‘It was a sheep. In the neck. I finished her off.’ He cocked the gun, tipped the cartridges out into his hand and pocketed them like he’d done it before.
28
I keep my back to the fire and walk slowly. It races along the edge of town. The door of the post office is open and no one’s inside. At the pub they have thought to close their doors; I can imagine someone getting in there and drinking the barrels dry while the world burns around them. The smell is of barbecue and eucalyptus and the sound is a roar that will crush everything.
The main street is empty apart from smoke, coddled so thick that I can’t see to the end where the road forks away from the fish shop and up towards home. A pademelon hops out from behind a parked car and we look at each other. Her ears are flat to her head, her eyes beady and bright. She sneezes and whips back underneath the car. There come more and more animals — a wallaby, sheltering from hot ashes in the bakery’s doorway, snakes whip into the road to collect in the gutter. A goanna stands still, watches me go by. Behind the shops at the end of town I can see the fire has made its way round, and looking back down the main street from where I’ve come, a kangaroo jumps, panicked, across the road away from a spot-fire that’s started up there, on the bitumen where nothing should burn. There’s a roar in the air. People talk about the roar a shark makes when it comes for you, the monster noise of it, hungry for your flesh and bones.
By the time I reach home, my arms are black with soot and my eyes are running. There’s a metal button on my shorts which burns into my thigh, and my plastic wristwatch has become soft. There is no one home. Someone has had the hose on and doused the dead grass at the front of the house, and sprayed the walls. The hose still runs. I sit on the front steps and ash is falling all around. Spot-fires, jumping devils, break away from the central roar. This is my home, I think, this is where nothing can get me. I’m not breathing air any more and so I go inside. Once the fly-screen has banged shut, my pulse starts to race. I feel aware for the first time of what is happening. I try to remember the fire classes at school, and I get the towels and sheets out of the cupboard that Mum folds them into, plug and run the bath and throw them in. Downstairs I turn on the kitchen tap, start to fill up the mop bucket, and then I collect the wet towels from the bath, and stuff them under the front door. The sheets I hang over the windows, and I keep one to wrap myself in. The water has stopped running into the mop bucket, there’s just a soft trickle now, so that’s it, that’s my water. While I’m thinking, a tree falls nearby, and it sounds like something is smashing its way through the bush towards me.
I open the freezer and there are two bags of ice in there for Mum’s daiquiris, and some block coolers for picnics. I take them out but I’m not sure what to do with them. I move the towel from underneath the front door and open it, thinking I will scatter the ice over the veranda, but outside everything is black, like the dead part of the night. Above me, where there should be sky, I see a redness and the ice in my arms starts to melt, like I’m holding it under a hot tap. My eyes hurt, and I smell burning hair so I close the door and stuff the towel back under it, put the melting ice back in the freezer and go to the triplets’ room with the mop bucket which is only half filled. Their room has a small window that opens onto the roof and has been nailed shut to stop them going out there and falling off. I can already see embers settling and taking hold on the roof and I send Cleve’s Magic 8 Ball through the window and jab away the worst of the shards with a plastic gun. I can feel the air getting sucked out of the room, and I tip the bucket of water onto the roof, which gets the embers I can see, but there’s the other side, and I can’t get to that. It’ll have to fend for itself, because it’s too hot now to do anything about it. Smoke pours in through the broken window, and I close the bedroom door and use the sheet I’d been saving for myself to stuff under it. Downstairs, another window has smashed and I can see the lace curtain starting to catch. I clap it between two ice packs and there’s a hiss like a dying snake. The oil in the deep-fat fryer is heating up on its own and the place smells more than ever like my home. The house starts to shake, it’s like being dunked under by a big wave, the mugs on the sideboard rattle and a framed photograph of my parents taken in the back yard falls off the wall and the glass breaks. I walk upstairs and get into the bath, which is about a quarter full, and I close my eyes.
29
Lloyd gripped me around the waist and helped me up, and just as I was about to complain that I could do it myself, I felt that I couldn’t.
‘The body,’ I said.
‘I’ll sort it.’
I sat in the kitchen drinking hot water and listened to the sounds of him with the wheelbarrow, into the field, out again. Dog curled himself around my feet and shook and I fondled his ears.
‘Sorry, love,’ I said to him quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’
Lloyd came back in.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I want to bring the sheep inside.’
‘In where?’ he said, sitting carefully down opposite me — I wondered if he had given himself a bad back.
‘In here. Just for now, until we find it.’
‘In here — in your house?’
‘Yes — just until we find the thing. It’s getting bolder.’
Lloyd looked at me for a long time.
‘This is your house,’ he said, ‘and those are your sheep. But I’m not going to let you do that.’
‘I’ve got to protect them somehow,’ I said, but even as I said it I felt like I wouldn’t win, that I wouldn’t be able to do it without him. I thought of the sheep I shot in the neck and put my head on the table. Dog rested his chin on my knee and Lloyd poured us both a whisky but I pushed mine away.
Something nested outside the window, and it sang loudly, Chip, chjjjj, chewk, jaay and jaay-jaay, tool-ool, tweedle-dee, chi-chuwee. It should have been me that finished her, she should have died thinking it was all going to be fine. Tool-ool, tweedle-dee, chi-chuwee. I wondered if the other ewes knew it was me.
‘Coffee then?’ Lloyd said.
He made a pot and took it to the kitchen table and there was a small spillage, just a splash. He got two mugs. He placed the sugar on the table with a spoon and sat down.
‘Do you think I’m mad?’ I asked. The question wasn’t answered, instead Lloyd stretched over and put his hand over mine for a moment. Then he put three spoonfuls of sugar in a mug and poured coffee into it, stirred and passed it to me. I had to hold on to it with both hands because of the shake in my arms.
‘Where’s the lamb?’ I asked, looking at the empty dog bed by the stove. We both listened but there was no other sound from the house.
30
I’m stealing looks at Denver Cobby, the half-Aboriginal kid from the year above. He is outside the gates, smoking and talking with another boy. He doesn’t care that anyone can see him, and because of that the teachers don’t ever hassle him. He’s that cool. I’m pretending to be really into the pebble I’m thumbing, like it’s an interesting one or a fossil or something, when Hannah and Nerrida come up to me and start going on.
‘How’s it going, homo?’ Nerrida asks, and I don’t look up. They might go away if I ignore them.
‘Hey!’ Hannah barks. ‘We’re talking to you.’ And I pretend that I’ve found something far more interesting than them on my stone. Hannah flicks her hair over to the other side of her head. ‘Rude bitch,’ she says. ‘Your sister’s stuck up too — but at least she’s fuckin’ got a pair of balls.’