Ash Road (22 page)

It came upon his vision as something living and evil, shapeless and formless, constantly changing, huge beyond comprehension: an insane creature of immense greed consuming everything around it whether the taste pleased it or revolted it, rejecting what it did not care for only after it had mauled and savaged it, then pitching it aside or spitting it into the heavens. The heavens shrieked with the indigestible things that the fire hurled from its mouth, spraying after them a froth of fury, flaying them with its ten thousand tongues, whipping before it the terror-stricken survivors of the deep green forest: screaming rabbits and wallabies, bush rats and mice, milch goats and cows, dogs and cats, children's ponies and wombats as fat as pigs, lizards and snakes, and creeping and crawling and flying things. But not Gran Fairhall.

Lorna and Graham stood side by side in the mud of the carrot paddock, holding hands. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to do. They seemed to have known each other all their lives; and they knew that they would continue to know each other for the rest of their lives, whether they lived scores of years or only a few fiery seconds.

They stood saturated in the mud within the arc of the sprinklers from the farm buildings and the tall trees, watching fires appear mysteriously in the encircling forest, watching flames start up suddenly and gather in the gloom.

Then little by little, in spasms, the sprinklers began to fail. Those higher up the hill ceasing before those lower down, they drooped and tiredly retracted, as if the nozzles of the sprays had wearied of giving out and wished now to take back.

‘What's wrong?'

‘Perhaps it's for the best,' Lorna said. ‘We would have scalded to death if the creek had boiled.' But she thought: ‘Dad has done it again. Run out of fuel.'

The women put plugs in the wash basin, the sink and the laundry troughs and turned on all the taps. Before they had finished, the water had stopped running. The tanks were empty.

They dragged the carpets into the open away from the house, down to the wet ground at the foot of the path where the household drains seeped into the earth and where the overflow from the bath had earlier found its way. The cord carpet from the hall, crisp and dry; the mat from Stevie's room, and the deep rug from Pippa's room, still limp and damp; frantically they placed them one above the other, drenching them with water from buckets and kerosene tins, preserving-pans and jugs, from all the utensils that Pippa had filled. Then they crawled underneath them.

Peter ran on as if drunk, pushed by fierce winds that now roared not over or through the monstrous thing that filled the valley, but towards it; winds sucked in from cooler places that fed smoke and dust and debris in gigantic clouds, in gigantic whorls, back into the furnace; winds that deflected the searing heat of the advancing furnace, and deflected smoke and vapours and dust and rubbish straight up to the sky. Cool air and boiling air met thunderously, explosively, and ahead of it Peter found his Gran at the roadside.

Though she had fallen heavily she felt no pain. She was past feeling, past caring; mercifully dazed and stupefied.

‘I'm here, Gran,' Peter called.

She gave no response.

‘Gran! You must get up!'

She didn't move.

‘Gran,' he roared. ‘Get up!'

She looked at him vaguely as if confronted by a stranger, and deliberately, positively, he slapped her face. He shocked himself, for the impact stung through his hand and through his head. It sharpened her and it sharpened him. ‘Get up,' he screamed.

And she got up, heaving her bulk on to her feet, tottering, until he slapped her again. ‘Move,' he screamed. ‘Move yourself,' and grabbed her arm and dragged, and she came after him like a reluctant beast yoked to a heavy load.

He fought off the road, through the ditch, heaving and pulling her into the sharp scrub, the scrub like needles—the acacias, the sword grass, the dogwood, the brambles, the burrs—and tumbled her through the wire fence into the potato paddock. She collapsed into a heap again, limp and quivering, and he slapped her back on to her feet with ferocious determination, screaming at her, ‘You will not die. You will not.' He propelled her across the face of the hill, across the line of the furrows, driving her like a broken-down bullock, until a huge blast of incredible heat seared out of the north across the open ground. He had an instant's warning, a reflex, and threw her down with paroxysm of strength, and dropped beside her, and the blast went over him like raw fire.

If Peter had still been a boy of only thirteen years, he would have cried then from the pain through his thin singlet and from the bitter, bitter disappointment. They were going to die here; they were never going to rise again because the abhorrent thing raging and writhing across the valley was upon them. But he didn't cry, didn't have time to cry, because suddenly, blasting back out of the south, came cooler winds: winds still of great heat, but cooler, roaring back in again with dust and debris in stinging clouds.

He found his feet again, almost blinded. The face of the hill was still there, like an ocean rock swept by spume, or a desert prominence lashed by sand, or metal liquifying in a crucible. The face of the hill was there, but it was no longer motionless, no longer immovable. It seemed to slip and slide, shivering like an agitated fluid, heaving. It would not remain fixed, and Peter dropped again, felled by heat and sound and dizziness.

It wasn't the hill; it was in his head, in his body, in his blood.

He got up again, and his grandmother rose like a drugged creature of low intelligence responding to unwanted orders, and together they moved again, wading rather than running, as if the earth had turned to mud and sought to hold them fast; on, as in a dream, across the curiously contoured brow of the hill with the heavens above them like a breaking wave: a breaker of blackness and brilliance and satanic grandeur, of scarlet and gold and purple, blue and orange, brown and black, turbulence and oiliness and gas: a breaker perpetually at the point of breaking, curved, crested, like a flare from the face of the sun.

Peter fell and the earth fell with him, shot from under his feet. He skidded and tumbled, rolled in a shower of dirt and pebbles, over and over, steeply down the face of the rocky subsidence; his Gran somewhere near him, rolling and tumbling through grass and burns and scrub, her cries unheard, her hurts unfelt.

They tumbled into the pool among the basalt boulders, into the welling spring that was the source of the creek below Grandpa Tanner's and the Buckinghams'.

The water was shockingly cold.

With them in the water were creatures of the forest, things that crept and crawled, even snakes.

Stevie staggered across the rows of carrots towards Lorna and Graham, groaning for breath. His hair was singed, his eyebrows were singed, and there were holes burnt in his shirt, for the bush along the roadside near the Georges' gateway had been burning; cyprus trees along the path to the house had been burning; even the trays of raspberries had been burning.

But Pippa stopped running.

For a moment she couldn't understand it; couldn't understand why the will to move suddenly left her, why her knees gave way, finally and absolutely, and carried her slowly, buckling, almost with gratitude, to the earth.

She knelt as if crawling, her trembling hands planted squarely across the lines of withered seedlings. Then her wrists gave way and she leant on her elbows, and her shoulders gave way and, totally exhausted, she flattened on the hot red ground. She couldn't get up. She'd never get up. Never, never had she known a tiredness like it.

But there was a new sound in the heavens, a sighing, as if a giant as large as the earth had expelled the last breath from its lungs. She felt its breath pass over her. Every living and growing thing bent to it, shuddering as it passed. And there was light of another kind, and sound of another kind, and in the sky a collision, a convulsion, a conflict of giants.

Lorna, too, stopped running. She was running uphill towards Stevie and Stevie was running downhill towards her. She was saying some sort of prayer when she stopped running and the prayer died in her, forgotten, for she saw that collision in the sky.

Pippa's mother and young Mrs Robertson, hiding under the carpets, could not see it; they heard, it.

Peter saw it, for it happened above him, to his left and his right, all around him, a flash of incredibly brilliant light from sky to earth or earth to sky, and an explosion that stunned him, numbed him, almost crushed him.

Then it fell like huge hot drops of metal, heavy like the sap of trees or globules of honey. It was even the colour of honey, sometimes burnt honey, sometimes golden.

The juices of the forest so greedily sucked up, the heady juices of gum and pine and acacia, and the wind-blown salts of the earth and the sweat of men and the blood of beasts and the steam of ditches and ponds and creeks and rivers and reservoirs, of tanks and hoses, of irrigated fields and mud puddles, seemed to have become too heavy a load for the sated heavens to bear, and having weakened, having allowed the first drops to fall, they seemed to be spilling the lot over.

Black rain, red rain, golden rain, steaming rain, crashed on to the earth, and the sound was real thunder and the jagged light was real lightning and the giants of north wind and south wind, of the inferno and of the breadth of the wide cool sea, were locked in conflict.

Peter and Gran Fairhall dragged themselves from the spring, away from the snakes and the other swimming creatures, and the mammoth flare in the sky had dissolved, had vanished, had become a tempestuous brown fog.

Gran, confused but revived, awfully battered but conscious, wrapped her huge fleshy arms about her grandson, as she was often apt to do, and hugged him tight. For years Peter had detested it, had endured it with a set face and a pounding heart; but that had been the way of a boy, not the way of a man. Gran even sensed the difference herself and faintly heard his voice: ‘It's all right, Gran. Everything's all right now.'

Pippa felt it beating on to her body. At first it came hot like her morning shower and she thought it was fire; but it did not consume her; it grew cooler; and cooler still.

She was wet now, and there was the smell of wet earth in her nostrils, the smell of wet smoke, the smell of wet dust sprayed with raindrops. She raised herself on her hands and knees, and cried and cried.

Stevie stumbled past Lorna, not seeing her, missing her by yards, on and down the hill until he knew that something had changed; that the open hillside was ringed not only by flames but also by smoke of a new kind, white smoke as clean as clouds, like masses of clouds rolling along the ground; that the wind was not hot at his back but cold at his face; and that water, not fiery ash, was pouring from the sky.

Stevie sighed; he sighed all over, from the pores of his skin and the hairs of his head. Fears and pains that were like hoops of steel about his chest unwound, dissolved. Relief took their place, relief like a soft bed or cooling oils. Relief and something else: wonderment that it was all over, that it ever happened and that he still held his teddy-bear by one limp paw. He looked at it, almost with shame. ‘Gee whiz,' he said, and furtively dropped it and walked away from it and hoped that no one saw.

Lorna saw, but Stevie's secret was safe with her. Rain streamed from her hair and into her eyes and from the tip of her nose. Her clothes clung to her as if she had swum through a stream fully dressed. She felt like a woman, standing there, proud in a way, dignified in a way, ready for whatever life was going to do to her. No longer lost. No longer frightened. Thankful that what her father had built had not been wholly destroyed. There was enough left to carry on, with him or without him. She couldn't have wept like Pippa even if she had tried.

Graham saw her standing there, separated from him by rain and smoke and the private thoughts that froze her like a statue. He was afraid of anything that might cut her off from him, even her thoughts. He didn't know her, not really, except that when she was near him she made him feel equal to anything, even to a public confession of what he had done, even to a determination to seek out a policeman at the earliest possible moment. She had said: ‘I think you've got to face it, Graham, and the sooner you face it, the sooner it's going to be over. It will be so much simpler than running away. And you didn't do it on purpose, did you? It really was an accident.'

She made him feel complete as he had never felt before. She filled a gap in him that Wallace and Harry had never been able to fill, because to Wallace and Harry he had attached himself. He had never felt he really belonged.

Was this the feeling that grown-up people meant when they talked of love? Perhaps it was, because when she turned to him again he limped towards her as quickly as he could go, already feeling strong again.

Grandpa Tanner looked out, almost in bewilderment, from beneath his blanket. Red fire was changing into hissing steam and frantic billows of smoke. The last flames around him were leaping and cracking like angry whips, and, having cracked, they disappeared eerily like genii in an instant.

He was not to die, not yet.

It was a disappointment.

He was alone again; the ghosts had gone. They had come so close, and then had gone away. He had no need of them now, for he was still an old man with an old house; he still had a roof for his head. No stranger would be building a stark, bare house with a flat roof and cement walls; not yet.

Grandpa had not meant the prayer for himself. Surely he had made it clear that it was for Julie and the Robertson baby and for little children everywhere.

But God had sent the rain. Of course He often did, though not always. He had built that provision into the plan of nature. Great fires drew to themselves great winds, opposing winds, and great rains. But not always. Just sometimes. Perhaps when men forgot themselves and prayed for little children; not when they shook their fists in fury and defiance.