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Fire

There are men she likes the look of and men she gets used to, mostly. Some men are full-on pretty boys and other men are onto her with their personality and she can hardly, later, recall their faces. Annoying, the vagaries of attraction. Jasmin knows embar­rassingly soon what she likes in this man, he’s as close to Lady Chatterley’s Lover as an Aussie bloke can be after a day’s work of shifting sand and stone. Though she’s never admired the foxy DH Lawrence she’s known she might one day take on a Lawrentian hairy man. The writer had a thing about his mother and about class, nevertheless, this man is no fiction. He is very oi oi oi, but classy in his own way.

He is a man who looks like a man used to look like. Shoulders lumpy from real work and arms muscular and hairy and scuffed, to be honest, not decorated with neat little muscles and waxed skin. No fashionable tatts that she can see. After ten years of a University life she is accustomed to seeing long-necks and nerds in the corridors, student eggheads and emos, and lecturers pausing in front of the white-board to stand side-on so the students can notice the mood, the tight trousers.

Angus is a landscape designer, and his sandy skin is believably of the earth, and he stands upright in his outside body and his outside mind. He designs and constructs lakes and ponds for council parks and then he builds them too. He even grins with his muscles. This is a man who lifts and carries stones.

At university Jasmin’s kind of day does its lifting firmly but abstractly in a fixed firmament of alliterative and tautological shifts. Heavy. Hers is an inside mind. She knows what a foggy thing the mind is and how she and her colleagues spend years of effort pretending to a kind of precision, but if the mind really was so precise it would veer off into fright at the absolute knowledge of realities like impending death. So, her life remains safe and rational most of the time.

She is standing at the outer of a party in the fire-blackened hills. Men, women, some kids. Meeting where the bushfires have a year earlier taken lives, where the evidence of destruction is still black around them in the branchless trees and charred fences. Crisp black patterning in the surface of wood. Earlier, as she drove into the district she had been shocked and moved by the silent signs of gravitas. But increasingly now on the darkened spindles of trees − dramatically green foliage.

Closer, there is more emotional hugging than any party she has seen: and a lot of crying. There are survivors here one year on from the fires and their tears come through for the loss, the un-changing loss, that most of them have and will keep. She had not realised this was in fact a memorial service done the Australian way – secular – as an anniversay gathering, with some guests having lost family or friends, others animals, no less beloved, and property; nearly all have lost property or know those who have.

Angus knows this awareness is the fire-shadow, how it has fallen heavily over all of the locals. Respect for people’s trauma is para­mount. So there is also quite a lot of booze, casseroles and vivid salads in bowls, but no barbecue – it would be unthinkable – so much sad reason for undemonstrative people to hug and cry and have some time out in this company, and to eat and drink… Their shocking dreams cannot live here and never will; they all know the others at night dream of flames and the terrible smell of all manner of things burning.

Angus is telling her about the news channels roaming the area for memories of the trauma. How intrusive they are.

In some ways it’s only right, he says, showing compassion to balance the horror they keep referring to. But it can be bloody ghoulish having them driving around looking for people to inter­view. Horror isn’t a topic, it’s an experience.

He stops and waves, no, he shakes his hands a bit more.

I think trauma is… something like a hologram in the nervous system.

This idea, of holograms, has only just come to him, and he is pleased with it regardless of the gravity behind its use. Jasmin sees his style is to think aloud; even if he is a hands-on working type this man is talking holograms?

Angus nods to his own thoughts.

For most people it’s something you can’t see, but they… he indicates the guests at this party… they can see it alright. In each other. And in their own minds.

They both look back towards the main group of people.

Sorry, he says to her, I should lighten up a bit. Here we all are – knowing very little about not very much.

And so Jasmin remembers something.

Did you know there’s a gang of cosmologists who believe we are not even here? That all of us are holograms. We are being projected from two-dimensional pixels on the furtherest wall of the universe.

Pixels? You mean we’re like… bits of graffiti stuck onto a wall? And not just any wall but the last wall in existence? Jesus, how whacky. And I thought I worked too hard.

And he grins at his joke. No, he is no Lawrentian. But she has the last line:

What they don’t say… is what’s on the other side of the wall.

Ha!

His face reddens with welcome laughter. He is ruddy. But some fraction of his ruddiness has previously been bottled. He has been drinking. But, he is sad, he tells her, and no, he is not a local. He’s from South Australia, arrived a few years ago. Unlike the others he does not expect or even want the occasion to cover him, to wear a fire suit of No and Only Us for strangers. Like war suits, for those who have been in wars, so fire suits can be: don’t talk to the others, they won’t understand. And it is true. They won’t.

When he is silent he has a habit of inspecting his roughened hands, and of scraping the edge of one thumbnail against the other. Every so often one of his out-breaths comes louder. Sometimes he thinks he is a dope. Yet he seems self-reliant, and calm. Something in him has been burnt, all the same.

Jasmin sees this. She sees as a profession. Semiotics: she is all eyes and thought. But she is empathetic, not just analytical. She makes eye contact with him and holds it, so it’s personal. His blue eyes. The burn she knows she sees if not how she sees. She believes his strange words of loss, the semiotic not on the outer, as she is used to, but inside, in the reach of intuition. She is the real stranger here, not him. She has known students for whom even Twitter cannot quash the grief. For many others, yes, oh yes, so totally is Gen Y putting bad news out of their busy minds (Whatever, she asked me, and I’m like: I’m real hot tonight for Jason. He’s such an idiot ha ha. The girl I’m after tonight I want to get her pissed and then… LOL). She knows how many other people in the fire fronts crouched and lay down in tears and burnt. How survivors had no choice but to return, saw past the house in brick-pile and ash, to their loved ones in white frames of bone.

Angus. His name sounds like a stone, she can hear in it Ingres, Angst, Angastura, Anxious… Anger? Or, here, in the fire-shadow, as he puts it, saying Angus she hears Sadness.

He makes a confession. When he told her he worked in land­scape design that was his party version: his actual job carries more stubborn weight – landscaping, gardening – and way less kudos. He designs public places with lawns and waterways. He moves mountains, and then he builds them up again.

He says his profession has added to the surface tension of the world: heavy cities, and now massive landscape constructions that might sometime (yes, he has dreamt it) plunge below the earth’s surface when a critical mass occurs. Think of it: so much concrete and stone in one place. Jasmin does. He has blue eyes. He is responsible for earthquakes?

He was apprenticed years earlier with dusty carpenters and holds as a precious memory the elegant wooden frames of houses before they are covered over with tiles or tin. He appreciated the pine wall-frames and the window battens and later the rafters, the way buildings waited, open to sunlight like something made for sun worship, their pinewood skeletons a kind of poetry of rafters.

Until bloody roof tilers clamber over a house and darkness spreads within the rooms below. The slab goes slug-cold in winter.

Look at Stan’s house, he says, pointing to the walls. This is one good thing borne of adversity. Which I…

He thinks better of saying it. Instead he refers to the strange metal framework of the external walls. How the lawn is a generic lawn but the house is clasped in unconventional metal frames. The outside walls are steel-banded like coopers’ bands around a wine barrel, but square, not hooped. Jasmin has been wondering when to ask someone about this. It’s not something she has ever seen before. Why then? she asks him.

It stops the walls exploding outwards, he says. It’s a unique idea which I… Well, I designed it for Stan. He built it.

When she frowns, disbelieving, he tells her: really, he’s not making it up. He has, he insists, no qualifications whatsoever, just a lot of nerve. But he knows about fires. And what happens to houses.

A woman approaches them and tops up their glasses. Angus smiles and she says something to him Jasmin doesn’t quite hear. Then he laughs, the house story apparently forgotten.

Well, it must be damn good wine he’s drinking. She in turn sees him like his rafters, standing above the roofline, an image of frames and happy angles. But he is up and down; there is something lost about him. He too seems banded, like the walls. Even his conversation has bands around it. But it has bright blue eyes. Light among the darkness of the mood and the eerie burnt-out landscape.

Glancing, warily perhaps, when she is looking away, Angus sees she has a sensual face and dark eyes. She has visible cheek-bones, her lips hold a generous and now, he guesses, a wry smile for those close to her. He can’t see (he will later realise) that the woman is always worrying over books and complex meetings with her students at University. Her academic face.

As they continue talking Angus’s guard is relaxing into unex­pected anecdotes she tells and he laughs at, and in her eye contact, and at the way she refers to Melbourne as a design city, and he likes that. Design. Not his kind of design, more her kind with the de and the sign parted with a hyphen. Designate. As a place of signs. Signs? Is that what she does, something to do with signs, he asks her. Well, she excuses herself, she is a semiologist. She lets him get away with What, a seismologist? after his images of stones and earth­quakes. (Once, at a performance of Coriolanus, she heard a dragged-along bloke say to his girlfriend, this Cornelius had better be good.)

Where has everybody else been? There were people hugging their awful secret. There were a few people yelling. There are always a few people yelling.

I hate parties, he groans.

Everybody hates parties, she says, I mean everyone says they hate parties.

Teasing him maybe – yet here they both are.

Not today, he adds. Today is an exception. This, he means to say, is based on strong feelings. Remembering the destruction and the need to move on. But he means her. Anyway, he likes the rush of social drinking, the excitement of it beats the hell out of a glass of something in silence at home. Searching too hard for the flavour of the wine. This is his confession of being single. And philosophical.

Except when driving home is too far and… though not today, I live close by, just down the road, he adds. He gazes across at the troubled pastures in the opposite paddocks, at the three brown horses stationary after their earlier galloping. The horses may or may not be happy but people at the party seeing the horses are happy to see them.

After a fire you see all the usual devastation, the kind that TV cameras can show, but there are odder things that show up, like skulls of kangaroos and things you thought lost which are suddenly visible. Old bikes, wheels, anything metallic really. Glass. Though sometimes glass is simply a blob with charcoally stuff solidified into it. Once, I was walking through burnt out bush and found the skeleton of a snake. It was white and the bones were still intact, which is remarkable because they are very fine bones. It looked like a metre-long comb of some kind.

She smiles and keeps eye contact with him, the newly arriving silence of eye contact. And says nothing.

It seems reasonable, he tells her, that so many locals still experience fear, and enough anxiety for sudden panic. No, not a panic-attack, that’s media-speak, but a state of panic, feelings that are the same as panic, or accompany panic, but do not rush about like someone panicking. Dread of a kind.

She is humbled by the gravity of what he is saying. And the plain-ness of his clothing, his calf-length shorts over tanned legs, his sandals - and his strikingly pale feet. A man who works outdoors?

He says he always wears boots, and laughs to be distracted from being, as he had been, stuck yet again in fire talk.

In fact I always wear safety boots. With all the years of outdoor work you might think my feet are hard but they’re not. They are probably as soft as yours.

She finds this surprisingly intimate.

My feet may not be as soft as you think, she says, smiling. I go barefoot whenever I can. I supervise my students barefoot, in my office, where no one knows or cares. In tutorials when it’s not too cold.

She is embarrassed; she has never said this to anyone before and as mild as it is, she feels now self-centred to confess it. She coughs.

And in good weather I run.

This he can guess. Her tights pay her a very shapely compliment.

They keep talking. They watch the kangaroos grazing across the paddocks below the house. Grey and plump at last, like card players in the shadows. It has taken this long for the grass to return and now it is green and lush from the ash and the potassium, the natural potash. Over in the valley it grows in patches beneath the trees that remain black and are scattered like crochets on the hillside.

After wandering off to get another drink, a bottle, Angus returns to see her in a glancing-over-the-shoulder conversation with a man in a checkered shirt.

He ambles closer as if wanting to stride but worried it will look like the striding male returns. She is smoking a cigarette.

You smoke? he says,

No, I don’t.

She looks at him.

I just borrowed one from a bloke over there. She smiles and shows her hands, palms up, as if to indicate she is not concealing anything, cigarettes included. She’s catching something in him. She is the hook and the fish of him is dragging. Old river cod. Perhaps it is nothing more than the awareness of her tight-fitting singlet. Opening his sometimes dour brain. Her singlet and the slim, neat shape of her words keep surprising him. Is he so obvious?

The other man smiles at Angus and says nothing. Then changes his mind and thrusts out his hand.

Mike, he announces.

Angus does the usual.

No, it is her voice. It is deep and confident and comes directly towards him like openness or friendship. Now she returns to telling him how her work involves teaching semiotics to dazed under­graduates and writing her own research on the languages and meaning, in other words, the way she can read public spaces (she reads public spaces?). In her lectures she uses the ideas of semiotic theorists but references her own hands-on research as often as possible. Anecdotally, that is.

She says all this to Angus, as if the other guy, Mike in the check shirt, isn’t there, and soon enough he isn’t.

They understand you? asks Angus.

I could throw boiled crayfish at them and they wouldn’t know the difference, she says. It’s like all teaching and learning – some of them understand.

She drops her cigarette and grinds it, twice, in the dirt. In this loaded fire-world and atmosphere it seems an odd thing to do. She bends and picks it up, looking around for something. Proof she isn’t a smoker.

Do you know Stan from long ago or more recently? he asks.

Um, I met him through Susan, a Uni friend of mine who lives in the foot-hills not far from here. I say she is half city, half hilly. On the border. Being a literary person, she says she is marginalia.

She sounds like jam.

She left before you arrived and I am just about to go, too.

Oh. Hang on. You can’t go now. Tell me about this lecturing stuff you do. I’ve hardly ever spoken in public, or in front of a crowded room. They say it’s way up on the stress-list, one of the things people most fear doing. People crap themselves over it.

Not me, mate.

No?

Never! As soon as I get started… and that’s the hard bit… I love it. No, my big problem is stopping. When the hour is up and the next lecturer is scowling at me from the doorway!

I bet you smile sweetly and have the last word – or sentence.

Angus feels a pleasure quite free of the regret each over-zealous response brings on when a man is trying too hard to impress, to see which words might work. He imagines sitting in her lectures, eyes closed, listening as she speaks with such deep pleasure about… crayfish? He has always imagined female academics as a very indoor species dressed in men’s shirts, and with buttons. He hates buttons.

Are you following any of this? She is staring at him, a frown just about tangling in her hair.

I am, I’m in there with you and the students and the crayfish and… your… forthcoming book?

She grins. Looks down at the ridiculous cigarette butt.

Yeah, my book. Some people think were are all nerdy, if not nutty. You know, I heard a nervous first-time lecturer refer to himself as part of acadamia.

So, nutty then?

When she laughs he feels her energy swoosh towards him. Nothing buttoned about her.

While she is not pretty, striking perhaps, strong he thinks again, it is her voice that keeps surprising him. Regardless of his gabbling (whenever it is his turn for gabbling) he wants to stay silent. Silent, as many of his days are, working alone, outside.

He confesses that he knows nothing whatsoever about pedagogy and what was it, poetics? and the ways texts, as she called them, made meaning? None of it. And reading public design? It made sense not as a text but as a tactic. Of? Semiotics?

Well, of course you won’t know about such things, she replies, and gently claps her hands. I wouldn’t expect you to.

He is taken aback. What has she clapped for?

Even she can’t tell anymore. She had begun her study in diagnostics, she tells him, in medical science, and how symptoms operate as a language… and the odd vice versa effect of this… but then she sort of sidestepped into signs more generally, just plain old semiology.

You went from the inside to the outside, he suggests.

She hadn’t thought of it like that.

Just don’t say anything about anything not being rocket science, he adds. Or hipsters.

Hipsters! We have lots of them.

Then she laughs unexpectedly, knocks her dark glasses up and the wings tangle in her hair. His grin turns practical and he reaches forward, standing close in front of her, and carefully disentangles a slim metal wing and its sharp hinge from her brown hair. Taking longer, it seems to them both, than is strictly necessary.

Stay for a while, he says.

The hills are turning lyrical, she thinks, more pastoral poetry than romantic. More Czerny than Beethoven. The wine is getting to her too. Susan’s place is close enough.

On the slope below them are fifteen or so vehicles, more than the usual proportion of 4WDs, and all of them silver except for one red, one black.

Which is your vehicle? she asks Angus, gesturing to the line-up.

The silver one.

Ha ha. Mine is the silver one.

Alright, then. The red one. Actually, mine is the red one.

Behind her in its metal frames the house sits there like a lift destined for the upper air, a box built into the side of a valley facing east, so the late light shines through the re-growing eucalypts and bleached grasses and into the dark native scrub roughening the valley opposite.

Angus!

They look up to see Stan leaning over the verandah with a glass in his hand. He grins as if pleased beyond measure and raises his glass in salute. Angus responds with the same.

Jasmin! This time Stan ruts up against the verandah railing and laughs again before turning away and disappearing.

Is he always like that?

Oh yes.

Stan, their host, another tall, sandy-haired man like Angus, but thinner, and noisier. He is known to be clever and very generous and he has taken endless trouble in times of trouble to help many people in the hills community. He is a prominent local member of the Greens. Compassion has not made him any more subtle.

Angus explains how he lost his own two-level house in the South Australian bushfires. Burnt to a ruin, the lower rooms left standing but the roof gone, the rafters black and distorted. It had blown its brains out. He was lucky to be here talking about it, given his panicked escape late in the fire-path. Not his idea. Not his house design either, just a house he’d purchased with his ex-wife in a difficult time, her choice and his… for going along with it.

Do you have a partner? he asks her.

Urh, yes. Well, I think so.

She ‘thinks’ of Richard, far away on his travels overseas and, like the Universe, disappearing towards that wall of pixels. Perhaps right through it.

She can’t read Angus’ reaction, or his lack of one. To be fair, nor can he.

But he’s in the UK at the moment. He’s a bit of a prick, if you want to know. He’s an academic too.

He raises his eyebrows (he wants to go huh and he hears it, silenced).

Right, he says, after a pause. Anyway, though I never lost friends to it, my house was lost in a bushfire, so I’m part of this lot. Except from another time and place. The experience is the same, regardless.

His face is grave again. He is going to add something but doesn’t, or perhaps he can’t. It is slight and slow and yet she catches some­thing in this slowness. And she remembers this afterwards.

Now Angus has re-built the SA house to make it as fire-proof as possible. Because he couldn’t sell a conventional house he’d never wanted, to pay for the divorce settlement he’d never wanted, to someone who most likely wouldn’t want a house in a fire zone. Unless it was safe. Crazy.

How safe is safe? she asks.

It’s hard to test an experiment like that, to test it with real danger, and he smiles at her, the opposite of her own work in research, housed in the safe world of ideas.

He has experimented. There is a lot going on now, where before there was nothing. So when Stan contacted him from Victoria to ask for help in designing his own ‘fire-proofed’ house, it seemed an extra-ordinary deliverance.

Angus takes her arm, gently, to direct her around to the side of the house. He helps her clamber up against the rear walls then explains how they began. How without taking more than a wink and a tinnie from the local experts, he and Stan had set about finding slow but beautiful fire and river-coloured bricks then mortaring them into double-brick walls with brick and block interior walls. Then, their big trick, insetting one course of bricks and wrapping the outside walls with steel bands, flush. And inside too, but hidden from view within the wall cavity. Surrounded by the most intense heat these walls should never burst open, nor implode. Inside, the vaulted ceiling is made of fire-proofed wood, again, banded with steel so the roof can never blow open like his own insanely blown-open house. No eaves to catch the embers. No maintenance either. And windows with shutters.

We could be in Italy! he says, a bit pissed now, opening his arms like a tenor cracking on a high note.

He slips on the crumbling clay surface and skids away from her and down the slope like a kid, or a long man in the luge. It takes more than wind out of him. She is laughing as she looks down. The man-genius reduced to stumbling legs. His left trouser leg is streaked reddy-brown from the clay. And his elbows.

Jasmin lowers herself towards him and gently brushes the clay from his arms. He sees her trying her best to hold back laughter and has to nod, and nod.

I’m as dusty as an old book.

Or an old bottle of wine?

You know, you should use your semiotics to study old books. Maybe even wine.

He might almost be lecturing. He is so innocent. But she is studying him.

People do, Angus. Books, and yes, even labels, on wine or on anything. That’s why I don’t. I look at… well, you know, I told you. Public things.

I think I’m getting the hang of it, he says.

More quietly than before, he then explains the deep incision they cut into the clay of the slope then reinforced with concrete, so it looks like a kind of acoustic shell. How they tucked the house in under it: the earth shape diverts the flames and the heat-wave up and over the specially-clad roof. The house is made part of the slope, stretching east. On the south west side of the cliff the soil is re-grown with prostrate ground-covers, native, of course, growing with minimal water through summer. Further back are the trees along the gravel access road and the public roadside.

The fires usually come over this way, he says, the big one did. They roar and roll over the house like a deafening wave of surf that crashes… then passes, you have to hope, leaving the house safe in its wake.

Hands busy with shapes and shoulders rolling Angus is performing again, this time a Marcel Marceu show of fire and design, making wide-arm curves and shell shapes as if describing the Opera House in a terrible wind.

By chance, he tells her, a real test arrived. They wouldn’t have wished it on anyone. And it did, the bushfire swelled over the house – and nothing happened. There are black charring-marks on the corners and gnawings into the wall plates under the roof where eaves would have been and these and other things Angus shows her, a signature of the fires.

He tells her very quietly, this building is one of the survivors.

Not to be overheard, she suddenly realises. That he and Stan had felt triumphant, their house had survived, but then felt a more compromised elation. Many houses with people inside them were not standing after the fireballs passed. There had been broken outer walls and lone chimneys and heat-bleached tiles on the floors and nothing else. Exploded house-frames. Metal roof-iron whacked out of shape by thousand degree heat, the fiery caul which went over everything as the people who waited, the people who stayed, as it was called, become nothing more than ash.

The evening is warm and windless on their side of the hill but the hours are adding up just as the guests are adding the numbers of drinks and subtracting the hours, knowing the equation was reducing their chances of staying for as long as possible and still driving home safely, that is without being stopped and breathalysed out on the highway.

None of this Underbelly drama, no big music. Just a cop sitting there under a tree, seatbelt still on, chomping through a packet of crisps like a man waiting for the last tick in his numbers book.

Angus has just gone off to talk with Stan and the two of them are leaning on the verandah posts staring in a comfortable old friends manner out across the valley where darkness is filling in the eerie paleness between trees. When Jasmin walks up to say she is leaving and thanks and all that, Stan’s two children run to them, all excited and wordy and blonde. Their small faces look tender and flushed.

They are beautiful boys you have, Jasmin says, though she makes it sound off-hand. Then embarrassed.

Stan steps towards her and places his hands on her shoulders.

You can have some just like them, if you want. And he laughs, delighted, though she can tell it’s a line he might use whenever a woman gazes at the kids.

Um, no thanks, Stan, not tonight. Got some washing to do. Embarrassed for him this time.

My beautiful genes?

Naff off, she does say, they get it from their mother.

If you change your mind, Jasmin, adds Stan, I mean, there’s more where they came from.

And he even grabs his crotch. At least it isn’t hers.

Jasmin.

Angus nods his head to indicate she move away with him. After a pause, she does. They walk downstairs again, into the quiet, where Angus immediately apologises, obviously annoyed.

Bloody Stan, he grunts.

She says she is leaving anyway, not to worry about it. She has become used to men who don’t do sexual and sexist humour, men who changed their ways years earlier, or had never learnt. It is odd to encounter it again.

Angus has grabbed a torch as they leave but instead of walking down to the cars he veers around to the back of the house.

Um, Angus? My car’s this way…

I want to show you something.

Come on Angus. No, you’ve been talking about it all afternoon.

Not… everything.

Perhaps he is going to smooch. He guides her briskly almost pushing her outside then unexpectedly around to the back of the house.

There’s a thump from inside the house, a toilet flushing. When he turns to the house he points above them.

Because the house is darker we cut three skylights into the roof, see, there and there. Nice, aren’t they?

At night she can see three glows on the roof, as if each bleb of glass had dropped intact from his finger-tips, and one over by the flue stack, where they constructed fitted lids which can be closed like the large shutters, and swung open again, manually in case of power outages, from the glass windows on the east side of the house and verandah.

Thank you again, Angus. Have I missed anything?

For a while longer than is comfortable he stands frowning.

Well, never mind, he says. We can go inside now. No, you’re leaving aren’t you? I should leave too.

She puts her hand on his forearm.

Forget I said that.

They must been looking at each other for too long. It is more complex than hugs and silly music. In her mind it is wonderfully silly music.

Maybe you could go into business with this house design, she suggests. Patent your designs and get them through as government regulations. That might make another line of profession.

Nah, I could, I could. However… there are serious risks.

Financially?

Yeah, sure. The money side of it. Very. But I was really thinking about…

The designs?

People always argue about new initiatives, and danger, but we reckon this house is unique, and some locals have looked at it and agreed and we’ve let them copy it. So the risk… is their own.

Angus, you have to be more savvy. You lost a house and this is what you’ve gained. Sell it. The design, I mean.

I dunno why, you know, but I can’t.

She has no idea where this will lead, as he continues:

People say things like that, that after someone’s died, oh if they fix up the road, or the crossing, or the laws, then their death will have meant something…

I don’t follow. Are you saying the design…?

I’m saying it doesn’t make a death worthwhile. An essential im­prove­ment after a disaster means something, of course. I suppose… what I’m trying… it sounds like the thing you say if you want to say something deep. It ends up on the TV news, it just trivialises the death, or whatever the loss was. There are some very bad places for cliché.

He turns around and rubs the blackened edges of the house:

This house has real meaning, a serious design based on traumatic experience. Nothing less. And so, the cliche may even be true.

That’s because you earned it. The truth of it. You put your mind to the problem and here’s the result. You turned the cliché back into a truth again.

Suddenly his face seems lighter.

I couldn’t have said that, he adds.

Ah, but you made it. I’m just an academic so I can describe it.

It makes her smile, a kind of oddly skewed understanding going on.

No wonder he feels lightheaded. Then he stops and thinks about it, looks up into the canopy of trees on the eastern side of the road. But I am, he says, changing. I’ve lived out here but I work in the city. I thought I couldn’t live in town again. Now I think it’s about time to move, to see Melbourne close up. I’ve earned it the hard way, but still…

Still…?

Earned it. As you said.

Suddenly it seems the table of good tidings must lighten a little.

They hug each other and kiss goodbye, full lips kissing and arms around each other. Neither lets go. What a night. Maybe the emotions and even grief have effected her emotionally, even (could it be?) carnally. Jasmin is certain she can smell smoke all over him. Smoke in his hair and on his collar and smoky sensual heat rising from his throat and neck. She offers her lips for one last kiss, and then holds onto him for a few more moments. He is smoky and leonine. And silent. They are both tall and they stand like trees moved together by wind.