A Constant Hum

by Alice Bishop

  About the Book

  Before the bushfires—before the front of flames comes roaring over the hills—the ridges are thick with gums. After the fires, the birds have gone. There is only grey ash and melted metal, the blackened husks of cars. And the lost people: in temporary accommodation on the outskirts of the city, on the TV news in borrowed clothes, or remembered in flyers on a cafe wall.

  A Constant Hum grapples with the aftermath of disaster with an eye for telling detail. Some of these stories cut to the bone; others are empathetic stories of survival, even hope. All are gripping and beautifully written, heralding the arrival of an important new voice in literary fiction.

  For my parents,

  for everything

  &

  For Christmas Hills, home—both before the bushfires of Black Saturday, and regrown.

  These words were written on Wurundjeri land.

  some words build houses in your throat. and they live there. content and on fire.

  NAYYIRAH WAHEED

  We have seen the pain people have endured and continue to bear, and we know it will be a long road to full recovery for many. [But] if time dims our memory we risk repeating the mistakes of the past.

  2009 VICTORIAN BUSHFIRES

  ROYAL COMMISSION FINAL REPORT

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  PREVAILING

  Bunker

  Just a Spark

  Horses

  Taking Back

  Before the Wind Changed

  Wattleseed

  A Constant Hum

  Cool Change

  Porch Light

  Blue

  City Girls

  February Again

  Follower

  Soft News

  Clearing

  Float Glass

  Teeth

  SOUTHERLY

  Saltwater

  Tissue

  Just a Feral

  Maps

  Valley Haze

  Flight Path

  Comfort Inn

  Tinderbox

  Woodwork

  Coppering

  Local Hero

  In the Ashes

  Can’t Complain

  NORTHERLY

  Kangaroo Paw

  Flanked

  Sticks

  Weather Report

  Kindling

  Screen Burn

  Half-light

  Low-pressure Trough

  Community

  Highway Lines

  Flint

  Torched

  Aftermath

  Dunhill

  Stay / Go

  Out of Range

  Burning the House

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright page

  Bunker

  ‘Tell ’em they’re dreamin’,’ Brent jokes when Kay, pink-cheeked, comes home with glossy fire-bunker brochures—glinting under the new, uncomfortably modern kitchen lights. ‘Fourteen thou is a bloody expensive hole in the ground.’

  It’s Friday, takeaway night, and the kids sit on the floorboards picking at the paper parcel of fish and chips sweating between them. A currawong calls from a charcoal tree as Kay gets the sauce out without acknowledging her husband, blurrier around the edges than she remembers.

  Ever since the Murrindindi front Brent notices the newly hollowed look to Kay’s face—like she’s hungry for something just out of reach, or hasn’t slept properly in weeks. Her pale, red-freckled limbs have begun to turn twig-thin—the kind of skinny that makes others feel suddenly able to comment. ‘So slim and lovely,’ Brent’s careworn mother praises, one weekend up the coast. Despite not feeling at all lovely, Kay smiles.

  It’s been years, now, but Kay’s chest still whirrs along to some white-noise hum since she watched the wool-furred dog curl up from smoke inhalation—her own breath quickening as the walls lit up around her: scrambling for the car keys in the sudden, umber-edged dark. A fleck of something—cookbook ash, a bit of the lit-up carpet, tiny glass shards—Kay wonders if there is something lodged in her lungs. Like Blu Tack in a vacuum-cleaner bag, some foreign body in a vent.

  Dusk darkens and the currawong calls soften, then disappear. The kids have gone to bed, chip oil and salt in their hair.

  ‘We just can’t afford this, love,’ Brent says—again, voice fluttering as he folds the glossy bunker brochures, smooth, between work-snagged hands.

  Just a Spark

  In court Linda learns too many things about Jake Holden—the man responsible for her daughter’s and her grandson’s, along with her son-in-law’s, deaths. At first, she thinks it’ll be best to know everything: about the kind of cigarettes the man in the prosecution stand likes to smoke (Pall Mall), about the disturbing way he’s been known to talk about women (referring to them, often, as dyke bitches under his breath), or that he’d been beaten in school (he was a proper outcast, as one local man—now almost forty, like Holden—remembers). But as the case develops Linda wishes she knew less about the man in handcuffs with an unreadable frown; the smaller details stop her from being able to sleep, even for the few hours per night she’d mostly managed after the fire folded over her horizon.

  A series of wide-eyed journalists pull at Linda’s dress—floral, billowy sleeves—as she walks from the first day’s courtroom session: Is Holden a monster or a misfit? What would your daughter want to see happen to him? What about your husband—where is he? Do you wish the bloke’d just plead guilty? The questions hit Linda as she heads back to the car park and her old Nissan Skyline, its paint peeling from valley sun.

  The first few days are long: coroners and firefighters and police and SES—they all blur into one. After the cramped sessions, listening to character statements about the man who ruined her family’s world, Linda drives out to the highway McDonald’s to sit in the invisibility of the car park. She watches people come and go: paper trays holding strawberry thick-shakes and crumpled bags filled with sesame-seeded, sugary bread. Linda imagines what it’d be like to feel normal again, just for a moment; she has no energy even to unclick her belt. But the car park provides refuge: she doesn’t think of Pall Mall cigarettes, of what was left over of her daughter, after. She is almost okay again, in the quiet anonymity of the bustling forecourt—cocooned in the odd familiar comfort of her car, the same one she’d had in her life before.

  As each highway-side evening darkens, Linda watches her diamond-shaped face in the rear-view mirror fade to near nothing. Sometimes—as passing cars light up the Skyline’s bonnet in dusty waves—she lets herself go back to the year before, with Hayley still calling her after work, religiously, at six: Hey, Mum, how do I cook an eggplant? What are you reading? How are things?

  Can’t complain, Linda would always answer to the last question—driving back from the Churchill nursing home where she had worked. But looking back, Linda wishes she could say: Hey, Hayley, you know I love you; I love you, and isn’t it great that we’re all still here? She also wishes she’d told her daughter to move from that bushy valley bungalow—that Hayley had taken that teaching job in Melbourne, not the tutoring work at the local high school. Linda wishes she’d said: Get out of this tiny little town, Hayley, honey. Get out, before the flames.

  Between ten and eleven p.m.—another day of the trial behind her—Linda leaves the McDonald’s car park and takes the freeway back to her cheap hotel on the city fringe. The Fawkner Best Western is sparse but Linda doesn’t care. To her motels are meant to be for holidays, for celebrations—not for nights spent mostly awake, nursing a grief so fresh she often feels like she’s been thumped in the chest. She doesn’t do the usual things she once did before bed: undress, wash her face with cold water
or brush the metallic taste of not enough food from her mouth. Linda just pushes her sandals off, undoes her zip and lies back on the too-firm double bed.

  There is a hint of normal, though, in morning routine: washing, drying, mascara then underwear, dress on, a cup of tea then a handbag-found muesli bar. With the ash and smoke, Linda stopped enjoying cooking things—the meals she used to prepare for her daughter and her grandson, along with her son-in-law: before everything went. Driving to the overpriced courtside car park, she hopes there will be some kind of sense made of things in the session ahead. She hopes the man, Jake Holden—who set the bush on fire during the state’s hottest day on record—says sorry. She hopes to see him broken, crying—feeling unshakable remorse. Some nights, in the light sleep she’s becoming used to, Linda dreams that Holden is crying, begging and apologising. I’m so fucking sorry, he says. And Linda, in her dreams, says—over and over—I didn’t hear you: say it again. He keeps crying, and begging, and shaking.

  In other dreams, though—more common ones—that now-familiar stranger is stuffing cottonwool balls down Linda’s throat. He’s standing over her, then: a great grey shape. She can’t breathe. He’s lighting something—a tiny, curling match.

  Our darkest day has a darker underbelly—what verdict are you hoping for? If you could say anything to Jake Holden today, what would it be? Do you think he’s showing remorse? The journalists outside the magistrate’s court don’t stop yelling questions at Linda as she arrives for each session. Two women she vaguely recognises from Churchill stand in the smoking area near the entrance. They don’t look like they belong in the city—ill-fitting David Jones skirts and caked-on foundation—making Linda realise she probably looks the same. The taller of the two, in shimmery silver-pink lipstick, nods at Linda as she walks through. Linda, overthinking the day ahead, misses her opportunity to nod back.

  Later, after the sentencing is delivered, after it all, this woman will walk over to Linda. Through the proceedings Linda will have learned that the woman in pink lipstick’s name is Carol Wright, and that the last she heard of her twenty-two-year-old son was his crackly 000 call—replayed to her so she could identify his voice. Linda smells tobacco and peppermint oil in this stranger’s top before they step back to look at each other through watery eyes. This time Carol’s not wearing any makeup; it’s the end of the trial. She grabs Linda’s hand, cupping it between hers. I hope that fucker burns in hell, she says. Linda nods this time, trying not to think about bodies—anyone’s—burning.

  ✶

  Jake Holden is just under six foot and thirty-nine years old. He has clipped-back receding hair, a pale-pinkish face and arms that seem slightly too short for his height. Sitting across from the yet-to-be convicted arsonist, Linda wishes her husband of thirty-five years—short and soft and always smelling of paint—was now not her ex. She watches other people in the courtroom audience press their damp faces into their partners’ shirts. Linda turns away when wind-marked men—in work boots and clothesline-faded polo shirts—kiss their wives’ foreheads as they sob for the loss of family members and friends. Sixteen people had died in the fire that glowed like a furnace across the hill. The victims’ ages are listed off by the lead prosecutor at the beginning of the hearing, a lottery ticket of the disappeared: 67, 68, 54, 16, 12, 58, 82, 83, 25, 29, 4, 7, 14, 34, 1, 36.

  Are you aware of the gravity of this situation, Mr Holden? the same prosecutor asks. Do you have any remorse? These questions are asked in the lawyer’s monotone. Without pause, the questioner goes on to mention Holden’s ties with the CFA volunteer program, about how he’d signed up two years ago but only showed up to training for a month. Weren’t enough fires to put out, then? the lawyer—in low wedge heels and a tight beige dress—asks. Did you take things into your own hands? she asks. There is talk, then, of the people filling the courtroom—of their lovers and children and mothers and fathers: all gone.

  When an old photograph is shown of the arsonist—smiling in his CFA-issued mandarin-coloured coat and helmet—Linda looks down at the floor, at her sandals, at the aqua-blue veins showing through the tops of her feet. Linda had known the story: that the man on trial had volunteered as a firefighter (only lasting that one month) before he went back to his part-time job packing the dairy fridge at the local IGA.

  Shame, someone yells from a seat behind Linda. Shame, the deep voice repeats—its crackling tone giving away the broken-heartedness beneath the yeller’s rage. There is a shuffling, then muffled voices, as the yelling man—in a dark navy T-shirt and tracksuit pants—is led out of court. Linda looks over her shoulder to see the back of the leaving man; she watches him as he stops at the courtroom door to steady himself, hunching over like he’s about to vomit after a big night out. It makes Linda remember her daughter, Hayley, how she had come home one night, maybe at fourteen, fifteen—or was it even sixteen?—smelling of her friend’s stolen Midori and stomach bile. Memories like these had started dotting Linda’s days: the moment Hayley took her first step; the smell of the Impulse she had covered herself in at thirteen; the day Hayley announced, a little too proudly, that she was vegan—animal rights and all—before proceeding to the fridge for a pot of yoghurt.

  C’mon, bud, a too-young court assistant encourages. Everyone looks across the room, the quiet crackling with dark excitement. The assistant is shining, doing his job perfectly. Although probably twenty-three he looks, to Linda, like he’s fifteen. Let’s get some fresh air, mate, he continues, and the man who had yelled across the crowd stands up, unfolds. Linda waits, hoping, but the man who said what was on Linda’s mind does not look back as he walks—shuffles, really—past clean-shaven security guards and out of the courthouse doors.

  It had been almost forty-seven degrees on the last day for Linda’s daughter. Linda’s grandson. Her son-in-law too. Elderly people had been dying from heat, and birds had been falling from the sky: this is how the prosecution lawyer sets the scene, before tracing Jake Holden’s day. Her account goes like this:

  10 a.m. Holden is seen driving his mother’s Ford Falcon up and down the Churchill main street. Driving unusually slowly, Holden is noticed. His Ridgeback dog sits up on the passenger seat. All four of the car’s windows, according to the witness, are rolled down.

  1.23 p.m. Security footage from the local IGA shows Holden enter the store wearing a faded Billabong T-shirt. He makes a purchase. The storeowner has reprinted the receipt: a Picnic bar, Pall Mall cigarettes, and two Bic lighters—pink and blue.

  1.50 p.m. Holden is recorded ringing 000—reporting a fire near the corners of Judd Grove and Henderson Road: a twenty-minute drive from the place Holden bought both cigarettes and lighters.

  4.30 p.m. As the fire burns out of control across the gully, Holden lodges a Crime Stoppers report online. His statement tells that he saw a pair of suspicious men in a white ute heading up the mountain with silver petrol cans. Security footage taken from a property nearby shows no white ute, no men, no petrol cans. Holden’s mother’s Ford Falcon—driven by Holden, along with a Ridgeback dog (head out the window)—is, however, shown passing by.

  Linda looks down at her feet again as the lawyer speaks. She’s too afraid to see Holden—scared that his white-pink face will not be showing regret, or sadness, or despair. A single Pall Mall cigarette: this is what the defence lawyer says started the fire—that Jake Holden threw the cigarette out the window without thinking, that forty-seven-degree day. There is talk of remorse, of a good man who made a simple human error. That’s when Linda looks up and across at Holden himself, his check shirt too bright and his almost-smirk making her head ache.

  If you ask her, Linda will tell you about the process of identifying her daughter’s and her grandson’s, along with her son-in-law’s, remains. She will use that word—remains—because the thought of her daughter’s body burning makes everything go white. She talks about this in her Victim Impact Statement, read out to the courtroom on the fourth day of the trial. It’s a sunny April morning outside the Willi
am Street building—office workers carry cardboard trays of coffees and plastic-boxed sandwiches—as Linda walks up to the stand. Her shoes are flat chemist-bought sandals and her dress is flax-soft—bought with her daughter, Hayley, back one weekend when they drove to Rye. The fabric is loose on Linda now, her body made small from grief. Nothing but the truth, Linda repeats back to the judge before speaking about finding her family’s remains, like charred and felled tree trunks, beside the road that had once led out of their Churchill house. Linda looks over at Jake Holden, made blurry by her held-back tears, as she speaks about the white noise that follows her everywhere.

  Ma’am, can I order you a taxi? one of the courtroom attendants asks at the end of the trial’s fifth day. Linda shakes her head. She needs to sit still for a bit; the afternoon has been testing—with primary-school portraits of Jake Holden being shown to the jury, and his high-school teachers, neighbours and own family all coming up to the stand to testify. Jake wouldn’t hurt a fly, Holden’s mother—soft and kind-looking, wearing a mustard-yellow dress shirt with plastic beads, even says. She speaks about her son’s hardships, his inability to fit in. When the defence lawyer asks Mrs Holden if her son was likely to throw a cigarette—Pall Mall—out the car window by mistake (even though it was a forty-seven-degree day) there are a few moments’ silence.

  Mrs Holden, the defence lawyer continues. I know this is hard for you. But would your son do something like that, knowing his actions could kill sixteen?

  No, the soft-looking woman in the mustard shirt continues. Jake would never hurt anyone.

  Hey, lady, a man calls, knocking his knuckles on the Skyline’s passenger window. Linda is in the usual highway-side McDonald’s car park, sitting quietly to try to forget. She wants some distance from the last day in court: being in the same room as the man ruled responsible (sixteen counts of arson resulting in death) for taking her daughter’s and her grandson’s, along with her son-in-law’s, lives. Hey, lady, the man continues, though he’s—to Linda—just a boy. His maroon nametag reads Dylan, and he looks bored, even as he peers through the open crack of the window. Customer parking only, he says. And as he turns away Linda is again thinking of scrub fire, of ember storms—of the sirens that never arrived, but she somehow still dreams of: a low, animal wail across town.