Playing With Water (20 page)

Again, we entered the old gate

in the glorious green gardens.

Under our umbrellas it’s impossible to

hate

in the glorious green gardens.

hoop and Wollemi pine, fig and ginkgo,

each symmetrical as algebra.

On the path, mud oozing from bats’

droppings

there’s talk of bait

in the glorious green gardens.

The pyramids of glasshouses hold jungles

of leaves dripping into pools.

You’d almost expect to see lyrebirds mate

in the glorious green gardens.

Two old friends talk of past mistakes,

the trees and what we plan to plant.

Consoled, we strolled in the pitter patter

rain

while it grew dark and late

in the glorious green gardens.

everything seems fragile after shock—

I could venerate a worm.

Somehow these ibis seem an authentic

Egyptian frieze

something left by fate

in the glorious green gardens.

‘Those purple flowers, Peri, glowing in

that shade

remind me of a bridesmaid’s dress I wore.’

‘Kate, what we must face is we’re heading

to that final date

in the glorious green garden.’

P
eri came into the room saying, ‘That was Servio in Brazil. He was ringing to see if we were alright. He says we are surrounded by bushfires.’ We walked outside and could smell the smoke. The sky was darker and we had noticed nothing. The fires had been on Brazilian television.

At dusk, the full moon, a boiled rose, hung above the street. The sky was purple and ash fell. We went inside, closed the windows, and twenty of us pulled bonbons and ate Christmas dinner. After the turkey, I slipped away and had a quiet swim in the dark pool in the garden. The eerie malevolent moon stuck to the black wall of sky as if it had been spat there. I swam below, feeling a strange combination of foreboding and being blessed.

On the south coast, my house, uninsured, is safe so far.

Thousands have fled firestorms. There are seventy-five fires burning in the state, some lit by arsonists. Five thousand people are fighting the fires.

Bob, Peri’s husband, was giving me a lift to the train on his way to work at the radio station, when I had a thought to ring and check the timetable. All trains to the south coast are cancelled and all roads blocked because of the fire. So I will stay longer.

Sleeping on Peri’s studio floor, I wake and look out at the Heads with the Manly ferry trailing backwards and forwards. Only the ferries are not affected by the fires.

Nonetheless, the blue jacarandas are blooming. I hop in and out of the pool all day and pray my house is safe.

Christmas dinners were abandoned on tables yesterday as people ran. Decorated with tinsel, fire engines fought fires.

Still stuck at Peri’s, the fires are worse than before. Fifteen thousand people are ready to fight the flames because the winds are strong and it is very hot. Arsonists light more fires, and fires join each other. The ash falls on the back lawn day and night and the beautiful poisoned moon hangs as if filled with rotting rose petals. It feels like war and, in a way, it is. Our
oldest, and the world’s second oldest, National Park, north of Wollongong, has been burnt out.

Peri and Bob’s granddaughter, Natali, is a State Emergency Volunteer, so at least one of us is able to do something. The sales are on and we are watering the garden. Peri and Bob play Scrabble at night on a table on the back lawn. Bob won’t play with me because the first time we ever did, I knocked the table over. He said, ‘You might be my wife’s friend, but I’m never playing Scrabble with you again.’ And he hasn’t.

Ghilly arrived and we drove to her home at Newcastle. Before we left she sang Musetta in the dress rehearsal of
La Boheme
at the Opera House, and I sat in the audience. We drank tea in the Green Room and read more about the fires. The road north was still open, so we could go.

It’s Ghilly’s birthday lunch in an hour, for ten friends. I looked out at Blackbutt Park and thought, what would happen if the fire reached there? Nothing would save the houses beside the park in Ridgeway Avenue, but nobody seems worried. I think maybe we should check the gutters, but don’t like to say so. The fires at Leura, when I lived there, made me aware. I remember pouring potatoes into the downpipe, when I had no
tennis balls to block the pipes as was suggested, and filling the gutter with water. The sound of chainsaws and helicopters went on day after day. The memory of the pile of branches cut from my trees on my back lawn, almost as tall as my house, stays with me. Now we raise our glasses to Ghilly and the New Year. And to the firefighters.

Happy New Year! The fires burn on. Black gum leaves fall everywhere. The train home from Newcastle went through blackened bush on both sides. I’ll never travel on a train on New Year’s Day again. While a teenage girl quietly vomited and her wild drunken boyfriend ran up and down the carriage, a young Chinese man, possibly a student going down to Wollongong University, put his video camera to the window and filmed the blackened trees. I wondered what his family back in China would make of this scene their boy had entered. Luckily they couldn’t see what was going on in the train itself. Bedlam.

My house is safe and still, as yet, uninsured. Understandably, insurance companies don’t accept people ringing up for insurance when the house has a bushfire coming towards it.

All’s well. Daphne and Terry watered my garden while I was stuck in town. Terry gave me his home-grown
tomatoes and cucumbers and my mail. Blackened gum leaves have blown inside the shed. At first I couldn’t think what this substance was. Then I deciphered the shape. I ate panzanella with basil and went for a swim in the sea pool. The black leaves litter the beach. It’s starting to feel like Pompeii.

Thousands of people have been evacuated to the beach south of here, at Sussex Inlet. The smoke has reached New Zealand. Our ash is falling there. Jack, Caro and Peter are here from a holiday at South West Rocks. Caro drove from 7 a.m. and got here at 2 p.m., exhausted. We had a swim and they all slept. Helicopters are dropping water on the fires. Jack and I, floating in the sea, watched as two helicopters flew over, each with a dangling umbilicus waving over the water.

Jack and I caught the train to Sydney. Fire was burning exactly beside the track on both sides. The train went slowly through the bush and we expected to be turned back at any moment. Smoke rose through the black trees and flames snickered beside the line for half an hour. We saw plumes of smoke from new fires rising
through green bush, in many places on unapproachable hillsides, silhouetted against the calm sea.

Heavy rain, thank heaven. Dressed like a firefighter, with big shears, I tackled the wild tangled roses in the back garden. It is no good waiting for autumn; the Albertine doesn’t bloom then, not being remontant, and the pink Lorraine Lee has collapsed onto the dirt, with two cottage roses making something like a barbed-wire blockage suitable to protect a beach in war. My clothes were in shreds at the end of the job, but the fence is clear now and Terry no longer has to worry about his shed’s gutters being blocked with my roses. I took cold baths all day and ran in and out, ragged and happy.

The fires are becoming controlled. Hundreds of firefighters who came from interstate are going home. My sister-in-law, Patricia, from Kingston SA, said two of the men who work for them drove over. She turned on the television one evening, having wondered if they had arrived safely, and saw them in the Willalooka fire engine spraying water. That must be over two thousand kilometres those men drove to help, and all done voluntarily.

The local paper,
The Mercury,
says that everything has a flash point at which it will burst into flames. Conifers ignite at fifty degrees celsius. Eucalyptus trees ignite at between sixty and ninety degrees Celsius.

David has offered to cut up the branches of roses left on the lawn, so they will fit into the bins. He says he enjoys it. But without seeing the thorns, and not using gloves because they make it too hard to sense things, it must be painful. He seems impervious or just stoical to the prickles.

The aftermath of the fires leaves a sad feeling, so much lost and yet so much saved. Lives and houses gone. The beach is still littered with black gum leaves. At night, the sky turns red and now we fold our fear away.

Mung beans. It’s something Terry told me over the fence again. ‘If you have a tree or plant that’s sick,’ nodding towards the blood orange, more wilted than before, ‘plant mung beans. Then you turn them in and that’s the best nitrogen and the plant will love it.’

It rained in the night. One of the loveliest sentences in the language. For hours the sound on the roof was there between the shifting screens of dreaming, turning or just sleeping. At dawn the rain stopped. I walked out
in bare feet to look at the new rain gauge, which had overflowed into its container and even out of that onto the red camellia below. As I emptied and poured the water into the measuring tube, it looked so pure and enticing that I lifted the bowl and drank. Suddenly I saw that I had spoilt the measurement by this lavish gulping. As the water went down my throat I remembered an old grey iron pump on an underground tank we had in childhood, and how the water streamed out as the handle was pumped up and down. I remembered the pleasure of making the water rush after its first thin reluctant stream. One by one, my brothers and I cupped our hands and drank the sweet water. Sometimes we used an iron dipper, a lipless jug, which altered the taste of the water, or seemed to, and made it slightly metallic as our teeth hit on the dipper’s cold edge. Gulping water is one of life’s deepest pleasures. Wells, dams, rivers, ponds and lakes; the way light loves water. As I raised a glass to my mouth the other day, I saw reflected on the surface the sky and branches of trees.

I want summer to never end. The frangipani is in full bloom, gardenias too. The purple bougainvillea spraying through the back fence is reaching farther up into the
jacaranda, which has grown tall. Everything is abundant. But the opium poppies are done for. I shook their seed pods hard as I pulled them out. This has led to something I’ve never had here before and that is bareness in places usually full of cosmos, both front and back. The poppies had a price. Now it’s late, but there are petunias in with
Portulacas,
a funny old plant I love, which fell out of fashion. There are a lot of white salvia seedlings in too, so now I wait to see if it is all too late.

David called today. We walked around the back garden and I showed him the fig with its fruit and silver foil flags to keep the birds off. He felt the smooth grey trunk of the big olive and I explained it is now as tall as the house.

Terry heard us in the garden and passed over cucumbers and tomatoes for us both. We had another of our cryptic botanical talks where Terry gives his country wisdom on growing vegetables, gained from being born on a farm in Queensland. For example, the blood orange I moved yesterday, overcome as it was by the great pink hibiscus, has wilted in shock and looks hopeless. Terry looked down at it below the fence and said, ‘If you cut it back hard’—words I hate to hear—‘it will be alright. You know, the leaves that droop never grow back.’ Privately, I thought I would still not cut it, in case he was wrong. It has taken a long time for those leaves to grow and the two bits of blossom to come.

David and I walked over to the station with the jacarandas in buckets where they have sat since Ghilly brought them down to me before Christmas. We also took seven or eight small
Ailanthus
seedlings that had sprung up from the big tree.

Once we got through the gate and he felt the high weeds among the plumbago, daisies, geraniums and roses, David bent and pulled them out. I was exhilarated. We walked along beside the platform and decided that six long strides should be the distance between the trees. This is close, but they won’t all survive, and if they are too close they can be moved later (did I really say that!). I left the digging to David and ran round to the platform tap with buckets. Handing the buckets over the railing, down to David below, I watched him water the first trees we had put in. Although not all went on the trees (great dips were in the dry mud where a truck had come to do electrical work, and the water slapped over the edges as he walked), much did. It was slow work, because the heavy wide hose won’t reach.

After we had planted about fifteen trees, some wilting, some sticks, some healthy, nonetheless all given a chance, we crossed over the train line. Here the bauhinia trees grow and the earliest part of the garden, which is full of daisies, geraniums and the white rose blooming. Among the agapanthus that were there
before, we put in eight thorn bushes. Denis had sent these in a heavy sack, along with petunias and tomatoes that he did not want to sell. The thorn bushes went in around the edge and a few in farther where vandals tear up the plants. I had been surprised when I saw the bag of thorns, but I remembered Denis shaking his head one day at the nursery, talking about thieves who climbed the fence and took his pots, saying, ‘What we really need is thorny plants.’ Now they are in. I had gloves, but David had none and he didn’t seem to mind the thorns. Tom, coming down the steps to empty a bin, stood looking worried and I said, ‘Tom, you know nothing about this. You haven’t seen it.’ Meaning thorns may be illegal, like barbed wire. So he walked off. Two boys, who were playing at the station and talking to Tom, got the hose when I asked them and watered the plants. Those who care for things won’t destroy them, I hope.