A Constant Hum

by Alice Bishop

  Didn’t know there was bottle-blond for lads, The Stranger says. But you young blokes these days… Eman still can’t see a face, an outline even. The charcoal stumps and still-standing skeleton trees all look like they could be people, for just a moment. The new dog stops up ahead and—Eman can see in the brighter light of the white-gravel road—sniffs a charcoal stump. Oi, Eman repeats. But it’s a shelter animal, that wide-eyed kelpie—it hasn’t yet learned to care.

  I said, you’re not from around here, then? The Stranger continues.

  I am, Eman answers, his voice not coming out like his own but high, younger-sounding, with a hint of fear. I’ve lived here since I was born.

  Something like the smell of onions cooking in oil fills the ashy air, along with a floral scent a little like potpourri, then the sharp tang of piss. Well, then. Wouldn’t have guessed it! the voice continues from in the trees. Another local!

  Didn’t let my place burn, mate. No way, The Stranger says—coming out of what’s left of the bush. He’s still a silhouette against a backdrop of stripped trees. Eman knows that the faceless man standing before him is not kind. He recognises this from the edge in his voice, and the way he walks with his arms lifted off the sides of his body. The Stranger talks at Eman, rather to him: telling him he lives down on Butterman’s Track—Eman knows that’s the road where the fire petered out. The Stranger puts his hands on his small hips then, triangles of arms doubling his width. You have a responsibility to face nature when you live out here.

  The strain is bunching up in the corners of Eman’s eyes—stress from squinting through the dark, but also from memories of the bushfire, the bath. He can’t forget the orange hail that took great chunks out of the roof above him as he sat—bathwater blackening with ash. The smoke burning the softest parts of Eman’s throat, his eyes and his nostrils as he tried to bury his face in his pointy knees, tried to breathe.

  Stayed and defended, the faceless man says. Yes, siree. We do what we gotta do out here.

  Eman knows this ridge better than he knows most things. He knows enough to be sure that the fire front, eucalyptus-blue and terrible, never rolled over The Stranger’s house: that faceless man’s place. Light embers, sure, might have reached Butterman’s Track but nothing like the front of the storm.

  You’re from Butterman’s Track, yeah? Eman asks, as something thumps past in the dark, a wallaby or a small roo—the crazed kelpie following, its shape smaller again in the dusk. Down near the gully where the boundary fence is?

  The Stranger’s head bobs once in the quickening dark.

  That’s where I’m from, mate, yeah, The Stranger says, and Eman waits for him to ask about his parents’ house, burnt, about his home on Skyline Road—just a couple of hundred metres away. The Stranger says nothing. Waiting for something, anything, Eman feels the lumps of damp gravel through his thin waterproof boots.

  The dog yelps excitedly in the distance. A kookaburra laugh floats up from the unburnt neighbouring gully as The Stranger—a shadow against the setting sun—continues to tell Eman how he saved his place. You gotta be tough, The Stranger says, to live out here. Gotta be a real man. Out bush.

  In the Ashes

  People think it takes away everything, but the colours were unlike anything I’ve ever seen: greys stronger than railway steel, blue-black charcoals, and oranges like tangerines—baked rust by dashboard sun.

  Can’t Complain

  ‘Sixty-five on top of normal building costs, give or take a few thou,’ John the builder says. ‘It’s the only way you’ll be allowed back.’

  John’s from Yarra Constructions. His advice to my father is straightforward: his own first house burned down on Ash Wednesday, 1983.

  ‘That smell of your burning things,’ he says, standing next to us in the place our house used to be. ‘Stays with you forever, mate. Forever—sorry to say.’

  John’s glasses are tortoise-shell-plastic-rimmed, the lenses thick. Beside him, my father looks worn down; the donated clothes he wears don’t fit properly and the usual softness has left his face. He nods. John the builder does too.

  ‘That much, really?’ Dad asks, again—just to be sure.

  ‘New building requirements for fire zones,’ John says, shaking his head: ‘Don’t make the rules, but have to stick to them. Otherwise they’ll come after me—ya see.’

  ‘Well, mate,’ my father says. ‘Guess I can’t complain.’

  ‘I guess we can’t—we’re both still here,’ John says.

  Both my father, in his borrowed Commodore, and John know that double-glazed windows, extra concrete reinforcement and overpriced sprinkler systems wouldn’t do much, were the ten-metre-high flames to blow over again. They know the smell of chemical smoke, along with the embers that would still be glowing the morning after, when anyone went back to see what was left.

  ‘Too much red tape,’ John in his thick glasses says. ‘Not many can afford to come back now.’

  My father asks about the old couple from the corner, Joan and Louise, and if John the builder has heard whether they’re coming home.

  ‘Haven’t heard anything, no,’ John says.

  ‘Righto, then,’ my father says. ‘Righto.’

  ‘All good here?’ A woman in a Vic Pol cap says out of her black SUV window. It’s the morning after the East Kilmore fire: tree trunks felled and turned to a charcoal glow.

  ‘All accounted for,’ my father says. ‘Two of us, yes. No deaths.’ It’s like he has been in a war or disaster before.

  We don’t spend long in the rubble looking for surviving things: photos, keepsakes, notes—souvenirs of our lives before. It’s clear, quickly, that everything has gone. The brickwork of the driveway has crumbled from heat. The wheel rims of my father’s old Subaru wagon are liquid, silver rivers running over warped tin. ‘Don’t step on anything sharp,’ he says, without looking up. He pauses for a second, before continuing: ‘If you smell anything chemical, use your jumper—cover your mouth.’

  ✶

  ‘Did you hear what caused the fire?’ John the builder asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ my father says.

  ‘Fallen faulty powerlines, hey,’ John says. ‘A government contract, hey—badly maintained?’

  ‘Yes,’ my father answers, ‘that’s right.’

  When my father gets the lawsuit papers mailed to him from Maurice Blackburn he calls me from his borrowed phone. ‘Got some class-action papers,’ he says. ‘Got to really sit down to read it over, though, to find out what it really means.’

  ‘Let’s get some advice, Dad,’ I say.

  My father mentions money again—that he can’t afford much more. I think of his retirement plans. Next year he was meant to be ‘packing it in’.

  ‘The way things are going I’ll be working till I’m eighty,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t, Dad,’ I say. ‘It’s gonna be okay.’

  We meet the case manager on a Monday. Dad wears his new polar fleece. He is looking small, but not as hollowed out as he has been.

  ‘Thanks for taking the time,’ our legal representative says. She’s in shiny black pants and has a serious but kind face. ‘We’ll need you to fill out these forms,’ she says, handing my father a folder of papers, fashion-magazine thick. ‘You’ll have to remember everything in your house. Everything in every room,’ she says. ‘From little things to big.’

  ‘S’all right,’ my father says when we’re up to the second bedroom—listing the little CD player, dusty from not being used; my shitty single bed (the doona covers and sheets); the big TV I watched too much midday telly on instead of driving into the city for uni; and the old video camera, along with the tapes of me when I was small.

  ‘You okay?’ I ask my father when I see him pause. The colour has left his face.

  ‘S’all right,’ Dad says again. ‘We’re here still; we’re okay.’ But by the time we get to listing things that were in the kitchen he has had enough. ‘Do you want to go and get a pie?’ he asks.

  ‘Let’s
,’ I say. And we go down the street.

  ‘An okay outcome for you, then, considering,’ John the builder says.

  We’re at the block again and the new house is beginning to take shape. The wooden frame is light against the furry regrowth that was once ten-metre-tall bush.

  ‘Can’t complain,’ my father says.

  John the builder is wearing new glasses. They’re small and round and have wire frames. ‘Would you believe it?’ he says, when he tells Dad that the government won’t bury the spark-prone powerlines, as the Royal Commission recommends. ‘Money,’ John the builder says. ‘Everything comes down to cash.’

  ‘Not surprising, really,’ my father says. ‘They’re in the business of boxes having to be ticked.’

  Dad calls me when the payout from the company responsible for the spark that started it all, that fire rolling over the hill, comes through. All the money, sixty thousand of it, goes towards paying off the fancy materials for a fire-resistant new house.

  My father has to pay arborists too, now—for detailed reports on still-standing trees. The council sends bored-looking officers in high-vis to survey the road once a month.

  John the builder says it’s because the government is wiping their hands of the area. ‘They get the paperwork done at their end, mate,’ he says. ‘Then they say: live out bush, sure—out in the wilderness—but it’s at your own risk.’

  ‘At least we’re both still here,’ my father says. ‘At least we’re still here.’

  Kangaroo Paw

  Flavoured Milk

  You’re sitting in the tearoom beside a strawberry Big M when your supervisor comes in. He’s wearing his usual uniform T-shirt, a pink breast-cancer ribbon pinned to it. Framing a pair of tiny sun-marked ears, his coppery hair’s clipped right back. Young Chloe, he says. You look tired—sure you’ve been sleeping well?

  Sure, Paul, as good I can, you answer. Thanks.

  The heat of the room hovers between you. Sweat prickles your thighs. A red-gold kangaroo paw sits on the break table—maybe a gift from someone in the area whose house didn’t burn down, or maybe a gift (yet to be given) for someone in the area who lost one. There’s no card; since the fires no one has really been certain what to say to each other, let alone write.

  You see, straight off, that Paul has that look you know too well about him: he’s after something.

  Breathe in. Think back, for just a moment, to being a kid and finding that mangy wombat roadside. Wasps were humming about, feeding on cracks in its irritated skin. Your mum, Ruth, had gone and bought special Cydectin rinse; she’d bought sick wombats in the area all kinds of chemical things. It’s okay, Chlo, baby, she’d said softly: We’ll make sure we get her good again. You remember the trips, daily, to the animal’s regular roadside grazing spot, the buckets of blue-tinted liquid thrown. Ruth had worn her thick hair stuffed under a faded RSPCA cap back then. The logging trucks heading out to the valley—you remember they didn’t slow down as they passed. They sometimes honked, sending the wombat running in a blind panic. Ruth, though, never flinched.

  Chloe, mate, Paul says. There’s an uncomfortable smile in his tone: You dreamin’ again? Tell me something—throw me a bone, will ya, Chlo—am I lucky enough to be in your dreams?

  Code Red Day

  Not even two weeks ago you’d been stuck. The big red truck’s heart had given out: there was a crackling, a coughing whirr, then silence—or maybe it was your hearing, temporarily gone—as the aluminium alloy engine cut off. The low-water alarm. We’re close to cooked. Fuck, one of your kinder colleagues, Callahan, had yelled, his face grey with fear, wide charcoaled hands shaking as he ushered you back in. There wasn’t much hope hiding in the vehicle—metal and glass and wires, still warm from electrical things.

  But all five of you had made it, somehow—holding hands like you never would have on any other day, in the face of any other thing. None of the other four have come back to training yet. You’d had to: there will be months, soon, when you will be bound by another thing.

  Gotta go through with it, you’d told Saanvi, your closest friend from the valley job you’d once had: clinical administration. She hadn’t been caught by the fire, but had been in the valley the following day—helping people with their hopes of recovering lost things. A social worker, Saanvi is tall and the same age as you: almost twenty-six. She wears designer pants that have little bronze zips and her hair long, plaited in complicated ways down her back.

  All the way through with it, you’d said. Even though I’m alone, you know, fucked up as it is? You’d been thinking about raising a small human on your own: its hands—as you’d seen on the screen—already in pink tiny fists.

  Chlo, is all Saanvi had said at first. Her warm but firm voice had made you think of being a kid, of Ruth—tall and soft-voiced herself—calling you from down the hall.

  Saanvi? It was a week after the fires and you were sitting at the unburnt local pub by two lemonades, a slice of browning lemon floating in each. The lingering heat was making your upper lip glitter. Saanvi, as always, looked fresh.

  You do what you have to—what you need to do, Chlo. That’s all any of us can do.

  You thought about the roos you saw the week before. How whole mobs jumped past the rescue van in awkward patterns—the pads of their paws and their tails singed. Can we call someone to help them? you’d said. And your ash-faced colleague Callahan had just put his arm around you, his body against yours smelling of fresh sweat—the kind you now associate with fear: salty and clear.

  It’s gonna be okay, he’d said. Just don’t look.

  Furnace

  The cardboard carton of pink milk has begun to sweat through. Paul opens the fridge and you know he’s reaching for a Tupperware container—his usual: stripped chicken flesh, cos lettuce, boiled eggs. He casually mentions his wife, Tina: how they’ve a new RAV4, along with another kid, their fourth, on the way. You think of his family in their Macleod house: shiny BMX bikes and Foxtel, a couple of those tiny dogs that look like gargoyles.

  The wife admires you, you know, your boss says. Not many women are up for fighting—especially after Black Saturday. Not many men, even.

  You know that your boss’s wife (though you’ve only met her fleetingly) packs his lunch—ninety per cent protein—every night before bed. She’d also be the one washing the kids after dinner, wiping the kitchen bench down and checking her face for imperfections in the oven door: all while her husband is enjoying conversations with other women, down at the Lower Plenty Pub. ‘Decompressing,’ he’d often call it; but usually he’s just getting hot drunk.

  You sure you’ve been looking after yourself, Chloe, mate? Paul asks again. Flavoured milk is just sugar, fat—think of the good ol’ food pyramid, he continues, raising blond eyebrows that barely exist. He laughs, pretending that what he just said was a joke. He looks straight at your stomach then, still smiling—his thin lips turning downward at the edges and the creases at the corners of his eyes disappearing.

  I mostly eat pretty good, yeah, you say, automatically smiling back. This, along with your cheeks blooming, is beyond your control. It’s like you’re fourteen again: unsure. The pool is cool and blue, almost freeing. But you hide yourself, your body; you’re beginning to learn the rules.

  Escape Route

  Sometimes you think of the other CFA volunteers: old Mack from Warrandyte—his belly overflowing his faded jeans. Twenty-year-old Dean from Kangaroo Ground—arriving at Sunday-morning training so hungover his clothes smell like cheap red wine. Backyard-sweet. His breath like rotten schoolbag plums. Paul never looks them up and down. He never tells them to get more sleep, to eat their greens.

  Had a big one, then, mate? Paul often said to hungover Dean as the team trucked out, Saturday mornings, to check the St Andrews supply tanks. D’ya get lucky then? ’Cause you’d have to be lucky, hey, he’d laugh. Then they both would. You’d just sit between them, looking at the map of the ridge—at the places marked as fire roads, escapes, highligh
ted red.

  We’ll make sure we get her good again, your mother had said. This time it wasn’t a roadside wombat but an ordinary fox—found in a shire-set rubber trap. You’d gone up to look at that orange animal, locked up in the long-empty chicken coop, its small front paws swollen, thick fur rubbed off in a band where the clamp had shut. Smiling and panting with stress, it hadn’t limped over to eat the rolled up slice of ham you held in your six-year-old fist. No, no, she’s a wild thing, honey, Ruth had said. Not a pet.

  Twelve Men

  The hot tearoom fills with bustling men, then quickly empties again: other firefighters who’ve returned, from different trucks and sub-teams. They’re out in the equipment room to try on new uniforms: fireproof boots and orange coats and helmets with thick straps around the chin. So much of the stuff was ruined: your boot soles had melted; your helmet—although you can’t remember how—was dented in. The truck had broken down beneath you. The steering wheel melted and the pads of your shaking fingers turned pink.

  You getting some more gear too? Paul asks and you look back up to the pink ribbon, pinned to his deliberately broadened chest. You deserve it. His voice is the same as it was on the day you can’t forget; it’s low and lazy and something like your first boyfriend’s, when you were both fifteen and had too many passionfruit UDLs and not enough barbequed sausages in squishy white bread.

  You feel Paul’s hand on the back of your neck again. You remember the cool storeroom wall, pressed against your cheek. He continues, but it’s like he’s speaking, far off: You can change in my office, Chlo—if ya want? S’all yours.