Читать книгу The One Winter Collection - Rebecca Winters - Страница 31

CHAPTER THREE

NOTE: IF A bush fire’s heading your way, maybe you should set the alarm.

He woke and filtered sunlight was streaming through the east windows. Filtered? That’d be smoke. It registered but only just, for Julie was in his arms, spooned against his body, naked, beautiful and sated with loving. It was hard to get his mind past that.

Past her.

But the world was edging in. The wind had risen. He could hear the sound of the gums outside creaking under the weight of it.

Wind. Smoke. Morning.

‘Jules?’

‘Mmm.’ She stirred, stretched like a kitten and the sensation of her naked skin against his had him wanting her all over again. He could...

He couldn’t. Wind. Smoke. Morning.

Somehow he hauled his watch from under his woman.

Eight-thirty.

Eight-thirty!

Get out by nine at the latest, the authorities had warned. Keep listening to emergency radio in case of updates.

Eight-thirty.

Somehow he managed to roll away and flick on the bedside radio. But even now, even realising what was at stake, he didn’t want to leave her.

The radio sounded into life. Nothing had changed in this house. He’d paid to have a housekeeper come in weekly. The clock was still set to the right time.

There was a book beside the radio. He’d been halfway through it when...when...

Maybe this house should burn, he thought, memories surging back. Maybe he wanted it to.

‘We should sell this house.’ She still sounded sleepy. The implication of sleeping in hadn’t sunk in yet, he thought, flicking through the channels to find the one devoted to emergency transmissions.

‘So why did you come back?’ he asked, abandoning the radio and turning back to her. The fire was important, but somehow...somehow he knew that words might be said now that could be said at no other time. Certainly not four years ago. Maybe not in the future either, when this house was sold or burned.

Maybe now...

‘The teddies,’ she told him, still sleepy. ‘The wall-hanging my mum made. I...wanted them.’

‘I was thinking of the fire engines.’

‘That’s appropriate.’ Amazingly, she was smiling.

He’d never thought he’d see this woman smile again.

And then he thought of those last words. The words that had hung between them for years.

‘Julie, it wasn’t our fault,’ he said and he watched her smile die.

‘I...’

‘I know. You said you killed them, but I believed it was me. That day I brought you home from hospital. You stood here and you said it was because you were sleeping and I said no, it wasn’t anyone’s fault, but there was such a big part of me that was blaming myself that I couldn’t go any further. It was like...I was dead. I couldn’t even speak. I’ve thought about it for four years. I’ve tried to write it down.’

‘I got your letters.’

‘You didn’t reply.’

‘I thought...the sooner you stopped writing the sooner you’d forget me. Get on with your life.’

‘You know the road collapsed,’ he said. ‘You know the lawyers told us we could sue. You know it was the storm the week before that eroded the bitumen.’

‘But that I was asleep...’

‘We should have stayed in the city that night. We shouldn’t have tried to bring the boys home. That’s the source of our greatest regret, but it shouldn’t be guilt. It put us in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve been back to the site. It was a blind curve. I rounded it and the road just wasn’t there.’

‘If we’d come up in broad daylight, when we were both alert...’

How often had he thought about this? How often had he screamed it to himself in the middle of troubled sleep?

He had to say it. He had to believe it.

‘Jules, I manoeuvred a blind bend first. A tight curve. I wasn’t speeding. I hit the brakes the moment I rounded the bend but the road was gone. If you’d been awake it wouldn’t have made one whit of difference. Julie, it’s not only me who’s saying this. It was the police, the paramedics, the guys from the accident assessment scene.’

‘But I can’t remember.’ It was a wail, and he tugged her back into his arms and thought it nearly killed him.

He was reassuring her but regardless of reason, the guilt was still there. What if...? What if, what if, what if?

Guilt had killed them both. Was killing them still.

He held her but her body had stiffened. The events of four years ago were right there. One night of passion couldn’t wash them away.

He couldn’t fix it. How could it be fixed, when two small beds lay empty in the room next door?

He kissed her on the lips, searching for an echo of the night before. She kissed him back but he could feel that she’d withdrawn.

Same dead Julie...

He turned again and went back to searching the radio channels. Finally he found the station he was looking for—the emergency channel.

‘...evacuation orders are in place now for Rowbethon, Carnarvon, Dewey’s Creek... Leave now. Forecast is for forty-six degrees, with winds up to seventy kilometres an hour, gusting to over a hundred. The fire fronts are merging...’

And all his attention was suddenly on the fire. It had to be. Rowbethon, Carnarvon, Dewey’s Creek... They were all south of Mount Bundoon.

The wind was coming from the north.

‘Fire is expected to impact on the Mount Bundoon area within the hour,’ the voice went on. ‘Bundoon Creek Bridge is closed. Anyone not evacuated, do not attempt it now. Repeat, do not attempt to evacuate. Roads are cut to the south. Fire is already impacting to the east. Implement your fire plans but, repeat, evacuation is no longer an option.’

‘We need to get to a refuge centre.’ Julie was sitting bolt upright, wide-eyed with horror.

‘There isn’t one this side of the creek.’ He glanced out of the window. ‘We’re not driving in this smoke. Besides, we have the bunker.’ Thank God, they had the bunker.

‘But...’

‘We can do this, Jules.’

And she settled, just like that. Same old Jules. In a crisis, there was no one he’d rather have by his side.

‘The fire plan,’ she said. ‘I have it.’

Of course she did. Julie was one of the most controlled people he knew. Efficient. Organised. A list-maker extraordinaire.

The moment they’d moved into this place she’d downloaded a Fire Authority Emergency Plan and made him go through it, step by step, making dot-points for every eventuality.

They were better off than most. Bush fire was always a risk in Australian summers and he’d thought about it carefully when he’d designed this place. The house had been built to withstand a furnace—though not an inferno. There’d been fires in Australia where even the most fireproof buildings had burned. But he’d designed the house with every precaution. The house was made of stone, with no garden close to the house. They had solar power, backup generators, underground water tanks, pumps and sprinkler systems. The tool shed doubled as a bunker and could be cleared in minutes, double-doored and built into earth. But still there was risk. He imagined everyone else in the gully would be well away by now and for good reason. Safe house or not, they were crazy to still be here.

But Julie wasn’t remonstrating. She was simply moving on.

‘I’ll close the shutters and tape the windows while you clear the yard,’ she said. Taping the windows was important. Heat could blast them inwards. Tape gave them an extra degree of strength and they wouldn’t shatter if they broke.

‘Wool clothes first, though,’ she said, hauling a pile out of her bottom bedroom drawer, along with torches, wool caps and water bottles. Also a small fire extinguisher. The drawer had been set up years ago for the contingency of waking to fire. Efficiency plus.

Was it possible to still love a woman for her plan-making?

‘I hope these extinguishers haven’t perished,’ she said, pulling a wool cap on her head and shoving her hair up into it. It was made of thick wool, way too big. ‘Ugh. What do you think?’

‘Cute.’

‘Oi, we’re not thinking cute.’ But her eyes smiled at him.

‘Hard not to. Woolly caps have always been a turn-on.’

‘And I love a man in flannels.’ She tossed him a shirt. ‘You’ve been working out.’

‘You noticed?’

‘I noticed all night.’ She even managed a grin. ‘But it’s time to stop noticing. Cover that six-pack, boy.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ But he’d fielded the shirt while he was checking the fire map app on his phone, and what he saw made any thought of smiling back impossible.

She saw his face, grabbed the phone and her eyes widened. ‘Rob...’ And, for the first time, he saw fear. ‘Oh, my...Rob, it’s all around us. With this wind...’

‘We can do this,’ he said. ‘We have the bunker.’ His hands gripped her shoulders. Steadied her. ‘Julie, you came up here for the teddies and the wall-hanging. Anything else?’

‘Their...clothes. At least...at least some. And...’

She faltered, but he knew what she wanted to say. Their smell. Their presence. The last place they’d been.

He might not be able to save that for her, but he’d sure as hell try.

‘And their fire engines,’ he added, reverting, with difficulty, to the practical. ‘Let’s make that priority one. Hopefully, the pits are still clear.’

The pits were a fallback position, as well as the bunker. They’d built this house with love, but with clear acceptance that the Australian bush was designed to burn. Many native trees didn’t regenerate without fire to crack their seeds. Fire was natural, and over generations even inevitable, so if you lived in the bush you hoped for the best and prepared for the worst. Accordingly, they’d built with care, insured the house to the hilt and didn’t keep precious things here.

Except the memories of their boys. How did you keep something like that safe? How did you keep memories in fire pits?

They’d do their best. The pits were a series of holes behind the house, fenced off but easily accessed. Dirt dug from them was still heaped beside them, a method used by those who’d lived in the bush for generations. If you wanted to keep something safe, you buried it: put belongings inside watertight cases; put the cases in the pit; piled the dirt on top.

‘Get that shirt on,’ Julie growled, moving on with the efficiency she’d been born with. She cast a long regretful look at Rob’s six-pack and then sighed and hauled on her sensible pants. ‘Moving on... We knew we’d have to, Rob, and now’s the time. Clearing the yard’s the biggie. Let’s go.’

* * *

The moment they walked out of the house they knew they were in desperate trouble. The heat took their breath away. It hurt to breathe.

The wind was frightening. It was full of dry leaf litter, blasting against their faces—a portent of things to come. If these leaves were filled with fire... She felt fear deep in her gut. The maps she’d just seen were explicit. This place was going to burn.

She wanted to bury her face in Rob’s shoulder and block this out. She wanted to forget, like last night, amazingly, had let her forget.

But last night was last night. Over.

Concentrate on the list. On her dot-points.

‘Windows, pits, shovel, go,’ Rob said and seized her firmly by the shoulders and kissed her, hard and fast. Making a mockery of her determination that last night was over. ‘We can do this, Jules. You’ve put a lot of work into that fire plan. It’d be a shame if we didn’t make it work.’

They could, she thought as she headed for the shutters. They could make the fire plan work.

And maybe, after last night... Maybe...

Too soon. Think of it later. Fire first.

* * *

She fixed the windows—fast—then checked the pits. They were overgrown but the mounds of dirt were still loose enough for her to shovel. She could bury things with ease.

She headed inside, grabbed a couple of cases and headed into the boys’ room.

And she lost her breath all over again.

She’d figured yesterday that Rob must have hired someone to clean this place on a regular basis. If it had been left solely to her, this house would be a dusty mess. She’d walked away and actively tried to forget.

But now, standing at their bedroom door, it was as if she’d just walked in for the first time. Rob would be carrying the boys behind her. Jiggling them, making them laugh.

Two and a half years old. Blond and blue-eyed scamps. Miniature versions of Rob himself.

They’d been sound asleep when the road gave way, then killed in an instant, the back of the car crushed as it rolled to the bottom of a gully. The doctors had told her death would have been instant.

But they were right here. She could just tug back the bedding and Rob would carry them in.

Or not.

‘Aiden,’ she murmured. ‘Christopher.’

Grief was all around her, an aching, searing loss. She hadn’t let herself feel this for years. She hadn’t dared to. It was hidden so far inside her she thought she’d grown armour that could surely protect her.

But the armour was nothing. It was dust, blown away at the sight of one neat bedroom.

It shouldn’t be neat. It nearly killed her that it was neat. She wanted those beds to be rumpled. She wanted...

She couldn’t want.

She should be thinking about fire, she thought desperately. The warnings were that it’d be on them in less than an hour. She had to move.

She couldn’t.

The wind blasted on the windowpanes. She needed to tape them. She needed to bury memories.

Aiden. Christopher.

What had she been thinking, wondering if she could move on? What had she been doing, exposing herself to Rob again? Imagining she could still love.

She couldn’t. Peeling back the armour, even a tiny part, allowed in a hurt so great she couldn’t bear it.

‘Julie?’ It was a yell from just outside the window.

She couldn’t answer.

‘Julie!’ Rob’s second yell pierced her grief, loud and demanding her attention. ‘Jules! If you’re standing in that bedroom thinking of black you might want to look outside instead.’

How had he known what she was doing? Because he felt the same?

Still she didn’t move.

‘Look!’ he yelled, even more insistent, and she had to look. She had to move across to the window and pull back the curtains.

She could just see Rob through the smoke haze. He was standing under a ladder, not ten feet from her. He had the ladder propped against the house.

He was carrying a chainsaw.

As she watched in horror he pulled the cord and it roared into life.

‘What’s an overhanging branch between friends?’ he yelled across the roar and she thought: He’ll be killed. He’ll be...

‘Mine’s the easier job,’ he yelled as he took his first step up the ladder. ‘But if I can do this, you can shove a teddy into a suitcase. Put the past behind you, Julie. Fire. Now. Go.’

He was climbing a ladder with a chainsaw. Rob and power tools...

He was an architect, not a builder.

She thought suddenly of Rob, just after she’d agreed to marry him. He’d brought her to the mountains and shown her this block, for sale at a price they could afford.

‘This can be our retreat,’ he’d told her. ‘Commute when we can, have an apartment in the city for when we can’t.’ And then he’d produced his trump card. A tool belt. Gleaming leather, full of bright shiny tools, it was a he-man’s tool belt waiting for a he-man. He’d strapped it on and flexed his muscles. ‘What do you think?’

‘You’re never thinking of building yourself?’ she’d gasped and he’d grinned and held up a vicious-looking...she didn’t have a clue what.

‘I might need help,’ he admitted. ‘These things look scary. I was sort of thinking of a registered builder, with maybe a team of registered builder’s assistants on the side. But I could help.’

And he’d grinned at her and she’d known there was nothing she could refuse this man.

Man with tool belt.

Man with ladder and chainsaw.

And it hit her then, with a clarity that was almost frightening. Yesterday when she’d woken up it had been just like the day before and the day before that. She’d got up, she’d functioned for the day, she’d gone to bed. She’d survived.

Life went on around her, but she didn’t care.

Yesterday, when she’d told her secretary she was heading up to the Blue Mountains, Maddie had been appalled. ‘It’s dangerous. They’re saying evacuate. Don’t go there.’

The thing was, though, for Julie danger no longer existed. The worst thing possible had already happened. There was nothing else to fear.

But now, standing at the window, staring at Rob and his chainsaw, she realised that, like it or not, she still cared. She could still be frightened for someone. For Rob.

But fear hurt. Caring hurt. She didn’t want to care. She couldn’t. Somehow she had to rebuild the armour. But meanwhile...

Meanwhile Rob was right. She had to move. She had to bury teddies.

* * *

He managed to get the branches clear and drag them into the gully, well away from the house.

He raked the loose leaves away from the house, too, easier said than done when the wind was blasting them back. He blocked the gutters and set up the generator so they could use the pump and access the water in the tanks even if they lost the solar power.

He worked his way round the house, checking, rechecking and he almost ran into Julie round the other side.

The smoke was building. It was harder and harder to see. Even with a mask it hurt to breathe.

The heat was intense and the wind was frightening.

How far away was the fire? There was no way to tell. The fire map on his phone was of little use. It showed broad districts. What he wanted was a map of what was happening down the road. He couldn’t see by looking. It was starting to be hard to see as far as the end of his arm.

‘We’ve done enough.’ Julie’s voice was hoarse from the smoke. ‘I’ve done inside and cleared the back porch. I’ve filled the pits and cleared the bunker. All the dot-points on the plan are complete.’

‘Really?’ It was weird to feel inordinately pleased that she’d remembered dot-points. Julie and her dot-points...weird that they turned him on.

‘So what now?’ she asked. ‘Oh, Rob, I can’t bear it in these clothes. All I want is to take them off and lie under the hose.’

It gave him pause for thought. Jules, naked under water... ‘Is that included on our dots?’ Impossible not to sound hopeful.

‘Um...no,’ she said, and he heard rather than saw her smile.

‘Pity.’

‘We could go inside and sit under the air-conditioning while it’s still safe to have the air vents open.’

‘You go in.’ He wouldn’t. How to tell what was happening outside if he was inside? ‘But, Jules, the vents stay closed. We don’t know where the fire is.’

‘How can we tell where it is? How close...?’ The smile had gone from her voice.

‘It’s not threatening. Not yet. We have thick smoke and wind and leaf litter but I can reach out my hand and still—sort of—see my fingers. The fire maps tell us the fire’s cut the access road, but how long it takes to reach this gully is anyone’s guess. It might fly over the top of us. It might miss us completely.’ There was a hope.

‘So...why not air-conditioning?’

‘There’s still fire. You can taste it and you can smell it. Even if the house isn’t in the firing line, there’ll be burning leaf litter swirling in the updraught. On Black Saturday they reckoned there were ember attacks five miles from the fire front. We’d look stupid if embers were sucked in through the vents. But you go in. I’ll keep checking.’

‘For...how long?’ she faltered. ‘I mean...’

‘For as long as it takes.’ He glanced upward, hearing the wind blasting the treetops, but there was no way he could see that far. The smoke was making his throat hurt, but still he felt the need to try and make her smile. ‘It looks like we’re stuck here for Christmas,’ he managed. ‘But I’m sure Santa will find a way through. What’s his motto? Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night shall stay St Nicholas from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.’

‘Isn’t that postmen?’ And amazingly he heard the smile again and was inordinately pleased.

‘Maybe it is,’ he said, picking up his hose and checking pressure. They still had the solar power but he’d already swapped to the generators. There wouldn’t be time to do it when...if...the fire hit. ‘But I reckon we’re all in the same union. Postmen, Santa and us. We’ll work through whatever’s thrown at us.’ And then he set down his hose.

‘It’s okay, Jules,’ he said, taking her shoulders. ‘We’ve been through worse than this. We both know...that things aren’t worth crying over. But our lives are worth something and maybe this house is worth something as well. It used to be a home. I know the teddies and fire engines and wall-hanging are safe but let’s see this as a challenge. Let’s see if we can save...what’s left of the rest of us.’

* * *

They sat on the veranda and faced the wind. It was the dumbest place to sit, Julie thought, but it was also sensible. The wind seared their faces, the heat parched their throats but ember attacks would come from the north.

Their phones had stopped working. ‘That’ll be the transmission tower on Mount Woorndoo,’ Rob said matter-of-factly, like it didn’t matter that a tower not ten miles away had been put out of action.

He brought the battery radio outside and they listened. All they could figure was that the valley was cut off. All they could work out was that the authorities were no longer in control. There were so many fronts to this fire that no one could keep track.

Most bush fires could be fought. Choppers dropped vast loads of water, fire trucks came in behind the swathes the choppers cleared; communities could be saved.

Here, though, there were so many communities...

‘It’s like we’re the last people in the world,’ Julie whispered.

‘Yeah. Pretty silly to be here.’

‘I wanted to be here.’

‘Me, too,’ he said and he took her hand and held.

And somehow it felt okay. Scary but right.

They sat on. Surely the fire must arrive soon. The waiting was almost killing her, and yet, in a strange way, she felt almost calm. Maybe she even would have stayed if Rob hadn’t come, she thought. Maybe this was...

‘We’re going to get through this,’ Rob said grimly and she hauled her thoughts back from where they’d been taking her.

‘You know, those weeks after the boys were killed, they were the worst weeks of my life.’ He said it almost conversationally, and she thought: don’t. Don’t go there. They hadn’t talked about it. They couldn’t.

But he wasn’t stopping. She should get up, go inside, move away, but he was waiting for ember attacks, determined to fight this fire, and she couldn’t walk away.

Even if he was intent on talking about what she didn’t want to hear.

‘You were so close to death yourself,’ he said, almost as if this had been chatted about before. ‘You had smashed ribs, a punctured lung, a shattered pelvis. But that bang on the head... For the first few days they couldn’t tell me how you’d wake up. For the first twenty-four hours they didn’t even know whether you’d wake up at all. And there I was, almost scot-free. I had a laceration on my arm and nothing more. There were people everywhere—my parents, your parents, our friends. I was surrounded yet I’d never felt so alone. And at the funeral...’

‘Don’t.’ She put a hand on his arm to stop him but he didn’t stop. But maybe she had to hear this, she thought numbly. Maybe he had to say it.

‘I had to bury them alone,’ he said. ‘Okay, not alone in the physical sense. The church was packed. My parents were holding me up but you weren’t there... It nearly killed me. And then, when you got out of hospital and I asked if you’d go to the cemetery...’

‘I couldn’t.’ She remembered how she’d felt. Where were her boys? To go to the cemetery...to see two tiny graves...

She’d blocked it out. It wasn’t real. If she didn’t see the graves, then maybe the nightmare would be just that. An endless dream.

‘It was like our family ended right there,’ Rob said, staring sightlessly out into the smoke. ‘It didn’t end when our boys died. It ended...when we couldn’t face their death together.’

‘Rob...’

‘I don’t know why I’m saying this now,’ he said, almost savagely. ‘But hell, Julie, I’m fighting this. Our family doesn’t exist any more. I can’t get back...any of it. But once upon a time we loved each other and that still means something. So if you’re sitting here thinking it doesn’t matter much if you go up in flames, then think again. Because, even though I’m not part of your life any more, if I lose you completely, then what’s left of my sanity goes, too. So prepare to be protected, Jules. No fire is going to get what’s left of what I once loved. Of what I still love. So I’m heading off to do a fast survey of the boundary, looking for embers. It’d be good if you checked closer to the house but you don’t need to. I’ll do it for both of us. This fire...I’ll fight it with everything I have. Enough of our past has been destroyed. This is my line in the sand.’