by Alice Bishop
Yes, your mother says. Here to sign our support forms.
A fire trap, wasn’t it? the woman says, smiling in a false-friendly way. This has all got me thinking, really. Should we be allowing things up there—I mean permits—to rebuild in bush…
The woman takes a sip from her cup and turns to another blond-and-bobbed valley woman: Irene! she calls. Irene, softer now. How are the horses, honey, the girls? I heard you lost a fence?
Highway Lines
1
Years later, she’ll say quietly (to those few who still ask): Things came back with the fire. But now only three nights have passed, and Sylvie’s washed her puffed face in hotel soap for two, before going to bed, shower-less. A string bag of collected items: a towel, some Coles-bought undies, a silver pouch of cashews and a cotton dress—all her belongings sit on the seat of the caramel-coloured Rent-a-Bomb. Where are you, Sylv?—text messages from Chris arrive every morning. For just a moment she feels the heaviness of guilt. She thinks of foldout couches, donated shoes and government forms; and of all the other things she knew he’d be facing, back where the air’s still thick with smoke and a new kind of dust.
February’s heat, still blistering, fills the small Best Western room—making Sylvie feel claustrophobic but less alone. The landscape she called home, once thick with tea-tree and blackberry, is flattened by flame and kilometres behind her. Even with distance, Sylvie’s surrounded by the foreign smell of burning things. It lingers on skin—the fumes of household plastics melting, fire-desiccated house bricks—as she flicks channels on the tiny telly. Everyday Heroes, the newsreaders croon before orange-overalled men—they’re always men—appear on screen. Half a week on and no amount of cheap body wash, of milk and honey, can get the smallest bits of ash from her eyelids and the warm bends behind her scabbed knees.
Driving into dusk, Sylvie still thinks about how she’d hitched a ride in the tray of someone else’s truck, how she’d watched the range light up, then get curtained: black. He’s gone, she thought of Chris. But instead of remembering the dark curls of hair that sprouted across her partner’s chest, or how many times he murmured I love you softly through the phone, Sylvie focuses on the freeway—imagines the white lines, below, taking her somewhere else. She thinks about sleeping alone, the sun coming up somewhere, anywhere; through the window—wherever she ends up—there’ll be the sound of bush birds waking: families of ruby-eyed choughs, crimson rosellas and sharp-beaked maggies, waiting for her morning scraps of overcooked toast. Sylvie’s already dreaming of a new place to live, unburnt.
2
You made it too, Sylvie had said to Chris, shocked—after he turned up at the valley shelter: his brown eyes watery from smoke and a crusted salmon beach towel, likely once red, laid across his shoulders like a makeshift cape.
I did. Chris looked at Sylvie in a way that challenged her to be disappointed. He had slightly silvering stubble. The whites of his eyes stood out against the dirt and ash across his skin. Sylvie almost slipped back into loving him. She forgot about the months of nights bunched up against opposite edges of the bed, and the evenings he spent, his gentle face lit up—a pale-blue glow—by his computer screen. She forgot about falling over as they’d, just hours earlier, ran from the melting Hyundai, about how, for a split second, she had that syrupy self-pity, the kind you have as a kid. She forgot about the smoke and the looming darkness and her knees bleeding. She forgot him: turning back to look at her, the fire and the broken-down car, before running off in panic. Away from her—through roadside scrub.
They didn’t touch at all that night, just signed some forms and sat on donated foldout chairs while people who had actually lost lovers made towel-smothered sounds: guttural, muffled, vast.
Do you want a peppermint tea, love? A woman wearing a government lanyard asked Sylvie as she stood over the table of donated biscuits—milk arrowroots mostly, and the kind shaped like giant bears.
Sure. She semi-smiled, wondering if she could eat anything, with her stomach still folded and the taste of burning in her mouth.
3
All kinds of people and pets filled the fire shelter: panting golden labs, white-haired men in dam-muddied running shorts, mewling cats locked in cars and horses with charred muzzles. The night went by in a blur before the morning arrived—worse than the night before. As the sun came up, the path of the bushfire was shown. Politicians in high-vis and sorry frowns began hugging people on screen. Charity-campaign tickers flickered at the edges of news reports.
You can’t spend the insurance, when we get it, Chris had already started saying, like we’ve got lucky and won some bloody prize. He was always thinking about money and what it would be like to have it. The crumpled tissues littering Chris’s side of the bed, her flock of synthetic work shirts hanging in the robe: Sylvie thought of all their disappeared things. Instantly free from the quiet weight of owning anything, she wondered: Who knows, maybe I did win? Maybe that firestorm—crossing the valley in hungry, kilometre-long leaps—was the equivalent of her TattsLotto numbers coming up, bright numbers in the dark.
It was the newly monochrome land—overexposed—that made Sylvie need to see herself in colour again: even if it was, at first, just the soft purple shadows under her eyes, then the pale-mustard tones of old cloud-shaped bruises surfacing on her thighs—popping up after it all like they had been lingering, beneath skin. Chris’s thick hand holding down the side of her half-asleep face. Him hardening. The disclaimers, then: That was okay for you too, yeah? Love you.
4
The hotel furniture blooms floral the further Sylvie gets out of town. Bathroom mirrors shrink but, in them, Sylvie notices a new brightness as she pulls her thin hair up and out of her face. Then it’s that barely filled string bag and a new set of keys left on a quiet beige desk. Cocooned in the caramel rental car, Sylvie slowly considers breakfast: petrol-station muffins or coffee hosed with cream. These little decisions let her forget about the crepe-blue skin around Chris’s eyes those last few nights they spent together, about his hands pulling at her borrowed T-shirt, her stretched but comfortable cottontail undies—sometimes her hair.
The air-conditioner drone keeps Sylvie comfortably distracted and cool on the road, as she follows the signs to weary towns she’s never been—for Kooka’s cookies and borrowed baths. It’s a Thursday night when the old car slows, its weak lights showing the woman, her back anyway—as she walks the safety lane of the sleeping freeway. Sylvie sees something like herself in the roadside figure, walking the night. There are no headlights in her rear-view as she passes, pulling over into the emergency strip—disturbed gravel making dust rise up about the car as she stops. Leaning over the passenger seat to open the door, Sylvie thinks of Chris and his newly toughened mouth, pushing into hers. She remembers the foreign smell of tyres melting—before saying gently, Jump in.
5
You know I’ve got the money side of things sorted, babe, Chris said to Sylvie the morning after their first night at the evacuation shelter. Despite warnings, they went back to the block to check what was left—the debris still smoking, making Sylvie imagine herself running: not anywhere particular but just away. Carpeted with fine grey ash, the ground smouldered beneath Sylvie’s slip-ons. She noticed a charred ringtail coiled around a sagging powerline, posts bending to razed earth. Sylvie thought of the animal’s death, and hoped it had been quick. She hoped there were no young left behind—before realising, again, that she was standing in the remnants of their house.
Sylvie? Don’t just stand there, Chris snapped. The northerly had eased but the fence posts glowed, pale-orange embers cooling to black.
The smell of her melting shoes, fumes of cheap plastic and glue, lined Sylvie’s nostrils as she watched Chris kick the charred skeleton of a barbeque.
Oh well, he said. Least we’ll get an insurance payout outta this fucking war zone. There was a new look in Chris’s widened eyes—one that Sylvie didn’t recognise. Something petrol-filled exploded in the distance
, the valley-softened thud making her jump.
In the car on the way back to their temporary accommodation, Sylvie cupped her hands over the scabs on her bare knees. She looked at her face in the side mirror—wispy light hair and a port-wine stain birthmark blooming over her bare left shoulder. As they funnelled onto the Eastern she looked over to Chris at the wheel. You ran, babe, she said, the words coming out calmer than she had imagined they would. You ran, Chris. And you left me there.
6
The woman walking the Calder Freeway at night is tall like Sylvie. It’s too dark to see the stories of her face—the smudge of mascara of her left check, the faint creases across her forehead, the splitting ends of her bleach-brittle hair—but Sylvie can see she’s holding something to her chest—something fragile, wrapped against her body in a hoodie, like a sling. Sylvie wonders if it’s a baby, small, before the woman smiles sadly, her teeth small and bright in the night. Wrote my car off, the woman says—a big mother roo. It’s then that a passing lorry fully illuminates the scene: the walking woman—the joey’s claws poking out of the jumper and her hair a peroxide halo in the headlights of a livestock truck, passing with its load of frozen-eyed sheep.
In that moment Sylvie remembers running, remembers tripping—the darkness preceding bushfire looming, and gravel pushing into the softness of her skin. She sees the roadside woman and wonders if she too has left a life behind to start anew.
There is the smell of petrol and something a little like rust, maybe blood, as the woman closes the door behind her—the bulge of the young kangaroo at her chest readjusting and shuffling under windcheater. I’m Sylvie, Sylvie announces, realising her own name sounded cold and blue when she said it—like it should belong to someone who wears their hair silver and dresses made of silk. Are you okay? Sylvie starts up the engine again, then veers slowly back out onto the empty freeway. Tiny winged insects dot the headlight beams before the car speeds up again, any bugs now hitting the Rent-a-Bomb bonnet unseen.
I’m okay, the woman says. Sometimes it’s important to see things go bad. Her soft voice melts into the sound of the old engine—humming. Puts things in perspective, ya know? She smiles. Her name is Anna, and Sylvie doesn’t ask her any questions when she says she’s headed north. Away from things at home, is all she says; and Sylvie knows that means a man, probably, and that home really means a house with low white ceilings, a fenced-in backyard and maybe a series of bar fridges—filled with cheap beer, stale bread and unused tubs of pale-yellow margarine.
7
The hotel room they wake up in has the usual floral curtains, backed by discoloured lace. Sylvie’s sleep was threaded with roadside bottlebrush, and the feeling of yellow that had once filled her when she walked along the still-bushy ridge. She can hear Anna on the pull-out bed beside her—whispering to the baby roo with its huge ears, small arms and silvery fur. You’re almost big enough to be on your own now, little mate, she’s saying. There is a sadness and a hope to her voice that Sylvie recognises.
The sun shines through the gap under the front door as Anna sits up. Breakfast’s my shout, she says. Hotcakes or a McMuffin?
Sylvie stretches her arms as the curtains are opened. The perfect chlorine blue of the tiny hotel pool, the pinks of the early warming sky: she sees it all.
Flint
She wears ash-snowed lashes and blisters on her skin. My neighbour, she’s still shining—in her soft, small way—when I walk in.
Torched
Fucken should have seen it go up, mate, he’s saying. Thought I’d seen the end of the world. The apocalypse, he’s saying. Can you believe I’m sitting here, he’s saying. I bloody can’t, he’s saying.
You can smell burning flesh: a smell you’d never thought you’d recognise. Hunting dogs with singed paws and noses are tied up outside the makeshift shelter, and this man—with his eyelids swollen from heat. His fingers—fat, red and split—look like sausages: overcooked. He’s high and humming from the adrenaline of almost being burnt through. Had to leave my collection of old bikes, this man is saying. It’s only stuff, sure, he’s saying. But s’all I got, he’s saying. I should have got insurance, he’s saying. Do you have it? he asks. But you don’t answer. You can’t; you’re thinking about her.
The Red Cross tent is filling with people but you can’t make out most of their faces; they’ve all blurred into one: wide-eyed and open-mouthed, shifting from the water station to the table of melting Arnott’s biscuits, back to the nurses for bandage checks and phone-call registers. A stream of small, questioning voices blur into one: Have you heard from anyone at 1180 Skyline Road? Have there been reports about Wallace Road? Where’s the fire now? Why is there no CFA? They say only three people have died, right? What—twenty-four? How can it now suddenly be twenty-four? The police aren’t sure if the fire’s reached Steels Creek? What—how can they not be sure?
The man you’ve been told to wait beside must be sixty-odd—about as old as your dad. There’s a faded tattoo of a blue wren on his left wrist. His hands, swelling more as the minutes pass, have started shaking. Used to torch cars, he’s saying. Have you ever seen a Ford or a Holden go up? I have, he’s saying. Seen a lot of stuff, he’s saying. But nothing like this. Maybe it’s karma, he’s saying. Do you believe in that? A woman with a nurse’s lanyard passes you, nodding to let you know she’ll get around to speaking to you, and your new friend, soon. You nod back. The man continues talking—maybe to you, maybe to the floor.
Why do we only have one word for smoke? he’s saying. In some cultures, mate, he’s saying, they have a hundred words for snow? A hundred words, he’s saying. We should listen to them more, he’s saying. I reckon the first people who lived here would know. We should listen more, the man says again, looking at his heat-split hands. Sixty thousand years, he says. I bloody reckon they’d know, he says again.
Your phone hasn’t rung. The last time you heard your wife’s voice was before the wind changed. Before the wind changed: you wonder if this will be something you’ll soon say too often—if it will become something defining, something in a sombre story you’ll have to tell and retell. You’ve heard emergency-centre rumours that the wind caused the fire to fold back on itself; but it is the flighty man beside you who has told you that. You don’t know who to listen to. The police say everything is okay, that no one is dead, then it’s sorry, mate, we misunderstood—the number’s up to sixty-four. The CFA, they’re off in hotter places—not milling at the Red Cross tent. I’ll be okay, baby; I have the sprinklers turned on, your wife had said.
There’s talk of roadblocks being set up. A woman in a worn Adidas T-shirt cries next to the burns-assessment desk. A tall nurse comforts her—plastic cups of warm water are offered, along with small understanding nods. You think of your wife and tell yourself she’s just got no reception. The phone just isn’t working. She’ll be wanting to call; the smoke and the ash and the cinders: all these things will be in the way. Things will clear soon, you tell yourself—over and over. You will hear her voice.
But really, have you ever seen a car go up? he’s saying. Seen a petrol tank catch fire? Or maybe those movies, you know, about atomic bombs? Houses were going up like that across the hill, he’s saying. Don’t reckon anything’s left up there, now, he’s saying. I got nothing left. Don’t know what I’ll do, he’s saying. Everything up there, all of it, everything—mate—it’s gone. The man with the blue-wren tattoo, next to you, he starts breathing like he’s been running—fast. His hands stop shaking and he’s staring straight ahead. You sit beside him and look down at your own hands, too clean for the situation. No ash. No burns. Nothing.
I’ve done some really bad things, he starts saying, breathing almost normally and speaking again. I never used to be good, he’s saying. But it all changed, he’s saying, as soon as I moved out here. You look over to the tent’s entrance at more blurry-faced people who have suddenly arrived. None of them are her. The hunting dogs by the temporary shelter don’t make a sound. Like you, they sit a
nd listen like they’re also waiting for news.
Maybe I should have become a religious man, he starts saying. Maybe this fire, it’s actually a taster of hell? he’s saying. Are you a religious man? he asks. He finally looks at you then, his eyes salty and pleading. Did you feel it coming? he asks. Didn’t it feel like the end of the world—the apocalypse? Like hell? he asks. The rawness of his voice scares you. The smell of burning is too familiar.
No, you say. No—I’m just really scared.
Aftermath
Silt and grit and cinders: these are the things I wash from my baby’s hair at my sister’s house. Only hours have passed and we’re in water again, bath-bound this time—trying to forget that dappled glow, the sky above us catching alight. My ears hiss with the echoes of that deafening crackle, made by a hillside of eucalypt leaves curling with heat. The small floral jars of cream, untouched—stacked in my sister’s cabinet—show me that she is still not happy, that she is still trying to smooth herself into something she’ll never be. The baby makes a small noise, something between a sigh and a hiccup, and I think of our bathroom cupboard, filled with things now burnt: the small bottle of tea-tree oil, a pale-yellow plastic toothbrush, cotton balls and an unworn blue coral ring.
Interviewer: How long did you shelter in the dam before the fire rolled over, before your neighbour—a true Aussie hero, some might say—discovered you and your little girl?
Interviewee:
The tap dribbles cool water over my sunburnt knees. I pause when the pressure stalls—creating a low bellow-creak from the wall-covered pipe. A small wave of residual panic pulls at forgotten parts of me before my daughter and I are back in that dam: the fire about to roar over us like an aeroplane leaving. My throat narrows, then my lungs bloom, before I regather enough to promise my baby her favourite for dinner.
