Facing the Flame

by Jackie French

  ‘Sun tea?’

  ‘Old bushies’ trick. Put the tea in a mug on a hot windowsill. The food in the fridge should still be okay. Don’t flush the loo, by the way — no water, and no pipes to speak of. But the bath is still full if you want a wash.’

  Felicity nodded. Flinty foraged. Bread, butter, cheese, pickles; a container of stir-fried chicken and vegetables with cashews. How had they ever managed leftovers before plastic containers? The boys ate everything before they could become leftovers, she supposed. Half a dozen lamingtons from the school drive, a jar of CWA pickled onions, some oranges. She put the mugs out on the windowsill, and the stone walls were still hot enough to warm them to tepid brownness in half an hour.

  ‘The smoke’s clearing,’ said Felicity, tying her hair into a ponytail as she came into the kitchen. She’d changed into some of the clothes she still kept in the spare room. ‘That means there’s no fire nearby, doesn’t it?’

  Or that the wind was blowing it away from them, thought Flinty. But she didn’t say so. ‘Breakfast,’ she said. ‘Or dinner. Or lunch.’

  Felicity sat and reached for a lamington. She grinned at Flinty’s expression. ‘Pregnant women are allowed food cravings. I crave a lamington.’

  ‘Just as you did when you were twelve,’ said Flinty dryly, making herself a cheese sandwich.

  Felicity took a bite of her lamington, then helped herself to a pickled onion too. ‘The next few weeks are going to be bad, aren’t they?’ she said quietly.

  Flinty nodded. People talked about lost lives and lost houses first. But what came after was terrible too: piled corpses of dead sheep and cattle, or, worse, stock screaming with pain and needing to be put down; moving all the skeletonised debris of what had been houses, cars, trees.

  Flinty peeled an orange. She handed half to Felicity, hesitated, then took a lamington as well. This was not a morning to be stingy with the small luxuries of life.

  ‘Will . . . will it grow back?’ asked Felicity.

  ‘Yes. But not quite the same as it was.’

  ‘I’m glad I’ll have lived to see it then.’

  Flinty looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Growth coming from the black,’ said Felicity, surprising her even more. ‘When things are bad in the future . . . and there will be bad things one day, people dying, other disasters. That’s just what life is. But now I’ll know that life changes, but goes on. Does that sound stupid?’

  ‘No.’ Flinty was startled into honesty. ‘The best gift Nicholas gave me back when I was a girl in 1919 was that there was going to be a future.’

  ‘Gran?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Tell me about meeting Nicholas,’ said Felicity quietly. ‘How you met him on the Rock, nearly sixty years ago. Please. Tell me everything.’

  She had never asked before. Nor had Flinty wanted to tell her. All Felicity had known had come from Nicholas, and Flinty had never known how much he’d told her. But today it seemed right. Her granddaughter deserved to know the true story of the girl from Snowy River.

  ‘He came out of the fog unexpectedly,’ she said and smiled. ‘How else do you appear in fog? One moment I was riding Empress, the mist sifting about as thick as flour, then suddenly there was a stranger, a young man in a bathchair wheeling across the stone as he gazed out across the valley . . .’

  It was as if she was writing one of her books, though this one would not be typed onto paper and put between book covers, or, at least, not by her. The story of the girl from Snowy River and the two men she had loved.

  Still loved. A story for the girl descended from one of them, married to the other. A story she realised, finally, needed to be told.

  And that was how Nicholas found them, sitting at the kitchen table, talking, drinking tea and eating lamingtons. Safe, despite the burned-out cars that had unmanned him for long minutes before he saw movement in the house.

  Heat rose from the valley behind him. The smoke had cleared even more, showing the black-clad hills of skeleton trees, the gleam of land burned down to crags, the blue-green mountaintops the fire had spared, the house sooty but safe.

  Felicity ran to him, hugged him. ‘What took you so long?’

  ‘I did a double shift on the radio, then slept on the floor. Then I went to the house, but you weren’t there, then the surgery, then the Macks’ . . .’ His voice broke, his face acquiring the concrete look of a man who refuses to cry. ‘I was about to call Search and Rescue.’

  ‘But we’re safe,’ said Flinty gently, forcing her body to creak up from the table and walk over to them. She put her arms around them both. ‘The valley is safe too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. None of us knew about the fire up here. How did you? It’s a miracle the fire didn’t spread.’

  ‘Not a miracle. It was Gran,’ said Felicity.

  Flinty smiled and moved stiffly back to her chair to eat the last lamington, while Felicity told her husband how an old woman and a young one had controlled a fire.

  Chapter 55

  THE FIRE

  And men and women could attack the fire now in places where it had weakened. Starve it once again with the backburns. Hoses arced at its edges, wetting down new fuel that might have given it strength. Men stamped on the black-burned earth, beating out still-glowing logs wherever the fire tried to gather strength again.

  The air grew thick with moisture: not enough to rain, but too heavy for the soot to stay suspended in the sky. Droplet by droplet it fell. By the time daylight filtered across the blackened land, the air was almost clear, the fire circled by backburns or by fire crews, not extinguished but under control.

  Slowly the great bushfire became not one but many, its force weakened into fragments. One by one, as the cool southerly blew, each one was surrounded, controlled.

  And, finally, put out.

  Cinders slept, deep in logs and half-burned trees. Tankers and men and women in overalls patrolled them, attacking every time a spire of smoke rose.

  And then it rained. A single storm, growling thunder, drenching paddocks and bush, so creeks and gullies ran black with soot.

  At last the fire was gone.

  Chapter 56

  MARCH 1978

  NICHOLAS

  ‘Felicity?’

  Felicity looked up at Nicholas from her stir-fried lamb loin with vegetables in oyster sauce. ‘Yes, darling?’

  Flinty had just moved back up to her beloved Rock Farm, its walls and floor and drapery and linen washed free from smoke, upholstery dry-cleaned. She seemed philosophical about the trees like thin black statues, the bare earth. It would change, she said. The land always changed, if you waited long enough.

  She had also said she’d eaten more than enough stir-fries and was giving Nicholas the CWA cookbook for his next birthday.

  Joe Borgino had taken the horses and his stepdaughter to his place, or, more accurately, his stepdaughter had arranged matters so decisively that neither Joe nor Flinty — neither of them easy to manipulate — had argued.

  Joe was a good trainer. He’d do well for Mountain Lion. But once Flinty had heard the story of her horse’s rescue, and seen the girl and horse together, she’d declared that if Mountain Lion was capable of winning the Melbourne Cup, then he’d do it for Lu Borgino.

  Nicholas had helped transplant River View to Drinkwater. He was, finally, for the first time in a month, able to have a quiet dinner alone with his wife, in their own home, for Flinty had said she needed the evenings by herself for a while.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  Felicity smiled at him encouragingly.

  ‘I want to do vet science. I know,’ he added hurriedly, ‘I’m going to be needed here more than ever after the baby’s born. I’ll see if they’ll let me do it part time. But I really —’ He stopped. Her smile had changed to one of relief.

  ‘Finally,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re doing what you want to do. And of course it will work
. You can do your prac sessions here. The practice really does need two vets — you’ve been doing most of the work of one already.’

  The fear that she would be upset, and the greater fear that she’d think he wasn’t capable of doing one of the hardest courses possible, vanished.

  His precious wife. His precious family and life.

  The stir-fry grew cold as he held her.

  Chapter 57

  MAY 1978

  JED

  Jed sat cross-legged on the sofa — a new one: impossible to get the smell of smoke out of the old one that she’d loved — her typewriter on a cushion on her lap, and regarded her daughter in her bassinet, batting her hands. She was laughing, as if at an unseen visitor who was tickling her tummy or playing ‘boo’. Which was an observation Jed didn’t want to share with Sam, just in case . . .

  No, her daughter was not seeing ghosts. Ghosts did not exist. You only imagined them in times of desperate need. ‘And they would also be a definite intrusion on our family’s privacy,’ she said aloud.

  Mattie laughed again and managed to grab Koala. One ear was already bare with gumming. The baby was also the possessor of two hand-knitted sheep — weird, when you considered it, giving Mattie toy sheep to cuddle when all around her were sheep that might one day be her dinner or someone else’s — and a hand-knitted golliwog in striped trousers, which Carol said was racist cultural chauvinism and that if Mrs Green hadn’t made it with so much love, it should be composted.

  Mattie also had cotton sheets hand-stitched by Moira, and hand-knitted cotton blankets made by Blue and Nancy, who had appointed herself honorary grandmother and vied with Blue for cuddling rights, which were perfect for this weather. Summer’s heat had fled before the purple shadows of autumn, and sunlight filtered through tree leaves instead of blazing from directly above.

  Mattie’s wooden plane, complete with propeller, had come from Sam’s Aunt Kirsty. She also possessed a variety of wooden construction toys made by the Beards and Mack at the factory, enough baby clothes, new and second-hand, to sink an ark, though, somehow, what with baby drool and milky reflux, all were needed, and a carefully non-gender-specific green Oxfam teddy bear from Carol . . .

  But Mattie, showing the determination Jed realised was not just genetic, but possibly reinforced by the marriage of two people who knew exactly what they wanted and, despite all odds, got it, had decided that only one toy, though, was so precious that a second’s parting brought on wails of fury: the zoologically inaccurate Koala, with its soft, fluffy tummy and nude ears perfect for gumming.

  It had arrived two months earlier, with a letter from Julieanne. Jed had already read it many times. She pulled it out now to read again, while Maxi yawned across the room, bored with the lack of human activity but also ready to let Jed know the moment Mattie demanded food or changing.

  Earl’s Court, London

  Darling Jed,

  You had to turn it into an opera, didn’t you, giving birth in the middle of a bushfire? Maybe one day you might even put that scene into a book. Thank Sam for phoning me all the way across the world with the news. I suspect, however, that he didn’t tell me the full story — and that wasn’t because the operator kept asking, ‘Do you wish another three minutes?’ For someone who will without prompting give a recital of the exact parameters of your new water tanks, Sam was surprisingly light on details of how your baby came to be delivered by Scarlett, in the living room. I hope you have changed the carpet and shall expect a full account when I return.

  That is a ‘when’, as in on 30 May, not ‘possibly next Christmas’, by the way. The mob here has offered me an assistant editorship in their Sydney office, which is where I will take your extremely tatty manuscript and its smell of smoke. I am tempted to have it retyped before I show it to anyone else, but the soot aroma does add an air of verisimilitude to what is, actually, a very convincing story.

  I like it. The ending doesn’t work, of course, and you have entirely skipped the dramatic possibilities in at least four places. Telling it in the first person also fails — you are not the 1894 protagonist and never could be. But you could be convincing as the outsider, looking in. Just suggestions, of course, in case you care to do some rewriting before I take it to my first Australian editorial meeting. You might even have some more paper that still smells of smoke.

  I very much hope you do rewrite it, and not just because I would like to turn up to the meeting with a potentially extremely successful book . . . or even the first in a series. Mostly, though, I want you to do a rewrite now because the story is convincing enough for them possibly to accept it as it is. The Sydney editors will not know that Jed McAlpine-Kelly is capable of writing a far richer, deeper book. So if you do find time between nappies, I’d be grateful if you could attack the manuscript again.

  Ring me, if you like, to discuss it — they haven’t given me international dialling rights here but, hopefully, even after the fire, you can afford a nice long discussion with your loving friend and potential editor,

  Julieanne

  PS Peter is not quite coincidentally coming to work in Sydney too. You are going to like each other. This is a decree.

  PPS I can’t wait to see my Goddaughter. She will be my Goddaughter, I presume? If by any chance you have already had her Christened, you’d better find another church where she can be Christened again, with the correct Godmother this time. Though I am quite amenable to sharing the duties.

  PPPS I am coming home! I didn’t realise till I read your book how much I needed to. Or even that it is home. Your book is good, Jed. I can smell the hot soil and gum leaves, as well as the soot in Grinder’s Alley and that inedible roast swan for Christmas dinner. If you can smell and taste the world the author creates, then their book works.

  Chapter 58

  GEORGE

  The new place didn’t have rafters, like River View had, where you could pretend to be Tarzan. Tarzan didn’t need legs to swing through the jungle. But Drinkwater homestead did have an excellent tree just outside his bedroom window. And if George manoeuvred the wheelchair exactly right, he could heave himself out through the window, onto a branch, then up to the next branch and crawl along that to yet another tree.

  Once he was further up that, he could see all around: black and green paddocks, as well as the nearer paddocks where the remaining sheep ate the lucerne hay delivered each day from the back of utes — if they’d been moved past the burned fields to the green, their wool would be dirtied by charcoal and ash. He could see the river and the pelicans . . .

  George liked the pelicans. They didn’t use their legs much either. You didn’t need legs when you could fly.

  One day he was going to walk, of course. But he would fly too. Maybe to an asteroid and back, or Mars, and maybe not in person, because Sam McAlpine had given them a talk on remote-control engineering. Sam had promised George that he could go out to the factory next weekend too . . .

  It was a good life. The best. And at night, when he said his prayers (of course you didn’t need to kneel down to say a prayer), he remembered to thank the bloke who’d given it back to him. It was like that poem that Ms McAlpine-Kelly had taught them a few weeks ago, the one that said:

  And may good angels send the rain

  On desert stretches sandy;

  And when the summer comes again

  God grant ’twill bring us Andy.

  The angels hadn’t sent much rain to Gibber’s Creek yet. But they had sent him Andy.

  Chapter 59

  FLINTY

  Flinty sat on the Rock, her stick beside her, staring out at the patchwork: long scars of black, the ridges burned almost to mirrors, dead tufts of casuarinas, here and there a swathe of trees and shrubs that, through some miracle, were scorched but hadn’t burned. The mountains behind her were black too, but the ones beyond were green-blue, just as the valley from Rock Farm down past the surgery was unharmed.

  Her beloved older brother, dead. It was still impossible to believe, de
spite the funeral in the tiny church down in the valley. Andy was buried at Gibber’s Creek, among the blackened headstones of the church that had burned in the fire.

  She had resented him so much when she was young: the boy who had been allowed so much more freedom than a girl, who had led the brother she was closest to, still underage, into the carnage of war where he had died. Even when Andy returned, he had abandoned her and Joseph and Kirsty to go to Queensland droving and escape the nightmares of the war; and then he came back again, prepared to sell Rock Farm to take on the manager’s position at Drinkwater. Only her marriage to Sandy and the unexpected success of her books had allowed her to save her beloved house and the farm.

  Flinty had tried to understand. Pretended she had understood. But she had hated him, because she loved him — and when you loved someone, they were supposed to love you back in the same way. An older brother should protect you, not leave you or sell your home.

  But then came better years, when Andy had married Mah, and love and joy for him became uncomplicated. They’d had more than forty years since then. Good years.

  She wiped her eyes and blew her nose on the handkerchief she still carried, despite Felicity’s insistence that tissues were more hygienic, and looked across the valley again. She could just see the blanket of black left by the vast fire that ate Jeratgully. It was strange how much the loss of a place that had been such a small part of her life mattered.

  But the rest of her family was safe. Her community, safe. Rock Farm had lost its sheds, yards and enclosures, but her house was liveable again.

  Yet the true agony of the fire was still being counted: kids who’d have nightmares all their lives. Thousands upon thousands of injured wild animals. Some could be saved, but others were humanely put down, just as thousands of sheep and cattle and horses had been.

  Kirsty was flying down for the memorial service. The funeral itself had been a small one, with so many of his friends away, still fighting the fires, though to her surprise the army had sent both a flag and representatives for a man who’d served his country, even so many years back.