Drought, pestilence, fire. There was a summer heralded by unwanted December storms, which chased one another in from the west, flipping the Showalter Park Cessna onto its back, stimulating the wild grasses, pinching the wheat crops where they stood. When the sun reappeared in January, bringing a long run of summer heat, it was too late—the government silos brimmed with worthless grain and Isonville lay tinder dry, wide open to the first spark. What were you doing out there? Anna demanded. Hugo stood sullen and mute. She shook him. His pocket rattled. You’ve been playing with matches again. Hugo threw his forearm over his eyes and shrank back: Don’t tell. But why should Anna tell? She wanted what he wanted. Show me, she said, and he dropped his arm, and relaxed, and gradually the lineaments of his mania reappeared and he turned and led her through the grass, away from the house with its knowing eyes behind the candy-stripe noonday blinds. They had been taught to strike away from the body. It’s gone out, Anna said, staring at the match on the ground—but it hadn’t, the sun had robbed the tiny flames of colour, that’s all. Then, before their eyes, the flames had shape and colour, eating swiftly through the grass, leaving ashen shapes like black and grey after-images in the dirt. Hugo danced at the edges, panicky, elated: Don’t let it get away! She felt it, too, a fire-lick in her belly. That was on Isonville. No playing with fire on their six-forty acres, where everything was precarious. When the little Austin truck had had its day, her father didn’t dump it in the creek or sell it to a wrecker but stood a two-stroke pump, hoses and a couple of 44-gallon drums of dam water on the tray and called it his fire plant. One late February evening, when the superheated air had been gusting for forty-eight hours without a break, Anna saw her father stop in his tracks, tip back his head, and sniff the wind. I don’t like it, he muttered. She was halfway across the yard with him, Kip dancing around their feet, tormented by the flap of mutton in his hands. It’s a bad one, he said, moving on to the kennel and the chain. Anna paused for a moment in the darkness, spooked now, the night assuming lost cries and flickers around her. She followed the jerking torch into the shed. She wanted to know what it was her father had seen or heard or smelt on the wind, but then she came upon him in one of his old, comforting postures, down on one knee, crooning as he clipped the chain to Kippy’s collar, and the world righted itself again. They returned to the house, arm in arm, discussing her coming year in the city. The call to save the town came at one o’clock in the morning. Pandowie, nineteen miles away, with a fireglow in the black hills behind it like a war, or hell, or a city of brawling nightclubs. They had scarcely reached Dead Man’s Corner in the little Austin when Channel 7 waved them down. Lose any stock or property, anyone hurt, anyone killed? reporters wanted to know, swarming around the truck. Anna’s father stared at them, a terrible stare. Finally he snarled: We’re here, the fire’s way the hell over there, you work it out. Ghouls. Morons. A little village of headlights and trestle tables had been set up in a dry creek bed in a forgotten gully deep in the hills, and for the next twelve hours Anna and her mother helped to make sandwiches and mugs of tea. The men were called the menfolk. They drove in, dog-tired, stopped for a while, drove out again. Anna stared after them, dreaming that she stood on a tilting deck, hosing down the flames, but she liked it with the women, too, a place where she heard things she realised she was hungry to hear. One day in August, Lockie drove down to the city to show her his call-up notice. Burn it, she said, stung into taunting him by the expression in his eyes, his queer, dreamy pride and hunger, his bitten, angular, country fingers. Burn the fucking thing. She made to snatch it from him: Here, give us it. You’re sick, he said, jerking away from her, they’ve twisted your mind, and suddenly ugliness and struggle were there in the room with them. When Wesley Showalter paid Sam to cut up and burn a massive pine tree that had split and collapsed in heavy winds, Anna took the children to see the bonfire. Suddenly she remembered Hugo, his matches, and anxiously searched the faces of her children as they watched the flames. Nothing abnormal; they hadn’t inherited that mania. The flames reduced the old tree to a bed of coals and a wall of heat. Anna stood watching with her children. Behind them the stud cattle watched. Still smoking, Michael said, two days later as they made the school run on the sunken road. And the cows and heifers were a few metres closer. On the third morning they saw the cattle standing around the ashy remains like spokes in a wheel, facing out, tails up, squirting long, hard and steamily upon the coals. It must be nature, Anna said, and it became something to giggle about over the years. Anna had assumed that she was done with fiery love. That part of her life was over and it had been fiery enough to last her forever, all that passion and pain. Someone solid and dependable, that’s what she’d needed after Lockie died, and that’s what she’d got in Sam Jaeger. But the body mends, or some states are temporary, for she woke up one day wanting to burn again. It was a disappointment she hadn’t counted upon, Sam’s muted needs. Companionship was all very well, but it was hard to let go of her need for passion. And where was the companionship now, anyway? Along with his emotional and sexual thrift, Sam was obsessive, he couldn’t sleep, he was eaten up inside with hatred for his father. Anna is writing about fire for the town’s Jubilee history: The Ngadjuri used fire to regenerate the scrubland. George Catford, founder of the Pandowie Lode, died when he fell, intoxicated, into an open fire. Fires burned in the mine shafts before the waters came. Fires lay waste to our livelihoods. We are forged in fire. As she writes, she wonders if anyone is interested. When Anna stays with Meg and Rebecca in the city, they might return from a draughty concert hall on a wintry night and stand before the gas heater like the three monkeys. Rebecca says that this is the only time she can see the benefit of wearing a dress, for she is able to bunch the skirt around her waist and roast the backs of her thighs. Anna will have central heating in her house beside the sea. A thermostat will cut in and out and warmed air will whisper in all the rooms. Bushfires on the evening news, that’s the closest she will get to naked flames when she is old, and she will never be quite warm enough.