12
AFTER THE HOUSE five along from Ella Evans’ sister’s home exploded into flame, Ella found their three children—Jess, Mary and little Stewie—playing under what little water was now oozing out of the backyard sprinkler. She told them that they were going to walk to Hobart.
Hobart? How far away is that? Jessie asked.
Ella had no idea. Seven miles? Ten? She felt frightened.
We have to leave straightaway, she said.
The children were wearing only their bathers and plastic sandals, except for Stewie, who was in his aircel undies. The fire was jumping everywhere, and Ella couldn’t be bothered arguing with Jess when she insisted on bringing with her a forty-five record player she had got for Christmas. Uniquely, it doubled as a hair dryer with a hose and plastic shower cap that she decided to wear to stop the sparks singeing her hair. In addition, she brought the only forty-five she had so far acquired, an old Gene Pitney single her aunt had given her.
They walked quickly down the road, brushing the burnt leaves and charred man fern fronds that fell out of the sky off their faces and out of their hair. They stared without wonder or surprise at the bitumen dripping away at the edges, at the red embers floating through the air like so many butterflies, their glow rising and falling with the wind gusts. They passed old Mrs McHugh, the piano teacher, whose paling fence was burning, and yelled at her to come with them, but she had an axe and was too busy chopping down the fence to stop the fire spreading to her house to be bothered with their cries.
At first, there was a magical excitement about it all, and something in their mother’s terror that made the three children feel better, even superior. They had passed into another world—an adult world, where everything was weighted differently, where people said what they meant, where what you did mattered and where your own life, hitherto meaningless, now mattered to them and to you. It was their first taste of death and they would never forget it.
They must have walked a good mile or so down the mountain when their excitement began to ebb and their fear grew. The main fire, which had seemed a good distance away when they had left the house, was now close to them. Stewie had begun to cry because the embers were burning his skin. He complained, not without reason as flames filled the sky and ate the air, of the fire’s neverendingness. They came to a brick house that had an aura of solidity and safety, unlike the weatherboard houses they had passed that, long before the fire reached them, were already smoking with small flames licking around their eaves.
Ella went to the front door and pushed the doorbell button. There was a sound of ludicrous chimes. The door opened only wide enough to allow conversation. Through its thin opening Ella made out an older lady dressed in a black-edged white-wool suit, as if about to go to a charity luncheon. By now Ella, who was wearing only a green cotton print dress and thongs, was covered in a dirty grease of sooty sweat. It was clear to her that the older lady felt Ella not to be of the same class and saw her near-naked filthy children as urchins. Ella had intended to ask for refuge, but when she opened her mouth she heard herself ask merely for drinks of water for the children. She had to ask twice. Without saying anything, the woman opened the door and showed them into a neat kitchen at the back of the house. She got out one old plastic cup.
Here, she said, holding it out, its rim pinched between her thumb and arched finger. The tap’s there.
The children just wanted to go: they knew the old woman wanted them gone, and their hate of her and her house was even greater than their fear of the fire. But something about the woman’s snobbery now made Ella determined to stay. Stewie was crying from his burns and Ella asked the older lady if she had some old children’s clothes she might borrow to protect her son from sparks and embers.
The woman opened a cupboard, and inside Ella saw shelf after shelf of neatly ironed and stored children’s clothes. Good clothes. Most of it boys’ stuff. She could smell the camphor, something she always associated with timelessness, a reassuring smell of place and things that never changed. The old woman turned around and passed to Ella a folded piece of clothing. Ella unfolded it with a flick of her wrists.
It was a girl’s old, worn red dress.
Thank you, said Ella.
Somehow she could not reconcile the idea of a safe refuge with such implacable humiliation. With her son in the tatty red dress, she took her family back out into the fire, believing it not only to be right but also wise.
When they got back out onto the road, the fire no longer made any sort of sense. There was wind behind them and wind coming at them, fire everywhere and wind whipping up willy-willies of swirling red embers, glowing magic cones that turned everything they touched into flame. They had been fleeing from the flames but now the flames were all around them.