Facing the Flame

by Jackie French

  But he could use Scarlett here. Women in particular wouldn’t admit they felt ill till they collapsed, especially at times like these. Heart attacks in women often presented as discomfort, not pain, so they ignored it. Scarlett, as well as being extremely bright and now well into her degree, had a way of getting people to talk to her . . .

  He headed towards the room at the side, which on other weekends acted as the tourist office, hunting in his pocket for twenty cents for the public phone. It would be good to have Scarlett Kelly-O’Hara at his side.

  Chapter 31

  SCARLETT

  The phone rang for the eighth time that afternoon. Half the district was checking up on Jed, thought Scarlett, strangely quick calls, as if they had other things on their minds. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except every time Jed froze, thinking Sam had been burned in the bushfire, or the tanker had rolled, or a drop bear had fallen on his head . . .

  She had tried to keep her distracted in the living room, with the fan on, a tray of ice evaporating in front of it, eating cold watermelon, just sitting, talking and remembering.

  Like the day they had met, which Jed remembered perfectly and Scarlett hardly at all. Jed had just been another of Nancy’s waifs then, totally uninteresting to the ten-year-old girl from River View. ‘Michael had made a flying fox,’ said Jed. ‘I couldn’t believe you wanted to fly on it. I thought you were incredible.’ She grinned. ‘I still do.’

  ‘Of course I am,’ said Scarlett with dignity, wiping watermelon juice off her chin. ‘No,’ she added to Maxi, ‘dogs do not like watermelon.’

  ‘Woof,’ muttered Maxi, who was quite sure they did.

  The flying-fox episode had been before she could use her hands well enough to feed herself, Scarlett remembered, or type or even hold a book. Life was an . . . interesting . . . journey.

  ‘Remember the Christmas you got the motorised wheelchair?’ asked Jed. ‘You crashed into every senior citizen in town that first week.’

  ‘Did not.’

  ‘Did too.’

  ‘I remember that first New Year’s Day you were here,’ said Scarlett. ‘The party down by the river. Sam stared at you all day and you didn’t even notice. You were too wrapped up in Nicholas. Did you really think you loved him?’

  Jed smiled. ‘I did love him. I just didn’t know it was only because we’d both been through a lot and no one else really understood, or we thought they didn’t, not because we were supposed to be together forever.’

  ‘How do you know when it is the together-forever sort?’ asked Scarlett casually.

  Jed lifted an eyebrow. ‘Think you may have found a together-forever one? That Alex bloke who came down to the wedding?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. He doesn’t want to get involved with anyone till he graduates.’

  ‘Or that’s a convenient brush-off,’ said Jed dryly. ‘Sorry, brat.’

  Scarlett flushed. ‘I know. We’ve been mates for two years now. We enjoy talking together, but —’

  ‘You want more now, and he doesn’t?’

  ‘I’ve always wanted more,’ said Scarlett bitterly. ‘But men like Alex don’t want more from girls like me. Not the forever sort anyway.’

  ‘Mark did.’

  ‘Mark wanted a waif to look after. He’s happy with Leafsong looking after him instead.’

  ‘Yes. That actually seems to have worked. And the café is making a profit. Or at least managing to pay me rent.’ Jed shifted her bulk again, trying to get comfortable. ‘I wish the wind would stop.’ She grimaced. ‘And I wish Sam would come back and bushfires would vanish forever and we’d have world peace and lamingtons with no calories. Brat, give it time. With this Alex bloke, I mean. And don’t do yourself down either. I told you about the vision I saw of you in the future, with the stethoscope? Maybe the bloke looking at you was Alex.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Scarlett had carefully suspended her disbelief in Jed’s visions of past and future, which was not the same as believing in them. ‘I . . . I think if I really cared about him, I’d stay away from him, just in case he ever could like me that way. Because genetically I’m a disaster zone —’

  The phone rang. Again.

  Scarlett wheeled into the hallway. ‘Hello? No, we don’t have the wireless on. Yes, I know we should have. I forgot, and anyway, Fire Control would ring us —’ Scarlett listened as Dr McAlpine’s words cut into hers. ‘I see,’ she said at last. ‘Yes, of course. Jed can help Leafsong at the café and sit in the storeroom with her feet up and fold spinach triangles or something. Is there anything we can bring? Okay, I’ll load up the van. Jed’s car too. We’ll be about forty minutes. See you then.’ She put down the receiver.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Jed from the doorway.

  Scarlett took a deep breath. How did you say something like this? ‘That was Dr McAlpine. The fire front that was heading to Rocky Valley and here is under control. But Jeratgully’s been burned to the ground. All of it. At least twenty houses gone, probably more.’

  ‘How many dead?’ asked Jed quietly.

  ‘He didn’t say. They’re evacuating people to Gibber’s Creek. Major injuries to hospital, everyone else to the Town Hall. Dr McAlpine wants me to help assess people there.’

  ‘I’m coming too,’ said Jed.

  There was no way she would have stayed behind doing nothing to help, nor was Scarlett leaving her alone here, not in weather like this. ‘Leafsong needs a hand at the café. She and Mark are making dinner for everyone. Dr McAlpine said bring sheets and pillows. And that you are not to help load the van and car.’

  ‘I am perfectly capable of carrying sheets. And pillows. I do still make the bed you know.’

  Which in Jed’s case meant pulling up the covers. Scarlett herself had been drilled in River View’s insistence on hospital corners and had obeyed the directions ever since her hands got strong enough.

  ‘Better bring your hospital bag. Just in case.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Jed. ‘Am I allowed to carry that?’

  Scarlett tried to smile. ‘All of Jeratgully,’ she whispered. What would it be like to lose Gibber’s Creek? Her past wiped out, as well as everything she loved today?

  Jed shivered, despite the heat. ‘It’s . . . it’s not real, somehow.’ She stiffened: something had fallen on the roof. ‘What was that?’

  Scarlett wheeled herself to the door and opened it just as something else thudded on the front lawn, the small amount of greenery left before the scorched blackness of the firebreak. ‘A bird,’ she said shortly. ‘Grey. I don’t know what kind.’

  Another thud.

  Jed went out and painstakingly bent to pick up the bird. It fluttered feebly out of her hands, then managed to fly a metre to the bird bath. It stopped as if gathering strength, then drank.

  Other grey birds fell now. Big ones, small ones, medium. Grey birds from a grey sky. ‘Maybe they’re flying here because the fire isn’t heading this way any more,’ said Jed quietly.

  Or the birds don’t have the strength to fly further, thought Scarlett. Part of her wanted to stay and help any birds that fell and could not get to water. But humans needed her more. ‘Come on. Let’s load the cars.’

  ‘What about Maxi?’

  The dog thumped her tail at her name, hoping for dinner, a walk or a ride in Jed’s car, her head poking out the window and ears flying in the wind. Even possibly all three.

  ‘I don’t like leaving her on a day like this,’ said Scarlett, ‘but we can’t take her to the hall or café, and it’s too hot to leave her in the van today. Maxi will have to stay here.’

  ‘Ha. She’ll probably sleep by the fan and not even notice we’ve gone,’ said Jed.

  Scarlett nodded. ‘I’ll pop back and give her dinner.’

  Maxi put her tail down. She might not understand the whole conversation, but she knew the word ‘stay’.

  No walk. No car ride. And ‘dinner’ was far away.

  Part of it may have been extinguished, but the larger front mo
ved on, swallowing, consuming, rejecting. A mob of sheep; another mob lying with their wool seared off, their legs pointing to the sky.

  The fire controlled the weather now, generating a vast cloud of heat above it, air that burned as well, breathing smoke over a hundred square kilometres or more. The fire owned the air and sky, as well as the land below.

  Its own winds controlled the earth’s feeble breezes. As the heat grew, it was able to consume even more, melting earth into rock, crumpling trees that had withstood a thousand smaller fires, turning seeds that once survived flames into ash. Possums might crawl into deep tree holes to survive a lesser fire. Not this one. Not now.

  The fire took, and moved on.

  Chapter 32

  FLINTY

  Headlights work in darkness, not when the air is thick with ash. But Flinty knew the road that curved up the valley to Rock Farm well enough not to need them, despite the deepening smoke. Black smoke, which meant a fire was close enough for burning embers to land near Rock Farm, embers that could lead to another spot fire, that had led to one, if what she feared was right.

  Flinty peered into the gloom again, holding tight to the steering wheel as the wind tried to gust the car off the road. The car began to wind up the mountain. Even the Rock was smoke covered today, the valley featureless grey below. No wonder the look-outs had seen nothing. She couldn’t see anything either . . .

  She braked suddenly, as if she had actually heard the words: ‘Be silent. Listen. Smell. Feel.’ Words spoken to her decades back by Rose Clancy, that inheritor and teacher of tens of thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge, showing her the land Flinty thought she’d known, the one in which you must be silent to understand.

  She opened the car door. Listened. But silence couldn’t help in this wind; nor could she smell anything but the smoke. Blind, deaf . . .

  And then she felt it. Felt the fire. Felt the greater heat coming slowly down the hill towards her.

  It had been lit by burning debris from the main fire front, possibly ten kilometres away or more, which was no distance at all to this high, harsh wind. It was coming over the brow of the mountain, if she was any judge, and she was. It was to the left of Rock Farm, and still uphill of it, but with the wind in this direction it would eat the house, flow down to destroy her valley, her people, her community. If Jeratgully could burn, so could Rocky Valley, its fire tankers away at the main fire front, the inhabitants blinded by ash smoke and unsuspecting.

  She would not let that happen.

  ‘You know what to do,’ whispered Rose’s voice in her mind. ‘You have just forgotten, in your rush and hurry.’

  Flinty reached for the cigarette lighter in the glovebox. Ran along the hillside, ran because her back and legs were working now: adrenalin made them firm and responsive. Did not trip because every tussock and hillock was known so well she had no fear of falling. How did the poem go? ‘. . . the hidden ground was full of wombat holes, and any slip was death.’

  She bent, lit a tussock, ran a metre, lit another, felt more than saw them flare uphill, kept running, leaving a line of fire behind her. Her fire, which would rush up the hill so fast that it would stop the slower fire coming down the hill to her valley. The wild fire could not burn where her fire had burned before.

  Flinty had saved her valley once, when she was young. She was damned if she was going to lose it now she was old, and yes, the bush came back after fire, but never the same bush, always simplified, fire-loving shrubs instead of the plenitude and complexity of the past, populations of frogs or mice or fairy possums gone forever . . .

  She should drive now, fast, away from both fires. But she would not leave her house. If her plan worked, both fires would meet, stopping the main fire from spreading. But not till it had passed Rock House.

  She ran back to the car, suddenly frightened it might not start, that she would be trapped here among the flames. Cars were so unreliable.

  Or had been. This was 1978, not 1928. Of course the car started. She gunned the accelerator, sure of the road now, even in the dark grey smoke, saw the house loom ahead of her. Braked hard and clambered out . . .

  ‘Grandma?’ Felicity ran towards her, staring at her as if she was insane. ‘I saw you light a fire! Why?’

  No breath to explain. No time. ‘Must get into the house . . .’

  ‘I need to get you back to the surgery. Call Dr —’

  ‘No!’ She obviously thinks I am having a senile fit, Flinty thought — old Gran, fuddled by smoke and fire. ‘There’s another fire coming. A spot fire. Get inside. Fast. I need to start the pump to wet down the house.’

  The girl stared at her. And then believed her. ‘I’ll get wet blankets. We’ll need them in the heat.’

  ‘You’ll stay inside!’

  ‘No,’ said Felicity. Her voice was quiet and determined. ‘Those are my animals. And I love this house too.’ And you, though the words were unsaid.

  She vanished into the house. Stubborn as a . . . as me, thought Flinty grimly, hoping the pump tank was full. Yes, she’d filled it last week. What was Felicity even doing up here?

  The pump engine coughed three times, started. Water flared from the hose, so suddenly she almost dropped it, wasting precious liquid. Enough in the dam for half an hour, at most. Fire fronts passed in five or ten minutes. In half an hour they would be safe. Or they’d be dead.

  She focused on wetting the house, the wood, the roof. She had cleaned the gutters out the previous week — carefully not letting Felicity or Nicholas know she’d been up a ladder — and filled them with water.

  The stream from the hose was strong. A good big pump, and a good big dam. But water alone would not save them if the fire sucked up all the air. They’d have to go inside then.

  She could only hope that when the flames arrived, Rock House didn’t burn.

  ‘Gran?’ Felicity was there, wrapped in a wet blanket, handing one to her, a rake in her hand and wet sacks too.

  A tree exploded, metres away, and then another. Felicity gasped. Flames reached high in the ash-thick air. The monster snickered, metres away. Flinty could feel her skin begin to redden where the blanket didn’t cover it.

  ‘Into the house,’ she managed. The heat surged like the furnaces of hell. She had never believed in hell, but here it was, sucking the air from her, the life from her . . .

  ‘Grandma.’ Flinty felt rather than heard the word; she felt her granddaughter’s arms about her, helping her, because she was dizzy now from smoke and heat. ‘Grandma, I love you . . .’

  ‘I love you too,’ Flinty croaked. And I have killed you, she thought. Because if I had not lit that backfire below, we could have driven away from here, yelled a warning to the valley below that the fire was heading their way, then kept driving . . .

  But of course neither would have kept driving. One way or another, both she and her granddaughter would have stayed to fight.

  The kitchen was a shock of coolness. Flinty forced her mind to clear. The windows were shut, but might shatter. She had left buckets and the bath tub filled, because . . . well, because in bushfire season you never knew.

  ‘Patrol,’ she muttered, unable to say more. Felicity understood. The arms vanished. Flinty missed them, desperately, then forced herself to move again.

  Red windows, lashed with black. A crack. She tossed a bucket of water against the curtains, tucked them into the break. Stumbled from room to room, heard Felicity’s firm steps too.

  Felicity’s animals would die in this. Unless . . .

  She pushed herself to the far end of the house. Looked out. And there was no fire. She waited, counting to ten. And then believed.

  Her fire had worked; had raced uphill to meet the other fire. And the two fires had met here, at Rock House. If Rock House still burned, it might spread embers into the dry country beyond, but for now, at least, the animal pens and paddocks on the eastern side of the house were safe.

  She stumbled back to the kitchen, saw the red had vanished from the wi
ndows; nor was there any sign of walls or ceiling burning.

  She grabbed a sack. A rake. Hobbled outside. The pump, and its shed, were gone. The car was rust; could have been abandoned a hundred years earlier, not twenty minutes. But only a few flames still flickered by the house. She had cleared the place well. She bashed them with the rake till they disintegrated into blackness. Beside her, Felicity clambered up the ladder she must have hauled from the laundry, a wet blanket over her shoulder, a bucket of water in her hand. She should not be carrying buckets pregnant. Should not be climbing ladders. Should not be in a bushfire.

  Bushfires took no notice of ‘should not’.

  Flinty swept burning leaves from a windowsill, then glanced at her granddaughter again. Felicity had shoved the ladder sideways and climbed again to extinguish yet more embers on the roof. Flinty squinted down the mountain, but smoke obscured the view. Was it truly out? Or was another spot fire roaring, spreading, eating through her valley?

  There was no way to find out till the smoke cleared, till it was safe enough to walk back down, or till someone came to find them. And it might be hours before that was possible; it might be hours, perhaps, before they were even missed.

  She gazed up to find the sun, to try to work out the time — she never did remember to wear her watch — and gasped.

  The sky pulsed deep red and vivid orange, as if the air itself burned.

  Somewhere bushfire still raged, having feasted, wanting more.

  ‘Gran! Can you hand me up another bucket? Fast!’

  Flinty hobbled towards her, grabbing a bucket and scooping water from the horse trough, singed but still intact. We will win this, she thought. We will survive.

  Chapter 33

  MERV

  Merv parked his car by the side of the road, around the corner past Janet’s house, where she and that cripple she lived with couldn’t see it and call the cops, and peered through the gloom. He’d never dreamed air could be black like this nor the sky such a flaming red. This really was the back end of the universe. No loss to anyone if it vanished, and its people with it.