Nine Days Before the Fire

ROSIE

I shouldn’t have bought these because they’re made of animal, but I had to. I love them. They work with everything I own. I am never taking them off and I will always be thankful to the animal.

Doorbell. I’m busy, not gonna get it, someone else should get it, why is it always me who—?

Someone got it.

It’s decided: tonight I’m wearing the boots and this dress.

The little girls are kicking off at the door. ‘Dad! DAD!’ I put an apron over my outfit and head up the hall.

A woman is wielding a chainsaw at our door. She might rip the chord and kill me but I’m not scared about that, I’m scared about the girl she’s with, her daughter I am told; another teenage fish left flapping in this town, who I am expected to get and befriend. Her name’s Vonny and she’s texting right in front of me with all her beeps still on, so I can’t get away from the conversation she’s having with her city pals, but I can’t be part of it either. Thankfully her mother is wanting to drop the chainsaw and run.

‘Fran! Fran Collins! Is that you?’

Dad knows the woman and is forcing fudge on her. Worse, he is forcing the daughter on me. He knows I know what he’s thinking – that she should come to the dance with me 65tonight. But I don’t want to babysit a girl who refuses to make eye contact with me – luckily, probably, because mine are angry. I try to stare Dad out, but he’s practised this a lot, and wins.

The healthiest mint is in the veg garden at the end of Tragedy Track. I act as tour guide with the intention of repelling this Vonny girl. By the time I’m done, she won’t want to go to the Blue Light Disco when Dad suggests it, and will therefore not ruin my evening.

‘Granddad Brian had a heart attack in the old meat shed there,’ I say to her. ‘There are still hooks in the ceiling where he tried to make Dad slit throats. I’m the only one who goes in now. I’ve seen chains swinging, all by themselves. Twice I heard a man saying “help”.’ I ask her if she wants to go in, but she doesn’t and we walk on. ‘Dad’s older brother, Uncle Martin, was supposed to shoot his sheep in that paddock,’ I say. ‘Shot himself instead.’

She’s tearing up. She’s overreacting. She didn’t know Dad’s brother.

I’m sorry about Uncle Martin, of course, but not as sorry as I am about the sheep. They moved north before I found out moving north was a euphemism. I’m telling her all this for some reason.

‘There’s a photo in the Free Press of four enormous trucks of fluff driving up the main street. People came out of shops to watch them leave, some men had hats and they put them against their chests.’ Somewhere along the line she’s lit a joint and I’m partaking. She’s tricking me and it will not work.

‘Better get the mint to Dad,’ I say. We pick enough to last a year, and I up the pace down Tragedy Track. ‘My horse died up there.’ I point to McBean’s Hill, and something about this Vonny girl’s reaction causes me to get poetic: ‘I saw Dad on 66his tractor. His hat against a sky that’d be a shepherd’s delight most other places, red on a rolling hill. Something warmed me that hadn’t done since Mum … Then I saw the rope attached. It was loose at first, and it ended somewhere over the hill. I was thinking a café would be nice on the top of that hill, just where that thing’s coming from, when I realised Dad was dragging a dead horse. Mr McBean was heading north too.’

She’s hugging me: ‘You must never walk on this track ever again – find another route, go anywhere else, go on any other track.’

Back in the kitchen, something has changed. Vonny’s mother just snort-laughed and is mimicking Dad’s body language; one elbow on the table, legs crossed. My father is saying her name all the time – Fran, Francesca, Fran – and whatever happened between me and Vonny on Tragedy Track is eclipsed. Neither of us want our parents to flirt. We’re both mad now. I don’t want her to come to the dance, definitely not. And from Vonny’s expression, she would rather stab herself in the eye than do dress-ups with little old me.

And yet, somehow, that’s exactly what we end up doing.

I do have plenty of clothes, it’s true. I’ve been gathering them from Op Shops on my city trips – mending, making adjustments, upscaling, and selling them online. So far I’ve raised $215, most of it from Maz and Ciara, the only cool people in town. ‘I need another three hundred at least,’ I say to 67Vonny, but I don’t tell her what for and she doesn’t ask (it’s for a decent sewing machine). I’ve only known her an hour but it’s already an on-off relationship.

She doesn’t wear dresses, she tells me, so I take out the other boxes. She goes for a crop T-shirt with MILK KILLS written on it and says, ‘Would this work with my jeans?’

Anything would work with her jeans.

‘How much?’

If I charge her, we will just be friends. If I tell her the crop top is free, something might happen. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I say, and she kisses my cheek.

‘Oh my God, I know it’s wrong but I love those!’ She’s wanting my cherry-red Doctor Martens boots, which are SO not for sale. I can’t believe what I do – I tell her she can borrow them if she wants, even though I don’t want her to borrow them. I don’t want to ever take them off. She says, ‘That’d be great!’ and watches while I unlace them. It takes ages.

‘I’ll cherish them,’ she says, ‘and I’ll give them back at the end of the night.’

They look better on her. I can’t stop staring at them. I’m thinking about the cow that was skinned to make them. I can almost hear it squeal. I’m starting to think my boots have been stolen as punishment. By this girl. I fall in love easily, and have done it again. Which is perhaps why I choose a shorter dress than the one I’d picked out earlier, pairing it with home-knitted socks and Blundstone boots. I’ve been so unhappy, I’ve managed to reach size eight, and I look eighteen at least. I’m so hot, I can’t imagine she thinks I’m not.

We have two hours till the disco and I have no idea how to fill it in this embarrassment of a madhouse. Dad’s got 68classical music on – oh my God, Tchaikovsky – and the twins are harassing Vonny with questions they shouldn’t be asking.

‘My dad’s Koori,’ Vonny’s saying to the brats, ‘which means I am too.’ She’s being very kind to them. ‘Yeah, they say my gran was stolen but it was much worse than stolen. She was playing in the front garden when some men grabbed her and put her in a car. She never saw her family again.’

The little girls are horrified, but distracted. ‘What’s the meanest thing anyone’s ever said to you?’ Harriet asks. ‘Bridget O’Connor said I was a cross-eyed bitch the week before my birthday.’

Amy’s got a better one: ‘And Rosie said to me that I shouldn’t have children, and probably won’t get to anyway, cos Australia’s getting hotter and hotter and soon we’re gonna be un-hab-able, and also city slickers are killing all the koalas.’

‘Oh sweetheart,’ Vonny says, giving Amy a hug, and exchanging suppressed smiles with Rosie. ‘Um … it’s not the meanest thing, but I don’t like it when people ask how indigenous I am, like they want a percentage, or a certificate. No-one ever asks anyone else that. But actually I suppose I’d rather people asked stupid questions than didn’t, long as they hang round to listen to the answer.’

Oh no, the little girls are about to ask a lot of stupid questions.

‘So you’re vegan?’ I say, desperate to change the subject.

‘I am, I’m vegan.’

She’s giving me an odd look and I’m wondering if vegan is code. Hope so. I tell her ‘I’m not a very good one. The Docs … and I had bacon and eggs in the city last Friday. Been thinking about it ever since.’ The twins have gone for their tea, thankfully, and we are as dressed as we can be for the disco. 69

‘What have you got to drink?’ she says.

Dad banned booze in the house after Uncle Martin. We decide to grab the dinghy from her shed, which she calls The Shed of the Dead, and to sneak up into her brother’s water tank. He hides weed in there. I have a stupid smile on my face and mustn’t get too excited. Vonny, I prefer Veronica, might be indigenous, vegan, and from the city – but this does not mean she’s into girls. We walk down Ryan’s Lane towards her brother’s house and I have my fingers crossed the whole entire time.

Vonny’s brother is actually a half-brother and his dad is The Boarder. No-one likes to talk about The Boarder, including Dante, who’s never met him, and who we spot kneading dough in the window of his shack. He looks too old to be anyone I know’s half-brother, but Vonny assures me he is hers; borne out of a Blue Light Disco in 1989. ‘We should be careful tonight,’ she says.

I am fifty-two percent certain she is flirting with me.

Vonny found Dante’s weed by accident, she tells me. The ladder up to the open-topped water tank is wonky and I’d rather not go up it. ‘Throw it up,’ she says, referring to the dinghy.

I toss up the lump of rubber and make a wish: Please let me lie in this rubber boat and smoke all night.

We take our boots and socks off and rest them on the top rung of the ladder. They look sweet together up there. There’s only a foot of water in the tank and once we’ve inflated the dinghy we realise how much it stinks in here, weed mostly, but not entirely. Vonny’s reaching for the ledge halfway up, which has an Esky cooler on it – Dante’s stash. She rolls like an expert. We forget the smell for a while, and stare up at the circle of sky, which is a deep, getting-darker-every-second, 70blue. ‘I’d kill for rain,’ I say, and she turns my chin in order to kiss me.

This water tank is the best place in the whole entire universe.