A Constant Hum

by Alice Bishop

  Blueberry pancakes, Elk-Elkie? I ask in a soft voice, not unlike the one I comforted her with in that clay-coloured water a few hours before. She faces me in the bath, the whites of her eyes still pink from smoke. Her tiny eighteen-month-old hands, fleshy and perfect, cocoon my thumbs. The fresh water is cool and clean, comforting—nothing like the dam water, smelling of pond and rain-soaked dark earth.

  Safe enough now, but uneasy in valley suburbs—built in ordered red brick—I pull my baby out of the cool town water and up onto my chest. There’s a comfort to having her close; in her breath I can still hear what everything was like before. I imagine my sister restlessly tapping her small neat nails on kitchen granite. She has what people would call a nice house; she buys lifestyle magazines filled with pictures of tanned, bearded lumberjack types walking flaxen paddocks alongside wool-clad wives.

  Tracey, my whittled-back sister, is happy in her unhappiness; she embraces her discomfort as a sign of strength, that she’s motivated to do better: pay more for softer hair; eat less for smaller clothes; live quietly for unlined skin. The stacks of magazines my sister piles high in shiny bedside bundles, they spur her on.

  Interviewer: Many people die when they find shelter in dams or tanks—known, often, by authorities as ‘death traps’. Tell us your message, as a surviving mother who may have—potentially—made a fatal mistake?

  Interviewee:

  Mum’s sandy voice finds a way to squeak through cracks in the bathroom door. Her already high and uneven tone has risen: It just doesn’t seem real, Trace, she says, then: They could have burned too.

  It will be weeks before I can wash the earthy smell of silt from my baby’s hair, along with the sharp tang of chemical ash: seemingly soaked into skin.

  Rowena! Mum yells this time, piercing and a little too much like a shriek: Are you okay in there?

  The baby’s tiny hands are in smaller fists. The backs of them are turning blotchy and white. Her short eyelashes, thick, are still wet and stuck together in clumps.

  We’re okay, I whisper. We’re okay—hey?

  Grey flecks whirr about us, the air-conditioner vents pumping in hot air and remnants of ash, as we drive to the IGA. My frost-lidded sister, serious, looks at my bath-freshened baby in the rear-view of her Jeep like she, too, is now nothing but news. I think of Tracey’s perfectly pale soaps, smelling of rosemary bush, of lemon and, now, a little, of soot. I think of her closets of neatly folded bed linen and her drawers of matching underwear—lacy and white but still sensible: not too small. I watch a firefighting helicopter through the window. Hours late to the scene, it hovers over the burnt ranges above us as the weather begins finally to break.

  Rowena? Tracey asks, interrupting my thoughts. Her tone is sharp, demanding an answer this time: Has the media called?

  Mum cuts in—rambling about getting more blueberries, then about the baby’s strength and how she needs to eat.

  I feel something like love for my mother at that moment—with her silver-flecked hair secured in a loose but neat knot on her head. For my sister, I wonder what would have to happen for her to go without eye shadow. Even if hospital-bound and burnt—hands wrapped in gauze and sticky Vaseline—Tracey would somehow still somehow be pearled.

  What do you mean, Tracey: the media calling? I ask from the back seat, not really wanting an answer. The baby stays quiet on my lap, her lashes still damp.

  Interviewer: Can we talk about your husband?

  Interviewee:

  As we step out into the car park, the helicopter leaves the ridge behind us and disappears over the mountain—towards the city, where it usually sits: shiny and sleeping. With the hum of its blades fading, I feel Elkie calm in my arms. Heavy drops of rain begin to splash darkness onto the footpath about us.

  You need to be heard, Rowie, my sister says, pulling her green bags from the car. I am surprised she is still so particular at a time like this. An interview is good professional experience, and—with everything gone—you’re definitely going to have to find extra work. My sister actually says this, her eyes shimmering as she waits to see me flinch.

  But something softens in me and I stay quiet like my baby, her hair still wet and smelling of my sister’s jojoba shampoo. As we walk across the empty car park a tied-up ridgeback begins to howl—its owners have probably left for the city, or are over at the emergency-relief centre on the oval. Poor animal, my sister says as the baby sneezes, the sound another comfortable reminder that she is still here.

  The smell of burning things is not a friendly smell—not like childhood bonfires or Sunday toast, blackened and scraped; there’s a harshness to the air about us. My baby looks up at me, the scratches on her face the same deep red as the old hatchback—left behind at our disappeared house.

  It’s all okay, hey, Elk? I say, smiling down. She almost smiles back, and I feel the heavy fog that follows panic lacing the abandoned valley street.

  Quieter than she’d ever been, the baby—puffy-limbed and perfect—clung to my water-stained shirt as we walked from the reeds, the ash of people’s houses falling about us in gumleaf-sized flakes. Hours, days, years: I couldn’t have said how long we’d been in the dam—huddled like animals ourselves, hiding from heat.

  I’m coming for you! a short man yelled through the reeds, seemingly appearing from nowhere—his sun-marked cheeks shining with sweat, maybe tears. Still umber from flame, the sky about his shoulders made him glow. I knew it was evening. And because I was talking to someone, I knew then that we were still alive.

  The radio warnings hummed through the man’s peeling ute as he drove me to my sister’s red-brick house—the only place I could think of going, despite hoping for somewhere else. Still teary, he wore a thick woollen jumper with the sleeves pushed up and dirty white tennis shorts. Punctuated by coughs and steely gasps, the man spoke too quickly of his apple orchard, charred, and told me that the CFA—tangerine-uniformed and sorry—had turned up late. Look at my arms, he said, a bit too abruptly, and so I did: at the blisters beginning to bubble and at the wire marks, burnt into too-smooth and shiny skin. We’re lucky, hey? I said, perhaps trying to convince the both of us, the smell of singed hair lingering on him.

  Before the man and his shimmering cheeks appeared, burnt things fell down about us like summer rain: the smaller grey flakes of ash disappearing softly, and the larger embers sizzling out more dramatically. Our breathing became raspy as bits of what were probably neighbours’ houses landed on the murky surface about us. I don’t know how many times I was convinced—along with a wave of glittering panic—that my fleece-haired baby had stopped breathing. It was then that—despite Elkie—I just wanted everything to stop.

  I know that feeling, the man with shimmering cheeks told me later. I wanted to just sit down by this old truck, love, and never get up.

  Interviewer: What did you find in the ashes? Any jewellery? Photos? For our audience, now, what would you take with you—if you got another chance?

  Interviewee:

  Salty cheeks, softening bottles of Mount Franklin, my baby’s small shorts darkening with fear: this is what I remember of fleeing, the house, and what people will refer to later (in hushed voices) as Everything: Gone. But too many stayed behind by houses, only to lie down, smoke-choked, alongside garden hoses—warm and limp.

  I could tell my sister Tracey this, but she would just pretend to listen. Only days will pass before she’ll mention the loaned DVD set, casually—her voice smiling semi-sympathetically through my borrowed Nokia: Did I lend you any box sets, sis? she’ll ask. Then, Mum’s silk wedding dress—you also had that, yeah?

  It’s hard to check, Tracey, I might say, thinking of the photos I’d neatly filed of newborn Elkie, her tiny face rosy and squished. I mean, I would go look, Trace, but—remember—it all burned.

  A small sigh will whirr through the phone. Oh, Rowie, my sister will say, pausing heavily for emphasis: I’m not upset—just keeping track of what I’ve lost, you know, too.

  Intervie
wer: I hear you lost a dog, along with everything else? What advice do you have for the pet lovers watching now?

  Interviewee:

  On the way into the studio my sister preens me, offering lip gloss, thick and glassy, while brushing unseen things from my borrowed shirt. The baby clings to me like a souvenir-clip koala as we walk backstage. There are trays of disposable cups filled with ice water and boxes of doughnuts, the expensive kind with icing the colours of earth. Elkie clings tighter as we pass a curly haired man in a lanyard and headphones, along with two white women laughing about something in their sprayed-terracotta skin.

  We’re okay, I whisper, my baby’s eyes fluttering with near-sleep. We’re okay—hey?

  Studio lights beat down on me, making the sweat rise in beads across my heavily made-up top lip; my sister has made sure my freckly skin is thoroughly covered in department-store foundation, thick as dam-floor clay. The interviewer is wearing small silver heels, strappy enough to show white-painted toenails. Her name is Bianca—even I know that. She forces a smile from the TV: ads for milk-coloured vitamins and under-eye cream.

  I remember that day so well, Bianca, the interviewer, is telling me before we start—her voice low and reflective. Her face is pulled tight and veins, aubergine, pop out along her wrists. Everyone remembers what they were doing the day of the fire.

  An assistant comes to brush something over my cheeks. I can’t see my baby from the stage, just a row of black cameras—lenses glinting in semi-fluorescent light. Victoria’s Darkest Day, Bianca continues. We were all so shocked and so scared.

  Yes, I try to say—but I am frozen in my chair and no words are leaving my mouth. Yes, I try to say, though all I want to do is stand up and say: No, Bianca. Then: No, not really—it was just silt and grit and cinders; not everyone was there.

  Dunhill

  Women who haven’t smoked for years accept cigarettes from friends they’d known from high school, but never talked to since. Our lungs are as good as burnt now, anyway, one short, peroxide-haired mother jokes. Her bony left hand shakes—cupping a black-plastic-lighter flame.

  Stay / Go

  Go, you say, before Pete gets in the mustard-coloured Nissan—paint melting—and rolls the window down. There’s still ash in your hairline and milk on your skin. His voice crackles, eucalypt-dry, as he tells you to get in, quick—and it’s lucky the old thing even starts. Smell the glue of your shoes, the rubber soles too, melting, as you stand still above cracked brickwork—laid down long ago, one catalogue-quiet Sunday afternoon. Come, he used to say in his quiet Pete way. Sit closer, he’d say: back when you took your coffee with sugar, with milk, and never thought, really, that you’d end up—blush-cheeked and salt-browed—on the wrong side of the news.

  It’s only been hours, probably two, since the front passed: the roar of something huge and hungry above you, but still clinging—a cicada-strong ring in your ears. Huddled, you’d made yourself small as possible—concrete tanks beginning to boil alongside you, steam coming out of the release hatch, just metres above your head. That pale-blue water-tank concrete, usually cool to touch in February heat, had singed the pale-blond hairs from the backs of your thin wrists. Violet, Vi-baby or Shit: you hadn’t heard Pete yelling anything from the house as you imagined the front door, redwood, catching light. In that moment, chemical smoke blurring the edges of things, you’d never known anything so swooping—so quick.

  Washing, oddly unburnt, still hangs like a sign: the linen shirt you once wore to the office—yesterday, when your cupboards were full of sheets and your drawers still full of spoons. Get in the bloody car, Violet, your husband repeats—yelling now—from that mustard-coloured Nissan. Remember running from him and the burning house, the red heeler trembling along at your side. I really can’t do this now, he says, his voice softening to plead a last attempt in that firm, work-learned way. You see the whites of his eyes are red now: with something like sadness, with smoke from the home you’d been happy in, just burnt: all ceilings, high, and reclaimed-wood doors. My Vi, he’d once called you, Sunday mornings over toast. My Vi, he’d once said, jokingly nudging you at the supermarket while shopping for pineapple icy poles, for ordinary white bread.

  Please go. I’ll be okay, is all you can say. Then just: Go, again and again—your heart fluttering like a rabbit kit, caught; your head filled with the sight of the house falling in on itself, something like scratchy childhood footage on repeat. You see Pete again by the kitchen sink, before it all: the amber-red hail and the house’s thickly painted walls, blistering. Saying things like, We’re staying, Vi, to defend. Saying, Nothing’s gonna take our house from us, baby—not fire, not anything. But it’s over now—that idea that there could’ve even been a choice. Pete, he has finally listened and it’s just you now, the red dog and the smouldering telephone poles—lining the road like felled trees—as you watch that mustard-coloured Nissan roar off up Skyline Road.

  Stay, you mouth to the heeler aside you, russety, her eyes also irritated and damp. You both look to the sky as fat drops of ash-laced Saturday rain speckle the dry earth, the twisted tin: home. A charred hen lies on what was once driveway—wings spread. You remember earlier hazily, like it was already yesterday: the pumps melting, then Pete running about yelling, Woollens, wet them—so you did, with everything from the fridge. Rev milk, Cottee’s, SodaStream: it all got soaked in.

  There are no sirens ringing out now. No helicopters hover, dumping borrowed dam water over neighbours’ sheds, over cars—all larger than your own. Rainbow trout; yabbies, blue—you steady your breath by imagining dam-bound things, not copper-coloured hail, falling from a cleared sky. Eyes closed, you see fish scales shining—shimmering up from the bed of soft grey ash that carpets your home. A car horn sounds, followed by some kind of crack; there’s no bush left to muffle anything anymore. The dog whimpers. Stay, you say, calmer now, the heeler panting a little less—smiling in her way. Stay, you say. Everything’s going to be okay.

  Out of Range

  You don’t hear the four shots fired out—echoing along the ridge. Or the heavy thuds of three horses collapsing, one taking that second bullet to fold down: ‘An act of kindness,’ she’ll tell you later, try to explain to anyone who’ll listen. ‘I couldn’t let them burn.’

  Burning the House

  Sit, right here with me—your Blundstones up on the balcony wire and my father’s honey-coloured whisky in your glass. You’re on the decking of our Christmas Hills house, the Yarra Valley stretching out like patchwork between your knees. My cream-polished hands, freshly freckled, shield my face from January sun as Mum, shining, listens to a radio hum inside—her hennaed hair tied back off her face. Yell out if you want food, she calls, and you look up at me like you’ve won something well-deserved—your smile not yet pyrite and my bones not as tall, then, as they later became.

  Cotton-backed curtains and knitted limbs: we sleep quietly in this unburnt house, still untouched by the disasters, natural and otherwise, we’ve seen on the news. Before bed, the port-coloured couch holds us, lighter then, as we flick through channels like we’re flipping tea-stained catalogues of the valley’s still-standing, suburban-same homes. Not this one, though, with wasps in the walls and its eight-foot reclaimed doors. We overcook toast in its taffy-wood kitchen, a smoke-alarm trill sending a crimson cloud of rosellas fleeing. You, you jump too. No, you’re not used to the burrs in your socks and the dust in the air. But Ali, you say, your mint-menthol breath meeting my own, I’ve never felt so at home.

  This house will burn soon, bushfire blue: the colours of bruised thighs, of eucalypt gas, of June sky. The leftovers, crumbled concrete and clusters of powdery bricks, will eventually go. People passing, years from now, will never know; the new house won’t seem like a replacement. Neighboured by silver sprouting wattle and mountain ash, regrown—it will again be a home. So just lie with me now, quietly, in this forgotten house like you used to—your hand on my hip and a faded cotton T-shirt rolled up under our necks. The ceiling abo
ve us is knotted pine, not yet burnt. Glow-in-the-dark stars and many moons still gleam their soft phosphorescence, stuck up long ago.

  Streetlights, lamplights, pleading phones: the nights are brighter than usual, those first few nights without walls. I walk through our burnt home in my half-awake dreams—up the stairs with their badly stapled carpet, through the front yard of grevillea and purple agapanthus, clumps overgrown, then back inside, down the photo-lined hall. Linen cupboards of dip-dyed tablecloths, bedroom drawers of Explorer socks, baby teeth and the carefully illustrated letters Dad wrote Mum, years ago. Journals printed with coffee-cup crescents, a puppy-chewed table leg—those small stories will disappear as the February wind carries ashes to the valley below. That first love for me, second for you—it will also be blown.

  So sit, right here with me, years ago and before it all goes: your still familiar feet up on the balcony wire and the valley stretching out below. Be with me, quietly, before the fire comes and you start to look at me like you’re watching the news. We still have the currawong calls and the photos, lining the halls. I can still feel the scratch of your cheek on my own.

  The aftermath, bushfire black: the colours of bruised eyes, of chemical smoke—that dark shade of your last, defeated sigh. But we find something in the steel-grey ash and the cicada shells of burnt-out Holdens lining our road. We know, now, that things can go.

  Acknowledgments

  This collection keeps those who died on Black Saturday, and those who knew them, in mind. Although we lost a house in the East Kilmore fire, I can’t imagine how it would really feel to lose family / friends / a partner in that way—what it would still feel like, today.