We headed back to the Bluehouse, twenty-five kilometres to the south-west. As we walked from the car, I took a moment to admire the reconstruction work they’d carried out over the past couple of years. The new house was a substantial dwelling of mudbrick, recycled iron wood and radially sawn timber that seemed to have somehow grown out of the earth and shaped itself to the contours of the surrounding slopes. Sam Kelly definitely had a touch of the homespun genius about him. God only knew how you got natural, solid materials like timber and stone to curve and flow the way they did here. They’d painted the doors and window frames blue in honour of the house’s predecessor and namesake.
After an excellent meal and a convivial fireside chat I headed off to the spare room I’d been given. I popped into Possum’s room to say goodnight. This was a risky exercise at the best of times: Possum’s room was a zoo. Her current guests included an ant farm full of jumping jacks, an injured baby possum and a Mexican walking fish. There was a magpie named Pendles, currently out of sight but generally perched in the tree outside her window. I remembered a previous occasion when I’d sat on a chair and discovered a baby snake beneath the cushion.
She put her book aside and looked at me directly.
‘You wanna talk about it?’ she asked, her eyes bright.
‘About what?’
‘Whatever you’ve been doing that’s got somebody so riled up they’re dropping trees onto your house.’
‘Sorry, Poss. It’s police business.’
‘And that’s another thing,’ she pressed. ‘I hear you’re not quite police these days.’
‘Just a temporary misunderstanding. I’ll be back in action soon.’
She licked her lips. ‘I also hear you got yourself a man – at last!’
I groaned softly. Was there no such thing as privacy round here?
She raised herself in the bed. ‘Do tell, Jess. Who is he? Is he hot?’
‘He’s just a slightly mixed-up feller who lives in the hills at Wycliff – when he’s not in gaol.’
‘Oh yeah, I heard that. Slight complication.’
‘Nash Rankin’s his name. He grows apples and corn and looks after injured eagles. Oh, and he specialises in rescuing roadside turtles in dramatic fashion.’
‘Sounds like my kinda guy.’
‘I suspect he would be. If he ever gets out I’ll bring him here to meet you. They’ve accused him of killing the man at Wycliff, but I don’t think he’s guilty. I’m trying to find out who is.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Well, you’re in the right place.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The hills around Satellite, they’re full of wackos. Always have been. Have you been to the Saturday market yet? It’s like the Star Wars bar on steroids. Shipwrecked astral travellers, gorillas in leather jackets, heavyweight hippies, featherweight drug dealers, survivalists, sovereign citizens – they’re all there, treading on each other’s toes. It’s hilarious.’
‘As opposed to Canticle Creek, you mean? Where you’re all chartered accountants and church wardens?’
Her laughter rang around the room. ‘More like church mice – as in as poor as. But seriously, Jess, Satellite’s always had a reputation. Makes us look tame. If I wanted to know anything about the people of Satellite, that’s the first place I’d look.’
I pressed for more information. ‘Nash said he was raised in a cult that used to operate in the Windmarks. Have you ever heard of the Revelators?’
She contemplated the ceiling. ‘Rings a bell. When I was at school there were a few kids whose families had been caught up in it. Those kids on average turned out pretty weird. From what I remember, they were either gibbering evangelicals or went the other way and became complete stoners. But I’ve only ever heard it spoken of as ancient history. The group disappeared years ago, didn’t it?’
‘I believe so, but there could be aftershocks running down through the generations. Nash also used to be a cop. I’ve been looking at people who might hold that against him.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘That’d fill the MCG.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, suppressing a yawn.
She noticed and told me to get some shut-eye because I’d had a hell of a day. I couldn’t disagree.
As I left the room, she picked up her book and said she’d ask around. I frowned. I always worried about Possum. If there was a firestorm, she’d be in there with the storm chasers.
‘Don’t go sticking your nose into anything, Poss. Somebody might bite it off. You hear anything, just let me know. I’ve got a bad feeling about this business.’
She rolled her eyes, suggested I was over-prone to bad feelings. I thought about the killer trees and toxic waste dumpers, the weirdos and wackos she’d just told me were cruising around the district and suggested sometimes bad feelings were justified. She made a face and returned to her book.
I lay in bed listening to some music. Courtney Barnett’s ‘Depreston’, a recommendation from Possum. Eventually I drifted off to sleep, getting as close as I could to the sleep of the just, enjoying a night not interrupted by drips, dogs or lethal trees.
First thing in the morning I rang Hayley, the vet. Flinders was hanging in there. The operation appeared to have been a success, but they’d need a few more days to be sure. She was still worried about infection; he was in a vulnerable state. If he did survive, we were going to have to rename him Tripod.
I put the phone away and sighed. Poor bloody hound.
I needed a bit of cheering up, so I headed out to the mudbrick cottage the Kellys had built for my father. I knew he was in residence when I spotted his old brown boots next to the back door. They were a portrait of their owner: they bore the scuffs and scars of every mile he’d hiked, every cliff he’d climbed, every fire he’d stomped out. I found him crouching over a canvas with a paintbrush in his hand and an air of frustration about him. He was well into his seventies now and looked it. But the older he got, the more desperately he wanted to make up for the sizeable slabs of his life in which he’d been forced to do things other than art to eke out a living. He’d only started seriously exhibiting when he was in his late forties.
He greeted me curtly, then got back to work.
I looked over the canvas he was jabbing at. The outer edges were shrouded in dark mist, but the centre section hummed with colour and life. I made out a plummeting goshawk, a hunchback orchid, a v-formation of spitfire caterpillars ploughing through the dirt.
‘What are you working on?’
I made the enquiry with some hesitation. Dad never liked talking about his work, said he’d let the paintings do the talking. But this morning he was in a loquacious mood.
‘You know how it goes with me, Jess. I just stuff around until something jumps out and grabs me by the throat.’
‘So, what’s got your throat now?’
He gave the question a moment’s consideration.
‘Carbon.’
‘Carbon?’ I echoed. He must have detected the surprise in my voice. He stood up, stretched his back and gestured at me to follow him. Outside, he led me towards a stand of trees at the back of the block. At their base was a curved, mud-covered structure, a metre wide, three or four long, burrowing into the surrounding slopes. I was surprised I’d never noticed it before, then realised it must have been buried in the undergrowth and only come to light after the fire swept through here.
‘What is this?’ I asked.
‘It’s a Japanese kiln,’ he replied. ‘No prizes for guessing who built it.’
The Bluehouse had originally been the home of Kenji Takada, Lucy’s father, a noted Japanese potter turned artist who settled here in the fifties.
Lucy came out and joined us, caught the tail end of the conversation. She must have spotted us from the kitchen.
‘It’s called an anagama,’ she explained. Lucy was a potter herself, had inherited many of her father’s proclivities. ‘Sam and I have been restoring it. We’re just about ready for our first firing.’
‘Have a look inside,’ said Dad.
He drew a torch from his pocket and passed it over. I leaned in and lit up the chamber. It was long and sloping, with a firebox at the front and a chimney at the back.
‘Here, let me open the side stokes,’ said Lucy.
She removed a brick from the side of the kiln. As the natural light flooded in, I saw that the floor was littered with shards of rock and pottery. But what really caught my eye were the walls. They were covered with a thin layer of molten green-gold glass. Those luminous surfaces were works of art themselves; you could discern frozen rivers and craggy mountains, lonely pine trees, long-legged birds. I picked up a fragment from the kiln floor. It was only a couple of inches long, but its vitreous yellows and greens formed the perfect image of a tree.
Lucy thought so too. ‘Looks like a golden wattle.’
‘Do you mind if I keep it?’ I asked. ‘I know someone who might appreciate it.’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘It’s yours.’
I slipped it into my pocket.
‘I remember the firings from my childhood,’ said Lucy, folding her arms and gazing into the shadows of the kiln. ‘We’d often take the shards, turn them into something beautiful: necklaces, bracelets, odd little toys. Once a year, Dad and his friends would load their pottery in, fill the firebox with acacia wood and light it up. Clouds of smoke and jets of flame would come billowing out the chimney. He’d say we were watching the dragon breathe.’
‘Fascinating, isn’t it?’ added Dad. ‘But what really got me thinking about the role of carbon in all this—’
‘In all what?’
‘In all of . . .’ – he waved a hand at the surrounding hills – ‘everything, was this tree.’ He gestured at a big old she-oak nearby. ‘Look how healthy it is. That’s because it was nourished by carbon from the smoke and ash in its early years. Carbon’s essential to the cycle of life and death. It forms compounds with other elements – calcium, potassium, phosphorus – and ignites the systems of the forest. It’s shape-shifting, indestructible, and its medium is fire.’
I was suddenly keen to take another look at the painting he’d been working on, curious to see how closely it aligned with what he’d just told me. The three of us walked back to the studio. I stood in front of the canvas and soft-focused my eyes. ‘Has it got a title yet?’ I asked.
‘The Black Spark.’
Typical. An oxymoron. I realised the blackness that ran around the outer edges of the painting was somehow central to its geometry. It glimmered like the desert sky at night. It was beautiful, except for a peculiar section in the upper left corner. The shadows there were of a different order, as deeply dark as a bog hole swallowing a wombat. Or a black hole swallowing a star. Looming over it was what looked like a rocky outcrop, or a human skull, deeply incised into the darkly impasto paint. The overall effect was almost demonic.
‘Why does this bit send a shiver through my bones?’ I asked, pointing at the corner.
Dad grimaced and scratched his whiskers.
‘Where there’s life, there’s death.’
‘What?’
‘Not everybody round here is as welcoming as the good people of Canticle Creek. I was pottering around the ridge country up along the northern end of the Wiregrass Valley a few months ago when I spotted an outcrop on the escarpment that intrigued me. It was on private property, so for once in my life I thought I’d do the right thing and ask the owner’s permission before going in. There’s this big house looming over the road like a medieval fortress. And bugger me if the bloke on the front gate doesn’t tell me to sod off. I ignored him, of course. Drove a little further down the road – past all the TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED signs – then nipped in the back way. But somebody must have spotted me. Next thing I know there’s this bloody great hellhound coming after me. I ran off, but it still took a chunk out of my arse. Had to scramble up the escarpment to get away.’ He shook his head. ‘Nice people. Thought I’d honour them with a mention in the painting. It was worth it, though. The outcrop was granite, like I suspected, but when I got up there I saw it was studded with xenoliths.’
Xenoliths I knew. Rocks with a different origin from the igneous mass in which they were embedded.
I was settling in for a discourse on the formation and distribution of xenoliths – Dad was a scientist before he became an artist, and a gasbag before he became either – when my phone pinged. It was a text from Vince Tehlich. ‘Starcy will see you.’ Vince’s old copper mate, Nash’s boss. ‘Number and address attached. He’s already had one heart attack don’t give him another.’