Ash road, p.11
Ash Road, page 11
Suddenly Stevie shrieked, ‘I can hear a car! A car!’
‘Well stop it!’ they yelled together.
Pippa took off after Stevie, and Wallace floundered out of the front seat into a crashing confusion of tool handles and collapsing stacks of empty wooden boxes; by the time he had fought his way out of them, fuming and shouting, Pippa and Stevie were out of sight.
They glimpsed the car, the tail-end of it, a utility truck pulling away from the gateway.
‘The milkman!’
They ran like mad, yelling and shrieking into the wind, waving their arms. The driver didn’t notice them. He had arrived unheard, left the milk bottles in the box, turned and pulled away again, up the hill. Stevie had heard him driving off.
They reached the road, still yelling, still waving their arms, but the milkman had gone beyond call. The Georges’ box was his last stop that morning on Ash Road, and now he was heading back to Prescott or somewhere else. They didn’t know where. They didn’t know which route he took.
‘Oh, Stevie,’ panted Pippa. ‘Poor Lorna.’
Wallace arrived limping. Lorna had stopped halfway down the path, too dispirited to come any farther.
‘That’s that,’ said Wallace. ‘You can be stiff, can’t you?’
‘The baker doesn’t come today, either,’ said Stevie.
‘Who does come?’ said Wallace. ‘Anybody?’
‘Not on Saturdays.’
‘Gosh. Talk about Siberia.’
‘Well, I reckon someone will have to walk,’ said Pippa. ‘We’ve got legs. It’s silly standing round doing nothing. And I reckon someone should get back on that phone and start ringing everybody for miles around until someone answers. Someone’s got to be at home. It’s just plain silly. And I reckon someone should walk up to the highway and stop the first car that comes by.’
‘How far is it to the highway?’ said Wallace.
‘Two miles.’
‘Crikey. Two more miles’d kill me. Me feet are like dirty great lumps o’ meat.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Stevie.
‘You’re too little. You’ve got to stop with me.’
‘I’m not too little. I’ll be in the fifth grade this year and I wasn’t too little to come lookin’ for you.’
‘You’re stopping with me,’ said Pippa firmly. ‘I’m responsible for you.’
‘Aw,’ said Stevie.
‘It’s a bad day. It’s dangerous. Just look at the light and the smoke up there.’
To tell the truth it was the first time Pippa had noticed it herself. It was a sudden revelation, an awakening, a shock.
‘Golly,’ breathed Pippa. ‘Just look at it.’
‘Yeh,’ said Wallace. ‘And it’s rainin’ ash if you please.’
Ash was eddying on the wind like snowflakes, fragments of burnt fern fronds, pieces of charred leaves. Probably it had blown for miles. The sky was full of it.
8
Gramps
‘Does it mean the fire’s comin’?’ Stevie said. ‘It’s awful-lookin’, isn’t it? T’isn’t like a fire at all.’
Pippa turned a frown on him. ‘If you do see it, you’ll like it even less. Fire that’ll put up smoke like that isn’t the sort you want to see.’ Not that Pippa wanted to see either.
Stevie squinted again into the sky. The smoke cloud was a pale brown overcast with billows of white and curious areas of mahogany and streaks of sulphurous-looking yellow. The sun shone through like a white plate in a bowl full of dye, but the light on the road was reddish. There was ash on the road, too, unnumbered flakes of it lying in the gravel and in the grass at the edges and caught up like black flowers in twigs and foliage. They turned to powder when Stevie touched them.
‘I say,’ said Wallace, almost unbelievingly, ‘isn’t that the milkman coming back again?’ He wondered how it could be the milkman coming into sight over the same hump in the road over which he had disappeared; but who else could it be?
Pippa yelled for Lorna. ‘A car. Quick. Quick.’ She pushed Stevie. ‘Run, Stevie. Make sure he sees you. He might turn round or something.’
Stevie ran, and the others waved their arms and jumped and shouted, and Lorna arrived, half-laughing, half-crying. ‘It’s the Fairhalls, Pippa,’ she shrieked. ‘It’s the Fairhalls’ car. It is. It is.’
Stevie, floundering up the hill, also recognized it as the Fairhalls’ car. Finally out of breath, he reeled to the side of the road and waited for it. It came lurching and shuddering towards the boy, blowing clouds of exhaust smoke, roaring and coughing, and then stopped a couple of hundred yards short of him, its engine beating at a high rate of revolutions. Stevie realized with dismay, that Gramps Fairhall couldn’t see him, or was ignoring him, or was so preoccupied that he wasn’t even looking.
‘Mr Fairhall,’ he shouted and started running again, with Pippa and Lorna after him.
‘Mr Fairhall! Mr Fairhall!’
Stevie got there first and grabbed at the door handle and anchored himself to it as if to prevent its escape.
‘Mr Fairhall,’ he panted, and an enormous, florid face, bereft of hair except for two bushy eyebrows, demanded, ‘What are you doing here, young Buckingham? I thought you were with your mother. Have you got Peter with you?...What’s that you say?’
Gramps seemed incapable of realizing that Stevie didn’t have the breath to make himself heard above the engine.
‘What was that about Peter?’ he demanded a second time. ‘What did you say?’
Pippa and Lorna arrived, flushed and breathless, throats so dry they could scarcely make a sound.
‘What are you children doing, running around on a day like this?’ Gramps boomed. ‘Where’s Peter?’
‘Oh, Mr Fairhall,’ gasped Lorna, ‘my dad’s sick. He’s dying, I think. You’ve got to take him to hospital. Please, Mr Fairhall, please.’
‘Can’t hear you, child. Speak up.’
‘Switch the engine off,’ yelled Pippa.
‘Can’t,’ boomed Gramps. ‘Got to charge my battery. If I stop it, it mightn’t start again. Tell Peter to come here at once or I’ll tan the hide off him.’
‘Mr Fairhall,’ cried Lorna. ‘It’s my father. He’s ill. Terribly ill.’
‘Peter ill? What do you mean, Peter ill?’
‘Not Peter,’ shrieked Lorna hysterically. ‘My dad. My dad! Oh goodness, what’s wrong with everybody? Isn’t anybody going to help me?’
‘Bless my soul,’ boomed Gramps, ‘you’d better get a grip on yourself, young lady. It’s your father that’s ill, is it? Well why did you say it was Peter?’
‘She didn’t,’ screamed Pippa. ‘Do switch that stupid engine off. Do stop roaring it!’
Gramps frowned irritably and eased his foot off a little. ‘If this engine stops,’ he barked, ‘you’ll have to push until it starts again. I’ve had troubles enough for one morning. I’ve got to get Peter back to town before all the roads are closed. You tell Peter to come here at once.’
‘Please, Mr Fairhall,’ pleaded Pippa, ‘Lorna’s dad is very, very sick. He’s paralysed. He’s got to be taken to hospital. Can’t you take him?’
Gramps drew his bushy eyebrows together, still with a trace of irritation. ‘If Mr George is sick, surely the doctor can get an ambulance?’
‘Lorna can’t get an ambulance, can’t even get a doctor. She can’t get anybody.’
‘He can’t be too sick, then.’
‘But he is, Mr Fairhall. Really and truly, he’s terribly sick. He looks like a dead man. She’s been trying to get help for ages. She’s so cut off.’
Gramps grunted. ‘I don’t know what I can do.’
‘You can take him, can’t you?’
‘If he’s paralysed as you say,’ said Gramps, ‘how do I get him to the car? I can’t take the car to him. I mustn’t run it down the Georges’ driveway. If it stops I’ll never get it out again.’
‘Please,’ appealed Lorna, almost hopelessly. ‘Could you come to the head of the drive then, and leave the rest to us?’
‘Well, where’s Peter? I can’t go without Peter. Is he with you?’
‘Peter’s in the bush,’ squealed Stevie. ‘That’s where he is. Hiding.’
‘Well turf him out for me, young fellow. You bring him here.’
‘Gee whiz,’ said Stevie, ‘I don’t know about that. How d’you find a fella when he’s hidin’?’
‘Look for him,’ boomed Gramps. ‘It’s as simple as that...all right, you kids. Hop in the back. I’ll run you down to the gate.’
They scrambled in. Lorna was crying to herself and Gramps said, ‘Has your dad been working in the paddock this morning?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘More fool him. A man of his age out in heat like this. And up half the night, I suppose, shifting those blithering sprinklers?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Lorna.
Gramps snorted and jolted off down the hill. ‘Fire’s bad,’ he said. ‘It’s over the top, they tell me. In the pine forest. I was speaking to the milkman. Tearing hurry he was in, too. Right along the top, he said, on a front of about ten miles. Three hundred houses, he said, razed to the ground. You young Buckinghams had better come back with me. I’ll drop you off at your house. That’s where you ought to be, sitting at that telephone. Your father needs his head read, rushing off and leaving you to yourselves on a day like this.’
He stopped opposite the Georges’ gateway. ‘All right. Pile out. I’ll turn her round and wait. And you, young Stevie, find Peter! No excuses. Find him. Until you find him I don’t budge from here.’
‘But he might have gone home again by now,’ wailed Stevie.
‘Not him. Flattens m’battery for me and leaves me to push the car to the road. If it hadn’t been for the milkman I’d still be there.’
Pippa and Lorna stumbled down the drive. They were past running. They were both wrung out. ‘The boys have gone,’ sobbed Lorna. ‘I just know they’ve gone. No sign of them.’
Pippa was afraid of that, too. It was the sort of thing that would happen. The first one had vanished at the earliest opportunity, and that was before the other two had blurted out their story. She knew they’d be gone. Anything else was too much to hope for. But she said, ‘Don’t be silly. They wouldn’t do that.’
‘Everybody else has.’
‘Mr Fairhall hasn’t.’
‘Only because he couldn’t get out of it. Only because it suits him anyway, because he’s got to take Peter.’
The boys were in the shed. They had Lorna’s father out of the car and back on to the door they had used as a stretcher. When Lorna saw them she could no longer stifle her crying, and Pippa had to comfort her. The boys looked away, and to Pippa it was all like a bad dream. She felt she’d have to be kind to Lorna, to stick to her for ever and always, for as long as she lived.
Stevie rushed down the road towards the bend, yelling for Peter. ‘Peter Fairhall, you stinker. Where are you, Peter Fairhall?’
Then he rushed up again. ‘If you don’t show your ugly mug, Peter Fairhall, I’ll kick your teeth in.’
Then he rushed down again, round the bend. ‘Please, Peter. Please. Come on out. Be a sport.’
Then he picked up a handful of stones and threw them fiercely in the bush. ‘You’re a louse, Fairhall. That’s what you are. G’arn. I bet you’re not even game to come out and fight.’
Then he reached the gate to Hobson’s place, where the apples grew. ‘If you’re eatin’ apples, Fairhall, I hope they give you a belly-ache.’
Then he got tired and discouraged and climbed over the gate because there was a lock on it, and picked an apple for himself. It was as green as grass and he spat it out.
Then he climbed back over the gate and plodded up the hill again towards the bend, muttering to himself.
The four young people arrived at the roadside bearing old man George on the door, and placed him gently on the ground near the rear end of the car. Gramps, still with one foot to the accelerator, leant out and took a look. He took a long look, first at his neighbour, then at his neighbour’s bedraggled daughter. Poor kid. She looked done in. Gramps suddenly felt profoundly ashamed of himself. Probably there was no real need for shame, but he felt it, not so much because he had been impatient with the children as because this tired old man on the ground had obviously all but worked himself to death, just as Gramps would have had to do if he had not had his secret inheritance. He had often told old man George that he had retired in comfort on the profits of a well-run farm, but only in one bumper year had his farm ever made better than wages. And old George had done this to himself to keep a disgruntled, complaining, whining woman in the comfort of a private ward of a rest home!
‘Can you get him up all right? Can you get him in?
‘Yes, sir,’ said Harry.
Gramps turned a keen eye on the lad and then on Wallace. ‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘Where’d you come from?’
‘They’re friends of the Pinkards,’ said Pippa quickly. ‘They’ve been trying to help us. They were going to drive the old car for us, but we couldn’t find the key.’
‘All right. Get him in...Now where’s Stevie with that Peter?’ But Gramps’s concern for Peter had undergone a change. If all these kids were mucking in, helping the Georges, why wasn’t Peter? Hiding, indeed. What was he hiding for? He felt a pang of guilt about Peter. The boy was a bit of a namby-pamby.
The car lurched to the weight of the two lads as they struggled in through the rear door with the sick man, and in a moment of acute vision Gramps confronted the face of old man George at a distance of about eighteen inches. Gramps had to look away, had to turn back to the front, for he had seen more than a moment of pain; he had looked straight into a lifetime of disappointment and defeat.
‘I’ll have to come with you, I think, sir,’ said Harry, ‘to hold him, or he’ll fall off the seat.’
‘If you think so, lad.’
‘Me, too, sir,’ said Wallace.
‘Why, lad? There are others to fit in, you know.’
Wallace felt that it was very important to stay with Harry. He felt inadequate by himself. Harry seemed to understand things, to know what he was doing. ‘I thought, maybe,’ said Wallace, ‘that after we’d got to the hospital you could drop us both off somewhere, at a fire station maybe. I reckon they must need all the help they can get.’
‘Yes,’ said Gramps, ‘yes...That’s the right kind of idea. Hop in, lad...’ He turned to Lorna again and the gentleness, the concern for her that was in him broke through to her. ‘Lorna, dear,’ he said, ‘you’re not going to achieve anything by coming with your dad. You go inside and lie down. By the look of you, you’ve had more than you can stand. You’ve got your telephone. We’ll keep in touch. If you’re needed, we’ll let you know. Don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about anything. Your dad’ll soon be in good hands.’
Lorna didn’t make a move one way or the other. She felt she couldn’t turn away, yet she dreaded climbing into the car.
‘Later on,’ said Gramps, ‘when Mrs Fairhall gets back from Prescott, she’ll come down to you. We’ll leave a note for her. There’s a good girl. What do you say?’
Pippa squeezed her arm. ‘Go on, Lorna. You go and lie down. You’ll feel better in no time, and I’ll see if I can trace John. We can do it on the phone. I’ll stay with you till Mrs Fairhall comes.’
‘You know you’ve got to go home,’ said Lorna miserably. ‘There are all those things your mother wants you to do, and you haven’t had any breakfast. I heard Stevie say so.’
‘My mother won’t mind when she knows what’s happened to you. And I can have some breakfast with you.’
‘All right,’ Lorna said. She leant into the car and kissed her father, and then ran away, back down the drive. Pippa for the moment was caught flat-footed. Gramps found her eye. ‘Off you go, lass. Stick with her. And make sure she rests.’
Pippa fell back a couple of paces, then turned and went after Lorna.
Gramps said to Wallace, ‘Can you see that grandson of mine? Is he coming?’
‘No, sir,’ said Wallace. ‘Not a soul in sight; not even the little kid you sent after him.’
Gramps reached firmly towards a decision. In all honesty, wasn’t Peter’s plight imaginary? In all honesty, wasn’t the fire, no matter how bad it looked, a long way beyond that impassable barrier of water, the dam? Even if by some strange chance it did reach Ash Road it would not be for many hours, probably for days. Probably never. But old man George’s plight was not imaginary.
When Stevie trudged round the lower bend a minute or two later the road was deserted.
He stopped, hands on hips, swaying. ‘How’s their rotten form?’ he squealed to the wind. ‘Left me for dead. Now I’ve got to walk home.’
9
The Angry Day
Peter wondered what time it was. It was not something he had to know; it was only part of his restlessness and anxiety. He didn’t know whether it was seven o’clock or eight o’clock or later. The summer sun was deceptive. It was so high in the sky so soon in the day.
It was hard to say exactly what thought was uppermost in Peter’s mind, for he was unable to concentrate on any one thing long enough. He knew he had to go home to Gramps but the longer he delayed the act the harder the decision to move off became. He feared the consequences of his break with Pippa but was reluctant to try to mend it in case the rift became worse. He knew it was not yet ten-thirty, when the Buckinghams would leave for Deer Sands—if they were to go at all—so the point of urgency when he had to find Pippa had not arrived. He was suspicious of the intentions of the unknown boy hiding somewhere in the bush behind him but didn’t have the courage to turn back to face him. Facing people was much harder than following them. And he was frightened of the sky. It was so threatening, so ugly, so unlike anything he had ever seen. It was a hot brown mantle over the earth with pieces breaking off it, little black pieces of ash; an oppressive mantle that did not prevent the penetration of the sun’s heat but imprisoned it, added to it, and magnified the hostility of the day.
It was an angry day; not just wild or rough, but savage in itself, actively angry against every living thing. It hated plants and trees and birds and animals, and they wilted from its hatred or withered up and died or panted in distress in shady places. Above all, it hated Peter. It seemed to encompass him with a malevolence that would strike him down if he ventured to defy it. There was a wall around him, an invisible wall that confined him to a few square yards of hot, dusty earth at the bottom of the Georges’ carrot paddock. He longed to burst out, to seek the shade like the birds and other creatures, to drink a long draught of cool water, but he couldn’t move.
