The Best Australian Stories 2014 (12 page)

The air thickens, turns molten. There's a sharp hiss as a shower of sparks bursts from the tangle of tea-tree between the gums. Marianne's senses are assailed by a strange high-pitched wail. She strains to listen. It's the sound of sirens. Could it be a police car? All around, the bush begins to creak and groan and crackle. Scraps of bark clatter to the ground. The acacias by Reception sough and sigh in the wind. She can hear a distant throb of engines. Surely not a helicopter?

‘Then I begin to speculate, perhaps wifey has known all along and enjoys the fact she doesn't have to bother with sex anymore …'

Marianne watches the hen hurry to her flock, gathered now in the shelter of the run. She wonders if she should shut them inside. The peacock is threading his way through the welter of smoke towards the orchard.

‘Hello,' Vron calls. ‘Are you there, Marianne?'

A Parks and Wildlife truck races down the drive. A ranger jumps from his vehicle.

‘Hello,
Marianne
?'

She hangs up.

The ranger is agitated. ‘The situation is out of control,' he says. ‘At the next signal of the sirens, get to the water as fast as you can.' ‘When might that be?' she asks.

He shrugs. ‘How long is a piece of string?'

She runs to their house on the block adjacent to the cabins, their blue tin house, the ceiling lined with oak beams, the wide timber deck, the home that Luke built, sturdy as a ship. What to take, what to leave behind? The artwork they have collected over the years? An oil portrait of her mother when she was young and wearing a turbaned Moroccan hat? Her passport? It's locked in the safe but where is the key? She grabs a backpack, dashes upstairs and stuffs it with a pretty frock, shoes, her blood pressure machine and phone charger. She lifts the lid of the cedar linen chest and snatches the carefully wrapped bundle of her aunt's silk scarves. At the bottom of the chest she finds a piece of glazed chintz, a remnant of her mother's peacock-patterned curtains. Her mother had loved them, had told her how this same pattern had once adorned the windows of Princess Charlotte's room in the Brighton Pavilion. She folds the fabric and manages to cram it into her bag.

Downstairs she opens the fridge and extracts a bottle of white wine. By now the wind has picked up and she is sweating in the heat. Is it possible for the house to spontaneously combust? She slams the door and makes for the rocks on the foreshore, and all the while she can hear the sirens wailing.

It is one thing to sit on a bench by the ocean and watch migrating whales, quite another to scramble from precarious boulder to boulder until you've reached the water's edge, which is slippery with kelp. She perches on a crag and black wavelets slap at her boots. On the headland opposite she can see ragged flares of fire writhing in the scrub. The front is roaring through, volcanic lava streaming its way south towards the national park, an unearthly sunset glow, streaks of rose madder, sienna and deep ochres. But most terrifying of all is the urgency and speed of it, the din of the furnace, the radiant heat on her face, the eucalypt and bracken swallowed up in the blaze. She thinks of her lovely peacock; in her mind's eye, he makes a frantic leap to the highest branch, flames torching his fabulous train.

Her phone rings. Luke! She has forgotten him.

‘What's going on? What's that noise?'

‘No need to worry,' she shouts.

‘I'll be on the next plane,' he says.

‘No, don't leave Ann, you can't.' The line goes dead.

Night begins to fall and for the first time her nerve falters. She has brought a bottle of wine but no torch. Crouched alone, she is afraid. She could trip over and injure herself, hit her head or fracture a bone. In the half-light, while she can still discern the outlines of the rocks, she decides to carefully retrace her steps and seek refuge in the second cabin with its cleared aspect of lawn and a quick exit to the water. She stumbles on a loose boulder and almost loses her footing while the weight of her bag threatens to throw her off kilter. Finally, she is able to follow a dim gleam of solar lamps on the cabin deck.

How strange it is to shower in the bathroom that she scoured that morning for visitors, stranger still to lie on the bed she made with such crisp competence. She pours a glass of wine but passes on a blood pressure check. She takes out the peacock-patterned chintz and smooths it onto the bed, admires the repeat of glazed azure and vermilion, the ascent of peacocks and scarlet parrots against a green trellis of intertwining foliage. As a child she remembers her mother making those curtains. The heavy drapes swirled and spilled across the parquetry floor and seemed to flood the entire front room as her mother kneeled and stitched in pockets of lead to ballast the weight of the hem.

After her father remarried, her aunt had been invited to spend the weekend at his cottage in Sussex. When she arrived, it soon became apparent to Rosa that the new wife was intent on stripping the house of every vestige of its previous occupant, Marianne's mother. ‘Hideous, aren't they?' Janice exclaimed when Rosa came across the curtains dumped in the hallway. While Janice was supervising the decorators, Rosa cut a swathe of the chintz and packed it in her suitcase.

On her last trip to London to see Luke's family, Marianne had visited the Brighton Pavilion and searched the chandeliered rooms upstairs, but had been unable to discover the bedroom that had belonged to Princess Charlotte. She had made an appointment with the Royal Keeper of the Pavilion's collection, a young, erudite, courteous man. ‘When did your mother acquire the material?' he enquired.

She hesitated. ‘Late seventies, possibly early eighties?'

He gave her a baffled glance, strode to a filing cabinet and began to riffle through a catalogue. ‘From the evidence here, the renovation work hadn't been carried out then.'

‘But Princess Charlotte's room,' she asked, ‘why is that closed to the public now?'

The curator gazed at her sympathetically. ‘It never existed,' he said. And he began to flip through several folders. ‘As far as I can see, there's no record of your peacock curtains.'

Outside now, the entire world thrashes and heaves and a branch smashes across the deck. It was all a fake, she thinks, the greens and the blues, the scarlet parrots, the ascent of peacocks, their trains curved against a trellis of boughs and leaves. If it weren't for the scrap of chintz on the bed beside her, she would have dismissed this memory of her mother as a childhood dream.

She tries to sleep, but when eventually she slips into a fitful doze, there's a frantic pounding on the door and voices shouting: ‘Get out! Get out!' Outside the sky is tinged yellow and the smoke is heavy, dense as fog. She opens the door to the chook pen and hurries over to Reception. The wind is still high and embers shower at her feet. The gums on the hill are charred and the air is pungent with a sweet fragrance of eucalypt and resin. She gets into her car and switches on the ignition. To her relief, the engine starts at once. She drives slowly towards the road, searching for the peacock and his hens, but there is no sign of them in the smouldering undergrowth. She turns onto the road, into a maelstrom of trucks, sirens and lights and the clatter of helicopters overhead. On either side, fast unfurling orange flames peel bark from the trees and scurry upwards to reach the withered leaves. She resists the impulse to put her foot down on the accelerator, but the palms of her hands are slippery with sweat and her heart is pounding. Somehow she navigates the barricades of traffic cones until at last she comes to a halt outside the little glass chalet that is the town bakery.

Inside, she orders a coffee. The volume on the TV has been turned up high, and distractedly, she half-listens to road closure reports. Although the place is crowded, there is no one she recognises. Then, through the window, she sees a woman riding bareback down the main street on a bay Arab stallion, her legs loose and relaxed, nudging the horse's flanks. It's her neighbour Jan, who has ridden her horse through the mayhem and ash to the safety of town, and who coaxes him now into a stroll and guides him through the traffic, reins held tight to keep his head down. She watches as Jan eases the bay into a trot towards the paddocks behind the RSL Club. She thinks once again of her peacock, his magnificent feathers alight. She imagines him flailing, all on fire, and the wallabies in a blind panic bolting through the scrub. She feels ashamed of herself.

The hours drag on. Luke's brother calls to say Luke is already on a plane. Then, around mid-afternoon, her neighbour Maureen rushes into the bakery.

She is breathless, her boots smeared with mud and her jeans soaked. ‘I'm defying the police blockade,' she gasps. ‘I've got to get to the alpacas. You'd better come with me and make sure your animals are all right.'

Marianne hesitates. She can't bear the thought of driving once again through the flying embers and the fearsome draughts of smoke. But Maureen is tall, determined and domineering. It was she who had given Marianne her peacock and two hens, who had come round without warning ten years ago carrying the birds in a sack. ‘Knew I'd find them a home,' she said as she shooed the indignant trio into the orchard.

Maureen swings open the door of the bakery and together they venture out into the wind and the searing heat. A burning branch has tumbled into the middle of the road and men armed with hoses are dragging it away.

She follows her neighbour along the highway with great caution. Again, her hands feel slippery on the wheel and her mouth is dry. She focuses on Maureen, so fast and competent ahead, and tries not to glance at the volumes of black ash which threaten to engulf her. At the turn-off, the barricades have been removed and a policeman waves her on.

The smoke-wreathed land is eerily silent. Flurries of scorched leaves pile in deep drifts across the drive. The hillside is rimmed with dark mauve flames through which she can just discern the silhouettes of firefighters darting in and out. At the door of Reception she finds a possum crouched beneath the rosella feeder, sucking on a discarded plum. It clutches the fruit between its paws and gnaws with quiet desperation while she studies its stained matted pelt, its limp, bedraggled tail. Gently she sets down a bowl of water. Then she opens the shed door and, reeling from the pent-up heat, fills a bucket and hurls pellets around the house where the wallabies graze. Meanwhile the peacock has arranged himself on the deck rail and preens the scalloped sapphire ruffles of his wings as if nothing has occurred. At her approach, he throws back his head and shrieks with all his might –
I am alive, I am alive
– and she can see the mist of his breath unfurl from his beak. Luke would shoot you, she thinks, but here you are, my friend.

Lucy the hand-raised wallaby bounds towards her and she sees the extended family waiting in the shadows. The peahens and their chicks emerge through the haze. By dusk, the bantams have roosted in the coop and with some misgiving she locks them inside and decides she will stay in the house. All night, the hillside clamours with the growl of bulldozers and the ominous sound of helicopters overhead as firefighters choreograph the back-burn with military precision.

In the morning, the phone rings. Luke is about to board a connecting flight in Sydney. He has been studying the weather on the internet and seventy-kilometre winds are forecast for Tuesday, winds that are likely to drive the fires through the village.

At noon, Marianne glances at her watch, unable to control her impatience, and continues to check it nervously until at last Luke arrives, jet-lagged and haggard. When they hug, the kitchen shrills with the peacock's cries.

‘Don't tell me that bloody bird has survived,' Luke exclaims, catching sight of him on the deck rail. ‘If we were to lose everything, at least we'd be rid of him.'

She laughs.

‘You look terrible,' he says.

From the window they watch the bush on the rim of the hill dissolve in soft grey tendrils of smoke: the firefighters' attempt at a back-burn has failed. The beams of the house click and thrum in the heat. ‘We'll leave early tomorrow morning when the winds change,' says Luke.

For the next hour, he tries to sleep but is too agitated, so they sit on the deck and drink wine, and he wants to talk about Ann but is too tired. She insists that he return to bed and tiptoes downstairs to the spare room where she listens to the wind threshing the trees, a sound like the susurrations of high-running surf.

When she wakes, she goes out to the bantams and finds the possum dead on the reception deck. The smoke has not lifted. She buries him in the orchard close to the lily pond. She can hear the peacock and the honking call of his hens but the rosellas are nowhere to be seen. If it weren't for the peacock, she thinks, there would be a terrible stillness. In the house, Luke has been busy and has stacked the paintings and wrapped the china. Now he locks their passports in the glove box of the ute. Resolute and methodical, he piles their possessions in its tray.

They drive onto the highway past fire crews, who are filling their water tanks from roadside hydrants, and they head south towards the open fields and farmlands. They have no plan.

‘We'll see how the gales play out,' Luke says as he negotiates the steep bends beside the river. All morning, he has barely said a word, has acted like a man silently resigned to whatever might come.

They turn onto a wide rutted dirt track that leads to the old lighthouse on the Cape. The light has long been decommissioned but the cottages are still there, the once-tended gardens wild yet beautiful, the neglected paths overgrown with day lilies, red-hot pokers and agapanthus. They wander along the cliff edge and gaze at the pall of brown smoke that blankets the coast. Sheltered in an inlet below at the very edge of breaking waves, a raft of seals sways back and forth, their flippers raised. Luke spreads a picnic rug on springy tussocks of grass and Marianne sinks down, aware for the first time of how exhausted she is. There are bruises on her legs and arms that she hasn't noticed before.