The Narrow Road to the Deep North (45 page)

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.

We’re surrounded, Stewie said, and cried again.

That’s enough, Ella said, grabbing him. We’ve just got to get to Hobart. Get behind me, hold each other’s hands, and whatever you do, don’t let go.

So linked, this thin line of hope and terror continued into the wind and smoke and flame. Mary started to cry because her feet were blistering.

We’ll fix your feet when we get to Hobart, Ella said.

There were trees and houses burning around them and now in front of them and Ella kept urging them to hurry. She was carrying Stewie now, with Mary behind her holding the hem of her dress with one hand and Jess with the other, and all of them terrified of what would become of them if they did not keep holding on to each other. Through the noise of the flames and the wind there was a crash, and up ahead a tree fell onto the road in a ball of flame. Ella found a path skirting around the flames and they kept on, past it, past a burning car wreck and past a fallen, burning telegraph pole with electric cables running like knitting wool around them. But the fire grew worse in front of them than it was behind, Mary’s feet were blistering badly, the heat was incredible, and suddenly Ella halted and turned to face her children.

We’ve got to go back, kids. Quickly, she said. No buggering around now.

She never swore. They knew something had changed.

Quickly, she kept saying. Quickly!

But what about Hobart? asked Jess, who had said nothing. If we get to Hobart we’ll be safe. Her voice was panting. We’ve got to!

And Jess shoved around and starting heading past them into the flames. Ella grabbed her and slapped her hard across the face.

We’ll be the Sunday roast if we go any further that way. We’ve just got to find somewhere to shelter from the fire.

Jess started screaming and Ella slapped her hard a second time. Jess burst into tears and dropped her record player, which smashed to pieces on the road. Their throats burnt with the tar of smoke, it was hard to breathe, their eyes were streaming and snot was running from their noses. It was impossible to see much more than a few steps in front, and they only knew where they were by occasionally sighting the beginning of a drive, a bend in the road, a sign.

They came to a house that had no garden and just one old apple tree and a fibro garden shed that sat in the middle of a dead lawn. There was nothing to burn and the fire was roaring up behind them; little fires were appearing on the dead lawn where there was nothing to burn but they were burning anyway.

Here, said Ella, opening the door of the fibro shed, thinking,
Here?—It’s here we all die
?

They huddled inside, holding each other in spite of the ferocious heat, hardly able to breathe. It was as if the fire was eating all the air in the world. They heard a sound like a jet airliner bursting over the top of them. An obscene tongue of flame, a good yard long, licked in under the door like a hungry animal, and Jess leapt back screaming and bumped a shelf full of bottles.

Jess! Ella yelled.

She was holding the shelf. It was full of bottles of brushes in mineral turps and methylated spirits. She hung on to that shelf and told them not to move.

Whatever you do, she said, don’t bump this shelf or me. Look at Gene, Ella said.

And Jess, still wearing her record player cum hair dryer plastic cap, speckled with black holes from sparks and cinders, held up in the gloom the forty-five Gene Pitney record she had carried all that way. In the heat it had drooped into the shape of a pudding bowl.

Look at Gene, kids, Ella said. Just look at Gene.

After a few minutes it was hotter than ever but the noise had died down and the flames had stopped licking under the door. They heard a strange noise. Very slowly, Ella opened the door. No one moved. They looked out.

Nothing made sense. The house was gone. Next to where its remains were smoking, the apple tree was still there, a little singed but otherwise okay, while the forest on the other side of the road was burning ferociously.

They heard the strange noise again and realised it was a car horn growing weaker as the car continued on, away from them. Ella hauled Stewie into her arms, and her daughters ran out with her, all of them yelling through the flames, but the car had already gone past and was disappearing into the smoke up the road. They yelled harder.

And then the car stopped. It was a green 1948 Ford Mercury with white-walled tyres. None of the children would ever forget it. The driver’s door opened and a man got out. And when he turned around, they saw that it was their father, come to find them.

They started running to him and he to them, through the smoke and heat and flames. When they met, Dorrigo grabbed Stewie, swinging him with one arm onto his hip. His free hand he opened out wide, cupped Ella’s head and clutched her face hard against his. He held her against him and the girls against them both, as if they were entwined roots holding up a decayed tree. It was only a moment before he let her go and they all fled to the car. But it was more affection than his three children had seen their father show their mother in a lifetime.

REASONING THAT THEIR
best chance of survival now lay in heading deeper into the forest that had already partly burnt, rather than heading into the fire that was now sweeping into Hobart, Dorrigo drove on in the direction from which his family had fled. Some houses and forest remained, but where the old woman who had not wanted them had saved her good boys’ clothes for someone else, there was now nothing except smoking tin and ash and a naked chimney. Where Mrs McHugh had been chopping down her fence to save her house, it was hard to know in the smoke where either had been.

They found themselves driving into a strange night. Coming round a corner the black sky gave way to a huge, red wall of fire, perhaps half a mile away, flames rising far above them. This was a new fire, roaring up from a different direction, and it seemed to be joining several smaller fires into a single inferno. The noise of it was overwhelming. For a moment longer they continued staring as they kept driving. Ella broke the spell.

It’s the fire front, she said.

Dorrigo braked, threw the Ford Mercury into a wild reverse swerve, crashed it into first and took off back down the road from where they had just come. Past the fallen wires and flaming car wrecks he drove like a man possessed. Within minutes though the fire front had caught up with them, and now he drove between walls of flame on either side, around burning tree limbs falling everywhere, past houses exploding, alternately speeding as fast as he could go when there was a clear stretch of road, and slewing and slowing when he had to. A fireball, the size of a trolley bus and as blue as gas flame, appeared as if by magic on the road and rolled towards them. As the Ford Mercury swerved around it and straightened back up, Dorrigo found he had no choice but to ignore the burning debris that appeared out of the smoke and hurtled at them—sticks, branches, palings—sometimes hitting and bouncing off the car. He grunted as he worked the column shift up and down, spinning the big steering wheel hard left and right, white-walled tyres squealing on bubbling black bitumen, the noise only occasionally audible in the cacophony of flame roar and wind shriek, the weird machine gun-like crackling of branches above exploding.

They came over a rise to see a huge burning tree falling across the road a hundred yards or so in front of them. Flames flared up high along the tree trunk as it bounced on landing, its burning crown settling in a neat front yard to create an instant bonfire that merged into a burning house. Wedging his knee into the door, Dorrigo pushed with all his strength on the brake pedal. The Ford Mercury went into a four-wheel slide, spinning sideways and skidding straight towards the tree, slewing to a halt only yards from the flaring tree trunk.

No one spoke.

Hands wet with sweat on the wheel, panting heavily, Dorrigo Evans weighed their options. They were all bad. The road out in either direction was now completely cut off—by the burning tree in front of them and the fire front behind them. He wiped his hands in turn on his shirt and trousers. They were trapped. He turned to his children in the back seat. He felt sick. They were holding each other, eyes white and large in their sooty faces.

Hold on, he said.

He slammed the car into reverse, backed up towards the fire front a short distance, then took off. He had enough speed up to smash down the picket fence in the garden where the burning tree crown had landed. They were heading straight into the bonfire. Yelling to the others to get down, he double-declutched the engine into first, let the clutch out and flattened the accelerator.

Charge the windmill.

The V8 rose in a roar, tappets clattering, and they crashed into the burning bush at the point closest to the house, where the flames were largest but, Dorrigo had gambled, the branches would be smallest. For a moment all was fire and noise. The engine screamed with wild intent, a heat of such ferocious intensity seemed to penetrate the glass and steel that to breathe hurt, everything was a dull red; there was the crack of flame, of branches snapping, metal scratching and groaning as panels distorted and bent, of wheels losing and gaining traction. The driver’s side rear window smashed. Sparks, embers and a few burning sticks flew into the car, Ella and the children began screaming as the children cowed on the far side of the rear bench seat. For a terrifying second or two the car slowed almost to a halt when something caught underneath its chassis. And then, as quickly, the bonfire was somehow behind them, and they were accelerating towards another decrepit paling fence that Dorrigo also smashed through in a momentary blizzard of breaking timber. The windscreen transformed into a white cloud of fragments, he yelled at Ella to kick it out, and when it fell away they found themselves back on the road, past the fallen tree, heading towards Hobart. He was steering with one hand, while leaning over grabbing burning sticks from the back seat with his other—his surgeon’s hands he had always tried so hard to protect—and tossing them out the smashed window.

As the 1948 Ford Mercury, green paint blackened and blistering, screeched and slithered its way back down that burning mountain, Ella looked across at Dorrigo, the fingers of his left hand already swelling into blisters the size of small balloons, so badly burnt he would later need skin grafts. Such a mystery of a man, she thought, such a mystery. She realised she knew nothing about him; that their marriage had been over before it began; and that it was not in the power of either of them to alter any of this. On what were now three tyres and one disintegrating wheel rim, the Ford Mercury careered round a long corner and, through the smoke, they finally glimpsed before them the sanctuary of the police roadblock.