Wind buffeted the house, as if trying to pound it to the ground. It reminded Finn of those Hobart nights when the winds of the Roaring Forties came up from the Southern Ocean and smashed against the windows and even their brick cottage trembled under the onslaught. Perhaps a cyclone was coming. It would be a relief if something external tore through their lives, flattened the house, flooded the town, flung them out.
She was gone from the bed again. He got up and crossed to the window. Kneeled and rested his chin on the windowsill.
Ripples on the pool’s surface. He peered, trying to make out her shape. What did she do in there? How could she bear it?
‘Are you coming to bed?’ he asked, too softly for her to hear him.
The wind roared and whirled around him. He closed his eyes and murmured, ‘Just come to bed, Bridget.’
A muffled splintering, cracking sound reached him over the wind and his eyes flew open.
What was it? A loud noise far away or a soft noise close by? Below, Bridget surfaced.
‘What was that?’ he yelled, loud enough to reach her.
Her face turned up to him, a glimmer in the dark. ‘I don’t know.’
Finn pushed himself to his feet in a single move. He’d sworn never to ignore a strange noise again. He turned and headed out of the room towards the stairs. As he reached the top he glanced towards Jarrah’s room. The door was shut. It hadn’t woken him, then. But the unaccountable urgency shoved him down the stairs and he broke into a run. Slid the verandah door open to find Bridget running from the pool, a towel flung around her.
She grabbed his arm, pointing. ‘Over there?’
Outside the gate Finn could see an odd, flickering light that filled him with a formless panic. He sprinted across the lawn, wrenched the gate open, skidded to a halt. Tried to understand what he was seeing as Bridget ran up behind him.
A huge branch of the gum had come down, its leaves obscuring the grass verge. Through the leaves, the light flickered. He could hear something, maddeningly indistinct.
‘Who’s there?’ Finn tried to shove his way through.
‘Help!’ he heard.
Bridget caught her breath. ‘Oh Jesus, Finn. Oh Jesus.’
By the glancing, flickering light of an iPhone: branches and leaves everywhere, a bent back. A head of hair. Too many limbs. Or not enough limbs.
Tom’s bent back. Tom’s panicked voice, hoarse: ‘I can’t get it off him.’
‘What the fuck is going on?’
Because it couldn’t be true, what he was seeing in snatches of light. Jarrah’s ashen face, the choking sounds coming from him, and Tom struggling with something around Jarrah’s neck. Finn fell to his knees beside them.
‘Loosen it, loosen it!’ Tom urged.
Somehow he and Tom got the two sides of the knot and prised it loose. Jarrah took a wretched, rasping in-breath over the wind. Then exhaled with a keen of agony.
Behind Finn, Bridget cried out. ‘His leg!’
Finn glanced to his left, and shuddered. A glimpse of bone and blood, crushed under the heavy fallen branch. He spun back to her, met her eyes. She nodded, turned and ran.
Tom was pulling the fabric out from under Jarrah’s neck. Jarrah cried out again, and Finn found his hand, and grabbed it.
‘It’s all right. You’ll be all right.’
‘I was worried,’ Tom panted. ‘I texted him to come and talk. I was waiting over the road. But he climbed the tree and…’
He looked up and extended what had been around Jarrah’s neck in Finn’s direction. It told Finn he’d nearly lost his second son; that if Tom hadn’t been out there on watch, or the branch hadn’t snapped, a second unimaginable nightmare would have engulfed him.
‘What the hell did you fight about?’
‘I don’t know! He had a bad day with his girlfriend. I think they broke up.’ Tom looked ready to run.
Jarrah groaned again and writhed. Finn couldn’t tell if he was fully conscious.
‘I can’t…’ Tom pushed himself to his feet. ‘I’m sorry.’ He scooped up the phone, backed away and turned and ran, leaving Finn in the dark.
Over the wind Finn heard Bridget shoving her way through the branches to reach them again. ‘They’re coming,’ she called.
Above the wind, the wail of a siren rose.