Ash Road (13 page)

Grandpa Tanner walked from his back door to that spot down the slope a bit from which he could see through the trees to the Buckinghams' house about 250 yards away. Grandpa often went there to watch the children playing. He always knew when the Buckingham children were at home, whether he could see them or not. When they were there the house seemed to have an aura about it. No one but Grandpa could sense it.

Julie went with him, holding his hand. She loved to walk beside Grandpa holding his hand. Grandpa was nice. His hand was knobbly, his face was all withered like a dry parsnip and he walked funny. His legs were so far apart that Julie had sometimes thought of running between them.

Julie wasn't quite sure what Grandpa was, except that he wasn't people. She hadn't got round to solving the problems of old age, but she knew that he was never angry like people, and was happy to sit and play when people wouldn't, and told wonderful stories about billy-goats and little pigs and big bad wolves and Pooh Bear and Heffalumps. She used to get God and Grandpa mixed up.

‘Well,' said Grandpa, viewing the distant and apparently deserted house, ‘Stevie hasn't found Pippa yet, by the look of it.'

Julie had a lot to say about that because Julie had a lot to say about everything, but Grandpa didn't really hear her, though he had a remarkable talent for making the right sort of noise when she asked a question. It was sufficient for Grandpa's well-being just to know that she was there, just to feel the pressure of her small hand, just to think his own thoughts against the background tinkle of her almost unceasing chatter. He had addressed himself rather than Julie, though he was not in the least anxious about the absence of the two children. Grandpa wasn't in a fizz about the fire as a lot of people seemed to be. All this talk of evacuation was a lot of nonsense; certainly it was all right for the able-bodied to go out and give others a hand, but he considered it the height of folly for able-bodied people, men or women, to leave their homes in the path of the fire, whether they left of their own accord or not. It was the privilege of the householder to protect his own home.

They'd never shift Grandpa. They'd have to blast him out first.

And as for the fire reaching Ash Road, or Prescott for that matter, Grandpa had never heard nonsense like it. The authorities were talking themselves into a crisis. A bad fire in midsummer was always a serious business, but people were behaving as if a fire had never happened before. Grandpa had reached the point of switching his radio off in disgust; though almost reluctantly he had straightaway switched it on again. Every station was the same. Hysteria. Radio reporters broadcasting from vantage points, from aeroplanes, and from ‘advanced positions at the scene of the fire'. And thousands of volunteers from the city were swarming into the hills to add to the confusion; hundreds of policemen and soldiers and all sorts of people who didn't know one end of a bushfire from the other. They'd end up with a disaster all right, but it was one they would create for themselves. Fighting fires was a job for experts, for bushmen, for cool heads. They were turning it into a glorified picnic, into a holiday of fear and foolishness.

Don Buckingham, in his own way, was just as bad. Gallivanting off to Miltondale. Robertson, too; just as bad. A man's place was with his family, unless he could contribute knowledge and skill to the job on hand. Neither Buckingham nor Robertson knew the first thing about firefighting. And that was what was happening. Hundreds of Buckinghams and Robertsons and, worse still, hundreds of inexperienced youths were rushing in where angels would fear to tread.

Grandpa had a suspicion that his thoughts were beginning to argue back and forth, that perhaps he was a little anxious for the children, that perhaps the fire
could
come. After all, it had come before in his own lifetime. But surely that was different. Surely circumstances had been different in the old days, even the country had been different then. Anyway, Prescott was filling up with evacuees; there was no talk of evacuating Prescott itself. That was why he had Julie with him and the Robertsons' baby in his house. Grandpa smiled when he thought of the baby. That young Mrs Robertson had entrusted her baby to him without the slightest hesitation pleased him tremendously.

He became aware of Julie again, tugging hard on his hand. ‘Look, look, look, Grandpa,' she was saying. ‘Look at the helipopter!'

The strident beat of its engine blared suddenly on the wind and it turned, almost like a crab, several hundred feet overhead. Grandpa saw, too, in a moment of some concern, that it crabbed round, not against a background of blue sky, but against an immense buff-coloured cloud.

It was smoke.

7

Siberia

Gramps Fairhall thought for one brief moment of exquisite but incredulous relief that the engine of his car had started firing of its own accord. He had got to the stage where fact and fancy were beginning to merge, but he knew that that sort of thing happened only in dreams. His car was as stubbornly silent as ever. The sound had come from a cursed helicopter beating somewhere overhead.

He leant against the side of his car, panting, trembling, and sweating as he strained to nudge a brick into position behind a front wheel with his foot. He was frustrated, angry, breathless. He hadn't worked so hard in years, and he was determined, absolutely determined, that the car would not beat him. He'd get it up to the road if it killed him.

He couldn't see the helicopter; he could never see very far without his glasses. The distance was always invisible and the middle distance was a fog. In fact Gramps rarely actually saw a helicopter or an aircraft in the air; he knew them only by the sound they made, and there was about that sound up there an urgent and fretful note. He did not like the sound; it shouldn't have been there. The fire had not crossed the crest of the ranges; or so he believed. He knew of no reason why the helicopter should be there. Gramps did not care much for mysteries at any time, and at this moment less than usual. What was that blithering helicopter doing?

He got the brick in position and collapsed against the side of the car, listening to the sound toss about on the wind, worried by it, deeply worried. Oh, he didn't like this day. It was a bad day, an ominous day; his bones ached with fatigue and foreboding.

‘Go away,' he bellowed at the sky, and obediently the sound went away. So completely did it dissolve into the roar of the trees that he wondered whether he had heard it at all, wondered whether it was something inside him, perhaps his protesting heart.

He had cranked his car until he couldn't crank it any more, then with one hand to the steering wheel and the other clamped like a flushed and fleshy vice to the car door, he had started heaving and pushing the obstinate vehicle up the gentle but long slope from the car-shelter to the road. He was a big man with the brute strength of sheer bulk, but he was scared to push too hard, scared to give it everything he had, particularly after he had caught sight of a face in the rear-vision mirror. It was his own face and it was contorted and almost purple. It had given him a terrible fright. If he had not known that his heart was reasonably sound he would have sworn that he was about to drop dead. Yet he had pushed on, holding back the last measure of absolute effort. He had to live long enough to get the car going, to find Peter, and to get him out of these hills. By now the boy's parents would be frantic.

He knew, of course, that he should have insisted upon enlisting the aid of Buckingham and Robertson and the others. That truckload of men could have pushed the car to the road in a minute. He was a fool not to have stated his case in more positive terms, a fool to have let them go. Once his car was on the road he could coast downhill; then, sooner or later, the engine would have to fire. But Robertson had been obsessed by a single thought: to fill his truck with able-bodied men and rush to Miltondale. Gramps at least had stopped him on the road, but it hadn't got him anywhere. ‘OK, Mr Fairhall,' Robertson had called, leaning out, ‘I wouldn't say, exactly, that it was a job for you, but hop on and dig your claws in or you'll be shaken off.'

‘No, no,' Gramps had puffed, ‘I'm too old for that sort of thing. I want some help. I want my car pushed up to the road.'

‘You want
what
?'

This question had hurt Gramps deeply, for it had been followed by an unnecessarily fierce take-off, by a roar of the truck's engine, and by rear wheels spinning in the gravel, spraying stones like shrapnel. Gramps would never forget that. Robertson could rot before Gramps would buy another bag of coke or another gallon of fuel from him!

He started pushing again, lurching rhythmically against the car to rock it off the brick; then he started heaving again, creeping it up the beastly slope an inch at a time until he had advanced it another couple of yards. Then he pushed the brick into position again and collapsed again and started cursing Peter breathlessly because Peter was not there. Even a boy would have made a difference, that little bit extra, that critical difference between a solitary ordeal and a team effort.

Peter's behaviour was thoughtless, selfish, rebellious, and grossly disobedient. Gramps was furious about it. He had almost resolved to put the boy across his knee and spank him—if there was any strength left in him for so vigorous an exercise. Then he noticed that the light had changed.

Perhaps he had been aware of it, subconsciously, for a minute or two, but had been too fatigued to see it. Shadows had softened. Grass and foliage, even green foliage, had taken on an orange hue. The light was diffused; the whole world about him was flushed as though seen through tinted spectacles.

Gramps stood up straight, his sweaty hands pressed into his back. There was a spasm of pain in his back and a spasm of a different kind in his heart, his mind, his whole awareness. A great body of smoke, high up, must have passed between the earth and the sun. Despite the intense and oppressive heat, Gramps shivered.

It was bad; very bad indeed.

He was frightened, too, for though he had seen a fire or two in his time, he had not seen one here, not a real one, in his own neck of the woods. There were always two kinds of fire—the fire that didn't matter because it was somewhere else, and the other kind, the kind that did matter.

He walked out to the road, unthinkingly, gripped by the irrational feeling that if fire were to come at all it would come along the road, just as everything else that came to him came along the road. He couldn't see anything that looked like fire, couldn't hear anything that sounded like it, and he wished the long hill were not there, would miraculously sink into the earth before his eyes and reveal, however indistinctly, what lay beyond it. But the hill remained immovable. It was like a high wall that shut him in, or cut him off, or perhaps stood as a fortress that might repulse the enemy on the other side.

He took a deep breath and bellowed, ‘Peter!
Peter!
'

Peter didn't answer, didn't appear, but over the crest of the long hill came a vehicle that stopped farther up at Grandpa Tanner's gate. It was the milkman.

They carried Lorna's father to the car in the shed and lifted him on to the back seat.

It was incredibly difficult, for although old man George was wiry rather than heavy they were afraid to rough-handle him; his body felt so unnatural. He was so stiff, so unbending. Even the sound of the helicopter failed to break through to them with meaning. Although it was less than half a mile from them, they were conscious of it only as another noise in a world full of noise, a world that blustered and groaned, and slapped and swirled with the dust of the paddocks; yet a world dominated by the face and body of a silent man. Pippa was afraid that he was as good as dead already and that the curious manifestation of life in his face was an illusion. She had never before understood death in relation to people; she had never seen death; she was horribly afraid that she was about to confront it. Harry thought the man had had a stroke, but was sure he had read somewhere that the symptoms were different. Wallace was merely frightened, tense, and awfully weak, for anything that was not normal always unnerved him. Stevie was pop-eyed, as if witnessing an event that didn't belong to his own world; he trembled all over and bitterly regretted his eager offer to show Wallace the way to the hospital. He didn't want to be in the same car as this strange creature that not so long ago he had known as old man George. Lorna just didn't know what was wrong with him and didn't want to discuss it, anyway. She didn't want to distress her father—because his hearing might have been unimpaired—and she didn't want to add to her own terror.

When they had got him on to the back seat they were afraid he would fall off, and Harry had to sit against him to make sure that he wouldn't, and Lorna said to Wallace, ‘I'll come. I'll show you the way. It's my place to go with him.'

‘Well, you'd better clean yourself up,' said Pippa. ‘You can't go like that.'

‘Like what?'

‘Oh, Lorna. You ought to see yourself.'

‘What's wrong with me?' said Lorna, looking at her hands and at her clothes. She sighed. ‘What does it matter, Pippa? It's so unimportant.'

Wallace walked around the car a couple of times, with Stevie on his heels. There wasn't much room, for the shed was full of tools and sacks and empty cases. ‘It's a bloomin' awful old car,' Stevie said. ‘It's older than I am.'

‘Yeh,' grunted Wallace. ‘Older than me, too.'

There were a couple of chocks under the front wheels. Perhaps this meant that the brakes were not too good. ‘What are the brakes like?' Wallace called to Lorna.

‘You've got to pump them. Is that the word?'

‘Yeh,' said Wallace. ‘I thought so.'

He slid into the driver's seat and was confronted by a strange set of instruments that meant nothing to him at all. ‘English,' he said heavily.