Ash Road (5 page)

Pippa felt dizzy and hot and bone-weary, unable to pull herself together. After a while she realized that she was sitting up in bed and that the hands of the little clock on her dressing-table showed twenty minutes past five. Her mouth was dry and there was a dull ache in her head. She felt as if she had been baked in an oven. Yet, strangely, she could hear water. It sounded like the bubbling of a mountain stream. Then Julie's voice came back to her from far away: ‘Pippa, Pippa, I can't turn the tap off.'

Pippa stumbled from her bed. The carpet was wet and made a squelching sound under her feet. ‘Oh,' she cried. ‘Mum! Dad!'

She floundered into the passage. Water was everywhere. She could hear it pouring from the bath on to the floor, and she could see it coursing down the passage into her own room, into Stevie's room, even into the kitchen.

‘Oh golly...Dad,' she shouted. ‘Dad!'

She turned the tap off over the bath and stood helplessly, with water over her toes, wondering what to do. She felt limp and useless and completely disheartened. It seemed that the whole day was ruined, that it was all part of a plot to prevent them from leaving on time for their holidays at the beach. She heard the voices of her mother and father and Stevie calling from his bedroom, ‘What's the matter?'

‘Water,' she cried. ‘Water everywhere.'

Her father poked his head in through the bathroom door. He looked unshaven and tired. ‘Godfathers,' he said. ‘Whose work is this?'

‘Julie's, I guess,' sighed Pippa.

‘The little devil. I'll skin her. Bet your life as soon as you're short of water something like this'll happen.' He looked around the flooded room and scratched his head. ‘We can't go away and leave the tanks empty. Not at this time of the year.'

Pippa wilted further. This was a complication she hadn't thought of. ‘Golly,' she said, ‘I hope it doesn't mean we've got to cart well water from Grandpa Tanner's again, in buckets, like last year.'

‘Of that, young lady, there's every possibility.'

The carting had been dreadful. Trudging up and down the hill with buckets was such hard work, such drudgery, and it took so long. Pippa felt absolutely miserable. ‘Well, I guess I'd better not pull the plug out of the bath?'

‘That's right,' her father said. ‘Every drop wasted is another drop to be carted. Throw me the towels. We'd better start mopping it up.'

Mrs Buckingham, in the background, was mourning for her carpets. ‘We'll have to get them outside. I hope they don't take too long to dry. Thank heaven it's a hot day. That's the only good thing you can say for it. Isn't it a
pest?
'

‘It's a confounded nuisance,' agreed Mr Buckingham. It was rather too early in the morning—that morning in particular—for anyone to take the incident lightly. ‘I don't know. Maybe I can put creek water into the tanks, if the blessed pump will work for me. Fool of a thing it is...Where's Julie?
Julie!
'

Stevie came out of his room, rubbing his eyes and stepping gingerly. ‘What's up?' he said. ‘What's all the water? Is it raining or something?'

‘Stevie,' said his mother, ‘call Julie, will you. I suppose she's outside somewhere. And bring a couple of buckets back with you. Oh, isn't it a crying shame. And it's
so
hot. I just don't feel up to dealing with a mess like this.'

‘Little devil,' snapped Mr Buckingham. ‘Been sailing boats on it, too. She'll have to have a jolly good smack this time.'

‘She did tell me,' said Pippa, ‘but I thought I was dreaming.'

‘She
told
you! And you did nothing about it? Really, lass!'

‘I wasn't awake, Dad...I didn't...'

Stevie came back with the buckets. He was still half-asleep. ‘Can't find Julie,' he said. ‘She doesn't answer.'

‘She'll be hiding somewhere. Put your shoes on, lad. Go look for her. She won't be far. She knows she's done wrong all right. Little devil.'

‘Dad,' said Stevie vaguely, ‘I reckon I smell smoke.'

‘Smoke? What sort of smoke?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You've got a job to do, Stevie,' said Mrs Buckingham. ‘Find Julie. Now get yourself dressed and do it. And you'd better help him, Pippa.'

‘Funny, that,' said Mr Buckingham. ‘I had an idea I could smell smoke myself. You couldn't see it, lad?'

Stevie shook his head.

‘I think I can smell it, too,' said Pippa. ‘Like when the fire brigade burnt off the Georges' bit of bush last year.'

There was silence for a moment; all four of them, man and boy, woman and girl, stood in water, tensely, each reluctant to take the conversation any further, Stevie because he wasn't sure what it was all about, anyway. There was something of the ostrich in each of them; what they didn't face they didn't have to worry about.

‘We'd better clean up this mess,' said Mrs Buckingham, ‘or we'll be lucky to get away by noon.'

‘In a minute, in a minute,' her husband said. He squelched to the kitchen and out on to the steps at the back. He was frankly fearful that he might see smoke in the sky, but he didn't. The sky, perhaps, was not as clear as it should have been, but that was probably the wind, probably dust. He could feel the wind on his face, hot and positive, almost like a physical blow, and he could hear it roaring in the tall timber. He looked around, and Pippa was behind him. ‘If there is a fire, lass,' he said, ‘it must be a long way off. Nothing to worry about, I should think. Bad day, though. A shocker. It's not going to do the berries any good. Finish them off completely. The Georges won't be too happy about it. Wouldn't hurt, you know, to give them a hand for an hour or two. I would if old George wasn't so blamed independent.'

The Georges were in the raspberries, in the midst of the long rows that leaned and lurched to the wind, rows already limp from the heat, their leaves scorched.

All three of the Georges were there—father, son John, and daughter Lorna—streaked with sweat and dust, hands bleeding with the pulp of fruit so soft that it bruised at the lightest touch. They had been there since the first light of day, not from any love of the dawn, but to save what they could of their crop before the sun sucked the juices out of it. But this had happened already, really. It was a poor man's yield, what was left of it, and that was what old man George kept mumbling to himself. A man worked like a slave and what did he get for it? A wind hotter than fire on his neck at five-thirty in the morning, and a whining son with itchy feet, fretting to leap on his motorcycle and roar into town; a whining son more concerned with heroics, with the smell of smoke, than with the sight of raspberries cooking on the canes. The smell of smoke to this young man was like the smell of fox to a hound. It was the call to the hunt.

‘Forget the smoke, will you,' old man George grated. ‘If there's a fire, let someone else do the fighting. We've got a big enough fight of our own.'

John didn't see it that way. His father's self-interest and self-concern infuriated him. ‘If there's a fire,' he said, ‘my place is with the boys. It's my duty. I'm their lieutenant. What the devil are they going to think if their lieutenant isn't there?'

‘I don't care what they think. Your place is here with me. This farm's your duty. In heat like this you're a farmer first. It's your bread and butter. Fighting fires isn't.'

One hundred and one degrees yesterday, ninety-nine the day before, ninety-seven the day before that; too much for raspberries unless they were in the gullies where humus was deep and soils were moist. The Georges' raspberries were in the open, on the hillside, because they had worked the gullies for so long that raspberries wouldn't grow there any more; there was a disease in the soil that stunted their growth. This happened to everyone, but old man George saw it as one more act of fate directed specifically against him. He'd have saved his crop if it had been in the gullies.

‘You haven't had a call,' he grumbled. ‘No one's had a call.'

‘Fat lot of hope I'd have of hearing the phone from here, anyway.'

‘You'd hear the siren, wouldn't you? And there hasn't been a siren.'

‘Even that's a toss-up,' said John, with an acute sense of guilt. ‘The way the wind's blowing it'd blow the sound away.'

The old man turned on his daughter. ‘Have you heard sirens, Lorna?'

She hadn't and she had to admit it, even though her sympathies were with her brother.

‘There,' the old man said. ‘Her ears are the youngest of the lot of us and she hasn't heard anything. It's heat, that's what, not smoke—sheer blistering heat. Fryin' the sap in the trees.'

Lorna felt like saying, ‘Don't be stupid. Don't act like a stupid old man. Don't make me feel ashamed of you,' but she couldn't say it and would never say it. She couldn't hurt her father. He was hurt enough already, for life had hurt him all along the line and Lorna knew all about it. Old man George was born unlucky, unlucky in all things except his children. John was a fine son, and as for Lorna, how she could be her mother's daughter, heaven alone knew.

Lorna was capable and level-headed and supremely patient, and over the summer months this was probably just as well. The family relied upon her, heavily, for her mother was ill: emotionally ill, they said. She was a weak woman who couldn't face up to life. If she had married a banker or a prosperous storekeeper and lived in comparative ease she might never have fallen ill at all, but she had married a farmer much older than herself, a small farmer whose crops were at the mercy of the elements. They said she would get better, but it would take a long period of complete rest in a convalescent home. Lorna was part of the cure, for her mother knew that her husband and John were secure for as long as she cared to leave them in Lorna's hands. Indeed she had always relied a great deal on Lorna; far too much, probably; but she was that kind of woman. She had never realized that Lorna's childhood had been something like a sentence to hard labour, hard labour in the house and hard labour in the paddocks. Old man George didn't realize it either, but for a completely different reason. To his mind one's children were duty-bound. Life wasn't a game, it was a battle, and everyone was in it.

‘Old man George is a tyrant,' people used to say, ‘and his kids can't have much spirit or they'd buck against it.' (People used to wonder in private, though. John's tenacious loyalty to his father couldn't have been a mark of weakness.) And Lorna's friends of her own age, her school friends, were not friends in the proper sense. Most of the time they couldn't be bothered with her because she was always wanted at home, and even when she said she'd meet them somewhere she hardly ever turned up. ‘Lorna George,' they used to say, ‘she's no fun. She always lets you down.' (Pippa, too, had said it at times, angrily and irritably, though her anger was not directed against Lorna as a person; it was directed against something that Lorna seemed to stand for. Something
un-Australian
, whatever that might mean.)

It was tough luck for Lorna that school-holiday time was also berry-picking time. Berries, along with carrots, came before holidays, before anything. Young carrots were a terrible worry during December and January; in the course of a single day tender plants could die in their tens of thousands, hot sun and scorching wind could burn them into the ground, and when that happened the Georges were in for a bleak winter, for carrots were the winter crop. Carrots were money during the winter.

Night and day for weeks on end the diesel engine on the creek pumped and the sprinklers turned, protecting the carrots from the malignant heat and wind that seemed to strive to destroy them. Every three hours during the day the sprinklers were shifted, and every three hours during the night. It was an endless, wearying chore which John and his father took turn about. Unless it rained—and it didn't rain often at that time of year—they never had a night of unbroken sleep; and they were up again at dawn anyway, when the heat was really on, picking the ripe red berries before the burning sun withered them or scorched them and rendered them worthless.

It was a frantic season, a frantic struggle. Mr George would not employ pickers to help the family out, and every day the berries kept coming, kept ripening, and the hotter the weather the faster they came, until sometimes, as now, they came all at once. Mr George didn't like pickers, he said, because they trampled his strawberries and rough-handled his raspberries. They did more damage than they were worth. Even more than that, he didn't like paying them. They were a luxury, he said, that he couldn't afford. Perhaps they were; but it all added up to form part of the illness that afflicted Lorna's mother. She hated the physical misery of summer with an evil-tempered hatred. Perhaps the doctors realized that, perhaps they didn't; anyway, they took her away from it and she rested blissfully in her convalescent home while Lorna (at fourteen years and three months) cooked and swept and washed clothes and helped with the picking and snatched at her holidays—an hour here and an hour there—when her father would allow her.

To John it was painfully clear that his kid sister had a colourless life. She was much too patient, much too good-natured. The paddock was no place for a girl of her age at this hour, for a girl who had to look after the house and get the meals and everything else as well. She should still be in bed asleep instead of staining her hands almost indelibly with a lot of useless fruit, smearing dirt and juices and sweat across her face every time she brushed the hair from her eyes.

His father was a stubborn old fool; he'd call black white if it suited him. Any reasonable man would admit that the crop was a write-off and start trying to live with the idea. If Lorna were to achieve anything by being here, all right, let her pick; but this was senseless; no less ridiculous than denying the reality of the smoke in the air. Telephone call or no telephone call, John knew he should be on duty. It was his place on a day like this. It was not as if he lived and worked fifty yards from the first station; he lived and worked three miles out. It was too far in an emergency. The other firefighters would be compelled to go without him. And this would be like a ship putting to sea without a navigator.