Sal turned into the driveway, the motion of the car catching Alison by surprise. She opened her eyes to orientate herself, and immediately regretted agreeing to come. Sinking down in her seat, she looked out the window at the decimated side of the drive. Over to the left, the bush untouched, dry and heavy but still all there, and then on the right, a blackened stripped-bare hellscape. She thought back to that moment on the day of the fire. The noise in the bush. The creeping feeling she’d had, the one of being surveilled. Not everything here was the same as that day. Ahead, the drive had been cleared. There was no sign of Simone’s car, and the hulking trunk that had blocked the drive lay chopped and piled neatly to one side.
Sal drove straight past, not knowing, and pulled in at the top of the drive a minute later. The tires crunched on the loose gravel as Alison examined the outside of her house. The grass was burned away as close as a meter from the veranda, and the pale green paint had blistered and curled. Sooty dust blanketed the walls and windows on this side, covering the weatherboard in a thick film of gray. Alison wanted to trace her name in it with her fingers, but she suppressed the childish urge. She walked up the front steps and sat down on the old cane chair her grandfather had bought decades ago. Sal was wandering around the lawn, looking for the edges of the fire’s path, the places the flame tongues had licked before the wind had forced the retreat.
“Are you going to go inside?” she called out.
“Not right now. I’m fine here.”
Looking down the drive she could see a cop car kicking up dust in its wake. Alison didn’t know why the police had wanted to meet her out here, but she’d agreed to the meeting reluctantly. As the car gained upon the house, it seemed to sag. It was filthy with ash and mud and dust, the windscreen caked in dirt, half-moons carved out by the wipers allowing the driver to see. As it got closer, Alison could see that the person driving was a woman. She didn’t recognize her and couldn’t see the usual baby blue of the uniform. A detective from the city, most likely. Alison had agreed to meet someone to go over what she knew about Simone, and she’d expected them to be a local. She didn’t know who this was. Someone from the arson squad, maybe. Papers said some of the fires had been deliberately lit. That on a 115-degree day, without a lick of rain hanging in the clouds, and with a hot breeze surging through the trees, some idiots had decided to fiddle with matches.
The car rolled up next to Sal’s, and Alison stood to greet it, raising a hand in a halfhearted wave. Sal walked over from somewhere near the water tank. The woman, in a light gray suit and immaculate white blouse that seemed ridiculous in this place, in this moment, swung out of the driver’s seat and slammed the door before walking at a clip up the front steps.
“Alison King?” The woman cocked her head to one side as she spoke, her eyes locked on Alison.
“Yes, that’s me.” Alison gestured toward Sal. “This is my friend Sal Marsh. I’m staying at her place at the moment.”
Sal nodded at the woman but didn’t speak.
“I’m Detective Corrine Mitchell.”
“Hi,” Alison said, not sure what to do.
“Can we go inside?” Detective Mitchell asked, breaking the ten-bar silence.
“Of course, follow me.” Alison realized she didn’t have her keys. She put her hand on the doorknob and turned, holding her breath. It gave way easily, even though she thought she remembered locking it on her way out. Had she? Unnerved, she shoved the door inward with her shoulder, a little surprised by how far into the hall she propelled herself. She flicked the light switch but nothing happened. In the sooty half-light, Alison was intensely aware of the traffic jam forming behind her in the hall.
“Sorry, electricity’s still out, it looks like.”
Sal’s voice carried through the gloom. “I’ll check the box, love. Have you got any wire?”
“Should be some in the hall stand, thanks, Sal.” Alison moved down the hall and into the dining room, where she swept her arm out, gesturing for Detective Mitchell to sit.
“I’ll see if the water’s on, fix us some tea.”
But the detective followed Alison into the kitchen and watched as she turned the tap. Water sputtered a little in the pipe, but then came out thick and fast. Alison rummaged around in the cupboard, emerging quickly with the stovetop kettle; she didn’t often make tea—made it only when Sal was visiting. Detective Mitchell watched, silent. The gas was, surprisingly, working too, so Alison lit the stove, momentarily hypnotized by the way the flame flickered and flared, and set the water on to boil. She went back to the cupboard for tea bags and busied herself collecting cups, sugar, and spoons. She found some long-life milk in the back, behind the cans of condensed milk her mother used to use to make caramel. There was a packet of butternuts unopened on the top shelf and she pulled them out too.
“Can I help?” Detective Mitchell asked.
A crow of triumph from outside. Sal yelled, “Try the lights, Ally, reckon I’ve fixed it.”
She walked over to the switch and flicked it. Nothing.
“Sorry, Sal, no go,” she yelled back. “I’m right, Detective; if you could take the cups, I’ve got the rest.”
Detective Mitchell disappeared down the hall with the teacups. Sal bustled into the room and began gathering up all the rest of the tea things. Alison stood there, watching the kettle, waiting for it to whistle. The longer it took, the more time she had to figure out what she wanted to know, what she wanted to say.
She turned around. Detective Mitchell was back, looking at her with what felt like suspicion. Alison tried to smile but the corners of her mouth didn’t cooperate.
“I’d like to get a sense of your relationship with Simone,” Detective Mitchell said abruptly.
“I didn’t have one. Never met her.” Alison watched the stream of steam increase in the spout, pushing out faster through the whistle.
“What would she be doing on your property if you didn’t know her?”
“Well, you’re the detective,” Alison offered, shrugging.
Her expression hardened and Alison could tell she didn’t appreciate the flippant response. The kettle began to hum.
“Alison Catherine King. Raised right here. Moved to Carlton to attend the Victorian College of the Arts, then ten years in Cairns after that, and the last couple of years here. Your Cairns address was unit 3B, 214 the Esplanade. That’s you, isn’t it?”
Alison spoke quietly when she answered. “Yes, that’s me.”
“Well, Simone Louise Arnold lived in that same block of flats for the last four years, up until about a month ago, when she disappeared off the face of the earth. Extraordinary coincidence she ends up here.” Detective Mitchell didn’t blink as she waited for a response. The kettle was whistling hard, the shrill note of an umpire’s reprimand, unrelenting. The noise split the questions in Alison’s head into a million fragments, none of them coherent. Alison thought about Simone’s license; the address was different. She mustn’t have updated it.
“It’s a coincidence all right. I might have lived in her building, but I never met her. It’s a big block, full of tourists and short-term rentals. I never paid much attention to who was coming and going.” Alison racked her brain for anything. Any hint at all. Did she know her? Was that why Simone had been carrying her address? She couldn’t remember. Shit.
The kettle’s shrill call made her temples throb. Alison turned the gas off and picked it up by the handle. She grabbed a cork mat from the countertop and walked past Detective Mitchell and into the dining room. Put the kettle down on the mat and pulled out a chair.
Detective Mitchell came into the room. She sat down slowly, watching Alison the whole time. Alison busied herself with the tea. Detective Mitchell leaned forward in her chair and put her hand on Alison’s arm.
“Can you tell me how you two knew each other?”
“We didn’t. I just told you that. Why would I lie?” Alison’s arm felt hot where the detective’s hand clutched it, the sweat from her palm making the skin clammy with wet.
“Because you don’t want to be blamed for Simone’s death, maybe.”
“She died in a fire. I nearly died in that fire. I had no idea she was there, no idea who she was.”
“I’m just trying to figure this out. Simone, as I explained to you, went missing. Right now, it’s not clear how she died. They’re doing an autopsy, but she had extensive bruising that could be consistent with a struggle, and it appears some bleeding on the brain. Her parents are looking for answers, and if you can give them any, they’d be grateful.”
“I thought they were going to be here too.” Alison had agreed to the meeting only because she wanted to meet them.
“I thought it was best we talked first. OK, maybe you didn’t know her. Maybe you knew her boyfriend”—she checked her notebook—“his name was Michael? Her parents say she was trying to get away from him.”
Michael. No one came to mind.
“No, I didn’t know her. I didn’t know anything about her.” Alison got up slowly from her chair and walked out of the room, down the hall, and into the bathroom. Simone was from the exact same apartment building in Cairns where everything had gone wrong in the first place. In the bathroom, the claustrophobia of the fire returned. And so did the sick feeling in her stomach, the fear of what might happen if she said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing. She felt trapped, not for the first time in this room, and not for the first time in her life.
Outside, through the broken window, a blur of movement in the blackened background, something out of place in the corner of her eye. What the fuck was going on? She stared hard into the landscape’s gaping wound, the ghostly trunks and ashen stumps. Alison heard footsteps and turned to see Detective Mitchell standing behind her, arms folded across her chest. Something about the way she was looking at her made Alison furious.
“Do you see that blanket?” Alison pointed to the heavy woolen blanket on the tile floor. The bath was still full of water. The glass from the window still strewn over everything. Detective Mitchell nodded.
“That’s where I was on Sunday. Underneath that fucking blanket, breathing through damp wool and increasingly convinced I would be dead before the day was out. I didn’t know shit about Simone Arnold. I’d never met her; I’d no idea she was headed my way. I was cowering under a blanket while the trees outside popped and crackled.”
Alison reached into the bath and pulled the plug out. The water began to drain, slowly at first, the whirlpool quietly gathering steam. She caught her finger on a sliver of glass that had nestled in the top of the plug. It sliced her cleanly, and she watched as the blood dripped into the water, clouding it rust. She didn’t notice the pain.
“I filled that bath up to the brim on Sunday. I had no idea I’d actually need it. I had no idea this fire was going to happen, and I sure as shit didn’t know about Simone Arnold on her way here or whatever she was doing. I lay here, terrified, for what felt like forever. After the fire turned, and I realized I was going to live, I drank some water straight from the tub. And then I got off the floor and walked out to the road. That’s when I found her. I wish she’d made it up here. I wish I could have helped her. I didn’t know her, but I would have let her share this blanket. I would have offered her this water.” The drain gurgled as the last of the water drained out.
“OK, Alison, I’m getting the message loud and clear,” Detective Mitchell said.
“Are you? Have you ever been in a fucking bushfire? You ever expected you were about to be cooked? You ever wished the heat or the smoke got you before the house burned down around you? You ever weighed the ways you could die and tried to maneuver it so you didn’t end up facing the worst one?” Alison leaned in close and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I have.” Her finger throbbed. Alison raised it high and squeezed it to try to stop the bleeding. Rummaged in the cabinet for a Band-Aid.
“I’m a police officer, Alison. I may not have been in a bushfire, but yes, I think I’m aware of how it feels to face a near-death experience.”
Alison couldn’t look at her, the mix of embarrassment and anger too much to bear. She busied herself patching the cut and waited for Detective Mitchell to leave the room.
Sal came into the bathroom, cleared her throat.
“I think I might pack up some of your things, Ally. You can stay with me a bit longer; you’ve got to get the electricity on and those windows fixed up.”
“Thanks, Sal, that’d be good.”
Alison walked back into the dining room. It was quiet. Detective Mitchell was staring out across the grass toward the ugly gash of darkness. She didn’t turn around, didn’t do anything to make it clear she knew Alison was there.
It seemed surreal, Alison thought, to have survived that fire—the papers were calling it once in a century—but to be here now, instead of Simone Arnold . . . a woman who, were it not for the wind, Alison could have been. Same age, same fucking apartment building. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Billy. She watched it ring, once, twice, three times.
“Are you going to get that?” Detective Mitchell asked, still not turning around.
Alison pressed the reject button and slipped the phone back in her pocket. “Nah, not important.”
After what felt like forever, Detective Mitchell got back into the car and drove away, the wheels kicking up ash and dirt in her wake. Alison watched her go until the car turned out of sight and back onto the sealed road. Sal came up behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “No point coming back here ’til you feel up to it.”
“Thanks, Sal, I don’t plan on staying at your place that long. I’ll be right in a couple of days.”
“You might not be, and that’s OK.” Sal walked down the front steps and headed to her car, a duffel bag stuffed with Alison’s things slung over her shoulder. She chucked it in the back seat and walked around to the driver’s side. “Ready?” she called out across the gravel, and Alison remembered she hadn’t locked up. Not that it really mattered, given the windows, but she wanted to have one more look, on her own.
“Just a minute,” she called and headed back inside. In the spare room, off the left of the hall at the front, her easel and paints were set up. She looked at the outlines on the canvas; she’d been halfway through blocking out a private commission. Working quickly, Alison wrapped her brushes in their roll and collected her small tubes of oils, enough reds and oranges to paint the fire back to life, some blacks and greens, white to mix for grays. She closed her eyes and saw a thousand shades of gray, hazy reds, and blacks.
In the low light of the white-walled gallery space, the brushstrokes that outlined the edges of her figure were accentuated by the downlights that allowed the eye to roam over the full curve of her hip, her thigh, her waist, her arm, and take it all in. She watched as he leaned in close, squinted a little to see where the oil rose up, the thickest parts of the paint, the heaviest proof of the brush, the places her hand had twitched and turned, where she had also leaned in close to scrutinize, to see that the pinks and whites and blacks and reds had melded like they should. That he should notice the work surprised her. He took care with it, raised his hand, rough and blistered from the kitchen, and traced the space a centimeter from the canvas, as if he were touching her. She felt the hairs on her arm prick up, the pull of him as if she were standing in the surf, trying to resist the undertow.
“Well?”
He stood up straight, rocked back on his heels. “You’re beautiful.” He had a playful glint in his eye as he spoke, making it difficult to tell what he meant. Sand shifted underfoot as the water swirled faster around her.
“But the painting?” The hard concrete of the gallery spun back into focus as she waited for him to deliver a verdict.
“I like the way the curves feel.”
She drew in a breath and held it. Let it sit uncomfortably in her lungs and diaphragm. Tried to wait enough time for it to start to hurt before slowly letting it seep back out again. She didn’t want him to notice she was on tiptoe, leaning in as far as she could to hear what he would say next.
“Like I’m touching you. My hand on your waist, in your hair, cupping your cheek, wiping that smear of mascara away from under your eye.”
The scrutiny felt pointed in her true direction, and instinctively Alison lifted her hand to her face, tried to wipe away the slick black of mascara. She knew, as she did it, there wasn’t anything there. She blushed, her cheeks rosy in the low light of the open space at dusk. He smiled. Leaned in close to her actual face.
“They’re wonderful. You’re wonderful.”
She exhaled fully, not realizing she’d waited all this time to do it. He held her gaze. Gil’s eyes were blue. Not International Klein Blue, or Matisse blue, or Starry Night blue. They were the flecked-gold blue of a pool of salt water in the rocks at the shore. Reflecting the light that dazzled in any room he entered. If they had a describable quality, it was the changeable fluidity of the sky after a storm, the flash of a wave on the sand; they seemed wet, always. As though he were constantly shifting internally, a little off keel. They fascinated her. She felt his hand on her waist and it pulled her out of herself. She panicked, shifted away from him.
“Well, I’m glad you like them.”
His eyes clouded over, the grit deep in the bottom of the pools disturbed somehow. “Maybe I’ll buy one.” He tried to sound light, but there was an edge to the words.
The room was full of people scrutinizing Alison’s work. Her friends from the hotel, the gallery’s regular visitors, the tourists who’d sniffed out the free bubbles and cheese of an opening. She wanted to stand there with him, let him put his hands on her, let him scrutinize her real shape, compare it to the work, but something about the way she felt around him scared her. She needed more time to figure it out.
She left him there, with the most eye-catching canvases, and circulated the best she could. Some of the pieces were small, focused on a curve or two. A cheekbone, the line of a rib, the deep cleft of a shoulder blade. Others gave it all away. There were no whole depictions of her face among the works except for in the one painting he had studied. She’d had a point about the commodification of the female form; she thought she’d made it well enough, but as she watched a group of footballers who’d stumbled in half-cut, attracted by the light and the chatter, she saw them joke about the body parts, quantifying their qualities and composing out of them a woman that didn’t exist.
“You can’t control how it’s interpreted, you know.” It was Gil again.
“They don’t get it.” She gestured toward them, one crudely thrusting his hips at the oily slick of arse on the wall in front of him. The gallery attendant was there, on the scene, encouraging them to leave.
“I don’t think I do either. I think they’re melodic.” Was he taking the piss?
“Melodic?”
“Like I’m looking at sheet music. You read this note, and then this one, and then this one.” As he talked, he stood behind her, pointing her gaze in the direction of the different elements of her face. “Then this one, then this one, and then there’s a whole face. Like you string the notes together to get the melody, banging them out one by one on the keys.”
She saw he was being sincere. “That’s not—I mean, yes, they are parts of a broader . . . I didn’t intend for beauty to be the point.”
“Not all music is beautiful.” He leaned in and kissed her gently on her cheek, squeezed her hand, and waved good-bye.
“You’re going?”
“It’s your night, enjoy it.” After he’d melted away into the humid street, she’d begun to circulate again, talking to strangers and friends, trying to seem cheered by their compliments. She kept looking around the room, connecting the works in her head, hearing his composition of them. When the gallery cleared out, the assistant began marking the canvases sold, placing red dots beside them. The big canvas, the whole of her, had sold before the show, to a frequent client of the gallery. Now, as the man went from square of canvas to square of canvas, she noticed that the bulk of the pieces that had sold accounted for her face.
“Who bought those?” she asked. He looked at the list.
“These five were purchased together, last name Watson.”
A warmth spread inside her from the tips of her toes to the top of her scalp. She felt sick and scared and thrilled and disgusted and wanted him to have bought them all, or none of them. She knew she was getting into something more complicated than she’d expected.
Sal beeped the horn and Alison hustled out of the room and back out of the house, her hands full as she pulled the door shut.
Sal had turned around and was idling in the drive, tapping her fingers impatiently on the wheel, the stereo dimly telegraphing “Lovefool” across the distance between them. Alison took one last look around her, at the blackened trees and scorched earth to the north, and the lush bush greenery to the south. Turning back to take in the house as she opened the car door, she was struck by the juxtaposition. It made for an eerie scene. Like the house had dropped there, one side in Kansas, the other in Oz. She swung into the passenger seat and buckled her belt.
“Let’s go.” She tapped on the dashboard and smiled at Sal.
The car rolled forward and Alison felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, but she waited until they were far enough down the drive that she couldn’t see the house anymore before turning around in her seat and pulling it out of her pocket. As they passed the spot where Simone’s car had hit an obstacle, Alison unconsciously crossed herself and closed her eyes. Then she remembered the phone in her hand and looked at it.
11:31 am
Fuck you then.
Billy. Sometimes he still managed to surprise her.
Alison rolled down the window, and as Sal picked up speed on the highway she breathed in the singed air deeply, this time wanting to remember exactly how it tasted.