Burn Patterns

by Ron Elliott

  Nicholas was not the first man to fail to consider the later consequences of marrying a gorgeous spitfire. Iris’s father had been weak but also intelligent and giving. He became an anaesthetist at the prompting of his wife because that’s where the money was, yet he still insisted on working in a public hospital. He was interested in the arts, particularly in reading history. His hobbies were of the mind. And Iris knew he adored her. She certainly adored him. Iris supposed her father saved her. He saved her from her mother, from her becoming her mother. The two of them made Iris something else of course.

  Iris was only sixteen when her father died. Firefighters cut him out of his car, which had gone off the freeway into a bridge stanchion late at night. He had been on his way home from eighteen hours at the hospital. He’d had a heart attack. Iris imagined the firefighters talking to Nicholas as they worked to free him, giving him a joke, asking about his loved ones, giving secret sad looks as they passed each other equipment to extricate the dying doctor. A romantic story of course, constructed, for he was probably dead before the car even left the road. Elsie broke the news in the morning. ‘Your father’s dead. You broke his heart.’ Iris did not believe her until she telephoned his hospital to confirm it for herself.

  Iris did not break down. She grieved quickly. She studied. Iris’s father clearly knew Iris would need protecting. He bequeathed Iris a large sum to be used for her education. Elsie went berserk. Not figuratively. She became deranged, physically out of control. She took to Iris’s bedroom, tearing the room apart. It was like a scene from Citizen Kane. No doll unbroken. No dress untorn. No papers unripped. She broke a door off the cupboard, cracked the window glass. This event probably did qualify as a bona fide psychotic episode.

  Iris became a boarder at a private school. Elsie sold the family home, moved down the coast, went a little hippie. She had several boyfriends. Charlotte and Iris kept in contact. Their relationship had always been difficult. They were never close but regarded each other with sympathy tinged with envy. Charlotte left school early, married young, moved east. Elsie followed her but never found or gave peace. When she died of cancer, Iris did not go to the funeral. She could admit it to Mathew, to Frank and to herself that knowing her mother was no longer on Earth filled her with enormous relief. Her shoulders were lightened. Dr Chew, I did not like my mother. Dr Chew would not be shocked. Narrative therapy accepted certain filial ties are the worst ones for our health.

  Rosemarie, then three years old, would never have to meet her. Yet Elsie remained, it seemed, inside Iris and between Iris and her own daughter. Iris loved Rosemarie with an ache. She missed her enormously, yet she didn’t seem capable of maintaining the narrow bridge between them.

  Mathew, Mathew’s whole family did it with such ease. Iris was careful to a degree that was fearful. This is who her mother made her, what she’d not been able to overcome with her husband or her daughter. Not all her fault, to be sure, but real. She loved in her own way. She was not able to change, no matter how often it was identified by Frank and others, no matter how many affirming, outreaching positive potential narratives were offered her. There was no counter-narrative she could transplant onto the person she’d been made into in her childhood. She was closed often to herself.

  Iris saw movement through the French doors. Mathew? She waved but the figure had gone. She looked again. The sun was low, reflecting the trees back onto the glass. She took more prunings to the pile. She would clear them tomorrow. She put her shears, gloves and hat on the patio table and went in.

  ‘Mathew?’ she called.

  Iris went into the kitchen, drank a glass of water, wandered upstairs. ‘Mathew?’ Was it Sunday? No, Saturday still.

  She searched through their bedroom, the exercise room, the upstairs lounge, finally down to Rosemarie’s end. Her study and her rumpus room were empty. Her bedroom smelled musty, covered with posters of bands whose names Iris couldn’t recall. The lead singer with the dark hair and blackly made eyes. Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands. Butterfly stickers covered the ceiling where they had remained since Rosemarie had been small. None of them, least of all Rosemarie, wanted them removed. Some still glowed in the dark.

  Iris thought she heard a door close. ‘Mathew?’

  She went downstairs. ‘Mathew, is that you?’

  Mathew’s office was empty.

  Iris opened the front door. She thought she’d locked it, but now wasn’t so sure. The front gates were open. She went out to the garage, flicked the button for the gates. They swung closed, clanged pleasingly, signally, the end of the day.

  The trees shimmered, darkly. The sea breeze was in. Iris could smell smoke. A neighbour was barbecuing something plummy.

  Chapter sixteen

  Iris slept late. Another restless night. She recalled feeling hot. She remembered dreaming, images she couldn’t quite recapture. She’d stayed off the alcohol before bed so maybe that was it. The word menopause flashed into her mind. What if her troubles had been masked or enhanced by pre-menopause as well as the wine, the overtiredness? Would that be a comfort or cause for further angst? Or completely beside the point?

  ‘I need butterflies,’ she said to the ceiling. ‘I need to stop talking to myself.’

  The zoo teemed with all manner of human creatures. It was Sunday. The monkeys got antsy on Sundays and school holidays. The baboons liked to disgust by throwing their poo, spitting. The lions would try to spray.

  Iris bought a coffee, stood watching the otters. It was warm already and they were gliding miraculously under the cool water.

  She switched on her phone, saw lots of missed calls, cued texts. She ignored them, dialled Rosemarie.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Hello, darling. How are you?’

  ‘I was going to call you later.’

  ‘I’ve saved you sixpence.’

  ‘Brodey and I are shopping.’

  ‘Sounds like he’s house-trained. Brodey?’

  ‘I’ve told you about Brodey. Or Dad. Didn’t he tell you? Anyway we’re doing the grocery shopping.’

  ‘I did the same yesterday. I made sushi. I used the special roller pad. You used to love helping with sushi.’

  ‘Yeah, well it’s easier to buy them made here.’

  ‘How’s uni?’

  ‘Waiting for results. You know.’

  ‘I was thinking about our walks to school.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Iris ignored Rosemarie’s tone. She said, ‘Remember how it used to be my job to tell stories on the way to school and your job to tell me about your day on the way home?’

  ‘Kind of. I remember you telling me about it. You had to pry it out of me and at some magic point I became articulate and impossible to shut up.’

  She was including Brodey now, Iris supposed.

  ‘I also remember playing I Spy, very early on. This wasn’t in the car. It was on a walk to school.’

  ‘No, butter. Not margarine.’ They were still shopping.

  ‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with S.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘I tried and tried. Stones. Stop sign. Sign. Street. I went through every S word in the entire dictionary, everything that could possibly be seen or passed by on the way to school, including some pretty esoteric words like sister and sunshine and story. Finally, I gave up, which, as I recall, was pretty uncool with you if I didn’t keep trying. And the word was …’

  ‘Cement.’

  ‘Yes. Cement. I didn’t have the heart to …’

  ‘Tell me until later. I became a bit obsessed about the S sound.’

  ‘Yes. You were around ten years old. Ceiling. Centipede.’

  ‘Cereal. Centre. Celestial.’

  ‘I’m not sure whether celestial was one of your ten year old words, although you were pretty precocious.’

  ‘A smart only child. Ha ha. Mum, I pretty much have to go.’

  ‘Oh, I thought I’d call. No problem. See how you’re going.’

  ‘Yes. I
’ll call you later. Oh, but there’s a thing after.’

  ‘Yes. Love you.’

  ‘Yes. You too. I’ll call. Which does start with a c, rather than salute.’ She said it with the Italian accent. Witty girl. ‘Bye mum.’

  ‘Bye.’

  Iris stared at her phone as though it were a young child’s hand. She felt a little weak at the knees, a little like tears, but happy too. And sad. Melancholy. Why has melancholy got a ch that is not a chhh sound? Rosemarie became a bit obsessed in high school about the many inconsistencies of spelling and sounding in the English language. If it’s an s sound write s and not ce. Silent letters infuriated her. Gh and ps and particularly the silent s such as in Grosvenor Street.

  ‘French!’ she declared one day at the dinner table. ‘The bloody French ran everything and they’ve made all the words unpronounceable.’

  ‘It was the language of diplomacy,’ said Mathew.

  ‘Autobahn,’ said Iris. They shook their heads at her, moved on before Iris could explain about words constantly being added from all over. Schadenfreude. Viennese Freud words.

  ‘I’ve seen a documentary,’ Mathew explained. ‘The history of English or the story of English. It was spoken by only a couple of suburbs of London.’

  Iris grinned at the memory. She headed to the native bird section as she dialled Mathew. The blue wrens weren’t very blue. She stood searching for them in the fake undergrowth.

  ‘Iris. Good morning.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Lots of roundtable reading of documents. Lots of long dinners. Field trips of very hot tramping over red rocks with the Nullabin.’ When Iris didn’t reply, he asked, ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m at the zoo.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you hated it on weekends.’

  ‘It’s nice today. I’ve been talking to Rosemarie.’

  ‘Excellent. How is she?’

  ‘Good. She was shopping. With Brodey.’

  ‘Yes. Met at a rally or student gathering. The sciences. Something sciencey.’

  Neither of them spoke. Iris filled the space. ‘Do you want to get a dog?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he said rather quickly. ‘Yes, let’s both think about a breed. Nothing small and yappy, I hope.’

  Iris laughed. Asked, ‘Shall I cook when you get back?’

  ‘Yes. Perfect.’

  ‘When are you back?’

  ‘Should be tomorrow the way we’re going.’

  Iris took a breath, said, ‘I miss you, darling.’

  After another slight pause, Mathew said, ‘Good. I’ll see you soon.’

  Was someone else listening in? He could have been talking at breakfast, surrounded by Chinese and Nullabini. There might well be no arts bureaucrats there, he might not have been in his motel room still at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. He might have been still peeved over his missing socks. There could be all number of reasons for his guarded, determined brightness on the phone.

  Iris saw finches. Many finches, drab, camouflaged. Camouflage was undoubtedly a dastardly French word, like bureau. Unspellable.

  Iris headed for the butterfly enclosure. She checked the messages. Missed calls from Gillian, Patricia, Frank, Detective Pavlovic. Her gang. Pavlovic and Frank had left a number of messages. She’d check them later. She’d been hoping for news from Chuck. A development in the teenage theory. She’d call them all in the afternoon. She composed a text message for Frank.

  I am not having a breakdown. I am having a recovery :) x

  Iris paused before pressing send because a monarch landed on her telephone screen. It was a darker orange than the garden variety. She examined the markings on the wings, like veins branching out to the black perimeter. Lighter dots like desert painting. Iris blew gently, watching its wings vibrate, its long dark antenna quivering in her breeze.

  It was warm in the butterfly house, humid. In the summer, the glass portion was dismantled because the temperatures outside were sufficient. Small sprays behind the special plants kept things humid. Water trickled in a channel alongside the path leading from entrance to exit. They’d created a tropical rainforest inside a tent.

  Two girls and a boy came to Iris almost immediately. ‘Look.’ The children gazed in awe. Iris knew a number of butterflies must have landed on her yellow blouse.

  ‘Are they yellow?’ asked Iris. There were common grass yellows tumbling about up near the net roof canopy.

  ‘Black,’ said the girl in the pink t-shirt.

  ‘Are their wings closed?’ asked Iris, turning slowly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Aha. They are my favourite. They’re called the Ulysses swallowtail. When they fly you can see a beautiful blue colour and I love the shapes of their wings. Like a bird’s.’

  The girl examined Iris with suspicion, downgrading her as a generic form of teacher or zoo worker, therefore slightly less interesting than she had first thought.

  The boy said, ‘They won’t land on me.’

  Iris said, ‘You have to be very still. It’s the colours they’re attracted to.’ She pointed towards the coloured discs on the white feeding tables set throughout the false forest of the enclosure.

  ‘Like a flower,’ said the less suspicious girl.

  Then Iris smelt smoke: plastic, acrid.

  The children were looking up above Iris’s head.

  Iris whirled around to see flames. Half of the enclosure was made of a fine netting that allowed air to pass but reduced temperature and wind. It was now covered in a yellow shimmer of flame like the sun setting in the ocean. The edges dripped melting net, goops of bluer flame falling into the entrance end of the butterfly house. Iris heard a dull roar like water down a distant fall, also crackles, pops, children’s calls of fear.

  ‘We need to get out.’ Iris turned away from the fire, towards the other exit at the solid end of the butterfly enclosure. The back section was constructed of wooden walls protecting the butterflies from the weather. Iris recalled from previous visits how it was warmer here, the temperature controlled to tropical heats of thirty degrees with higher humidity.

  A man in a baseball cap banged on a side door that led to the incubation room. The sign said staff only. People, mostly mothers and children, were at the exit, piled there, stacking into each other. Why weren’t they leaving?

  Iris looked back again to the fire. The heat was already intense, pushing at her. It looked like a wall of yellow liquid, descending as well as spreading above. A wave of yellow turning to red and orange. The molten drips from the material started smaller fires below. The wood of a feeding container and the wood of the building structure were bursting into bluer flames, dotted around the ground. A plastic electrical outlet exploded in a sizzle of green and white sparks. Plants were frying, searing, sagging, collapsing in black heaps. One burst into momentary flame like a flare.

  The butterflies were gone. Instead of the garden of blooming orange, yellow and blue drifting, fluttering flowers, there was only dry heat. Iris supposed the occasional sparkle and flash was a butterfly burning, cindered in an instant. She inspected the ground, finding a scatter of them. Autumn. They were still. Dead from the heat before the flames would reach them. One quarter of the butterfly house was on fire, orange now, not yellow.

  One entrance was completely engulfed, the other seemed closed, a pile of people gathered there. Someone screamed, a cry of despair. The man in the baseball cap smashed a bollard against the wooden wall on the side of the incubation room. The wall was smoking.

  Iris looked to the pond. A man-made stream fed a fake pond in the middle of the fake rainforest. Iris shouted to the children who hovered at the back of the blocked entrance. ‘The pond. Get in the water.’ She held her hand out.

  They looked at her, looked at each other, looked at the walls of the enclosure, thinking of their parents beyond.

  Iris stepped towards the fire, then off the path and down into the water. She lowered herself into the water, dippi
ng herself to neck height before sitting up, turning to the children. She yelled, ‘Get into the water!’

  The boy came first, the two girls ran after. They came down into the half metre of water, and Iris splashed them. The fire felt near, the heat harsh. Iris squinted up to see the plastic net roof and walls were nearly gone. She could see sky past the smoke. She wasn’t sure there were still flames above.

  Then came the explosion like her recurring nightmare, like one of her flashbacks. It seemed distant, hollow, a truck backfiring without echo. Iris turned towards the fire to see a cylindrical object flying towards her, like a black torpedo in the air with yellow flame coming from the back. It swerved and fell with a metallic clunk into a pole, bending it. Then came another explosion, a deeper whump, white, complete with a hot blast of air. Metal sprayed, flying, falling fast. Iris recoiled from it, crouching her back to shield the children, turning with the blast of hot air, a piercing tickle in her shoulder.

  It was quieter, suddenly, a freeze in time like at the school, as though the physical world complied for an instant with the emotions of the humans, physics and stress taking a rest beat. Iris heard the crying and the alarms. She breathed in the faint noxious smell of all kinds of burnt things, plastic, rubber, plants, gas, meat. Iris finally opened her eyes. One of the girls was whimpering. Iris put her arms around all three.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said.

  And it was. The fire had gone. The huge wave of flame was nowhere. The fire had evaporated. She heard alarms. Someone moaned in pain up near the exit. She became aware of waves of wailing coming from outside of the butterfly enclosure. She imagined a hundred parents standing outside, crying for their children in the gutted zoo enclosure. Iris stood, nearly tripped over the three kids still cowering in the plastic walled pond. Her shoulder hurt. She’d been cut. Water dripped, discoloured with blood. The cries outside were surreal, a mix of fear and keening, altogether inhuman.