A Long the River Run, page 2
Kevin Cutler waved his arms and said words like ‘out of control’ and ‘runaway’ and ‘crowning’ by which he meant that all the years of the Cutler’s authority over the valley and the ridges and the people and the plants and the animals couldn’t stop the blaze from reaching them. Angela thought that Kevin Cutler looked scared and broken and the young boys and middle-aged men on his truck reminded Angela of her grandfather, the Law’s, photographs, that he had sent back to her grandmother just before Singapore fell, of men clambering on trucks in Malaya heading off to some place called Parit Sulong. The boys in Malaya smiled nervously at the camera like little boys waiting for the dentist and so did the men and boys on Kevin Cutler’s truck.
‘I suppose your idiot neighbour is going to stay and try and fight the fire?’ Kevin Cutler said to Angela by which he meant Killer. Angela said that she assumed that he would because Killer had once said to her that the only way that he would be leaving the valley would be in a box and even then he would prefer it if, when he went, that some kind person would borrow Bobby Parson’s backhoe, dig a six foot deep hole, roll him in and cover him up and not to bother with any headstones or grave markers but just leave him in peace.
‘Fucking stupid old bastard’ Kevin Cutler said, still referring to Killer and walked back to his truck where his boys all looked like scared puppies, eager to please their master but still expecting to get a firm toe in the guts. ‘If he gets in the shit, we won’t be risking our lives to get him out of it. If you see him, tell him that’ Kevin Cutler said and jumped into the truck and took off up the road towards the ridge that marked the end of the valley and meaning that even though he would drive past Killer’s house, he had no intention to stop and tell Killer to leave the same way that he had Angela. Kevin Cutler knew what Killer’s answer would be anyway, so there was probably no point.
It was then, that what sun there was, completely disappeared beneath the hot clouds of white and grey smoke that was flecked with red and the roaring in the sky grew even louder and Angela MacGregor shivered and realised that in all of her years, in all of her travels, in times when she felt uncomfortable and even a little afraid, she had never really known fear the way that it pounded into her stomach and making her think that she might vomit and her skin was tingling like she was being pricked all over with hundreds of tiny needles as if she was undergoing acupuncture, but ten times, a hundred times worse than when she had allowed herself to be pricked with the little needles to help her give up smoking and it didn’t work anyway and the only way she gave up smoking was through sheer willpower.
The ground was smoking now. Little puffs of smoke arose where embers settled on the tufts of dry grass and there was a little fragrant fire smouldering in what was left of the herb garden and she could pick the different essential oils that surrendered themselves and their volatility to the coming fire. The wind had changed in front of the fire and was howling the way her grandmother had described the dritch skraich of the boodies in the glens at night. On the breeze a little leaf fluttered down and landed in Angela’s hair and she saw that it was leaf from a gum tree, a eucalypt, perhaps a Stringybark and the strangest thing was that the leaf was in one piece, but without much colour and almost transparent in places and felt brittle under her fingers and Angela realised that the leaf had been baked at an intense heat for a very short time without burning, it was radiant heat and she remembered seeing the pictures of people in Hiroshima who had been killed and what they left was their shadow on a wall, a silhouette of suffering. Angela turned and walked to her car.
The Subaru Forester was the one luxury she allowed herself. Once, when she was a student, she caught the train to a country town in the New England with a boy that she was sort of seeing and, looking out the window somewhere near Walcha or Uralla she had mentioned to her friend that for people who were allegedly doing it tough, she was surprised that so many of the properties they passed had relatively late model cars parked in their yards and her friend had said to her that when you live so far out of town a reliable car can be the difference between life and death and that’s why a lot of the people in the houses they passed might not spend a lot on material goods, but they had cars that could get them to hospital long before an ambulance could reach them. When Angela bought the mud brick cottage, she traded in her old Ford Fiesta for the Subaru and when she turned the key, she was glad that the engine turned over straight away. Killer told her once about a fire, years ago, that came through a neighbouring valley so fast that when the people tried to flee, they found that their cars wouldn’t start because the intensity of the heat of the fire was vaporising the petrol in their carburettors before it could be pumped into the cylinders and that’s why it was better to have fuel injection. Angela thought that Killer might have been making that up because you could never tell when he was spinning a yarn.
Angela drove fast down the hill towards the village and liked the way that the car, driven by all four wheels, felt sure of foot on the gravel road and she imagined that it was leading her to safety. She was never one of those people, like one or two of her friends, who anthropomorphised their cars and gave them human names but now, as she fled the fire, she was sure was coming after her, she felt that the car was a living breathing thing like a horse that was intent on delivering her to safety.
About two kilometres from her house she rounded a bend and saw that Tony and Alyssa, a couple that had invited her to their house for a meal a couple of times, were standing in their front yard next to a huge water drum on the back of a trailer and Tony looked like he was connecting a hose to a diesel pump. Angela stopped the car and wound down her window and asked if they were planning to stay and fight the fire. Tony and Alyssa were both in overalls that, when Angela was a girl, were called boiler suits, and all the men who worked at the dockyard and the steelworks and on the railway wore them. Tony and Alyssa were also wearing heavy black suede work boots with thick woollen socks into which was tucked the bottoms of the legs of their boiler suits and they had big felt hats pulled firmly down on their heads and bandannas around their necks that they could pull up around their noses and mouths and they both wore big clear plastic safety glasses.
‘We’ll give it a decent crack’ Tony said and smiled.
‘Where are you going?’ Alyssa asked Angela and Angela told her that she was heading to the city and would be staying with her friend Ingrid who had a flat in one of the new developments along the harbour.
‘I bet your friend calls it an apartment and not a flat?’ Tony said and he and Alyssa laughed, and Angela found herself laughing with them and agreeing that Ingrid probably did call it an apartment or perhaps a unit but definitely not a flat.
A flat, what was a flat? A cold water two room part of the upper floor of what once must have been a grand house with a shared bathroom on the landing somewhere in London. Angela avoided Earls Court and Shepherds Bush but didn’t stray too far from Kangaroo Valley when she stayed for a time with Georgia in South Kensington, and Georgia even got her a job pulling pints at the Queen’s Head down near the King’s Road. That was when Angela had decided to spend a year in search of Mick or, at least, a year when she hoped she could meet and talk with Mick because he wasn’t missing or anything and was really pretty easy to find in his little fishing village in Essex. What was a flat? Something cold and expensive and a long way from home, not like Ingrid’s place with its glass and views and appliances and swipe card entry and little dark grey cylindrical pods in every room that played music for you or told you the time or what the weather was going to be like that day or answered inane questions with equally inane responses. There was no peeling paint or rising damp in Ingrid’s place, but Angela wondered whether, in time, the salt air would corrode all the appliances. Still, she thought, there would be time to replace them gradually when, for Angela, come tomorrow, all that she possessed might be the things that she had managed to squeeze into boxes and bags in the back of her car, some clothes, some books and photos and a few treasured knick knacks from her travels and adventures. Everything else by then may well be ash and soot. Ash, she thought, Ash Wednesday and the unit on Eliot she had taught her third year class on Modernism in English Poetry and how, some of them, would openly yawn in class and how she told one young girl full of giggles, in one of her other classes, who wanted to be a high school teacher, to fuck off and that she was a waste of space and had no business studying English because she was too dull to get the finer points of literature and how the Head of Department had suggested that Angela might like to take a sabbatical which was easy for him to say with his tenure and his annual salary and his long service leave and study leave and superannuation scheme and his dreadful talented wife who was some research scientist of something that the university thought was useful for its prestige and the fact that it bought in money, as if poetry, as if Mick and his strangers who may or may not be Christlike were of no importance but told us more about ourselves than any genome sequencing ever would.
Angela admired Tony and Alyssa for their courage, or maybe it was for their cheerful foolhardiness. She wasn’t sure which. She called out to them to not stay if it got too dangerous and they waved and went on with their preparations, as the colour in the sky started to change even more. It was well into the afternoon and the sun was getting lower in the sky and the smoke kept billowing and as Angela looked in her rear vision mirror, she could see high on the ridge, up where the grim faced Kevin Cutler and his coltish nervous young charges had headed, that the crowns of the big gum trees were starting to explode ahead of the fire front and there were more and more embers being carried by the north wind and they were dropping on the road in front of her.
‘The north wind is tossing the leaves,
The red dust is over the town,
The swallows are under the eaves,
And the grass in the paddock is brown’
Angela sung to herself as she sped down the last bits of windy road before it straightened out and the bush gave way to paddocks and the paddocks gave way to the little village of Allynsdale. A shop (that was also the post office and bank), a pub, the Anglican church and a service station sat on the four corners of the intersection where the road to Angela’s place met the main road that headed down the valley towards Maitland, where she would get onto the highway and find her way to Ingrid’s. Just past the pub there was a collection of vehicles, mainly crew cab utes, sitting outside the shed that housed the bush fire brigade. Outside the pub there was a station wagon with the logo for the national television broadcaster and a technician was setting up what looked like a little antenna like the ones the people in town had for their pay television stations and a young blonde woman in jeans and a chequered shirt was standing holding a microphone and looking up at the sky to the north and there was a crowd of people on the pub verandah, holding beers and looking at the reporter and wondering, Angela thought, what the fuss was all about and Angela knew that soon, the fuss would come roaring out of the hills and across the dry grass paddocks that were brown and she remembered that the song she was singing to herself was some Australian Christmas Carol that she had learned in Primary School and she wondered if she actually remembered it correctly of if, over the years, the words had gotten all mixed up in her head that was already so full of words of poems and songs and quotes from books and movies and plays and important political speeches and the words of her own Mum and Dad that may or may not have been words of wisdom or just repeated truisms to be imparted on their children in the hope that those children would maintain their own view of the world.
Her Grandma got angry with her Dad when he took Angela out of the Primary School with the nuns and their rulers across the back of the legs, or the back of the hands, and put her in the state school where she said the teachers weren’t allowed to beat their pupils. Angela, aged eight, sat in her bedroom and listened to the raised voices of her Grandma and her father and her Grandma saying that her father agreed that the children would be raised in the church and would go to the church school and that was a condition of him being allowed to marry Angela’s mother and she remembered hearing her father saying that he didn’t need the permission of hypocrite priests and her Grandma saying that Angela’s father was no better than the communists and her father saying that there was nothing wrong with the communists. Angela doubted that there were any communists in Allynsdale. There were some Greenies in the hills in mud brick houses like her own, and she suspected that the people in the little village thought that she was a Greenie, but they never asked. After five years, the gossips in Kevin Cutler’s shop would still stop talking when she walked in to buy some supplies, so she went to Maitland once a week, making the two hour round trip to stock up on all she needed and to sit in a café on the levee bank and enjoy a coffee and a pastry and use the free wi-fi to make contact with what was left of her world. She would go into the little café section next to Cutler’s shop every couple of days to check her E Mails on her laptop hot spotted to her mobile but never really talked to anybody and she never went to the pub since the night some bloke who must have been ten years younger than she was, dressed in hi vis work clothes and a greasy baseball hat that sported a picture of a horse’s head and the word ‘Broncos’ that Angela vaguely knew was a football team, she thought from Brisbane, had propositioned her in front of his mates, that might or might not have been for a dare or a bet, and all she wanted was a beer because it had been hot and she had been working in her garden all day and only had wine and gin at home but it was a beer that she really wanted, the bitterness and the coldness and the bubbles and the slightly gassy feeling you get when you drank it and she told him to ‘fuck off’ and he looked hurt and angry and the more so when his mates all laughed and when she finished her beer and walked to her car the man in the hi viz shirt called out that he knew where she lived and she gave him the bird but when she got home she kept her doors and windows locked at night but refused Killer’s offer to lend her his old shotgun, the one with the slightly bent barrel that he said wouldn’t matter providing she got nice and close before she pulled the trigger, and he chuckled like the old coot he was and told her that from her description the bloke in the baseball cap was Kevin Cutler’s nephew and that he was all mouth and had no brains but seemed happy enough without them.
Angela pulled into the servo to fill the car with petrol. She looked back up the road, up the hill towards her house and could see that the flames had crested the big ridge and would soon come flowing down the valley in a flood of heat, flame and radiant energy changing matter, laws of thermodynamics she tried to remember from chemistry, or was it physics, she doesn’t remember and just did science for the HSC to keep her father happy because he wanted her to go to university and study something real like medicine, something he said that he could be proud of when all Angela wanted to do was read books and study English and her favourite, in Year 12, was Mick and his story of the rusty ships mast sitting in the ocean at Geraldton that might have been, for the little boy, something else and Mick had taken some lines from John Donne and her teacher, Mrs Jackson, a kind but whimsical hippy, had told her that John Donne was a metaphysical poet and when Angela taught John Dunne to her first year uni students, she wondered how many of them thought that metaphysics had something to do with spiritual naturalism and even witchcraft and not because of the use by the poets of conceit.
When Angela walked into the little service station shop to pay for her petrol, she thought that Anila looked scared and while Anila was scanning Angela’s bottle of water and packet of jelly snakes, she kept looking out the window to the flames on the ridge. Anila’s husband, Gerald, was out fighting the fires but not in Kevin Cutler’s brigade. Gerald was in the brigade in one of the neighbouring towns and he and Kevin Cutler hardly spoke, and Alyssa said that it was because Kevin said unkind things about Anila when she came to Australia from India with Gerald when he returned to run the servo after his father died. Kevin had said that Anila could live in the town for the rest of her life, but she would never be part of the community. Angela always made a point of being nice to her and would thank Anila by joining her hands at the finger tips and bowing her head whenever she bought petrol or her jelly snakes.
When she walked back out to her car, Angela heard the sound of sirens in the distance but getting closer now and coming up the Maitland Road, and soon she saw a line of fire fighting vehicles appear from a number of the neighbouring towns and villages. They had been fighting these fires for a couple of days in the hard scrabble gullies and ridges but for some reason, some person, somewhere, sitting in an office perhaps with maps and white boards and radios and worried colleagues and thermos flasks of tea and unattended sandwiches going hard and curling up at the edges, had made the decision that whatever else was burning, Allynsdale was now the priority and, Angela thought, in the tropes of the cowboy films her father liked to watch on television on Saturday afternoons, the cavalry had arrived and she was pleased to see that one of the leading trucks was from the brigade where Gerald volunteered and he was at the wheel of the Toyota Landcruiser and gave Angela a wave and tooted his horn for Anila as he swept past the servo and the shop and the pub and the church and pulled up just past old Molly Thompson’s house where it looked to Angela, who did not know much about the art of firefighting, that this was the spot where they had decided to defend the town and then Angela felt sick because, by not going further up the road, the fire fighters had already abandoned all hope for her place, or Killer’s, or Tony and Alyssa’s and perhaps Kevin Cutler and his band of boys had already entered the mouth of Dante’s furnace.
