delia listens and her stomach tightens, each clang ratcheting up the tension.

  ‘My brother’s here,’ she says.

  Robin

  Delia was clearly upset and worried. She cared about her brother, but I could see that she was also afraid. And then the clanging stopped, and she looked even more afraid.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘We’ll go quietly and have a look. We’ll find him and we’ll bring him back with us. It will be alright.’ And I tried to believe it as we started again along the track.

  It was obvious that despite the fire there was still plenty of fuel here. At the side of the burnt track, stark black tree trunks stood out against bright regrowth, but between the trees and across the track, quick new grass had grown and dried and folded over into a thick blond mattress of kindling. We walked with superhuman quiet, avoiding the dry grass that would crunch and rustle with every step, avoiding those places where the track had eroded into ankle-twisting gullies that could make us fall with a shout and a thud. Somehow my feet just knew their way around up here. I could feel my own grace, and that grace carried both of us quietly along the track.

  The clearing was about fifty metres away. We approached quietly, heads sideways, listening. I had an image of us as two magpies hunting. When magpies hunt, they walk carefully, without making any sound, so not to interrupt the flow of messages from the sunlit world through their secret ears and into their minds. Between every step a magpie’s foot relaxes, curls softly, then stretches out for the next step, toes spread with great intention.

  I thought of the way Mo the magpie had walked around our paddock, listening and hunting his underground prey, wings behind his back, and the sunlight passing in dappled shafts of black and white across his back, matching perfectly his uniform of light and shade. And I thought of how his uniform was not a disguise, not a camouflage like the curlew’s. It was an announcement: I am here. This is my place. I belong.

  We were hunting like that, Delia and I. We were hunting Seth. We were standing, walking, stopping, listening. And, oddly, belonging. The place entered through our ears and guided our feet. The place made us walk. We stepped with magpie precision around the crunching grass.

  Delia stopped, one foot raised, softly curled. She’d heard something new. I leaned forward, head cocked to the side, listening. I heard what Delia had heard. I heard our quarry. He was laughing. He was singing. He was crying. And then I heard something else, a loud metallic bang. And then my nostrils had information. He was smoking. And there was another smell. Something foreign here. Dangerous even.

  Petrol.

  We stepped quietly into the space where the track met the clearing. Seth was there, oblivious. He was sitting on a log, tucked tight into a ball. He had a rolled cigarette to his lips. His hands were shaking. His body was shuddering with laughs and sobs and giggles and shouts of anger. And with silent, airless crying.

  Delia drew in a breath at the sight of him. I watched him calmly. He wiped his face with his sleeve, dragged on the cigarette; it made a crisp sound, like bushfire. He was playing with something, kicking it with his boot, a metallic bang. It sloshed. A dented, blackened jerry can.

  It was the jerry can from the four-wheel drive. I could see where he’d wrenched it off the vehicle. Amazing that the petrol didn’t burn up in the fire. The fire must have passed quickly and the can must have been sealed tight. Not anymore though. The lid lay alongside it on the grass. It was an open, dented, blackened jerry can. He kicked it and petrol slopped out onto the mattress of dried grass.

  He held the cigarette out towards it, as if showing a child a lolly, just showing the can the light, the picture of its future.

  Seth

  He wants a fight. He wants someone else to get mad at him so he can fight back, so he can scream at someone, so that someone can scream at him and he can scream back louder and louder and then he’ll be screaming about someone screaming at him and not about some unnameable, unbearable feeling. He wants to see whatever it is that is coming for him. He wants it to show itself so he can fight it head on. So he can be released.

  He holds the lit joint out to the can. Release. He shouts at the can. ‘Release!’

  He kicks the can and it tips over, glugging onto the grass. He kicks it again. It’s useless. Nothing happens unless he makes it happen. He holds out the joint. There is a shout.

  A flash of red through the undergrowth. Then the girl at the entrance to the clearing. Coming for him.

  ‘Seth! Stop!’

  Seth looks up, but doesn’t withdraw the joint.

  ‘Seth!’ Now it’s his sister’s voice. Delia is there with the girl, standing behind the girl. ‘Seth, what are you doing?’

  ‘Get the hell out of here!’

  ‘Seth, put out the cigarette.’ That girl, the flame, telling him what to do. Standing there, red head on fire between the trees.

  ‘Why are you here?’ he says. ‘You going to burn me too?’

  ‘Seth, why are you shouting?’

  ‘Who are you?!’ Seth’s voice breaks as he screams at her. ‘Why are you coming for me?!’

  That girl, just looking at him. She knows that he knows her. She is challenging him with her eyes.

  ‘I’m going to burn you,’ he says. ‘I’m going to get you first.’

  She’s taking small steps towards him. Inching her way across the clearing. Delia is following her silently. They are creeping, like they’re approaching a wild animal. They are coming to get him.

  ‘Seth, I’m not coming for you. You followed us, remember?’

  He shook his head. She wouldn’t get him like that. ‘I’ll burn you.’

  ‘Like you tried to burn my house?’

  Delia grabs the girl’s arm, and the girl looks back at her. And then suddenly she stands up straight, shakes off Delia’s hands and turns back to him. Looking right into him.

  ‘You could have killed me,’ she says. No more creeping: she walks straight towards him across the clearing. ‘You could have killed my mum.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ he says quietly. And, because it’s true, he says it again: ‘I don’t care.’

  She gets closer. She gets louder. ‘How dare you! How dare you behave this way! There you are, standing there,’ she says. ‘You’ve got petrol. You’ve got a light. You could do anything. Does it make you feel big? Do you feel powerful? You’re just being a bully.’

  This is what he wanted. He can feel the fire welling up in him.

  She strides towards him through the clearing, red hair catching the sun, setting her ablaze. ‘And how dare you come and behave this way here? How selfish can you be?’ She yells at him. ‘For God’s sake, Seth, your sister needs you!’

  The light in the clearing dips, changes in a way that seems sudden as the sun draws around the bend in the earth. ‘No-one needs me,’ he says. And then louder, ‘No-one needs me, knows me, wants me.’ And then suddenly he is shouting. ‘There is no-one, don’t you see?! There’s only me, just me –’ he pokes his own forehead violently with pointing fingers and spits the words out – ‘stuck in here, all alone.’

  She stops on the other side of a fallen log. She looks at him for a moment and then speaks quietly. ‘If you start a fire now, there isn’t going to be anything here for a long time.’ And then he hears panic in her voice for the first time, even though she tries to keep it steady. ‘Things live here, Seth. They actually live here.’ And then she looks at him straight on, an unwavering gaze, an explicit, direct question. ‘How you can be so selfish?’

  Seth is paralysed. Some chance is slipping away from him.
He could grasp it if he knew how. He feels a rushing in his head, a darkness creeping up from the base of his spine, gathering speed, gathering force.

  The girl says, ‘Delia seems to think you’re a good person. I’m not sure what I think yet.’

  And then the noise is there, filling the clearing, the bird, the curlew, loud and true and frightening. It is crying from somewhere nearby. The girl-flame and Delia turn their faces back up the track, looking concerned. He hears it and closes his eyes. And as Flame turns back to him, he sees himself through her eyes. Bound together by the sound, by the bird, as they always were, he suddenly sees himself as she sees him: dishevelled, threatening. A frightening figure. He hears her speak out loud and inside his own mind. ‘Seth, don’t you think this place deserves time to recover?’ And his mind responds with the only word it can say. Flame.

  And then he is back in his own head. Opening his own eyes. Looking at her.

  He sees surprise register on her face. She heard it. She felt it. He can see that she felt it and understood; has felt it before and knows it was him. Him and the curlew. And he can see that he has been mistaken. Badly mistaken. She doesn’t mean him any harm. She doesn’t mean Delia harm. She never harmed his mother. She’s not just Flame, she’s Robin. And now the view of him from inside her head is this: Threatening. A bully. A selfish bully.

  She is his chance. All along, she has been his chance. She has been showing him his other way to be. The pictures in his head, the pictures on her wall, the wild landscape: she has been showing him how to love the world, how to belong to it. How to live. He sees again the sparks falling from the sky, setting her world alight, but even then, despite her fear, through her eyes, it was utterly, utterly beautiful. The world, through her eyes, is beautiful. And he has seen himself through her eyes: dark, shadowy, threatening, but also beautiful, also part of the world. And as she stands in the clearing calling him out, she’s showing him how he could be. She is his chance and he’s letting it slip.