When hot northerlies blow, Annie tenses and shudders, dreading fires. The world becomes a tinderbox and she holds her breath, listening to the radio and watching the news, waiting to see what will ignite. Because if the mountain burnt, anything can. Nowhere is safe, not even the city.
Nobody talks about the wind. It was the wind that frightened Annie, that she trips back to. Again and again. It’s the northerly wind, blowing through the city during summer, that sets her teeth on edge. The sharp snaking feel of it shifting; becoming a westerly; a southerly. She watches people smoking, throwing their butts into gutters, and thinks about how easy fires are to start. She thinks of lightning strikes and angle grinders and matches and lighters and explosions.
She’s surprised at how much it bothers her, and not surprised at all.
They’ve started running ads about bushfires in the suburbs. About how if you live near a park or a reserve you need a plan. How even a thickly scrubbed block can be enough to burn down the neighbourhood. The fire seasons are getting worse – less predictable, more ferocious. Last year, the same summer the mountain burnt, ten houses less than half an hour from the city went up. Annie tries to imagine the world damp and grey when the northerlies come. She imagines the sound of the hot, dry air is the sound of a winter storm coming in from the icy south. She imagines that the clatter of bark and leaves against windows and iron roofing is rain and hail, wetting everything down. Keeping it safe.
Gladys didn’t die in the fires, although it’s the story that everyone tells. Even Annie, in the quiet moments when she sifts through her memories of that day. Each moment. Distorted now, she’s sure. But she thinks about that day endlessly, as though it’s a puzzle that needs to be solved. As though it’s something that could have been stopped.
Gladys died in the wind. The howling northerly killed her grandmother. Or the tree that fell on the house killed Gladys. Or the section of roof that landed on her. Annie picks at the words endlessly.
Just after the fires she tried to explain it to others. ‘It wasn’t really the fires. She died in the wind. The house got crushed. A tree fell. The fire was still fairly new when it hit our place. It got bad in the forest, before it hit the town.’
Lately she’s been thinking less about Gladys dying. Annie thinks about missing her. She thinks about Gladys alive. She thinks of whittling and trees and Gladys’s rolling laugh. She thinks of the forest tracks whole and green, the sounds of the lyrebirds fanning out from the underbrush.
* * *
As the moon settles behind cloud, Annie paces around the house. It’s after midnight but before dawn and she keeps thinking of what she’s packed for Pip for the trip back up the mountain. She can hear Tom breathing loudly, heavily asleep. She wipes toast crumbs from the table and throws a pair of Pip’s shorts into the laundry.
She slithers into the gap behind the shed and touches the wood. She is overcome by a longing to take the wood back up the mountain with her. To take Gladys’s chisels and whittling knife. To sit where Gladys sat and whittle there. Maybe then her wood will keep its warmth, its shape.
She is going back for Susan, but she thinks that maybe she needs to be home too. That maybe she needs the mountain. And maybe Pip does, as well. Maybe wide, deep circles will help her calm down. Will help her feel safe.
Annie drags all but the largest pieces of wood into the boot of her car and covers them with a picnic rug and a fanned-out jacket. She doesn’t want Tom’s eyebrows to arch up in surprise; for him to frown or pull away from her.
Back inside she treads slowly into Pip’s room and sits on the floor with her head resting on Pip’s bed. She stares at her daughter in sleep. Her fists are clenched around her scarf and her breath is uneven, like a cat or a dog caught in a dream.
‘Bananas!’ Pip yells, still sleeping. She’s been talking in her sleep a lot this past year. The therapist says it’s related to trauma, but Pip never says anything about the fires. From what Annie can gather, her daughter mostly dreams of basketball and food.
Annie would like to curl up in Pip’s narrow child’s bed but doesn’t want to wake her. Pip always seems unsettled in the darkness. Annie doesn’t think she has the patience to get her back to sleep.
She closes her eyes, listening to Pip’s breaths. One after the other. And when she dozily wakes up to the light just before dawn, it is to the same jagged, sleeping breaths. Pip’s hand is pressed against Annie’s neck. Warm and damp there. Holding her close.
* * *
Len was seventeen when Annie was born. He had always seemed far more grown-up than Susan, although there was barely two years between them. But when Annie turned seventeen herself, she realised how young he had been to have had a niece in his life.
Susan liked to tell stories about how much Len had complained about Annie, about her crying and vomiting and the endless dirty nappies. How he hated the gaudy colours of the plastic toys that neighbours dropped in and the smell of pureed apple and pumpkin.
‘I’m moving out!’ he’d yell, his hands clapped over his ears. He refused to talk to Susan for six months. ‘This is all your fault!’
But Gladys told Annie about how, if she was quiet, she would catch Len holding Annie, murmuring to her, playing games, when he thought nobody was watching. Sometimes he would just brush his thumb against her palm, marvelling at the size of her tiny hands and pulling faces until she giggled.
He collected feathers for her from the forest tracks, even though Susan said they were probably full of diseases. He told Annie stories of the lyrebirds when she was too little to walk with him. Sometimes he’d borrow Susan’s carrier and carry her along the forest tracks on his back, pointing out this and that, although she was too young to understand most of it. She swears she remembers it, though. Being that small. Being carried through the forest, listening to the deep thrum of Len’s voice, Len’s footsteps, and the rustle and endless calls of the trees.
‘After he moved out to his place,’ Gladys said to Annie, ‘I felt like when he came home, he mostly just came to see you.’