Ash Road (3 page)

They hadn't bothered to put the tent up; they wriggled into their sleeping-bags in the open.

‘Hope it doesn't rain,' said Graham.

Listening to voices, even one's own, was sort of nice in the dark.

‘My dad says it won't rain for a month.' (That came from Harry.)

‘Hot, isn't, it?' (Graham again, though that one or another should say it was not important. That the words should keep going was the thing.)

‘Stinkin' hot,' agreed Wallace.

‘These sleeping-bags'll be like ovens before long.'

‘Better than bein' eaten by the mozzies.'

‘I've got some repellent if you want it.'

‘Beaut, isn't it, bein' on our own?'

‘Super.'

‘Makes you feel good. I don't mean goodie-goodie. You know,
good.
'

‘Tough?'

‘Yeh. In a way.'

‘Better chuck us that repellent.'

‘Makes you feel as though you'd like to do something you've never done before?'

‘Like what?'

‘I don't know. Like somethin' different. Like somethin' that'd get your name in the papers.'

‘Like making a parachute jump?'

‘Yeh. That's what I mean. Like driving a car or chopping down a tree or having a shave, maybe.'

‘I shave once a week. Every Wednesday.'

‘Honest?'

‘With dad's shaver. Electric razors are beaut. Much better than blades.'

‘Gee.'

‘I reckon they give you a cleaner shave.'

‘My dad says they're useless. Wouldn't shave a baby, he says.'

‘He can't use 'em right. They shave me good.'

‘I wonder what it's like makin' a parachute jump?'

They heard cars on the main road in the distance, and a dog barking somewhere.

‘What'll we do tomorrow?'

‘Find a better spot than this and get organized.'

‘Don't want to get too far from Tinley.'

‘Yeh. We've got to go in for grub, you know.'

‘Two or three miles out, I reckon. We don't want the local kids finding out where we are.'

‘No fear. They'd be raidin' us an' all.'

‘When'll we start out for the Pinkards' place?'

‘I dunno. I dunno that I want to go much. It's a heck of a long way from here and if his mum and dad are there it'll spoil the fun a bit.'

‘Well, we said we'd go, didn't we? And I reckon it'd be good. All those cattle and everything.'

‘Yeh. If there
are
any cattle. You can never believe a word Jerry Pinkard says. He's such a bloomin' show-off.'

‘Crikey! Jerry wouldn't lie about that. You've seen the photographs. He couldn't fake the photographs.'

‘Wouldn't put it past him. What do you reckon, Harry?'

‘Well, I'd like to see the place. And I don't reckon he would have asked us if it wasn't fair dinkum. I'd say start heading his way about Wednesday or Thursday. No good getting there any sooner because they won't be there.'

‘Did you find Ash Road on the map?'

‘Yeh. It's there all right. I reckon it'll take us about a day.'

They heard a bough crack from a tree and fall.

‘Crikey!' said Wallace, ‘the wind's strong.'

‘We'd look good if one of those landed on top of us.'

‘Not scared, are you?'

‘Huh. Come off it.'

They heard frogs and crickets and leaves and snapping twigs and big moth wings.

‘Who wants a cigarette?'

‘Eh?'

‘You heard.'

‘You didn't bring them, did you?' said Harry. ‘Not after everything they said.'

‘Couldn't throw 'em away,' said Wallace. ‘Now could I?'

‘You know we promised.'

‘Yeh, yeh. I know. Do you want one?'

‘I promised not to,' said Harry, ‘and they're bound to ask me.'

They heard a screech owl. It sounded like someone being thrown from the top of a cliff.

‘I wish we'd brought a lamp,' said Wallace.

‘I reckon we've got too much already,' said Harry. ‘Any more and we'd need a pack-horse. My shoulders are aching and aching. What do you want a lamp for, anyway?'

‘Well, we can't have a camp fire.'

‘Who wants a camp fire? I wish you'd shut up and let a fella sleep.'

‘Graham's asleep now, I think.'

‘Trust Graham. He'd sleep standing up, I reckon.'

‘Horses sleep standin' up.'

‘You don't say?'

‘Yeh. I saw it on TV.'

They heard other sounds. Rustlings, faint cheepings, scratchings.

‘Want a cup of coffee?'

‘
Another
one?'

‘I reckon coffee's great,' said Wallace. ‘They won't give it to me at home.'

‘Aw, go to sleep.'

There was a long pause.

‘Gee, it's great, isn't it,' said Wallace, ‘bein' on our own?'

There was no answer.

Wallace was half-awake, half-asleep. He had been asleep for a while, but had become partly aware of his surroundings again, of the wind and the heat. He was wet with perspiration. Graham had been right about sleeping-bags and ovens. Wallace felt that he was being cooked, and his right hip was bruised and sore. He had dug a little hole for his hip, but he must have turned away from it. The trouble was, he couldn't completely wake up. He was in a sort of limbo of acute discomfort but was too hazy in the head to do anything about it.

When at last he managed to open his eyes he became aware of a faint glow. He thought he could smell methylated spirits. He even thought he could see Graham.

‘Is that you?' he said.

‘Yes,' said Graham.

‘What are you doin'?'

‘Making coffee.'

Wallace sat up, panting. He felt giddy. ‘What are you makin' coffee for?'

‘I'm thirsty. Do you want a cup?'

‘What's the time?'

‘Twenty past one.'

‘Yeh. I'll have a cup.'

Wallace peeled his sleeping-bag down to the waist, and felt better. ‘Twenty past one!'

‘About that.'

‘Harry's sleepin' all right.'

‘Trust Harry,' said Graham. ‘He could sleep anywhere.'

Wallace thought he had heard something like that before, but couldn't remember when. ‘Funny in the bush at night, isn't it? Awful dark.'

‘Noisy, too. I heard a tree fall down. Not far away either. Woke me up.'

‘It's the wind.'

‘Guess so.'

‘Stinkin' hot, isn't it?'

‘You can say that again. But this water's awful slow coming to the boil.'

‘The wind, I suppose.'

‘It's taken two lots of metho already,' said Graham.

‘Have you got the lid on?'

‘Can't see when it boils if you've got the lid on.'

‘Put the lid on, I reckon, or it'll never boil.'

‘Don't know where the lid is, do you?'

‘
Feel
for it. It's there somewhere. Use your torch.'

‘The battery's flat. Blooming thing. Must have been a crook battery. Hardly used it at all.
Now
look what I've done! There's the metho bottle knocked for six.'

‘You dope,' cried Wallace. ‘Pick it up quick. Or we'll lose it all.'

‘The cork's in it.' Graham groped for it, feeling a bit of a fool, and said, ‘Crumbs.'

‘Now what?'

‘The cork's
not
in it, that's what. It must have come out.'

‘How could it come out? Honest to goodness—'

‘It's
burning
,' howled Graham.

A blue flame snaked from the little heater up through the rocks towards the bottle in the boy's hand; or at least that was how it seemed to happen. It happened so swiftly it may have deceived the eye. Instinctively, to protect himself, Graham threw the bottle away. There was a shower of fire from its neck, as from the nozzle of a hose.

‘Oh my gosh,' yelled Wallace and tore off his sleeping-bag. ‘Harry!' he screamed. ‘Wake up, Harry!'

They tried to stamp on the fire, but their feet were bare and they couldn't find their shoes. They tried to smother it with their sleeping-bags, but
it
seemed to be everywhere. Harry couldn't even escape from his bag; he couldn't find the zip fastener, and for a few awful moments in his confusion between sleep and wakefulness he thought he was in his bed at home and the house had burst into flames around him. He couldn't come to grips with the situation; he knew only dismay and the wildest kind of alarm. Graham and Wallace, panicking, were throwing themselves from place to place, almost sobbing, beating futilely at a widening arc of fire. Every desperate blow they made seemed to fan the fire, to scatter it farther, to feed it.

‘Put it out,' shouted Graham. ‘Put it out.'

It wasn't dark any longer. It was a flickering world of tree trunks and twisted boughs, of scrub and saplings and stones, of shouts and wind and smoke and frantic fear. It was so quick. It was terrible.

‘Put it out,' cried Graham, and Harry fought out of his sleeping-bag, knowing somehow that they'd never get it out by beating at it, that they'd have to get water up from the creek. But all they had was a four-pint billy-can.

The fire was getting away from them in all directions, crackling through the scrub down-wind, burning fiercely back into the wind. Even the ground was burning; grass, roots, and fallen leaves were burning; humus was burning. There were flames on the trees, bark was burning, foliage was flaring, flaring like a whip-crack; and the heat was savage and scaring and awful to breathe.

‘We can't, we can't,' cried Wallace. ‘What are we going to do?'

They beat at it and beat at it and beat at it.

‘Oh gee,' sobbed Graham. He was crying, and he hadn't cried since he was twelve years old. ‘What have I done?
We
'
ve got to get it out!
'

Harry was scrambling around wildly, bundling all their things together. It was not that he was more level-headed than the others; it was just that he could see the end more clearly, the hopelessness of it, the absolute certainty of it, the imminent danger of encirclement, the possibility that they might be burnt alive. He could see all this because he hadn't been in it at the start. He wasn't responsible; he hadn't done it; and now that he was wide awake he could see it more clearly. He screamed at them: ‘Grab your stuff and run for it.' But they didn't hear him or didn't want to hear him. They were blackened, their feet were cut, even their hair was singed. They beat and beat, and fire was leaping into the tree-tops, and there were no black shadows left, only bright light, red light, yellow light, light that was hard and cruel and terrifying, and there was a rushing sound, a roaring sound, explosions, and smoke, smoke like a hot red fog.

‘No,' cried Graham. ‘No, no, no.' His arms dropped to his sides and he shook with sobs and Wallace dragged him away. ‘Oh, Wally,' he sobbed. ‘What have I done?'

‘We've got to get out of here,' shouted Harry. ‘Grab the things and run.'

‘Our shoes?' cried Wallace. ‘Where are they?'

‘I don't know. I don't know.'

‘We've got to find our shoes.'

‘They'll kill us,' sobbed Graham. ‘They'll kill us. It's a terrible thing, an awful thing to have done.'

‘Where'd we put our shoes?' Wallace was running around in circles, blindly. He didn't really know what he was doing. Everything had happened so quickly, so suddenly.

‘For Pete's sake run!' shouted Harry.

Something in his voice seemed to get through to Wallace and Graham and they ran, the three of them, like frightened rabbits. They ran this way and that, hugging their packs and their scorched sleeping-bags, blundering into the scrub, even into the trunks of trees. Fire and confusion seemed to be all around them. The fire's rays darted through the bush; it was like an endless chain with a will of its own, encircling and entangling them, or like a wall that leapt out of the earth to block every fresh run they made for safety. Even the creek couldn't help them. They didn't know where it was. There might as well not have been a creek at all.

‘This way,' shouted Harry. ‘A track.'

They stumbled back down the track towards Tinley; at least they thought it was towards Tinley, they didn't really know. Perhaps they were running to save their lives, running simply from fear, running away from what they had done.

When they thought they were safe they hid in the bush close to a partly constructed house. They could hear sirens wailing; lights were coming on here and there; the headlamps of cars were beaming and sweeping around curves in the track. They could hear shouts on the wind, they heard a woman cry hysterically, they heard Graham sobbing.

Over all was a red glow.

2

Ash Road

Tinley was in the foothills near the north-west extremity of the ranges; Ash Road, where the Pinkards had their country place, was in the Prescott district at the head of an immense valley on the opposite side of the ranges, the eastern side and somewhere near the centre, the side that caught the first rays of the rising sun. By car it was about fourteen miles from Tinley to Ash Road; across the ranges in a straight line it was no more than six or seven.

Ash Road didn't go anywhere in particular. It branched off the highway opposite the water-storage reservoir in Prescott Vale—the Prescott Vale Dam—and ended in the bush about two miles farther east. That was the way Ash Road was on the fierce morning of Saturday, 13th January. That was the way it had been, more or less, for a very long time.

The dam hadn't always been there, nor had many of the other landmarks that had become familiar over the years. Tanner's, the oldest house still standing, had been built soon after the turn of the century. The chestnut trees were at Tanner's—tremendous trees, known for generations to every child in miles. Fairhall's place had gone up about 1919. Hobson had planted his apple orchard in 1925. Collins had established his nursery in 1937, and after the war at different times had come the Robertsons, the Georges, the Pinkards, the Buckinghams. Those families, their homes, their farms, and their children were the landmarks of Ash Road.