Ash Road (17 page)

Gramps said to Harry, ‘All right now, boy?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Close shave, that.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Better than running from it, though. We'd have fried, for certain.'

‘Didn't we?'

Gramps shrugged. ‘Never seen a fire so fast. Thirty miles an hour, I'd say. Just as well it was, boy. Or we'd have fried just the same.'

Gramps looked as though he had, partly. His voice, so confident and possessed, belied his wretched appearance. ‘Remember that, boy; safest place in a fire is behind it, if you can get there...Here, look after your mate. I'd better see to Mr George.'

‘Is he dead?'

Gramps looked at him sharply. ‘What made you say that?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Well, don't talk of death.'

Gramps turned to the car, and Harry helped Wallace to his feet. Wallace looked crimson and green at the same time. He shivered in Harry's arms. ‘Strike me,' he stammered. ‘Oh strike me, strike me.'

But Harry was watching Gramps, or the part of him that he could see, his feet to the ground. The rest of him bent over the man on the back seat. Harry tried to read through Gramps's feet what Gramps saw through his eyes.

Then Gramps said, ‘He's a tough old bird. I thought m'self he'd be dead.' Gramps straightened up. He knocked out a hole in the crazed windscreen with his forearm, brushed the pieces away, and resumed his seat. He freed the gears and pressed the starter. The engine fired.

‘Eureka,' he said. ‘All clear behind?'

‘Yes, sir.'

Gramps backed out away from the bank, but he couldn't turn. ‘The blithering thing won't steer,' he said. He got to the centre of the road, and the nose still pointed to the bank. Then Harry saw a steering arm trailing on the ground.

Gramps got out and inspected it himself. ‘That's cooked it,' he said. ‘But we can't stay here. There's still a lot of fire about.' Gramps thought it over, and Harry was glad that the problem wasn't his, that there was a man to deal with it.

Well,' said Gramps, ‘we'd better get the car off the road and walk. Though if we could run it'd be better. It's about a mile to Miltondale, I reckon. Maybe a mile and a bit. Blithering pest. Cars aren't what they used to be. Hit a train back in thirty-seven and drove away.'

It looked so ugly outside that Pippa was glad to get back into the house. ‘I wish we had the wireless,' she said. ‘I'd like to know what's going on.'

Lorna shrugged. She wasn't quite awake. She was still in the old armchair.

‘You haven't got a transistor, I suppose?' Pippa asked.

‘No.'

‘The sky looks awful.'

‘How long have I been asleep?'

‘About an hour, I suppose.'

‘Did you get your breakfast?'

‘I had some cornflakes, thank you.'

‘You didn't cook anything?' Lorna said.

‘The power's still off. I didn't like to light your wood stove. It's hot enough without that.'

‘What's the time?'

‘Five to nine,' said Pippa.

‘Dark, isn't it?'

‘I was telling you about that. The sky.'

‘Oh goodness,' exclaimed Lorna. ‘Five to
nine
!'

‘Yes?'

‘The water! The carrots. The sprinklers haven't been shifted since five o'clock. They should have been shifted at eight. And the berries. All the berries we picked. They'll be out of the shade. The sun'll have moved round.'

‘There's not much sun, Lorna.'

‘Thank heaven for that.' Lorna had reached the door. ‘I'd hate those berries to be spoilt. They were bad enough, and I'd hate them to get worse...Maybe they'll be the last he'll ever pick.'

‘Don't say that.'

Lorna looked different now. The desperation had gone. ‘I've got to face it, Pippa. They say it comes to everyone sooner or later.'

‘But just the same...' Pippa thought it was bad to talk about it. ‘Where are you going?'

‘To bring the berries up, of course, and to shift the sprinklers. I'd be letting him down if I didn't.'

‘I'll come with you.'

They stepped outside and Lorna saw the sky, the light, the smoke, the evidence of the continuing high wind. Hours had passed since she had been aware of it. Perhaps the fire had been dismissed from her reckoning from the time her father had collapsed. There had been moments when the fact of it had cut across events, there had been the continual harassment of its influence on other people, but to Lorna it had been one part only of a terrible experience, and not the dominating part.

Pippa sensed the sudden sharpening of Lorna's concern before she expressed it. ‘Gosh,' said Lorna, ‘someone's in trouble. I've never seen anything like it. Have you?'

‘No...'

‘I can see what you mean about a wireless. Gosh, I wonder where it is? I wonder how far it's got? The boys lit
that
?'

‘So they say.'

‘You tried the telephone again?'

‘About half a dozen times. Dead as a doornail. I suppose there's a tree down somewhere over the wires.'

‘Probably dozens of trees. I don't suppose Mr Robertson called?'

‘No. Should he have done? I think Stevie said he'd gone to Miltondale and taken a lot of men with him. My dad was one of them.'

‘He was bringing us a drum of fuel oil for the pump,' said Lorna. ‘I know we need it, too. We haven't got much.'

They went down into the raspberries, with the dog for company, out on to the open hillside. ‘That smoke's terrible,' said Lorna. ‘You'd swear it was just over the hill.'

That was what Pippa thought, too. But it couldn't have been; it simply couldn't have been. Yet the sky was so full of rubbish, of bits of bark and leaves and fern. It was all dead stuff, but live pieces could have spread the fire, could have carried it miles ahead of itself and started more fires. By now there might be hundreds of fires impossible to contain, impossible to control, with no one to fight them, no one to spot and report them. The firefighters might even have given up and fled. What could mere men do against fires that made smoke like that?

An hour ago Pippa had thought it couldn't possibly get worse, but it had. Now that they were away from the house, the sound grew louder and they could smell sharper odours, of eucalyptus gases and the flaring juices of millions of growing things now spent; boiling clouds laden with the spoils of the forests were everywhere, for as far as the eye could see. Whatever were the fighters to do with it? How were they to put it out?

‘I wish John were here,' Lorna said breathlessly.

‘And I wish my dad was, too.'

‘You know, Pippa, we might have to get out!'

‘How?'

It was such a little word, but Pippa had never uttered anything more graphically profound.

Lorna shook her head. ‘Somehow,' she said, without conviction.

‘Yes, but where do we go?' Pippa with a trembling hand pointed into the south-east. ‘We can't go that way. It's all bush. The worst thing you can possibly do is get into the bush. That's what they've told us so often. And we can't go the other way because that's where the fire is.'

‘You don't think it
could
happen, do you?'

Pippa bit her lip. ‘I don't know...But I think I'll have to go home. There's Stevie. He'll be terrified. I thought he'd come here...Oh, Lorna...'

Pippa turned and ran. She could think of nothing except Stevie. And Julie. Julie was even closer to the fire than Stevie, Julie and Grandpa Tanner, that old, old man.

Peter looked back, and with a start saw Pippa.

Funny: he had supposed himself to be on his way home to look for her, but this had come too easily, too soon. He was on the point of darting for cover at the roadside—if he could have stirred himself sufficiently—when he saw that she was calling him. Though he couldn't hear her voice, he knew from the attitude of her head and body that she was crying out, appealing.

He stared at her hurrying and stumbling, and remembered his numbed vigil at the bottom of the carrot paddock. He had done that for her and she hadn't cared. She hadn't even known about it, or that he had worked out who had started the bushfires. She'd never understand what he had gone through, the loneliness, the misery, the awful tiredness, the grim battle to break through the invisible walls that had confined him. She would never know the effort it had cost him to walk out of the paddock. It had been terrible because it had been so strange. Nothing like it had ever happened to him before.

He didn't hide; he turned his back on her, suddenly angry, and tried to summon from himself what little dignity the morning had left him. He had no clear idea of what dignity was, except that the adult world he lived in placed a high value on it. It had something to do with tummy in, chest out, and chin up. Tears had no place in it; nor had tantrums or whining. Most of the time it was the exact opposite of how a boy felt, for when he felt mad he was supposed to look glad, and when he felt wildly happy he was supposed not to dance about and whoop. But it didn't seem to cover occasions like this.

He heard her voice: ‘Peter...'

And he stopped at once. How could he walk away from her when she cried out to him? But his back was still turned to her, because he was afraid he was going to cry.

‘Peter...'

He tensed himself and felt her hand clutch at his shirt. ‘Oh, Peter, I'm so glad to see you.'

She was in front of him now, and though he looked away from her, he knew she was flushed and frightened and too short of breath to pronounce her words properly. He hardened again, not expecting that he would, not knowing why he did. ‘You're only glad to see me when it suits you,' he said. ‘I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to have anything to do with you.'

She was trying to get her breath back. Perhaps she didn't really hear him. ‘Oh, Peter,' she panted. ‘Help me.'

‘Why?' he said.

She clutched at his arm again. ‘We've got to hurry. Time's so short. There's so much to do.' She made to go on up the hill, certain he would go with her, until she realized that she was dragging on him and that he was resisting her.

‘Peter,' she shrilled. ‘Come on. Quickly.'

‘I'm not going anywhere with you,' he said.

She dropped her hand and stared at him. ‘What's the matter with you?'

‘You know what's the matter. Or if you don't you've got the shortest memory I've ever heard of.'

‘We had a row,' she said, astonished. ‘Are you holding that against me, at a time like this, after everything that's happened? You can see the sky, Peter. You can see what's going to happen, can't you? If we don't do something, people are going to get burnt to death.'

‘Don't talk stupid,' he said.

‘Stupid? What's stupid about it? Stevie's on his own. Julie's with Grandpa Tanner and they're on their own. And we're on our own. There's no one to help us. All the men have gone away. Even your Gramps has gone.'

Peter's breath was coming faster and faster. His heartbeat was high in his throat.

From the sound he made Pippa guessed at once that he didn't know what she was talking about. Where on earth could he have been these past hours?

‘You haven't been home?' she said. ‘Or anything?'

‘Where's Gramps gone?'

‘He's taken Mr George to hospital. Two of the boys went with him.'

‘Without me?' he exclaimed.

‘Yes,' she shouted. ‘Of course without you. What's that to get upset about? I thought you didn't want to go.'

Now Peter wasn't sure what he wanted. ‘What's wrong with Mr George?' he said. Not that he was interested; the question was automatic; it came out of his confusion, out of his fright, for being abandoned by Gramps was altogether different from dodging him. To be denied an escape was different from not wishing to take it.

Pippa didn't answer his question. Her impatience with him flared again. His stupidity was too much to take. He
must
have known what had been going on.

‘You're useless!' she shouted at him. And for the second time that morning she ran from him, hating him, wondering almost blankly how she had ever thought he was nice.

Peter watched her pass over the hump of the hill and out of sight, and felt utterly lost. Nothing else in heaven or on earth really mattered except that he had bungled his reconciliation with Pippa. She hadn't said the right words, nor had he. He had tried to be dignified instead of being just himself. With her passing from sight he was sure she had gone away for ever. It was an awful feeling, lonely and dark and empty. He wasn't even angry with her.

After a while he pushed one leg in front of the other and started plodding up the hill again. What had happened to this day was still a mystery to him. Pieces of it were plainer than others, though at first they came faintly, like tiny pinpoints of light a long way off, that had to grow brighter before he could see them clearly. Pippa may have been special once, but she wasn't special any more. She was just another girl, a playmate he had known when he was a little boy. Was that really one of the things that he could see? Was that as plain as the fact that Gramps had gone away without him, that Gramps for the first time ever had failed to enforce his will upon him? And that if Gramps had gone, Gran might be on her own and might need him, not as just a little boy to smother with love, but as a young man to protect her from danger? Unless Gran had gone with Gramps? Surely not.

Was he on his own, like Pippa and Lorna and Stevie and Grandpa Tanner and that unknown boy who had disappeared in the bush? Could he really be on his own, on his own two feet, in the face of this monstrous sky? Not dependent upon anyone? Not tied to anyone, even Pippa? Completely free? But to be a part of the inferno that he
knew
was about to burst from earth and sky?