The Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie

by Kirsty Murray

  April looked at Lucy and rolled her eyes, but she was grinning from ear to ear. Lucy realised that despite all her complaining, April really liked Jimmy, perhaps more than she was willing to admit.

  She looked up at the boy at the top of the ravine. ‘I’m Lucy,’ she said. ‘And April and I would love to come for a swim with you.’

  River Kids

  Jimmy rowed them to a wide bend where giant rivergums stretched white limbs to the sky. From one of the branches a long rope was suspended high above the golden river. When they’d tied up the boat a little distance from the swimming spot, Jimmy threw off his shirt, grabbed the rope and swung out over the water. He whooped loudly as he flew through the air and splashed into the river.

  April didn’t bother to take any of her clothes off this time. She snatched at the rope as it swung back and then followed Jimmy, flying like a monkey over the water. When the rope came sailing back towards Lucy, she held it for a long moment. A smoky summer haze was in the air and the river lay cool and inviting. April and Jimmy bobbed about in the current, calling to her.

  Lucy took a deep breath and sailed out into the air before letting go with a shout.

  Later, as she sat in her damp clothes on a branch of the gum tree watching April swim, Lucy turned to Jimmy.

  ‘Where’s Tom?’ she asked, feeling shy for even speaking his name.

  ‘He’s back at Avendale, helping his dad size some canvases.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That means they’re fixing up some canvases so his dad can paint them. You know he’s a painter, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Some people think that’s strange, but I think it’s great,’ said Jimmy. ‘Imagine being able to earn a living out of making pictures! Imagine being able to do something you love every day of your life. I reckon April and Tom’s dad is a beaut bloke. The whole family are bonza. April, she’s top isn’t she? And Tom, he’s a champ. I don’t have any family, see, only my old man and he doesn’t care what I do. So Tom and April, they’re like my family, and little Lulu and their mum and dad. No one else in town cares about the things they care about. Like pictures and books and music. My dad thinks I’m stupid for liking all that stuff. He says it’s arty-farty. But I don’t care. I reckon it’s magic. The sort of magic that makes life worth living. I reckon I’m going to be a musician, no matter what my dad thinks.’

  Jimmy had grown angry as he spoke. Lucy didn’t know what to say. Even though she often felt lonely in her family, as if she were a tiny little outlying island rather than part of the big mainland, she’d never imagined anyone would feel like a foreigner in their own family. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live in a family where things like music and books weren’t important.

  As if to cover up the awkwardness of Lucy’s silence, Jimmy pulled out his harmonica and began to play. It was the sweetest, saddest sound in the world. Like a lullaby of tears.

  ‘Hey, Jimmy Tiger, how about playing something to make me smile?’ called April from the river, kicking a spray of water into the air.

  Jimmy took the harmonica away from his mouth and grinned.

  ‘How about this one?’ He played a few bars of a song that Lucy had never heard and then he put down the harmonica and began to sing.

  ‘If April Showers

  Should come your way

  She’ll drive you crazy the livelong day

  So if you’ve got sense, you’ll let her go

  Because she isn’t worth the pain, you know

  She’ll make you feel so low’

  April gave a howl of indignation and swung onto a branch that overhung the water. In a minute she was up in the tree, dripping wet. She jumped on Jimmy Tiger, snatching his harmonica out of his hand. They fell off the branch and onto the muddy riverbank where April pinned him down, her knees on each of his arms.

  ‘You are so mean!’

  ‘What has he done?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘That song,’ said April. ‘He messes it up and sings it at me all the time.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  April tickled Jimmy under his arms and then jumped off. ‘Don’t you understand? My name is April Showers. I hate it. So Jimmy sings that song to tease me.’

  ‘No way!’ cried Lucy. ‘I’ve got an old aunty whose last name is Showers.’

  ‘How strange,’ said April, frowning. ‘Maybe we’re related. Maybe you’re a long-lost cousin or something like that.’

  Lucy stared at her. She had known that there was something familiar about April from the minute she met her. She felt a strange shiver go up her spine. Why hadn’t she put all the clues together before now?

  Lucy began to laugh. All the parts of a jigsaw puzzle fell into place at exactly the same moment. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before. It was incredible.

  April was Big.

  Lucy knew that Big always signed her paintings A. Showers but she’d never thought about what the initial stood for. Everyone had called her Big for so long that Lucy had never heard her called April. But how could it be true?

  ‘What are you laughing about?’ said Jimmy. ‘I swear, the girls in this valley are completely loony.’

  ‘I was just thinking about the future,’ said Lucy.

  ‘I think about the future all the time,’ said April. ‘I think about how I’m going to be a painter. A famous painter. And I’ll go to Paris and have a studio and paint pictures and eat fancy French pastries and go and see all the famous French paintings in all the galleries.’

  ‘They say there’s a war coming in Europe,’ said Jimmy. ‘They’ll probably blow up everything before you get there.’

  ‘Don’t say that! Dad worries about it all the time. He was a war artist in the last one and he says it was the war to end all wars. That’s why we came to live in the bush, you know, ’cause the war made Dad so sick. I’m scared this one will be worse.’

  ‘You worry too much,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘But what if there is a war?’

  ‘Then I’d be off and fighting, wouldn’t I? I don’t like the sound of that Hitler fella one little bit.’

  Lucy wanted to tell them that she knew there would be a war. A big and terrible war, World War II. She knew that Australia fought in it for years and awful bombs were dropped that changed the world. Thinking about it made her nervous about all the things that the future held for April, Tom and Jimmy Tiger. Did they fight in the war? Why hadn’t her mum told her she had a great-uncle called Tom? And what had happened to April after the war? Why had she turned into the cranky old lady who lived alone in a shadowy, musty version of her childhood home?

  ‘What do you imagine things might be like when you grow up?’ April asked Lucy, looking up at her where she sat alone in the gum tree.

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Lucy, gloomily. She couldn’t help but think of her own family, of Claire and what the future held.

  Jimmy and April lay on their backs on the riverbank and gazed up at the hazy summer sky talking about their dreams for the future, but Lucy stared out over the water wondering why she was there. What was she doing in this other Broken River, worrying about a war that had ended more than half a century before she was born? Why was she able to walk through the pictures into her family’s past?

  She was so deep in her own thoughts that she didn’t hear the call from the river. Another boat was cutting across the smooth surface of the water.

  ‘Come back to the house!’ called Tom. ‘Quickly! There’s bushfires coming. The mill at Five Mile exploded and the fires are jumping across the valleys. The whole state’s burning.’

  April and Jimmy scrambled down into Jimmy’s rowboat and grabbed an oar each. Lucy swung down out of the tree to join them. She sat in the stern of the rowboat while Jimmy and April rowed in perfect synchronicity, catching up to the little skiff that Tom had paddled along the river to search for them.

  When they came alongside Tom’s skiff, he grabbed their boat. ‘I’m s
o glad I found you. Mum was worried sick that April was somewhere up on the hill.’

  Then he looked hard at Lucy. ‘Hey, you’re April’s twin, aren’t you? The girl who visited last spring. You couldn’t have picked a worse time to come back.’

  He turned to Jimmy and April and spoke urgently. ‘There are spot fires all over the hills. Me and Dad cut a firebreak above the creek, but embers are raining down on the south side. If the fire races up to the peak, we’re not going to be able to stop it. The winds are coming over the hills so the bushfire could come right down into the valley any minute.’

  Lucy saw April grow pale and realised that a fire could mean that not only the Empire of Pulpit Rock was threatened, but that Avendale too was in danger.

  ‘What’s the date today?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘Friday the thirteenth,’ said Jimmy. ‘Bad luck. So we better be careful.’

  ‘Friday the thirteenth of what? What month? What year?’

  April and Jimmy looked at Lucy as if she were a little crazy. ‘Friday, thirteenth of January, 1939, of course,’ replied April.

  ‘It’s Black Friday!’ cried Lucy.

  ‘Why do you call it that?’ asked April.

  Lucy wanted to say don’t worry, because she knew the house would survive. But what if her being there changed things? Why had the painting opened to her? What was she here for? Maybe arriving on Friday the 13th meant she was destined to bring bad luck to her very own family.

  Black Friday

  As they turned a bend in the river, Avendale came into view and they saw how close the threat of fire had become while they had been swimming and dreaming about the future. A hot, dry wind drove billowing clouds of smoke across the hilltops, and a distant ridge flamed black and orange against a swirl of smoke.

  Tom jumped out of his skiff and tethered both boats.

  ‘Now that I know you’re safe,’ he said. ‘I’m going up the hill to help Dad. We threw hessian sacks into the dam to soak before I came to look for you. I reckon we’ll use Smoke and Banjo to help us take them up the hill to fight the spot fires.’

  ‘I’m coming too,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘But Tom, Jimmy,’ said Lucy. ‘No one should go and fight a fire in shorts and those thin shirts. You’ll get burnt. You need to put on protective clothing.’

  Both boys frowned, startled that Lucy was giving them instructions. ‘What?’

  On the far side of the creek, April and Tom’s father was beating out spot fires with a branch but when he noticed the children, he came racing down the river track and flung his arms around April.

  ‘Thank our lucky stars you’re safe! Who’s this child?’ he asked turning to look at Lucy. ‘Your parents must be worried sick about you.’

  ‘She’s from up the river. Her family are staying around here,’ said April.

  ‘Well, she’ll have to stay with us for now. The roads are closed because of the fires. Boys, we have to head up the hill to tackle those spot fires.’

  ‘Then we’re coming too,’ said April, grabbing Lucy’s hand.

  ‘No, you girls go back to the house.’

  Lucy was afraid. How could her great-grandfather be talking about fighting the fires with two boys and some wet sacks? It was impossible. Bob Timmins had said they were the worst fires in history. What if Tom and Jimmy and her great-grandfather were all going to die? She had to fight down the urge to flee back through the painting to find out what had happened to them all. The only person that she knew had definitely survived was April.

  Big had said the family escaped the fire by taking the boat down the river. Lucy hoped she had meant the whole family.

  ‘The fire that’s coming is going to be too big to fight,’ said Lucy. ‘You should take the boats and escape. Row down the river to safety.’

  April stared at Lucy, bewildered by this new, authoritative girl. Lucy took her hands and squeezed them, hoping to reassure her. She wanted to say to all of them, ‘Don’t worry, the house will survive.’ Because she knew that it was sitting safely on the other side of time.

  Black clouds billowed high over the hillside and the ridge glowed orange. They all looked up at the darkening sky. The sun glowed an ominous coppery ball behind the clouds of smoke.

  Tom’s father looked from the sky to the children gathered on the jetty.

  ‘Maybe the girl’s right. Up to the house, all of you. We’ll help Mother gather up what’s precious and be back here in ten minutes.’

  The afternoon had grown unbearably hot. Lucy felt as though she had a fever as they ran up the hill to Avendale. As soon as they passed through the front door, everyone began shouting and arguing. Lucy barely had time to register the presence of the woman who was her great-grandmother, or the short, fair-haired girl who bowled past her, her arms full of toys, who would grow up to be Lucy’s granny. Then Mr Showers roared at them to hurry up and herded the family out the door and back down the hill.

  Embers were floating through the air like snowflakes. They reached the jetty and Mr Showers turned to Tom. ‘We have too many people to go together. We won’t all fit in one. We’ll be too low in the water. I’ll take the girls and you and Jimmy take the skiff. Jimmy’s boat will be too slow.’

  ‘Jimmy and I will be too heavy for the skiff, Dad,’ said Tom. ‘We’ll have to take his boat. Or I could go alone in the skiff.’

  In one terrible moment, Lucy realised her presence had changed everything. The bigger rowboat would only take six people. Everyone would have fitted in one boat if she hadn’t been there.

  ‘Won’t you need a boy to help you, Mr Showers?’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t weigh much so I could go in the skiff with Tom.’

  ‘You’re a very bossy young lady,’ said Mr Showers, smiling. ‘But perhaps you’re right. You’re smaller than Jimmy, that’ll make it easier for Tom to keep up with us. Jimmy can take the rudder while I row.’

  ‘I could do that too,’ said April, but she was silenced by a fierce look from her father.

  April, her mother and her little sister climbed into one end of the boat. Jimmy took the rudder while Mr Showers took charge of the oars. Tom leaned over the jetty and gave the boat a push. The family headed out into the deep heart of the river where the current would help carry them downstream to the town of Broken River.

  Then Tom gestured for Lucy to climb into the skiff. But how could she think of leaving? All she had to do was run back up to the house and disappear through the wall to safety. Tom would travel faster without her.

  ‘Tom,’ she said. ‘I can’t come with you. I have to go up to the house.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Tom. ‘We have to follow my family.’

  ‘No, you go. I have to stay. I know the house will be safe.’

  But as Lucy spoke, a piece of flaming bark came flying through the valley and landed on the steps of the front porch. Tom saw it too and before Lucy could stop him, he ran up the hill and began beating out the spot fire with a green branch that he’d snatched from a tree.

  ‘This can’t be happening!’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t understand. The house shouldn’t burn down.’

  Lucy put her hands to her hot cheeks and thought about what Bob Timmins had told her about the 1939 fires, and what she’d read in the CFA brochures. There were things that she knew that might help save the house. Maybe this was the reason she was here at this other Avendale.

  Breathless from the heat, she ran up the track after Tom. He was standing, smoke-stained and panting, beside the front steps. He’d saved the house for the moment.

  ‘The first thing we have to do is let the horses out of the stables. They’ll be safer outside,’ said Lucy. She couldn’t tell him that she knew the stables were going to burn to the ground.

  ‘That makes sense,’ said Tom.

  As they raced to the stables to free the horses, a great burst of flame flared on the far side of the hills. Lucy was so afraid she wanted to run into the outside–inside room and find her way back to her own time. But some deep
er instinct told her that if she didn’t help now there might be no future to escape into.

  The horses were flighty, made skittish by the smoke. As they led the horses away from the stable, another piece of flaming bark, swept through the air, landed on the roof of the stables and the wooden structure burst into flames.

  ‘We should get those sacks you soaked in the dam. If we put them around the windows and doors of the house, it will stop smoke getting in and keep away embers. And we need to make sure the gutters are clear and then block the downpipes and fill them with water.’ ‘How do you know all this?’ asked Tom.

  Lucy ran towards the dam. ‘No time to explain,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘We need to get cracking.’

  The heat rolled down in waves, scorching their backs as they loaded wet sacking onto the skittish horses. When the sacks were piled up on the verandah, Tom smacked the horses rumps and sent them bolting down to the river.

  Another small fire had broken out on the front verandah, and Tom grabbed one of the wet hessian bags and beat it out. Then, together, Lucy and Tom laid the wet sacks along the windowsills, doorways and baseboards of the house.

  ‘I’ll get all the woollen blankets out of the cupboards,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ll fill the bathtub and soak everything.’

  Outside, Tom cleared the gutters and stuffed rags into the downpipes so he could fill them with water. Inside, Lucy turned on the tap and filled pots and buckets. Tom hosed down the roof and walls of the house, drenching the building with the last of the water that was left in the tanks and then joined Lucy inside the house.

  Lucy had done everything that she could think to do to help. She could only hope it was enough. She was desperate to get back to her own time to make sure that Avendale really had survived.