I tell you, I’ve taken more time choosing an item on a menu than I took making the decision to end my father’s life. And as someone who has always battled the pernicious vice of indecision- beginning the moment my mother dangled the raw nipples of two milk-filled tits in my face and said, “Choose one”- I found that having suddenly made a quick choice, however dreadful, gave me a supremely satisfying sense of empowerment.
In the kitchen I grabbed the carving knife. It smelled of onions. Through a crack in the door, I could see my parents struggling. They were really going for it. He’d hit my mother before many times, always late at night, in the privacy of their bedroom, but not since she’d told him she had cancer. My mother was clawing at him as best as she could in her half-dead state, and in return he gave her such a backhander, she fell to the floor in a crumpled heap.
My strength flowing, I burst through the door unsteadily but kept a clean, tight grip on the knife handle. They saw me- first my mother, then my father- but paid no attention to the knife in my hands. I might just as well have been holding a feather, they simply were so deep in their own private nightmare.
“Martin! Get out of here!” my mother wailed.
At the sight of me, my father’s face did something I’ve never seen a face do before. It contracted to half its normal size. He looked back at my mother, picked up a chair, and smashed it to pieces on the ground so the fragments shattered around her.
“Get away from her!” I yelled, my voice cracking and wobbling at the same time.
“Martin…” he said in a strange voice.
My mother was sobbing hysterically.
“I said get away!” I repeated.
Then he said, in a voice like a grenade, “Your fucking crazy mother has been putting rat poison in your food!”
I stood there like a wall.
“It was you,” I said.
He just shook his head sadly.
I turned, confused, to my mother, whose face was partially covered by her hand. Her eyes streamed with tears; her body heaved with sobs. Immediately I knew it was true.
“Why?” my father yelled, punching the wall next to her. She screamed. He looked at me with tenderness and confusion and sobbed, “Martin, why?”
My mother was shivering. Her free hand clutched a copy of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas. That was the next book she’d planned on reading to me. “So she could look after me,” I said, almost inaudibly.
He looked at me blankly. He didn’t get it. He didn’t get it at all.
“I’m sorry, son,” he said, in the first display of love he’d ever shown me.
It was all too much. I stumbled through the kitchen and down the hall and, grabbing my suitcase, burst through the front door.
If I’d been in any kind of reasonable state at all, I would’ve immediately noticed something wrong in the world around me. I walked in a daze, feeling the heat of the day on my face. I walked and walked, fast, as if carried by a strong current. My thoughts broke in half, then replicated- anger dividing into horror and rage, then again into pity and disgust, and so on. All the time I kept walking, feeling stronger and stronger with every step. I walked to the top of Farmer’s Hill.
Then I saw it.
The sky.
Fat cones of dense smoke spiraled into thin trails. Layers of hazy orange overlapping gray fingers stretching out from the horizon.
Then I felt it. The heat. I winced. The land was on fire!
A bushfire!
A big one!
Standing on top of the hill, I saw another in a quick series of searing images that I knew at once would never leave my mind. I saw the fire split. One half raced toward my parents’ house, the other to the prison.
I don’t know what possessed me as I watched that fire encircle my town- but I became convinced that it was within my power to rescue at least part of my family. I knew that I probably couldn’t help Terry, and that he die violently and unpleasantly in the prison my father helped build just so cleanly rounded off the issue, my choice was clear. I would go and try to save my mother, even though she had just tried to kill me, and my father, even though he had not.
The bushfire season had started early that year. Soaring temperatures and strong winds saw to it that small fires had sprung up along the periphery of northwestern New South Wales throughout the summer. It takes only one sudden gust of searing wind to fan the isolated fires, pushing them rapidly into raging uncontrollable infernos. That’s how it always happens. The Fire had some shifty strategies up its flaming sleeve: It threw embers into the air. The embers were then couriered by winds to a destination a few miles ahead, with the intention of starting fresh fires, so by the time the main Fire caught up, its child was already raging and taking lives. The Fire was no dummy. It evolved like crazy.
Smoke crept over the town in an opaque cloud. I ran toward my parents’ house, passing fallen trees, poles, and power lines. Flames crept along both sides of the road. Smoke licked my face. Visibility was zero. I didn’t slow down.
The fallen trees made the road impassable. I took a path through the bush. I couldn’t see the sky; a thick curtain of smoke had been drawn over it. All around me was a sound, a crackle, like someone was jumping on old newspapers. Burning debris blew across the tops of trees. It was impossible to know which way to go. I went on anyway until I heard a voice call out, “Stop!”
I stopped. Where was the voice coming from? It was hard to tell if it was from far away or inside my own head.
“Go left,” the voice said. “Left!”
Normally, demanding voices who don’t introduce themselves would have had me go the other way, but I felt this voice had my best interests at heart. Terry was dead, I just knew it, and the voice was his, his last words to me on his way to the other world.
I went left, and as I did, I saw the right-hand path consumed by flames.
Around the next bend I came across a group of men shooting water into the trees. They held swollen wild pythons that jutted from the bellies of two firetrucks and wore wet rags over their mouths. I wanted one. Then I thought: There’s almost no situation you can get yourself into when you don’t want what the other guy has.
“Martin!” a voice called.
“Don’t go that way!” another shouted.
“My mum and dad are in there!” I shouted back, and as I ran on, I thought I heard someone call out, “Say hello for me!”
I saw the fire jumping a dry creek bed. I passed the flaming carcass of a sheep. I had to slow down. The smoke had thickened to a gray wall; it was suddenly impossible to tell where the flames were. My lungs seared. I knew if I didn’t get a whiff of air soon, this was the end. I gagged and vomited smoke. There were carrots in it.
When I reached my street, a jagged wall of flame blocked the entrance. Through it I could make out a group of people standing on the other side. The wall of fire stood like fortress gates. I squinted against the intense glare as yellow-black smoke billowed over the people.
“Have you seen my parents?” I shouted.
“Who are you?”
“Martin Dean!”
“Marty!” I thought I heard my mother’s voice. It was hard to tell. The fire swallowed words. Then the air grew very still.
“The wind!” someone screamed. They froze. They were all waiting to see which direction the fire would run next. A flame whirling up behind them, standing tall, was ready to pounce. I felt like a man about to be guillotined hoping that his head could be stuck back on later. A hot breeze touched my face.