another tall, sandy-haired man like Angus, but thinner, and noisier. He is known to be clever and very generous and he has taken endless trouble in times of trouble to help many people in the hills community. He is a prominent local member of the Greens. Compassion has not made him any more subtle.
Angus explains how he lost his own two-level house in the South Australian bushfires. Burnt to a ruin, the lower rooms left standing but the roof gone, the rafters black and distorted. It had blown its brains out. He was lucky to be here talking about it, given his panicked escape late in the fire-path. Not his idea. Not his house design either, just a house he’d purchased with his ex-wife in a difficult time, her choice and his… for going along with it.
Do you have a partner? he asks her.
Urh, yes. Well, I think so.
She ‘thinks’ of Richard, far away on his travels overseas and, like the Universe, disappearing towards that wall of pixels. Perhaps right through it.
She can’t read Angus’ reaction, or his lack of one. To be fair, nor can he.
But he’s in the UK at the moment. He’s a bit of a prick, if you want to know. He’s an academic too.
He raises his eyebrows (he wants to go huh and he hears it, silenced).
Right, he says, after a pause. Anyway, though I never lost friends to it, my house was lost in a bushfire, so I’m part of this lot. Except from another time and place. The experience is the same, regardless.
His face is grave again. He is going to add something but doesn’t, or perhaps he can’t. It is slight and slow and yet she catches something in this slowness. And she remembers this afterwards.
Now Angus has re-built the SA house to make it as fire-proof as possible. Because he couldn’t sell a conventional house he’d never wanted, to pay for the divorce settlement he’d never wanted, to someone who most likely wouldn’t want a house in a fire zone. Unless it was safe. Crazy.
How safe is safe? she asks.
It’s hard to test an experiment like that, to test it with real danger, and he smiles at her, the opposite of her own work in research, housed in the safe world of ideas.
He has experimented. There is a lot going on now, where before there was nothing. So when Stan contacted him from Victoria to ask for help in designing his own ‘fire-proofed’ house, it seemed an extra-ordinary deliverance.
Angus takes her arm, gently, to direct her around to the side of the house. He helps her clamber up against the rear walls then explains how they began. How without taking more than a wink and a tinnie from the local experts, he and Stan had set about finding slow but beautiful fire and river-coloured bricks then mortaring them into double-brick walls with brick and block interior walls. Then, their big trick, insetting one course of bricks and wrapping the outside walls with steel bands, flush. And inside too, but hidden from view within the wall cavity. Surrounded by the most intense heat these walls should never burst open, nor implode. Inside, the vaulted ceiling is made of fire-proofed wood, again, banded with steel so the roof can never blow open like his own insanely blown-open house. No eaves to catch the embers. No maintenance either. And windows with shutters.
We could be in Italy! he says, a bit pissed now, opening his arms like a tenor cracking on a high note.
He slips on the crumbling clay surface and skids away from her and down the slope like a kid, or a long man in the luge. It takes more than wind out of him. She is laughing as she looks down. The man-genius reduced to stumbling legs. His left trouser leg is streaked reddy-brown from the clay. And his elbows.
Jasmin lowers herself towards him and gently brushes the clay from his arms. He sees her trying her best to hold back laughter and has to nod, and nod.
I’m as dusty as an old book.
Or an old bottle of wine?
You know, you should use your semiotics to study old books. Maybe even wine.
He might almost be lecturing. He is so innocent. But she is studying him.
People do, Angus. Books, and yes, even labels, on wine or on anything. That’s why I don’t. I look at… well, you know, I told you. Public things.
I think I’m getting the hang of it, he says.
More quietly than before, he then explains the deep incision they cut into the clay of the slope then reinforced with concrete, so it looks like a kind of acoustic shell. How they tucked the house in under it: the earth shape diverts the flames and the heat-wave up and over the specially-clad roof. The house is made part of the slope, stretching east. On the south west side of the cliff the soil is re-grown with prostrate ground-covers, native, of course, growing with minimal water through summer. Further back are the trees along the gravel access road and the public roadside.
The fires usually come over this way, he says, the big one did. They roar and roll over the house like a deafening wave of surf that crashes… then passes, you have to hope, leaving the house safe in its wake.
Hands busy with shapes and shoulders rolling Angus is performing again, this time a Marcel Marceu show of fire and design, making wide-arm curves and shell shapes as if describing the Opera House in a terrible wind.
By chance, he tells her, a real test arrived. They wouldn’t have wished it on anyone. And it did, the bushfire swelled over the house – and nothing happened. There are black charring-marks on the corners and gnawings into the wall plates under the roof where eaves would have been and these and other things Angus shows her, a signature of the fires.
He tells her very quietly, this building is one of the survivors.
Not to be overheard, she suddenly realises. That he and Stan had felt triumphant, their house had survived, but then felt a more compromised elation. Many houses with people inside them were not standing after the fireballs passed. There had been broken outer walls and lone chimneys and heat-bleached tiles on the floors and nothing else. Exploded house-frames. Metal roof-iron whacked out of shape by thousand degree heat, the fiery caul which went over everything as the people who waited, the people who stayed, as it was called, become nothing more than ash.
The evening is warm and windless on their side of the hill but the hours are adding up just as the guests are adding the numbers of drinks and subtracting the hours, knowing the equation was reducing their chances of staying for as long as possible and still driving home safely, that is without being stopped and breathalysed out on the highway.
None of this Underbelly drama, no big music. Just a cop sitting there under a tree, seatbelt still on, chomping through a packet of crisps like a man waiting for the last tick in his numbers book.
Angus has just gone off to talk with Stan and the two of them are leaning on the verandah posts staring in a comfortable old friends manner out across the valley where darkness is filling in the eerie paleness between trees. When Jasmin walks up to say she is leaving and thanks and all that, Stan’s two children run to them, all excited and wordy and blonde. Their small faces look tender and flushed.
They are beautiful boys you have, Jasmin says, though she makes it sound off-hand. Then embarrassed.
Stan steps towards her and places his hands on her shoulders.
You can have some just like them, if you want. And he laughs, delighted, though she can tell it’s a line he might use whenever
