by Alice Bishop
There are all sorts lined up at the coffee truck: vineyard hands, mostly—in polar fleece, high-vis vests and faded khaki. Notice the way Elle always stands tall behind those workers, like it’s any other morning decision made: toast/cereal, skirt/ pants. Sorry—she actually says, one morning, right to you—go ahead. Yet she’s not really looking at you, but past you as she fumbles in that worn-out floral purse for coin. Elle’s irises, you notice, they’re roadside scrub and well-fuelled flame.
Winter after fire is always colder than before: you read that in the morning papers once, shiny cars rolling by your now-usual Collingwood cafe. There’s no grevillea left to hold the cold up on the ridge, no tree coverage to bend in like rooftop over any still-standing homes. Keep following Elle up to the rise, though, polyester blanket in hand every dawn, your window rolled to watch her walking—backwards and forwards. Perhaps you’ll offer her the warmth, one day. You imagine having coffee together, before you take her away from this place—ghostly and long gone.
Realise the locals up here don’t know each other as well as they say on the news. Hear the occasional kid: just an echo of training wheels shaking down newly asphalted road. Guess how far away they are, and if those children—if real—still think of this place as home. Wonder if they go to school close by, if their lockers are full of oversized woollens and small leather boots. Evacuation Training, the teachers would call it, though there would be nowhere to go.
Watch pale Elle turn her head at the sound of the Caterpillar tractors, still pushing earth, months after it all. Perhaps she looks out of habit: to see what rises when the dirt’s turned over, like compost. Ashen bedsprings, ceramic shards, melted glaze: the last memories of neighbours’ lives lived up here, where you can walk the skyline like you’re on top of the world.
You ask about Elle, but only once—questioning the council workers who patrol the road in well-marked Toyota Rodeos. But they’ve not seen her, scouring what’s left of her—her parents’—home. One worker, fluorescent-vested, knocks on your window, later, to ask what you’re really waiting for. He holds a strawberry Big M and a brown-bread sandwich filled with ham. You saw it coming? he asks, like he’s waiting for a story. But you just shake your head. No. I’m just trying to find out about my girl.
Blackened trees are somehow darker at dawn, silhouetted against lavender-pink sky. Sip your syrupy cappuccino, now cold, most mornings and think about rolling down your window, chalky from gravel ridge road. Keep coming up with things to say—Hello there, Morning Gal—but everything you practise in the rear-view sounds odd. Wonder what Elle would do if you stood beside her, your fingers spread to meet hers—gauze-rough and itching—on that empty block she once called home.
You don’t approach her, nope—not at all. And as the days slowly get longer again, you wait for her in your usual spot—window now rolled right down. For Sale signs have now popped up along the ridge. Small print reads Valley Sights, 360º Views, Serenity. Sure—it is always calm, before and (a few months after) the storm. A bright white placard goes up at her block. And you wonder, for just a moment, who put it there—one midday, probably, when neither of you were around. Imagine a team of fake-tan real-estate agents, silver heels aerating ashy earth.
There’s something easy about sitting and waiting to be asked what you want—and coffee in the city is still nicer, always hot. A waiter with spindly facial hair and a moon tattoo asks if you’re an artist. No, you answer, I’m just trying to find my girl. He leaves you alone then, bringing you a lukewarm latte and a passionfruit shortbread, stale—on the house. You’ve not eaten a proper meal in weeks, just bits and pieces in transit: powdery 7-Eleven donuts, soft counter bananas and the occasional egg-and-lettuce roll.
Things close in on you in the city, always have. Your friends, and you do have a few, spend their money on boutique beer and other girls—fancy breakfasts in fancy cafes. Your Elle, though, she’d be a Vegemite toast and Just Juice kind of girl. She’d sleep in faded flannel because, like you, it reminds her of being small.
Elle’s teeth spark when she smiles at you that first time, still from the other side of the road. It’s recognition, at least, and you feel a glow. Her teeth are porcelain-flecked, just like the ridge’s dirt. And maybe it’s not a glassy shimmer coming from her mouth, but her thirteen-year-old self’s braces, back for just a moment—glinting through springtime dusk. Finally, you think she says. Before realising she’s just humming an ordinary little song. But then she gets in that silver car again, its bonnet spray-painted gold.
Follow her home along the freeway that night—like you usually do—before she disappears behind one supermarket truck or another. Or off some exit while you’re hopefully, always so hopefully, checking your phone.
But her smile complicates things and you get too comfortable towards the end—of course, you always do. Keep the window rolled right down now, despite the April cold. But you only see Elle on Mondays now. At dusk, no longer dawn. Your car floor is covered with cardboard cups from the same Coldstream coffee seller. Perhaps Elle doesn’t do caffeine anymore; you never see her there again, lined up in her ochre-floral pants—shoulder-length hair now curtaining those cheeks, even whiter now than morning valley fog.
Maybe you’ll meet Elle in some other line: in the Northcote Coles, or at some petrol station lit up gold. She’ll have filled her pockets full of Freddos, though no one knows. You’ll be the only one who doesn’t confuse her smell of smoke for incense, for last-night’s cigarettes. She’ll pass you as most girls do—brushing by to the sound of opening automatic doors. You might notice, under sparkling forecourt light, then, that she opens that Barina from the inside out. It has no windows now, that car, and the handles are just empty spaces where plastic melted, long ago.
People drove through the flames on that ridge, though it was the deadliest thing to do: you learned that from the news. Wonder how Elle got through. If her lungs had filled with plastic interior fumes. Tell me about it, you imagine asking. And your girl, Elle Birks, would put down her phone. Her cheeks would bloom in colours again as she remembers for you: the ground lighting up as if it were turpentine-soaked, the fire ten metres high. The wallaby, she might say, just a blur through bushfire glow. Maybe you would be in a different Collingwood cafe, free from hassle—no man with a moon tattoo. You imagine leaning over the breakfast bench, over magazines about all things bespoke. You’d touch her hand, warmer now: I know.
But then it’s another night, and the stars and valley lights glitter as one through Wednesday’s black. Elle’s not around at this time, as usual, but you’ve opened the hatchback to look out at the view. You can’t sleep for the faint mopoke mopoke of a lone boobook owl, fattened from antechinus, themselves newly back. Stand in the place where her bedroom used to be, decorated by her eight-year-old self. There were probably posters of palomino ponies, snapped in full flight. Shoeboxes of sequins and freshly cut newspaper clippings for all kinds of pets: all free—to good homes.
And then it happens. Elle leans into your window, that last night—her eyes, they’re just smoke and cinders now. There’s been a change. She says something about the jumping jacks after the fire, how they came up out of the ground in panicked trails. Her breath smells like bitter coffee, or maybe it’s burning cedar, furniture, as she laughs. Can you imagine that? she says. All those ants! And it’s only then that you realise it—the rift. Something crackling quietens as you watch Elle hop in her melted ’99 Barina, one last time. You don’t even watch her disappear down ridge-road gravel, long-settled ash rising in clouds.
So roll up your dust-fogged window, and get back on the Eastern. You’re in your Subaru: gunmetal grey and cold. The hum of a thousand cicadas, or maybe just that freeway breeze, fills her place, a new space, in your head. Take a sip of day-old cappuccino, milk as cool as a morning dusk. Think of Elle—that belle, as the coffee man said. Think: you’d almost found her, found home.
Soft News
Okay, class. Let’s get straight into it: wha
t will climate change really be like?
Ms Belay’s small and wears those clear-glitter jelly sandals, just like my aunty Narelle did.
I think it’s very important to talk about the reality of things, she says.
Her purple texta scratches across the whiteboard—running low on ink: List three things you would save from your burning house…
I don’t get upset that no one brings up Black Saturday, from back when I was seven: other stuff, much worse stuff, has been on the news since. But the air gets a bit sparkly and it’s hard to breathe. My neck feels hot, like there’s an electric blanket under my skin. It’s okay, though. The feeling stops me yelling out at the other girls: You wouldn’t care about saving your Maybelline, soft toys from when you were little, not even your Adidas tights. You wouldn’t worry about your pastel phone charger, or even your phone.
For just a moment I almost yell my list out loud.
It goes like this:
1. Mum
2. Aunty Narelle
3.
Miss, miss. Oi, miss: the new kid—I forget his name—interrupts Ms Belay. He does it by putting his pen-marked hand up and automatically starting to almost-shout. Some of the other girls, the more popular ones—Caitlin and Keko and Ray—they laugh. Miss, miss. C’mon, miss, Chris, maybe Oscar, continues. C’mon, he says, smiling. Can’t we ’least pick five things?
Clearing
The wattle trees came back first: thick walls of them. They grew up out of the ash so quickly that Theo didn’t know where to start clearing. Wendy—soft-bodied, strong—had noticed her husband spending more time bent over the new kitchen sink of the house they had rebuilt. She’d watch him peer out the window, over the block and towards the valley below. ‘I should get on top of it, hey?’ he’d ask, not checking first if she was about to hear. For a couple of months there was quiet; no machinery droned out across the charred hills. It wasn’t until the trees reached chin height that the worry took root: Theo buying a Stihl saw and beginning to spend more time in the rust-red shell of the still-standing shed.
Sometimes Theo would repeat the fire commissioner’s words to his wife, as she watched Grand Designs on repeat, or gently sewed—lifting the hems of all his new pants. ‘We don’t want community complacency,’ he’d joke. ‘Clear up or clear out,’ he’d add, waiting for her rebuttal. Wendy, however, couldn’t be stirred; she knew it was Theo’s way of dealing with the accumulating unrest—which hit him hardest in the hours just before dawn. Peanut-butter toast and black tea fixed it for a while, the late-night snack occupying time, making him forget, for a few moments, the longing for their cupboards of photos, his inherited leather motorbike jacket—once worn by his father in all kinds of weather—and the knotted-pine doors.
The days were particularly long that first summer back: it didn’t get dark until eight, sometimes half-past. Wendy filled the hours in the new sunroom, playing digital mahjong; or in the kitchen with shiny cookbooks, experimenting with all the new appliances—the electronic mixer, the small juicer, a boxy ice-cream machine—sometimes baking for potential guests. She liked the smells of the new home: fresh wood and decking oil. She liked most things about the new house, really—everything except the shininess of the surfaces: the benchtops, splashbacks and windows all reflected a face that had grown foreign since the fire: puffier and softer. She had even learned to live with the chainsaw dust, which she smelled in the air most days—once the first trees got taller than Theo.
Wendy found the growth comforting—in the beginning. The shoots, unfurling, were a reminder that they hadn’t seen the end of the bush. During those early days Wendy had often wanted to stop the clearing, but she had hesitated. Whenever she got the urge to yell at Theo through the wattle, or to snap at him over breakfast—in anticipation of the long, lonely day ahead—she’d draw a slow breath, then take a foldout chair to the patio and watch for birds. The pair used to document the various types they saw before the fires, and there was comfort in anything close to normal. Wendy hoped to spot a tawny frogmouth, a lyrebird—something other than the new chooks.
Unlike Theo, Wendy knew that clearing wouldn’t make a difference if a fire were to rush over the mountain again—that empty gutters and small fire breaks wouldn’t do much in the face of another ten-metre front. Theo’s efforts would at least allow her to tell friends—when they dropped by for all the usual occasions—that something was being done about it all. When Pam and Mirco stopped by for Kingston biscuits and filtered coffee, as they did most Sundays, they would nod and smile at the progress Theo had made. ‘You’re really getting on top of the bush,’ Pam would trill, drinking her coffee in short, sharp gulps. Wendy would smile back, realising that Pam wasn’t one for details.
Wendy assumed that everyone’s interest in the area had dried up with the news articles, so she kept the changes to herself. The new splits in the creases of Theo’s fingers, and the way he had begun documenting everything—from the time it took for the emergency water pump to kick in, to the number of new wattle shrubs that had sprouted along the roadside—remained untold. Wendy had even opened the pantry one night to find a sandwich bag filled with muddied ash, grass seeds and dried wattle leaves. ‘Just doing my research, yeah,’ was all Theo had said to her gentle enquiry—turning his back to her before switching on the evening news.
Theo began filling his time by following the weather—tracking the temperature and winds daily at first, then on the hour, every hour. The dust and leftover ash had been replaced by regrowth: new grass and burrs. Sometimes Wendy would sit with him in the shell of the old shed, and listen to the radio report humming out across the ridge. It was on one of these evenings that Wendy noticed a new curve to her husband’s spine. She realised that it had curled from the long days of clearing—all the stooping and crouching among the thicker second, even third layer of regrowth.
As the longer days became clipped, Wendy began dropping two chalky calcium tablets into Theo’s calloused palms each night. Before he went back out into the sprouting bush most mornings—grass seeds decorating the tops of his woollen socks—she would rub her hand down his back. Wendy would feel the change through his polar fleece: the new arch, the knobs of his spinal discs along with the sinewy muscles keeping them in place. ‘Yell out if you need anything, okay?’ she’d ask, to no reply.
By the following January the neighbours still hadn’t returned. The days had slowed even further for Wendy as she struggled to fill them, especially with Theo out in the yard and her recorded architecture shows becoming tired. She resorted to making things—mosaics with the burnt bits of crockery they’d found in the ash, at first, then preparing terrariums. Her new habit of pinot at night provided her with the glass, and cuttings weren’t hard to source. One evening, for just a moment, the wine bottles reminded Wendy of Theo’s fish tank before the fire. She wondered how it had all gone in the end—imagining that the large glass case had cracked first, the heat shattering everything it touched, including the big open windows that used to look over the bushy valley. She pictured the tiny catfish, along with the gravel, spilling out onto the study floor, before hearing Theo’s chainsaw switch off in the distance—a signal that he was done for the day.
Theo would sigh when he noticed the plant-filled bottles lined up along the sink—placing his cracking hands in the pockets of his overalls. Watching him, Wendy always assumed he was remembering their old kitchen: the jars of pickled lemon and olives that used to line the windowsill and the shelves above, heavy with ceramic vases. Perhaps, she thought, he was thinking of the worn floorboards he once felt beneath his feet in the morning—dipping and straining with his sleepy weight as he looked out at the gums, still standing, framing his view of the chequered paddocks and rows of vines that filled the valley below.
When the class-action lawyers had asked for a room-by-room account of the house as it had been, Wendy and Theo had struggled to recall the smaller details of their fifty years of belongings—the specific books, old cameras and shelves o
f long unplayed records. The boxes and boxes of photos and their passports with faded faces, still young. Theo, however, had the contents of his bedside table memorised. Running out the door on the day of the fire, he had glanced across the room one last time. Theo’d had to stop himself from reminding Wendy, daily, of what he saw: a Polaroid of her on their wedding night, her round cheeks freckled and her hair still chestnut; the list of his top bird sightings, including his awkward sketches of a Red Browed Finch; crumpled copies of the Monthly and a few worn twenty-cent pieces scattered across the floor. ‘How can I stop remembering the little things, honey?’ Theo would sometimes ask afterwards—his voice filling the quiet night.
Wendy was sitting on the deck on a Monday, maybe a Tuesday, when she noticed it first; it was the bits of sediment in her cup of tap water that marked the beginning. Theo was a dot to her, halfway down the hill below, in his navy-blue overalls and plastic earmuffs, his small orange chainsaw quiet at his hip. The taste of the dirty water made Wendy look—really look—for the first time out over the block. Despite the endless hours of work Theo had put in, the twining climbers were making their way up the trunks of the tallest, blackest trees—stubborn and still standing. The wattle too, was still coming up out of the ground—thick. When Theo came up for a sandwich as usual—covered in dirt and pollen—Wendy decided not to worry him. She poured him a glass of cold, cloudy apple juice, and chatted about her thriving bottle gardens. She had stopped having to mist the smaller wattle cuttings, their tips reaching well above the top of the glass necks. ‘They’re really beaut, Wen,’ was all Theo had to say. ‘Just make sure they head outside at flowering time, yeah?’ Wendy nodded, brushing the small seeds that had already begun sprouting from the seat covers.
