The Narrow Road to the Deep North (44 page)

She was drawing nearer. He tried to slow his step as his mind sped ever faster. His stomach churned and his balance was uneven. He was close enough now to see the small mole that defined her upper lip. Now he did not think she was as beautiful as ever, or that she was beautiful at all. Only that he wanted her. She was wearing a necklace that sparked an uncontrollable insurrection of memory. Had she seen him? He would call out to her. He would! And then, with the full light of the sun behind her, he saw her pinch her dress between her thumb and forefinger and tug it back up her cleavage. For a moment, perhaps, he expected that in that transcendent light she would now welcome him into her arms and her life.

But there is only light at the beginning of things.

As he went to say something, he realised they had walked past each other without a word. He kept on walking in the shadow, continuing to look straight ahead. He had got it wrong. Her, him, them, love—especially love—so completely wrong. He had got time wrong. He could not believe it, yet he had to. Her death, his life, them, everything,
everything
wrong. And the gravity of his error was so great, so overwhelming, that he could not fight it and turn around, call out, run back. Only when he reached the other end of the bridge did he find the strength finally to turn.

Amy was nowhere to be seen.

He stood in the middle of the walkway, with people spilling all around him—as though he were just one more urban obstruction, a bollard, a bin, a body—and he thought of Lot’s wife and what a lie that story was. You become a pillar of salt when you don’t turn and look back. He realised he should have stopped her and he realised he now never could. He should never have walked on and yet he had.

Had he chosen? Had she? Was there ever a choice? Or did life just sweep people up, together and away?

Around him, behind him, beyond him were people, moving every which way. Wild flying particles in the light, lost long-ago, as he knew everything now was lost, in the steel and the stone, in the sea and the sun and the heat rising and falling in the cloudless blue sky, lost in the ochre cranes and the thundering expressway.

For a moment longer he remained there, an insignificant figure amidst the soaring iron half-circles and the roaring traffic, the blue day and the sparkling water. Thinking: How empty is the world when you lose the one you love.

And he turned back around and kept on walking, pathless on all paths. He had thought her dead. But now he finally understood: it was she who had lived and he who had died.

AFTER THEY HAD
walked across the bridge, Amy bought her two nieces ice-creams at Circular Quay and caught the ferry back to her sister’s home in Manly. For many years she had thought him dead. She had become aware that he had not died during the war only in recent times, as his fame had begun to grow. Why, why, she thought once more as she sat on the ferry’s rear deck, watching the coruscating waters recede, why if he had been alive, had he not come back to find her? Why? she thought on arriving back at her sister’s home. Why? she thought as she lay down on her bed, so very tired. For she could not forgive him for having broken his promise.

It never occurred to her that he might have thought she had died in the explosion, rather than discovering it the next morning, as she had, when she drove the Cabriolet back from the coastal beach where they had first gone, and where—after Keith told her he was dead—she, undone with grief, had driven to think of Dorrigo and ended up sleeping the night.

In recent years she sometimes had the fancy of seeking Dorrigo out. She had been on the edge of it several times—even finding his number and writing it down—but she had not really been on the edge of anything. Every time she thought about contacting him she felt overwhelmed. What did she want of him? What would he want of her, if anything? Sometimes she wondered if he would even have a strong memory of her. And, in any case, what would she say? That she had thought him dead?

How to tell him of the inheritance, comfortable, in the wake of Keith’s death; of the second marriage, long after the war, pleasant, fun, to a bookmaker better at losing money than keeping it, who blew the lot then disappeared, it was said, to America. And that was about it. One or two others, brief encounters, more or less. Mostly less. How to tell him it had not been love, not even with the bookmaker? Something lighter—a hat or a dress or a cloud. But who remembers a cloud?

And whenever she came close to writing a letter, making a phone call, she saw before her the huge obstacle of his rejection of her in never having sought her out, in not having come back for her after the war, as he had promised. Now their positions were changed utterly: he was the famous Dorrigo Evans, forever rising, and she nobody, sinking. And then had come the diagnosis. How to tell him that?

Her sister called a second time.

Yes, she said, one minute more.

She was so weary. She had forgotten so much about him. But it had been him. He was not dead and nor yet was she. It was enough. She took her necklace off and rolled the pearl in her fingers. She felt many things. Then she put it down. He had become someone, or more than someone—she could see that he was passing into something not a person.

She, on the other hand, would soon be nothing. There were treatments—extreme and, her oncologist had told her, essentially futile. She’d had two cleaning jobs, and between them battled to get by, but had now thrown them in, after her sister agreed to nurse her. Her dreams were long ago spent.

Now she sought pleasure in sunsets, in her friends, few but loved by her, in the charms of her city—the warmth of early morning, the smell of bitumen and buildings after wild rain, the daily summer carnival of its beaches, the view of it from the bridge of a sunny afternoon, the strangers she sometimes met, spoiling her nieces, the pleasant solitude of memory that the evening of a summer’s day allowed. Sometimes she felt happy.

Occasionally, she remembered a room by the sea and the moon and him, the green hand of a clock floating in the darkness and the sound of waves crashing, and a feeling unlike anything she had known before or ever knew again.

She would not contact him. He had his life, she had hers: the merge was impossible to dream. And what we cannot dream we can never do.

In eighteen months—six more than she had been given—she would be buried in a suburban cemetery, an unremarkable lot amidst acres of similarly unremarkable graves. No one would ever see her again, and after a time even her nieces’ memories would fade and then, like them also, finally be no more. All that would remain, luminous in the long night of the earth, would be a pearl necklace with which she had asked to be buried.

THAT NIGHT DORRIGO
Evans flew to Melbourne, from there the next day he got the morning flight to Hobart; in the overwhelming drone of the 707’s engines and the strange oblivion they invited he found a restful limbo. His flight’s descent into Hobart was marred by violent winds and heavy smoke coming from bushfires in the island’s south; the plane dropped, pitched and tumbled like a pea in a violently boiling pot. They disembarked into the odour of ash and the slap of wind-gusted heat.

He was welcomed by old Freddy Seymour, a surgeon of disputed years who ran the Tasmanian chapter of the College of Surgeons, and who, somewhat eccentrically, drove an old green 1948 Ford Mercury, kept, like Freddy, in a state of immaculate grace in denial of its age. The College of Surgeons was hosting a luncheon in Dorrigo’s honour in a Hobart hotel that day. After that, Dorrigo was heading to Fern Tree—the village just out of Hobart, located in picturesque mountain forest, where Ella’s sister lived—and his family. He rang Ella from the airport’s public phone; her sister was gone till mid-afternoon with her car. In any case, it was too hot to do anything other than stay put with the kids. She said it was pleasantly cool in the shade of the vast eucalypts and she couldn’t think of a better place to be.

The lunch was a more pleasant affair than Dorrigo had expected; at least, it was a diversion for his mind from everything else that was crowding into it. But just as they had got to the sherry and cigars there came word that the fire situation had considerably worsened, and that towns to the immediate south, among them Fern Tree, were now threatened by a firestorm.

Dorrigo Evans found a hotel phone and tried calling Ella’s sister’s number, but the connection was down, and so too, said the operator, were almost all the lines to homes on the mountain. Dorrigo Evans turned to Freddy Seymour—who had just lit up and whose sunken coral-pink cheeks wobbled as he chuffed the smoke in with tiny, quick breaths—and asked if he might borrow his car keys.

I love you, Evans, said the old surgeon, exhaling his own smoke plume. Like a son. And, like a son, you shall return my car not as it was, and like a father I shall forgive.

Fern Tree was twenty minutes’ drive from the city. The winds by now were ferocious, the heat a gritty oppression. When he got into the Ford Mercury, he was startled to see his face in the rear-view mirror covered in smuts of the ash that was swirling outside in thick eddies, like black snow.

The Ford Mercury drove like a bucket with only a vague relationship to the road, but its V8 had a reassuring power. The mountain, copyrightly a majestic presence, was invisible, lost in a pall of smoke so thick that within minutes Dorrigo’s visibility was down to a few yards and he had his headlights on. Occasionally another car would appear out of the gloom, seeking to escape into the city with people inside looking as he had seen Syrian villagers once look as they sought to escape the war. Some of the cars were scorched; one, improbably, had no windscreen; another’s paintwork was raised in big, blackened blisters. He passed from the outer suburbs of Hobart into a thick, tall forest through which the road now cut a deep and sinuous trench.

Coming round a corner, he came upon a police roadblock stopping any car from going further. A solitary policeman put his head into the 1948 Ford Mercury and told Dorrigo he had to turn back.

It’s a death zone up there, mate, he said, jerking a thumb behind him in the direction of Fern Tree.

Dorrigo described Ella and his children and asked if they had passed through the roadblock. The young policeman, who said he had been there for two hours, hadn’t seen anyone like that. Perhaps they had fled earlier.

Dorrigo Evans calculated that there was perhaps an hour and a half from the time of his phone call when Ella and the children might have fled. But it was unlikely she would have left when the town was unthreatened, and, besides, she had no car. Dorrigo Evans hoped they had escaped, but reasoned that he had to act in the expectation that they hadn’t.

The fire’s coming up from the Huon, the policeman went on, and across from the east. I’m hearing crazy stories of it spot-lighting from embers in front of the main fire, up to twenty miles away. As he spoke, glowing embers fell onto the bonnet, as if in proof of the policeman’s argument.

You’d be crazy to go up there, he said finally.

My family is up there, Dorrigo Evans said, dropping the column shift down into first. I’d be crazy if I didn’t.

And with that he politely asked the policeman to step away. When the policeman refused, he dropped the clutch, smashed through the roadblock and mumbled the first of several apologies to Freddy Seymour.

Within half a mile flames surrounded him, but it did not seem ferocious enough to be the main fire front, though what a main fire front looked like Dorrigo Evans had no idea. He also had no idea where Ella’s sister lived, having never visited her before, and while he had an address, no street signs were visible. Nor, hardly, was the road which had become a confusion of burning branches, the occasional burning abandoned car, raining embers and thick smoke. He drove at little more than walking pace along the same road he had travelled near twenty years before in a Cascade brewery truck. Where he had once tried to divine love in a snowstorm, he was now desperately searching for his family in dense smoke, scanning driveways, road verges, shelters, beeping his horn constantly. But there was no one. He presumed everyone was gone or dead. There was no longer sky, only an occasional glimpse of wildly billowing blue-black clouds backlit by a hellish red light. He kept driving, concentrating on his search, keeping his ear close to the window and the window just enough down that he might hear someone, somebody, anything.

And then he thought he heard somebody, but with all the other noise he dismissed it as the whistling the vaporising sap was making as the trees exploded. Then the noise came again, fainter, but different. He stopped the car and got out.

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.