Chapter 1-2

‘You can’t look at my car straight away?’ ‘Afraid not,’ the woman said, standing behind the till. ‘Con’s come in to wash up for the night. Those pies won’t bake themselves.’ ‘She can stay here. We got plenty of room out the back.’ I put down my plate and stepped aside, keen not to stand too close to Con. ‘The hotel looks fine.’ ‘It’ll cost ya.’ ‘Two dollars twenty.’ The woman held out her hand. Con came and stood over me as I ferreted about in my purse. ‘Not stopping then?’ ‘The hotel will do just fine, thanks.’ ‘Suit yourself.’ The door swung shut behind me and I took a lungful of the cool night air. There was no wind. A peppering of street lighting sent forth a milky haze into the dark. The trees that hugged the town loomed like ghouls. Heading for the hotel, I crossed the forecourt and waited roadside. A second later, I was frozen like a rabbit caught in the high beam of a truck. The great, rumbling behemoth approached from the west. As it crossed the bridge the groan of compression brakes splintered the quiet. Weighed down by its load of tree trunks, the truck thundered by, headed through the town and was gone. I hurried across the highway in case it had a mate. Approaching the hotel entrance, I started to lose faith in luck. The chips were repeating on me. No doubt fried in rancid oil. The flavours of the pie were blending with the orange squash, the entire mixture resulting in a series of unpleasant belches. I entered an empty and wide corridor. There was a glass-panelled saloon door to my left and a plain door to my right, and stairs leading up to the accommodation. I heard voices. Pushing open the saloon door I was received by the yeasty smell of beer and three pairs of dismissive eyes as the men at the bar all turned. A silence descended. I took in the blue shirts and the suntans and returned the silence with a casual smile. The back bar was cluttered with bottles of beer, wine and spirits, packets of potato chips and nuts, a Bex powders display and a haphazard assortment of glasses. On a cabinet in the centre sat an old television, switched off. I wondered if it was colour. ‘Can I help you?’ It was a woman’s voice. She materialised, standing up behind the bar. Small, slight of build, with thick sandy coloured hair, shoulder length and parted in the middle. She had a round, open face that carried the nondescript features of a woman too busy doing chores to fuss with makeup. I picked her to be in her mid-thirties. She seemed personable. I stepped forward and the men turned back to their beers. ‘A room, please. If you’ve one spare.’ Someone sniggered. ‘Okie dokie.’ She disappeared and a second later, poked her head through the saloon door. ‘Follow me.’ The corridor contained a small reception desk tucked beneath the stairs. There were more doors leading off in all directions. ‘Just the one night?’ ‘I expect so. Or should I say I hope so.’ ‘Aw, take no notice of them blokes in there,’ she said. ‘They’re not used to seeing a woman in the bar.’ You’re a woman, I thought but didn’t say. ‘You on holidays?’ ‘Moving interstate. Car broke down.’ ‘So that was you. Thought so. I’ll put you in Room Four.’ I followed her upstairs. She was a brisk climber, lithe. The sort of woman always on her feet. I was panting at the last tread. ‘You’ll be comfy in here,’ she said, flicking on the light. She moved aside for me to enter, handing me the key as I passed by. The room was spacious and pleasantly furnished. High ceiling, faded rugs on scantly polished floorboards. Other than the bed, the room contained a free-standing wardrobe on legs, a dressing table and a couple of chairs. Long velvet curtains hung open, framing the windows. I went and stood in the middle of it all. ‘You eaten?’ ‘I had a pie across the road.’ ‘Belly okay?’ ‘Why do you ask?’ ‘No reason.’ That explained it then. It was the pie. ‘Breakfast at seven thirty suit you?’ ‘Sure will.’ ‘Have a good night.’ She closed the door. I ambled about the room, ran a finger along the dressing table top and found it satisfyingly clear of dust. Then I stood by the pair of windows. They were double hung, with nets of cream lace strung across the lower frames. The sills were set at waist height which meant I had a clear line of sight out the top panes. She’d given me the corner room, overlooking the crossroads. The iron lacework beneath the railing conjured a vintage era of horses and carts. Realising I was a silhouette backlit by the single pendant light hanging from the ceiling, I crossed the room and switched it off, returning to my lookout, knowing I wouldn’t be seen. I wasn’t there long when I heard a cough, followed by a groan and a muffled scrape of something—a chair maybe—being dragged across the floor of the adjoining room. Then all went quiet. I took umbrage at having been put right next door to another guest. Wasting no time, I left my station and locked myself in my room. Over by the door I heard the distant sound of laughter coming up from the bar. It felt comforting in a fashion, yet the cheery sound seemed to reinforce my isolation. A digital clock on the bedside table told me in vivid green that it was seven. I considered joining the men downstairs but thought better of it. Instead, I returned to the window. The town looked lifeless. Nothing moved, not even in the roadhouse. Despite the brightly lit neon sign, the roadhouse was closed. I wished I’d had the presence of mind to grab a few things out of the car before checking in, but then again, Con had been hostile. Realising he still had my keys, I didn’t like to think of all my possessions piled on the back seat, and in the boot. I felt oddly violated, intruded upon, as though something vital had been taken from me. My power. Maybe I should have stayed there, the better to guard what I had brought with me, all that I’d scraped together in the aftermath of my charred life. I was there in a flash, back in Cockatoo, standing by another window, the one in the living room that looked out over a forested valley, on one of the hottest days I’d ever experienced. I should have known it would turn out bad after the birds had gone. It was Wednesday the sixteen of February and at that hour in late-summer, sulphur-crested cockatoos would grace the valley with a raucous chorus. Not that day. On that day, the silken trunks of the mountain ash stood tall along the back fence of my yard, silhouetted in a dense haze. The sun, blazing red on the horizon, couldn’t raise a glimmer or a shadow. The feathery fronds of the ferns were crisping about their edges. Not a rustle of a lizard could be heard in the undergrowth. High above, the tufty tree canopy was still. A conflagration had been billowing beyond the western hills all day. A southerly was due any minute. Everyone was hanging out for the cool change. The heat wave had been dragging on too long and this was the hottest day of all. We were all craving that wolfish wind to roar through and devour the fire front, make it blow back on itself. Aching for the sigh of cool and clean air that would follow. I had the radio on. The presenter said the wind would arrive in an hour, possibly two. I waited. Like a lot of people in town that day, I waited. What few of us knew was another, smaller fire was threading its way east through the bush up Bailey Road and heading for the town centre. The leaves on the trees beside the road fluttered for a few moments before settling still. I leaned forward and gazed up at the canopy. Clusters of leaves on the ends of thin branches were swaying languorously. Fern fronds in the undergrowth quivered and waved. I opened my bedroom window to listen. Smoke stung my nose—the air acrid from the smoke of the Belgrave and Beaconsfield fires. The radio had said those fires were under control. The sun dipped behind the western ridge. Then, below the gentle crackle and crinkle of the tinder-dry bush, there was a distant, roaring rush, like a far-away kettle-drum roll. Something told me to get out of the house fast. Going outside was like entering a fan-forced oven. Breathing was an effort, the smoke raw in my lungs. It was eight-thirty and the sun had nearly set when the wind caught the thin thread of blaze that had been tracking down the hillside, transforming it into a mile-long fire front blasting down the valley with the force of a hurricane. It all happened so fast. The smoke had got so thick I couldn’t see more than a few metres. Trees were falling, some uprooting. Families were running out of their houses, screaming, and heading down to the reserve. Panic-stricken men and women raced their cars helter-skelter towards the Woori Yallock Road. Suddenly, the police helicopter was overhead with its siren blaring. In minutes the firies started evacuating the town. They did the right thing, cos that fire was raging down Bailey Road razing everything in its path. We didn’t know it then, but in just sixteen minutes, two-hundred and eighty-three houses were gone. Another twenty-four were lost in the following hours and days. The firies had been tackling blazes all day. They were exhausted. You could see it in the way they moved. Yet they went hell for leather up and down the streets behind the shops and there wasn’t a whole lot of time. There were hundreds of us who couldn’t get out. We had nowhere to shelter. Someone must have had a key to the kinder building down by the railway line. It wasn’t ideal. We knew it wasn’t much more than a shack, despite its fancy design, a glass-windowed carousel. But we had no choice. The smoke was suffocating us. The fire was sucking the oxygen from the air. Birds, the ones that had ignored their instincts, like us, and hung around, were dropping dead from the sky. You could hear the gas bottles exploding. Boom. Boom. Boom. And then came the fireballs, larger than a soccer ball. The endless roar of the fire, deafening like a hundred jet engines. None of us thought we would survive. Seared in my memory was the terror of three-hundred residents crammed shoulder to shoulder into that kindergarten building. Stinking hot we were, staring out all those windows at the apocalypse. A third of us were kids. Some men climbed up onto the roof to keep it free of embers. It was a bitumen roof, and without those men risking their own lives to keep us women and kids safe, the building would have burned for sure. They were good men. I will never forget how good they were. You don’t forget something like that. The distress on everyone’s face, the terror in their eyes, the crying, the wailing, the choking stench. My thoughts were interrupted by headlights approaching from the west. The vehicle didn’t stop. I followed it with my gaze and was about to move away from my post by the window when I saw the roadhouse garage doors open. More headlights, this time a double set, and I watched a station wagon pulling out and heading across the forecourt. As the car entered the reach of the street lights I saw it was canary yellow. Its engine rumbled and chugged. The driver, Con presumably, made a right turn and then a sudden left, and disappeared up the road to the north. Where was he off to at that time of night? It came to me then that I knew not a thing about Cann River, a town I’d driven through on my way up the coast so many times before. It had always been a nothing place, a welcome relief from the endless forest, a chance to take a short break, a corner sort of place where, soon after, the coastline would stop being southern. A place welcoming at first sight. Half an hour later, and I was always glad to see the back of it. I drew the velvet curtains, flicked the light back on and lay down in the centre of the bed. Noises from next door started up again, bonks, a moan, a cough. I tried to block them out. Told myself the next day, I would be on my way. It couldn’t have come soon enough.