Ash Road (19 page)

They passed each other by and Gramps said, ‘Where's Robertson's truck?'

‘Heaven knows,' said Pippa's father. ‘Police commandeered it and Robertson went with it.'

Gramps grunted, as if he had known all along it would happen, and Pippa's father flushed again angrily at the recollection of it, for even then Bill Robertson and he had been on the way home, just the two of them. They hadn't got far when the police stopped them. It had been a raw scene. It was still hard to say who had been right—Bill Robertson or the police—but the police had won. Families as far away as Prescott were beyond reach, the police had said; there were other men's families who came first because they were immediately at hand. In the end an officer had pulled a gun. That had finished it, in a nasty way.

So Gramps and Mr Buckingham passed each other by before something stopped them; something that had nothing to do with politeness or neighbourliness; the faint and unwanted stirrings of something that might have been called duty.

Gramps said to Wallace, ‘Put him down,' and Wallace responded automatically and sank panting on to the hot road beside the car seat, conscious of nothing but his own exhaustion. For the moment Gramps, too, felt like collapsing, but knew that if he did he'd probably never get up again. He swayed and wiped sweat from his eyes and felt light-headed and empty-shouldered. He pressed an arm against his thundering heart and heard Pippa's father say, ‘What are you doing without your car?'

Gramps had almost forgotten that he owned a car. ‘Back up the road somewhere. Broke a steering arm.'

They exchanged looks, not really drawn to each other, even now. As a rule they put up with each other simply by avoiding each other as much as possible. ‘What's happened?' Mr Buckingham said.

‘It's old man George,' said Gramps. ‘Had a stroke, I think.'

That meant nothing to Pippa's father. His mind couldn't reach beyond his own family and his futile attempts to reach them. ‘What's happened to Prescott, I mean?'

‘Nothing that I know of.'

‘That's difficult to believe. They've cleared out. They've run for it!'

Gramps, also, was too fatigued to understand anything beyond his own problems: beyond the agony in his hands and body, and the compulsion to honour his obligation to old man George. ‘Prescott's all right,' he said, ‘I just left it.'

‘This doesn't add up. I'd like to believe it, but how can I? Prescott was abandoned at nine o'clock.'

Gramps, against his will, tried to summon out of a recent past not clearly remembered an appreciation of time. How long ago
had
he left Prescott? ‘Abandoned?' he said. ‘What for?'

‘It's out of control. They can't stop it. They've given up trying.'

‘Prescott is?'

‘The fire!'

Gramps slowly shook his head, still not understanding.

‘They've pulled back into open country. They're letting most of the hills go. Better to let property go, they say, than life. They're lighting new fires in open country where they can control them. Lord, I ought to know. Burning breaks miles wide. It's the only way they'll ever stop it before it cleans up half the State.'

Gramps continued to shake his head. ‘Abandoned?' he said. ‘They wouldn't abandon Prescott. You've got to be wrong, Buckingham.' He began to feel towards this man an intense irritation.

‘They can't fight it,' said Mr Buckingham. ‘It's too big. It's leaping miles ahead of itself. You've lost track of time somewhere. Would I invent these things with a wife and children of my own in the middle of it?'

Gramps swayed and pressed his arm harder to his heart. Wallace looked up, red-eyed, still panting.

Pippa's father glanced at old man George. ‘Where are you taking him?'

‘Hospital.'

‘They evacuated it two hours ago.'

Slowly Gramps's legs gave way and he sat on the road, and his sigh meant more than words could ever express. ‘Oh, what a shame,' he said. ‘What a downright shame...And you're going home?'

Mr Buckingham nodded.

‘You should never have left it.'

‘I know.'

‘Nor I.'

Harry came round the curve, hunched and drooped, his eyes almost closed, arms flopping at his sides. He slouched past them and didn't see them, and Wallace struggled on to his feet and went after him to bring him back.

Gramps said, ‘We'll find a safe house and move in. Then we'll try to get help. I can't believe that everyone has gone.'

He was talking to himself, for by then Pippa's father had gone and old man George was dead.

Pippa's mother, with Gran Fairhall, and young Mrs Robertson, drove hard through the winding gully below Prescott.

They knew they had left their run late. They hadn't meant to; indeed, they had not suspected until nine o'clock that such a run would be necessary, for up till then Prescott had been a place that evacuees were coming to by the hundred, perhaps by the thousand, not a place that people were fleeing from. Before nine o'clock the three women had been caring for the frightened and the homeless and the weeping; now they were fugitives themselves.

In Prescott Mrs Buckingham had been caught in a snarl of traffic. Cars parked in the yard beside the Public Hall were all trying to get out at once. The drivers were not panicky so much as dismayed, and in their dismay and anxiety they misjudged distances. Three cars were locked bumper to bumper, another backed on to a tree stump and stuck. Mrs Buckingham could not move forward or backward or sideways. She had to wait behind them. Had to wait and wait. At last she had escaped into crowded Main Street and cut recklessly across its endless line of oncoming traffic to run free and fast down the side road towards home. By then it was after 9.20.

At 9.24 she came (for the first time) to the broken blackwood tree which blocked the way with a mass of foliage and fractured branches twenty feet high and which had borne power lines and telephone lines to the ground; the blackwood tree that no one had had time to clear away.

‘I'll have to go the long way round, by the highway,' said Mrs Buckingham.

‘But how will you get through the town?' said Mrs Robertson. ‘The traffic's moving against you. There are
hundreds
of cars.'

‘I'll have to try.'

‘Wouldn't it be best to leave the car and walk or run?'

‘It's more than a mile. Mrs Fairhall couldn't keep up with us.'

‘I couldn't. That's true.'

‘I'll hurry. I'll do it. Don't worry.'

Mrs Buckingham turned the car and drove back to town. But she couldn't get through. Tears and threats, even gathering hysteria, were not enough to part the traffic. She put the car's nose out into the line of cars to try to break across to the left-hand side, but a man she knew ordered her back. He thrust his arm into the car and knocked the gears into neutral. ‘Go on back,' he said. ‘Get back. Do you want to start a pile-up? What's wrong with you?'

‘Our children are there,' she cried. ‘Who's to warn them? Who's to get them out? It's a dead end.'

‘Your children are not that way! They're
that
way!'

‘There's a tree down. We can't get through.'

‘You'll never get through the other way; that's certain.'

The character of the township had changed. There were drawn and haggard faces she had never seen before. Even the people she knew were different. They were there, passing across her consciousness; kind people with hard masks. Kind men who were acting rudely and roughly and others who were acting strangely. ‘There's a car,' one yelled, pointing at her. ‘They've got room. Into it.'

And a horde of people with armfuls of household pieces rushed towards her. She fumbled the car into reverse, and backed away, swerving wildly into the gutter. She wrenched the car out of the gutter and in tears drove back to the tree.

There they abandoned the car, scrambled down the bank and up again to skirt the fallen blackwood, and ran.

Time had ceased to mean anything. Time as an hour of the day was pointless. The only reality was the raging holocaust, heard but not seen, in the north and the west.

But Gran Fairhall couldn't run, and had no child to run for, anyway. Not even Peter. For Peter, she believed, was miles away, safe in his own home.

The others left her farther and farther behind.

And Pippa's mother could not run as fast as young Mrs Robertson.

The three women drew farther and farther apart in a frightful world where even adults feared to be alone if they thought of themselves.

Gran Fairhall had no one to think of but herself. If she had known how to handle a car she would have returned to it and driven away. But she couldn't. So she waddled on, puffing and blowing, in a sweat of fear, yet encouraged by the knowledge that at home she would find her identity. On the open road she was nothing, just a fat and nameless old woman that the overwhelming fire might leave unrecognizable, but at home she was Gran Fairhall, a woman of consequence, of property, and of dignity. If there had to be an end that was how and where she wanted it to be.

Stevie sat on the end of Julie's bed, cuddling the cat, interminably stroking it. Hundreds and hundreds of times he must have stroked it, sometimes singing to himself, sometimes quiet. The room had been bright enough when he went into it, but after a while he had drawn the blind to shut out the awful sky, to shut out the ash he could see falling down, to shut out the hot and horrid day that frightened him so, even to shut out the wind that he could see pulling at the trees, throwing twigs on to the roof of the house with a sharp clang of iron, and blustering angrily through the grass and the dust.

Stevie didn't like the fire any more. He didn't like his dad being away and his mum being away and Pippa being away. It was horrible being alone, for even though he talked to the cat and sang to it, the cat didn't care a bit. Sometimes it purred; sometimes it couldn't even be bothered to do that. And the telephone that was supposed to ring didn't ring, though every minute he was sure it was going to; and no cars came down the hill, though dozens of times the wind sounded just like a car; and no one knocked on the door; nothing happened at all.

He wondered about ‘nothing'. People were silly to say that nothing was nothing. It had to be something. Nothing was something that happened when nothing happened. Stevie didn't like nothing. It started buzzing in his head. It made a noise. It went round and round. It throbbed. It was a great big pain. Much worse than toothache; much worse than green plums. It even made him cry, it hurt so much.

The screen door crashed and Stevie leapt from Julie's bed and the cat skidded across the floor.

It was Pippa, Pippa floundering into the house all flushed and dishevelled and almost too breathless to speak.

‘Pippa,' shrieked Stevie.

She caught him on the run and hugged him and swayed with him. ‘I'm sorry,' she panted. ‘I'm terribly sorry. Oh, Stevie, I'm so sorry.' She pushed him away and looked at him. ‘You've been crying, too.' She hugged him again until Stevie reckoned he had had enough of it. ‘Fair go,' he said, wriggling free. ‘You're makin' a sissy out of me.'

Stevie wasn't afraid any more. He even felt chirpy again. He bounced back like a rubber ball. ‘Where you been?' he said. ‘What'cha been doin'? Leavin' everythin' to me.'

Pippa wasn't in the humour for that sort of thing, for she knew she had to get out on that dreadful hill again and start running again up to Grandpa Tanner's. ‘Stevie,' she panted (she could
not
get her breath back), ‘I don't want to frighten you, but there's not much time...I just can't imagine why Mum hasn't come home, or Dad...Where
are
they?'

‘Helpin' at the fire, of course,' said Stevie.

She shook her head impatiently, breathlessly, almost tearful. ‘I don't mean it that way...Stevie, the fire's coming.'

‘Yeh?'

‘Here. Here! Maybe in a few minutes. Maybe in a minute. I don't know.'

‘Here?' shrieked Stevie.

‘Yes, yes, yes.'

‘Not right here? To our house?'

‘That's what I'm telling you, Stevie. Haven't you seen it? Can't you see it for yourself? It's everywhere.'

‘But the fellas,' said Stevie. ‘What about the fellas to put it out?'

‘There
aren't
any fellows. There's no one. What have you done? Where have you put the water?'

‘Eh?'

‘The water! In the spouts. In the buckets. Over the walls. How much have you done?'

He didn't have to tell her. She could see from his face, from his shame, from his embarrassment. ‘You've done
nothing
?'

He shook his head.

‘Oh, Stevie...Our house. It's got to have water all round it and all over it, or it'll burn.'

‘But the fellas'll come, won't they?'

‘We don't know. We can't be sure. Probably not. Grab a handful of rags and stuff them in the downpipes. You can climb up on to the roof over the lattice. Then I'll hand the buckets up to you. Be quick, Stevie.'

‘The carpets aren't in, or anythin'.'

‘The carpets don't matter.'

‘But we won't have time if it's comin' in a minute.'

‘Do as I tell you. Grab a handful of rags from the laundry. Anything will do. It doesn't matter what it is.'

‘So it's not comin' in a minute?'

‘I don't know when it's coming,' Pippa cried. ‘Just do as I say.'

‘All right,' grumbled Stevie. ‘There's no need to do your block. I can't make girls out...'

‘You're wasting time!'

‘One minute they're huggin' and kissin' you; the next—'

Pippa was almost frantic. She could have taken him by the shoulders and shaken the life out of him. She snatched two buckets from the kitchen floor where her father had left them, and rushed to the bathroom, plunged them into the bath, and reeled back down the passage, bumping into the walls, staggering from the weight, until she stumbled down the steps on to the path at the rear of the house. Stevie was there with an armful of what looked like perfectly good shirts and aprons. He hadn't made a move towards the roof. He seemed to be frozen.