DRIBBLE, WEDNESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 1978
Life was not quite perfect, thought Jed as she tried to find a comfortable spot on the sofa for her nine months’ pregnant bulk as the fan ineffectually stirred air hot enough to dry a tree full of apricots. Happy, fulfilling, but definitely not perfect.
Outside, smoke tried to seep past the Dribble window frames into the living room. Sam and Michael had just finished burning a wide firebreak from the road to the river that half circled the house and its paddocks. They’d headed down to Drinkwater after lunch.
Over by the fan, Maxi slept with the virtuous exhaustion of a dog who has successfully supervised the morning’s work and almost caught a rabbit that had escaped the flames.
Beyond, the hills rose hazy in the heat, more tree trunks than leaves, as the gums abandoned their foliage in the dry soil, leaves crackling like cornflakes on the hard baked ground, the sky a too-clear blue, as if it had forgotten even the idea of rain. Cicadas yelled, triumphant.
Only idiots would burn firebreaks in this heat, thought Jed, regretting the afternoon swim she would now not get, unless she wanted to breathe smoke.
Yet Sam and Michael were not idiots, and nor were Nancy and Blue. If they said there needed to be firebreaks around Overflow, Drinkwater, Dribble and Moura this year, then their reasons would be valid.
But it was just so hot! The heat sat on her, making even standing up an effort. The burning off had made it worse. If only it would rain. Deep, soaking rain that filled the sky and then the soil.
Spring’s green grass had dried to long brown hair, wisping against fences, trodden by sheep looking for green pick below — though not in the Overflow–Drinkwater paddocks, where Nancy and Michael kept the groundcover short with mixed mobs of sheep and cattle.
Summer always meant bushfire somewhere. The fire trucks raced out, the blokes collecting their tools and as much soft drink as they could carry. Jed had even gone out with the crews a few times the year before, despite some muttering and a few rude jokes by the blokes. Sam, Michael and Andy showed her how to rake grass and tussocks to extinguish flame, how to use the fire rakes to scrape burning bark from trees so others could bash out the fire with green wattle branches.
Most of the fires she’d attended had been lit by someone burning off on a total fire-ban day of high wind, or a trail bike’s spark catching dead leaves on a bush track. Only one had been caused by a lightning strike, soon put out by the following southerly change and rain.
There’d only been one bushfire so far this season, back before Christmas, a ‘controlled burn’ by the Forestry Commission that had been left unchecked over the weekend and had spread. No matter what the local Forestry workers wanted, rules said they needed to finish work at a set time — and budgets did not allow for overtime.
Local bushfire brigades couldn’t go onto Commission-controlled lands unless invited. But the mountain men — distantly related to her husband — had ridden in on horseback and kept the boundaries of the fire from spreading till the wind turned, letting the fire die out as it tried to feed on the black ground it had already eaten.
Husband. It was a . . . comfortable . . . word. Like pregnant. Except pregnancy itself was not comfortable, at least not in the last three months when every stranger seemed to feel free to pat her belly or ask, ‘When is it due?’
How come everyone said pregnancy lasted nine months when it was really forty weeks, which was really ten months, not nine? Was it part of a vast conspiracy to keep women having babies?
Jed had a feeling Nature was really a male chauvinist. Why else make the last weeks of pregnancy so impossible?
No swimming in the river in the last month of pregnancy — though she had ignored that one. How could you survive a Gibber’s Creek summer without a swim in the river?
Not even any ice cream because suddenly it gave her heartburn. Getting up three times a night because there was no room for a decent-sized bladder when you were carrying a kid who was probably six foot four already.
Her belly was now officially known as The Bulge in the McAlpine–Thompson–Kelly households, and it was too large for her to bend down and tie her bootlaces. Which meant either sweating in gumboots, or risking snakes in bare feet or sandals.
Not that snakes were much of a risk. Nancy and Matilda had taught her how to recognise the small birds’ snake alarm calls, and she now automatically avoided stepping over logs or rocks where one might be basking.
Jed stuffed a cushion under her knees and lay on her side. Ah, that was better.
The firebreak and the river bend should protect Dribble, and Sam and the Beards of the Whole Australia Factory had even installed an automatic pump on the roof, to keep the house safe behind a curtain of water from underground cisterns if flames approached. Dribble also had the solid hardwood cladding and shutters that had protected the Drinkwater and Overflow homesteads from fires in the past, along with their owners’ knowledge of not just fire’s ferocity but where it might be vulnerable.
Safe. That was a good word too. The houses that she loved were safe. The extended Thompson–McAlpine clan was safe. Scarlett was safe, gone back to Sydney for a month’s reading before uni began again, about to enter her third year of medicine and deeply happy.
All her earlier fears had gone. This baby would be loved and cherished in the bedroom Sam had painted white and where Scarlett and Leafsong had stencilled dancing purple wombats along the tops of the walls, bright and playful for the baby to stare at. Clancy’s cot had been repainted, the old stroller fetched from the Drinkwater attic, and a drawer filled with small white garments knitted by Sam’s mum, Blue, and Nancy, who would be Other Grandma to this baby, rather than great-great-aunt-by-marriage.
Another baby, still and cold in her arms, surfaced in her memory. She had wanted that baby so badly, even if it had been the child of rape. But would she have glimpsed Merv when she gazed into its face? Jed closed her mind abruptly.
She should write a nice long chatty letter to Julieanne, who was complaining about London’s cold, wet slush. She might even pull her courage up from her ankles and send her friend the revised manuscript waiting in the bottom drawer of her dressing table. Except her book was nowhere near as good as Swords and Crowns and Rings, for which Ruth Park had got the Miles Franklin, and which was so good she felt it was nonsense she should even think of sending her pages to a publisher.
Yet.
She could give Sam a shock and actually cook something for dinner. Or even better, gather a picnic of leftover salmon quiche, olives, the cider-vinegar pickled onions Sam adored, plus homegrown lettuce and cucumbers and tomatoes — even if it did mean venturing out in the heat and smoke to find a lettuce stubborn enough to survive mid-summer . . .
The doorbell rang. Jed frowned. No one she knew rang doorbells or even used the front door. They called out, ‘Cooee!’ or ‘Are you decent, love?’ or ‘Hi! It’s me,’ then stepped into the kitchen.
‘Fat lot of good you are as a watch dog,’ she said to the still-sleeping Maxi.
Maxi stirred, said ‘woof’ briefly and then rested back on her paws, her duty done. Jed heaved her bulk off the sofa, patted The Bulge affectionately, lumbered down the corridor and opened the door.
‘Sorry about the smoke —’ She stopped, her hand frozen to the doorknob.
The man on her veranda was short — why had she remembered him as tall? Balding, a tracksuit sagging at the knees and belly, a stink of rum she remembered suffocating her when he’d held her down, when he’d —
He smiled, and she was fifteen and friendless all over again. ‘Hello, Janet,’ said Merv.
Halfway up the mountain the fire glowed deep within a log, the only sign a small shimmer of hot air between the trees. The mountain men thought they had extinguished it, but one small ember burned.
The fire waited.