Three Summers

by Judith Clarke

‘If everyone leaves the road’ll be blocked,’ said Laura. ‘Nobody’ll be able to move. People would get burnt up in their cars.’

  A gust of wind set the flags on the roof of the post office rippling: whomp whomp whomp, they went, whompey-whomp – and the girls looked up, because it was such a spooky sound.

  ‘They tell you to hose down your house when the fire’s coming,’ said Folly. ‘But my dad says if a fire’s coming there won’t be any pressure because the firemen’ll be using all the water. Nothing’ll come out of your hose.’

  ‘And what about the people who don’t have cars?’ whispered Laura. ‘They stop the trains when there’s a fire. How will those people get away?’

  ‘And what if a fire starts at night and comes really fast, when everyone’s asleep?’ said Folly, and her face lost all its cunning and went soft with fright. ‘You’d wake up and it would be too late.’

  ‘Will youse shut up!’ roared Big Meg. ‘I’m sick to bloody death of hearing about fires!’

  The way she stood there, legs apart, huge trainers flat to the ground, arms folded across her enormous chest, you could just tell how she’d be at forty, thought Dancey. A big old mum standing on the doorstep yelling at her kids, ‘Get in here, youse lot, before I get the strap! Tea’s on the table!’

  ‘Sick of fires!’ the big girl said again, and now there was something like a sob in her thick voice.

  Everyone went quiet.

  Folly patted her friend’s arm.

  ‘It’s so hot here,’ Big Meg whimpered.

  ‘Let’s go back in the bus,’ suggested Folly. ‘Look, see – it’s just comin’ back round the corner there.’

  ‘And what’ll we do then?’

  ‘We can go to Laura’s place,’ said Folly with a sly glance at the other girl. ‘She’s got that nice big air-conditioned basement. Haven’t you, Laura? With a rumpus room and all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Laura in a little voice. She stood on one foot and scratched her calf with the toe of her sandal, and Dancey thought she looked uneasy, even worried, but all the same she nodded and said to the others, ‘Okay, we can go to my place if you like, sure.’

  six

  Laura’s house was the last one on Cloudy Ridge; at the end of her garden the land fell away to a deep blue valley from which the further mountains rose like steep grey walls. The four girls stood huddled together on the last little strip of dry brown grass, hair whipping round their faces, staring down into the trees.

  There’s a path,’ said Laura, pointing to a rough pebbly ‘track down the side of the hill.

  ‘Where’s it go?’ asked Folly.

  Laura shrugged. ‘Nowhere really. Just down into the bush. There’s a view.’

  ‘The bush,’ sneered Big Meg. ‘I hate the floggin’ bush. And views. I hate views too.’

  The wind roared, snapping at her words; the treetops threshed and fumed.

  ‘Whew! Imagine tossing a match in there!’ gasped Folly.

  Dancey sucked in her breath. As if Folly would be game. As if any of them would be, even Big Meg Stoyles. They had too much to lose – their big fancy houses would burn up, and all their glitzy clothes: the tiny skirts and spangled tops, the soft leather shoes and the expensive runners in icing sugar colours; their makeup and perfumes and big squashy bags, their trashy jewellery and their best jewellery: the gold chains their dads had given, the strings of pearls from nans. Their mums and dads would burn and even they might burn. Dancey imagined Big Meg’s legs lying dead on the black earth, the fat in them sizzling, bone showing through, a puff of singed blonde hair blowing in the wind. A phrase stirred in her mind, from some school, someone reading in a room – a rag, a bone, a hank of hair – that’s all Big Meg would be. The phrase made her think of little Frankie lying in his cot, and then the next day not being there and she had this feeling that what you loved might always disappear. You were better off without it.

  The wind roared again, slapping at their faces, tugging at their hair.

  ‘C’mon!’ yelled Big Meg. ‘Let’s get inside!’ and they ran in a bunch round the side of the house to the basement door. Laura pushed it open.

  ‘Oooh, it’s dark! I’m not goin’ in there!’ cried Folly.

  ‘Didn’t know you were scared of the dark, Fols,’ grinned Big Meg and Folly blushed and said, ‘I’m not. It’s just—’ and then Laura switched on a light, revealing a long room with a flight of narrow stairs at one end, a big table in the centre, an old couch and several battered armchairs pushed up against the wall. ‘Hurry,’ she urged them, ‘before the heat gets in!’

  They surged inside and Laura shut the door. Big Meg flung herself down on the sofa and gasped out, ‘That’s more like it!’ for the air was deliciously cool in here – except for a certain stuffiness, and a faint eerie whistling of the wind behind the walls, you’d never guess at the kind of day outside. You could be anywhere; you could be away down in the city where you didn’t have to worry about the weather except for what outfit to wear, where fires were no more than chatter on the radio and no one had ever heard of emergency bags.

  Dancey sat down on one of the armchairs and looked around. The house was built into the side of the hill; at the far end of the basement the ceiling came down lower and the tiled floor gave way to hard packed earth. It was like a cave. Suitcases were piled up in there, and boxes, and a roll of old carpet, and the spaces between were full of shadows, damp and dark. There was a musty familiar smell.

  ‘Anything to drink?’ Big Meg demanded. ‘Any Fanta? Coke?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Laura, ‘we’ve only got lemonade.’ In the shelter of her own house, her voice sounded firmer, more sure.

  ‘Lemonade it’ll have to be then,’ sighed the big girl, wrinkling her little pug nose.

  ‘Folly?’ asked Laura. ‘You want some lemonade?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m gaspin’.’

  ‘Dancey?’

  Dancey didn’t answer, she was still staring towards the cave at the end of the basement.

  ‘Dancey?’ Laura said again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You want some lemonade?’

  ‘Oh – yeah.’ She added, ‘Please,’ and Laura smiled.

  ‘Right. Back in a minute then.’ Laura ran lightly up the stairs.

  Dancey huddled in her chair. She held her arms round her body as if she was cold. Her legs trembled. The cave, the darkened earth, reminded her of that place beneath the overpass where the street family had their home. She remembered the dog shit and the dark stains on the ground which could have been oil, or blood, or anything, and how she and the other girls had swept stuff clear and laid sheets of old cardboard they’d collected from the backs of factories and shops. And how the cold still struck through the cardboard and the sleeping-bags and through their very bones – and a hardness like iron, and the coffin stink in your clothes.

  Never! Dancey promised herself in the depths of the old armchair. ‘I’m never gonna be in a place like that again!’

  ‘Talking to yourself again?’ sneered Big Meg.

  Dancey shook her head.

  Upstairs a door closed softly and a moment later Laura appeared on the steps with a tray of glasses and a big jug of lemonade.

  ‘Crisps?’ wondered Big Meg, when drinks had been poured, but Laura said gamely, ‘We’re not allowed.’

  ‘Not allowed?’ Folly raised her pencilled brows. ‘You’re not allowed to have crisps?’

  Laura flushed. ‘Mum says they’re too salty. We’ve got some nuts and raisins if you like.’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Big Meg, and took a huge swig of lemonade. Then she burped so loudly the sound filled the room. Folly burped too, even louder, and Big Meg shrieked, ‘Good one, Fols!’

  ‘We’ll have to be a bit quiet because Mum’s home,’ said Laura.

  ‘Thought your mum worked down the library.’

  ‘She does. But she’s home today because Frankie’s sick.’

  Frankie. Dancey went still; it seemed utterly strang
e to hear someone else say that beloved name. Dancey said it every single night before she went to sleep – she’d done that ever since the morning she’d gone into the room at Roseland and Frankie hadn’t been there.

  ‘Frankie? Who’s that?’ Big Meg asked Laura.

  ‘My little brother.’

  ‘What’s he got?’

  ‘Mumps.’

  ‘Mumps! Geez! Lucky we’re not boys, eh?’

  Dancey had a funny faraway feeling inside her head, it was almost as if she wasn’t really sitting in the armchair, but floating up near the ceiling, looking down at them all. Distantly, she heard Big Meg’s loud voice going on about mumps and the damage it could do to a boy’s equipment. ‘Shrivels everything right up!’

  ‘Frankie’s only four!’ Laura replied indignantly.

  Like her Frankie, thought Dancey. Her Frankie had been four.

  Then she was back in the chair and Laura was bending towards her.

  ‘Are you okay, Dancey?’ she was saying.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m okay,’ said Dancey quickly, sitting up straight and pushing back her hair. ‘Just – can you tell me where the bathroom is?’

  ‘She means the dunny,’ sneered Big Meg. ‘Only she’s too polite to say.’

  ‘It’s upstairs, next to the bathroom. I’ll show you,’ said Laura. Dancey picked up her shoulder bag because somehow she knew she wouldn’t be coming back to this room, and then Laura took her hand and together they went up the stairs.

  ‘You’re so pale!’ Laura exclaimed when they reached the top. ‘Would you like me to get Mum?’

  ‘No, no, I’ll be all right,’ said Dancey. ‘It’s – it’s just the heat. It makes me feel dizzy.’

  Laura nodded. ‘I know. I fainted once in school assembly. It was awful; two of the teachers had to carry me to the sickroom, and everyone was staring.’ She smiled at Dancey again and unexpectedly Dancey found herself smiling right back and though there was no sign of the garden or the peacock she thought she heard the dark-haired man saying, ‘She’ll be a good friend for you, Dancey.’

  Laura pointed down the hall. ‘The bathroom’s there,’ she said. ‘That blue door, see?’ She peered at Dancey in a worried way. ‘You sure you’ll be all right?’

  Dancey nodded and then Laura said, ‘Well, okay then. Call if you need anything. I’d better get back to the others.’ When she said ‘others’ Laura rolled her eyes at Dancey to show she wasn’t included in those others, and then she hurried away down the stairs.

  Dancey stood by herself in the cool green hall and thought about Frankie. Of course she knew Laura’s Frankie couldn’t be her Frankie: there couldn’t be some kind of miracle where her Frankie hadn’t died but only been sent to another hospital and then miraculously adopted by Laura’s family. Things like that just didn’t happen in the world. And even if they did happen, once in the very bluest of moons, it wasn’t possible anyway because Laura’s Frankie was four now and Dancey’s Frankie had been four way back at Roseland, three whole years ago. If he’d lived, Dancey’s Frankie would be seven.

  Frankie hadn’t been sent anywhere. He’d died. She’d known that very morning when he wasn’t in his cot, and there’d been a nurse in the room folding up his clothes.

  ‘Where’s Frankie gone?’ she’d asked.

  The nurse hadn’t answered but Dancey had known from the look on her face.

  She tiptoed down the Laurences’ hallway, past two closed doors, one with a china plaque which said, Laura Sleeps Here. The third door was open a little way, and a woman’s voice drifted out, saying something about having to make a start on the dinner, and then a child’s one asking, ‘And then will you come back?’

  Dancey peeped round the edge of the door.

  She saw a little boy sitting up in his bed, in a way that Frankie never could sit up. His face was flushed and his eyes had dark shadows beneath them, but he was a perfect and beautiful child.

  ‘Have a rest now,’ his mother was saying, and the little boy lay back against the pillows, and she touched his eyelids lightly with her fingertip, one by one.

  ‘You’re my best boy,’ she told him. ‘You’re my own dear darling,’ and she dropped a kiss on the top of his small rough head and out in the hall Dancey felt that sudden raw pain in her chest, and the gnawing hunger for something that could never ever be hers. She turned and hurried away along the hall, down the steps, past the door to the basement, through a long living room and out into the blazing day, where the hot wind rushed at her and the grey smudge on the horizon had sent long thick fingers out across the sky. She fled down to the end of the garden and onto the rough track that descended steeply into the valley, and as she ran, slipping on pebbles, grasping at the thorny branches of bushes, the little boy and his mother flickered like an old film inside her head: over and over the mother’s fingertips touched her son’s eyelids, her lips kissed his hair. ‘You’re my best boy,’ she said. ‘You’re my own dear darling.’

  For a long time Dancey had told herself that love was only people fooling themselves; it was stuff that wasn’t real, that lasted no longer than a blob of fairy floss on your tongue before it melted away. Except she kept on seeing it, the real true thing: people saying goodbye at railway stations, looking into each other’s eyes, mothers standing at school gates, little kids flying out to them, dads in the park pushing swings. She kept on seeing it and she couldn’t stand to see because it made the gnawing hunger well right up inside and even the garden and the peacock and the dark-haired man singing his song for her couldn’t seem to make it go away.

  ‘I don’t care! ’ cried Dancey as she stumbled down the hillside. ‘I don’t care!’

  There was no one to hear her. The track ended in a small lonely clearing between the tossing trees. The dry grass prickled at the back of her legs as she sat down and the earth itself was hot as the skin of a feverish child. Below the clearing the land fell away sharply, the trees, their thin trunks slanted, went on and on like soldiers marching down to the valley floor. The hot wind blew and the treetops surged like breakers in a big wild stormy sea.

  Dancey reached into her shoulder bag for the photograph of Bansi and his family. She held it in her hands and deeply gazed. See! There it was: love was real, it was just that people like Dancey and little Frankie never got it: no one wanted them, not really, and if they said they did, it was only for a little while. Ruth would get sick of her soon – she thought of the way she’d slipped her hand into Ruth’s last night: how pathetic could you get? It was stupid to think a person like Ruth, who had all those friends and students and godchildren, would need any comfort from her. Dancey Trelawny was totally all on her own. It isn’t fair! she thought, and heard a dim chorus of carers’ voices replying, ‘Life isn’t fair, Dancey.’

  Big Meg had a mum and dad who loved her, even though she hated them – and so did Folly and Kimberly and Janis. She closed her mind on Laura’s mum, the sweet voice saying, ‘my own dear darling,’ the light kiss laid on the top of a small rough head. A kind of rage flared up inside her; why was she the only one who had to be all on her own? She raised a hand to her mouth and gnawed on her thumbnail – she’d like to take everyone away from everyone so they’d all have to be alone like her! She stared down at the photograph; she gripped the edges with both hands and tore. She tore it carefully, in tiny little strips, taking the people away from each other, so that everyone was separate; so the woman had no arm around her, and the little girl had no father’s waist to lean her head against, and the baby was all on its own. There!

  She reached for her shoulder bag and took out the box of matches. As she struck the first one she could almost sense the dry trees watching her, as if they held their breath. First she burned the mother and father, and then the baby and the little girl; she turned the little family into ashes, and blew them right away.

  ‘I don’t need anyone,’ she whispered, but she knew it wasn’t true. She took a second match and struck it, while in front of her the dry bush waited and t
he trees went still. The match went out. She waited then; she waited for the garden to come and the peacock to spread his jewelled feathers and the dark-haired man to sing his song. They didn’t come, though Dancey could feel them somewhere quite near, still like the trees, as if they were waiting for her to know what she had to do, as if they were saying silently, ‘You’re a big girl now.’ She lit another match and tossed it down into a clump of dry grass. After a moment, a tiny flame shot up and leaped into a litter of dead leaves and they began to smoulder, and from somewhere she thought she heard a small sad sigh. The wind blew, coaxing the smouldering leaves into a line of little flames, and as she watched the flames grew taller, they ran along the edge of a small dead branch and licked at the bottom of a banksia.

  A fire was beginning.

  The way the wind was blowing, a fire would go back up the hill to Laura’s house and then down through the reserve to Hayfield Lane.

  There was a new feeling inside her now – it reminded her of the time the street family had found the old tramp sleeping in their place beneath the overpass and got stuck into him with their boots. Dancey had stepped back into the thick shadows of the concrete pillars so the others wouldn’t notice that she wasn’t joining in. She’d clasped her hands behind her back so tightly that the nails had driven in, and stood there watching the family’s faces: she’d seen how at first it was as if they didn’t want to do it, but then they couldn’t stop themselves; they had to. How timid they’d looked at the first kick, but then there was a second kick, and then more and more and more, and you could see their faces changing, lit with an emotion it was impossible to name. It was like they had to. It was how she felt now about the fire: she didn’t really want to, but something inside her had to have its way. She took another match.

  The fire would get her, too, but that didn’t matter, it never had mattered what happened to her; there was no one to feel sad. The banksia bush was beginning to burn quickly now, its lower branches whistling and singing with a little, racing flame. Its curling leaves smelled heavenly; Dancey drew in a long breath – the raw hungry feeling had gone; now there was only a great flatness like a landscape of poisoned ground. The peacock and the dark-haired man had left her on her own; for a moment she thought she heard the distant sound of the man singing, but it was only the voice of the fire. The fire sang and crackled; something popped and flew right through the air.