A Constant Hum

by Alice Bishop

  Guess I got chucked in the deep end, good, was all I had said to Mae, after it was done—over summer iced coffees, milky, soy and just a bit too sweet. As usual, she was wearing one of her expensive blouses printed with little things—galahs, eucalyptus leaves.

  You need a holiday, said Mae, reaching over to touch the growing softness of my upper arm. And I loved her then, smiling an acknowledgement that she wouldn’t ask the usual questions: How many people really died—the number keeps changing, hey? Were they all burned up really bad? What was the smell of burnt bodies like—I’ve heard you can never forget it?

  The 52 hums along the coast; even the buses are quieter in New Caledonia. Mangroves push up through the shining water outside. A collarless dog runs alongside us for a while, barking, before we leave her behind. I wonder where she sleeps, who feeds her: she looks healthier than most of the dogs back home. People get on the bus with the right change, bags of washing powder, baguettes and other ordinary things. Most of the women wear bright cotton dresses, making my strapless rayon dress—gold specked and foiled—seem crass.

  Bonsoir, the driver says as I get off in the more touristy area—a Hilton looming over perfectly bowed coconut trees and the occasional group of New Caledonians sitting in circles on the grass that turns into sand, then—further on—the aquamarine ocean I saw from the plane. The same colours of the turquoise dolphins and crappy toe-rings we all collected from those faux-hippie markets when we were kids. Growing up in Coburg, Fawkner and Diamond Creek, I dunno how we’d convinced ourselves that we were anything like the surfer girls from magazines.

  Bonsoir, bonsoir, bonsoir, I practise under my breath as I walk towards the sparkling bars up ahead, the nightlife—hoping both won’t be as tacky as my clothes. Cars and bicycles and kids on foot make their way beside me along the boulevard. Shop owners in plaited leather sandals, too-tanned women my grandma’s age in fluorescent-peach crop tops, a white man in saggy jeans and a Rasta hat—I wonder, then, who would shout first, who would yell out, if a fifty-foot wave rose on the horizon. Would it be me—kicking off my espadrilles and screaming: Run! Or would I freeze and just wait to be pulled under? Apart from the initial terror, would there be some kind of peace—a letting-go, the type you always hear from people who sell their stories of near-death?

  What would be left for the hospital, after? I think about that too. Probably the most. Maybe there’d be a nurse like me—fuelled by vending-machine breakfasts and canteen coffee—packet-dyed hair tied back from her oily face. Maybe she too would only just be beginning to realise all the different ways a body can break. Perhaps she’d be there in the aftermath, with all the odd shoes, small and big, new and old, which they’d find, after it all—scattered, like washed-up soft-drink bottles, along the beach.

  Back in Melbourne, the syrupy swirl of Smith Street had seemed so wrong during summer nights out, especially that week after the fires were all over the news. My patients had been bed-bound, some choking on their own exhausted bodies—throats finally caving in—as we danced till our too-tight dresses dripped and all the souvlaki shops began to fill with sloppy people: forgotten five-dollar notes, shredded lettuce and bits of falafel ball falling to the floor.

  I’d told the girls about the new weight of my job that night, tried to tell them about having to stimulate wounds, remove charred tissue and constantly administer IV fluids. But after about twenty minutes (about the time when I mentioned the enemas) my old hockey friend Kate stood up in her gold leather clogs. Toilet, she said. And when I come back, gals, let’s talk about my new guy. She smiled her faux-shy smile, looking relieved and making sure to look specifically at me—probably not out of nastiness but fear. It made sense; I learned pretty quickly that people don’t like talking about my work. Unless there’s an unusually gruesome or TV-worthy happy story: the more regular gory stuff, it’s just a reminder of the uncomfortable ordinariness of disaster.

  Merci, I say. The bartender hesitantly pours me a creme de menthe (it just sounded so French, you know, so I thought I’d better give it a try). A local woman walks past the bar windows, dressed like she’s been working at a bank—plain grey pants and white shirt. Like the hotel receptionist she also has a frangipani, fresh, behind her left ear. It makes me think: I haven’t read up on the French colonisation of this place. About the island’s first people, who I think were stolen from their families to work in Queensland’s sugar-cane industry. At that moment I’m embarrassed that I can’t even remember the word for sorry in French.

  I’ve actually never served this, you know? the woman behind the bar says in a French accent, heavy. Frizzy pink hair haloes her heart-shaped face.

  Oh, I reply. I wonder if she’s happy working here, and guess she’s the kind who is really good with her money—saving all her tips to put away for a little place of her own. Maybe she’s looking for a beach bungalow with wind chimes made from ordinary string and a freestanding bath. She probably has a partner too: the kind that brings her glasses of water in the middle of the night.

  Merci, I nod as she pours another. Thank you, I say—just to be clear.

  A man sits at the bar a few seats up with a bracelet—plaited in the bright colours of the flag I see everywhere—on his wrist. He glances over at me while pretending to look at the TV behind my head. Some moments I feel hideous and in other moments I feel above everything. He looks over at me again. Right now I feel something like beautiful (the creme de menthe helps).

  Bonjour, he says once the people between us have left and the air smells of seawater, and a little of petrol. Hello, he repeats (he has whiter teeth than my friend Elka, who got hers bleached). You on ’oliday, or you for work? His accent is thick, and words—not really needed anyway—are skipped.

  Nurses, in general, are expected to get used to everything: patients falling in love with you, because of the morphine; patients yelling at you for cleaning up after them; patients crying over pineapple muffins and telling you they suddenly have dreams about leaving whoever they’d been loving before they got in. You can’t get upset: it all comes from a vulnerable place, as my first mentor—a trauma nurse, just out of training herself—once said.

  Aerosolised heparin, Acetylcysteine, and terbutaline–steroid combinations: I learned about the benefits of all these things. As patients came in we learned about singed nasal hairs and facial swelling, about the blackened sputum and the particular look burns patients get. The pain levels are beyond imagination, my colleague said, so get ready for patients to ask you to help them end everything.

  When asked to get more stock of saline solution, from down the hall, I found myself standing in the supplies room under fluorescent light and looking at my hands: covered in pink skin, still working.

  What are you after? a voice came over my shoulder, and I said, Saltwater, that’s all…saline?

  The breeze through open bus windows, on the way back to the hotel, smells like turpentine and ocean. I’m pretty sure the fluorescent lights aren’t flattering, but I try not to care as the man from the bar kisses my neck. Our knees touch. My eyelids warm up. There’re only a few other people about and they seem not to care (well, that’s what I tell myself; I don’t really look up). His mouth tastes a little like cigarettes, but also a little like mint cream. Like promise—a little like beer.

  The hotel reception is boarded up by the time we get back. I pour some rum from one of those tiny minibar bottles, then the last of the vanilla vodka—room temperature and sweet.

  Magnifique view, the man with the plaited wrist says, acting nonchalant and walking over to the window. He’s wearing those crisscrossed leather sandals, the kind all the men over here wear. The water laps on the beach. He—well, he has a name: Jacques—stays quiet but sometimes looks over his shoulder and smiles. I’m on the chair; there’s just one—feeling something like warmth from the spirits, and a little too calm for the situation, I think.

  So lame, sure, I know—but for just a moment I wonder if he might be the one. You know, we’d h
ave avocado toast in bed and he’d make me coffee—the real kind—whenever I had a shift ahead. Maybe we’d go to the movies together and talk about the things we’re scared of: the warming world, or that feeling you get when polyester anything clings to your skin.

  We sit on the tiled deck and he lights a cigarette, the glow of its end brightening as he breathes in. I think of burnt skin.

  At two a.m. I wake up with the smell of smoking things again. I step onto the balcony: two empty glasses on the table, minibar bottles strewn. There are no birds at this time of night, and I wonder where they all go to sleep.

  Mon cherie, I say, mostly because it’s what I’ve heard people say in movies. Mon cherie, I say again, because I’m trying to talk myself into the obvious beauty of this place.

  Abby? I hear the almost-stranger ask from the bed. The flyscreen door that should be closed between us is open, and for some reason unhinged.

  Yeah? I say, almost not knowing how to respond to my own name.

  Are you okay?

  What? I say, and I wonder if I’m still dreaming. I smell the cigarette ash, lingering. I feel dried out, but happy—like there’s been sun, and saltwater, on my unburnt skin.

  Abby, belle, he calls. Do you need a glass of water? Or anything?

  Tissue

  Her old bushfire scars, shimmering, look something like the rainbow insides of an abalone shell. They look, to him, like the sky at night, out bush—where it’s clear enough to still see the Milky Way.

  Just a Feral

  Sadie couldn’t forget the way Dave had held his spoon like a shovel, his wardrobe of earth-coloured cottons, even his love of too-sweet ciders—pear, berry, apple and cinnamon. She thought back to the day, eight months ago, that they put him, or what he became, anyway—just a handful of ash and three silver-dotted molars—into the ground. ‘We’re so sorry,’ one of the other pale-faced survivors said, head shaking, the first time Sadie made it down the street for milk and bread. But all she could focus on was the woman’s faded Sea World T-shirt, picked up, she assumed, from the Yarra Valley Red Cross tent.

  Dave had occasionally hunted Sambar deer—coming home with new lists of the native plants they’d destroyed, the Hilux’s tray heavy with carcasses and his Hard Yakkas flecked with darkening blood. Sadie had filled Dave’s plate with potato gems those nights, with neat hills of defrosted peas and corn too, listening to him talk about the fairy wrens he saw and the wallabies that would benefit from the cull. One morning, before Dave had taken the load of deer away, Sadie watched a wedge-tailed eagle perch itself on the edge of the ute’s tray. As she opened the big wooden front doors of the now-ash house, the huge bird struggled a little before flying off—running first, head lowered, along the driveway, its belly full of flesh.

  ‘Would’ve been quick,’ Dave’s cotton-haired mother whispered to whoever would listen, on the day his photo was on display in the old Kangaroo Ground Hall. The portrait showed Dave as Sadie remembered him best: all wide speckless smile and steel-wool curls, ends rusty from sun. Sadie wore a pale nylon dress to the funeral, sweat blooming across her back before trickling, slowly, down the backs of her thighs. She poured kiwi-and-strawberry cider into polystyrene cups as people milled about in the heat—many speaking wide-eyed about just making it, then guiltily bowing their heads to scrutinise the redwood floorboards. The rims of Sadie’s grey-blue eyes were irritated and puffy as she nodded and smiled at the next family waiting to use the hall, standing out by the closed tennis courts—the occasional hand wrapped in bright-white gauze, some nearby car bonnets still warped and melted.

  ‘Sorry,’ they said to each other, passing through the gravel car parks, reaching out to pat strange shoulders, to kiss unfamiliar cheeks.

  ‘Take the time you need,’ the head baker at Sadie’s work said, the day she went back—wearing someone else’s shoes, Kmart pleather and a half-size too big. She smelt of lavender soap, the kind that always shows up in donation boxes. Usually purple-wrapped, it found its way there from unwanted gift sets. ‘I mean it,’ the head baker, tall as the doorway, continued. ‘No pay, but you at least know your job’s secure: take the bereavement leave, six months.’ But, thinking of all the stuff she needed to buy—photo frames to refill with newly made memories, running shoes, maybe another dress to replace the funeral-tainted one—Sadie only nodded, pulling trays of farmer’s bread, of melting chocolate croissants from the oven to be sold.

  Sadie’s block—her own now—was almost as bare as the valley paddocks she’d worked in before the bakery: lifting vineyard wires, trapping silvereyes and pruning at the right time of year. Sitting among the few black resprouting gums, she watched the birds as they slowly came back: sparse families of white-winged choughs, a pair of wood ducks, maybe a bark-feathered tawny frogmouth. One night, curled into the seat of the peeling maroon hatchback, Sadie even heard the call of a boobook owl, its call travelling along the ridge and into the valley below.

  Autumn arrived, and heavy rain pushed the ash and leftover rubble of the ridge down to the valley—exposing debris-flecked earth. Sadie found a shard of the orange plate Dave had bought for their last barbeque, a blackened teaspoon, a pair of bent scissors. She pocketed a single charred spring from the bed they’d picked up on eBay, back when they had decided to leave Preston to return to the bush they had both grown up in. It had belonged to a floral-skirted girl who explained, quietly, her breath smelling of mint, that she could not keep any of the furniture that her once-boyfriend had helped her to buy. ‘Take it,’ she’d said, voice ringing out across the bare court of a Northcote apartment block. ‘Just attach some better memories to it for me.’

  Sadie had watched the side of Dave’s face on the way home—noticing the twitch in his temple as he concentrated on driving along the curves of the Eltham-Yarra Glen Road. ‘Do you think we’ll be okay, you and me?’ she asked, the low hum of talkback radio rumbling from the hatchback doors: the mumble of the male presenter sounding something like a muffled, distant storm.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Dave said, pulling the sun visor down before reaching out to rest a hand briefly on Sadie’s leg. ‘Always.’

  Only months before the fire—lying face up and side by side in their new oak bed—Dave and Sadie had talked about being kids. Shorthaired Sadie, unlike Dave, hadn’t collected paper bags full of matches, chocolate coins and sherbet drops—all from the small general store—to bury in case of the end of the world. ‘I wanted to be prepared for it,’ he said, turning to her: his arm then across the softness of Sadie’s stomach and his chin, bristling, resting on her shoulder. ‘Weren’t you worried about stuff like that, when you were small?’

  Sadie thought back to packing her soft toys into lilac garbage bags, apologising to each one as she worked out who she would take if the bush was to catch alight, as her primary-school teachers sometimes warned.

  Putting off too-complex insurance claims, or trips to the city—to buy the house-full of belongings back that she no longer seemed to need—Sadie began scanning the bakery corkboard on her tea break. There were endless handwritten ads for missing pets: too many tabby cats in black collars, a ginger one, along with a few horses, dogs and a blue-tongue lizard called Snake. People had let their animals free as the fire approached: cages opened, gates flung, front doors gaping—soon to burn.

  The couples from Brunswick and Northcote who had once come to the bakery—to load Persian fetta and sprigs of dill onto bits of hardening breadstick—didn’t come back with the birds. ‘Just not getting the traffic we used to,’ Sadie’s boss said—his huge apron patterned with large icing-sugar hand-prints, with flecks of dried dough. Sadie—tea-break coffee scroll and honeycomb milk in hand—knew that her shifts would be cut. On her last Sunday double she took the older missing posters from the board. Missing cat, one read: Ginger. Female. Blue eyes. Silver bell. The flyer didn’t list the cat’s name, which made Sadie wonder, before she remembered that cats weren’t like dogs: loyal and listening, always, like her. As the posters cri
nkled in her hands she guessed possible names of the orange cat: Marmalade, Apricot, maybe Fanta, like the drinks Dave liked—too bright and sweet.

  ‘What’re you doing with those?’ Joel asked, as Sadie left through the back flyscreen door. Sadie was winding up the window of the little hatchback in the neighbouring supermarket car park before she had time to think of an answer that made sense.

  As bakery work dried up and the surviving trees along the ridge tried to sprout at their forks, Sadie started trapping, thinking all the while of Dave: his hand cocooning hers and his clothes smelling of home. Armed with a possum cage and sandwich bags filled with rabbit mince, Sadie set herself up on the ridge—her lap piled with tattered descriptions of cats, mostly, followed by telephone numbers and first names. Sadie wasn’t surprised that all the flyers were written by women: Joans, Elaines, Rishas, Kates. She bought some Hard Yakka overalls from the internet—had them posted to the milk-tin letterbox that fronted the bare block. Pulling them over her thin hips, then tightening the straps over her shoulders, Sadie thought of Dave’s body beside her own—the way his hipbones jutted out, and how the curly hair of his thighs flattened when pushed against her own.

  Like others from the ridge, Sadie wondered if there was any order to that Saturday, months ago now. She wondered if the study cupboard had burned first, or if the fleeing clouds of birds—screaming rosellas, galahs, black cockatoos—had given Dave enough warning to soak some towels with whatever was in the fridge: soy milk, orange juice, maybe beer.

  Sadie hoped the pump hadn’t melted first, like it had at most houses in the area. She hoped the electricity had stayed on long enough, too, for Dave to fill the two empty watering cans with cool water, to pour around him to stop the heat running up his jeans—ones she hoped he’d been able to find among the mess she’d left, clothes thrown, running late for a last-minute afternoon shift.