Flames

by Robbie Arnott

  Let me give you an example: after moving to the area it took him less than two days to make a mortal enemy of Gladys Grapefruit, our postwoman. After receiving his first lot of post (which included, I believe, nothing more than a power bill and a welcome letter from the local Scout troop) Mr Hough stormed into the post office and demanded to know how the authorities had discovered his address. Gladys (who, at the age of one hundred and two, was the country’s oldest public servant) told him that she was merely delivering his mail, and Mr Hough responded with a storm of screams, threats and general carry-on about the so-called invasion of his privacy, before returning home and setting fire to his letterbox. Undaunted, Gladys continued to deliver his letters by sliding them under his front door. Mr Hough countered her efforts by putting posters up all over town with such slogans as EXTERMINATE ENVELOPES and GRAPEFRUIT: SOUR FRUIT, SOUR WOMAN and RALLY AGAINST POST TERROR, THIS SUNDAY, 3 PM. Shortly after tearing down these posters (and celebrating her victory with a long night of sherry, bingo and dancing), Gladys died in her sleep. Notwithstanding her advanced age, many locals believed her feud with Mr Hough was the cause of her death, and from then on he was marked as a strange character who was best left alone.

  But despite the distance the townsfolk kept from Mr Hough, controversies continued to occur. He fell into the South Esk and tried to sue the water company; he got into arguments over the price of potato cakes at the fish-and-chip shop; he challenged the milkman to a duel at high noon; and on one sweltering summer’s day two local lads, Garry and Barry Chinstrap, accidentally trespassed on his property while taking their motocross bikes for a ride. After spying them through his kitchen window, Mr Hough tracked them all the way to the Avoca Arms, where they were enjoying a post-ride beer, and started shooting at them with what looked like an ancient air rifle. He missed both Garry and Barry—according to them, they had never seen someone less skilled with a firearm—but he did manage to clip my poor Larry (who was having a counter lunch) on the ear. Incensed, all three of them chased Mr Hough out into the street, where Garry, Barry and Larry gave him what was described around town as a ‘thorough belting’.

  And do you think he learned anything? Do you think a public hiding convinced him to change his ways? If so, you are mistaken. Only days later he committed what was perhaps his worst crime of all: distributing flyers throughout the region claiming that my beloved Country Women’s Association was a secret arm of the government, with the sole aim of infecting the population with mind-control chemicals, based on the fact that we do not include lists of ingredients on our homemade cakes and jams. Needless to say, my fellow women and I were shocked to our very cores, and spent hours (hours!) tracking down and destroying the ridiculous material. To this day we still get asked if our recipes include microchips or pacifying agents or uncommon levels of oestrogen.

  But Avoca had the last laugh on Mr Hough. Just as we were drawing up a petition to have him banished from the municipality, a rumour began spreading through town that he had died, which was soon confirmed by the local constable. Hough’s body had been discovered in his house by one of his clients. No cause of death was given, but most of us believed a heart attack or some other stress-related illness had taken him, no doubt brought about by his explosive temper and violent constitution. Relatives were searched for to identify the body, but none could be found. I wouldn’t have been surprised if his family had disowned him many years ago, and besides, it wouldn’t have made any difference, because Mr Hough’s body had apparently been in such a state of deterioration that a visual identification would have been impossible. The local wildlife had broken into his house and gnawed upon his body—water rats, in particular, had taken a liking to him, feasting upon his toes, fingers and face.

  Given the grisly nature of his passing, I suppose it would be appropriate to say something nice about Mr Hough. But I’m afraid I can’t; he was a terrible neighbour, an unpleasant person and a poor citizen. Compare him to any of the upright people of Avoca (Lovely Larry! Garrulous Gladys! Gorgeous Garth!) and he is left wanting, every time. I’m sorry to say it, but the town is much better off without him. And if you think I’m being harsh, you could check with the client who found his body—he seemed as unconcerned by Mr Hough’s death as his neighbours were. A thin, jittery and softly spoken young man, he told the constable everything he knew in a dispassionate and polite manner, all while paying me the utmost respect. Afterwards he thanked the officer for not detaining him and then departed, taking the half-finished coffin Mr Hough had been building for him. Oh, there was something else—my mind is running away from me with all these stories. He also took a golden-brown pelt that had apparently been clutched by what was left of Mr Hough’s fingers.

  But enough of Thurston Hough! He is as unpleasant in death as he was in life. I believe the time has come to delve into one of my most significant triumphs: my back-to-back victories in the annual Avoca cake-decorating contest, thanks to my secret lavender-icing recipe that doesn’t actually contain any lavender—it’s just sugar, butter, purple food colouring and marijuana that Larry grows in his backyard.

  GRASS

  He had seen many things that filled him with quiet wonder, down at the end of the world. Sky-blanking ice storms, blown up from Antarctica, pelting hail hard enough to scar volcanic rock. Lightning fires that scorched and regenerated the great buttongrass plains. The misting spray of whales; the bulleting breaches of Oneblood tuna; the swishing luminescence of the southern lights, painting the winter nights loud. He saw it all, all that was small and huge and wild and strange, all down there in his far-flung place of work.

  He’d been the ranger in the Southwest National Park for ten years. Before that he’d been a junior ranger idling around the mild white-sand reserves of the east coast. Before that he’d been an apprentice carpenter, before that a woodsy teenager, and before that a quiet child, hair constantly strewn with leaves and fingernails thick with dark soil. After school his mother would welcome him home by locking him outside, where their cottage bordered a great forest of eucalyptus and sassafras. She’d press a handful of dry Nutri-Grain into his palm, nudge him towards the trees and go back inside. To many this might seem cruel or selfish, but to the child-ranger it was a gift: a licence to throw himself into a world that was forbidden to others. For two and a half hours every afternoon he’d climb trees, follow tracks, build shelters and swim through the dense green, always feeling a buzz of belonging in his throat and chest. His mother would unlock the back door at dinnertime.

  But none of these buzzing, forested afternoons—nor his time later in the gentle east—prepared him for life in the southwest. In his decade there he’d become used to the sights, the storms and beasts and sounds and power, and the waves of wonder that they washed through him—although the first few times it happened, he had been unsettled. He was there to stop poachers, maintain trails, preserve the environment, not to be bowled over by the bright, harsh beauty of his surrounds. Yet soon this bowling over became such a common occurrence that he began to accept it, and once he accepted it he allowed himself to enjoy it: to let the wonder take his soul places it hadn’t been since he was a child in the forest, crouching in a branch-built shelter, thirsty for the taste of all the wild things in the world.

  The wonder became a regular part of his days. Watching a seal dance away from a pod of hunting orcas affected him differently to seeing the sky flash purple and iridescent—but he always felt comfortable, appreciative. The wonder was always welcome, and because he welcomed it he’d forgotten it could shock him. It could move him, pause him, shake him, but never with rage or violence. Not until he saw a woman leaking fire at Melaleuca.

  They had come to his hut in the morning, the two young women, and at first he hadn’t believed them. They were speaking fast about Allen, how he’d gone mad. Cruel. Wrong. The deaths of the wombats—deaths the ranger hadn’t known anything about—had fouled up the man’s mind, and now the farmhands were afraid. They wanted to leave, and they wanted t
he ranger’s help to do it.

  But as far as he knew, Allen was fine. A quiet man, but a sane one. A good farmer. A friend, or the closest thing to a friend he had down here. So he didn’t give these women what they wanted, not straight away. He told them he’d visit the farm. He would see it all for himself, and he would sort things out.

  He walked through the frost and wind to find Allen. An hour later he called the parks office and requested a plane for the farmhands.

  At dusk, as he watched the plane descend, he reached out and tried to feel the wonder. The wings were shuddering in the wind as the sun, yellow and huge, dropped into an orange horizon. Behind it there was nothing but whipped clouds and glinting water. The world was wild and lonesome, and all of this should have been enough to trigger the wonder—but he couldn’t feel it. What he’d seen at the farm was replaying in his mind, blocking everything else. The wombat corpses, lying in the field. The thronging cormorants and their flashing bills, streaked with cold blood. Allen’s shouts and threats and red-rimmed eyes. His haggard face. His froth of madness.

  The closest thing the ranger had to a friend.

  Along with the plane he had called for a doctor, but they wouldn’t be able to send one for perhaps a week. He’d have to leave Allen alone until then. There were plenty of things to do: trails to check, supplies to restock, data to gather, but each night he would have to return to his hut, a short walk from Allen and the farm. It would be a week of tension and sorrow. He thought about writing his mother a letter—something he didn’t often do, even though he still loved her as fiercely as he had when a child—but the thought petered out as he realised he didn’t know what he would say to her. It was all too strange, too unpleasant. He didn’t want to burden her with harsh stories.

  The plane landed, skidding in a jagged path across the airstrip as the wind refused to release it. The buttongrass was blown flat. The plane could not return now, not in this wind. The pilot would have to stay in one of the bushwalking huts, like the farmhands, and leave in the morning.

  The ranger walked to the plane, trying to focus on the hard wind, the clear sky, the things he loved and found wondrous.

  Something flashed in his dreams, something bright and vivid and real. He woke up. In the darkness he pulled aside the thick curtains in front of his window. All he could see was grass and snow and the small huddled huts. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything. Maybe there had been a stray fork of lightning in the sky; maybe the night was fooling him; maybe his fears were planting colours in his head.

  But as he was drawing the curtain he saw the blink of a light—something blue, flickering near the farm. He felt his guts drop, and he fumbled for his boots. When he lurched out into the night, with a thrum of fear flicking through him, it was gone. The wind blew and bit. He shoved his hands into his pockets and stumbled off his porch towards the border of the farm, waiting for the light to blink again, but it didn’t. All he could see was the farmhouse, and the fields, and the lapping shore of the harbour. And the stars: above him they were as hard and sharp as ever. For a moment he stared up at them, at their harsh, pure light, and tried to convince himself that everything was okay. That he would soon be back in his bed, and he would wake peacefully in the new dawn.

  Then he heard the noise: the staccato thumping of boots. The fear thrummed again, and he stared up at the hill closest to the farm. Two figures were running down it: the farmhands. He began moving towards them, instinct and curiosity pushing him forward, but after a few steps he was stopped by the next thing he saw: the blue light. It wasn’t a torch or a siren or cornflower lightning, or any other source of light he’d imagined. It was fire.

  Blue flames licked over the top of the hill, steaming the dew from the grass and rushing into the stalks. The flames were low, but they roared down the hill at a tremendous pace, and they were leaving nothing unburnt. The farmhands kept running, and the ranger hung back on the gravel, stupefied. He had to do something, but he didn’t know what. Thoughts of fire hoses, of the small extinguisher in his cabin, of rowing out into the harbour all thrashed through his mind, but it wasn’t until he heard a shout and a bang from behind him that he remembered: they had a plane.

  The shout had come from the pilot, who must have been woken by the noise of the fire, and the bang had come from him yanking the plane’s door open. He yelled something at the ranger, waving an arm towards the runway. The ranger turned to the farmhands, who were now less than fifty metres away. He began shouting and motioning towards the plane. They had slowed down, and their strides were heavy, uneven, but when they saw him they changed tack and picked up speed, sprinting for the plane. He ran now too, beating them there by a few lengths.

  As they stumbled towards the stairs the pilot started the engine. Its ticking bellow swamped the ranger’s ears, just as he started telling them to keep moving, to board the plane, because the farmhands weren’t climbing up. The short, red-haired one—her name was Nicola, the ranger remembered—was talking to the taller one, Charlotte, who looked shaken. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, her hands wobbling by her sides. The ranger began exhorting them again; but then he was stopped. Not by Nicola or Charlotte, nor by the pilot or the approaching flames—by what he saw next.

  A thin trail of blue tears, the same hue as the fire on the hill, was falling from Charlotte’s eyes. The ranger thought she was burning, that sparks had caught in her hair, but then he realised, both understanding completely and not understanding at all: the tears were flames, and they were coming from within Charlotte.

  As a fat globule of blueberry fire welled from Charlotte’s right eye, Nicola reached out and touched her cheek. The ranger was sure she would be burnt, but at the touch of skin on skin the drop of fire fizzled out. All the other flaming tears stopped, too. Charlotte shook her head, as if coming out of a trance. Nobody spoke. The engine sputtered and groaned.

  The flames in the distance were getting closer, and the ranger heard the pilot yelling at them, and finally heeding his urges the farmhands launched themselves into the cabin. One turned back to help the ranger through the door, and together they slammed it shut and shouted for the pilot to take off.

  The plane rose as smoke ripped up from the fields. The ranger watched as the farm burned blue, fast and fierce, and the flames tore across the plains.

  The pilot asked questions that nobody answered. A field of stars pocked the sky. The flight was dark, but short. The small farmhand kept her hand on the taller one’s wrist the whole way.

  The sun rose as the plane fell, diving to scrape its wheels across the tarmac. A pale capital dawn. The ranger promised to explain everything to the pilot, to make sure he was paid overtime, double time, stress pay, whatever he wanted, but he needed to speak to his superiors first. Come with me, he told the farmhands. Everything’s going to be all right.

  The tall one looked like she might bolt, but the short one pulled her along, fingers still gripped on a pale wrist. In the reception area of the airport police office he motioned at a few stiff chairs: Wait here. I’ll sort it all out. He turned to hit the domed silver bell on the desk and waited for someone to appear, a figure of authority he could tell about the fire so that word would spread among the police, the fire service, the rescue patrol, his own department, anyone who needed to know. He’d sit with the farmhands as they were interviewed. If they didn’t want to talk about where the flames had come from, he wouldn’t say. He hadn’t wanted to see what he’d seen, didn’t want to know what he knew. They could make something up about campfires or faulty flare guns, and he’d nod and keep his lips shut.

  Nobody came to answer his tapping of the bell. He turned to the farmhands, shoulders shrugging, air pushing from his mouth in exasperation. He looked around the small room. He checked the toilet, called their names, pushed his head out the door towards the terminal, but he couldn’t find them, and even as he looked he knew he wasn’t going to.

  He heard the sound of a throat being cleared. A policeman was standing at the desk, l
ooking harassed. The ranger tried to smile, and he tried to come up with something to say. But the disappearance of the farmhands had dragged the weight of concern away with them. He didn’t need to tell anyone about what he’d seen. Who would believe him, anyway? And who would it help? He was just a ranger, there to report a fire and make sure the pilot was paid.

  That’s all he needed to be. That’s all he needed to do.

  As he walked back towards the desk, fumbling for the right phrases, he was thinking of what Melaleuca would look like now. How the fire, having razed the vegetation, would have burned itself out on the rocky shores of Bathurst Harbour. How the charred humps of buttongrass would already be gleaming with morning dew, hours after burning to their roots. How new shoots would soon spring forth, green and vital, stronger than before. How these bright blades would summon wallabies and potoroos, and with them would come wild wombats, down from the chalky mountains, which would reinforce any survivors from the farm. Birds would follow, too, in the coming months of spring. Orange-bellied parrots, bright and loud in the greenery, and seabirds of all kinds, gulls and sandpipers and oystercatchers, wheeling low among the loose clouds. Whales would slide along the coast, spraying their life-breath high, smacking the dark water white.