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