so totally is Gen Y putting bad news out of their busy minds (Whatever, she asked me, and I’m like: I’m real hot tonight for Jason. He’s such an idiot ha ha. The girl I’m after tonight I want to get her pissed and then… LOL). She knows how many other people in the fire fronts crouched and lay down in tears and burnt. How survivors had no choice but to return, saw past the house in brick-pile and ash, to their loved ones in white frames of bone.
Angus. His name sounds like a stone, she can hear in it Ingres, Angst, Angastura, Anxious… Anger? Or, here, in the fire-shadow, as he puts it, saying Angus she hears Sadness.
He makes a confession. When he told her he worked in landscape design that was his party version: his actual job carries more stubborn weight – landscaping, gardening – and way less kudos. He designs public places with lawns and waterways. He moves mountains, and then he builds them up again.
He says his profession has added to the surface tension of the world: heavy cities, and now massive landscape constructions that might sometime (yes, he has dreamt it) plunge below the earth’s surface when a critical mass occurs. Think of it: so much concrete and stone in one place. Jasmin does. He has blue eyes. He is responsible for earthquakes?
He was apprenticed years earlier with dusty carpenters and holds as a precious memory the elegant wooden frames of houses before they are covered over with tiles or tin. He appreciated the pine wall-frames and the window battens and later the rafters, the way buildings waited, open to sunlight like something made for sun worship, their pinewood skeletons a kind of poetry of rafters.
Until bloody roof tilers clamber over a house and darkness spreads within the rooms below. The slab goes slug-cold in winter.
Look at Stan’s house, he says, pointing to the walls. This is one good thing borne of adversity. Which I…
He thinks better of saying it. Instead he refers to the strange metal framework of the external walls. How the lawn is a generic lawn but the house is clasped in unconventional metal frames. The outside walls are steel-banded like coopers’ bands around a wine barrel, but square, not hooped. Jasmin has been wondering when to ask someone about this. It’s not something she has ever seen before. Why then? she asks him.
It stops the walls exploding outwards, he says. It’s a unique idea which I… Well, I designed it for Stan. He built it.
When she frowns, disbelieving, he tells her: really, he’s not making it up. He has, he insists, no qualifications whatsoever, just a lot of nerve. But he knows about fires. And what happens to houses.
A woman approaches them and tops up their glasses. Angus smiles and she says something to him Jasmin doesn’t quite hear. Then he laughs, the house story apparently forgotten.
Well, it must be damn good wine he’s drinking. She in turn sees him like his rafters, standing above the roofline, an image of frames and happy angles. But he is up and down; there is something lost about him. He too seems banded, like the walls. Even his conversation has bands around it. But it has bright blue eyes. Light among the darkness of the mood and the eerie burnt-out landscape.
Glancing, warily perhaps, when she is looking away, Angus sees she has a sensual face and dark eyes. She has visible cheek-bones, her lips hold a generous and now, he guesses, a wry smile for those close to her. He can’t see (he will later realise) that the woman is always worrying over books and complex meetings with her students at University. Her academic face.
As they continue talking Angus’s guard is relaxing into unexpected anecdotes she tells and he laughs at, and in her eye contact, and at the way she refers to Melbourne as a design city, and he likes that. Design. Not his kind of design, more her kind with the de and the sign parted with a hyphen. Designate. As a place of signs. Signs? Is that what she does, something to do with signs, he asks her. Well, she excuses herself, she is a semiologist. She lets him get away with What, a seismologist? after his images of stones and earthquakes. (Once, at a performance of Coriolanus, she heard a dragged-along bloke say to his girlfriend, this Cornelius had better be good.)
Where has everybody else been? There were people hugging their awful secret. There were a few people yelling. There are always a few people yelling.
I hate parties, he groans.
Everybody hates parties, she says, I mean everyone says they hate parties.
Teasing him maybe – yet here they both are.
Not today, he adds. Today is an exception. This, he means to say, is based on strong feelings. Remembering the destruction and the need to move on. But he means her. Anyway, he likes the rush of social drinking, the excitement of it beats the hell out of a glass of something in silence at home. Searching too hard for the flavour of the wine. This is his confession of being single. And philosophical.
Except when driving home is too far and… though not today, I live close by, just down the road, he adds. He gazes across at the troubled pastures in the opposite paddocks, at the three brown horses stationary after their earlier galloping. The horses may or may not be happy but people at the party seeing the horses are happy to see them.
After a fire you see all the usual devastation, the kind that TV cameras can show, but there are odder things that show up, like skulls of kangaroos and things you thought lost which are suddenly visible. Old bikes, wheels, anything metallic really. Glass. Though sometimes glass is simply a blob with charcoally stuff solidified into it. Once, I was walking through burnt out bush and found the skeleton of a snake. It was white and the bones were still intact, which is remarkable because they are very fine bones. It looked like a metre-long comb of some kind.
She smiles and keeps eye contact with him, the newly arriving silence of eye contact. And says nothing.
It seems reasonable, he tells her, that so many locals still experience fear, and enough anxiety for sudden panic. No, not a panic-attack, that’s media-speak, but a state of panic, feelings that are the same as panic, or accompany panic, but do not rush about like someone panicking. Dread of a kind.
She is humbled by the gravity of what he is saying. And the plain-ness of his clothing, his calf-length shorts over tanned legs, his sandals - and his strikingly pale feet. A man who works outdoors?
He says he always wears boots, and laughs to be distracted from being, as he had been, stuck yet again in fire talk.
In fact I always wear safety boots. With all the years of outdoor work you might think my feet are hard but they’re not. They are probably as soft as yours.
She finds this surprisingly intimate.
My feet may not be as soft as you think, she says, smiling. I go barefoot whenever I can. I supervise my students barefoot, in my office, where no one knows or cares. In tutorials when it’s not too cold.
She is embarrassed; she has never said this to anyone before and as mild as it is, she feels now self-centred to confess it. She coughs.
And in good weather I run.
This he can guess. Her tights pay her a very shapely compliment.
They keep talking. They watch the kangaroos grazing across the paddocks below the house. Grey and plump at last, like card players in the shadows. It has taken this long for the grass to return and now it is green and lush from the ash and the potassium, the natural potash. Over in the valley it grows in patches beneath the trees that remain black and are scattered like crochets on the hillside.
After wandering off to get another
