Ash Road (21 page)

He stood up and twisted his hands together. He developed an irritating twitch in the corner of his left eye. Fresh streams of perspiration started from his armpits. But he wasn't frightened; he could say that to himself quite positively.

Perhaps he had better go outside; perhaps even down to the Georges', since Gran wasn't around to do it. But it was so far to the Georges'. Perhaps he ought to go down to the creek and swim in the dam or down into the pit under the house—the cellar, Gran called it—where the apples and the blackberry wine were kept.

He had been so sure that Gran would be at home. It made everything kind of awkward. It was hard making a decision like this on one's own. He didn't want to hide himself away from it as if he were scared of it, as if it were going to burn him up or something.

Pippa knew she had to get to Grandpa Tanner's, and then past Grandpa's to the potato paddock lying fallow. There was no other clear land except odd paddocks of a couple of acres. That meant she had to run towards the fire, not away from it. She knew that if people were to survive a fire like this one, they had to have space around them, open ground and open air, or lots of water. She did not reason this out: she knew it by instinct.

And people must not panic. If they panicked they had to be dealt with roughly. And she herself was so near to panic. Who was to deal roughly with her, except herself? She beat the palms of her hands against her brow, hurting herself.

She had to think. She had to break down the door that shut her body and her brain into separate compartments. She had to calm Stevie, had to calm herself. Their lives depended upon her.

‘I want my teddy,' Stevie said.

He had grown out of his teddy-bear years ago. ‘Not now, Stevie. Please, not now.'

‘Let me get my teddy. He'll burn all up.'

These were the important things. These were the things she had to think of. ‘Quickly. Get him.'

He ran into the house and she waited for him. The seconds seemed like hours. And in those seconds she saw fire in the smoke-swirling gully at the foot of the hill below her. Flames appeared in the trees, like unexpected lights at night; flames in the Buckinghams' own trees not three hundred yards from where she stood, the trees where she had searched that morning for Julie.

‘Oh my goodness.'

She wanted to break, but she held on. She wanted to scream, but she didn't. She held on and waited for Stevie and hurried him away from the door before he had a chance to look downhill. She bustled him, smothered his sight with her arms and her haste and her urging: ‘Now to Grandpa's. Quickly to Grandpa's. As fast as we can.'

‘I don't want to go that way,' Stevie said.

She held his arm and dragged him to the gate. He seemed suddenly to be opposing her. His face looked different, and he drew his breath through his teeth.

‘I won't go that way.'

‘You will!'

She didn't really want to go that way herself. Instinct tempted her to run in the opposite direction, away from the fearsome sound, away from the roaring smoke clouds billowing over the hills, away from the heat that came like a mighty wind.

He fought against her and tried to break her grip. She didn't know where her strength came from, but her grip on his arm was brutal.

‘You're hurting!'

She dragged him after her. Grandpa's gate looked a mile away.

‘No, no, no,' he screeched and kicked at her ankles, and she lost him. He broke free and ran from her.

‘Stevie! Come back! You mustn't run that way!
Come back!
'

But he fled downhill, weeping; and how could the legs of a little boy run faster than a fire that might be about to burst above him?

Pippa went after him, at first because she had to, then because she couldn't stop herself. Her weak-kneed stride settled naturally into the downhill grade. She reached out her hand to grab Stevie, but he was always a little ahead, screaming, ‘No, no, no.' Then, when she could have reached and grabbed him, fear held back her hand: fear of turning again to face the uphill grade. It was so much easier to run down than up, to turn one's back than to present one's face.

It was too late for Grandpa; too late for Julie.

‘Oh, Julie,' she sobbed, despising herself as she ran on downhill with her arm outstretched to grab Stevie, to stop him, yet never quite reaching him.

They would end up at the Georges', under the sprinklers, but only if they ran faster than the fire.

13

The Moment of Truth

Peter opened the front door—as if to step outside to take a breath of air—and walked along the veranda. He had started coughing spasmodically and his twitching left eye was watering. He wasn't crying, really; it was the smoke. At times visibility was not much more than fifty yards; at others it opened up.

Peter didn't know why he walked along the veranda. Possibly it was because of what he had to do. Something said to him: ‘Get outside and walk along the veranda.' So he did. It was as if Gran had said it, or Gramps. He saw, then, the fire burning in grass against the fence. It was not a very big fire; it looked almost neat and tidy, like a fire purposely lit to clear the fence line. Yet it was a bigger fire than Peter could have stamped out with his feet or extinguished with a bucket of water. He was not sure what he should do about it. He didn't particularly want to do anything except watch it. Perhaps there were others?

There were, too. Curious little fires. Dozens of them. There were tails and puffs of smoke up and down the road, across the paddocks, even in the garden. There were hundreds of little fires falling out of the sky, riding along on the wind like nightmarish birds, some coming straight down and very fast, others whirling round and round, others passing high above the trees.

Against a clear blue sky and green grass the sight would have taken his breath away; now it was gruesome and ugly. There seemed to be lightning flashes and thunder claps rolling one into the other to form an almost continuous explosion; and outside the thunder claps a vibrating roar and gusts of wind like steam under pressure buffeting every living thing from all directions. Trees and plants were bowing and bending back and forth, to left and to right, in complete disorder, as if suffocating, as if throwing themselves about in search of cool, fresh air. There were spirals of wind laden with leaves and dust, and the gate, off its latch, banged open and shut. And there were other sounds: giant trees along the roadside groaning mightily, and other living things that Peter could not see, screaming.

This was not how he had imagined it would be. He had imagined trees burning like candles, silently; forests of beautiful candles, and people running with their arms in the air like supplicants praying. Something like Christmas in a cathedral; reverent, majestic, awe-inspiring. Not brutish like this.

Nor lonely like this.

No one to talk to. No one to watch running by with their arms in the air. No one to share it with, not even Pippa, because Pippa wasn't special any more.

Peter felt confused and disappointed and incomplete. Simply to occupy himself, he walked off into the garden, into the stinging spray of grit and dust and leaves and ash, first to let the fowls out of the hen-house, then to stamp on all the fires that were small enough to stamp on. Those that were too big he didn't bother about. He moved from fire to fire, his eyes smarting painfully and his breath coming with labour. A single cinder like a branding-iron dropped out of the sky and burnt through the shoulder of his shirt. It hurt terribly, and he had to tear the shirt off to get rid of it.

After that he went back to the veranda and stood with a hand pressed to his shoulder, watching the fires multiply. Slowly his lips drew back and his teeth began to show. He was seeing things very clearly, too clearly. He was not dazed or dulled or paralysed, but he still felt incomplete, desperately incomplete, even after the last shades of the fire he had imagined fell away.

A fire that burned minutes before it arrived was quite beyond imagination. He was certain that some fires were starting where cinders had not dropped, because now the house was burning also, inside.

Grandpa Tanner put his pipe down on his tree stump, and poured a bucket of water over himself, and called down the well, ‘I'm still here, little darling. Grandpa's going to make it dark now. And remember what Grandpa said. When you hear them come, shout out loud, as loud as you can, “Here I am, everybody. Down the well, safe and sound”.' With difficulty for the wind was troublesome, he slid two sheets of corrugated iron across the top of the well, and weighted them down with rocks, and painted on the iron with black enamel:
Children Here.

Then he curled up on the leeward side of the stump, drew a wet woollen blanket over himself, and bit very hard on the stem of his pipe.

When Pippa's mother stumbled through Grandpa Tanner's gate, fires were burning in the long grass near the house and a clump of young gum-trees was weirdly flaring as if the leaves were formed wholly of gases. But of eerie destruction she was not aware; she saw only young Mrs Robertson returning from the house, reeling rather than running, almost as if swimming in a current of unstable heading. They closed into each other's arms and held on.

‘They're not here.'

‘Has he left a note?'

‘Nothing.'

They clung to each other, fighting for breath, producing their voices out of a groaning emptiness.

‘Better try my place.'

‘I couldn't run.'

‘You'll have to.'

They got back on to the road.

‘He couldn't have got far. He's so frail.'

‘Perhaps the police?'

‘Yes, yes.'

‘The children are all right.'

‘Of course they are.'

‘We'll be safer at my place. The lawns are cut. The garden's clean.'

They tried to run again. Air burned into them like fire. Their lungs were like fire. Their throats were like fire. And Peter saw them coming, reeling, their arms at their sides, not waving over their heads. They didn't seem to see him until they were almost upon him.

‘Gran's house is on fire,' he said.

‘Peter!'

‘Gran's house.'

Pippa's mother was almost past speech, almost fainting.

‘Peter, Peter. What are you doing?'

‘Gran's house is on fire.'

‘The children? Why aren't you with them? Didn't you go with them?'

‘Go where?'

‘Haven't they gone?'

‘Gone where? Pippa went home. Where's my Gran?'

‘Pippa went home?'

‘Where's my Gran? Her house is burning down.'

‘Oh, the children.'

‘Where's my Gran?'

‘Coming.' Mrs Buckingham waved an arm at the long hill and said, ‘You stay with us.'

‘My Gran is back there?'

But the women were not there to answer him. They were running away from him.

‘My Gran is back there?'

He couldn't see her. She wasn't coming at all.

‘Back there?' Peter cried. ‘Not back there!'

The women had told him to stay with them, but a single pace after them was all he could take.

‘I'm coming, Gran,' he said, and went. This was what he had had to do.

14

The Crucible

At the house the women found the buckets of water, the kerosene tins, the preserving-pans, the jugs, all the utensils that Pippa had filled with water; and the fire in the gully at the bottom of the hill, now raging, and more fires over near the eastern boundary fence, and others up the hill towards Grandpa Tanner's. Smoke even seemed to be coming out of the ground, out of fissures or cracks. There was smoke even where vegetables were green.

Pippa's mother croaked the names of her children—if they had been there they probably would not have heard—and went down on her knees near the back step where the water was spilt and wept without tears, without sound. For the moment, all that had sustained her had gone.

Young Mrs Robertson floundered past her into the house, calling for her baby. She found her way back to the kitchen and fastened her fingers like talons to the frame of the door, drawing deep breaths of heat and smoke and ever-sharpening vapours. She was a pretty young woman usually poised and well-groomed. All that had gone now; all her looks, all her grooming, all her poise. ‘Not here,' she said, looking down through the wire screen at the woman kneeling weakly on the ground.

‘Just gone,' said Pippa's mother, ‘only moments ago.'

‘But where?'

‘God be with them.'

‘The boy hasn't come.'

‘What boy?'

Peter ran hard. Like most thin people, light-limbed and wiry, he was very fast on his feet. He had often surprised people by his speed, even his house master at school (his house master, however, had done nothing about it, because Peter Fairhall was a difficult child, a loner, usually stuck in a corner somewhere with a book).

Peter ran now as he had never run, with elation. He knew without being able to frame the words that he was running into manhood and leaving childhood behind. He hated childhood. He ran away from it with joy. He was ready to prove himself a man; ready to be baptized a man with fire, whether he survived the ordeal or died from it. He didn't care about the cost, except that his Gran should live to know—and that everyone should know—that her life had been given back to her by him.

He ran, not blindly but with difficulty, into the face of fierce heat, expecting his Gran to appear, wraithlike, out of the smoke. She didn't. He drew nearer and nearer to the tempestuous crest of the long hill, the blind crest that marked so distinctly the division between the little world where the Fairhalls and the Buckinghams and the others lived, and the beginning of the great world beyond. But still she did not appear.

He came to the crest, and a spectacle of outrageous splendour stormed and funnelled and sheeted. The fire was a mile away, perhaps only half a mile, he did not know; except that the dam had not stopped it, that in the midst of it the dam bubbled and steamed unseen, and the Robertsons' blew up unseen, and the Collinses', unseen, shrivelled into the earth.