Alison was still alive. It felt like hours, but looking at her watch as she emerged from her blanket cocoon, she couldn’t quite believe it had been only thirty minutes or so. She crawled, dripping sweat and soggy clothing, to the nearest window, stopping to drink a little from the bathtub and extinguish the few stray embers smoldering on the tile. She peered through the space where the windowpane had been. Outside, the stillness seemed to be a trick, concealing what had gone before. But the sky was red-orange, and there was smoke on the air, clinging to the trees, the eaves, the roof, the veranda, and the gutters. The ground was covered in ashen debris. Ghost-white-chalky-black-dusty-mingled-gray soot covered everything.
The day was a little cooler now. No more than ninety-five as the sun crept low, a long way from its midday peak. Alison was alone, which didn’t normally jar, but lying under the sill, staring up at the sky, the acrid smell of death and ash surrounding her, for once she allowed herself to be lonely. It was just a few seconds. And then she forgot to continue wallowing. The house was shrouded in smoke and had a few broken windows, but otherwise it was, somehow, all right. She moved slowly through the rooms, checking for damage. There was no power, no water in the taps, and where the fire had torn through the bush the trees were stripped and blackened. No viable limbs remained. Outside, she knew there would be work to do. Fences and trees down, the driveway surely blocked, impassable.
The screen door was hot to the touch, and an arm’s length from the veranda the closest blackened trunk stood, barely upright. It would have to come down. Alison followed the sweep of the hill with her eyes. There was uncountable debris. Licking at the edge of the house, the fire front had suddenly moved around to the side and stormed off down the drive, lighting up one side of the unsealed road and leaving nothing but ash and black-brittle splinters in its wake. On the other side, the trees were the same mottled green-brown of hot high summer, as though nothing had happened.
She would have to wait for the State Emergency Service to come through and clear the drive before she’d be able to get the car out. That could take days, maybe longer, depending on the scale of the fire. The road was a kilometer away. She grabbed a bag and shoved a few things in it, checked her phone. No service. Time to go.
On the dirt path Alison sifted her way through the wreckage back to bitumen. It was quiet now, the usual sounds of the bush dampened by death. What little wildlife had been able to flee would not return in a hurry. She thought of the family of tawny frogmouths that had lived in that now-blackened tree by the front door, their delicate feathers and round amber brown eyes, the curve of their sharp-edged beaks, and the sound of their calls, dragged up from their throats and percolated in the backs of their mouths.
As she walked, Alison tried to reorder her mind. You’re fine. But it was hard not to get stuck dwelling on how likely it was that some of her neighbors were not. Alison hadn’t seen it coming—how would anyone have seen it coming? She tried to arrange the past twenty-four hours in her head, tried to remember the normal course of her day, the things that happened before this happened. Pull apart the edges and put them back together so what had happened made some sort of sense, closed her eyes and in the sandy soot-covered space of the drive sunk down onto her knees and let the memories roll over her—the hours before everything changed, again.
By midmorning the heat was up there, pushing 104 degrees before the clock hit eleven, a hot wind racing up to a hundred kilometers an hour, air forced around the state like a giant dryer, not a drop of moisture about—humidity as low as two percent—and even in bayside Melbourne, where Alison had spent the night at a friend’s, it felt as though her eyeballs might cook in her skull.
She’d tossed her backpack into the boot of her car, slid into the driver’s seat, and turned the key in the ignition, the radio stuttering to life . . . a high like that forecast, it’s going to be a scorcher, and a total fire ban is in place, with the premier urging people in high-risk areas to stay close to their radios for updates . . . Alison knew the warnings about fires you can’t escape, moments you can’t change, houses you can’t save, lives you can’t get back; she’d heard it from her grandfather every summer since she was small.
The sound of a gum tree falling, one with a hundred years or more on its ledger, is the loudest, most sustained crack of thunder you’ll ever hear, as limbs fold and crumple and crash and tumble all that long way down to the ground; timber splits and splinters with a wrenching that slices through time and tears at the tranquility of the day. You’re in the eye of a storm when the thunder and lightning are simultaneous. Sound travels slower than light. When you can hear something loud enough to shake your eardrums and clatter about in the space between your ribs, it’s right on top of you.
When Alison heard the first scream of the fire, she thought it was a gum blown down in the breeze. But at the window in her bedroom, she looked out across the bush and saw the smoke, heard more crashes—and then she saw it, coming fast, glimpses of red-hot movement among the trunks. Embers pushed the fire forward, rushing and crackling and spreading their blazing fury wide; there didn’t seem to be time to even consider leaving—the car was on the other side of the house, but Alison had no way to know whether the fire was farther down the drive, making escape an impossibility. Instead, she had grabbed a blanket from the linen cupboard in the hall and rushed into the bathroom, dunking it in the bathtub.
Outside, the fire grabbed at trees and closed around them, two, three, four at a time, obliterating them with its gaping jaws, spitting still-smoldering remnants forward, leaving smoked skeletons in its wake; the bathroom was on the northeastern side of the house and Alison cowered there, her entire body swaddled in the thick, wet woolen blanket, the tile floor damp and cool as her cheek pressed hard against it. The noise was unbearable—a roaring, whooshing, crackling din; she closed her eyes and waited, uncertain what to do when you don’t believe in prayer, and the sticky camphor smell of the blanket distracted her, made her hold the air in her lungs. With a start, she remembered to breathe, not sure how long it had been between gasps—it was so hot. She was sweating and the air felt empty, like the oxygen was all gone. A shower of glass rained down on the blanket, and Alison could feel the pressure in the room change; she lifted a corner of the blanket, saw a smoky, hazy, wide-open rectangle where the window had been, and flames just barely a meter away, spewing embers and thick smoke in her direction, and then, with one fickle twist, the firestorm receded—like a giant had drawn a deep breath in—the front changing tack as a southerly blew through.
Sitting now with the bitter char of burned eucalypt in the back of her nostrils, Alison felt as though she had been split in two. Slumped in the dirty ash, she traced the lines of her name with her fingers, rubbed them out, pushed the black dust back into place, and used her little finger to trace a quiet curve like the bend of the tawny frogmouth’s neck, where the fine, sharp feathers curved from the base of its head to the tops of its wings. The way the brown dirt mingled with the whitest parts of the ashy ends of sticks and leaves and whatever else evoked the mottle of their coats. The sun sunk lower still in the sky of wild red.
Get up. Keep moving.
She didn’t listen to the unsettled voice inside her, just kept thinking about her morning, knees dug deep into the soot, rocks pressing into the soft hardness of her patellas. Still on her knees, she felt uneasy with the recollection, uneasy with the way it swished about in her brain. The pieces weren’t quite whole, the moments not quite matching. Like the night the cops had knocked on her door and told her about the accident. Taken her parents away with a sentence. Stopped up the one remaining valve in her calcifying heart. She heard the whoosh of the cooling southerly breeze as it tickled the strands of hair at the nape of her neck, on her temples, and over her ears. From the silent bush she felt an intensity, as if it were staring at her. I’m losing it. She peered through the gaps in the thick low brush, tried to locate the feeling’s source. A sharp jump in her bones as a twig snapped somewhere in that direction. The crisp, easy break of small wood under a big foot. There’s someone there.
“Who’s there?” Her voice carried into the trees, where it was absorbed and flattened. Deadened and muted by too much clutter. Nothing came back out.
Alison stood up and tried to shake the shuddering shiver from her frame. Could be anything. Could be nothing. Could be the snap and pop of wood returning to rest from heat-swelled discomfort. No one’s going to be out here in the middle of this. Alison knew she shouldn’t be either; it was time to get moving again.
There was a cocoon-like quality to this stretch, dense trees one way, the view of the house receding atop the hill, a hump in the road obscuring the lower part of the drive, and the black-white wall of stripped trees on the other side, making the familiar feel like the unknown. Goose bumps rose up on the flesh of her forearms as Alison fumbled over the hump and down toward the highway. An old-growth trunk had fallen as it burned, obstructing the path. Still smoking at the base, it was as wide as Alison was tall and stretched from the moonscape of the burned-out bush to the thick pale green bouquet on the other side. Alison raised her hands out in front of her, touched the unburned wood of the trunk near the top of what she could reach. The bark was slippery and sloughed off easily. Getting a foothold to clamber over the trunk would be dangerous. She cursed under her breath and looked around for another way through.
To the right, there was a narrow passage near the root base. Alison skirted the tree and emerged on the other side, soot smeared down her jeans. She blinked and saw something she couldn’t process. Something that shouldn’t be there.
She tried to blink it away. Tried to piece it together. Gather it up in a way that made sense. The hard outline of metal and glass, rubber and bright paint, against the soft chaos of the bush and the long dirt drive.
The car didn’t seem real. Like the noise in the bush or the bird she’d sketched out in the ash, could it be a product of her uncooperative mind? No. It was covered in soot, but bright cherry red peeked through where Alison smeared her hand along the car. Felt the heat of the steel that had absorbed the fire. The windows were blown out and the bonnet was wedged, crumpled, under the heavy tree trunk. Apprehensive, she crept toward the door, not sure that she wanted to confirm what she saw the outline of inside, but unable to stop herself.
Fuck. There was a woman in the driver’s seat, seemingly untouched by the chaos around her. Alison closed her eyes for a full minute before she willed herself to move around the car to the driver’s side and lean in to check for any signs the woman might still be alive, but as she reached out to feel for a pulse, she knew there would not be one. The woman’s eyes were open wide; the blue-gray of the pupils seemed washed-out, faded. Did they always look like that? When the last breath is drawn does the light really leave you?
She tried to remember her parents, at the funeral home. In the caskets. Their eyes were glassy like the marbles she had shot with her grandpa as a kid. These eyes weren’t any kind of glass. Stone maybe. The kind you find in the sand, washed down smooth from the waves, dried out in the sun. The woman’s skin was clammy but hot, and Alison shuddered at the sensation. Panic rose in her chest, making it hard to take deep breaths, or any breaths at all. The fog of it seeped into her brain and rang bells in her ears. She needed to know something, anything, that she could use as an anchor. Stop the whole world from spinning.
In the center console lay a purse and a mobile phone. She reached in and grabbed the purse. It was gray calfskin leather, worn smooth in patches where its owner’s long fingers had gripped it tightly. There were lots of cards, the plastic corners peeling on some, others shiny and new. The woman was thirty-three. Alison’s age. Her driver’s license showed they were born weeks apart. They were the same height. They both needed to wear glasses when they drove. The card was old, Alison noticed as she scrutinized the Queensland crest superimposed over the details, the five years of validity almost up. The address was somewhere in the suburbs of Cairns, which surprised Alison, since she’d lived in Cairns too, a couple of years ago. She looked at the body again. Her face wasn’t familiar, and neither was her name.
What was Simone Arnold doing there? In the middle of a bushfire, on the driveway to Alison’s house? From the license a face full of life stared back at Alison. Here they were, her real eyes, dancing with light, and her cheeks, close to curving for a smile, light laugh lines visible at her temples. Simone Arnold looked like fun, Alison thought. Her dirty-blond hair sat in a long, neat braid that fell down the right side of her chest. She wore jeans and a pale pink camisole. Alison saw a blanket on the back seat, and she reached through the broken window for it. She threw it gently over Simone, not wanting to leave her exposed. She softly dragged her fingertips over her eyelids, concealing the dulled stare. She wasn’t able to parse it. To hold this dead woman’s story in her head. It was too much already.
She gripped the purse tightly in her own hand. It calmed her to squeeze it. The foggy din in her head receded enough to remember where she was and what she was supposed to be doing. It was time to keep going.
Alison reluctantly continued to walk down the drive, toward the black tar, now visible ahead, pockmarked and blistered from the inferno. Evening was settling in, in pink and orange hues. Overhead a confused clutch of wrens flitted around in search of a suitable home. A few strides from the highway Alison stopped and turned back, again trying to take it all in. The car was still there. Of course it is. The tires were flat, causing it to sag into the drive, the exhaust pipe almost touching the ground.
It isn’t going to go away.
For a second Alison panicked. She wanted to turn around and seek out the familiarity of home. She wanted to go back and drag Simone Arnold from the car, try to force the air back into her lungs, shake the life back into her arms, pump the blood back into her heart. She wanted to scream. She wanted to swap places. She wanted to die on the bathroom floor, covered in wet wool, breathing in smoke and cinders. Dissolving into the dirt.
The low-level buzz of a headache started up in her skull. She looked down and realized she was still holding on to Simone Arnold’s purse. She didn’t want to go back up to the car, so she forced herself to head toward the gravel shoulder, the leather gripped tight against her palm. From her house to the road was roughly a full click, and she reached the highway as the light began to truly drain away for the day. She’d only been walking toward town for a few minutes when a ute pulled up beside her.
“Alison?” It was her neighbor Jim Allenby.
“My drive is blocked.” She knew she looked a mess, her hair still wild from hiding under the blanket, her arms and legs streaked with white ash from the car, a smear of it over her left eye.
“Come on, then, I’ll take you in.” Jim reached across the cab of the ute and pushed the door open.
Alison swung up onto the seat.
“There’s a car in it,” Alison said quietly.
“Your driveway? Did you try to get out in that little Corolla? Well, no wonder you didn’t make it. I’ll bet you’ve got trees down all over the place.”
“Yes, everywhere.” They pulled away from the shoulder, leaving thick treads in the charcoal and ash.
“You can stay in town tonight. I’m sure Sal will have you.” Jim was driving as fast as he safely could, the ute jostling over the broken road, crunching the twigs and branches that had fallen in the firestorm.
“There’s a woman in the car.” Alison’s voice barely registered any emotion. As she spoke, she felt a rushing in her ears, like too much blood was trying to get to her brain.
“What car? Your car?” Jim kept driving, one hand on the gear stick, the elbow of the other arm propped up on the window. Alison noticed the hairs on the back of his leathery left arm seemed to have almost disappeared, and the skin looked redder than usual.
“No. The car in my driveway. What happened to your arm?” She knew she wasn’t making sense.
“Whose car is in the drive?” Jim turned and looked at her, finally figuring out that she was saying something important.
“Simone’s.” Saying her name to someone else, even Jim, seemed strange. Saying the name at all made it realer than Alison wanted it to be.
“Friend of yours? Did she stay with the car?” He slowed a little; the blackened trunks out the window became distinct pillars, a thousand individual husks where there once was bush.
“She’s not my friend. She’s dead.”
He stopped the ute a little too quickly and Alison’s chest jerked forward.
“There’s a dead woman in a car in your driveway?” Jim asked slowly.
“Yes. I think it must have been the smoke.”
Neither of them said anything, and Alison began to feel, sitting in the ute, surrounded by the ghosts of trees and the incinerated bodies of birds, lizards, bugs, snakes, and marsupials, like they were the last two people on earth. A siren’s wail carried on the breeze from high up on the hill and broke the silence.
“Radiant heat, more likely,” Jim said, turning the key in the ignition. They needed to get to town. “You know her?”
“No.”
He accelerated slowly, his weathered face strained.
“We better tell the coppers.” Alison began to cry. “Alison?” Jim paused, thinking. “How do you know her name?”
“She’s the same age as me. She’s thirty-three.” He didn’t respond. “We’re the same height. Her hair is blond. I always thought I would like to be blond.”
“Alison, I think you’re in shock. Just try not to think about it. We’ll get there soon.”
“I looked in her purse, to see who she was. I thought maybe if I could call her name, it might make her wake up.” She remembered, as she said this, that she hadn’t said anything to Simone, hadn’t tried at all to break her from the grip of death with words. The purse, which she’d pulled out of her bag to wave in Jim’s direction, felt heavy in her hands.
“Come on, now, stop it. You’ll work yourself into a state.”
Jim was speeding. Alison’s breathing was ragged. Her voice was high and tight. The words were hard to distinguish from the sobs.
“Maybe if I’d got there sooner.”
“No, Alison. Fire like the one today, the only way you’d have seen her alive would’ve been if you’d died right alongside her.”
There was silence. Alison was too upset now to cry, too exhausted to speak. The old Ford barreled along the two-lane highway, high beams on. To the south, in the rearview, a ridge of flame snaked across the plain. Ahead, the lights of the town were beginning to emerge. Alison was surprised there was power still, but grateful for the sense of normalcy it imposed.
“There’s nothing you could do.”
She wrapped her arms around herself. Tucked her chin into her chest. After a few minutes, she opened Simone’s purse again, having kept it clutched in her sweaty hand. They were the same age. She thumbed through the cards, counted the cash—a lot of it, Alison realized now, almost seven hundred dollars in notes, another eight in change. Tucked among the fifties, a piece of paper.
Alison King, 5872 Cook Creek Road, Lake Bend, Victoria
The words, scrawled across a torn corner of a yellow pad lined red, jolted Alison. She stared, her back straight against the seat, hairs on her arms rising. She glanced over at Jim, wondering, had he seen her reaction? He was focused on the road, cluttered as it was with the windblown remains of the bush. Alison had no idea what it meant. Was she the reason this woman had died? Who was she? What was she doing there? Alison’s head throbbed as the ute navigated the early dusk. The handwriting was not unlike Alison’s, all uppercase, no respect for the imposed guidelines of the notepaper. Flourish on the R, the B, the K. Fuck. Alison tried to contain the energy she felt coiled inside her, the howl that wanted to escape through her smoke-singed throat. She took three deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Felt a little better. Felt a little worse. Jim still wasn’t talking. They rocked along the road at a steady pace as Alison tried to settle. She couldn’t.