Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  The girl was thin and tan. Her clothes were clean—or probably had been in the morning.

  Canny held out her hand. “My name is Agnes, but everyone calls me Canny.”

  The girl took Canny’s right hand awkwardly with her left, and shook. “Bonnie,” she said, “though I’m going to call myself by my middle name—Yvette—when I go to school next year.” Then she pointed up the valley. “You were going this way.”

  Canny moved back onto the path and they went on together, sometimes stepping sideways to stay together, swerving a nettle or tree root. Bonnie now and then glanced up, her look one of admiration, which was a new experience for Canny.

  Canny asked the girl where she was going to go to school.

  “Founderston. My mother and father live there. I’m starting at Founderston Girls.”

  Of course there was no telling what kind of school any barefoot country kid might go to, but Canny was a little surprised. She thought of that school’s tree-lined, bowling-green-smooth playing fields and dark wood-paneled classrooms. She said, “That will be a shock to you.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re here for the summer?” Canny asked.

  “No, I live here. Zarenes all get raised in the valley between five and twelve.”

  “Even if their mother and father live somewhere else?”

  Bonnie nodded.

  Canny was thinking that this was a very strange arrangement. But then again plenty of Islander girls and boys in Castlereagh schools had come from the Shackles for their education and were living with aunts and uncles. Of course those kids were usually sent away from home at thirteen, not five.

  “But you’re living with aunties, I guess?” Canny said.

  “I’ve been living with Uncle Lealand. The little ones you saw, they live with Aunt Iris.” Bonnie gathered her tangled ringlets and pulled them all over one shoulder and started twisting them. “You have very long hair,” she said. “Is that the fashion?”

  “You’ve been out, haven’t you? You’ve seen the fashions.”

  “Sometimes I stay for weeks in Massenfer with my parents. We have long visits. And they’re always sending me nice dresses and shoes. Mother is a buyer for a department store. She has very good taste.” Then, “Are you from Castlereagh?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are lots of Islanders in Castlereagh. Because of the canneries.” Bonnie said this quite bluntly, as if recalling some lesson.

  Canny asked her if she ever got to wear her pretty dresses and shoes.

  Bonnie stopped twisting her hair. “I do when I go to Massenfer, to the movies. Us big ones go every Sunday.”

  “What’s that on your arm?” Canny asked, hoping Bonnie would hold still and show her.

  Bonnie covered the blue symbols with her other hand.

  “It looks like a tattoo.”

  Bonnie laughed. “Children don’t have tattoos, do they?”

  Canny said that her mother was tattooed from her hips to her knees. “When she was full-grown though, otherwise the patterns would stretch out of shape. She had it done when I was a little girl, when we lived on Lost Link Island.” Canny could still remember the long hours when she was supposed to be napping. She’d lie with her cheek pressed to the woven mat, listening to the tapping of the block on the hardwood tattooing comb. Sweat ran down her mother’s face, and blood down her flanks. Canny remembered the tattooist’s stained fingers rubbing dye into the little perforations that, day by day, built up into patterns—palm leaves, sharks’ teeth, woven sails.

  She said to Bonnie, “Women aren’t generally tattooed either, I suppose.” She wanted the girl’s confidence so she made an effort to smile. “So, I guess that mark can’t be a tattoo.”

  “You don’t believe me,” Bonnie said.

  “Well—it does look like a tattoo. But I’m glad it isn’t, because this summer, girls are wearing sleeves to here”—Canny touched the place on her arm where her cap-sleeved blouse ended, then her wrist—“and gloves ending here.”

  The younger girl’s lip quivered. She stopped and stared balefully at Canny. Then she held out her arm.

  Canny took it and turned it to the glow coming off the sunlit river. The symbols were in tattooing ink, and immobile, but they were like simpler creatures from the same environment as the great creature of Extra over Fort Rock. She said, “What do they mean?”

  “Nothing,” Bonnie said, and withdrew her arm.

  They walked on. They passed a group of houses with boarded-up windows and sagging porches covered in passion fruit vines. The houses may have been derelict, but they were surrounded by regular rows of cherry trees full of heavy fruit. As soon as Canny saw the cherries she recognized them as the most prized kind that always appeared in the Castlereagh fruit shops at Christmastime.

  “How does your mother get on with her tattoo?” Bonnie asked. “Do people stare?”

  “Well, for a start, people only see it when she’s in a bathing suit. When she got it she didn’t know she’d be coming back to Southland. She didn’t know she’d be living in two worlds.”

  Bonnie looked eager for more, so Canny told her Sisema’s story about the hermit crab.

  “Mother was pretty miserable on Lost Link. After her time in Southland during the War, the island seemed too small. And she wasn’t completely accepted when she came home—for instance, she was banned from the body of the church. That was because of me. Because I didn’t have a dad. Anyway, what she says is that she got sick of all the nonsense and decided she wanted to go back to Southland. But she couldn’t bear to think she’d end up somewhere ugly or untidy. That’s the word she uses—‘untidy.’ You see, Lost Link’s towns might have rusty, shabby buildings, but everything is covered in flowers, and all the trees are—” Canny made shapes in the air, trying to describe what she remembered. “They’re sort of solid, and definite, and symmetrical. Like new furniture. Except furniture with leaves and flowers on it. And it rains a lot on the island, so everything is always clean. Then the sea is”—Canny looked at the river; it was a very similar color to that of the sea inside Lost Link’s reef—“turquoise, like your river.

  “Anyway, Mother didn’t want to give up any of that. Or never being cold. And she thought that if she left she wouldn’t be anybody anymore. That without her family she wouldn’t know who she was. They were being stern with her, but they weren’t strangers.

  “One night she was sitting on a curb in Arahura, the town with the port. It was a high curb, for storm water. She was sitting with her feet in the gutter. There was a park behind her, and palms, hissing in the wind. The beach was just beyond the palms, and she could hear the reef over the sough of the wind in the palms, sounds that filled everything up so there wasn’t a speck of silence. She was feeling like someone in limbo. Then she noticed a hermit crab. One of those crabs that lives in an empty sea snail shell. It was walking along the edge of the curb looking for a place to step down. It would try and try, but the curb was too high. This was a cautious crab. Anyway, this undecided walk along the edge made my mother think of herself, and the decision she had to make, and then she suddenly thought, ‘If I go, I won’t be leaving my home. I can be like that hermit crab and carry my home with me.’”

  Bonnie looked fascinated. She said she thought she’d heard a song like that on the radio, sung by a singer with a ukulele.

  “Someone wrote a song about my mother’s story. Or a song with her hermit crab in it. It’s mostly about the Shackle Islanders in Castlereagh.”

  Bonnie did a little skip. She stopped hiding her tattoo.

  Canny could hear children—maybe the same group on another path. They were shouting in some competitive childish excitement. A dog had joined them, and they’d stirred it up so that it was barking, that bark with a little whine at the end. An anxious bark.

  Bonnie wanted to know if Canny was staying in the valley.

  “If it keeps raining in Massenfer. We got rained out. Our tents and sleeping bags are wet. I thou
ght I’d take a walk to see if I could buy some eggs and fruit. Could you tell me where to go for that?”

  “You could have at the gardens back there. But there’s a stall by the guesthouse. I’d take you all the way, only I’d better go fetch those kids to their dinners.”

  “Is there a map of the valley anywhere?” Canny asked.

  “In the guesthouse there’s a map of walking tracks. It has on it everything you might want, the stalls, the swimming holes—”

  “How about the house on the little hill at the head of the valley? Is there a track up to it?”

  Bonnie stumbled and then stopped still, her mouth open.

  Canny had partly expected some sign of surprise. But not one quite this dramatic. Only the day before she hadn’t really known there were such things as spells outside of stories—though every time she saw her Extra she had felt, vaguely, that she might be living in one of those stories. But she was sure there was a spell on Fort Rock. It might be there to create a tourist attraction, rather than to distract people from the view. But when Bonnie stumbled, Canny was sure that the spell on the rock formation was about the house—was all about the house. “Are you okay? What is it?” she said innocently.

  “There isn’t a track,” Bonnie said. Her eyes flicked left and right, as if she were looking for a cue card in order to answer a question she’d never expected to hear asked. Then she gave the only answer she knew. “It’s out of bounds.”

  “You mean it’s private property?”

  Bonnie flushed. “The whole valley is private property. But we like visitors. Only—that hill isn’t safe. It’s unstable. There are sinkholes. And gobs deep underground. A gob is a void left in the ground after the coal’s been taken out. Terminal Hill is above the end of the coalfield, and over part of Bull Mine. The Bull is closed and flooded. No one goes up the hill. There isn’t a path anymore. And the house is—no one lives there.”

  Canny just nodded and turned to stroll casually on. The girl fell into step beside her. Her head was lowered, her hair hiding her face. “It’s derelict,” she murmured. “That’s the word.” They came to a branch in the path. Bonnie said, “Aunt Iris’s guesthouse is up that way.” She flipped her hair back and turned her face up to Canny’s and gazed at her, but all she said was “Bye,” then she waved and ran off.

  Canny left the river and followed the path to the guesthouse. It intersected other paths, but there was always a sign pointing the way to the Zarene Valley guesthouse. The path went along the edge of an orchard. The ripening pears were not the pretty pinkish sort that Castlereagh’s fruit stands would display in glowing mounds; they were the kind that bottled well but grew skins speckled like the worn gilt on old picture frames. The fruit was abundant, but the tree limbs were bearded with lichen, and very old. The trees seem to hum, though since the blossom was over, it was too late for the bees, and too early for wasps to come and feast on ripe fruit. But Canny could see insects among the leaves. Or rather at first she saw insects, because she expected insects. But it was more Extra, an insectile cloud of symbols that shimmered into filmy visibility when she looked at it straight on. She stopped and tried to read it. But it wasn’t words, only letters. Maybe letters. And then she saw it—many words, changing momentarily with the dance of their letters, and she couldn’t read them any more than she could read an ordinary sentence if she knew only the vowels.

  The sun made the top of her head hot, so she went on into the shade of a stand of native trees. She walked along thinking about the Extra and feeling sad—because it was now clear to her that, though she’d been calling it hers for years, someone else had made it, for their own purposes. People who knew how to use it, whereas she only helplessly noticed it. The sadness Canny felt was similar to the feeling she had when her teachers talked about “our European Heritage,” and she went on for a time, head down, scuffing her feet, and whispering, “Not mine, not mine.”

  When she came out of the trees, the guesthouse was in front of her. It was a big building, with a wraparound veranda. An ancient woody wisteria grew along its front, so that the veranda was festooned with tassels of pink blossom. The garden was cared for, but not designed. It was a children’s garden, sectioned into little plots of flowers grown from seed and salad vegetables. At the end of each plot were tall stakes with two hooks, one for a sunhat and the other for a watering can.

  A youngish man and woman were sitting on the front steps doing up the laces on their hiking boots. “Morning,” said the man. “Great day for it.”

  Canny said, “Is this place nice?”

  “It’s lovely,” said the woman. “Really restful.”

  “And the food’s great,” said the man.

  “Very reasonable,” said the woman.

  “Thanks,” said Canny, and went past them indoors.

  * * *

  SHOLTO WOKE TO DISCOVER that Canny had disappeared while he and Susan were asleep and wasn’t now in calling distance. He was worried, especially after he went down to take a look at the river and discovered what sort of river it was. He found a fallen tree, its big trunk still buried in the riverbank. The tree was totally stripped of bark by the current. Its branch and crown were submerged and being played on like some giant drum by that deep current, so powerfully that the loud, bass knocking made the riverbank quiver.

  For some time, Sholto walked up and down calling, till Susan joined him and told him to stop being a wet hen. “She’s a big girl. You’re being overprotective.”

  “This river flows into the Taskmaster, and as you know the Taskmaster once washed away a whole bridge, which demolished another bridge miles downstream—after reaching it in minutes.”

  “Yes, and a bus full of people went into it in 1938, and neither bus nor bodies were ever seen again. You’ve already told me the stories.”

  “The Taskmaster flows out to sea and eventually becomes an ocean trench. And it doesn’t really become the river it is till this one joins it,” Sholto said. “It’s serious, Susan.”

  “But we aren’t talking about the river, Sholto. We’re talking about your sister.”

  “Canny can’t take on a river.”

  “No, I don’t mean that, I mean she’s too sensible to go paddling in this,” Susan said. “And we have other problems. Our tents are nearly dry but our sleeping bags are still sopping.”

  It was then that Canny arrived, breathless and waving a business card. She shoved it into Sholto’s hand. It was a list of room tariffs rates, mealtimes, and a helpful little map showing where to find the Zarene Valley guesthouse. “One night,” Canny said. “Please, Sholto, we can carry our sleeping bags there and hang them on the clothesline. The boy I spoke to at the guesthouse said our stuff will be perfectly safe. We can even leave the car unlocked.”

  “Not with the department’s recording equipment in it,” Susan said. “But well done, Canny, let’s go there. Sholto?”

  Sholto muttered, “What say they expect us to take three rooms?”

  “Canny and I can share if it’s one night. And we can ask them where we can camp.”

  Canny looked very happy. She was bouncing up and down. She did that sometimes. But her face was, for once, almost animated. Sholto gazed at his stepsister. She didn’t look like herself at all. It was as if she’d been wearing a mask—something beautiful, and finely wrought—as if for a masked ball, and midnight had finally come and she had taken it off. He was quite moved by the change, but his feelings came out as surliness. “Well, it’s good to see you happy for once.”

  “So, is that yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Both girls squealed.

  “One night,” he reminded them.

  Susan ran back up the meadow shouting that she’d bundle the bags.

  “Get your wash things and a change of clothes,” Sholto said to Canny.

  He got what he needed then they locked the car and, burdened by bags, set out up the river path, leaving their almost dry tents draped on the lilac bushes.

 
* * *

  THE RECEPTION DESK WAS TUCKED into the angle under the stairs. There was a seat in front of it and, on the wall above, a board with room numbers and keys. A sign on the desk read: “Ring the bell on the porch.” Sholto and Susan waited for several minutes before overcoming their—Canny thought—very adult timidity and going to find the bell. It was a school bell, and when Sholto swung it, Canny almost expected a jostle of kids to arrive and line up at the base of the steps.

  A boy darted around the side of the house and said, “I’ll get Aunt Iris,” and rushed off again.

  Canny followed him.

  There was a belt of trees behind the guesthouse, and a track that led through them to a field. On its far side were four long, low buildings with bricked terraces and many doors. The doors were all open, and children’s shoes were lined up by each doorsill. There was a large outdoor oven under a shelter by the building and a long table set with many places. The children were waiting. A tall woman with a mass of gray-streaked black hair bunched in a bun was serving from a large pot. Each child took a filled plate and carried it carefully to its place at the table.

  The boy spoke to the woman, who glanced down the slope then said something that called the boy’s attention to the fact he’d been followed. He came running back. “Aunt Iris will be down in a minute. Once she’s done serving the orphans.”

  He scampered past, and Canny had to chase him. “Are they?” she said.

  He vaulted up the steps before he responded. “Are they what?”

  “Orphans?”

  “That’s the Orphans’ Dormitory back there.”

  Canny knew there had once been a fund for war widows and orphans, but the War had been over for fourteen years. She wanted to know what had orphaned those twenty children. She hurried to catch up and seized the boy’s collar. The boy stopped abruptly and gave a strangled squawk.