Ash Road (20 page)

‘What's wrong with you now?' she yelled at him.

His reply was a plaintive whine. ‘Is it really comin' in a minute? Really and truly?'

‘Oh, Stevie! Forget about it.'

‘Don't you think we'd better go somewhere safe, like down the creek or somewhere?'

She had to talk to him; there was no avoiding it. Even though the boiling sky seemed to be falling upon her, she had to still her own panic and appear to be sensible and level-headed. ‘All in good time. First things first, Stevie.' (She sounded like a grown-up. She sounded so unreal she didn't even impress herself.) ‘When it's time to go we'll go.'

‘To the creek?'

‘No. Not to the creek. I've heard that creeks boil.'

‘
Boil?
'

‘And ponds and tanks and things like that; they boil, too. We've got to get out in the open away from trees and long grass and scrub. Right out in the open somewhere.'

‘Where?'

She didn't know. ‘We'll find somewhere.'

‘Like the potato paddock next to Grandpa Tanner's?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Like that.'

‘The fire won't burn there,' he said. ‘The fire'll stop there. It won't come any farther, will it?'

‘The fire won't stop,' she said. ‘It's not that sort of fire. Now get up on that roof. And hurry. Because I've got to get up to Grandpa's. I've got to see about Julie.' Pippa could feel her panic flooding back again: it was as violent as a storm or an explosion. ‘
Do as I say, Stevie
!'

He leapt for the lattice as if a whiplash had touched him. He scrambled up desperately, sobbing, frightened not so much of the fire as of Pippa: she was so nice one moment and so awful the next. As he crawled on to the edge of the roof he heard her again: ‘Wherever there's a pipe going down from the spout, jam some rags in it. Jam them in hard. We want the spouts to hold water, not leak out. While you're doing that I'll get more water.'

She brought the water out in kerosene tins and saucepans and jugs and preserving-pans. She scarcely knew what she was doing, scarcely knew how she threw one leg in front of the other, for all that her legs wanted to do was to fold up. She wanted to see about Julie and Grandpa Tanner, but there was so much to do here first. That stupid boy; that stupid, stupid boy. All that time and nothing done. She was splashing water everywhere and slipping in it and trying to think of all the other things she was supposed to do. What
did
one do in a case like this? What was one supposed to do?

Were there things to be dragged out of the house? Were there business papers to be found? Were there special things, loved things, that had to be saved? If there were, what were they and where were they? And where was she supposed to put them? How could she protect them? Whatever they were. She couldn't isolate them, picture them, arrange them in order of value.

There was a block in her mind, a black emptiness. Her body rushed around like a frantic thing on one plane; the other plane, the one of logic and reason, was shut off. And she knew it was shut off. There was a door she couldn't beat down. She couldn't bring her body and mind together.

A mass of things to do, and she didn't know what they were. She had known once, but she couldn't remember now. A thousand things to do, and no time, no energy, no clear direction.

And every time she put a foot out of the door there was the smoke roaring over the top of the hill behind Grandpa Tanner's place; every time more and more roaring over that hill until it stopped her and held her fascinated, transfixed; roaring over all the hills, roaring everywhere, roaring through the great valley, obliterating it, roaring through the gully at the foot of the hill, roaring through the trees along the road, roaring across the garden.

It wasn't imagination. It wasn't the wind. It wasn't blood or breath roaring in her own head. It was the smoke; it was the sky; it was the air so hot that plants were wilting and withering and birds in flight were dropping to the ground.

The roar was in the world around her, everywhere, in a world growing darker and thicker and denser; a world that was like an endless roll of thunder without lightning, without fire or flame, only noise, fearful noise, only smoke, only blackness that bore down with a weight that she could feel, with the brute force of a prodigious hand.

Then she saw Stevie. He came upon her suddenly; Stevie wide-eyed and deathly white, clinging to the edge of the roof line, peering down at her.

‘Come down,' she screamed. ‘Come down.'

12

Men Stand Up and Fight

The end was coming. Grandpa Tanner could see it with his own eyes, could feel it in his heart. The end of eighty-seven years.

He sat beside the well, a little withered-up old man (whose legs were so bowed that Julie had sometimes thought of running between them). He looked terribly alone yet he was surrounded with friends: the ghosts of everyone he had ever loved.

He sat on the stump, the same stump where he had mused in the shade on hot days these many years past; and, probably for the last time, he was filling his charred and chewed old pipe. But there was no shade today, only the lowering gloom.

Above him was his garden, overgrown but fruitful still; Jonathan apples on the wilting trees and Santa Rosa plums and the great tossing chestnuts in flower, roses full-blown and fox-gloves beaten down, and forget-me-nots thicker than weeds. And in the midst of the garden, tucked in, eighty or ninety yards away, his home, only its roof visible to him, with its inches of dust in the ceilings and its insatiable termites in the foundations and its old ornate thermometer at the kitchen door reading 116 degrees.

From time to time he called down the well: ‘Don't cry, little darling. Grandpa's here.'

Now there was a vibration in the earth and a tempest in the heavens and Grandpa remembered the psalm that said, ‘The earth shook, and the heavens dropped at the presence of God.' But this was not the presence of God; this was His absence. This was the work of man; what man had done and what man had not done.

Grandpa was not afraid; he was resigned. He had tendered his life's resignation when he lowered Julie and the Robertson baby into the well: very calmly, very deliberately, trying not to appear overdramatic. He did not want to offend the ghosts gathered around. But it was not the sort of thing that one could do naturally. It was not like dropping a bucket down forty-four feet to water or stoking up the stove or tidying a bed; it was not like anything else he had ever done. Julie sobbing and strapped to a chair that turned slowly on the end of a clothes-line, Julie with toffees and chocolates and the conviction that Grandpa had somehow betrayed her; and the baby at the end of another line in a basket secured with safety-pins and woven leather shoelaces knotted end-to-end.

Grandpa was glad he had dug the well so long ago. He had often been glad before, in the drought and the dry, but never more glad than now. He was sorry, though, that he had to leave the house to burn, for he had built the house, too, with his own hands, with boards and planks and beams he had split from messmate logs with sledge-hammers and wedges and had shaved smooth with sharp axes. All the fussy bits that his wife Marjorie (who seemed very near to him now) had wanted; the extra rooms and sleep-outs as the extra children came along; the fernery, the pergolas, the playhouse now tumbledown. Soon it would all be gone as if it had never been. Perhaps in a year or two someone else would come along and build again: a stark, bare house with a flat roof and cement walls that would never look like anything but a stark, bare house with a flat roof and cement walls. He wished he could fight for his home as he had fought once before, but he was old and frail and his place was beside the well.

Grandpa also knew that Prescott had been left to burn. No one had told him; no one had come to warn him because Ash Road was out of sight and out of mind and all its other residents seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. He knew that Prescott was empty or emptying fast because that had become the pattern. It was a new sort of pattern that he had followed with dismay from the radio until the power failed and the broadcasts mercifully were silenced.

The authorities directing the fight against the fire did not regard houses as homes, as things of the heart, but as expendable buildings that could be rebuilt after the fire from the proceeds of insurance claims. The world had become unwholesome and its values distorted, and Grandpa Tanner was glad that he was old enough to shake its dust from his feet without regret.

People were not standing up to fight as they used to do. They were not calling out of themselves the ultimate effort to survive with dignity as they used to do. They were running as they used not to do.

They were running now because at the start, before there were men enough to deploy against the fire, a few families had been ordered to run, and running had become contagious and an easy way out. As a short-term policy it was so much safer. The authorities could report with satisfaction: ‘The worst fire in living memory, but no casualties.'

And when the fire gathered breadth and depth it had been easier to abandon empty houses to it than to face it and stop it, easier to speak of a master plan and hurriedly invent one than to admit mistakes and to stand up and fight. People, Grandpa knew, were too busy looking after themselves, their own skins and their own reputations, too busy inventing excuses. If they had gone in their hundreds, in their thousands, into those gullies behind Tinley—the gullies they had left to burn because the risk to life was too great—it would never have come to this blazing moment of truth. The sky would be blue not black, and Julie would be playing in the sunshine where she belonged, not sobbing at the end of a clothes-line forty-four feet down in the wet, cold earth.

‘I'm staying with you,' he called to her. ‘I'm here. When the fire's over they'll find Grandpa and then they'll find you. It might take time, little darling; the night might come and the sun might come up again, but they'll find you. Don't cry, or you won't hear them when they come. Shout out loud, won't you? When you hear them come, you sing out: “Here I am, everybody. Down the well, safe and sound”.'

God was the friend of little children; of that Grandpa was confident. But he dared not ask God to be the friend of an old, old man. Not today. Some things were reasonable and some things were not.

Young Mrs Robertson, on the way to Grandpa Tanner's, looked back and saw Pippa's mother as one might see from a great height a stricken person drowning in an ocean of mud.

Pippa's mother looked back and saw Gran Fairhall as one might see a distant climber ghosted by gases on the face of a mountainside, giddily, as if beyond the climber an active crater were blowing up.

Gran Fairhall looked back and saw the world melting, saw fire in the clouds hundreds of feet above the earth, fire like fluid hands and fingers, like the branches of trees shedding leaves, fire flashing on and off like the neon lights of a great city.

Peter walked into the house calling for his Gran.

‘Say, Gran, I'm back. Gramps got the car ready yet?'

He hoped that the hearty tone of his voice would ward off the storm and suggest that his long absence was in order. It was a thin defence, but better than none.

‘Are you there, Gran?'

The house was dark and quiet; quiet as a tomb might be while the earth above shook to the hooves of a stampede.

‘Gran!'

He had expected to find something different; he was not sure what; but not this. Perhaps anger, perhaps tears, perhaps a house half-stripped of possessions or a house of fear, not an untouched house beset by reeling silence.

‘Gran.'

Then he saw the note on the table hurriedly scrawled by Gramps. The room was not so dark that he couldn't read it:

Edna,

Off to Miltondale with old man George. He's very ill. A stroke. Lorna needs you. Ask the Buckinghams to drive you down.

Love, Percy.

 

Peter frowned. There was no mention in it of himself, and how odd it was to see the Christian names, Edna and Percy, just as if Gramps and Gran were ordinary people. A note for Gran that she had not seen. Why?

Peter sat at the table. The breakfast things had not been cleared away. The electric clock over the kitchen bench had stopped hours ago, at 7.34. There were eggshells and bacon rinds, a carving-knife and an empty tea packet on the bench; a fallen dish-cloth on the floor; yesterday's date on the calendar still unturned. The calendar offended Peter's sense of history; the day had to be right; everything else could stay as it was. He adjusted the calendar and stared at the date: ‘January, Saturday 13.' The devil's number. He returned to the table again.

He felt restless: thought of Pippa for a moment or two, then dismissed the thought; thought of Lorna George, but he scarcely knew the girl and she'd never bothered about him; thought of Pippa again. Blow Pippa!

The air about him was in a state of constant shock; it trembled, shuddered, cracked. Something was rattling; windows, perhaps, or crockery on shelves. How like the ocean it sounded; the roar of a huge sea crashing continually on a reef.

It was silly, really, doing nothing. He felt that he was cheating himself of something, but somehow he didn't want to step outside again, not yet. He wasn't quite ready to face it. To face what? Death? Gosh, no. Not that. But he knew there was something he had to face.

He didn't want to die. At least he didn't think so, but if he didn't go outside he wouldn't see it; he'd miss it. It'd come and go and it would be all over and he'd only see the ashes afterwards—the ashes of trees and sheds and houses. But if this house burnt while he was still inside it, what then? Perhaps he could run a bath and sit in it or soak some blankets in water and pull them over his head.

Peter was becoming more and more restless. There was something that had to be done, but it failed to present itself to him.