by John Marsden
Normally lighting a fire at night, in dewy grass, would be hard, but this had been a hot dry night, and the wind was getting up to quite a blast. It was a hot dry wind too blowing down the spur. If anyone was still operating the bushfire warning on the road into town they would have it on ‘severe’. Not quite ‘extreme’ but high enough considering it was early in the season.
We all carried matches, of course. It was just one of those things you always put in your packs, even if we didn’t light so many cooking fires these days. When the others saw me pulling the little box out from a side pocket they got the idea fast. I crouched down, shielded the match with my hand, and lit it. Up here on the hill, where the water would run as fast as it fell, the grass was crackling with dryness. It took me four matches to get it to light but when it did catch, my God, did it go. It went up so fast I took a step back to save my eyebrows. I looked across at the others. Kevin already had a nice fire going, Homer was fanning a little flame about the size of his matchbox, and Fi was still frantically looking in her pack for the matches.
But the fire I’d lit was starting to rage. I felt guilty watching it, thinking what my father would say if he saw me. I mean he’d understand, of course, but it definitely felt weird to be doing this. The flames flickered and ran, like mice scattering in the machinery shed when you walk in.
I stepped forward, through the line of flames, and peered over the brow of the hill. There was some grey light in the sky and I could just see some soldiers. But I was horrified at how close they were. They were on the spur and coming fast. Little dark dots like fleas on a dog’s tummy. I guess they knew we weren’t armed. They weren’t even bothering to look up. They were determined. I knew we’d be dead if they caught us. After what we’d done to the soldiers in the bush I thought there was a good chance these people would shoot us on the spot. As I was watching, my heart fluttering with fear, one of them did see me. Either me or the fire, or both. He looked up and gave a shout to his friends. I couldn’t hear it, but I could see him point. Certainly he pointed straight at me. They all stopped suddenly. Behind me Homer yelled, ‘Ellie, get back.’ I turned around and saw why. The flames were waist-high in most places, and they were really starting to burn. The wind was picking up at every minute. I had a bit of trouble finding a place to get back through the fire. When I did I ran along the spur to see what the soldiers were doing. I heard someone behind me and looked around. It was Fi. She didn’t say anything, just grinned at me from her grimy sweaty face. We paused beside a big old gum tree. ‘There they are,’ I said, pointing.
They’d come on another fifty metres or so but they’d stopped again. I could see why. There was a wall of flame now, and it was moving down the hill. I don’t think they had much idea of what a bushfire could do, but I knew. If I knew nothing else, I knew that. A bushfire with the wind behind it, in dry grass or scrub, it moves like a semitrailer on heat. It moves like a Santa Gertrudis bull with a BB pellet up its backside. It moves like a mob of cattle in a drought when they see you drive in with a load of hay on the back of the one-tonner. It’s the most frightening thing on God’s earth. Exciting, in a weird sort of way, but definitely frightening.
And suddenly it took off. There was a big blow of wind, the flames answered with a roar and doubled their height in a moment. The soldiers on the spur went back a couple of steps. I thought, ‘You’ll need to move faster than that if you want to get out of this.’ For the first time I realised that they might actually get trapped. They might die in the next five or ten minutes. And to be burnt to death, what a terrible, terrible thing. I had nightmares about being burnt to death. I’d always thought that would be the worst death of all.
I hadn’t wanted them to get burnt. I just wanted to put a barrier between us and them.
So I did something really dumb. How unusual. I came out from the shadows of the tree and waved to them. Not like, ‘Hi guys, how are you going down there?’ but like, ‘Get out, get out, go back fast.’ It gave Fi a shock. I heard her say, ‘Ellie, what are you doing?’ but then I guess she realised, because she didn’t say anything else. After a couple of minutes she even came out and waved at them herself, although I don’t think she was too keen.
The soldiers looked confused. They were gathering on the knoll. When they saw me waving so furiously one of them actually lifted his rifle, but then I think someone said something, because he lowered it again suddenly and they all turned around and went running back down the spur. Even then I didn’t know if they’d be in time. A fire can outsprint a person, no worries. And this fire was on the move. Angry hot clouds of smoke were billowing up in the air, black and grey and white. Twigs, leaves, bits of bark were going up with it. Straight down the slope below us a tree suddenly whooshed into flame. At the bottom of the hill, fifty metres below the fire, the crown of another tree exploded in flames too. When I saw that, I realised this fire was really going to go. Once they start kangaroo-hopping you know you’ve got a big one. I began to worry about Wirrawee. If we burned the whole town down we wouldn’t be too popular. With Fi following I hurried back to the actual lookout point. Through the smoke you couldn’t see much of Wirrawee, but there didn’t seem to be any reaction yet. The town slept on. In a few minutes I figured there’d be some action, with a huge bushfire about to roar down on top of them. As long as they’d kept the rural firefighting trucks in good order they should be all right. There wasn’t much fuel on the edge of a town for a bushfire – there was a natural firebreak this side of the road – and there should be plenty of water in the reservoir still, with winter not long over.
Homer and Kevin came to where we were standing. Their faces were split by huge grins. I’ve always suspected boys are secret pyromaniacs. They love lighting fires.
Mind you, Fi and I had enjoyed burning down the Wirrawee bridge last summer.
‘What do you reckon?’ Kevin said. ‘Stir them up a bit?’
‘Where do you think we should go?’ I asked.
Homer chipped in. ‘Into town,’ he said, to my surprise.
‘Into town?’
‘Yes. And I’ll tell you why. Because it’s the last thing they’ll expect. And also because we still haven’t found Lee and the Kiwis, and if you guys have any memory left you might recall it’s why we came out of Hell in the first place.’
I couldn’t answer that logic.
‘Which way?’ Fi asked, meaning ‘Which way should we go into Wirrawee?’
‘Straight down the road,’ Homer said. ‘Then cut across the footy oval, and lose ourselves around Honey Street.’
We could hear the wailing of sirens in the distance now. Somehow I hadn’t expected that. Having sirens on fire engines seemed to be part of the old way of life. It didn’t belong in this new world. But the sirens made us realise that we’d better get out before it was our asses that were on fire. Once the whole place got mobilised they’d have the manpower to come looking for us again.
We hurried off down the dirt road, keeping low and leaving a big gap between each person. We did that kind of stuff without even needing to discuss it these days. They were just obvious basic things we did to stay alive.
At the footy oval the others turned right, across the little white fence, and one by one set off around the front of the grandstand. I couldn’t help stopping to look back at the fire. It was amazing. The whole hillside was blazing from top to bottom. The roar of the flames was unbelievable. It sounded like a cyclone. There was a red reflection on all the houses on the other side of the street, as though the sun was setting. The red light, and the noise, were bringing people out of their houses. As soon as I realised that I hurried to catch the others, to warn them. I’d thought that everyone would be so distracted by the fire that we’d be able to go anywhere we wanted. In fact the streets would be very dangerous, because everyone would be outside.
We had another of our quick conferences. These seemed to get quicker all the time, maybe because we were so used to each other now, so in tune with each
other’s feelings, that we usually knew immediately what everyone thought. So we decided straightaway to go to the other side of the oval where we could stay well away from the houses.
We worked our way around there. It was tricky and took a while. We had to use sheds and trees for cover, and had to go right back to the fence a couple of times. When we finally got to the other side we had a choice. There was a toilet block, there was a padlocked store shed, and there was the scrub behind the buildings, beyond the fence.
We chose the toilet block. There was something comforting about being in a building again, even if it was a toilet block. Naturally the boys insisted we go in the boys’ toilet. I have no idea why it was important to them but it was. Maybe they thought it’d be too girly for them in our dunny. If they only knew. There wasn’t much that was girly about the stuff written on the walls in our toilets.
But as soon as we went in this one I started getting really uneasy. After only half an hour I was totally claustrophobic. We were in a trap if we stayed there. If soldiers came we had no way out. I didn’t like it.
I said to the others, ‘Let’s go.’
They didn’t put up any argument. I think they felt the same way. We slipped out carefully, in case anyone was watching, but it seemed clear. I guess everyone was either fighting the fire, or fighting to save their own houses.
Whoops. When I say their houses, I mean the houses they stole from us.
One thing we realised fast. The fire certainly wasn’t under control. The air was black with smoke and bits of ash were floating past us. Fi was coughing as soon as we got out in the open. In the distance we could see glimmers of flame. I sneaked down to the road and saw one man hosing his house – the house he stole – but the pressure in his hose was very low, of course. Some children were standing in the street watching the fire. I couldn’t see anyone else. I was nervous about what we’d done but I still thought they should be able to save the town. I went back to the others and told them what I’d seen. We really didn’t know what to do. If we moved we risked being caught. If we didn’t move we risked being caught. We might even find the fire on top of us if the wind changed slightly.
In the end we decided to move.
‘If we don’t,’ I said, ‘it’s too easy for them to find us here. And once they put the fire out they’ll be looking for us.’
‘Yeah,’ said Kevin, ‘they’ll sure as hell be looking for us.’
So we set off again. In some ways I think this was our most dangerous journey yet. To be moving through the town while everyone was out of their houses and while everyone was hating us was incredibly risky. But I was sure we had no choice.
The smoke helped us a bit, but not much else did. We were heading for the one place we all knew well, a place we were pretty sure would be unoccupied. Wirrawee High School.
We got there by the silliest routes. It was amazing how much Wirrawee had returned to ‘normal’ living. There were so many people now. I don’t know how many houses were occupied, but it was an awful lot. I just hoped they hadn’t got as far as re-opening the schools, but we didn’t see many kids.
We did have to take a lot of care. Every hundred metres was different. The trip included sneaking along behind a fence in one big house, belly crawling through a garden in another, and waiting half an hour in Mr Potts’ garage while two blokes stood outside discussing the fire – at least I think that’s what they were discussing. It was almost funny at times, but so scary too. The only easy part was going along the creek bed for half a k.
We didn’t reach Sherlock Road until about one in the afternoon.
Getting into the schoolgrounds wasn’t too bad. There’s only a couple of houses in sight of the school. No one seemed to be there but of course we couldn’t take that for granted. So we took ages working our way into the place. The fire seemed to be better controlled, as far as we could tell. But that was bad news in one way – it meant they’d have time now to find us. At least the school wasn’t occupied. In fact it looked like it had been deserted years ago.
We were hanging out for a rest but we still had one problem: to find a way into the building. It sounds simple, but we had to do it in a way that wasn’t obvious. I mean, it was no good smashing down a door, because someone would notice that. But we got into the little quadrangle in the middle of the school and we felt better in there, at least. It was completely concealed from the road. The ferns were all dead, which was sad, and there was a lot of rubbish blowing around, but otherwise it felt a bit safer.
In the end we did have to break a window. We were ready to run, in case there were burglar alarms. But it was OK. In peacetime there had been alarms, but they didn’t seem to work any more.
After we got inside we cleaned up the glass, then found some masonite and tape and boarded up the window. We were hoping that anyone who came along would think it was an old breakage.
Fi volunteered to do sentry, which was incredibly nice of her, and at last the rest of us could get some sleep.
Chapter Thirteen
We had found maybe the one building left in Wirrawee that was pretty much untouched. A few things in the office had been ripped out but nothing else was damaged. The feeling grew on me that the place had been deserted for a long time. It wasn’t exactly the dust, it wasn’t the silence. It was a lack of people: you just knew as you walked down those deserted corridors that no human had been there for a long time.
I suppose it was also the smell, although I didn’t realise that at the time. Everyone does have their own smell. They say blind people can recognise who’s been in a room by the smell they leave behind. I know I could recognise when my father had been in the bathroom by the smell he left behind. Talk about toxic. If we’d bottled that and released it as nerve gas we’d have won this war in the first week.
Of course, with my infallible judgement I’d found the only room in the school that wasn’t silent. It didn’t help when I was so desperate to get some sleep. It was the sick bay, where they had two beds. I had one and Kevin the other. But there must have been a slight gap between the window and its frame, and the wind whistled and howled through the hole with a note that changed all the time. It was the eeriest noise. It sounded like wild lost creatures crying in the night, their haunting voices begging for someone to save them. Except it was like they were already dead, and they were crying from the grave. Then it would stop for a minute and I’d think, ‘Oh good, at last I can get some sleep’, and sure enough at that moment it’d start up again. Things weren’t helped, either, by the fact that the black smoke from the fire was drifting past and, although there seemed to be less of it now, it did make the whole place feel and sound like a scene out of Hell.
So I didn’t get much sleep. But I guess the real reason for that was my fear. It felt so dangerous to be here in Wirrawee in broad daylight, trying to sleep. Sure I could give myself a hundred rational reasons why we’d be OK. No one had been here for ages, they’d all be busy fighting the fire, they’d think we would have gone bush ...
OK, three rational reasons why we’d be OK. They were good reasons, too. But they weren’t enough. I was still all tensed up, staring through the window at the hot black smoke.
I began to realise that there was one more reason I couldn’t sleep. The ride with the horses through the bush, running down those soldiers, coming so close to death myself: it had only happened twelve hours before. It was like everything else in this war there was no time to react, no chance to think about stuff, to find meaning to it, or put it in a picture that made sense.
If you don’t know what something means you’re in trouble.
Of course I knew what last night meant in one way: I knew I’d done those things because I wanted to stay alive. No prizes for getting that right. But I wanted an answer that told me something more. If I was going to say that my life mattered above someone else’s, that it was OK for someone else to die so I could survive, I had to know that was OK. Sure it’s human nature to preserve
your own life at all costs. Not just human nature either. Nature full stop. I’ve seen what a trapped kangaroo does to dogs that get too close. But if God gave me a mind and a conscience, and an imagination that can put me inside the head of someone else, then he must want me to use those things. Not just do stuff with no thought about what it meant. I’m not a kangaroo.
So I thought – and I still think – about whether it was OK.
Another thing God gave me was a sense of responsibility. I wish he hadn’t, sometimes. Thanks for nothing, God. Because having got it means I’m stuck with it, and when I do something powerful, that I think might be wrong, I can’t just shrug it off. I knew that I’d killed another person, maybe more than one; it’s something I did, it was mine and I owned it.
So I had to cop it. Those soldiers had died last night. And the horse. I’d again made the decision that my life was worth more than theirs. And I didn’t even know these people. They were strangers to me.
Was there some plan to all this? Did I deserve to live, and did those strangers deserve to die? Was this a test I had to pass? Was I going to go on and find a cure for cancer or something? Suppose one of the soldiers was going to leave the army in ten years and find a cure for cancer, but now it would never happen because I’d killed him?
That’s what I was trying to say about finding a meaning to the madness happening around me.
And instead of a meaning, all I got was the weird scream of the wind, and the choking smoke and the heat of a fire I’d started myself.
By late afternoon the fire at last seemed under control. There were ashes as far as the eye could see and the playground was sprinkled with black, like castor sugar on a sponge cake, only the wrong colour.
