LUNA | Goddess of the Moon
Often depicted wearing a crescent moon helmet, reminiscent of horns, Luna drove a chariot pulled by horned oxen. Her temple was destroyed by Nero in his great fire.
WEDNESDAY
I’d been awake since Sunday and it was 2 am Wednesday. I was twelve hours beyond my health being affected. I knew this. Sleep doctors had told me, as though knowing could help. My white blood cell count was low, therefore my immunity was low. How would I cope in court, in just a few hours? I’d sit between Genevieve and Stephen again. Perhaps Ivy would come, hold Stephen’s hand, carry their child? Tomorrow I might have blackouts. I might even hallucinate.
I once saw a film where soldiers were interrogated after being deprived of sleep. Insomnia made them more honest. If only the entire Magistrates Court, the entire town, were awake like me. If only I could rely on the truth. I’d read Victim Impact Statements in the prosecution brief, and everything else I could get my hands on trying to find a defence. If only I could keep Rosie awake. If only I could compel her to tell the truth. If only my insomnia could creep over the fence and through her blinds and keep vigil by her bed and torture her into forgetting her anger and vengefulness. But she was free to say what she wanted. And she’d never forgive Caleb.
Some witnesses were the parents of children I’d taught. Darren Doonan, for instance, was the father of Hayley Doonan, Grade 6 of two years back. His testimony would be damning. Vanessa Thornton was planning to say that on the day of the Brunton fire, near ignition time, she had seen Caleb at our place. Joe Green would say he’d seen Caleb on his bicycle. Constable Dave Briggs would limp to the stand, probably in his police uniform, burn scars visible on his hands and his face. And it would be worse when they spoke to Michael Gillan. The prosecutor would bring the tragic loss of Shelly and Violet Gillan into the case, adding oxygen to the belief in Caleb’s guilt. I couldn’t help myself. I imagine Michael arriving home, his house alight, bursting through the front door, fighting his way to the family bathroom, discovering his wife and daughter already dead. Just how angry was he with himself for losing Caleb’s urine sample after the accident? It had been such a little incident at the time, such a small amount of money to have to change hands. But afterwards, how much did Michael blame Caleb for the loss of his own family?
CALEB
He woke early Wednesday, in flames. Fire’s movements weren’t simply a response to the wind. He knew fire itself did battle with fire. Fire told lies and was tricksy. Caleb learned in his training that, though you might want to read fire, it didn’t want to be read. The Yarra Valley had many hills and gullies. Fire loved to go uphill but the gullies also influenced its behaviour, acting as funnels. Convection plumes pulled the flames in opposing ways. People got confused when embers in the convection plume flew a different direction from surface winds. You could be in the direct path of the fire and also be in clear air. Fire snuck up. People were the prey. Fire is the hunter. Clever. Stealthy.
Fire had changed how Brunton looked at Caleb. Glances no longer slid over him like he wasn’t there. Eyes were narrowed – he had grown into something despicable. Embers floated redly behind his eyelids and in his dreams, platelets in a video about blood. Like Caleb bled flames. Or the earth was haemorrhaging its molten interior. Fire had a different meaning, once. Everything meant something else, before.
Caleb was often misjudged. ‘Have you ever tried hard drugs?’ Mum asked once, after a newsreader said Victorian country towns were losing a generation to ice. But Caleb would never take anything to dull the pain. He deserved pain. Sean had been like the dream brother he lost one long-ago summer at Gran’s. He’d been taken out of school. Mum had been pregnant. A bit fat and happy, then very sick and sad. She’d had a miscarriage. No one thought Caleb old enough to know what he’d lost.
That summer, at a racetrack fair, he first saw fire engines and fireworks: Catherine wheels and volcanoes and penny bangers. Mum was married to Dad – that summer, it was unthinkable that this could end. She told him about bunyips. Caleb spent hours at the creek, scaring himself with imagined monsters. A stupid summer, before he stopped being scared of bunyips or anything else he couldn’t see, realising he only needed to be scared of himself – what he could do, how terrible the consequences could be.
Holidaying in Brunton had been so different from living in Brunton. When they moved, Caleb knew no other teenagers. He’d tried to look after Sean, chasing away the mean kids at school, making sure Pattern was walked. But that all belonged to the Caleb of before. The guilt monster bit into him, sucking, consuming until he could stand it no more, until he had to reach inside himself using pencils and pastels, and pull his guilt out and throw it at a piece of paper, where it stuck, sometimes for long enough for him to go to sleep. Then it slipped off the paper, slid across the room and ate its way back inside him, increasingly violent with its gnashing teeth and hot breath until Caleb was pulled into horrified wakefulness with the voice – his voice – screaming inside his head, What have I done?
Some days, pain was all he had. Pain made up for things. He would control himself, keep his consciousness firmly in the damage he had caused and couldn’t fix. Maybe one day he’d find a way to make a difference, to do something positive with his life. Maybe. That was where his thoughts had been last year, when Jack suggested joining the CFA.
‘It’s a chance to contribute to the community,’ Jack had said. ‘You’ll like the group. You belong as soon as you put on the uniform.’
And Jack had been right. Caleb did feel better about himself when he joined. He kitted himself in yellow high-vis overalls; the helmet, goggles hid more than his face. They completely concealed who he was. The uniforms were labelled, but as soon as someone was absent, Caleb borrowed theirs, and hid the one labelled Caleb Wharton. No one deserved that name. Part of a well-functioning machine, he blended in. Ironically, high-vis made him invisible. Tough leather gloves concealed even his fingerprints. In uniform, he could have been anyone. He could die and no one could identify him. He wasn’t the boy who… If only he deserved to feel better about himself. Mum was right about ghosts. The town was haunted. Massacres had happened that no one felt responsible for. The whole world was being vandalised but that was always someone else’s fault. The whole system was fucked.
The day of the fire had begun, hot and still. Caleb’s bed felt sweaty, wet as a bath he’d been in too long. His window revealed a disappointed world, heat washed a fading tint over the entire view, all the way to Damper Creek. Before the day was old, it was already hot as a dog exhausted by a summer run, rancid breath panting into corners, licking away any hint of perspiration that might have sent salt into Caleb’s new lip piercings. He drew the day like that, a huge, pale mongrel stretched out against the horizon, torn between sleep and destruction. His lip hurt and he drew the dog with a sore mouth too, bloody with damage from its own canines. Those piercings were called a snakebite. He drew the day again, this time reptilian.
Longing for a breeze, he walked outside. The creek bed was dry, and when the wind came, it was a harsh, dry northerly. It prickled through dehydrated leaves treetop first, as if teasing the oily eucalypts it would return for later. It whistled around window panes like a rude schoolboy and played with Caleb’s hair, running harsh fingers down the back of his neck. He returned to his room, drawing until Mum told him it was time to go to the CFA. ‘If you’re sure you want to go.’
He grunted. Of course he was sure. She should know.
Cars sped through town followed by a trail of dust, a ghost of smoke and dust. Boys who had laughed at Caleb for not having his licence were ferried into the city, where it was safe, driven by those women who complained the most about how he’d driven. That one time.
Mum took him past the War Memorial, and the hotel where she said she and Dad once shared a single pot of beer because they were too poor for two, before Mum met Gran. Even in this weather there were tourists. They called it sight-seeing, but all they did was drink. Wine-tasting. That meant making pretentious comments about wine’s body and nose like… like it was a fucking girl.
That language came easily to Caleb, at least inside his head. It was much easier to think than to speak. Sometimes he would do neither, but just draw. A variety of things, back then: his response to Kafka’s Gregor metamorphosing into an insect or a cartoon wine-bottle that was half female, with curves in all the right places, as Dad would say. In and out again.
Mum wanted to go to BuyCheap first. Caleb stood outside, waiting for her. Ingrid, the checkout bitch, glared at him through the window when she thought Mum wasn’t watching.
‘Would you like a Mars bar?’ she’d asked five-year-old Caleb, visiting Gran, and he’d smiled, gap-toothed, young, stupid. ‘You’d better get your mother to pay for it, you little hooligan,’ she added under her breath as he bit in. Mum was furious with him for taking food without asking, and made him throw the rest out.
‘You know better than that,’ she’d announced in a loud voice, a performance for the town. ‘I’ve talked to you about stealing.’
Caleb had spat out the mouthful he’d been about to chew. It tasted bad anyway, flavoured with Ingrid’s smirk. Caramel had tasted vitriolic to Caleb ever since. He’d been taught about bullies at school but never met a child as malicious as a small-town gossip.
Outside, Ingrid emptied a wastepaper basket into the footpath bin. Heat radiated off the road in slow waves. Mum was still inside, putting her wallet away. ‘I don’t know why you’re still here,’ Ingrid murmured to Caleb. ‘After what you did to Sean.’
‘Where would I go?’
‘I don’t care. Just someplace else.’
Mum had seen them. The door slid open and she smiled over the top of the basket. ‘Caleb, you’re being helpful,’ she said, and turned to Ingrid. ‘Isn’t that nice?’
The sky had turned the colour of faded jeans, his old ones, with the life and promise washed out of them. Time didn’t move properly in a heatwave. In Caleb’s lifetime, apart from the catastrophe he caused, nothing had changed. Stock in the store windows, buses passing at timetabled intervals, ladies chatting al fresco around little tables outside the coffee shop, all these things were always the same. Until today. Today, store owners had lowered their blinds, heat had chased the al fresco ladies inside and slowed the buses. Each passing vehicle was pursued by a dust-cloud like a phantom. As cars parked, the dust slowly fell, bleaching colour from the road. No one was followed by shades of what they had done. No one except Caleb.
Mum dropped him off on Main Road just before the corner leading to the CFA. Caleb watched her driving away. CFA volunteers were already arriving. Joanne Morris’s old utility van with the ripped tray cover pulled into a roadside car park after Mum left, then Bernie Lippard’s ancient souped-up Falcon, with the twin exhaust pipes that would spread sparks like a Catherine wheel.
Caleb joined them inside for a briefing. ‘With year after year of rising temperatures, we’ll have to get used to days like this.’ He checked his uniform. Stared at his stomach, his legs. They’d look even skinnier when he replaced his black jeans with the yellow high-vis. The uniform obliterated him. Was that all right? Did that mean he was suffering enough?
His feelings used to explode sometimes. But now, anger was a memory. He would keep it under control today in court. No matter how angry he was. He once believed justice was related to truth. Justice was another statue, blindfolded, outside Caledonia Magistrates Court. If only Justice would rip that blindfold off, look around, see the truth, the wailing babies wheeled outside court like ballast for their mother’s placards, watch Mum battle with insomnia, watch Caleb wonder why being ripped apart over this accusation still didn’t make up for what he did.
Mum didn’t stop to read placards outside the courthouse, and didn’t listen to the taunts or yelled insults. Harmony and Leanne tried to get her attention. Harmony wore a school uniform, waistband rolled to raise the hem. Caleb couldn’t see any tattoos. Douglas tried stepping between them and Mum, but Harmony was insistent. ‘I know her. She was my best teacher. Ms Wharton, I need to talk to you.’
Mum sighed. Her eyes had dark black shadows underneath. ‘Yes, Harmony?’
‘The day – the day you saved us. Thank you.’
Mum stood very still, touched her eye, then touched Harmony’s hand. ‘Thank you too,’ she said, in a low voice.
Caleb had remembered to bring a scarf. He held part of it over his face, stirred by what he saw and not wanting to be. He wasn’t someone who cared about people; he was someone who hurt them. If he’d learned one thing, that was it.
Sadie thrust a microphone at them again. Why wouldn’t she give up? Her work was disgusting, all those pathetic hack jobs that ripped people’s lives into pieces for her readers’… what? Entertainment? For a rush of righteous anger or second-hand grief? A better hunter wouldn’t be hunting wounded prey, like Caleb.
Mum paused again near a familiar homeless beanie-wearer. Before the fire, Mum used to buy coffee for him outside the petrol station. She was that kind of person. Her persistence was annoying, but she deserved a better son than Caleb. The beanie-wearer scowled at the banner-holders. ‘You’ll be all right. You’re good people. I can tell.’
Mum teared up. Maybe she was happy to have at least one supporter.
In their dingy conference room, they huddled around the conference table like gamblers with a new hand of cards. Mum tried to look alert but dark circles around her eyes revealed that she wasn’t sleeping.
He returned alone to the dock. It was like being cast in the wrong show, like seeing Mona Lisa in an Impressionist painting. Nothing made sense. The magistrate and lawyers spoke, their words dancing with each other’s, weaving false meaning into sentences, obscuring the truth in legal jargon. Mum wanted him to tell the truth, but should realise that, in court, truth didn’t matter.
‘Too many lawyers in our lives,’ Mum said to Caleb once. ‘Too much tricksy language wasting our solid, real English.’
‘I’m calling Constable Dave Briggs to the stand,’ Charles Scott said.
Douglas leaped to his feet. ‘Objection! Prejudicial.’
‘The witness hasn’t said anything yet,’ Charles Scott observed.
‘The witness’s burns are an obvious attempt to sway a future jury,’ Douglas said.
The magistrate glared. ‘I’m overruling this objection. Victims can’t be excluded from testifying simply because they are victims.’
Dave Briggs called the day worse than Afghanistan. In Caleb’s mind’s eye ashes and rubble, white, Middle Eastern rubble, were stained blood red with bushfire light. He saw a row of bodies in Afghan dust, each corpse transforming into someone Caleb knew who had died, a row of Christians burning on crucifixes. Penelope’s parents… he blinked that memory away. He’d heard them die, perhaps. That speculative memory was too painful even to own.
Next, Bernie Lippard spoke like he was dictating an official report about seeing Caleb at a roadblock between Anzac Avenue and Main Road.
‘You let him through?’
‘The roadblock was to keep people out of the fire area, not to trap them there.’
Bernie Lippard described seeing Caleb leaving the ignition site. To him, Caleb’s guilt was historical fact. Next was Darren. In disclosure documents Darren said he’d seen Caleb at a drinks machine at the front of Doonan’s Hardware, purchasing two bottles of water. Dad had taken Caleb to Doonan’s many times for weedkiller or grout cleaner that Gran wanted. For a few months, Caleb had worked at the paint counter. His first job. Darren sacked him for dyeing his hair black. ‘You scare away customers,’ Darren said then.
Outraged that night at home, Caleb had turned to Dad. He remembered the conversation vividly. ‘You can have black hair and sell paint,’ he’d told Dad.
‘It’s not just the hair though, is it?’ Dad wasn’t a human rights lawyer, not even if the human involved was his son. He said people who grew the economy by employing people should be allowed to hire, and therefore sack, anyone they liked. That was commercial law, apparently.
With Darren sworn in, Charles Scott paused the CCTV on a close-up of Caleb’s face in its former full goth glory. Black hair, melting eyeliner blackening his eyes, punctured lower lip. Riding his bike into town after the fire had begun. Charles Scott alleged he was returning from having lit it. A future jury would take note of every detail of his ghostly look and judge him, even though his piercings had healed into the faintest of scars. To Mum, Caleb’s goth guise had been experimenting, going through a phase, trying to shock his father. To Mum, Caleb looked different now because he had grown up. But the contrast between the two Calebs would mean something different to strangers. To future jurors. They would suspect his current puffy, passive incarnation was an attempt to deny his skinny, angry past. At the very least, in his changing appearance he looked unbalanced.
Douglas had said he wanted to prove Darren was prejudiced. ‘Do you know how many people used your drink machine that day?’
‘Probably lots. It was hot.’
‘Could you identify any of the others?’
‘Well, no. There was a lot going on.’ Darren’s sarcasm drew a titter from the audience. ‘A bushfire was about to burn my store.’
‘Can you explain why you noticed Caleb?’
Darren shook his shoulders and tried to pretend his statements weren’t based on pre-existing hatred. Douglas returned to his seat with a look that said, We’re getting somewhere.
Joe Green testified to seeing Caleb standing beside his bike on Anzac Avenue, near Setback Mountain, with a flat tyre. Caleb remembered that moment. The smell of smoke and burning tar, the road so hot his tyres had melted. He remembered trying to speak to Joe, yelling against the roar of the wind, resisting his urge to get into the car.
Other witnesses made distressingly similar claims. Matty Shearer said he and his fiancée were looking for a refuge when they passed Caleb tying his bike to a park bench. Caleb remembered that conversation. ‘You better get away from here, mate, that front’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen,’ Matty said.
Caleb tried reassuring him.
‘He was nuts!’ Matty said, now. ‘Fire was coming and he was hanging around worrying about his fucking bike!’ He looked at the bench. ‘’Scuse the French, your magistratcy. I mean, his bloody bicycle.’
Vanessa Thornton testified to passing Caleb. ‘It must have been about 4.40. Something like that. Twenty minutes after we left home. I stopped and told him it wasn’t safe. He said he was in the CFA and wanted to help fight fires. My husband was with me. He said, Going to light a bloody fire more like.’
‘Did your husband have a reason for suspecting the accused was an arsonist?’
‘Only that he nearly killed Sean Henderson.’
‘Objection!’
The magistrate murmured something about pretending she hadn’t heard Sean’s name. Caleb’s world went blurry, smoke in his eyes. Of course Sean would be mentioned. That was what should happen. He needed his pencils. All those emotions he drew because he couldn’t find words rose within him. Dread, shame, guilt. None of them quite right. All too heavy to carry.
Douglas turned swiftly to Caleb. ‘Are you all right?’
Footsteps echoed. ‘He’s about to faint!’ Mum’s voice, coming closer though she wasn’t allowed in the dock. The smoke stopped making sense. It was too early for smoke.
It was that day. Caleb was riding home, despite waves of dry heat and dusty wind, riding quickly, winged as the god Mercury who Mum talked about. Mercury, as a newborn god, made fire from straw by striking stones together. Mercury left his mother Maia behind the day he was born, he was so precocious.
Caleb had to get his Sean the Adventurer sketchbook. He should have taken it earlier. That was what the warnings really meant. To be prepared, to keep your precious things safe. He’d known there might be a fire but had never really believed it might come here, to Gran’s house, where everything always stayed the same. Then in a CFA briefing, the real danger became apparent to him. Caleb couldn’t forget the hours he’d put into his Sean stories. Leaving the book behind was like abandoning Sean, sentencing him to a wheelchair for a second time. Caleb couldn’t. He checked his watch, knowing that by now the CFA was establishing a refuge in St Monica’s hall. That was where Penelope should be, not at Creepy Chic. That was where he needed to take her. But first, he had to go home. It shouldn’t take long.
How awesome, in spite of heat and fire, to be so fast on his bike! A car overtook him, then pulled to the side of the road. A window wound down, a head stuck out.
‘Hey! You from around here?’
Caleb dismounted, wheeling his bike closer. Wind whipped all words from his mouth. A sandy-haired man in an unbuttoned shirt waved an iPhone. ‘I’ve got no reception! How can I get to Brunton?’
Caleb gave directions, pointing and telling the man where to turn right.
‘Will my phone work there?’
‘I doubt it.’
Caleb rode the rest of the way home and threw his bike on the gravel outside the door. He stomped through the house and yard to the creek, big boots flattening dead, dry grass, desperation stretching before him like an incendiary device. How often he’d needed to run away as a little boy, his feet stamp stamp stamping. Mum made him wear shoes. He remembered rebelling by taking them off, though his soles burned, toughened to the thickness of scars around his heels.
He knew why he was here. He unlaced his boots, hopping, fingers twisting through the knots, skintight through the arches of his feet. Pebbles, prickles, sharp twists of broken twigs dug into him, stung like shattered glass. Pain to take pain away, to appease the guilt creature. He’d given birth to it, yet still it chewed on his intestines and swelled and burst from his heart. But guilt wasn’t inside him, it was walking ahead, stamping through the dry grass, a dragon breathing fire. Dangerous. Uncontrollable.
Fire had always fascinated him. Its vivid colours: red, orange, yellow, the hot blue centre of a candle flame. The sweet smell of winter’s fireplaces. Oils cracking through dry timber, like distant applause. This creature was as destructive as Caleb. Like the dry heat that licked away his sweat, these tongues might sweep away his guilt.
A shadow sniffed around the abandoned hut like the ghostly fossicker who’d sought a fortune here, not so long ago. Was that smoke Caleb smelled, already? He paused to look back at the house that Gran gave him because she didn’t know what monster lurked inside him, what a monster he’d become. His bedroom window looked back over the yard. If fire swept through from here, that part of the house would ignite first. He’d lose everything he deserved to lose. Only the skeleton of the house would be left, and the tangled mess of the car Caleb never should have tried to drive. Skeletal, all those things would lose their voices. Nothing would remain to tell what he had done. Only these tongues of fire, whispering his secrets while they burned themselves out.
His memory faded into vague impressions, each as distinct and frozen as a frame in his graphic art. The day ached with heat, earth and air pushing violently against each other in the volcanically carved terrain. He thought he heard something. He must be imagining it. (He hadn’t learned for weeks that Rosie saw him there. He didn’t notice her with her binoculars and camera, looking for another reason to hate him.) But he could almost hear Jack’s voice, his frustration.
Where are you? Come back to the station.
He was hallucinating. Jack wasn’t here. Jack was the CFA captain, needed elsewhere. His voice, over the telephone. What was that? The flash of light like a woman in a white dress, a whisper of pale smoke. Caleb found the sketchbook he’d come for, the one he promised Sean, the one filled with his Sean the Adventurer stories. Perhaps heatstroke had made him delirious. It was his custom; he lit a cigarette and stood and worried. He shouldn’t have come here. He’d been torn. The desire to be here, the desire to find Penelope, both needs really, with risks attached to whatever course he chose to take.
And that was a flame, licking at a tree across Damper Creek. The scent of smoke, then flames. They reminded him of puppies taking their first steps from the stray mother he’d cared for, one summer. Gran hated wild dogs and cats because they attacked native animals. One morning the puppies crept from the miner’s shed where Caleb hid them, like beads of sweat in the heat. Claire, ruthless as the north wind, whisked them away.
‘The RSPCA,’ she told Caleb. ‘They’ll find good homes.’
Caleb had been helpless to stop or believe her.
This was fire. Now it had come, nursed and channelled. He had to move. He raced inside and made his first phone call. ‘There’s a fire,’ he said. He was nervous, scared, terrified, his voice betrayed him, turning into a childish squeak. ‘Near Anzac Avenue. Brunton.’
‘We’re tracking all fires at the moment,’ a woman’s voice told him. Stern and disbelieving. ‘Please be aware it’s a crime to make a false report.’
Caleb mentioned the CFA brochure. It warned that you would see smoke before you heard about fire on the radio or over the internet. But the woman had already hung up.
Through the window Caleb watched an orange grey cloud gather, as menacing as something from a horror film. It was no femme fatale, sucking nicotine from an ashy cigarette. There was nothing womanly about the fire after all. That haze of eucalypt oil and those scents distilled from tea-tree and musk, they were no exotic perfume designed to entice, seduce. They were just fatale, fatal, coalescing into the shape of an enormous mummy’s face as it grew and expanded and sought to eat him alive. It would chase him back to Brunton.
Heat finally burning through his lethargy. Caleb sprinted through the house. He had to get away, he had to get back to the others. Could his bike melt in the blinding heat? His hands felt their first burn of the day when he picked it up, climbed on board. The heat was heavy, thick as trying to ride through baking bread. He’d forgotten to lock the door. He didn’t turn back. Fire didn’t need a key, wouldn’t knock.
On his way back, shrivelled by heat and terrified about Penelope, Caleb unthinkingly passed various people who’d come forward as witnesses. Where was Penelope? At home, probably. He could cycle there, too. Nature was malicious, the wind howling, a wild beast. Hot breath whispered in its own language, deceptive words, a little bit tempting but most of all threatening with the desire to own, to consume, to destroy. Pedalling, Caleb remembered a science lesson about the birth of a new star. In the immensity of time and space, had there ever been a place as hot as this? The clouds alternated grey, orange, red. The heat was solar flares, blasting out radiantly into space. He needed to make sure Penelope was okay.
‘Caleb, you have to wake up.’ It was Mum’s voice. Now. Here. In Caledonia Magistrates Court. ‘It’s time to go home.’
He opened his eyes. No smoke. The fire was long ago. Green shoots had matured into new leaves, plants. People were already speaking about the next Fire season, like it fell between Summer and Autumn, Excessive heat was something they’d expect cyclically. Meanwhile the country’s alleged leaders were still the most pathetic followers of all, reacting to what had already gone wrong instead of acting to stop it getting worse. Caleb was fat and here, in court. Facing justice one day at a time.