Ash Road (15 page)

Then he reached the gate to Hobson's place, where the apples grew. ‘If you're eatin' apples, Fairhall, I hope they give you a belly-ache.'

Then he got tired and discouraged and climbed over the gate because there was a lock on it, and picked an apple for himself. It was as green as grass and he spat it out.

Then he climbed back over the gate and plodded up the hill again towards the bend, muttering to himself.

The four young people arrived at the roadside bearing old man George on the door, and placed him gently on the ground near the rear end of the car. Gramps, still with one foot to the accelerator, leant out and took a look. He took a long look, first at his neighbour, then at his neighbour's bedraggled daughter. Poor kid. She looked done in. Gramps suddenly felt profoundly ashamed of himself. Probably there was no real need for shame, but he felt it, not so much because he had been impatient with the children as because this tired old man on the ground had obviously all but worked himself to death, just as Gramps would have had to do if he had not had his secret inheritance. He had often told old man George that he had retired in comfort on the profits of a well-run farm, but only in one bumper year had his farm ever made better than wages. And old George had done this to himself to keep a disgruntled, complaining, whining woman in the comfort of a private ward of a rest home!

‘Can you get him up all right? Can you get him in?

‘Yes, sir,' said Harry.

Gramps turned a keen eye on the lad and then on Wallace. ‘Who are you?' he said. ‘Where'd you come from?'

‘They're friends of the Pinkards,' said Pippa quickly. ‘They've been trying to help us. They were going to drive the old car for us, but we couldn't find the key.'

‘All right. Get him in...Now where's Stevie with that Peter?' But Gramps's concern for Peter had undergone a change. If all these kids were mucking in, helping the Georges, why wasn't Peter? Hiding, indeed. What was he hiding for? He felt a pang of guilt about Peter. The boy was a bit of a namby-pamby.

The car lurched to the weight of the two lads as they struggled in through the rear door with the sick man, and in a moment of acute vision Gramps confronted the face of old man George at a distance of about eighteen inches. Gramps had to look away, had to turn back to the front, for he had seen more than a moment of pain; he had looked straight into a lifetime of disappointment and defeat.

‘I'll have to come with you, I think, sir,' said Harry, ‘to hold him, or he'll fall off the seat.'

‘If you think so, lad.'

‘Me, too, sir,' said Wallace.

‘Why, lad? There are others to fit in, you know.'

Wallace felt that it was very important to stay with Harry. He felt inadequate by himself. Harry seemed to understand things, to know what he was doing. ‘I thought, maybe,' said Wallace, ‘that after we'd got to the hospital you could drop us both off somewhere, at a fire station maybe. I reckon they must need all the help they can get.'

‘Yes,' said Gramps, ‘yes...That's the right kind of idea. Hop in, lad...' He turned to Lorna again and the gentleness, the concern for her that was in him broke through to her. ‘Lorna, dear,' he said, ‘you're not going to achieve anything by coming with your dad. You go inside and lie down. By the look of you, you've had more than you can stand. You've got your telephone. We'll keep in touch. If you're needed, we'll let you know. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about anything. Your dad'll soon be in good hands.'

Lorna didn't make a move one way or the other. She felt she couldn't turn away, yet she dreaded climbing into the car.

‘Later on,' said Gramps, ‘when Mrs Fairhall gets back from Prescott, she'll come down to you. We'll leave a note for her. There's a good girl. What do you say?'

Pippa squeezed her arm. ‘Go on, Lorna. You go and lie down. You'll feel better in no time, and I'll see if I can trace John. We can do it on the phone. I'll stay with you till Mrs Fairhall comes.'

‘You know you've got to go home,' said Lorna miserably. ‘There are all those things your mother wants you to do, and you haven't had any breakfast. I heard Stevie say so.'

‘My mother won't mind when she knows what's happened to you. And I can have some breakfast with you.'

‘All right,' Lorna said. She leant into the car and kissed her father, and then ran away, back down the drive. Pippa for the moment was caught flat-footed. Gramps found her eye. ‘Off you go, lass. Stick with her. And make sure she rests.'

Pippa fell back a couple of paces, then turned and went after Lorna.

Gramps said to Wallace, ‘Can you see that grandson of mine? Is he coming?'

‘No, sir,' said Wallace. ‘Not a soul in sight; not even the little kid you sent after him.'

Gramps reached firmly towards a decision. In all honesty, wasn't Peter's plight imaginary? In all honesty, wasn't the fire, no matter how bad it looked, a long way beyond that impassable barrier of water, the dam? Even if by some strange chance it did reach Ash Road it would not be for many hours, probably for days. Probably never. But old man George's plight was not imaginary.

When Stevie trudged round the lower bend a minute or two later the road was deserted.

He stopped, hands on hips, swaying. ‘How's their rotten form?' he squealed to the wind. ‘Left me for dead. Now I've got to
walk
home.'

9

The Angry Day

Peter wondered what time it was. It was not something he had to know; it was only part of his restlessness and anxiety. He didn't know whether it was seven o'clock or eight o'clock or later. The summer sun was deceptive. It was so high in the sky so soon in the day.

It was hard to say exactly what thought was uppermost in Peter's mind, for he was unable to concentrate on any one thing long enough. He knew he had to go home to Gramps but the longer he delayed the act the harder the decision to move off became. He feared the consequences of his break with Pippa but was reluctant to try to mend it in case the rift became worse. He knew it was not yet ten-thirty, when the Buckinghams would leave for Deer Sands—if they were to go at all—so the point of urgency when he
had
to find Pippa had not arrived. He was suspicious of the intentions of the unknown boy hiding somewhere in the bush behind him but didn't have the courage to turn back to face him. Facing people was much harder than following them. And he was frightened of the sky. It was so threatening, so ugly, so unlike anything he had ever seen. It was a hot brown mantle over the earth with pieces breaking off it, little black pieces of ash; an oppressive mantle that did not prevent the penetration of the sun's heat but imprisoned it, added to it, and magnified the hostility of the day.

It was an angry day; not just wild or rough, but savage in itself, actively angry against every living thing. It hated plants and trees and birds and animals, and they wilted from its hatred or withered up and died or panted in distress in shady places. Above all, it hated Peter. It seemed to encompass him with a malevolence that would strike him down if he ventured to defy it. There was a wall around him, an invisible wall that confined him to a few square yards of hot, dusty earth at the bottom of the Georges' carrot paddock. He longed to burst out, to seek the shade like the birds and other creatures, to drink a long draught of cool water, but he couldn't move.

The day was so angry with him that he was frightened to raise a hand against it.

In the house it was dark behind drawn blinds, and less hot, and Lorna said there was a jug of lemon water chilled in the refrigerator. Pippa had difficulty finding it; there was no light inside the refrigerator and everything was so gloomy. When she flicked the switch on the wall the light in the ceiling didn't come on, either. Eventually she took a glass of lemon water into Lorna's bedroom and said, ‘Do you want this, or would you rather have tea?'

Lorna drank the lemon water.

‘What about breakfast?' said Pippa. ‘Have you had any yourself?'

Lorna nodded.

‘What about a plate of cornflakes or something?'

‘No. But if you cook something I'll eat it with you to keep you company.'

‘You're to stay where you are—unless you want to take a bath.'

Lorna smiled wanly. ‘You mean I should take a bath?'

‘It's bound to help you pull yourself together. Particularly if it's a warm one.'

‘I suppose so.' Lorna lowered her feet from the bed to the floor. ‘Perhaps I will, and change my clothes.'

‘Yes,' said Pippa. ‘I'll run it for you.'

‘It's a kerosene heater, Pippa. It's so slow and makes a dreadful noise. It's not like yours.'

‘I'll manage.'

‘I'd rather do it myself. You might blow the place up. And I'd rather you tried to get a message through to John.'

‘Yes,' said Pippa. ‘I'll do it now.'

‘Do have your breakfast first.'

‘Don't be silly. I wouldn't dream of it.'

‘You're very good, Pippa.'

‘Don't say that. I don't feel good at all.'

Talking wasn't easy. It would have been better not to have tried. They had gone through a raw time together and hadn't got over it. Lorna was nerve-racked and weak. It was too soon to forget the desperation and the pain: much too soon. She felt as if her soul had been stripped in front of Pippa, and she was still embarrassed, still faintly humiliated. For Pippa, though a friend, was not an intimate friend. Lorna had not an intimate friend in the whole world. She needed time to get her dignity back, time for the aches of her heart and head and body to heal a little, to be washed over by fresh events. And Pippa, with unusual intuition, all but guessed the state of Lorna's mind. Indeed, she needed time herself to recover from the bewilderment of confronting, for the first time in her life, a fellow human being in an hour of cruel crisis. Anguish had never touched Pippa's life before. It shocked her.

‘I'll ring the fire brigade first,' Pippa said. ‘And if they don't answer I might try the vicar.'

‘Oh,' said Lorna.

‘What is it?'

‘I should have thought of the vicar before.'

‘Goodness. I don't know how you thought of everything that you did think of.'

Pippa went into the living-room to the telephone, and Lorna walked slowly to the bathroom. The matches had apparently fallen from the window sill above the water-heater and dropped in the gloom behind the bath. And the light wouldn't come on. She flicked the switch up and down several times, uselessly. She thought the globe had burnt out until she tried the switch in the passage outside. The passage light didn't work either.

And when Pippa picked up the telephone it was dead; quite dead. No matter how often she tried she could not produce the dial tone.

She heard Lorna behind her. ‘It won't work, will it?'

‘No...'

‘It's my fault. I should have made sure before I let Mr Fairhall go.'

‘Oh, Lorna. How can you blame yourself for that?'

‘The power's off, too.'

‘I know...'

‘It's not my day, is it?'

Pippa didn't know what to say. Lorna sat heavily in a deep, leather-backed chair and closed her eyes. Her face was that of a grubby little girl. She looked about eight years of age.

‘Oh, Pippa. It isn't fair...'

The boys didn't know that Gramps was short-sighted. They assumed that the spectacle of the inferno along the crest of the ranges failed to excite his comment because it was less serious than it looked—though it looked serious enough, heaven knew. As soon as the car breasted the top of the long hill the horizon of the fire boiled into their vision. Smoke boomed from the horizon. The earth seemed to have split for miles along the ridge of the range, allowing vast reservoirs of smoke and flame, long trapped beneath the surface, to come gushing out. It was an explosion, a continuing explosion of unimaginable violence, of dark and fierce turbulence. It seemed inconceivable that any living thing or any structure built by man could survive within it. It seemed that it must melt the earth.

Wallace turned and found Harry's eyes. Harry's eyes were wide; appalled, unbelieving. They said to Wallace, ‘Did we start this? This
can't
be our doing!' If Harry had spoken the words Wallace could not have heard them more clearly. But Gramps Fairhall didn't express surprise or the vaguest concern; he merely kept his eyes on the road ahead, plodding on at a steady thirty-five miles an hour, avoiding the more obvious debris peeled by the high wind from the trees by the roadside. He came to the crossroads, past the potato paddock lying fallow, and turned west towards Prescott. The signpost said,
Prescott
2
miles.

‘He doesn't seem worried,' Harry said to himself. ‘It can't be as bad as it looks.'

And Wallace said to himself, ‘Blowed if I know, but he's a cool customer.'

Down in the dip, about a mile and a half from the township, Gramps stopped the car short of a tree lying across the road. They had come upon it suddenly, round a bend. It was an old blackwood, a giant, rotten at the butt from the ravages of beetles and grubs, that had borne to the road a horizontal mass of fractured boughs and branches and foliage more than twenty feet high. It would have taken a dozen men with axes and saws an hour to clear it away.

Gramps grunted. ‘We'll have to go round by the highway. There's no other way.'

He turned and drove back to Ash Road, then headed northwards again, towards the source of the unspeakably horrid sky, round Ash Road's curves, past the deserted acres of James Collins and Sons, the nurserymen, until the highway intersected the old road and cut it off at Bill Robertson's corner. There another signpost declared that it was still two miles to Prescott. The looming, tortured mountains seemed very close. Beyond the grey and wind-whipped surface of the dam the dark-green forest climbed towards the smoke, and closer, much closer to them, a line of cars packed with women and children and household items crawled in the direction of Prescott. And barring Gramps's further progress was a barrier across the road, a barrier he had never seen before. ‘What blithering impertinence is this?' he bellowed.