He would write to his mother about it, telling her what he was seeing, how he was living every day amid it all. As she read his words she would look out the kitchen window at her own forest, seeing in the swaying trees the origin of the man he had become, the things that had grown and nourished him.
Everywhere the world would open up to him as it used to, huge and humbling; he would be dwarfed by its colour and power. He would forget the farmhands and the fire. In the shudder of his skin, in the run of his blood, he would feel the wonder again.
SNOW
A memory, sharp as snapped glass: her father coming home on a summer evening. The folds in his face were lined with salt, cooked to a dense crust by the sun through a long day on the water, and his legs were stumping slowly up the driveway—stiff and heavy, knackered. Yet when he looked up to see her waiting behind the rails of their deck his stride lengthened, his knees lifted higher and the salt crust on his face was cracked open by a spreading, full-toothed smile. Their eyes would lock, and the smile would remain in place all the way up the drive, whether it was a good day or bad, right until his scarred hand plunged into her mass of copper ringlets and mixed them into a maze of knots. And even though there was never much else—no hugs, no deep talks, no dancing together at a cousin’s wedding—it didn’t matter, because it was always enough: the smile that cracked the salt. Even thinking about it now, years later, it still bloomed in her a warmth she could not control or describe, for she knew: she caused that summer smile. She stretched out those tired strides. She split the face he showed the world, and drew his love towards her.
Nothing could conjure the same feeling. Not the apprehensive giddiness of unwrapping a birthday gift, not success at school, not the dizzy red swirl of high-school crushes. Nothing could match the blaze of love in her father’s smile. Nothing, that is, until the burn that spread from her stomach the first time she touched Charlotte McAllister.
She’d grabbed her without thinking. The flames were spreading across the field; they needed to run, but Charlotte wasn’t moving; she was just pushing out heavy breaths, staring at Allen’s fleeing figure while she continued to leak her flames. Nicola grabbed her. That’s all it was—a thoughtless lunge, fingers wrapping a wrist—and in that moment of contact she felt it: the burn. Through her throbbing fingertips she could feel the source of the flame, pulsing out from deep inside Charlotte. Then she felt it waver, slow, and die, and in that instant she knew: she had done this. Her touch had travelled through Charlotte’s heat. She had quenched the rage; she had stopped the fire.
Charlotte’s face went slack. They saw the flames on the ground, how they were spreading and growing, and then they were running, flying, numbing, landing and soon sitting in that airport office. As the ranger turned his back Nicola was thinking only of the police, what they might do, how she’d explain it, how crazy it all sounded. She thought Charlotte was too exhausted to talk; she hadn’t said a word since the fire. But as Nicola’s thoughts turned to Allen and his madness, she felt a hand shaking her knee. Charlotte was flicking her eyes between Nicola and the door: let’s go.
And Nicola—who was always so measured, so thoughtful, so full of plans and logic and duty—was standing up and following her. Quiet feet touched grey carpet. The latch clicked shut. In moments they had made it to the other side of the airport, to the long-term car park where Nicola had left the old station wagon her parents had lent her. The key twisted: once in the door, again in the ignition. A cold engine ticked into life. Tyres bit and rolled. And before they could be stopped, before a calm and clever plan could be teased out, they were on the highway, going north.
Charlotte slept. Nicola drove, tired enough to feel sick but not to sleep, for she was full of running, leaping thoughts. Thoughts of blue fire and unburnt skin. Of her father’s smile; of her fingers on a cold wrist; of different kinds of burns. Of police; of her family; of Allen; of the ranger; of eyeless, blood-painted wombat bodies; of what lay ahead, and what she’d just left.
Thoughts of where they were heading, and where they should hide. Her mind circled and dragged, tripping on memories of places she’d felt safe. Unil she knew where they could go.
When Allen had brought Charlotte up from the dock Nicola was tired and in desperate need of a friend. She’d known it would be this way—nobody goes to Melaleuca, not in winter—but she’d thought she’d be able to handle it. The work was rewarding, the wombats filled her with joy, and the experience, for someone her age, was impossible to find anywhere else. But she needed human contact beyond quiet conversations with Allen and occasionally the ranger, so when she saw Charlotte get out of the ute she felt a sudden, bursting thrill. A visitor; a companion; maybe even a friend. At the very least, someone to talk to.
Charlotte barely looked at her—not there in the driveway, and not for days afterwards. Even when they were introduced and Nicola found out she’d be staying to work on the farm, Charlotte’s eyes would not drift from the ground or sky. It was as if she was trying to blend in with the fields and snow. As she showed Charlotte around the farm Nicola let her eyes linger on her face longer than was polite, trying to provoke her into looking back. Nothing. The thrill Nicola had first felt ebbed away into a small, sharp pebble of disappointment.
Charlotte was good at the work, Nicola soon learned. The wombats took an instinctive liking to her, and she didn’t mind the dirt, the cold, the frost. She continued to keep to herself. The evenings in the farmhouse were quiet and dull. It stayed that way for a few weeks, and it probably wouldn’t have changed all winter, if not for the deaths and the change that came over Allen.
There was only one good outcome to his increasingly violent mood swings: it brought Nicola and Charlotte closer. At first they just discussed what was happening, but as Allen became more erratic they began spending more time together. The wombats kept dying; the madness in Allen kept growing; and then they were walking everywhere together, making sure each knew where the other was, and soon Charlotte was sleeping on the floor of Nicola’s bedroom.
By the night of the fire they were creeping to the edges of a friendship. A friendship defined by shared danger, but a friendship nonetheless. There was too much happening for Nicola to dwell on it, but she could feel it happening: the closing distance between them, the comfort of company, the urge to reach and touch.
The station wagon rolled on through the Midlands, past farms, fences, gold-grey cylinders of harvested wheat, over barren Spring Hill, past the sandstone of Oatlands and the splatter of Tunbridge, heading north, north, north. An hour later Nicola twisted the wheel left, and they rolled down into the Meander Valley. Stubbled Midlands gave way to the spiderish irrigators and green glow of dairy country. Dolerite tiers rose at the western edge of the flatlands, dark and steep, their jagged columns free of the gum forests that clung to their slopes. The rattling wagon passed the slow South Esk, fields of patchwork cattle, the occasional berry farm, and then swung northwest at the pull of Nicola’s arm. Her eyelids were pulling, too; she’d barely slept for two days, but she did not want to stop, not when they were so close.
At Sheffield, her head rocking forward, she parked outside a small supermarket. They had closed in on the great tiers; the closest one glinted with clean snow as it loomed above the town. It was late afternoon. The farmers were still in their fields, schoolchildren had come and gone, and the town was slumped in wintry solitude. She should have slept, if only for a few moments. But Charlotte was still sleeping, and she did not want to wake her. Instead she wandered into the supermarket and bought enough food to last them a month.
On she drove, leaving the highway, up a skinny country road, past the snow-capped tier and into the forest on its foothills. The road twirled into the thickening treescape, dropped into a gorge, passed a rumbling hydro station and rose sharply up the other side of the valley. On this zig-zagging incline Charlotte stirred. Nicola had hit a rock, and the extra pulse of vibration in the window was finally enough to wake her up. She rubbed at her eyes a
nd asked: Where are we?
Nicola, yawning. Nearly there.
Charlotte shifted in her seat, straightening up, looking around. Nearly where? She had fallen asleep amid blunt crops and grey fields, but now she saw a dense, deep dark-green wall of tree ferns, myrtles, moss. Nicola yawned again. Somewhere safe.
The car climbed on, and the world was not done morphing. As Nicola piloted them ever upwards the crowded gloom of the ferny forest thinned and was gradually replaced by shorter trees and bigger gaps in the foliage, gaps wide enough to reveal shards of the darkening sky. As they crested the last rise, the green walls disappeared entirely. They had emerged onto a flat plain. Here there were no forests, no ferns, no lushness of leaf or frond or fungus. Stunted snowgums, their twisted trunks a melodic whirl of beige-green-brown, gnarled out of the ground sporadically between the field of lichen-scarred boulders. Flat ponds of standing winter water were scattered among the rocks, along with stubbled bushes and pale deadwood, and everything was smattered with drifts of bright snow. It took them both a few minutes to adjust to this strange, muted landscape. Charlotte was still groggy, and Nicola was exhausted; by the time either of them had thought of anything useful to say Nicola was swinging left again, at the urging of a sign: Cradle Mountain.
Charlotte threw her a glance. This place is full of tourists.
Nicola shook her head, as much to keep herself awake as to disagree, and mumbled: Not all of it.
Charlotte looked back out the window. They were slowing down now, as black speed humps and yellow wildlife signs began to crowd the road. Small huts and wooden lodges poked out of the thin bush. Car parks and walking trails huddled close to the asphalt, and then they were passing a sprawling visitor centre and a parks office. Charlotte pointed at the sign. I came here as a kid.
Nicola, blinking furiously. Me too.
From here the black road narrowed further, winding and dipping amid the snow, until Nicola lurched the car into a small car park beside another pond-pocked plain. Before her eyelids could drop she swung her legs out of the car. The highland air bit at her face. She moved to the boot, where she grabbed a coat, beanie and gloves from the emergency bag of clothes her mother, a tourism operator, always kept in the car. Charlotte had gotten out too, her questions hijacked by shit and fuck and holy shit, it’s fucking freezing as she joined Nicola to rug up. Nicola grabbed the rest of the clothes, half the groceries, and pointed across the plain. A trail of wooden duckboards led through the snow towards a scraggly forest. This way. It’ll take fifteen minutes.
Charlotte picked up the rest of the groceries. Where the hell are we going?
Nicola let her foot hit the first duckboard. It won’t take long. Another heavy step. Please. She pushed on, not looking to see if Charlotte was following but knowing she was—she could hear her boots landing on the wet wood behind her, a thudding monotone that through her exhaustion still somehow lit the kindling in her gut.
Across the boards they trudged, wind cutting them, snow tripping them, until they reached a rocky path that wound between the whorled trees. Up they went, past a cold mountain stream that gushed between banks of snow. Five minutes later, as Charlotte stumbled over a great boulder and let out a foggy gasp, they found the source of the stream: a slate-grey lake. Its surface held a pattern of tiny waves, roused by the wind, and on every side it was bordered by black cliffs of steeply climbing, sharply crumbling dolerite, covered in patches by snow. Nicola joined her on the boulder, two words escaping between her clattering teeth: Crater Lake.
She then lifted an arm towards something Charlotte had not seen: a large hut, built of stone, sitting on the edge of the lake.
It belonged to a friend of her father’s, a fish trader named Oshikawa. He had bought it two decades earlier as a place to escape the ocean. Unlike Nicola’s father he had no abiding love for the coast, or the fish, or even his job. He viewed fish meat and saltwater simply as necessities of his career—privately, he preferred the dark mountains in the Central Highlands. At the end of each fishing season he would sell the last of his stock and relocate to the hut for at least a month. Here he would hike the great peaks that scraped the sky in every direction, often staying out for days, only returning to his hut by the lake when he’d run out of food.
He liked it up here so much that he occasionally invited friends to come enjoy it with him: fellow wholesalers, visitors from Japan, and the odd client and their family—like Nicola’s father. Nicola had been here a few years earlier, not long after her father’s seal died. And now, without Oshikawa’s permission, she was back.
Nicola’s plan was simple: to bring Charlotte somewhere fireproof. Up here there were stone walls, and a stone roof, and stone-cold snow in every direction. The vegetation was not thick and it was always wet. Outside their front door was a deep, ice-edged lake. If Charlotte’s fire escaped again there would be little for her to destroy, and lots of ways to put out her flames. Here they could rest. Nobody would find them. Summer was months away, and Oshikawa would be too busy to come on a holiday. They could stay as long as they needed to—as long as Charlotte wanted. And once she was sure she had her fire under control, once they were sure she wouldn’t burn down any hospitals or playgrounds, they would head back to the capital. They would go to the police, answer their questions and apologise to the ranger. Everything would be okay.
That was it: hide, recover, re-emerge. Nicola hadn’t factored herself or her needs into this plan; that wasn’t her way. Since her days on the deck, cracking open her father’s smile, she had lived by putting others first. Her first instinct was always to help, to shrink back from the front and push others forward. It wasn’t pure selflessness; she drew pleasure from how she could affect others, and when they showed her gratitude she bathed in it, glowing in the knowledge that she, and only she, had made them feel that way.
But this plan with Charlotte—this was different. Nicola was being driven by something more powerful than a desire to help, more urgent than a taste for gratitude. Something red and foggy. It knocked, fast and firm, through her veins.
Inside the hut there were two blanket-covered couches, a sparse bookshelf, an open kitchen adorned with hanging cast-iron frypans, two doors leading off into bedrooms, one into a bathroom, and a huge black wood heater that dominated the eastern wall. The walls were built with stacked slate, held together by some kind of mortar. They seemed impractical, especially for somewhere this remote, but Nicola didn’t care; slate would not burn. The floors were wooden and covered by a thick layer of faded rugs, but nothing could be done about that.
The temperature was no higher than outside. Charlotte began gathering twigs and paper from a wicker basket by the fireplace. Nicola watched her, thought about helping, then collapsed on a couch. Sleep swallowed her; she didn’t even have time to take off her boots, or watch as Charlotte searched the hut for matches before realisation swam across her face and she returned to the wood heater, peeled off a glove and gingerly shook her wrist until a shower of blue sparks sprayed out from beneath her fingernails onto the dry fuel.
Nicola was woken sometime between two and three in the morning. She opened her eyes, and in the cave-dark hut briefly lost her bearings. She couldn’t remember where she was, or how she had gotten there, but then she realised that Charlotte was sleeping on the other couch. Calmness replaced confusion, but only for a moment. Her nostrils zinged, and she realised what had woken her up: smoke.
She turned to the wood heater, expecting embers to have fallen from its mouth, but the door was closed. A blackened log lay on a bed of glowing coals, and no sparks, flames or smoke were leaking from it. Nicola turned back to Charlotte, looking harder through the darkness, and saw a thin blue trail worming out of her ear. It had reached the cushion beside her head—a wispy, plasticky stream of it, rising up into the cabin. As Nicola scrambled towards Charlotte the smoking patch of cushion erupted into a small blue flame. With one hand she smacked it out, and with the other she rested a palm on Charlotte’s hot cheek.
Through her palm she again felt the pulse of flame from within Charlotte’s body. Again she felt it flicker out. She felt the burn in her stomach, hot and red, and knew she’d doused the fire. Again she didn’t want to let go.
The flame died. The fire stopped leaking from Charlotte’s ear; her eyes flew open. Confusion appeared on her face, and she raised a sleepy arm to brush away Nicola’s hand. Nicola pointed at the burnt cushion. Sorry. But you were…
Charlotte looked down at the black mark. Her nose twitched. Shit. She rubbed at her ear. Sorry. I’ve got to get a handle on this.
It’s all right, said Nicola.
Charlotte stopped rubbing her ear and stood up. No, it’s not. She strode to the basket near the wood heater. Go back to sleep. I’ll stay up.
Nicola was going to argue, but Charlotte was poking more wood into the fire and paying her no attention. Her eyes were focused on the heater; the conversation was over. Nicola slunk back to her couch and lay down, watching Charlotte tend the coals through half-closed eyes until sleep found her again.
Hours later, as light crawled into the hut, she woke back up. Charlotte was in the kitchen, unpacking groceries into the small cupboards. A metal kettle was boiling on top of the stove. As Nicola rose from the couch Charlotte brought her a slice of buttered toast.
In the bedrooms they found proper highland jackets—thermal, fleece-lined, waterproof—and with the sky clear of storms, and with nothing else to do, they went out into the winter. Black spurs of the mountain range poked high and sharp above them, daggering up into the pale sky. The sheer cliffs that fell away from these peaks revealed great faces of jagged Jurassic rock. Down where the land was less vertical snowgums gnarled their way out of frozen dirt, their trunks a patchwork of grey-brown-green, as if all the colours of the forest had poured themselves into a single species of tree. Small bushes huddled among these low gums, and between the trees and bushes currawongs flapped, their white tail feathers contrasting against their black plumage and yolk-yellow eyes.
Flames Page 11
