Fire Song

by Libby Hathorn

  When she’d got back home, some of their immediate neighbours had come inside. Mum would never have allowed that. Decrepit Mrs Bennett, nosy Mrs Johnson and lazy Mrs Rankin, she called them. But those women had fussed over her and little Pippa and with their kindness there was less of the fear and strangeness in the house without Mum.

  And then Mrs Harry Williams said she’d take the kids into her place for the while. That was just before she’d asked, ‘Don’t I smell kero?’ All quietly, and Ingrid had lied and said well maybe because before the terrible thing happened, they’d just filled the heater and spilt some.

  The women nodded at each other. ‘Your mother was far from well, poor dear.’

  ‘You mustn’t be too upset, ‘Mrs Bennett had said, pressing a red apple she’d thought to bring into Ingrid’s hands. ‘Your mother is in the best place, you know.’ And though she was afraid for Mum in that hospital, best place or not, as the idea settled, there was this uncontrollable guilty thankfulness she just couldn’t help feeling.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Bennett. I know she is.’

  Thank you, God, she wanted to sing out, that there’ll be no fire-setting tonight, no burning down of our house. No Emoh Ruo going up in smoke.

  ‘It might take some time, dear, but your mother will be fine,’ Mrs Johnson said in the kindest way. And Ingrid nodded in agreement as she spoke. Please God this was true.

  Mum would get better real fast and then, when she came home, she’d have a real change of heart about all this fire stuff. She’d look around and see just how pretty the place was with its nice wide hall and with all those big rooms left and right all the way along it. And she’d notice the good things like the homely smell of Grandma Logan’s big fireplaces and the kitchen smell of apple pie and wild roses and the sharp apples from the garden. And Mum would work out something else, the way she always did, and not go on with this terrible idea anymore. ‘That was tommyrot,’ she’d say, like she usually did. ‘Absolute stuff and nonsense! What on earth was I thinking?’

  This was heavenly intervention, just as Mrs Harry Williams had said there could be. Just as well she hadn’t spilt the beans about Mum’s plans to anyone in the town.

  But right now, despite comforting words, all these hours later, Mum was still lying weak and pale, in some hospital bed that she’d have to find. Weak and pale didn’t suit Mum. And what about her face? Sometimes she spent hours at the blond wood dressing table. She never missed a mirror in the hallway or lounge room or the bathroom – always looking, adjusting, studying that pretty face, even in the window glass!

  Ingrid thought about it. What in the world was she going to say about Mum’s face? Unless, as the ambulance man said, it was already untwisting, and she could tell Mum the good news.

  Unwilling footsteps along the pavement, long pauses as Blackie sniffed at fences and gateposts, flower scents, bush scents and other dogs’ scents, and every now and then the dark Creosote bases of telegraph poles. It was good for Blackie to get out like this.

  ‘Twenty minutes sniffing new smells – absolutely essential for a dog,’ Uncle Ken always said. Mum often kept Blackie tied up in the yard too darned long. Good for him, this investigating of smells, and it slowed things down.

  Wallerawang. Wallerawang. The song began the minute she saw the neat cream building at the end of the road, and the flower-bordered walkway across the garden that led into the hospital. She walked quickly to a different beat down that path, so that Freddy’s song wouldn’t be in her head. Wallerawang, Wallerawang, Way away, way away, wailing away in Wallerawang!

  ‘No dogs allowed,’ a man by the door said. ‘This is a hospital!’ As if she didn’t know.

  ‘Yes, sir, I know that!’ she said, feeling silly, because in her confusion she’d forgotten all about tying Blackie up. Not that she wanted to find Mum too quickly, in that maze of corridors and wards with their lines of beds. She turned away and crossed the lawn slowly to the big pine tree, where she’d leave the dog while she visited her mother.

  Mum!

  Ingrid noticed her hands were trembling as she tied the knot, as she patted Blackie’s old faithful head, wishing right now, wishing like hell that she was a dog that never had to make decisions about a mother like she did. A dog that could stay here in the cool shade, while someone else altogether went on inside.

  She pushed open the swinging doors that announced the visiting hours – no one said she shouldn’t – and stepped inside, to the enquiring face of a nurse.

  ‘Ward 3, Bed 3 and she’s doing well, your mum.’

  Ingrid didn’t like to ask about Mum’s face, but surely ‘doing well’ meant something good.

  ‘So go right down there, love. No one’s going to bite you, you know!’ Ingrid took small steps on the deep brown lino, slippery with polish, thinking that Mum as well as Grandma Logan would approve of its shine.

  Grandma Logan! If only she’d been here.

  Ward 3, Bed 3 – and here she was at the door. The ward seemed a long room with lots of beds in it, most of them empty. The furthest one had a curtain drawn around it. She tiptoed over. Maybe Mum would be asleep. ‘Please, God, let her be sleeping,’ she prayed for the second time that day. ‘Let her be all right and let her be sleeping.’ But when she pushed back the curtain, she saw at once that Mum was awake. She seemed absurdly small, lying there on two big pillows, looking like herself in the face, except for the droop of her mouth. Maybe one of her eyes was a bit wonky, too.

  ‘What took you so long?’ Mum asked in her usual voice, but as she struggled to sit up further, Ingrid saw the colour rise in her pale face.

  ‘Mum, the doctor said, Mrs Harry Williams, too – I mean, they all said that you should be left to rest.’

  ‘Pah! Left to die, I s’pose they meant,’ she said dramatically. ‘Whereas,’ there was still the glint in her eye that Ingrid didn’t want to see, ‘I’ve been lying here semi-helpless, just waiting for you to come.’

  Ingrid didn’t know whether to be pleased or not.

  ‘Sorry, Mum, but Mrs Harry Williams –’

  ‘Never mind, never mind.’ Mum cut her off crossly. ‘Just pull that curtain to. So many busybodies.’

  Ingrid looked around. There were eight beds in the ward and only two of them with patients far down at the other end. But this was Mum’s way. She pulled the curtain along the track that closed out the world. She was in a pink cocoon that might have been private, but it didn’t feel safe. It was awful, but she didn’t want to be here alone with her mother.

  Now that the curtains were drawn across, Mum allowed her head and shoulders to rest on the pile of pillows. ‘I suppose I look a wreck.’ She started smoothing her hair. ‘I need a mirror, but do you think anyone will fetch one?’

  So she didn’t know about her droopy mouth and her wonky eye.

  ‘You look fine, Mum. A bit –’

  Her mother’s face clouded.

  She did know about it, then.

  ‘They said I’ve had a stroke. A mild stroke. One hand’s a bit useless, see. But not the other. I must look a fright. But enough about that at the moment. Here, come closer.’

  She clutched her hand in a way that Ingrid didn’t like – at all. The same as that old man, Joe, who used to sit on the front fence of his mother’s house and tell stories to all the kids who came by. He’d been in the war and they said it was his nerves that made him rave the way he did. And if you got close enough to him, he’d grab you, just as if he was a drowning man, and he was so hard to get away from. Now Mum was holding onto her with her good hand just like that, and trying to sit further up on the pillows.

  ‘Please, Mum, you shouldn’t sit up!’

  ‘I may be down, Ingrid child, but I can tell you one thing. I’m not out! No siree! Come closer. I don’t want any busybody to hear what I got to say.’ Ingrid’s heart sank. Something bad, something maybe worse than Mum’s changed face was about to happen, and there wasn’t a darned thing she could do about it.

  ‘Youve got
to do it now,’ she hissed. ‘And that’s all there is to it. I hear you’re staying next door with the God-botherers. Well, then, you can get away from Mrs Harry Williams after dark. Out the window if you have to. Might be best, out the window. Easy.’

  Mum, stop. Just stop!

  ‘I’d not filled every bowl like I’d planned to, but there’s one in the lounge room under the curtain, so that’s enough if you light ‘em front and back, and then get the hell out of there, back to your bed. It’s perfect. No one’ll ever know!’

  ‘But, Mum –’ she said, and nothing more.

  There was a terrible silence then as Mum showed the full force of her disapproval, squeezing Ingrid’s hand hard, but then falling back onto the pillow, her face clouded in a look that Ingrid knew could escalate to rage. Yet when she spoke it was softly, her weird eye fixed on Ingrid’s face.

  ‘I’m counting on you, Ingrid, like I never have before. D’you understand?’

  ‘Mum, I –‘The word ‘can’t’ just wouldn’t come out.

  ‘Don’t say anything, love; just listen. You know very well we’re at the end of our tether, don’t you?’

  She nodded miserably, thinking of Blackie at the end of his tether, stretched out happily in the shade of the pine tree and not having to listen to the wrack-and-ruin song, the out-on-the-street song. Nothing but the birdsong and the cool mountain breeze music. It was stifling in here.

  ‘Well, then, I’ve explained what that means. It’ll be the end of us. You and Pippa in a home and Freddy and Charlie, of course. A horrible home.’

  Ingrid nodded dumbly.

  ‘But it’s not just that.’

  ‘What, Mum?’ Surely to heaven there couldn’t be anything worse. Once again Mum reached out to take her hand.

  ‘It’s about that no-good dad of yours,’ she whispered angrily.

  She felt fear, anger at her mother for making her heart go wacky again, but she just nodded, waiting for the worst.

  ‘Seems he could get himself knocked about a bit, your daddy.’ She spoke with that mean edge of triumph in her voice.

  ‘Ran up a massive gambling debt in Sydney, the fool. See, he needs money help, too.’

  Oh no, Mum! It wasn’t fair to use Daddy like this. And yet, how was she to know if it was true, what Mum had just told her? It might have been a trick to make sure she’d go and do this wrong thing.

  ‘So you need to do it tonight, the way I planned. That’s all! Better still that I’m cooped up in this place, as it turns out. Now do it!’

  ‘I hate you!’ Ingrid wanted to yell out so that everyone in or near the ward, the whole world, could hear. ‘I won’t do it. I won’t set Grandma’s house on fire for anything. Not for the insurance money, not for you or Daddy, not for anything! I won’t!’ But even as these thoughts raced through her head, she was nodding yes to her mother – a sad sack of a nod, but it was yes!

  She could see a change in Mum’s face at once, a crooked smile, as she lay back, pale and exhausted, relieved. But she wasn’t finished yet.

  ‘There’s something else I need to tell you. I’m not sure this is the right thing, but just so you won’t get your hopes up. Your father and I, well you see, we’re divorced now. It’s a horrible word, I know, but it’s better for us.’

  How? How could it ever be a better thing for Daddy to be divorced? Divorced from all of them, separated forever. The words made her feel cold.

  ‘It’s the truth, Ingrid – divorced a few months back. I was going to tell you at the right time and now this is it. We’re divorced and I think you should know, because he’s not coming back to live with us ever, and I’m not having you be like Mrs Harry Williams, waiting and waiting for nothing. And if he gets over this stupid gambling thing, you know what he plans to do?’

  ‘No, Mum.’ How could she know what Daddy planned to do, when she’d never heard a word from him or about him?

  ‘He’s going off with your Auntie Ivy to live in Queensland and I’ll never forgive him or her for that. Never!’

  ‘Then that means –’ Ingrid was confused. Exactly what did it mean? Why was Mum saying this now?

  ‘But we’ll help him,’ Mum added just a bit too quickly. ‘Only this once, so he can get out of his money worries and all, at least that. He’s your father. But once we’ve done that, I don’t want to hear either of their names ever again.’

  ‘No, Mum.’ Her voice was a strangled whisper. She mustn’t cry. No crying.

  ‘Come and look at me, Ingrid.’ Mum beckoned. ‘Stand up and look at me, ugly and all as I know I must be. And listen hard!’ Her eyes, even the wonky one, glinted with power again, though her voice still came in hoarse whispers.

  ‘You’ve got a job to do and you’re going to promise me that you’ll do it! All right? For me and for your – our – family. Our whole family. Understand?’

  Ingrid nodded dumbly.

  ‘Let me hear you say it. Let me hear you promise.’

  ‘Yes, Mum, I promise.’

  ‘See, if I don’t smell smoke tonight, my dear.’ She never called Ingrid that, and Ingrid hated to hear it used like this. ‘If I don’t hear that fire truck roaring by, so help me God, I’ll find a way to get to Emoh Ruo myself.

  ‘I’ll take a wheelchair and I’ll get down there somehow and do what has to be done, even if it kills me. And you’ll be –’ But Mum began coughing and her face started to twitch in weird ways and Ingrid pressed the buzzer for the nurse and that was all there was to be said, for the nurse soon sent her packing.

  ‘You’ve tired her out, your poor mum. Off you go now.’

  It was then that Ingrid wanted to make her mother believe in her. She wanted to take her mother’s hand in hers and look in her face and get to that stony heart and say, ‘Mum, I’ll look after you. Honest to God, I’ll look after you somehow, some way, and we have no need to do this thing you’re asking me. We’ll find a way just like Grandma Logan always said. We will!’ And then Mum would say, yes, of course we will, and she’d kiss her poor hand and then she’d put her arms round her mother and hug her better, just as she did with Pippa when she fell over.

  But the nurse shooed Ingrid away. ‘She’s going to be all right, if she can just get some rest.

  ‘No more talking, no more visitors for you today, young lady!’ The nurse was all over Mum then. ‘That’s the way. We’ll have you right as rain in no time.’

  And then Ingrid was outside on the lawn, sobbing into Blackie’s collar, where no one could see her, a new damned fire song starting in her head. Fire and brimstone, fire and hearthstone, fire and stone, her stony, stony heart.

  When she stopped her crying and mopped her eyes with her hanky, she made a kind of plan. Everything was so awful she couldn’t – wouldn’t – think much more than an hour ahead. But for now, she was not going to go straight home to Mrs Harry Williams’s place to play Sevenies or anything else with Gracie. She’d go home to Emoh Ruo and collect a few things from round the house, no matter what Mum had said about not taking too much, because now she’d gone and promised to do what Mum wanted tonight.

  She could take everything next door without a worry, because she was staying there now. She could get Mum’s overnight bag, the strong leather one that Mr Neville Franks had left behind. Mum had said it was his bad luck and she wasn’t chasing all over Australia for him, if that’s what he thought about his blessed bag. He could come back and get it if he wanted, but he never did. It was big enough. She’d grab clothes, of course, some books and photos and other precious things.

  Most of all she was thinking of Freddy’s letter, the only one they’d ever received – had to be almost a year ago. It was curling up at the ends now and a bit worn from so much reading. She wouldn’t let that precious thing go up in flames, no matter what else did, when Emoh Ruo burnt to the ground.

  ‘It’s funny, you know, Blackie,’ she said, as she went out the hospital gate and headed for home. Of course she couldn’t say out loud what was funny. You never knew who co
uld be passing by and think you were nuts – even if you weren’t exactly talking to yourself, but to a dog. The funny thing was that the thought of collecting some of their things from Emoh Ruo made her feel calmer again, even though the reason she was doing it was nothing short of monstrous.

  6

  This kiss is from Freddy

  Wallerawang

  C/-Wallerawang Post Office

  (but don’t post anything here, because she gets it first and I won’t ever see it. I’ll send you an address. Maybe for Cessnock Post Office next time, but let me find out.)

  Dear Ingrid,

  I can’t believe my luck in getting this letter to you. We are stuck in this hole of a place, Charlie and me, on this stinking farm and seems like we’ve been here forever. Six months now. I’m counting the days, the weeks and months. But it won’t be forever, I promise.

  So he hated Wallerawang and that was why the Wallerawang song got stuck in her head like some bad off-note. He hated it from way back then when they’d been there six months! And so did Charlie, despite Mum saying when she’d talk about them – which was hardly ever, now – how they both just loved it, those boys, free and easy out there on a lovely big healthy farm.

  We don’t get to school much on account of the load of work the old slave driver gives us. We double on an old horse that sometimes stops dead and I’ve got to get off, find some sweet grass and stuff and then haul her forward to get her going again, because school is two mile and Charlie gets extra tired.

  How I’m writing this to you (which is a bit of a miracle) is because at school three days ago I was given this paper and this pen and envelope. He’s a good chap, Mr Brown, even though he’s a bit wild with the cane and he yells too much in class. After I help him clean out his cupboards – because, damn it, he’ll be leaving real soon – we’re getting a lady teacher, who he says is a good person. (Mum said the bitchbiddy was a good person, so I don’t know about that.) He gives me this paper and then he tells me to write home, write lots, and at the end of the week he’ll make sure it gets posted. He once asked me about all of you and he must have guessed how I feel about my family back home and about Wallerawang and that. He lets me write some of it every day.