Ash Road (18 page)

Perhaps he was.

Peter smiled faintly, and there was strength in his body again, and the tears in his eyes were not those of a little boy.

11

Dead End

Lorna hurriedly pulled her tray of raspberries up to the front gate to get them out of the way. The Georges had a little rubber-tyred trolley for the purpose; John had made it from the wheels of an old baby-carriage. Though Lorna was sure the carrier from the jam factory wouldn't accept the berries, she left them in the usual place in the shade of a wattle-tree. Perhaps later in the day, she would try to pick more; in the cool of the evening, if the evening turned out to be cool, if the evening came at all.

Lorna was not wholly sure that there would be an evening, because minute by minute the day assumed aspects of still greater gloom and greater dread.

She ran after Blackie down into the carrot paddock. The sprinklers still were turning; wind-blown water still sprayed far and wide. But for how much longer would the engine continue to drive the pump? How much fuel was there? And she might need that water now, for other things: for damping down the house, for spraying the outbuildings, for those simple demands of survival that water alone could answer. If she had the strength to manhandle the heavy pipes...But it couldn't happen. How could there be an end so terrible? Awful things like that might threaten, but they never came about. It always rained, or the wind changed fiercely and drove the fire back into burnt-out country, or hundreds of men with beaters and knapsack sprays and hoses arrived in the nick of time. Sometimes people said prayers and the prayers stopped it. Sometimes the fire came to a river and couldn't burn any farther. Sometimes it came up to the shores of a lake or a dam and that was the end of it. Sometimes it went out for no reason at all; just died down and went out. The life of a fire wasn't all that easy. From the moment it started everything in the world was against it. Even the wind wasn't always its friend; if the wind blew too hard it blew it out.

But Lorna knew that the special circumstances of this day were with the fire, not against it. There wouldn't be a wind-change because the wind was set; there wouldn't be rain because there was none within a thousand miles; there wouldn't be hundreds of men because a fire as vast as this monster that filled the sky was beyond the hand of man—the only men she could even hope to see would be exhausted men, beaten men, fleeing for their lives. But who would come this way, down this road, into a dead end? And prayers wouldn't stop it or they would have stopped it already; and rivers wouldn't stop it, and lakes wouldn't stop it, and dams wouldn't stop it, and it wouldn't die down and go out until there was nothing left to burn. Nothing could stop it until it reached the ocean, fifty, sixty miles away. The end of the world wasn't getting ready to happen; the end of her world was happening already.

She stood among the carrots, in the mud, with the cool water spraying her face, looking in to the lowering sky, into the west and the north and the south, into an arc of smoke beyond measure, nothing but smoke and raining ash, and the leaves of ferns and trees and scrub and twigs and pieces of bark and lumps of resin as big as hen's eggs, falling. Many of them smoking. Many hitting the ground not dead. And thousands and thousands of birds in flocks flying east; hawks and eagles, crows and parrots, magpies and kookaburras, starlings and finches; birds free, flying overhead, and leaving her below. And somewhere a sound like a mighty wind but not the wind, somewhere a sound that she had heard about, that John had spoken of but had never heard himself for it did not belong to the fires that John knew; a sound that Grandpa Tanner had talked of once, a sound not unlike other sounds yet different from them all. Like a raging sea, but different. Like an earthquake, but different. Like an avalanche, but different.

What was the use of worrying about carrots? Or raspberries? Or outbuildings? Or the house? Or anything? There wasn't time. Or was there still?

She began to feel smaller. It was an awful feeling. It actually seemed to be happening. She turned up her hands and half-expected to see that they had become the hands of a baby. She cried a little and was surprised to hear that it was her own voice, not the cry of a baby.

‘Please, God,' she said, ‘send someone to me. I'm all on my own.'

Except for Blackie. Blackie bounding towards her across the rows. Blackie barking in that way of his when he had found something, a wombat or a wallaby or an ant-eater or a snake.

Graham knew that something was wrong, but it was difficult to bring his senses to bear. He felt cramped, half-suffocated, and so, so tired. He didn't want to wake up. He wanted only to go on sleeping, to escape the feeling of despair that belonged to the conscious world. But the conscious world wouldn't let go of him; it dragged him out of sleep almost by the hair of his head. ‘Wake up,' it said to him over and over again, and pricked at him with needles, hundreds of needles, right down one side of him.

He rolled over, suddenly grunting with pain, flinching from the agony of blood coursing through numbed veins.

He was awake, and the light in the gully was poor, so poor that he thought he had slept all day. The thought did not disturb him much; he still drew breath sharply to counter the pins and needles in his side; breath that tasted as bad as his mouth, breath that was not good, clean air. Gradually he realized that the gloom was not natural, not the gloom of evening. The face of his wrist-watch stopped swimming in front of his eyes and became clear. It was 9.28; 9.28 in the morning. It had to be, for by 9.28 at night there was no light at all.

Then he saw the dog.

The instant their eyes met the dog barked and the boy's heart leapt with fright. They weren't six feet apart. Then he saw the girl. She was kneeling beside him and he had not seen her sooner because he had rolled away from her. ‘Come on; wake up,' she was saying. ‘Pull yourself together.'

‘I am awake,' he said thickly, struggling to sit up, frightened of the dog, alarmed by the presence of the girl, oppressed by an awful feeling of failure that he was not for the moment fully able to understand.

‘You'll have to get on your feet,' she said, ‘if you don't want to be burnt to death. You'd have slept through it, you know. I
couldn
'
t
wake you up.'

He didn't understand.

‘Get up,' she said roughly. ‘Stand up!'

‘My feet,' he groaned.

‘I can see them,' she said. ‘What on earth have you been doing with them?'

‘Oh, golly...Go away. Leave me alone.'

‘Look here,' said Lorna. ‘Do you want to stay alive or not?'

‘I'm sick,' sighed Graham. ‘You can see I'm sick. Leave me alone.'

‘So you do want to burn to death?'

‘Eh? What are you talking about?'

‘I'm talking about the bushfire. The fire you and your friends lit.'

Graham suddenly felt cold; cold despite the awful heat; cold to his fingertips and the crown of his head; so cold inside that he didn't even have the will to deny what she said. Numbly he corrected her: ‘I lit it. They didn't.'

‘Graham's your name, isn't it?'

‘Yes.'

Lorna liked him for the pain in his dull eyes, for his dirty face, and for something else, she was not sure what.

‘Graham,' she said. ‘Let's be friends. I'll stick by you and you stick by me. The fire's coming. You've got to get up and walk. You've got to get up and help me. If you don't we'll probably both be burnt to death.'

She was so matter-of-fact, so calm, so purposeful; it was plain common sense to do as she said. Graham took her hand and groaned on to his feet.

He held on to her hand and leant against her. ‘You're Lorna, aren't you?' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘Is your dad all right?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I'm sorry—for everything.'

‘That's all right. Wallace and Harry have gone with him, with Gramps Fairhall, to the hospital. They were going to ring me, but they can't, because the phone doesn't work. They should be back, but they're not.'

‘The fire?'

‘I suppose so. It's terrible. Can you put your shoes on?'

‘No.'

‘I'll take your pack. It'll make it easier for you.'

‘It's too heavy.'

‘It's too heavy for you, with your feet. Give it to me...Hurry. Please hurry.'

The men were to meet—perhaps by chance—on the last yards of the road above Miltondale, at the fringe of the State Forest, where the dark evergreens ended and bright deciduous trees and exotic shrubs and houses began. Where the forest had ended yesterday and the town had begun yesterday. Today the line was not drawn so sharply. Today there was a bond between them; of tongues of fire, of smoke, and of a common blackness.

Gramps Fairhall didn't know that the meeting was about to happen, nor did Pippa's father. The world could be a very small place in times of stress or danger.

Gramps and Wallace came round the last bend above the town carrying old man George between them. He was strapped to a car seat, inelegantly, grotesquely, and weighed about a ton. Every ounce of a ton. He was so, so heavy and their hands were so, so sore. Blistered. Even cut from the sharp edge of the seat. And their clothing was soaked with sweat, stuck to them, tugging and tweaking at them, and their bodies cried for relief, for water, for rest. Gramps was waiting for his heart to break or stop, but it pounded on, confusing his senses with its thunder.

Harry had given in. He had been sick so often that they had left him to follow when he could. He wasn't far behind, no more than a few hundred yards, and he had never felt sicker. He had swallowed too much smoke, and though he believed himself to be shocked less than the others, he was in fact shocked more. It hadn't taken long; only a few minutes; then it had come back over him like a gigantic wave or a gigantic noise. The rampaging fire-front, though behind him in time and space, enveloped him again in his mind. Then a second time and a third time. Then he had started screaming. Now he dragged his feet and hung his head; his arms and shoulders drooped. One moment he was feverishly hot, the next desperately cold. And he was dry. His thirst was raging, and he walked on only because he knew that if he didn't some tree still burning might fall upon him, some new blaze springing up might cut him off. The danger was no less real because he kept on the move; it only seemed so. If life for Harry had not held such promise, if he had not dreamt of someday being a man, he would have fallen to the road and not got up. Except that the road was hotter than the air. It was hotter than the sands of a desert. It was hot through the soles of his shoes.

Gramps and Wallace came slowly round the bend, and there below them were the outskirts of Miltondale, an odd blend of the living and the dead, veiled by smoke, in places still fiercely burning. Showers of sparks and billows of smoke driven by the wind into hillsides of ashes. Tall trees here and there unburnt, isolated garden copses unburnt, homes scorched but standing, elsewhere cracked chimneys rearing from twisted heaps of iron like blasted guns surrounded by bodies. And a smell. The curious smell of burnt things once used by men, the smell of burnt tables, burnt books, burnt beds, burnt armchairs, burnt bread. Things that burned with black smoke and green fire. Things that burned with white smoke and red fire. Things that smouldered. Things that exploded. Things that wouldn't burn but turned into powder. Things that cracked. Things that shattered. Things that melted. Things that vanished.

There were no people. The people had not come back. They were lucky to have had somewhere to go. There were no living animals or birds, no insects.There was a great sound of wind and burning, of things falling down; yet also a great silence, a great desolation.

They saw it but didn't see it. They were aware of it but could not take it in. They came down the hill towards it like actors on the wrong stage, and Pippa's father came up the hill on a bicycle. He didn't know whose bicycle it was; he didn't care. He hadn't ridden a bicycle in years and his calf muscles and thigh muscles were in torment. He had ridden it for three miles as fast as he could. He had begged for a car to drive him to Prescott, but cars were no longer going that way. They were heading in new directions now, south towards other townships, south along back roads and branch roads, and then west, swinging wide of the ranges towards the city, for Prescott was no longer the haven it had seemed to be.

He had hoped to borrow a car or take one, but the only cars left were cars burnt-out or cars that wouldn't go. He had found a motorcycle, but there hadn't been any petrol in it; he had found a motor-scooter, but had been unable to start it. So he had taken a bicycle to ride ten and a half miles home; and having got it he had been afraid to put it down; afraid to dismount long enough to stop any passing vehicle on the road in case someone should take the bicycle from him. Cars heading out of the ranges would not turn back, anyway, and there were none at all heading in the direction he wished to take.

He saw Gramps Fairhall and Wallace coming round the curve down the hill towards him, but did not recognize his neighbour until the gap between them had closed to a few yards. By that time the steepness of the hill had beaten him and he was walking breathlessly beside the bicycle as fast as he possibly could, and Gramps and Wallace with their peculiar burden had drawn so close they looked like stretcher-bearers stumbling dazed from a battlefield.

Their eyes met, and in the manner of men under great strain, obsessed by their own concerns, they expressed no surprise and felt none. That they should meet in circumstances so out of the ordinary seemed the most natural thing in the world.

As far as Gramps was concerned there was no need even to stop. He was almost hypnotized. His body knew it had to keep plodding on until it reached the hospital or someone or something turned up to take over the responsibility. Buckingham with a bicycle was clearly not that person or object. If Buckingham had been driving a car it would have been different. Nor did Mr Buckingham see in Gramps Fairhall any relief for his own distress.