Limestone Man (34 page)

II

Kath was sleeping. She'd given directions and dropped off. I woke her when we came to the turning she'd described, and she explained how to get there.

It was obvious what she wanted us to see. Rolling hills, once good horse country, but arid. No, worse than that. All the acacias, all the gums, had been burned. The earth was still smouldering.

The fire had started maybe a month before. We stepped out of the car and nobody said anything. What was the point? That fire stank like the sea stinks in Cato Street. Only one hundred times worse.

Smoke was still leaking out of the soil. Threads of smoke, fine and white as wire. The smoke was a pelt on that earth, a smoky fleece made up of thousands of hairs. Every hair was a filament of smoke. Smoke like … fur, I suppose.

In a few places that smoke was still billowing. Yes, there were smoke geysers in the valley bottom and along the slopes. On the ridge a tree was still burning.

I looked at that smoking tree and thought it was something from the bible. I used to go to Sunday School and I racked my brain. But the verse didn't come.

So many other verses I know, from all the hundreds of songs I've heard and learned. Even ‘When I paint my Masterpiece'. With its clunking rhymes. Why did I already know that song? Why were we playing it?

But your mind lets you down, doesn't it? There was no place for the burning tree in my memory. No, the burning bush, wasn't it? No space because of all the other rubbish.

The fire might die down, Kath said. But all of a sudden it'll catch hold again.

Because that fire refused to die. It had started a month, two months earlier. The gums had gone up like candles. When a gum burns the fire cracks like whiplash. You could smell the trees' resin that had oozed from those gums. A burnt oil smell. Like our black chip fat.

Someone set it deliberately, Kath whispered. Oh yes. It's well known.

And that's all we said. As if we were afraid we'd be overheard. By the firestarters.

Who? I asked.

Who?

That's all I could say. I was whispering to Kath but she never answered.

And Lulu? She was overcome. But she did say one thing. Yes, she made a speech. When we were in the ash fields. Where everything was reduced to powder.

Just think, said Lulu, what it's like here. After dark. The embers still glowing, burned branches crumbling away. The whole earth cracking and exploding like seeds. And the sparks alive like stars. Yes, stars like rubies. What are they, teacher?

Arcturus, I laughed. Not sure about the others…

Well remember them this time, she said. Aldebaran, Betelgeuse. And on and on. We all had to recite them. The names of the red stars. In that white field, thick with ash. Even Kath, who wore a grim little smile. Suited her twisted mouth. Even Kath had to name the red stars.

No, don't misunderstand. I liked Kath. She was doing her best. Better than I would in those circumstances. Being foreign in her own country. Being dirt poor. Being ill.

Jaundice had been the problem for years. You know what causes that. She had a yellow tinge, did Kath. But plenty of those people were the same.

That's how a few of the locals knew her in Goolwa. That yellow nigger. Or that yellow
nunga
if they were being benevolent. But Kath was more yellow than black. And Lulu was not black at all. Not really. Just kept her hair curly as a fashion statement. As a way of being.

As far as I know the arsonist was never caught.

III

Getting out of the car I bent to touch the earth. It was still warm.

Then in that empty place, I heard a noise. Not a bird was singing, there wasn't a breath of wind. But gradually we heard an engine. Then this Mitsubishi 4x4 comes over the ridge.

Rust
-
red and battered it was. With a spare tyre on the bonnet. Didn't seem right, that something should be moving. Or anyone should be alive, after such a blaze. Didn't feel …
appropriate
, if you understand me.

It passed us within ten yards. Lulu waved, but the driver, and this blonde girl with him, ignored us all. They were heading into the heart of the fire, with ash white in the tyre tracks.

Yes, ash everywhere. Ash white, ash grey. Thick quilts of ashes, intricate as snow. Like a goosefeather pillow I remember bursting as a boy.

That ash lay drift upon drift. Soon there was harshness in the backs of our throats and the three of us were coughing. No matter how carefully we walked, we disturbed the ash. Finer than talcum powder, those siftings. And some of the tree trunks were still crowned with sparks. That fire was clinging to life weeks after it had begun.

IV

There was one stump I saw. I thought it was decorated with rubies. Yes, hot rubies in the dust. Like Lulu said.

And when we passed the tree those cinders glowed again, their fire renewed. Just the breath of our bodies was enough to bring them life. Those sparks in the dust were like red ants.

But you know what? I remembered The Works and the sinter spread over the beach and the dunes, and my father feeling betrayed. Feeling left out. Jack Parry isolated and alone because his own son had found a job. The wrong job. The easy job.

We went along the ridge and up the hill. Trying not to disturb the ash. Ash softer than Caib sand, sculpted into fantastic shapes. We tiptoed on through the tree stumps in a charred forest of sticks. There were trees reduced entirely to powder. They crumbled to nothing as we passed.

We were hardly breathing by then. Holding the coughs in our fists, afraid to disturb a spark. Unwilling to mark that ash with our footprints. Ash deeper than snow. The footprints that were leading up to us.

V

And I thought, no, nobody's walked here before. And no one will walk here again. A frost where no one had stepped. But there we were, the three of us, the first people in the world.

A young woman in dirty shorts. An older woman in jeans. A middle
-
aged man on medication. Together on an incinerated hill.

What did we know? Nothing? What had we achieved? Nothing. Yet we were the first and we were the last.

Don't tell me. I know we were fools even to stop the car. Fools to have driven up that dirt road.

The fire wasn't out and we had wandered away from the vehicle. Kath said there were people burned to death in a home close by. A boy had run back to the house and climbed into a full bath. He had boiled to death. His mother was trapped in a field and the fire had run over her. Run over her and run through her.

Ancient legends. Recycled one more time. Fire stories you hear all over that country. Echoes from the mythology of fire, especially the boy in the bath. I didn't know what to believe.

But I saw what the fire had done to that ground. Ploughed it and harrowed it. Then raced roaring away.

I pictured the boy and the woman, mummies made of ash, consumed entirely. Statues of salt. Nothing greedier, is there? And nothing more ignorant than fire.

But how did Kath know about that place, I wonder? We were one hundred miles inland on that hill, a different country from Goolwa and the Coorong.

And how gorgeous Goolwa seemed in comparison. Goolwa with its rivers and salt lagoons, its lakes and bayous. Its basking sharks. The Murray at its mouth was salty as a bowl of olives. Yet with all its luxurious water. Thinking about that ash makes me thirsty, even now.

Back at the car my boots were white. Kath was laughing in her strange way. She said it would be a good place to cook, the ground was so hot. The whole hill was a fire
-
pit.

But Lulu was quiet after her speech about stars, her face smeared white. That's what they did, you know, the aboriginal people. Daub themselves with ashes.

Some of it was men's business and some of it women's. Painting with ashes signified many things. Made quite a ceremony of it, did Little Miss Lulu. Anointing herself that way. With the gold dust on her clothes, already.

When we were walking back we passed the Mitsubishi. That dirty great Shogun covered in caked mud. And now grey with ashes. The driver and the girl were both out in the ash. This perfect pale pasture.

The man was filming and the girl, she was … she was
dancing
. In that ruined place. Where those people had burned to death. Where the fire had obliterated everything.

Wearing a red bikini, the girl was. Like a flame herself. Crimson, I suppose, the deepest red. No, call it cadmium red. Like a bottlebrush flower or the flowering peas that grow in the desert.

And quite a dancer she was. The man was urging her on, slowing her up, making her race, laughing at her, soothing her. Bringing the best out of her. In that place of all places. On that part of the hill that had been …
consumed.

They were playing music too, pretty loud. I didn't recognise it, maybe it was their own concoction. One track was drumming. But there was also something else. Sad and mysterious. A silvery sort of music.

We saw the dancer stop for a drink and start again. Only now she was naked, peeling off the swimsuit and throwing it into the Shogun. Then she walked out into the untouched ash. That ash like a snowfield.

I tell you, the girl was naked in the firedust and dancing like I've never seen anyone dance. And the man was filming everything, every movement she made, every breath. And then she tumbled. And lay still.

That's the last thing we saw, the girl falling to earth. A cloud covered her, a veil of dust and grit.

She lay there, smeared with ashes like mud and mortar, mixed with her own sweat. Grey and spent. And only then did the music stop.

Yes, when that music stopped there was silence. But the man carried on filming.

TWENTY-TWO

I

Parry stared at the street. The mist hung in the air. Icy smoke. Bone
-
coloured blossom. The foghorn moaned down the coast.

Fret, he said to himself. Warmer air, colder sea. That had always been the cause of such weather in the old days.

Like cuttle, he thought. With a yellow tinge. And an acid taste to such mist. But the colour of an old woman's jewellery. An old woman's saltwater pearls. Or owls' eggs. The pride of the collection. Dirty behind glass.

II

Last night a spasm of hail. He'd watched it in the gutters, smoking as it vanished. A creature that became a negative of itself. Now nothing moved. No traffic sound. No traffic.

Parry looked up at the first floor over the shop. The finial beside the aerial was still there. But bleached to matchwood. It was the last one to survive on that part of the street.

Home, he thought. And shrugged. Or maybe it was a shiver. Bedsit.
Bed-sitter images
. With the grey lace curtain, the cactus on the sill.

Last night he had stared out of that window. At the mist that writhed in the lamp light. Not far away the sea had lain slumped yet invisible.

A man might die in a room like that, Parry thought. And he remembered back to his teenage years in the resort. A room not unlike the room he now called home, a summer room when sea frets also intruded. When mists gripped the town and hid, he always thought, the people from themselves.

But there were better times. Times when the swifts arrived. Or came back. To Amazon Street. Now, unexpectedly, he was thinking of swifts.

Out of the attic window of his boyhood, through its aquarium gloom, he had watched the swifts arriving in May. Swifts screaming between the houses. Over the roofs and the reefs of air, seaward and westward. Swifts over the water, that water the colour of June grasses, the sea moving as the grasses moved on the dunes. The swifts arriving from Africa.

Yes, swifts. Sleepless swifts back out over the ocean. Black swifts arriving and immediately taking back the street, the shore, the sky with their screams. Taking back the swiftless world. Swifts reclaiming the light through the cobwebbed pane. As if they had never been away. Had never been missed.

But Parry had missed the swifts. Their stoops, their steepling climbs. Their absence an ache. Swifts that might never come again, even after the million miles each swift flew. Swifts gone from the rafter. The creosoted beam.

And what might unreturning swifts signify? Grief, he thought. A grievous shade to the world. A deeper shadow.

An absence of swifts meant a code had vanished. The prehistoric code of wings and wingbeats. And if the swifts failed he failed. Or so he thought.

Yes, that was something else to worry about. Some sign or signal. To bring him down to earth.

And he remembered coming off the beach with Sev. They were walking down Amazon Street on a blistering afternoon. Sev's brown skin was peeling, so it appeared silver. Yes, Sev was silver that afternoon, Sev in his Californian shorts, his bleached daps. Parry could only squint at his friend on that hottest day of the year.

Then Sev had turned away and ducked down.

What's that? asked Parry.