The day after the fires, Annie went back to the city with Pip and Tom for a night. Len came down the next morning and they sat opposite each other at the cramped kitchen table. Annie chipped at the places where the wood was worn until it splintered against her fingers.
They listened to the sounds of everything outside the house. It made the house seem tiny, like a burrow. Annie wanted to climb free.
‘You’re going back up,’ she said. Her voice still catching, still not her own.
Len nodded. ‘The animals need help.’
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘Annie,’ said Tom. ‘What about Pip?’
‘Pip will be fine! She’ll have you.’ Annie stood up. Her body ached.
‘Where are you getting supplies?’ she asked.
‘Don’t go,’ Tom said.
Annie looked at him. ‘I have to.’
‘What about Pip, Annie? Pip needs to come first.’
‘She has you.’
‘How am I supposed to work and look after her? Can you just think? For one minute?’
Annie turned back to Len. ‘Supplies?’
Len glanced at Tom. ‘Annie, I think –’
‘Where are you getting the bloody supplies, Len?’
Len sighed. ‘I picked them up yesterday from a friend at the base of the mountain. John Gilligan.’
‘I remember John,’ Annie mutters. She turns to Tom. ‘I need to. You can get a few days’ leave. Pip will be fine. Who else knows the mountain like we do?’
Len kept looking Annie dead in the eyes until she wanted to smack him. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I do,’ Annie said.
‘Pip needs you,’ Tom said. ‘You’re her mother.’
‘You’re her father! Me going back up there is a helluva lot more important than you missing a few days of work. Far out – I’m not the only one who can look after Pip.’
‘She wants you,’ Tom muttered.
‘You’re great with her, Tom. It’ll all be fine. Just for a few days. You’ll see.’
Tom went quiet and Annie and Len left. The city was muggy. It smelt of smoke. Annie bent and retched in the gutter, but shook Len off when he tried to support her. She saw the twitch of curtains from inside. Tom watching. Tom furious. She hadn’t even said a proper goodbye to Pip, who was still sleeping, curled up in the middle of her and Tom’s bed.
‘You really don’t have to,’ Len said.
‘I know.’ She straightened and hoisted the bag of things she’d had in her cupboards. Sedatives and bandages and burn cream. Antibiotic shots and anaesthetics and poultices. Len had a rifle in his boot, but they were both trying hard to ignore it.
‘Ready,’ Annie said. And then they drove.
Emergency services workers had cut through most of the trees that had fallen across the road, but more kept falling. Council workers had pulled up at a tree about four kilometres out of town. A man with a chainsaw was working on it. He was wearing thongs and no goggles.
‘Well that’s stupid,’ Annie said and Len didn’t say anything.
They walked after that. As quietly as when they walked the green tracks of the forest, looking for their lyrebirds.
Everything smelt smoky, although the air had mostly cleared. Annie’s lungs still ached and her hair caught strangely in the breeze where it had been burnt off during her ride down the mountain. She’d hacked the rest off with scissors.
‘Here,’ Len muttered, nodding at a long driveway to their left.
They knew the properties in the area that had animals. Len had been treating them for years. Horses and goats and cows. Cats and dogs and pigs.
The properties on the west side of town were burnt patchily. The house was gone on this property, but Len said the Carringtons had both been at work when the front had gone through.
The birds were all dead in their aviaries. Whether from lack of water or lack of oxygen; from the heat or stress, Annie wasn’t sure.
They stared at them. The blues and yellows and greens at the bottom of the metal cages.
‘Do we just leave them here?’
Len smiled crookedly. ‘If you’re planning on carrying all the dead animals we find off the mountain, you’re going to need a bigger bag.’
‘I’m not saying that. Just … could we bury them? Or something?’
Len held his arms out. ‘With what?’
‘Yeah, okay.’
‘Our priority is the dying, not the dead. Let’s check the stables, hey?’
The large insulated shed behind where the house used to be was still standing. The fencing was up in parts and Annie hoped the horses and cows were somewhere in the unburnt trees on the other side of the pasture.
‘You right?’ Len asked.
‘Course I am.’ Annie pushed past him into the smoky dimness. The Carringtons’ border collie was in there, barely breathing.
‘You can wait outside,’ Len said, unslinging the rifle from his shoulder.
‘Would you be going on like this if I was a man? I don’t need to be coddled, all right?’ Annie at down by the dog and brushed its head. It whimpered and closed its eyes. ‘I’m a vet, same as you.’
‘Hop out the way, Annie.’
‘If you’re seriously worrying about hitting me at this range, you shouldn’t have a gun licence.’
‘Just get up, hey?’
‘For fuckssake,’ Annie muttered, brushing the dog’s head again and standing behind Len.
‘Good boy,’ she said. ‘Good boy.’
The shot went off. Annie was used to gunshots. You couldn’t live on the mountain and not be. But the sound always shocked her. It was always louder than she expected.
‘Good boy,’ Annie murmured, turning and going outside. ‘Good boy.’
There were a couple of cows that Len needed to shoot. They found the Carringtons’ flock of sheep by the dam and managed to wire together a section of falling fence.
‘They don’t have much feed in there,’ Annie said.
Len shrugged. ‘We don’t have much choice. They’ve got shelter and water and they’re not injured, which is more than we can say for most of what’s up here.’
The next property yielded a sow and her ten dead piglets. Annie started to wonder about who was hearing their shots. Whether each one sent the same shiver down their spine as it did Annie’s.
A cockatoo jumped down at Annie’s feet as they entered the third property. Annie tasted blood in her mouth. She kept sipping from her water bottle but couldn’t make the taste go away.
‘Fuck,’ Annie muttered, sidestepping. The cockatoo was missing a few feathers but was bright-eyed. It flared its crest. ‘Hello!’ it said.
Annie squatted down. ‘Len, check this guy out. You ever seen him at the clinic?’
Len turned around. ‘Nah, haven’t seen him around before.’
‘How are you?’ the cockatoo asked, hopping forward and tilting his head.
‘Very well, thank you,’ said Len. He turned to Annie. ‘He’ll be someone’s pet. Not Dave’s, though. I’d have remembered if Dave brought him in.’
‘We don’t have anything to carry him in,’ Annie said.
‘No, I know.’
They kept walking and the cockatoo hopped along behind them until Annie lowered her arm and he fluttered onto her shoulder, clicking his beak and shrieking.
‘Bugger!’ he yelled and Annie grinned and caught up to Len.
‘He’s cute, isn’t he?’
‘Very. He’ll probably fly off next shot I fire, though.’
But the cockatoo stayed perched on Annie’s shoulder, flaring his crest and shrieking when Len fired. He rubbed his cheek against her face and Annie ran her fingers through his feathers, ignoring his sharp black beak and claws. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Hello!’
‘I’m going to call him Nigel,’ Annie said as they walked.
‘He’s already got a name.’
‘But we don’t know what it is. Until we find out, I’m calling him Nigel.’
‘Why Nigel?’
‘He looks like a Nigel.’
Len chuckled. ‘All right. Nigel it is, then.’
Nigel was comforting, heavy on her shoulder as they walked from property to property. Annie tasted blood and her head began to hurt and they’d barely gotten into town.
‘I’ll help,’ said Mary, who was stuck on her property because of fallen trees. ‘Can you take a look at Randolf too? His feet are burnt pretty bad.’
The rest of the day blurred into walking along gravel roads, over broken fences and past broken houses. Gunshots. The smell of ash and things turning rancid. The heat dried the sweat off her before it could cool her down. A few times, trudging up steep inclines to houses nestled in the crofts and ridges of the mountain, Annie thought the heat and exhaustion and the pain in her lungs would kill her.
Nigel stayed with Annie, and when they went back to the broken house on dusk, they found Susan sitting on the fallen cypress, drumming her heels, smoking a cigarette and staring out over the blackened hillside. She was wearing a pair of ballet flats. A dirty bandage had partially unravelled from one of her feet. Her feet and legs were scratched and bruised and dark with soot. She’d been down in the suburbs when the fires hit, talking to a gallery curator about exhibiting some of her work.
‘How the hell did you get up here?’ Len asked. ‘You’re meant to be in town!’
‘On my broom.’ Susan butted out her cigarette, dropped the butt on the ground and held her arms open to Annie.
‘Susie, don’t,’ Len said.
Susan burst out laughing. A raucous sound that would’ve sent birds scattered up into the air if there’d been any around to hear her.
‘You don’t want me to drop my butt?’ She gestured wildly at the broken house. The shattered glass and splintered wood and bent sheets of rusted iron.
‘You shouldn’t be smoking,’ Annie says.
Susan blinked at her. ‘Oh, Annie. Think of the smoke you’ve inhaled over the last few days. I’m just trying to catch up.’
‘Gee. Thanks, Mum.’
‘Mum’s still under there, you know,’ she said, giving Annie a quick squeeze and then settling back to her heel drumming.
‘What?’ Len said, stepping back, away from the tree. The house.
‘They haven’t gotten her out yet.’ Susan lit up another cigarette. ‘Her body.’
‘So you’re just sitting there,’ Len said.
‘Yes.’
‘On your dead mother.’
‘No, I’m sitting on a tree. I don’t know where she is, exactly.’ Susan twisted. ‘Somewhere over there, I think.’ She gestured vaguely towards the base of the tree, the crushed bedroom and study. ‘I saw her hand.’
Len’s face had turned an odd colour. Annie touched his shoulder. ‘Sit down a sec, Len.’
He shook his head. ‘How can you …’
Susan blew out a smoke ring. ‘What? How can I what?’
Annie pressed on his shoulders. ‘Len, sit down before you fall down.’
Len sat down roughly with his legs bent in front of him. ‘Just … I don’t even know. How can you be sitting there, calm as anything? Our mother’s fucking corpse is under you!’
Annie winced at Len saying fuck. She’d never heard him say it before. Not in thirty-three years. Not even whispered under his breath. The worst she’d heard him utter was shit.
‘We’re getting her out,’ he said, dragging himself back onto his feet.
‘Len …’ Annie ran after him.
He dug and dug. And Annie dropped down and dug next to him. Smaller branches and fractured pieces of wood. The house groaned and they paused, watchful. And when they couldn’t dig any more Len ran to the shed and pulled out the chainsaw and cut the larger pieces of wood into sections. All the while Annie held her breath, not sure what Len would chainsaw into.
When they found her, Gladys was pale. Annie remembers that. But the details are vague. She remembers Gladys being pale and she remembers Len laying her out as best he could and crossing her arms over her chest. She was so unscathed that it seemed impossible that she had been crushed by the tree, the falling house, the wind.
‘Get me a blanket,’ he muttered and Annie went inside. Her hands shook. Nigel hopped in after her. She gave him a handful of cereal from the cupboard and filled up a dish of water. He picked up the flakes with his feet and gnawed on them. ‘Bugger,’ he said and whistled as she picked up a blanket and went back outside.
Susan had watched them pulling away all the debris. As Annie came out with the blanket, Susan lit another cigarette. Len covered Gladys carefully with shaking fingers and stood, trembling all over. He stared at Susan and shook his head.
She shrugged and took a deep drag on the cigarette. Annie had never seen her smoke before or since. ‘Well, Len. What else was there to do?’
* * *
The day after Len and Annie shot the dying animals, Annie woke up in her mother’s tent. Len had offered her the couch at his place, but she’d been too tired to move. Everything smelt strange: rotting and burning at once. The power was still out, their generator out of order.
They were meant to come back down from the mountain to the control centre, but they had sat with Susan by the tree. They hadn’t talked very much. Annie had listened to Len’s breath, still wheezing; to Susan’s breath, drawn out into long sighs, as though she was deeply disappointed by the tree. The wind. The fires. As though the whole situation had disappointed her.
Annie and Len took Gladys inside and settled her on the floor of the kitchen. The house groaned and shifted and they hurried back out onto the verandah.
Annie had fallen asleep on the floor of her mother’s tent. Curled around her jacket like a soft toy. She ached, now. Along her spine and into her hips. Her legs ached from walking. Her mouth tasted strange and she stared up at the ceiling. The sigh of gum leaves, falling from the trees in the still, hot air. That morning was the first time she heard that sound. Gladys in flight, watching her.
All of Annie tensed at that thought and she heard another sigh. The peppermint gum and the lemon-scented gum outside the house. Unburnt. Untouched. Just ruffled by the scorching northerlies. The fierce breath of them.
She counted to ten in her head. But she couldn’t shake the image of Gladys in the debris.
The tent was quiet and smelly and Susan was reading an old newspaper on the steps of the verandah. Annie stared at her. Her mother’s crossed ankles, her dirty, sore feet and her glasses pressed lopsidedly onto the bridge of her nose.
As Annie came out of the tent she saw that Len was sitting out on the grass, fiddling with his old phone. He glanced up when Annie sat down.
‘Why haven’t they picked her up yet?’ Annie asked.
Len shrugged. ‘I don’t know. They can barely get motorbikes up. The trees keep falling over the road.’
Annie had her bag on her shoulder. ‘It feels wrong.’
‘What about this doesn’t, though?’
Annie fiddled with her backpack strap. ‘Do you think Mum’s okay?’
‘Annie, I’m pretty sure she walked up here. Up the mountain. Did you see the blisters on her feet? I think she’s as mad as a cut snake, but that’s just your ma.’ Len stood up, slowly. Annie could almost hear the creaking of him. ‘All right.’ He tipped out the dregs of his coffee. ‘Let’s do this.’
* * *
Annie and Len didn’t talk much, striding along the broken, burnt roads. It was too hot. Annie had left Nigel on the verandah with her mother. She hoped he’d still be there when they got back.
There was so little shade and everything smelt sharply, hotly, of fire. Of ash. They skirted around a few burnt-out cars. Annie looking hard the other way. Terrified of what she might glimpse in the wreckage. Seatbelts, still done up, perhaps. The charred suggestion of bones. She looked at the horizon line a lot that day, at that place where grey met black.
Ribbons tied to letterboxes and fences crackled in the wind. Annie wasn’t sure what they meant. Whether the places had been checked and were clear or had bodies or were unstable. They made her uneasy. They waved, as Annie and Len walked down the road. Like tiny children along the route of a parade.
Twice, Annie saw the twisted ruins of houses next to the lazy sway of gum trees untouched by the fires.
They stopped outside Len’s practice, the one just out of town. They walked in, but there was nothing living. Annie didn’t have the heart to ask him if there had been, before the fires went through.
Annie’s body loosened up and she thought about Pip as she walked, in their little city terrace with scratches on her arms and legs, not wanting to eat and waking up with nightmares. She didn’t let herself think of Pip crying out for her.
She thought about Luna, who was being stabled by a vet friend at the bottom of the mountain until things had settled down.
She wondered how the fires had started. Reporters were already suggesting arson, lightning and powerlines. Annie didn’t know.
They stopped at an unknown property and found a dog with terrible burns panting in the grass. Annie hadn’t seen it before. But there were lots of unknown animals up here now.
‘With an operation …’ Annie said, but Len just shook his head.
‘When?’ he said. ‘How?’
The dog met Annie’s eyes and let out a long yelping whine that nearly made Annie burst into tears. She ran her fingers through its patchy fur and touched her face to its nose. She knew it was bad practice. That it could have mauled her. But she didn’t care.
Annie turned away when Len fired the shot.
She heard Len groan and turned to see that he had fired the shot into the field, away from the dog. His head was pressed heavily into his hands. ‘I can’t.’ He burst into tears. ‘I fucking can’t, Annie. No more.’
Annie took the rifle from him. Her own panic was there, skimming below the surface. Like pebbles and rocks. She cocked the rifle, blurred her eyes and shot the dog.
Len kept weeping in the grass.
They sat for a while. The sound of blowflies landing on the dog. Buzzing around their faces. Both of them were sprayed with blood. Annie had fired from too close. She ran her fingers through a patch of fur not thick with blood. It almost felt living, kept so warm by the sun.
They were nearing the centre of town now. The oval was starting to be set up with tarps and tents. There were a few emergency response teams already setting up, but Annie had seen what was mobilising at the bottom of the mountain. These people had no idea what was coming.
People slowed when they saw Annie and Len, walking up the main street, streaked with animal blood, the rifle on Annie’s shoulder.
‘Have you seen the paper?’ Cheryl Drum asked in her deep, calm voice. She held it out and Annie stopped. The rifle slipped from her shoulder and Len took it from her.
It was a photo of Pip, Luna and Annie, coming down the mountain.
Annie started laughing. Cheryl startled. Len squeezed Annie’s shoulder.
‘Come have a cold drink, love,’ said Cheryl. ‘And by cold, I mean wet. The bloody generator somehow blew up the freezer at the milk bar.’
Annie clutched the front page. NIGHTMARE RIDE. ‘It’s me.’
‘Yes, Annie,’ Len said slowly.
‘It’s me. And Pip. On the front of the newspaper.’ She stared down at it, blinking hard, as though blinking would be enough to turn it into another photo, of other people. She stayed stubbornly there, her leg dark against Luna’s brown and white coat. Her beautiful Luna, taking her and Pip through the fires.
‘Do you want a drink?’ Len asked as they sat down on the floor of the milk bar.
‘No.’ Annie bent her head to her knees. She clenched the paper. ‘I mean, yes. Thanks, Cheryl. Is … how is everyone?’
Cheryl rummages around in the big chest freezer. ‘They flew the worst people out in the helicopters once the smoke cleared enough. Mostly just bumps and bruises up here now. Have they cleared the way yet?’
‘They were getting pretty close,’ Annie said, accepting a warm can of lemonade.
‘Pretty shocking, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, but with everything so dry …’ Annie took a mouthful of lemonade. It burnt her tongue. ‘They warned it would be a bad fire day. In all the papers.’
Cheryl frowned. ‘No. Not that. I mean that Alex started it. Alex Rivers.’
‘What?’ Annie sat up straighter. She heard the crumple of newspaper as her fingers tightened. ‘No.’
‘There’s all sorts of stories floating around,’ Len said, more calmly. ‘So far we’ve heard it was lightning, an angle grinder, a backfire and a burn-off. We don’t know.’
Annie stared at him and Len pulled her up and steered her away, steered her through the rest of the main street.
‘How can she …’
‘Annie Thompson, these people are out of their minds with shock and fear. Hell, we probably are too. You keep your shit together, you hear? It’s probably just gossip, but there’s no point riling these people up. They’ve got enough on their plate. Just smile, just nod. And we’ll wait for the reports to come out. Okay?’
‘Can you stop talking to me like I’m ten?’
‘Okay?’
Annie shrugged free. ‘All right. Okay.’
They kept walking, taking in the new main street. Sunlight streaming right across the road, in places where it used to be blocked by buildings. Len’s walking slowed when they reached his practice, but he just cleared his throat. ‘I told you. Nothing left.’ And kept walking.
Annie walked more slowly past the rubble. She didn’t ask Len if he’d had any animals admitted.
Annie stared down at the newspaper photo and started to laugh again. Even to her own ears the laughter had a sort of hysterical ring to it. Quickly the bubbling laughter gave way to hiccoughy sobs. She had to bend over and brace her hands above her knees to steady herself.
‘Why’re you laughing?’ Len asked.
‘Because the house didn’t burn!’
Len narrowed his eyes and considered this, then shook his head. ‘No. Not following.’
‘I took Pip through this.’ Annie waved the scrunched newspaper sheet at Len. ‘And the house didn’t fucking burn down. If Nana had been somewhere else in the house, she would have been fine.’
Len sighed. ‘Don’t do that to yourself, Annie.’
Michael Smith came up, red-eyed, and hugged Annie tightly without saying anything. She could feel him trembling. She waited for him to start crying but he didn’t. He forced a smile. He had taught her and Alex in grade four and five at the local primary school. His hair was greying now and the heat had flushed his face an alarmingly dark shade of red.
‘I’m so happy to see you,’ he said.
‘Me, too. How’re your family? Your house?’
He breathed out. ‘All okay. Thank God.’
Annie squeezed his hand.
‘I’m sorry about the photo,’ he said. ‘Pretty heinous, isn’t it?’
A man walked past Annie, face drawn tightly into a scowl. ‘Who’d you have to fuck to get this on the front page?’
Annie stared at his retreating figure and then hurled her half-filled can of lemonade at him as hard as she could. It hit him in the back and when he spun around to face her, Annie started walking towards him and he quickly turned back around and disappeared across the quiet road.
‘I don’t think that counts as keeping your shit together,’ Len said.
Annie threw the creased front page into an overflowing bin. ‘Alex didn’t do it.’
Len sucked in his lips. ‘That’ll all come out. We’d better keep going.’
‘Hey. Hey!’ Annie turned to see Jenny, Alex’s mother, limping out of the front door of the doctor’s surgery with her T-shirt on inside out. ‘I’ll come. I’ll help.’
Jenny’s hair was wild and her face was blotched.
Annie just nodded. ‘Thanks, Jenny.’
They spent the next few hours going from property to property and marking everything down on a notepad. Walking slowly, letting Jenny keep pace with them. When the animal welfare organisations arrived up the mountain in the early evening, Annie handed over the notepad. She pointed wildly towards certain streets and the grim older woman just nodded and wrote things down and clasped Annie’s arm and then was gone.
The pain in her lungs hit her then.
She remembers Susan telling her that Gladys had been picked up and that she was waiting for the house to be checked. She remembers Jenny howling like an animal when it was confirmed that it was Alex who had started the fires. Then her head seemed to split in two. Len drove her back to his place and she slept for two days.
When she woke up, it was to Rose sitting with her feet on Annie’s bed, flipping through a magazine.
‘It’s like the world’s ended.’
‘It feels like it has,’ Rose murmured.
* * *
Annie sits outside in the paddock as it gets dark, Pip and Susan already tucked up in bed, murmuring to each other. She feels safe, so close to the trees. She tries not to think about Alex. Of him and Jenny, butting heads over her moving while the town mills unhappily around them.
Alex is tied up in everything. Her happiest, her saddest, her most terrifying moments. She closes her eyes. We’re okay.
Annie weaves her way back to the house, eats a boiled potato and then lies down on the smelly couch and slaps at buzzing mosquitoes that she can’t see or feel.
She tries not to think of Alex, but she can’t help it. Circling around and around. Endlessly. She longs for sleep, but knows she’ll only dream of him. Of running and fires and drowning and Alex’s throat, the angry red welts of it. She had heard about it. Maybe read about it, she’s not sure. After the fires stories blurred together so much she couldn’t ever properly untangle them. Some of the locals from the mountain, from here, had dragged Alex to the apple-packing factory and burnt his neck with a cut-off metal pipe. She swallows now, wanting to cry.
She dials Tom’s number into the home phone, wanting the comfort of his even voice, but he doesn’t answer.
She rolls onto her side and tries to list everything she wants to get done up here. She keeps wondering what she’s really doing back on the mountain. What the point of all this is. Whether it’s going to help her and Tom, or be the final blow that sends them splintering apart. Her mouth dries, her pulse quickens. So she takes a deep breath. She presses her hand downward and lets herself think of Alex. Eventually her hand cramps and she gives up, throwing her hands above her head, staring out the window. Still trying, so hard, not to think of Alex’s ravaged throat.
* * *
Tom is a letter writer. It confused Annie at first. How when he and his family disagreed seriously on something, they’d flood each other with letters until it was resolved. Sometimes emails, but mostly letters; pen pressed to thin notebook paper.
‘Why don’t you just go over there?’ Annie asked one day, watching Tom agonising over the right phrasing.
He looked up. ‘Because I need to get it just right and I can’t if I say it in person.’
Annie set her book aside. ‘Don’t think my mum or nana have ever written each other anything like this. It’s all just out in the open. Yelling and crying and working through it all. It’s better that way.’
‘You think?’
‘It is! It’s healthier. You get it out of your system, then it’s done.’
Tom just looked at her. ‘That’s not healthy, Annie. Yelling and screaming isn’t healthy.’
‘It is!’
‘It isn’t.’
‘Healthier than spending two whole nights working on a bloody letter.’
They were quiet after that. In their relationship Tom has flooded her with letters. Typed and handwritten, always neatly folded. She’s never written anything in return; she prefers to say things out loud. To yell them if she has to. But Tom is unyielding. Typing letters of sadness and frustration long into the night.
He always smiles at her in the morning, though. There is that.