far away was the fire? There was no way to tell. The fire map on his phone was of little use. It showed broad districts. What he wanted was a map of what was happening down the road. He couldn’t see by looking. It was starting to be hard to see as far as the end of his arm.
‘We’ve done enough.’ Julie’s voice was hoarse from the smoke. ‘I’ve done inside and cleared the back porch. I’ve filled the pits and cleared the bunker. All the dot-points on the plan are complete.’
‘Really?’ It was weird to feel inordinately pleased that she’d remembered dot-points. Julie and her dot-points...weird that they turned him on.
‘So what now?’ she asked. ‘Oh, Rob, I can’t bear it in these clothes. All I want is to take them off and lie under the hose.’
It gave him pause for thought. Jules, naked under water... ‘Is that included on our dots?’ Impossible not to sound hopeful.
‘Um...no,’ she said, and he heard rather than saw her smile.
‘Pity.’
‘We could go inside and sit under the air-conditioning while it’s still safe to have the air vents open.’
‘You go in.’ He wouldn’t. How to tell what was happening outside if he was inside? ‘But, Jules, the vents stay closed. We don’t know where the fire is.’
‘How can we tell where it is? How close...?’ The smile had gone from her voice.
‘It’s not threatening. Not yet. We have thick smoke and wind and leaf litter but I can reach out my hand and still—sort of—see my fingers. The fire maps tell us the fire’s cut the access road, but how long it takes to reach this gully is anyone’s guess. It might fly over the top of us. It might miss us completely.’ There was a hope.
‘So...why not air-conditioning?’
‘There’s still fire. You can taste it and you can smell it. Even if the house isn’t in the firing line, there’ll be burning leaf litter swirling in the updraught. On Black Saturday they reckoned there were ember attacks five miles from the fire front. We’d look stupid if embers were sucked in through the vents. But you go in. I’ll keep checking.’
‘For...how long?’ she faltered. ‘I mean...’
‘For as long as it takes.’ He glanced upward, hearing the wind blasting the treetops, but there was no way he could see that far. The smoke was making his throat hurt, but still he felt the need to try and make her smile. ‘It looks like we’re stuck here for Christmas,’ he managed. ‘But I’m sure Santa will find a way through. What’s his motto? Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night shall stay St Nicholas from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.’
‘Isn’t that postmen?’ And amazingly he heard the smile again and was inordinately pleased.
‘Maybe it is,’ he said, picking up his hose and checking pressure. They still had the solar power but he’d already swapped to the generators. There wouldn’t be time to do it when...if...the fire hit. ‘But I reckon we’re all in the same union. Postmen, Santa and us. We’ll work through whatever’s thrown at us.’ And then he set down his hose.
‘It’s okay, Jules,’ he said, taking her shoulders. ‘We’ve been through worse than this. We both know...that things aren’t worth crying over. But our lives are worth something and maybe this house is worth something as well. It used to be a home. I know the teddies and fire engines and wall-hanging are safe but let’s see this as a challenge. Let’s see if we can save...what’s left of the rest of us.’
* * *
They sat on the veranda and faced the wind. It was the dumbest place to sit, Julie thought, but it was also sensible. The wind seared their faces, the heat parched their throats but ember attacks would come from the north.
Their phones had stopped working. ‘That’ll be the transmission tower on Mount Woorndoo,’ Rob said matter-of-factly, like it didn’t matter that a tower not ten miles away had been put out of action.
He brought the battery radio outside and they listened. All they could figure was that the valley was cut off. All they could work out was that the authorities were no longer in control. There were so many fronts to this fire that no one could keep track.
Most bush fires could be fought. Choppers dropped vast loads of water, fire trucks came in behind the swathes the choppers cleared; communities could be saved.
Here, though, there were so many communities...
‘It’s like we’re the last people in the world,’ Julie whispered.
‘Yeah. Pretty silly to be here.’
‘I wanted to be here.’
‘Me, too,’ he said and he took her hand and held.
And somehow it felt okay. Scary but right.
They sat on. Surely the fire must arrive soon. The waiting was almost killing her, and yet, in a strange way, she felt almost calm. Maybe she even would have stayed if Rob hadn’t come, she thought. Maybe this was...
‘We’re going to get through this,’ Rob said grimly and she hauled her thoughts back from where they’d been taking her.
‘You know, those weeks after the boys were killed, they were the worst weeks of my life.’ He said it almost conversationally, and she thought: don’t. Don’t go there. They hadn’t talked about it. They couldn’t.
But he wasn’t stopping. She should get up, go inside, move away, but he was waiting for ember attacks, determined to fight this fire, and she couldn’t walk away.
Even if he was intent on talking about what she didn’t want to hear.
‘You were so close to death yourself,’ he said, almost as if this had been chatted about before. ‘You had smashed ribs, a punctured lung, a shattered pelvis. But that bang on the head... For the first few days they couldn’t tell me how you’d wake up. For the first twenty-four hours they didn’t even know whether you’d wake up at all. And there I was, almost scot-free. I had a laceration on my arm and nothing more. There were people everywhere—my parents, your parents, our friends. I was surrounded yet I’d never felt so alone. And at the funeral...’
‘Don’t.’ She put a hand on his arm to stop him but he didn’t stop. But maybe she had to hear this, she thought numbly. Maybe he had to say it.
‘I had to bury them alone,’ he said. ‘Okay, not alone in the physical sense. The church was packed. My parents were holding me up but you weren’t there... It nearly killed me. And then, when you got out of hospital and I asked if you’d go to the cemetery...’
‘I couldn’t.’ She remembered how she’d felt. Where were her boys? To go to the cemetery...to see two tiny graves...
She’d blocked it out. It wasn’t real. If she didn’t see the graves, then maybe the nightmare would be just that. An endless dream.
‘It was like our family ended right there,’ Rob said, staring sightlessly out into the smoke. ‘It didn’t end when our boys died. It ended...when we couldn’t face their death together.’
