Jim did try to get through to his father. On a particularly hot day, he went and sat near him in the front room. Waiting until Harold looked up from his page, he spoke quietly so as not to drown out the Ravel gurgling in the background. Dad, there’s some zebra finches just outside, you should come and have a look and a listen. They’re so chirpy. They live in the needle trees this side of the barbed wire fence. So they’re not “out of bounds.” Jim even avoided the sarcasm the final comment might carry.
Harold, impervious, said, It’s hot out there, son. You’ll get filthy traipsing about among the bushes. You should do some of that holiday reading you’re supposed to do. Get the jump on your courses.
Already have, Dad. Hey, do you know, there’s an echidna that shelters under the house during the heat of the day. Curled up in a ball. It feeds on all those termite mounds down the hill around the melaleuca thickets and York gums.
That’s interesting, Jim, said Harold, returning to his book, Ravel louder in his head.
Going out, Jim said to his mother, who was online shopping, muttering at the slow dial-up connection. Going up to the caves, he said. He’d almost given up waiting for a reply when she said, That’s fine, darling, wear your hat and take some water.
Jim found Susan sitting on the back step in the shade and asked if she’d like to climb with him. She ignored him and returned to her room to sulk and wait for her turn on “dire-up” so she could get on Facebook. She missed her friends.
Jim loved the cool of the caves.
It’s 45 degrees out there and the caves are cool-as, he said to himself. He sketched the vista in his notebook and eyed off the canyon. This island of bushland in a sea of sand, the great stripped areas where the wheat is grown, the sea that joins a deep blue Indian Ocean. He had occasionally gone surfing out there at Flat Rocks with some mates, but surfing wasn’t really his thing. He did it because Harold hated it.
He smelt it first. Weird, he thought—like cigarette smoke. Another thing he’d tried but not liked. He was one with Harold on that one.
He hoisted himself up from the sand and the roo-shit and went to the mouth of the cave. Great zamia palm fronds, ancient residues in a place that books told Jim was the most ancient on earth, wavered in the stiffening easterly. It was a searing hot wind rolling off the roof of the outcrops and rushing down into the canyon, and over down towards the house, the sandplains, the sea. He wondered what it would do to the surf when it met that immensity.
He climbed out and onto the top of the cave. A band of smoke rose and capillaried into the wide blue sky a few hills away. It could be mistaken for a dying willy-willy, but the driving easterly, and the continuous feeding of the grey blur against the blue, and the increasingly acrid taste and smell in the air said otherwise.
Jim leapt down through the rocks and crashed into the scrub, scratching and bruising himself as he tumbled towards home. He passed a stand of three primeval-looking trees he’d never seen the like of in nature or a book before, and knew it must be a species verging on extinction. In the rush for home he saw things he’d not seen looking closely, when he’d had an eye to finding. Other than the sound of his exodus, all was silent. The birds had vanished. He tore his flesh plunging through the barbed-wire fence.
Reaching the back steps, he called, Fire! Fire!
He found his mother in the kitchen and said, We must go now, there’s fire. She looked out the window, and seeing now a massive wall of flames cascading down from the outcrops, she called, Harold! Harold, we must leave, there’s a fire.
Susan yelled, Shit, Mum, what’s happening?
Harold walked into the kitchen where the other three had gathered and said, Stop the yelling! What are you panicking about?
Jim grabbed his father’s sleeve and dragged him towards the window, pointing at the avalanche of flame, That! That!
Harold picked Jim’s hand off his shirt. Settle down, son!
There was an agonizing pause, filled with the rush of wind and flames. They all looked to Harold, who said, Jump in the bath, all of you. Jenny, turn on the shower and put the plug in the bath.
They were nonplussed, so frightened they did what Harold said. Then he vanished and reappeared with blankets, which he soaked under the shower. He threw them over his family, whom, truth be told, he didn’t really like. It was a shit of a life. He climbed into the bathtub, where they all crouched, squeezed together with the shower going and wet blankets over their head. Someone was crying, all were shaking, except Harold, who seemed indifferent. There was a whoosh of air like a vacuum cleaner, and the windows lit up orange. The world smelt putrid.
The new house was one of Geraldton’s talking points. Susan settled easily into her new role as one of the “wealthy girls,” though in truth they had less money than ever. Mortgaged to the hilt, her mother would complain a little too loud, Susan saying, Shoosh, Mum, my friends might hear.
Nouveau-riche status meant little to Jim, but he enjoyed being the center of a different kind of attention. A Guardian newspaper reporter had even interviewed him about his experience in The Fires, and Jim had used the occasion to lament the loss of many rare and probably little-known plant species. He called for the preservation of the area, which would certainly bounce back from fire if left untrammelled. He felt that his future as an environmentalist was assured.
When Jim told the story of the fireball that rolled over the tin roof of the house and blazed its way across the sandplain all the way to the ocean, his description was accurate as a naturalist would produce. He researched accounts of fire rolling over roads, across paddocks, and even the iron roofs of houses. Like waves surfing the earth. It made a poet of him. But he didn’t mention his father. He almost forgot his father had been there.
The more easygoing among us usually called him “Fossil,” but resorted to the standard “Carcass” when one of his more outlandish goals, or “victories,” was achieved. And for the purposes of the yarn I am about to relate, he most certainly deserved the name “Carcass.”
Carcass was a reasonable shearer, but never a great one. He could knock them off pretty fast, but was, as the cockies say, “rough as guts.” The sheep sliding down into his catching pen looked like they’d had a date with a bad surgeon—a plastic surgeon who’d been struck off but kept practicing, nonetheless. Merinos are renowned for the extra wool they carry in their skin folds, and it takes skill to weave the comb in and out of those mighty crevices, but Carcass was notorious for shearing straight on through—skin, wool, and anything else in the way. And he had that element of sadist about him that even the young blokes found a bit hard to stomach. The cockies who knew of him wouldn’t let him near their prize rams . . .
I am not one for painting backgrounds, and like to get to the point. But I will say that like those real estate adverts, so much rests on location, location, location. Or maybe I should say isolation, isolation, isolation. I mean, you’ve got to understand that when we’re shearing the stations, we’re a long way from anywhere, and you tend to get to know each other’s bad habits pretty well. Carcass has many, but his worst as far as the rest of the blokes are concerned—and I mean any blokes on the same team as him—is his habit of cracking on to every girl rouseabout he comes across. They’re a captive audience for him. Sometimes it’s a female wool classer, or even the cook. He’s not fussy: any size or shape or age will do. He claims they’ll all fall to his charms sooner or later. Seriously, the guy is grotesque, and stinks with it. And there you go, he hounds them, flatters them, jokes with them, drinks with them, smokes dope with them, and they eventually fall.
Then he’ll tell us of his conquest, describe