A Constant Hum

by Alice Bishop

  I’ve been to so many clients’ houses through this job, made cups of tea in all kinds of strangers’ kitchens. You can tell a lot about someone from their cutlery drawer—packets of unused plastic knives; maybe a single metal set: one knife, one spoon, one fork; or the extra fancy, unused set, kept in the cleaner, barely opened compartment below. Kenneth was the one-of-each-kind type. His house was home to two leather armchairs—smelling of beeswax and some kind of preserver. That’s where I first find him sitting, in this almost-bare room, feet wrapped in Glad Wrap and face relaxed. Sorry about the mess, he says. The missus went mad and I shot her. And for just a moment I don’t know what to say, before he winks. Only kidding—c’mon, kid, he says.

  Years ago, Kenneth had made a living from selling unwanted yearlings, bad racers, to pony-club girls—mostly for showjumping, cross-country and a little for track work. He tells me this as I cover his feet in antiseptic and gauze, after I pick bits of melted cotton, old sock, from his soles. He’d been wearing worn-through Dunlop Volleys when he went out to check on his last cow: honey-coloured, hollowed. The ground had been on fire around him. All the rosellas: they’d flown.

  You’ll get used to losing old friends, Kenneth says, still smiling—after I ask if there is someone else about, someone to drive him to Maroondah Hospital, in a day or so, to check the wounds. But there is no direct answer; Kenneth just talks about his last old cow: how she’d felt the fire coming, how she’d run herself into the fence. He spoke of the twisted barbed wire and the old pruning shears that’d heated in his hands while trying to cut the animal free. Leather gloves had saved the pads of his sun-stained hands, but there’d been no time to think of his feet. Later I learn that family history, diabetes and age can cause nerve damage—numbness in hands or feet. Kenneth hadn’t known his feet were burning, then later turning as he sat. He had been feeling lucky his house hadn’t gone, while processing the loss of his last old friend.

  What were you doing the day of the fires, Farah? Kenneth asks. I guess his voice is probably higher than it once was, but it’s still low—crackly like driveway gravel under car tyres. His hands, big white knuckles poking through, look wide and strong. For just a flash, there I am again: walking out of the corner milk bar, colourful plastic flaps brushing past my face. Frosty Fruit juice is melting down my wrist as I click the council-car door open, then a rush of scorching air. The steering wheel is too hot to touch as I reach over to turn the radio on. Set to be Australia’s darkest day, the a.m. radio voice is humming. Homes have already been reported lost, and people—we are yet to confirm how many—are missing, feared dead.

  You were swimmin’ that day, I bet? Kenneth continues. He brings up, then, how he used to get paid to take young racers out into the ocean on hot February days—leading the fresh horses through soft surf and out into the depths for training. For muscle conditioning and variety in their routines, he says. I imagine a younger Kenneth, waist deep in salty water—leaning forward to put his face against one of the horse’s glossy necks. I bet some good old-fashioned saltwater—the ocean, Kenneth continues, would make me feel a million bucks right now, hey…

  It’s then that I smell something off again, before asking the usual questions: How is your mood? What are you eating lately? Can you rate your sense of overall wellbeing, maybe, from one to ten, where one is bad and ten is great? Kenneth smiles, and I notice that his teeth are too perfect to be real. Can’t whinge, can I? he says. The ticker’s still going. I just wish the old cow didn’t have to go like that. Kenneth talks about how he’ll probably never own another animal, that his old unnamed cow—that was it. He looks down at his bandaged-up feet for a moment too long, and I know I have to let him; I stop myself from filling the quiet with small talk.

  That’s when the hospital bed is ordered for two days ahead, and the med student who drives the patient van, the one who will later say ‘peripheral neuropathy’, ‘nerve damage’ and ‘second-degree burns’ like she, too, is reading out weather. She doesn’t listen when Kenneth tells her about how as a kid he’d kept rabbit kits in cardboard boxes and half-formed tadpoles in lunch boxes—dented, tin; she can’t. She has another kind of numbness, a learned kind. The woman, in navy and grey, cannot take the stale smells of loneliness and burning things, of tinned beef soup and eucalyptus oil, back to her own home—to her kids.

  The transfer of Kenneth from his home takes place in a day or so, when I am back in my own half-empty house—distracting myself with other patients’ files and Nicorette patches and tuna that comes in long flat tins. When I turn on the TV there are feel-good stories about kids getting new bikes, about couples being reunited after thinking each other dead. Big companies are donating beds and hotel getaways and flowerbeds. For just a moment I forget about Kenneth, his old burnt cow and his hallway of livestock memories—muscly bulls and horses with ribbons around their necks. I forget about the way he looked at me as I left. How I caught a hint of something, acceptance maybe. Dread.

  Catch ya, then, kindling limbs, Kenneth calls, as I stand up to go. An old dog I hadn’t even realised was sitting there stands up too. It’s skinny and tall, like me. A greyhound but shaggier. Talkback comes on and Kenneth reaches over to turn it up—the backs of his hands a see-through purply-blue. The voice on the radio is a woman’s, soft but strong. She’s talking about the sense of pride so many people have in looking after one another after a natural disaster. About mateship—strong as ever. The community has banded together, this woman says. We’ll be for the better.

  Kenneth’s freshly dressed feet look like giant earbud ends, propped up on the faded green milk crate I found on his porch. His eyes are closed. I imagine him floating out in the ocean somewhere—the saltwater soothing his feet.

  You call me, right, if you need anything at all? I say.

  Course I will. Kenneth smiles, eyes still closed.

  Screen Burn

  The woman with all the certificates on the wall: she’s already teaching me how to shelve it—that flick book of images, of people we found. ‘Elsie,’ she says. ‘Elsie. Think of that slide-show like the telly, Sunday evening: turn it off.’ But that screen flickers, especially at night. My hands in green rubber gloves. A sink of foam. Something ordinary and there I am again, picking up the pieces—a molten watch, a silver hip. We’d worn white suits, walking the ridge.

  Half-light

  Both women’s shirts were still damp with dishwasher steam, with spray from the old hose they had used to clear confetti from the small car park that backed onto the cellar door. Ray’s chambray dress shirt remained dry—a small winery logo embroidered in gold on its pocket and its cuffs buttoned a little too tightly around his wrists. ‘Success, then,’ he said. And as they sat at the now-abandoned trestles, no one looked up and over the vineyards to the south—at the new nakedness that cut into the ridge and the haze that hung above it.

  Though ash still laced the air, coloured rice lay scattered across the linen tablecloths. Lorraine gathered gritty handfuls of the grain as she waited for conversation to begin—the blue food colouring bleeding into the creases of her fingers, down the sides of her bitten nails. She had helped bag it up the day before—the small cotton bundles reminding her of the lavender-filled heat packs her mother had once warmed in the microwave before bed, releasing an earthy, floral smell into the kitchen that wafted down the hall.

  Lorraine thought the ribbon used to tie each tiny sack of rice was telling. The peach heart prints and L’amour in cursive meant she could expect a certain kind of day—just as if the bride had requested napkins, cotton, to be rolled and tied in organic taffeta; vegan cheeses; and table settings of native flowers to match the bridesmaids’ floral crowns. Lorraine knew Ruby, being younger, preferred the former, simpler, kind of ceremony—her cherry-coloured fingernails scanning excitedly across any pre-wedding instructions written in tacky loopy swirls, on pink tissue-thin paper that had, most likely, been bought by the sheet and packaged in neatly sealed pockets of clear cellophane.

>   As Ray poured the wine—his own riesling blend, pale gold against the tablecloth—the glasses frosted and his forehead bunched in thought. ‘The overflow fridge is full if you want leftovers,’ he said, tilting his head back towards the cellar. ‘Almost too hot for eating, though.’

  ‘Never,’ Ruby replied, standing up and running her forearm over the bridge of her nose, its glitter of sweat disappearing for only a second. Lorraine watched her head off to the kitchen, stepping over a missed napkin stand on the way—its painted wire pressed into the earth by someone’s shoe. The sight of Ruby’s smallness—her silver-belted hips not much wider than any other part of her—not only made Lorraine think of her own gathering weight, but also of how little she’d eaten that day. She had only managed to grab a slice of leftover wedding cake—its hard fondant icing turning to clag in her mouth as she ate hurriedly, loading wine glasses onto the steaming trays to be washed.

  Lorraine knew Ruby enough to know she’d be thinking of the wedding guests as she crossed the browning lawn to the fridges—how they had reached for the bruschetta selections over the blue-cheese puffs and Persian fetta she had spent hours allocating into softening portions. The bride had provided her own tiny Japanese plates, covered in indigo prints of fish and birds. ‘You’d just love it over there,’ she had said to Ruby by the buffet tables, smiling through Rose Paradise lipstick—the heat causing it to seep a little, and run into the corners of her mouth. Her earrings were silver, dulled and dotted with tiny flecks of jade. They looked heavy, Lorraine thought, watching as the bride’s earlobes strained with the weight, swinging slightly with every nicety, and the movement of every hello and thank you. ‘No bush to burn in Tokyo, that’s for sure.’ Ruby had smiled automatically, before straightening the large bowl of salted caramels—their shape lost to the afternoon heat.

  Each dish would be washed and placed in a pocket of bubble wrap during the week. Then Lorraine—in charge of all the winery’s postals—would write the bride’s address on the cardboard box they’d be repacked into. As she told Ruby in the freezer one day, she found satisfaction in packing things up neatly and sending them away.

  Watching Ray across the table—his hairy hand flat on the surface, wedding band indenting the softness of his finger—Lorraine wondered if she would be offering to help do the same for him if his marriage folded. She had met his wife, Lisa, many times and guessed she would have favoured matching dinner sets and velvet-lined cases of cutlery, silver-plated and shiny. Her boxes would be bought and neatly labelled, not gathered from IGA—smelling like overripe fruit and cheap adhesive.

  A fruit truck passed by on the highway just as Ruby returned with an untouched tasting platter, still wrapped tightly in fogged cling wrap. Ray looked across the vineyard and over to the paddocks behind, home to horses that would be spending the following weeks making up for the missed weekend at the track. Before putting the tray down, Ruby followed Ray’s gaze: ‘Even the trotters get a rest, hey, Ray?’ She had reapplied her lip balm and her whole mouth seemed glossy as she spoke. She didn’t wait for a reply before picking up one of the engraved dessertspoons and pushing it into a wedge of quince paste. ‘Let’s just start. I want to eat it all.’

  The sharpness of the heat lowered with the sun and the usual few musk ducks slowly disappeared from the vineyard dam. Lorraine and Ruby ate the harder cheeses first and, like the guests hours earlier, left the soft ones to sweat in their small Japanese dishes. Both women’s thin watchbands—Lorraine’s a brassy gold and Ruby’s leather plaited with magenta thread—cut into their wrists, which were swollen from the long day in the heat, from carting plates of uneaten platters to and from the fridges, and pouring from full bottles of cold champagne.

  Ray sucked back a mouthful of riesling, appreciating the stone-fruit and citrus characters he too often assumed were lost on others. He looked content, all things considered. The day had run smoothly. He had been anxious that they would want to reschedule, as the next few wedding parties most likely would. He had seen the newsreaders in ash-flecked safety vests and the children they were interviewing pale with confusion at the piles of hot bricks where their houses used to be, at the steam rising up from water tanks they had once etched their names, growing heights and small hopes across: badly drawn aeroplanes made real by leftover hardware-store paint samples.

  Ray had noticed that the town was particularly still on his way to work that morning. He slowed down as he passed the racecourse, looking at the small group of cars—some open-booted to show sleeping couples, some with pillow slips wound into the windows to block out the morning sun. And although Ray knew they were all waiting to be allowed back up onto the mountain, to see what was left of their homes, he tried to only think of the day ahead. Old Bentleys, as he had been informed, would probably slow down too, in just a few hours. He thought of the white triangle of ribbon across each bonnet, buffeting in the breeze as the procession sped up again—the bride inside the lead car, reapplying blush to the sharpest parts of her face.

  ‘You went up this morning, Lorry? Anything left?’ Ruby asked, sparkly eyed, before wondering if she should have. Ray wiped a stray drop of wine from his chin and looked over at Lorraine, who stayed focused on the rice, at the trails of colour printed on the tablecloth. She could still picture her friend Wendy standing out on the gravel—her street had been given the all-clear and the roadblocks were lowered for residential return. The hatchback was packed to the roof, her wolfhound’s panting smile just visible amid the piles of soaked doonas, curtains and old beach towels.

  ‘Must be something up there?’ Ray said, pinching the stem of his wine glass like it would topple if he didn’t.

  Lorraine shook her heavy head before looking at Ruby, then out to the rows of vines. Ordinary birds sat on the wires, barely moving as the neighbouring vineyard shot up some scare flares—Ruby and Ray barely blinked either. She looked towards the darkening ridge, at the stripped trees that poked up stubbornly, leaning slightly in the direction they had been blown the day before.

  ‘Nothing,’ Lorraine said, thinking of the single letterbox she saw, crisscrossed with police tape, the whites and blues standing out against the grey stretch.

  ‘I’d be up there sifting for jewellery, you know, sentimental stuff, in the ashes,’ Ray said, his eyebrows rising slightly as his voice petered out.

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ Lorraine said, folding a sauce-stained corner of the tablecloth over on itself, so it was out of sight. ‘Just imagine the moon, Ray—there’s nothing, no colour even, as far as you can see.’

  Ruby had been serving vol-au-vents when the ash started falling over the wedding ceremony, leaving tiny cigarette-like burns in the cream canopy. The bride’s misting fans, hired, covered the guests’ faces in a filmy dew as they walked by, curious but mostly unworried about the terracotta haze that hung over the ridge to the south. Things were still burning that day, one day later: the trunks of the older trees, whittled almost to stumps now; and even the carpet of ash still smouldered, melting the soles of shoes worn by those who had decided to go back, to assess the rubble—mostly with a gasp as they walked up over the fire line. The continuing billow of smoke had blocked out the sun by the time Lorraine had been told to start ushering the guests indoors, forcing her to switch on the paper lanterns hung from the banisters—casting an eerie glow across the plates of canapés and causing the gold-rimmed cocktail glasses to glint.

  After the second glass of wine Ruby decided to slip her flats off. Lorraine sat in the same position she usually did—her right arm folded over the softness of her stomach and her legs squarely apart, her feet flat on the ground. The security lights of the vineyard sheds came on as Ray stood up—specks of termite flies milling through the glow. ‘Should call the wife, say I’ll be late,’ he said, at the same time considering which bottle should follow—and whether the back shed would be too hot to set up the foldout couch for the night.

  He noticed the odd stillness of the evening as he walked back to the cellars.
The breeze from the dams at the back of the property was unusually still and the usual hum of traffic—tourists making their way back to the city—was missing. A stray bit of white taffeta made him think about his own wedding—how his wife had sat down at the end of it all and sighed. ‘Let’s go home,’ she had said, and Ray had noticed the semicircles under her eyes, how they were a silvery blue, almost transparent, in the evening light.

  As Ray clicked shut the cellar door behind him, a cinder fell onto the marked tablecloth—between the fetta-smeared dishes and the silhouetted figures of Ruby and Lorraine, slumped from it all. The thud of a tree collapsing somewhere high above them travelled down to their spot in the valley before Ruby leaned forward, her glossed lips pulled into a tight circle to blow the grey flake away.

  Both women watched carefully then, bare feet squarely on the hired turf, perfectly green and lush, as the cinder floated back up into the warm night air and over into the shed lights. It went through the circling termite flies and over the surrounding paddock of vines—wire rows gleaming under a bushfire moon, bronzed.

  Low-pressure Trough

  The women dream in amber, now, of cracked Coonara glass.

  Community

  Home-brand Tim Tams melt. Butcher’s paper flutters across temporary trestle tables, borrowed from the local high school, as people mill about the valley hall. The second community meeting is packed: emergency-services workers and council officers stand at the front of the room, clothes dark and lanyards bright.

  You watch as a woman from Healesville, her house unburnt, taps your mother on the shoulder at the coffee stand—soft polystyrene cups of Blend 43 between them. How are you, Janine? It’s been so long! she says, her corroding cheeks caked with bronzer. I heard the house went.