The Colour of the Night Read online

  THE SUN ROSE higher and shone brightly upon the group. Across the street, it also caught the front window of another house, a daily event that always attracted an elderly woman who lived there. That morning, as she went to draw the curtains, the woman was surprised to see a gathering of people on the side street directly opposite her, and spontaneously counted them all. There were nine in total – a social event of some kind? She rocked lightly to disrupt the pattern on the sheer curtain and leaned in to study the small crowd. They were just standing there and appeared to be doing little more than looking at each other.

  Elton looked at Jess; he liked her despite her confrontational ways, despite himself. She was standing, arms crossed, looking at her father, expectantly. Simon did not look at his wife but directed his attention to Nikos, who was trying to avoid eye contact with them all. Adele looked at Benton and he acknowledged her. They hadn’t conversed since the day they’d drunk tea in her front lounge, the day he’d told her of his family’s manor house that stood on a verdant rise next to a trout-stocked pond on which white swans cruised.

  Arman appraised them all: was this a measure of Western life? Perhaps Benton was right: as an Afghan, he stood apart, he did not fit in. And he seemed to be the only one among them willing to live by a set of moral codes, the only one who knew God. But he was a newcomer to the land, a country more stable than his own; who was he to judge?

  And James looked at Stef, his mother, who, with the intensity of a woman scorned, stared long and hard at Adele, the one at the centre of it all who stood casually, arms folded, her jet-black hair liberated, her body wrapped in a fluffy pink dressing-gown beneath which, her bare, polished legs were exposed.

  3

  A HOT WIND scuffed up Frederick Street swirling road grime and the grit of mortar into cracks and corners. At forty-two degrees, the paint blistered on wooden fences, the surface of asphalt split and glistened, brickwork pulsed, searing to the touch. Apart from the hum of one or two aircons backing out of wooden window frames, the air was hot, heavy and soundless. The duco rippled on modern cars parked at the kerb and through the roadway shimmer an ambulance cruised silently by, its emergency light strobing. The hot wind gusted more forcefully and plastic bags, paper, chips of styrene foam and the powdered excreta of domestic pets swirled and scudded along the scorched concrete, peppering hot walls and infilling the cracks of windows and doors.

  Suburban birds lay low, their appetites on hold, old sparrows expired or fell into downpipes in search of moisture. Unripened fruit on backyard trees withered and dropped, English blooms perished, their buds falling onto brown lawns. If it had been 1850, before the suburb existed, the tough native shrubs would have turned inwards, offering only their fragrant oils to the torched air. But now in Frederick Street there was little but tar and tin, brick and concrete – nothing mediated the heat; everything enhanced it.

  Inside Adele and Elton’s terrace, the temperature remained tolerable, sandwiched as they were between the other two properties. Adele blocked all cracks to the outside world, including the ragged fissure in her bedroom wall which remained untreated – a contractor had at least restored the foundations. She went downstairs where a portable aircon hummed, earnestly attempting to disrupt the depleted air. It was here that she sat shoeless in a light dress, her limbs parted, and watched the television, absorbing the unfolding drama to the north-west of Melbourne.

  Upstairs, Elton continued as usual, the heat outside confirming his chosen lifestyle; in cyberspace, everything was cool. It was true, weather conditions on Zuldazar could be far fouler than this but it didn’t touch him; rather, it helped to improve his warrior status, the atmosphere there being far more useful than anything in real life. Even on this day, as the combined heat from the poorly insulated tin roof above him and the emissions of his various hard drives pushed the internal temperature of his room to that of the Blasted Lands, he still seemed not to notice. It was only when his mother called him downstairs that Elton realised what an oven he was sitting in.

  ‘Come and look at this,’ she said.

  Elton approached the TV. He saw a plume of grey smoke tumbling diagonally across it.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A big bushfire. Right now. Towards Daylesford, and it’s getting closer to your Uncle Morris’s house.’

  ‘Do you think it will reach Melbourne?’

  Adele probed here son’s eyes. ‘Elton – your Uncle Morris, Aunty Sharon and Shaun. Their property is in danger. The fire’s heading towards them. And your Uncle Chris is not far away either.

  Uncle Chris; Elton tried to focus. He’d virtually forgotten about his other country uncle.

  ‘Well, they would have –’

  ‘Evacuated. I hope so. They would have had warning – but their homes.’

  Elton watched a close-up of a wall of flames – he’d seen similar on Azeroth. He tried to identify with it: Moz and Shaz and his cousin Shaun. Why had they placed themselves in such danger, why were they living out there at all? In Third World countries it was sometimes necessary; there might be little choice but to scratch out a living in the dirt using hand-held tools, tending animals, trading their flesh. But his uncle and aunt didn’t even do that: they lived in the bush, even further removed from normality, cohabitating with birds, bugs and snakes. What could possibly be gained from that kind of voluntary regression?

  He watched his mother pick up the phone and dial. Seconds later he listened to her message: Morris, it’s Adele. I’m watching the fire on TV. It looks awful. Are you okay? Hope so – please give me a call. Just need to know that everything’s alright. With no more success, she phoned Chris, her other brother, and was obliged to address his answering service as well.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Elton reassured his mother. ‘They’ve probably gone to help out. Isn’t that what country people do?’

  ADELE NEVER fully understood why both her brothers had chosen a bush lifestyle. Chris moved first; he trained in environmental sciences and felt it was only appropriate that he should live a little closer to nature: Practise what you preach, he told his sister. He bought a small cottage on a dozen hectares of partial bush just south of Hembridge and moved there in 1998. Within a year, Morris and his wife Sharon had purchased a substantial package of forested land just half an hour away. For them it was all about new beginnings, a chance to create their own environment amid an untouched, unspoiled setting; a sanctuary.

  While hardly religious, both felt they’d been offered some sort of blessing. The offspring of baby boomers, they’d grown up with alternative parents, hippies in their day who played with dope and then abandoned it, who applied their adult lives to saving the planet, who, even in their seventies, stooped to pick up other people’s rubbish, who had instilled in their children a sense of the spiritual – whatever they should interpret it to be. Morris and Sharon felt privileged and honoured to be taking responsibility for a fragment of the natural world, a rare thing because, as everyone knew, it was fast disappearing.

  Set on the edge of the Wombat State Forest, their ten hectares sloped down to Dyson’s Creek at the rear. It was open sclerophyll forest, according to one of their specialist books, and the sunlight penetrated the canopy, shafting warmly onto native grasses, wildflowers and all manner of bushland creatures. In winter a fine mist lingered among the eucalypts, eradicating all shadow and presenting a timeless tranquillity. It’s a glimpse of life before humans, they told others, and altogether, Morris and Sharon saw their serene bushland oasis as a seceding from the mad tear of modernity, a rebuff to the material world. It was the sublime they sought, rather than the picturesque.

  From the kitchen window they could look down the grade through the stands of giant eucalypts and observe kangaroos grazing untroubled and the looping flight of rosellas and pink-crested gang-gangs, their eye-catching colours more distinctive than corporate logos. By day, all they could hear – apart from the raucous crow of their penned rooster – was the whirring of cicadas or the delic
ate calls of forest birds. At dusk, it was not uncommon to see a wombat trundle through or a sugar-glider emerge from some tiny hollow, still bleary from twelve hours of slumber. At night, the calls of frogs, owls and koalas penetrated their full-length glass panes and fused with the pop and fizzle of the open fire.

  It was into this verdant cradle that little Shaun was born. The first sounds he heard – apart from his parents’ voices and the opening bars of the ABC news – was the hiss of wind in trees and the hum of insects. Lying outdoors on a square of his mother’s quilting and seemingly immune to the mosquitoes, he was amused by the blowflies abuzz at his cloth nappy, and when a bug or beetle or tree-spider accidentally alighted upon him, he took it as a tiny gift, grasping it joyfully, observing its re-emergence through chubby fingers. Occasionally he was bitten, but that too seemed like the natural course of things, less traumatic than a head bump under the rough-hewn kitchen table.

  As soon as he could walk he was gone, vanishing into the bracken in bare feet, following the path of an echidna, crawling into wombat burrows, scenting the presence of the various fauna rather than seeing them. By six years of age, he had a family of pet kookaburras, but they weren’t pets in the suburban sense. Instead, upon the appropriate command from him, one or another would come arrowing from the forest to alight upon his outstretched arm. He named them all individually and fed them worms, grubs and little spiny crayfish caught in the creek. At any time of the day it was not uncommon to see Shaun walking alone on a bush track in conversation with at least one kookaburra perched on his shoulder.

  IT WAS HIS family of kookaburras that Shaun first thought of when the faint scent of smoke came with the north wind on that scorching day. His birds were territorial, they never ventured beyond their five-hectare terrain – to do so would violate everything in their nature. He ran down to the creek – dry now after three years of drought – but the kookaburras were not there. The whiff of fire in green eucalyptus came more potently. He thought of the resident koala – a female with a young on its back – and scanned the treetops in search of her. There she was, very high up, hunched into the fork of a Swamp Gum that listed in the blistering northerly. Then his mother called.

  ‘Shaun! Hurry up! We’re leaving. Now!’

  The boy carried the bags packed by his parents and helped press them into the car. He did not fasten his seatbelt. Instead he looked back through the rear window, his eyes searching. His parents in the front seat were of little use to him right then, preferring to shout at each other. It appeared that one wanted to take more items, the other did not want to leave at all, the former wanted to release the chickens, the latter refused to lose them but levelled criticism because the woodpile was too close to the house. Both agreed they should take Shaun to safety before returning to save their home. They would not allow a shower of embers to take away all their possessions, their hard-won dreams, their future.

  On the road out, Morris put his foot down. The aircon was on its highest setting but still the interior was stifling. At the T intersection he turned left into Falls Road away from the fire and geared up to a hundred – usually, the would only travel at fifty along there, conscious of other people’s road-kill. They soon reached the little town of Kilbana and sped towards the bluestone church where the population now gathered. They bundled their things out of the car and gave Shaun instructions: stay inside, carry a wet towel, do as the policeman says. Then they headed back.

  On the return trip the smoke thickened, just as they’d expected. With some luck they would have half an hour before the fire front arrived – if it arrived at all. The CFA suggested there was a strong chance it would be held up at Rochelle’s Winery. But at Fellow’s Road visibility was patchy and the pulses of intolerable heat deadened their resolve. Bizarrely, a small bird fell onto the road ahead, then several others. A wren of some kind dropped lifelessly onto their bonnet and was swept aside. Sharon’s heart raced. A kangaroo shot in front of them, its fur alight, and then another, a smoke trail marking its panicked flight. Sharon grabbed Morris’s shoulder and he put his foot down. But where was the road? He braked hard.

  ‘We can’t,’ he bellowed. ‘We can’t!’

  Sharon wailed. ‘Turn around! Hurry, Morris! Turn! Now!’

  Morris reversed to the side, spun the tyres, reversed again. Where was the road?

  ‘There!’ his wife shouted. ‘There!’

  They lunged forward and the smoke cleared, before thickening again. They could barely breathe and the hot acridity burned in their throats. Morris hardly heard his wife. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Oh my God.’

  The car lurched. ‘Don’t stall!’ Morris screamed, ‘Don’t stall!’ He found himself shouting at his wife: ‘Hold on! Don’t panic! We’re getting out of this!’

  But he was not to know that already a huge redgum had crashed across the road ahead, sending showers of sparks skywards, its volatile oils bursting with a crackling roar. The sound was deafening, all oxygen was sucked out, a white-hot flare shot horizontally and the earth, for a moment, resembled the surface of the sun.

  ‘ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, if I hafta, I hafta.’ Nikos had argued for weeks against refilling the cellar: The wall’s good now. Solid as a rock. I’m gunna seal it with fibreglass sheetin’ so’s the water don’t come in. But the weight of the others was against it – even Arman and Benton wanted it refilled. For Benton, his surveillance monitor had failed to deliver: whenever an interesting subject appeared it was gone in a flash. And for Arman, the completion of the renovations might create a more settled, civilised relationship between them.

  ‘Well, I won’t be able to get the same dirt back,’ Nikos declared. ‘We’ll have to buy new stuff.’

  ‘You’ll have to buy new stuff,’ Adele told him. ‘And this week, or I’m calling my lawyer.’

  Uncharacteristically, Adele was a jangle of nerves – so much had gone wrong and now the endless summer had turned from severe to tragic. The waking hours were bearable but the hot nights caused her to sleep badly, emphasising the exact cause of her distress. She did not hear from the police until the morning after the fire when it had already burned itself out. But she didn’t need the call to confirm what she already knew. The television coverage had sickened her: all those artistic shots of ash patterns on hillsides, stark standing chimneys, iconic images of outbuildings uncannily spared, melted metal assuming attractive shapes on the roadside, the blackened bodies of charred cars. The statistics alone appalled her – not the number but the continual retelling: 12,000 head of sheep, 800 cattle, 52 horses, – possibly more – 91 houses. Eighteen people were dead and many more unaccounted for, her brother and sister-in-law among them.

  And all because of a deliberate burn-off. ‘Prescribed burns’ were a contentious issue: should or should not the bush be burned in advance to avoid a big fire? Many resisted the idea. They said the practice destroyed delicate ecosystems in an already depleted habitat. Adele knew that side thoroughly – her brother Chris, the ecologist, championed it. Not that we should stop controlled burning altogether, he’d said in one of his many email monologues, just that it represents the tiniest part of any useful strategy.

  But after Black Saturday in 2009, the forces for taming the bush – for reducing it – had gained new strength and those like Chris, opposed to slow burns, had lost the battle. Human suffering had won out and Parks Victoria and the DEPI redoubled their efforts, burning twice as much bushland, a quarter of a million hectares.

  Considering her brother’s viewpoint regarding burnoffs, it seemed ironic to Adele that this latest disaster was actually caused by one. A cleanup of timber-getter’s residue on the edge of a state forest had left an old tree smouldering and no one seemed aware of it. But on a particularly hot afternoon, the tree fell, scattering a handful of hot coals into the grass.

  The following day, while the accusations flew, Adele received the call. It was from Chris; he had lost his house and everything in it. Adele felt the nausea rise and found difficulty speakin
g. He was okay, he emphasised, his own tears streaming; he would be all right. For a while neither spoke, then Chris told his sister that Morris and Sharon were still missing. It was hoped that they’d taken shelter at some remote site as yet unaccounted for.

  They had not. A later call confirmed that a capsule of blackened metal had been located and in it were the remains of two people: her brother and his wife. Adele convulsed and grasped the bench. Nothing registered, nothing seemed real. It must be a mistake: her brother and his wife could not be the objects of such meaninglessness. Are you sure it’s them, she pleaded, are you certain? She gripped the phone and listened to the detail, the arrangement of the bodies, the relevant identifications. But they have a son, she told them, there would have been three.

  Shaun is safe, the voice reassured her, and Chris was going to his aid, though the sooner the boy was removed from the scene the better. Her brother could not take care of the child and they wished to deliver him to her the very next day.

  Adele’s hand shook so violently she could not replace the receiver: her brother dead, his wife beside him, and in such an unspeakable way. They must have screamed – she shuddered at the thought of it. Could she ever thrust that image away? Her brother, that dear young man. Guilt streamed in: why hadn’t she seen him recently, why hadn’t she made the effort to visit? It seemed doubly tragic that they’d shared such intimacy as children yet had become so estranged as adults. They were not alike, but suddenly she wanted to know him, to reconnect to the boy whose hand she’d held for the entire first year of primary school. Her whole being felt torn and tortured as though she’d been subjected to some cruel and barbarous act.

  She asked Elton to sit with her and unsteadily conveyed the details. But even as she directed the information to the boy’s blank face she had difficulty believing her own words. Morris gone and his beautiful wife beside him; it was unthinkable. And little Shaun, now orphaned. Of course she’d take him – immediately. But it had been two and a half years since they’d last seen each other – before Randall left. Would the boy still know her? Another form of trepidation loomed: how could she take responsibility for another’s child? How could she replace Shaun’s mother and father – her brother, now dead? Could she even manage an eleven-year-old on her own? She too needed time to heal.