Someone was banging at my back door. I shone the torch in the eerie darkness and there was Dan.
‘What the hell are you doing out in this?’ I asked.
‘Checking you’re okay,’ he said, his face wet, his oilskin dripping.
‘Maiden in distress?’ I asked.
‘Not quite a maiden.’ He grinned. ‘But if you could act like one, it might be fun.’
This whole conversation was carried on at a shout over the banshee wind.
‘Come down to mine,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the car.’ His house was more protected. Lower down the hill.
And then a terrific rush of wind made us both jump, followed by a tree branch crashing through the kitchen window. The whole house shook and groaned, the wind screamed. I dropped the torch. I had an image of Dorothy hurtling out of Kansas, airborne in her flying house.
‘Too late,’ he said. He had already grabbed my arm and was pulling me into the hall.
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ I replied, but he didn’t hear.
Dan began dragging the wardrobe across the window and the chest of drawers in front of it to anchor the wardrobe more securely.
‘Grab the bedding,’ he said. ‘We have to get under there. These old sleigh beds, they’re made to go the distance.’
We pulled pillows, the doona and blankets into the space below the bed.
‘I’ll be back,’ I called over the wind.
I scuttled back to the kitchen where rain was sluicing the floor. I crawled under the branch and looked about with the torch beam. There it was. I pulled my backpack from the remains of what had recently been the kitchen bench. My roof, I thought. The branches and leaves on the newly arrived tree branch shivered and quivered in the torchlight. The wind was making the most hideous howling sound, as if a thousand grieving spirits had been loosened from the dark caves of the underworld. Glass was shattered across the floor. Back in the bedroom, I tossed the bag in under the bed and crawled in after it.
‘Supplies,’ I said to Dan.
‘You’re a nut,’ he said. ‘What was so important?’
I pulled a gyro lantern out of the backpack. I turned off the torch and wound the lantern awkwardly in the confined space. It gave a gentle glow to our cocoon of blankets and pillows. The dark space beneath the wooden slats became a cave. His proximity was a little disturbing. His eyes were dark blue in the lamplight, his teeth very white. My hand searched the backpack and found the zip. I brought out the bottle. I handed it to him. Suddenly I felt giggly. I’m in shock, I thought.
It was the whisky we’d been given after the death of the Chinese worker.
‘I thought if we died it would be a shame to waste it,’ I said.
‘What else have you got in there?’ he asked. I smelled the damp, good smell of him.
‘A book,’ I said. ‘I just figured if it was my last night, I’d rather spend it doing the things I like.’
‘So what book?’
I showed him.
‘One Hundred Great Ghost Stories,’ he read. ‘Food?’
‘Biscuits and cheese. Chocolate. Couple of apples. Packet of mixed nuts.’
‘Right now, you are the most attractive woman on earth,’ he said.
Once the lamp burned down, it seemed pointless to rewind it. We checked our phones. Both on low battery now. We lay side by side in the pitch-black, the blankets beneath us not doing much to soften the floor. He took one of my hands and held it. The storm raged on, a symphony of catastrophic proportions. The whisky was warm in me. I closed my eyes.
‘I don’t want to be crushed to death,’ I said.
The skin of his hand was a little rough. I curled my hand into it, and he stroked his thumb near my thumb.
‘This house was built in 1939. It isn’t built to withstand a cyclone,’ I said. ‘It’s too close to the trees. We shouldn’t even be having a cyclone. Or a super storm, or whatever this is. It’s not right. It’s not even possible. Everyone knows that. What’s happening to the world?’
He pulled me closer. I reached my fingers up through the bed slats and felt the mattress.
‘I don’t want to suffocate either. I don’t want to be crushed to death. What if the legs give way? Are you sure the legs won’t give way?’
‘Pretty sure they won’t,’ he said.
‘It’ll be like a sandwich press. I don’t want to die that way.’ Dan offered me another slug of whisky and took one himself. Somehow this seemed the most sensible thing to do. I had never lived through a severe weather event. But I had seen the aftermath of hurricanes and tsunamis. ‘Severe weather event’ seemed an improbable term for whatever was happening outside. I had worked with people who had lost everything. Their homes, their businesses, their churches and schools, their children and elderly: all washed away in storms or blown towards death by wind or water on an unprecedented scale. Except now there was no unprecedented. There was whatever happened next.
I thought of how the media would measure it against other storms. It would be explained by changing currents, warmer temperatures. An act of God. When we couldn’t explain it any other way, it was always an act of God. Even insurance companies called it that, trying to explain the inexplicable. A medieval God perhaps. An ancient vengeful God of Chaos. Something freed by an archaeological dig, ripping through this part of the world at forty degrees latitude and unleashing an ancient might.
Lightning cracked, sending shards of light across the floor and about the bed. Then it blinked out and the thunder broke once more. I had seen those illustrations on weather charts of warming water and the effect this had on cold air and precipitation, and how it lifted then travelled and gained velocity. The rain was pounding on the roof. Thunder sounded again. Very close. So close we felt it reverberate in our bodies.
‘Fuck,’ Dan said, squeezing me closer. ‘Whatever is going on out there, it’s going to pass. It has to. It has to drop out eventually.’
‘What if this is it?’ I said. ‘Hypothetically.’
‘I don’t think it is,’ he said. ‘Hypothetically.’
‘But if it is,’ I said, ‘what should we be talking about?’
‘Well,’ said Dan, ‘if this were the last hour of my life, I think it would be the time to confess to anything I’d never confessed before.’
I stayed silent. He waited.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘You go first,’ I said.
‘I think it’s a ladies-first moment.’
The wind was a moan now, a things-coming-apart kind of moan. I’d had all the edges knocked off me with death and falling trees and his body so close to me, the whisky inside me and the urge to be loved. I told Dan the thing I’d never told anyone, not even my best friend at the time, Becky Walton.
‘When I was seventeen, I got pregnant,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t get an abortion in Tasmania back then, so my mother took me to Melbourne. At the clinic, when they asked her to sign the forms for the operation, she wouldn’t let me have any anaesthetic. Usually they give you a general, or at least a local. But I wasn’t allowed anything. She told the doctor that she didn’t want me to forget it. So they stuck a hose inside me and there was this lovely nurse, an older woman, who held my hand and cried the whole time. It was really painful, but it was harder watching her. All the nurse kept saying, over and over, was: “I’m so sorry, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.” Later that day, my mother took me to a fancy restaurant she’d heard about. She seemed surprised that during the meal I could think of nothing to say. I haven’t really had anything to say to her since.’
Dan seemed frozen momentarily, then he pulled me very close and held me.
‘Ace.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
He kissed my forehead. The first kiss he’d given me. He ran his hand over my hair and I felt the warmth of his face against my cheek. After a while, I said, ‘Your turn. Something you’ve never told anyone.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d tell you I’m in love with you.’
I was now the frozen one.
‘And I’d wish I’d told you sooner, so that at least there might be the possibility of sex. But of course, you may not feel the same way. And now we’re in this situation where even if we wanted to, sex would be seriously awkward, and when the next tree comes down, we could be pinioned together when the rescue workers discover our dead bodies in the morning.’
I could feel my heart beating and the blood in my veins.
He said, ‘You going to help me out here at all?’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘Play the game, Ace,’ he said.
It made me smile, that.
‘Oh, God, don’t tell me it’s all me?’ he said, groaning. ‘You’re killing me here.’
There was another gigantic drum roll of thunder. The wind reached a top note of operatic shrillness.
‘I’m out of practice …’
‘What?’ he asked.
‘I might be …’
‘In love with me?’ he asked. ‘A little bit?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Say it, Ace. You’re about to die. This is what people say to each other when they’re about to die.’
‘I might be in love with you, Dan Macmillan.’
‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we are going to die, by the way.’
‘Fuck you,’ I said.
‘I’m waiting.’ He grinned.
And then, as he was kissing me, really kissing me, the gum tree by the front fence surrendered its roots and came through the bedroom roof. Ceiling plaster, beams, all of it came crashing down on top of the wardrobe and the bed.
Rain began cascading onto the floor around us, and there was a vivid smell of eucalyptus. I reached my hand out beyond the bed and felt wet leaves with the tips of my fingers. The tree groaned and settled. The bed sighed above us, as if burdened by a great weight. One leg groaned in an almost human way, but the frame held. I realised, in the next flash of lightning, that I was looking into the yard.
‘The wall’s gone,’ I said. ‘Are you sure we aren’t going to die?’
‘I’m sure,’ he said. We both reached up and felt the mattress pushed hard between the slats. Wind was rushing into our cave in freezing blasts.
We took several more slugs of whisky. Then we pulled the blankets and doona closer about us, up over our heads. We huddled in there, and I thought of all the walls caving in. I thought of Tavvy and Paul.
‘Kiss me again,’ I said. So he did.
After some time, as the creaking and groaning of whatever was above us continued, I managed to turn over. I pulled Dan’s arms around me, and he curled his body against me, tightening the blankets about us.
‘Don’t let me go,’ I said. I prayed silently then, one of the only prayers I remembered. Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. And then I added, Just let us get through the night. Do whatever you have to do to me tomorrow. Just let us get through this.
Improbably, I slept. It might have been the whisky. It might have been him. It might have been the prayer. At some point, deep in the wee hours, as the storm was leaving, an almighty noise was heard across the channel. It woke me. I listened to it rolling on and on. It seemed to go deep into the core of the earth. There was a wild screeching and wailing, high-pitched and cruel. I wondered if those awake thought it was the storm giving its last hurrah. I lay there for a long time, listening to Dan’s gentle breathing, feeling him close to me, until sleep washed me away.