There is a bandaid half peeling on Pip’s knee and Annie gazes at it for a moment as she buckles Pip into the car. She wants to pull it off, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t even know how Pip hurt herself. A trip in the schoolyard, maybe. Asphalt. Plastic play equipment. There is so little for children to bruise and graze themselves on here. On the mountain, Annie had been perpetually bruised and cut from trees and blackberry thorns; from slipping on gravel and being thrown from Luna. She stood on rusted nails and sliced her ankle on iron sheeting. There were always splinters and angry roosters and trees too high to climb. There were always holes in paddocks, hidden by grass, and the crashing tip of billy carts.
Tom is at the window. His arms crossed. When Annie gets into the driver’s seat and starts the engine, he turns away. Annie feels a swell of rage that she bites down against. She knows she’s being unfair.
The traffic out of the city is boggy and uneven. Cars in gridlock have a smell, like body odour on a train. Annie puts the windows up and the airconditioner on until Pip kicks her seat. ‘I’m cold.’
Annie stares out the side window at a terrace house with a plain blue rug hung over the wrought-iron fencing. A woman in a white shirt, sitting on the verandah, stares back at her. She’s looping a paper chain together with glinting red paper.
Flickers of Tom’s voice from last night. She’s my daughter too.
Annie changes lanes. If you wait a few weeks, I can come up with you.
She breathes out so forcefully that the air feels like something hard as it passes her lips.
‘Mum?’
Annie turns the music down. ‘Yes, Pippa Thompson?’
Pip is quiet.
‘What is it?’
‘Don’t call me Pippa.’
‘Sorry.’ The traffic inches forward another few metres.
‘It’s just … what if the fires come back?’ Pip asks, her voice so old and quiet.
‘They won’t be back this year,’ Annie says, careful. Toeing that line between lying and comforting. Pip looks to catch Annie out, prying for weak spots.
‘What about next year?’
‘There’s nothing to burn up there now.’
Pip sniffs. ‘But it’ll grow back.’
‘Yes, it’ll grow back.’
‘So there’ll be more fires.’
‘I don’t know.’ But Annie does. The hotter summers; the drier springs. The howling winds. She knows there will be more fires.
Pip sniffs again, more loudly. ‘But there’s nothing to burn right now.’
‘Nothing,’ Annie says, the traffic easing forward towards a set of red traffic lights. She runs her hand through her short hair. Her mother hates it. Tom rubs his hands through it like he’s searching for something familiar and lost.
‘What if someone drops a cigarette?’ Pip asks.
‘There’s nothing to burn. Even with a cigarette.’
The pressing of Pip’s feet on the back of the driver’s seat. Annie thinks of Tom, turning away from the window as they pulled out of the driveway. Tom handed her a letter. He was big on letters. About how he felt like she was being selfish and he hoped she’d come to her senses and be back home before Christmas. She stuffed it in the glove box.
The quickening of her blood. It seems strange to think that she had once thought of that quickening as marking something exhilarating. Now it marks only panic. The feeling of being trapped inside something she can’t make out.
Breathing. Pip’s feet. The give of the steering wheel under her fingers. We’re okay.
* * *
Susan was always treated like a naughty child, always slightly on the outer of their tight little family. The three of them. People called them the girls and Gladys would mutter about being patronised. Gladys, Susan and Annie, in their little house on the hill.
Susan had Annie when she was fifteen and Gladys never let her forget it. It was there when Gladys told Susan she’d been out too late, or to put a warmer jacket on Annie when it was raining outside. It was there when Gladys pressed her wedding ring into Annie’s hand when she turned twenty-one, while Susan sat and flexed her ringless fingers across the table.
Gladys treated Annie and Susan both like her children. Susan had disappointed her by having Annie. Susan disappointed her again and again. Susan loved painting and drawing and Gladys thought it was all a waste of time. Susan forgot to take the kettle off the stove, to turn the oven on to heat, to shut the windows when it rained. Annie loved wood and chisels and oil and polish. She loved growing things. She took after Gladys.
* * *
As Annie and Pip drive further out, the roads thin. The air loses its rubber city smells and becomes damper. The roads become potholed, their edges giving way to narrow, gravel shoulders. Annie stares straight ahead. Her nostrils flare with the surprising smell of it all, like a startled horse. Those naked black branches. No green. Nothing.
Pip starts kicking the back of Annie’s seat and won’t stop.
Annie clears her throat and turns the music down. ‘I spy …’
‘No,’ Pip says. ‘I feel sick.’
‘Do you want me to pull over?’
Pip kicks Annie’s seat extra hard and Annie pulls the car off onto the gravel shoulder. Pip claws herself out of the car and takes big gulps of air, her hands braced above her knees.
Annie strokes her hair. They’ve stopped outside the Rivers’ place. There is only a brick wall and two halves on either side left standing. It’s the first building you see, driving into Quilly from the south, from the city. ‘You okay?’
Pip sniffs. ‘Yeah.’
Annie turns Pip back towards the car. Across the paddock, thick with cream-coloured grass, the wall has writing on it. Wide black spray paint. Alex Rivers – MURDERING CUNT.
Annie holds her breath, hoping that Pip won’t look up and read those four letters. Longer words she still struggles with, still has to frown and sound out. But cunt is an easy word. Cunt she’d be able to sound out in a single breath.
Annie feels a punch of sadness as she looks quickly away from the painted brickwork. But a little part of her relishes it. Good, she thinks. He deserves it. It shocks her and doesn’t shock her at all. Her viciousness.
Pip keeps her eyes closed, her chin tilted to her chest. She grips her booster seat so hard that her hands begin to purple.
Annie puts the radio on. They don’t speak, and part of Annie wishes Pip had noticed the words. Instead, Pip pulls her green scarf over her head and Annie hears her breathe out slowly.
* * *
All through winter, in the broken house, Susan baked cakes and sent them to Annie. The flour and butter smell through everything. Thick in the cold dampness of the city.
Susan’s oven hissed and burnt things and sometimes the cakes were so dry that they crumbled completely to pieces when Annie tried to cut into them. Susan was always softer when she baked, gazing through the rain-speckled glass at the narrow leaf peppermint gum that grew on the edge of the garden. She called Annie and Len less. She was calmer on the phone, her voice slower. Gentler.
She was always tired, after baking. And she’d ask Len to take the cakes into town. To Jenny’s or to the relief centre or to Mary, who ran the pub. Susan would ask him to run them in to the volunteers still working at the temporary village off the main street.
Mostly, Annie enjoyed Susan’s baking after the fires. It was something familiar, something that filled the terrace in the city in a way that made her feel like Gladys was still out in her shed on the mountain. Like Susan was sprawled on the couch with a wine while her cakes turned golden in the oven.
Sometimes, though, it made Annie’s jaw set too hard. ‘Just dump them in a bin somewhere,’ she’d say to Len on the phone when he called to complain that he’d run out of people to gift the cakes to.
‘I can’t,’ he’d quietly say.
And Annie would sigh. ‘I’m sorry. I know.’
* * *
Everything has the brittle smell of wood smoke and baked gravel. It makes Annie think of the hot, still schoolyard. The mowed patch of grass and the peppercorn and the cemented quadrangle next to the brick buildings. How the schoolyard, the mowed square, gave way to wheatfields.
Pip starts clearing her throat and Annie hands her an apple juice. She sucks it in through her gauzy green scarf, still tight around her head.
‘Thanks, Mumma.’ Her voice is muffled. So often Pip is all sharp angles, impatient and stubborn and endlessly moving. But she is soft now. And Annie suddenly wishes she could pull Pip into the front seat and drive with her pressed into her lap, her face buried against Annie’s collarbone, the smell of her – of grass and crayons and apples – thicker than the smell of sharp stones and smoke.
‘I don’t know here,’ says Pip, her voice breathy through the scarf.
Annie pulls up the driveway of the farm. The short, curved driveway. The trees. The fallen cypress, still across the remains of the back half of the house. Gladys had hated it, but had never had the money to justify having it lopped down. She waged a constant war on invasive plants. Annie looks at the shootings of sweet pittosporum, holly and pine along the roadsides. The mountain after the fire would’ve broken her nana’s heart.
‘Oh! You do, too! It’s where Gran lives,’ Annie says. There are untouched mountain ash along one side of the driveway. They soothe Annie. She’s always loved the mountain ash; how they make the mountain seem so ancient, when many of the larger ones are only a hundred years old. There are fifty potted plants on the gravel outside the house. The flowers are wilting in the sun. ‘And Aunty Rose and Uncle Len are just down the road. You love Aunty Rose!’
‘No.’ Pip pulls the scarf off her face just enough to peer with narrowed eyes up at the broken house.
There are dogs barking and a magpie lands in the wattle that runs alongside the house and stares at the car with its head cocked. Annie climbs out and opens the back door. Nigel, the rescued cockatoo, flutters down onto the side mirror and shrieks.
‘No,’ Pip says again as Len and Rose pull up. Annie spent her childhood half in love with Rose, in the way that young girls love each other, all tangled legs and shared lunches. Secrets and best friend bangles. Two years older than Annie, she’d always seemed so worldly. So certain of things.
Annie waves at them and Pip stares and then gives them a small, uneven wave too.
Rose’s shining dark hair is longer than it’s ever been before, pulled into a messy ponytail but still reaching the small of her back. It makes Annie conscious of her own short hair.
‘Annie!’ Rose yells and suddenly Annie’s arms are full of Rose, the sweet smell of her, the press of her necklaces and rings. She lowers her voice. ‘We brought you a proper dinner – your mum’s still only baking cupcakes.’
‘And roasting potatoes,’ says Len, shutting the car door.
‘Uncle Len!’ Pip squeals, forgetting for a moment where she is. On the mountain. She drops her scarf and flings herself against his legs and he hauls her up with one hand and dangles her off the ground. She chokes on her giggles, delighted. Annie tenses, wondering whether to pull her free, but Len puts her gently back down on the ground and she stays there, panting and laughing. ‘Uncle Len!’ she says again.
Annie hugs Len and he kisses her cheek and tousles her hair. ‘Like the short hair. Suits you.’
‘My girls!’ Susan calls, coming out onto the gravel with bare feet. Wearing jeans and a shirt, her hair pulled back into an uneven ponytail.
‘Mum! Your feet!’
She glances down. ‘Oh, I’m all right.’
‘Gran!’ Pip runs over to Susan. She just about climbs up into Susan’s arms, like a possum.
Nigel shrieks and bobs his head. ‘We’re okay!’
Pip turns to stare at him. ‘He talks,’ she says.
Susan smothers her cheek in kisses. ‘Yes, but he only says a few things.’
‘Why does he say we’re okay?’
‘Because we are,’ Susan says with a grin.
Pip frowns. ‘But why does he say it, Gran?’
‘Because he heard someone saying it a lot, I guess. Cockatoos are very clever.’
‘What’s with the flowers?’ Annie asks, pulling their bags out of the boot.
‘What about them?’ Susan kisses Pip’s head and puts her down.
‘Just, why are there fifty of them? In the middle of the driveway?’
‘Oh. The flowers! They like the sun. They’re for my bees.’
Susan’s bees. It was the only time she and Gladys could be seen, heads bowed, talking quietly together in the garden.
Susan blinks at Annie. ‘Did you know they forage up to fifteen kilometres during summer? That’s such an awfully long way for them. Particularly up here, where everything’s still a giant muck. They like the flowers.’
‘I hate bees,’ Pip tells Susan, her eyes huge. She picks up her scarf from the gravel and pulls it tightly over the top of her head.
‘Oh? That’s a shame. They’re wonderful little things. Come inside, I’ll make you a drink.’
‘A Milo?’
‘No. A magical bee drink!’
Pip’s eyes narrow. But Susan still has novelty on her side, still has the lure of being something mysterious.
A white duck waddles by the front of the car, on her way from the sunken bath by the shed to the cool of the verandah. Annie scoops her up. She quacks, once, twice and then settles into Annie’s arms. She smells musty and sharp, like freshly rotted soil. Her feathers are silken.
Pip follows Susan. On the second step of the verandah she turns back to Annie. ‘Mum?’
‘I’ll be in in a sec,’ Annie says.
Susan pokes her head back outside. ‘Oh! We should go to the community dinner! There’s one every second Friday, Annie. At the community centre. Everyone brings a plate. We should all go!’
‘Yeah, great idea,’ says Rose.
Susan smiles and disappears into the kitchen.
‘Do not let your mother go to the community dinner,’ says Rose.
‘But, you just said …’
Len sighs. ‘Last time she got drunk and climbed up on the tables.’
‘And danced,’ says Rose.
‘Oh.’ Annie scratches her ear. ‘Well, that’s disturbing.’
Rose grabs Annie’s arm, all wide eyes. ‘So disturbing. There were children crying. Biggest thing to happen here in years.’
‘Well, apart from the fire,’ says Len.
‘Yeah,’ says Rose. ‘Apart from the fire.’
Len gazes out towards the paddocks. ‘And the dinner before the last one where she dressed up in a wizard costume and tried to read people’s palms.’
Rose raises a hand. ‘She didn’t tabletop dance that time, though.’
Len nods. ‘This is true.’
Annie shakes her head.
‘She says it’s part of her healing journey,’ Len says
‘If that’s what you want to call it,’ says Rose. She claps Annie’s shoulder. ‘Anyway, you’re going to have your hands full. That’s all we’re saying.’
* * *
Susan was not like other mothers. Annie knows this. Susan was too young to have a child, and as Annie grew up they squabbled more like sisters than mother and daughter. They argued about what to watch on television and whose turn it was to take out the bins. They argued about Susan’s cooking and Annie’s riding and drinking and shoes and whether or not to oil the decking. As Annie grew up, she stole Susan’s clothes to go out in – the short skirts and tight tops that Gladys didn’t know she had. Hunting for the lyrebirds out on the tracks with Len was a relief. Annie was made exhausted by her mother. Sometimes she imagined that Susan wasn’t her mother at all, but her aunty. She imagined that there was a cover-up; that Len was her father and her mother was someone mysterious, someone who had disappeared or was famous and living far, far away. They made her guilty, these daydreams. But they comforted her too. Len was so much easier than Susan. It was nice to pretend she belonged to him instead.
Annie supposes things would have been different had she and Susan lived away from Gladys, away from the mountain. But her mother has long been in stasis. She has stayed a teenager long into her adult years.
* * *
Annie and Rose go down the hallway. The pale blue walls and thick wooden door frames. The broken side of the house is all hemmed in by corrugated iron and plastic sheeting.
‘This would’ve taken her hours,’ Annie mutters. Her mother has pinned doilies all over the broken side of the house, where the narrow hallway ends abruptly only a quarter of the length it once was. Paper and fabric doilies, all different colours. The floor is spongy under Annie’s feet, made soggy from a long, cold winter. The water runs through the cracks, as much as Annie tried to stem it when she was home after the fires. Len has tried too. With liquid nails and plastic and duct tape. They’re waiting for the insurance company to get back to them. They’re not even sure whether the house qualifies as a rebuilding project. It wasn’t damaged by the fires but by the wind.
‘This and the animals,’ Rose says.
‘Huh?’
Rose sighs. ‘This wall and looking after all the animals Len drops round. She’s always tired, always busy. And it’s from decorating this wall and fussing around with the animals.’
‘So, she hasn’t called the insurance company yet?’
‘No.’
‘She needs to,’ says Annie.
‘She does.’
* * *
In the weeks after the fires went through the mountain, everyone in Quilly slept, and in between they smiled at each other.
People either asked Annie about Alex, as though nothing had changed, or didn’t mention him at all. Twice, Annie was spat on. And she wasn’t sure if it was because of the photo or because of Alex. She doubted if the people who spat on her knew, either.
Everyone was told to stay off the mountain in the meantime, if they could. But Susan was living next to the broken house in a tent with her radio and a cask of wine, so Annie went up there. And Pip stayed home with Tom. Sometimes Annie wonders whether she should have taken Pip up with her. Whether going back up the mountain so soon after the fires would have really damaged her any more than being away from Annie.
Annie still doesn’t know whether she did the right thing, but more and more she suspects that she maybe didn’t.
She thought about it while she was up there. With Len, with the volunteers, with the crowds of shell-shocked people.
Annie had hot drink after hot drink pressed into her hands, even though the weather was still scorching. She had never heard so many poor jokes.
The vans came up with food and then the Country Women’s Association moved in with sandwiches. The streets were full of police and yellow tape and Country Fire Authority and Metropolitan Fire Brigade, all sweating inside their heavy gear and thick uniforms.
Everything smelt and tasted of smoke. Annie dreamt she was choking. The pattern of her dreams started to change then. The ash that was like water.
Once the power was back on, the shops started to reopen.
Family and friends appeared from down the mountain. Trucks came to clear away the remains of houses and chippers were hauled up the narrow roads to deal with all the blackened, fallen trees. A temporary village was set up next to the oval.
Case managers, subcontracted from existing community organisations, came in a flurry of grey and black Toyotas and Fords. Some were amazing, some sat back and tilted their heads. I know what you’re going through.
And everyone smiled at each other. So many of them in pieces, and they were embarrassed by it. Furtive.
The people who had lost the most were often the ones who told the worst jokes, who worked themselves up into a flurry to get things sorted. The roads cleared, the food distributed, the houses checked. In between the jokes and the manic activity, they’d sit with horrified expressions on their faces.
Their grief became like bottles of liquor clutched in underage hands. They hid it in public and opened it up in private, where things were dark and quiet. And after, they slept badly. They rose feeling ill. And the cycle of it repeated itself.
Tom, calling Annie. Tom, messaging her. Wanting Annie to come home, wanting her to come back. Pip was too upset for school. He had to apply for compassionate leave from work because he couldn’t leave her. Pip kept punching him in the stomach. Pip kept weeping, calling for Annie at the top of her lungs.
Tom didn’t understand that Annie had to be on the mountain. That the broken generator was her generator. That the broken house was her house. That there was a bit of her that existed beyond him, beyond them. That there was a part of her separate from Pip.
* * *
Pip stares down at her dinner plate and then looks up at Susan, who is fiddling around with a scented candle, and then at Annie, who is too exhausted to say anything. Annie had started preparing the casserole Rose and Len had dropped around but Susan had grizzled about it. ‘No! I’m cooking! Do they think I’ve lost it completely? That I can’t make a delicious meal for my girls? What rot. What unbelievable rot!’
‘This isn’t dinner,’ Pip says now. She has a green frosted cupcake on the middle of her plate. She pokes at it with her finger and then stares from Susan to Annie.
‘It’s a special dinner,’ says Annie.
‘It’s cakes, Mumma.’
‘Yes, it’s cakes. But it’s a special night. Our first night visiting Gran. So we’re having a special dinner.’
Pip stares at Annie solemnly. ‘Cakes are never dinner, Mum.’
‘Well, what would you like then? If you don’t want cakes?’
Susan puts the candle down on the table and whispers into Annie’s ear. ‘You need to hold boundaries. She needs to eat what’s put in front of her.’
‘Mum! I’m not going to make her eat a bloody cupcake if she doesn’t want to!’
‘It’s the principle.’
‘Parenting’s picking your battles. Not holding every line. C’mon, Phillip. What do you want?’
‘No,’ says Pip, gripping her plate. ‘I want the cake. It’s just not dinner. That’s all.’
They chew in silence, listening to moths nuzzling heavily against the kitchen window.
Annie pushes her plate away. ‘Do you have a trundle or something for the kitchen? Don’t think we’ll both fit on the couch.’ The couch is pressed up under the window, tight behind the kitchen table and opposite the stove and sink. It makes the kitchen cramped, but softens the hard edges of it too.
Susan frowns. ‘Oh, you two take my room.’
‘We’ll be fine in here if you can just rustle up something for down on the floor.’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Mum …’
‘I sleep on the couch most nights, anyway. My bedroom gets stuffy. You’re doing me a favour, really.’
‘Huh.’
Susan digs at her cupcake. ‘Judy’s coming over tomorrow.’
‘Judy?’
‘Judy Robson. You remember her – she was in your class.’
‘Oh, I remember her all right. I just don’t get why she’s coming over.’
‘She comes over a lot these days, Annie.’
‘But why?’
‘Because she’s my friend.’
‘Judy’s your friend?’ Annie folds her arms.
‘Yes. Is that a problem?’
Annie pulls a face and pokes at her cupcake. ‘Have you seen what’s painted on what’s left of the Rivers’ place?’
Susan’s face hardens. ‘Len told me. It makes my blood boil. How dare they? I tell you what, if I’d caught them, I’d have bloody …’ She glances at Pip and falls silent.
‘You’d have bloody what?’ Pip asks.
‘Bloody told them it’s not acceptable behaviour to deface someone else’s property.’
Pip stares at Susan. ‘That’s not what you were about to say.’
‘It is!’
‘It isn’t, Gran.’
‘You caught me,’ Susan says. ‘But it’s just dreadful. Like Jenny and Alex haven’t been through enough without redneck idiots making it even worse for them.’
‘Redneck idiots,’ Pip murmurs to herself, trying out the words. Folding them away for later.
‘Alex is coming back,’ Susan says.
‘What? He wouldn’t!’
‘Jenny’s in a bad way.’ Susan chews and swallows. ‘If I know that boy at all, he’ll be back up before Christmas. He wants her to move.’
‘He wouldn’t come back up, not after what those men did to him last time.’
Susan shrugs. ‘I just have a feeling.’
‘Well, I don’t think he will. He’s got more sense than that. Jenny’s an adult.’
‘Jenny needs help and Alex is the only one who can give it to her! We’ve all been trying but she’s always been a stubborn old monster and nothing’s changed.’
Pip gives a crumble of cake to Giddy, the old border collie Susan has had for ten years. He’s greying around the muzzle now and walks more slowly than he used to.
‘What animals do you have, Gran?’ Pip asks, stroking Giddy’s head.
‘Lots!’ says Susan. ‘You tell me. What have you seen?’
‘Bees,’ says Pip. ‘You said you have bees.’
‘That’s right, I do. We’ll go have a look at them tomorrow. They’re lovely little things.’
Pip sucks her lips in and scrunches her nose.
‘Oh, you’ll love them. I promise. What else have you seen?’
‘Giddy.’
‘Yes, Giddy.’
‘Chickens.’ Pip holds up seven fingers. ‘This many.’
Susan makes a big show of counting Pip’s fingers and grins. ‘Almost. We’ve got fifteen! You don’t have enough fingers for that many.’
‘Two cats.’
‘Yes.’
‘Weird-looking birds.’
‘Oh! The ones that make the loud noise?’
‘Yeah. And have bald necks and heads.’ Pip swings her legs under the table.
‘Those are your great-grandma’s guineafowl. They’re wonderful things, eat all sorts of garden pests and they keep snakes away.’
‘They don’t keep snakes away,’ Annie says flatly.
‘They do! I haven’t seen a snake in years.’
‘Coincidence. They just make a racket and eat bugs, that’s all.’
Susan’s eyes narrow and Pip gives Annie a withering look before turning back to her grandmother.
‘A duck. And Luna.’ Pip says Luna’s name quietly, like the horse might overhear her.
Susan looks back at Pip. ‘We’ve also got kittens and another two dogs outside. Your Uncle Len finds sick animals without a home and drops them around here for me to look after until he sorts something out.’
Pip considers this for a long moment. ‘That’s nice, Gran.’
‘I think so. But honestly, I like having them around.’
‘And you have eggs.’
‘Yes, we have eggs. But no rooster, so they won’t hatch.’
Pip blinks, mystified, and turns to Annie with a frown on her face. ‘Why aren’t the eggs pets?’
‘They’re just not. Eggs come in different types,’ says Annie.
‘But I saw them hatch. Last year Mrs Fisher brought them in! I saw them hatch into babies.’
Susan clears her throat. ‘Well, the rooster –’
Annie drops her fork. ‘No! No, Mum. We haven’t … talked to her about babies yet.’
‘Babies,’ says Pip. ‘But how are the eggs different?’
‘Magic!’ says Susan. ‘Magic, that’s why.’
Pip frowns and tilts her head. A moment later she nods and picks at the icing on her cupcake. ‘Magic. Okay.’