White Light (7 page)

‘She's asleep.'

‘Is she well?'

‘Yep.'

Not meeting his eye. Surrounded by her things.
4 Sal
.

‘Did you get home safely the other night?'

‘Yep.'

‘Do you know what happened?'

‘She came home. I told you, she always comes home. I go to school. Same as before. Now we're moving.'

‘What about that fellow, Paul, the boyfriend?'

‘He's not her friend anymore.'

‘Did he do this?' Waving his hand at the furniture.

‘No. He's a lazy cunt.'

‘Who helped you move all this stuff out here?'

‘Me mum. Who else? The truck'll be here soon.'

‘Well, I hope it doesn't rain.'

‘Me too… Hey Mister, how much will you give me for this couch?'

Dean moved on and did not reply. The trees overhead shushed in the strengthening breeze; it was always windy this time of year. Currawongs tuned their pipes in the elastic branches. Grace and Shona and the dog dawdled ahead. He felt appalled that he did not want to catch them up. If the wind were to drop it might be cold enough to snow. Every footstep felt the same.

D
uring the filming of the climactic scene in the action-packed Hollywood blockbuster
Stealth
, I was chief fire officer for the Megalong Valley CFA. I have not seen the film myself, not being much of a movie-goer, but I am told it is close to a masterpiece. Or maybe that is a masterpiece of extravagance? Either way, it reflects well, even though only a few minutes of my work made it into the final film. A few minutes, after all that effort, with Ross Livingstone losing his work shed, and kissing goodbye to an old Harley-Davidson he was working on in pieces on the floor. All up in smoke. Ah well! Sad but true. My son, Barry, wants me to take him to see the film, but I don't think it's an appropriate sort of entertainment, what with all the violence and ‘adult themes'.

It's a long story. But in a nutshell,
Stealth
is a tale about an intelligent jet-fighter plane that wants to save the free world by blowing the billy-o out of the hanging swamp along Mount Hay Road. I don't know what the free world has to fear from the hanging swamp along Mount Hay Road. The producers claimed that blowing the billy-o out of things was in keeping with the plane's character and therefore crucial to the plot. You don't really expect Hollywood producers to come up with sensible explanations. It makes you wonder where they cook up these ideas. The hanging swamp was supposed to represent a desert of some kind, the kind of desert that harboured evil terrorists. Unfortunately, the swamp was also home to some endangered skink, or butterfly or rare parasite that lives only in the roots of the moss that grows there. Not sure if I've got the right end of the stick here. When we read this in the
Gazette
, Barry said he didn't want the butterflies to be blown up. He likes butterflies. And skinks. And birds.

This is where the greenies stepped in, taking the law into their own hands. ‘Save the parasites,' they shouted. They chained themselves to gates; lay down in the path of the napalm; chanted,
We shall not be moved
, even though there were only about twenty of them. After a few photographs, the police dragged them off.

It worked. Unfortunate for Hollywood, but lucky for us, the protesters won. A victory for the environment; a victory for the defenceless. As you'd expect, being a big budget blockbuster, money was no object. The
Stealth
producers shopped around. They offered Ross Livingstone (after he rang up and volunteered) a bucketful of dosh to let them transfer the location of the shoot (I've got all the lingo) from the hanging swamp up on the mountain, down into the shadows of the valley where they could blow the billy-o out of his property, on which he ran several horses and a few head of shivering cattle. Think of the money these Yanks would bring down into the valley, Livingstone argued in the community hall. They would need accommodation. And they would need dinner. And breakfast. And probably lunch. They would eat the teashop out of house and home. It would be an economic boom.

So we agreed. The valley is a magical place, as anyone will tell you. The cliffs of Narrowneck plateau rise to the east, so that each day begins like a kid poking his face up over a fence. Barry, who has an affinity with animals, would ride a horse from sunup to sunset if he could, all the way over the Cox to the Wild Dogs and back. And the horse would do that for him. But as Ross said, money is money.

Even though the location had changed, the valley was still meant to represent the desert. The intelligent fighter plane, Stealth, was supposed to be able to fly through the night sky like a bat, reading people's thoughts and such-like but I don't reckon the producers rated the intelligence of the audience too highly. Continuity, I think it's called. Or lack of it. Since when did the Megalong Valley look like a desert?

Anyhow, they splashed their big bucks around, sneered at the greenies, and Ross Livingstone said, yes, they could blow up whatever they wanted on his property. Within reason. They couldn't touch his shed, for example. He'd need some guarantee. That's where the Country Fire Authority came in. The biggest controlled explosion in the, oh I don't know, the Southern Hemisphere? Something like that. It was certainly bigger than the last cracker night we had down in the valley before they were banned. And much cheaper for them, blowing up things here in Australia than in their own backyard. I examined their permit and it was all above board. So, fire away. I thought Barry might get a good memory out of all the razzle-dazzle.

Our job was to help plant the pyrotechnics. That is, to supervise the Hollywood powder monkey while he wired up the Nitropril and detonators, poured petrol—petrol by the tanker load—down the trunks of hollow trees, into rabbit burrows, all over Livingstone's doomed but profitable property. They were very professional. Only once, in my official capacity, did I have to tell them that they were pouring their diesel in a trench too close to the creek that fed the Cox, which was part of the Sydney water catchment and might get a few people jumping up and down. It was a disaster waiting to happen. They were pretty good about it. They didn't want another environmental fuss on their hands.

But Ross told me to keep my damn nose out of it. It was his private property, he said, and he had given permission to blow up anything the director thought would look good cart-wheeling through the air on fire. So long as they paid. It was a deal they had and he didn't want me to put the mockers on it. The director said he did not wish to enter into local politics, he was simply remaining faithful to the script; this project had artistic integrity. And money was no object in the pursuit of artistic integrity. I couldn't help thinking that he was making it up as he went along. There was talk of shooting a scene where the intelligent fighter plane confronted the greenies about the value of parasites and the value of life in general, thereby developing his character to a more sophisticated level, but underneath realising that the greenies were really terrorists and didn't care a hoot about the value of life, no, they only cared about power and so deserved to have the billy-o blown out of them. I don't know if that scene made it into the final film.

It was all very interesting how they went about things. My second-in-command, Barry, jiggled from foot to foot in anticipation. He was hoping to meet movie stars. He was eighteen and this sure made a change from the quiet life in the shadows he was used to. A dead kangaroo on the side of the road is about as much excitement as we get around here and takes a bit of working through. He watched them set up their caravans and catering tents and camera dollies and all the other film paraphernalia. But the only stars in this scene were a handful of extras and stuntmen who were to play corpses in the desert. Even Stealth, the star of the show, was back in a studio hangar somewhere.

Once they were all set up, Mrs Lewis brought over some scones and homemade jam from the teashop, but the crew only wanted their hotdogs and Pepsi. Did they not want anything at all from the local shop? No thanks, Ma'am, they were fully self-sufficient. Barry and I loved her scones so we tucked in. Barry asked a stuntman for his autograph. And got it. He clutched the piece of paper like a jewel, showed it to Mrs Lewis.

‘That's lovely, Barry.'

Any road, it took ages to prepare the location. Barry followed the powder monkey around getting in everyone's way. You might have thought he was taking lessons although, God knows, lessons were wasted on him. Eventually, they were ready. All they had to do was wait for nightfall. The mobile phones rang hot, synchronising watches and so forth. Dusk came and went, turning the cliffs of the escarpment all around us orange. The faces in the sandstone were changing with the light. It was a clear evening. Roos abounded. No wind. I thought the cliffs would have looked real beaut in a film if you were making a film about cliffs, but I guess they didn't look much like the desert either. Barry gazed at them in rapture.

‘Barry,' I called, ‘put your jumper on. It's getting cold.'

He didn't hear me. I had to take the cotton wool out of his ears and repeat myself.

‘Birds,' he said, pointing to the sky.

Eventually the director called—
Lights! Camera! Action!
No. No lights. It was nighttime. Just action, then. In the distance, coming from Medlow, a little Cessna flew overhead with a few red lights blinking. This was simply for the cameras and the bad guys on the ground to track through the sky. Continuity again. They think of everything. Later they would get a computer to superimpose Stealth stealthily traversing the treacherous terrain, pinpointing the location of the bad guys with his infrared, X-ray vision. Funny really, because according to the plot, Stealth was supposed to be able to read people's thoughts and empathise with their predicaments and be a protagonist for good, before offering helpful advice in the cause of peace and ultimately blowing the billy-o out of them. Oh well.

Livingstone, standing alone on his porch, watched all this activity with interest.

Then came the wanton destruction.
Ka Boom!
as they say in the comics. The ground trembled and bucked, which made Barry widdle. I gasped to my boots. Flames reached the moon, or so it seemed from our point of view. Whole trees exploded into kindling. The escarpment glowed ochre and shimmered. They had cameras all over the place to capture every flaming, spinning piece of debris, moment by moment. Parallel lanes of flame burst through the night. Pity the poor parasites, not to mention all the other wildlife about the place, blown to smithereens. The noise of it was truly deafening. Echoes rumbled to every corner of the valley. Some of the extras lay dead on the ground. Burning birds flew like comets. The bonnet of one of Livingstone's old Bedford trucks erupted high into the air and floated down like a piece of flaming pastry. It was like the ending of the world. Very speccy.

Then came our turn. Once all the pyrotechnics had blown off and the director had yelled
Cut
, through his loudspeaker, or
That's a wrap
, or whatever he said, my team of volunteer fireys ran around with their extinguishers and hoses dousing the flames where they were beginning to spread. A blaze down in Livingstone's gully almost got away into the bush, but luckily the tanker was down that way with the new pump paid for by a sausage sizzle and meat tray raffle. It worked a treat and a real disaster was averted. Good work, lads.

I don't suppose even Hollywood can plan for every contingency. Unfortunately, the Bedford bonnet, flaming down from orbit, crashed through the roof of Livingstone's shed and set the whole shop on fire. Oil and grease everywhere, it's no surprise. It was lit up like a Christmas tree by the time anyone noticed. That is, a Christmas tree doused in oil and grease and set ablaze. Ross ran around shouting but I don't think they got any footage. In about three minutes, the shed was a pile of smoking rubble. Where was my crew? Nowhere to be seen. Eventually, I found Barry around the back, his face turned up to the stars, fireman's helmet hanging from his chin by its strap, his jaw agape. I could still see the dancing sky aflame in his eyes. He did not hear me until I pulled the plugs from his ears.

‘It's all over now, son.'

He looked at me, putting the words together.

‘Dad, can we do that film again?'

As the evening began to wrap up, Livingstone complained loudly about the shed, but Hollywood thought they had paid him more than enough. They had all the footage they wanted. He could buy a new shed. All this while they were bumping out. The situation was what the Americans called a YP not an OP. That is, it was Your Problem not Our Problem. So then, he complained loudly that the CFA had not done their job properly and we ought to compensate him for the loss of his antique Harley-Davidson which had been inside the shed and was now underneath the smoking rubble. When no one showed any interest, he complained loudly about the sort of people the CFA had working for them. Cretins. Look at them. Some of them couldn't even tie their own shoelaces. I told him that if he spoke about my son like that again, I'd drop him on his arse as soon as look at him. He did not respond, other than with the closure of his jaw. The film crew then stowed their cameras, tents and other gear into the vans and drove in convoy back up to the swishy Hydro Majestic hotel on the cliff top, leaving us to mop up any spot fires, although after Livingstone's tirade no one was very enthusiastic. We all wanted to go home to bed.

The next morning, not too early, Barry and I were back, wandering through the carnage of the landscape. Tendrils of smoke drifted in the air. It was like a bomb—well, yes, I suppose a bomb had hit it. It was surreal, like—well, yes, like being in a movie. I'm not saying this right. Barry was horrified; charred and blackened patches of earth, trees uprooted and flung aside, fences ruined, charcoal scars, the bush scorched to ash. On neighbouring properties, horses and sheep trembled up against the most distant gates. Cows did not come in for milking. It looked—well, yes, like a war zone, which I guess was what the producers were after. Veris-(I looked this up)-imilitude. It was very lifelike. The sad bit was—all that aftermath and not a camera in sight.

While Livingstone was busy mourning the loss of his shed and composing letters of complaint, Barry found a splintered, devastated tree, laid flat like a twisted civilian. In the soft light of day, it was hard to see how Livingstone's bottom paddock could even remotely resemble a desert filled with terrorists. More full of nervous kangaroos with the squitters than terrorists. A giant angophora had been felled by one of the blasts. Barry walked its length. I followed slowly, extinguishing coals and hot spots underneath with a burst of foam. I watched him peel a strip of torn bark from the trunk. Angophora sap is red, so it looked like he was peeling back flesh from a human wound. Under the bark was a small hollow where a dozen little bats huddled together in the smoke and steam. They shifted their wings as if shielding their faces from the light. Barry made some soft noises and nudged them with his finger. As we watched they flapped their leathery wings and rose together in a spiral, like stars around a cartoon character's head. Barry watched them, willing them upwards, his neck craned back.