Ash road, p.15
Ash Road, page 15
They knew they had left their run late. They hadn’t meant to; indeed, they had not suspected until nine o’clock that such a run would be necessary, for up till then Prescott had been a place that evacuees were coming to by the hundred, perhaps by the thousand, not a place that people were fleeing from. Before nine o’clock the three women had been caring for the frightened and the homeless and the weeping; now they were fugitives themselves.
In Prescott Mrs Buckingham had been caught in a snarl of traffic. Cars parked in the yard beside the Public Hall were all trying to get out at once. The drivers were not panicky so much as dismayed, and in their dismay and anxiety they misjudged distances. Three cars were locked bumper to bumper, another backed on to a tree stump and stuck. Mrs Buckingham could not move forward or backward or sideways. She had to wait behind them. Had to wait and wait. At last she had escaped into crowded Main Street and cut recklessly across its endless line of oncoming traffic to run free and fast down the side road towards home. By then it was after 9.20.
At 9.24 she came (for the first time) to the broken blackwood tree which blocked the way with a mass of foliage and fractured branches twenty feet high and which had borne power lines and telephone lines to the ground; the blackwood tree that no one had had time to clear away.
‘I’ll have to go the long way round, by the highway,’ said Mrs Buckingham.
‘But how will you get through the town?’ said Mrs Robertson. ‘The traffic’s moving against you. There are hundreds of cars.’
‘I’ll have to try.’
‘Wouldn’t it be best to leave the car and walk or run?’
‘It’s more than a mile. Mrs Fairhall couldn’t keep up with us.’
‘I couldn’t. That’s true.’
‘I’ll hurry. I’ll do it. Don’t worry.’
Mrs Buckingham turned the car and drove back to town. But she couldn’t get through. Tears and threats, even gathering hysteria, were not enough to part the traffic. She put the car’s nose out into the line of cars to try to break across to the left-hand side, but a man she knew ordered her back. He thrust his arm into the car and knocked the gears into neutral. ‘Go on back,’ he said. ‘Get back. Do you want to start a pile-up? What’s wrong with you?’
‘Our children are there,’ she cried. ‘Who’s to warn them? Who’s to get them out? It’s a dead end.’
‘Your children are not that way! They’re that way!’
‘There’s a tree down. We can’t get through.’
‘You’ll never get through the other way; that’s certain.’
The character of the township had changed. There were drawn and haggard faces she had never seen before. Even the people she knew were different. They were there, passing across her consciousness; kind people with hard masks. Kind men who were acting rudely and roughly and others who were acting strangely. ‘There’s a car,’ one yelled, pointing at her. ‘They’ve got room. Into it.’
And a horde of people with armfuls of household pieces rushed towards her. She fumbled the car into reverse, and backed away, swerving wildly into the gutter. She wrenched the car out of the gutter and in tears drove back to the tree.
There they abandoned the car, scrambled down the bank and up again to skirt the fallen blackwood, and ran.
Time had ceased to mean anything. Time as an hour of the day was pointless. The only reality was the raging holocaust, heard but not seen, in the north and the west.
But Gran Fairhall couldn’t run, and had no child to run for, anyway. Not even Peter. For Peter, she believed, was miles away, safe in his own home.
The others left her farther and farther behind.
And Pippa’s mother could not run as fast as young Mrs Robertson.
The three women drew farther and farther apart in a frightful world where even adults feared to be alone if they thought of themselves.
Gran Fairhall had no one to think of but herself. If she had known how to handle a car she would have returned to it and driven away. But she couldn’t. So she waddled on, puffing and blowing, in a sweat of fear, yet encouraged by the knowledge that at home she would find her identity. On the open road she was nothing, just a fat and nameless old woman that the overwhelming fire might leave unrecognizable, but at home she was Gran Fairhall, a woman of consequence, of property, and of dignity. If there had to be an end that was how and where she wanted it to be.
Stevie sat on the end of Julie’s bed, cuddling the cat, interminably stroking it. Hundreds and hundreds of times he must have stroked it, sometimes singing to himself, sometimes quiet. The room had been bright enough when he went into it, but after a while he had drawn the blind to shut out the awful sky, to shut out the ash he could see falling down, to shut out the hot and horrid day that frightened him so, even to shut out the wind that he could see pulling at the trees, throwing twigs on to the roof of the house with a sharp clang of iron, and blustering angrily through the grass and the dust.
Stevie didn’t like the fire any more. He didn’t like his dad being away and his mum being away and Pippa being away. It was horrible being alone, for even though he talked to the cat and sang to it, the cat didn’t care a bit. Sometimes it purred; sometimes it couldn’t even be bothered to do that. And the telephone that was supposed to ring didn’t ring, though every minute he was sure it was going to; and no cars came down the hill, though dozens of times the wind sounded just like a car; and no one knocked on the door; nothing happened at all.
He wondered about ‘nothing’. People were silly to say that nothing was nothing. It had to be something. Nothing was something that happened when nothing happened. Stevie didn’t like nothing. It started buzzing in his head. It made a noise. It went round and round. It throbbed. It was a great big pain. Much worse than toothache; much worse than green plums. It even made him cry, it hurt so much.
The screen door crashed and Stevie leapt from Julie’s bed and the cat skidded across the floor.
It was Pippa, Pippa floundering into the house all flushed and dishevelled and almost too breathless to speak.
‘Pippa,’ shrieked Stevie.
She caught him on the run and hugged him and swayed with him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she panted. ‘I’m terribly sorry. Oh, Stevie, I’m so sorry.’ She pushed him away and looked at him. ‘You’ve been crying, too.’ She hugged him again until Stevie reckoned he had had enough of it. ‘Fair go,’ he said, wriggling free. ‘You’re makin’ a sissy out of me.’
Stevie wasn’t afraid any more. He even felt chirpy again. He bounced back like a rubber ball. ‘Where you been?’ he said. ‘What’cha been doin’? Leavin’ everythin’ to me.’
Pippa wasn’t in the humour for that sort of thing, for she knew she had to get out on that dreadful hill again and start running again up to Grandpa Tanner’s. ‘Stevie,’ she panted (she could not get her breath back), ‘I don’t want to frighten you, but there’s not much time...I just can’t imagine why Mum hasn’t come home, or Dad...Where are they?’
‘Helpin’ at the fire, of course,’ said Stevie.
She shook her head impatiently, breathlessly, almost tearful. ‘I don’t mean it that way...Stevie, the fire’s coming.’
‘Yeh?’
‘Here. Here! Maybe in a few minutes. Maybe in a minute. I don’t know.’
‘Here?’ shrieked Stevie.
‘Yes, yes, yes.’
‘Not right here? To our house?’
‘That’s what I’m telling you, Stevie. Haven’t you seen it? Can’t you see it for yourself? It’s everywhere.’
‘But the fellas,’ said Stevie. ‘What about the fellas to put it out?’
‘There aren’t any fellows. There’s no one. What have you done? Where have you put the water?’
‘Eh?’
‘The water! In the spouts. In the buckets. Over the walls. How much have you done?’
He didn’t have to tell her. She could see from his face, from his shame, from his embarrassment. ‘You’ve done nothing?’
He shook his head.
‘Oh, Stevie...Our house. It’s got to have water all round it and all over it, or it’ll burn.’
‘But the fellas’ll come, won’t they?’
‘We don’t know. We can’t be sure. Probably not. Grab a handful of rags and stuff them in the downpipes. You can climb up on to the roof over the lattice. Then I’ll hand the buckets up to you. Be quick, Stevie.’
‘The carpets aren’t in, or anythin’.’
‘The carpets don’t matter.’
‘But we won’t have time if it’s comin’ in a minute.’
‘Do as I tell you. Grab a handful of rags from the laundry. Anything will do. It doesn’t matter what it is.’
‘So it’s not comin’ in a minute?’
‘I don’t know when it’s coming,’ Pippa cried. ‘Just do as I say.’
‘All right,’ grumbled Stevie. ‘There’s no need to do your block. I can’t make girls out...’
‘You’re wasting time!’
‘One minute they’re huggin’ and kissin’ you; the next—’
Pippa was almost frantic. She could have taken him by the shoulders and shaken the life out of him. She snatched two buckets from the kitchen floor where her father had left them, and rushed to the bathroom, plunged them into the bath, and reeled back down the passage, bumping into the walls, staggering from the weight, until she stumbled down the steps on to the path at the rear of the house. Stevie was there with an armful of what looked like perfectly good shirts and aprons. He hadn’t made a move towards the roof. He seemed to be frozen.
‘What’s wrong with you now?’ she yelled at him.
His reply was a plaintive whine. ‘Is it really comin’ in a minute? Really and truly?’
‘Oh, Stevie! Forget about it.’
‘Don’t you think we’d better go somewhere safe, like down the creek or somewhere?’
She had to talk to him; there was no avoiding it. Even though the boiling sky seemed to be falling upon her, she had to still her own panic and appear to be sensible and level-headed. ‘All in good time. First things first, Stevie.’ (She sounded like a grown-up. She sounded so unreal she didn’t even impress herself.) ‘When it’s time to go we’ll go.’
‘To the creek?’
‘No. Not to the creek. I’ve heard that creeks boil.’
‘Boil?’
‘And ponds and tanks and things like that; they boil, too. We’ve got to get out in the open away from trees and long grass and scrub. Right out in the open somewhere.’
‘Where?’
She didn’t know. ‘We’ll find somewhere.’
‘Like the potato paddock next to Grandpa Tanner’s?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Like that.’
‘The fire won’t burn there,’ he said. ‘The fire’ll stop there. It won’t come any farther, will it?’
‘The fire won’t stop,’ she said. ‘It’s not that sort of fire. Now get up on that roof. And hurry. Because I’ve got to get up to Grandpa’s. I’ve got to see about Julie.’ Pippa could feel her panic flooding back again: it was as violent as a storm or an explosion. ‘Do as I say, Stevie!’
He leapt for the lattice as if a whiplash had touched him. He scrambled up desperately, sobbing, frightened not so much of the fire as of Pippa: she was so nice one moment and so awful the next. As he crawled on to the edge of the roof he heard her again: ‘Wherever there’s a pipe going down from the spout, jam some rags in it. Jam them in hard. We want the spouts to hold water, not leak out. While you’re doing that I’ll get more water.’
She brought the water out in kerosene tins and saucepans and jugs and preserving-pans. She scarcely knew what she was doing, scarcely knew how she threw one leg in front of the other, for all that her legs wanted to do was to fold up. She wanted to see about Julie and Grandpa Tanner, but there was so much to do here first. That stupid boy; that stupid, stupid boy. All that time and nothing done. She was splashing water everywhere and slipping in it and trying to think of all the other things she was supposed to do. What did one do in a case like this? What was one supposed to do?
Were there things to be dragged out of the house? Were there business papers to be found? Were there special things, loved things, that had to be saved? If there were, what were they and where were they? And where was she supposed to put them? How could she protect them? Whatever they were. She couldn’t isolate them, picture them, arrange them in order of value.
There was a block in her mind, a black emptiness. Her body rushed around like a frantic thing on one plane; the other plane, the one of logic and reason, was shut off. And she knew it was shut off. There was a door she couldn’t beat down. She couldn’t bring her body and mind together.
A mass of things to do, and she didn’t know what they were. She had known once, but she couldn’t remember now. A thousand things to do, and no time, no energy, no clear direction.
And every time she put a foot out of the door there was the smoke roaring over the top of the hill behind Grandpa Tanner’s place; every time more and more roaring over that hill until it stopped her and held her fascinated, transfixed; roaring over all the hills, roaring everywhere, roaring through the great valley, obliterating it, roaring through the gully at the foot of the hill, roaring through the trees along the road, roaring across the garden.
It wasn’t imagination. It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t blood or breath roaring in her own head. It was the smoke; it was the sky; it was the air so hot that plants were wilting and withering and birds in flight were dropping to the ground.
The roar was in the world around her, everywhere, in a world growing darker and thicker and denser; a world that was like an endless roll of thunder without lightning, without fire or flame, only noise, fearful noise, only smoke, only blackness that bore down with a weight that she could feel, with the brute force of a prodigious hand.
Then she saw Stevie. He came upon her suddenly; Stevie wide-eyed and deathly white, clinging to the edge of the roof line, peering down at her.
‘Come down,’ she screamed. ‘Come down.’
12
Men Stand Up and Fight
The end was coming. Grandpa Tanner could see it with his own eyes, could feel it in his heart. The end of eighty-seven years.
He sat beside the well, a little withered-up old man (whose legs were so bowed that Julie had sometimes thought of running between them). He looked terribly alone yet he was surrounded with friends: the ghosts of everyone he had ever loved.
He sat on the stump, the same stump where he had mused in the shade on hot days these many years past; and, probably for the last time, he was filling his charred and chewed old pipe. But there was no shade today, only the lowering gloom.
Above him was his garden, overgrown but fruitful still; Jonathan apples on the wilting trees and Santa Rosa plums and the great tossing chestnuts in flower, roses full-blown and fox-gloves beaten down, and forget-me-nots thicker than weeds. And in the midst of the garden, tucked in, eighty or ninety yards away, his home, only its roof visible to him, with its inches of dust in the ceilings and its insatiable termites in the foundations and its old ornate thermometer at the kitchen door reading 116 degrees.
From time to time he called down the well: ‘Don’t cry, little darling. Grandpa’s here.’
Now there was a vibration in the earth and a tempest in the heavens and Grandpa remembered the psalm that said, ‘The earth shook, and the heavens dropped at the presence of God.’ But this was not the presence of God; this was His absence. This was the work of man; what man had done and what man had not done.
Grandpa was not afraid; he was resigned. He had tendered his life’s resignation when he lowered Julie and the Robertson baby into the well: very calmly, very deliberately, trying not to appear overdramatic. He did not want to offend the ghosts gathered around. But it was not the sort of thing that one could do naturally. It was not like dropping a bucket down forty-four feet to water or stoking up the stove or tidying a bed; it was not like anything else he had ever done. Julie sobbing and strapped to a chair that turned slowly on the end of a clothes-line, Julie with toffees and chocolates and the conviction that Grandpa had somehow betrayed her; and the baby at the end of another line in a basket secured with safety-pins and woven leather shoelaces knotted end-to-end.
Grandpa was glad he had dug the well so long ago. He had often been glad before, in the drought and the dry, but never more glad than now. He was sorry, though, that he had to leave the house to burn, for he had built the house, too, with his own hands, with boards and planks and beams he had split from messmate logs with sledge-hammers and wedges and had shaved smooth with sharp axes. All the fussy bits that his wife Marjorie (who seemed very near to him now) had wanted; the extra rooms and sleep-outs as the extra children came along; the fernery, the pergolas, the playhouse now tumbledown. Soon it would all be gone as if it had never been. Perhaps in a year or two someone else would come along and build again: a stark, bare house with a flat roof and cement walls that would never look like anything but a stark, bare house with a flat roof and cement walls. He wished he could fight for his home as he had fought once before, but he was old and frail and his place was beside the well.
Grandpa also knew that Prescott had been left to burn. No one had told him; no one had come to warn him because Ash Road was out of sight and out of mind and all its other residents seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. He knew that Prescott was empty or emptying fast because that had become the pattern. It was a new sort of pattern that he had followed with dismay from the radio until the power failed and the broadcasts mercifully were silenced.
The authorities directing the fight against the fire did not regard houses as homes, as things of the heart, but as expendable buildings that could be rebuilt after the fire from the proceeds of insurance claims. The world had become unwholesome and its values distorted, and Grandpa Tanner was glad that he was old enough to shake its dust from his feet without regret.
People were not standing up to fight as they used to do. They were not calling out of themselves the ultimate effort to survive with dignity as they used to do. They were running as they used not to do.
