Every day you climb the mountain. The first time it was he who showed you the way up there and it was
just after dawn, just after he’d asked if you’d marry him and just after the
night he’d spent explaining the myriad of reasons why he couldn’t do it.
Nankeen kestrels sliced through clouds of orange butterflies. It was too cold
to stay, even huddled together out of the wind behind the firetower and your
temperature regulation shot from a night without sleep.
The doctor tells you to stand on one leg with
your eyes closed, touch your toes, breath into the spirograph machine, read the
letters at six metres. She dongs your knees with her stethoscope, inspects your
ears, presses her fingers into the muscles beside your hip bones and asks you
to cough. She checks your skin for melanomas with a magnifying glass and it
feels like Reiki. It’s been an age since such sustained attention was paid to
your body. Blood pressure, blood test, piss test. ‘Perfect! You’re good to go,’
she says and signs the Fit Slip for the department.
Every day you climb the mountain to the
firetower, unlock the sprung door and climb a little ladder into the tower. You
winch up the shutters and turn on the radios. You can see the ranges ninety
miles to the north east and you can see the inlet where you live, gleaming like
silver paper to the west. Still panting from the climb, you radio the office to
log in and report that visibility is perfect. You begin scanning the country
with binoculars, a specimen table laid out just for you, and settle into the
business of looking for smoke.
Your sister was sleeping every summer night
with the windows open so she could smell smoke approaching, but she was in town
when the fire suddenly stood up, enraged, and ripped through Isaac’s Ridge like
it had a particular vengeance in mind. What remains of her refrigerator hangs
by your front door. She kept the motorbike. By the time the fire reached 1800
degrees, her Honda was repurposed into a gleaming silver stream of molten
aluminium, an art piece that she hangs on her wall as a visceral nod to the
ferocity of those fires. She talked about the fires with you. How she saw the
trees gather up the flames and crown from one tree to the next, whoomp whoomp whoomp through the valley,
crown to crown, eating her house and everything else in its path.
The next day you climb the mountain, the burning
crew have been through and the ground is blackened and clear of leaf litter.
Trunks of the massive karri trees are scorched up to your own height. Charcoal,
russet, lichened granite and the startling emerald of a bracken fern unfurling
from the ash. You meet a couple taking a breather above the silver ladder. ‘I
wish they did not burn this,’ said the woman in a heavy Dutch accent. ‘It’s to
reduce fuel in case of wildfires,’ you tell her, ‘and the bush comes back
beautiful, the seeds all germinated. It’s meant to burn, the Australian bush.’
‘It makes it so ugly,’ she complained and her partner smiled apologetically and
said that she was from Europe. You continue up the next ladder and too late,
the analogy comes to you. The bush, she is like a beautiful woman. She doesn’t
exist purely for our viewing or pleasure. She has her own life to live.
‘It’s like you have died,’ he said to you a
year ago. ‘But much worse, because you are still alive.’ A friend did die then
and three days later he stopped by the shop where you worked to ask how you
felt about him going to her funeral. He didn’t know her very well. ‘Please
don’t ask me to make that call,’ you said. He stepped in front of your grief,
so great was his need for attention, to be enmeshed again, whatever. Your
sadnesses smashed together like waves on a changing tide. You didn’t really
understand it, or him. You didn’t go to the funeral. He told you all about the
event on his return from the city.
You climb the mountain, winch up the shutters
and turn on the radios. A spackle of static as the spotter pilot announces he
is taxiing, ready for take-off. Airborne. Endurance 420 minutes. He’s half an
hour away from the mountain and you get busy spotting all the smokes you can
see before he gets here, mapping, working out coordinates and radioing them in to
the office. Thin spires of blue smoke rise from the karris collaring the
mountain.
How can it be more than a year and you are
still not through this? How long does it take? ‘To get over someone, you need
to get under someone else,’ a friend tells you but you have no heart for this
folly, hollowed out as you are. In the firetower, you snoop through his twitter
feed. It’s like eating junk food: it makes you feel like shit. His desert pea photograph
brings all the girls into the yard. He has stopped ghost referencing you though.
This produces brief relief and a longer, prickling loss that dismays you. Long
after the bust up, he posted little poems that only you would appreciate,
layered with a meaning invisible to others. A photograph of the rusting whaling
ship your Dad used to live aboard. A quote about the inlet on your birthday.
These posts throat-punched you; the thread of the secret marriage continuing unbidden
into your very warp and weft. Rage created callous replies: ‘Have you told your
wife about me yet?’ ‘Block and delete,’ your friend says but you can’t. The
last reference to you on twitter was a while ago; a photograph of the books he
was reading. Quietly stashed in the middle of the stack was the anthology that
included your piece about the affair. If he won’t tell the truth about me, you
were thinking when you wrote that story, then I will. Let the world cleave
open. Let it split. Let’s see that witch’s stone try to weight me to the bottom
of the inlet. I am way too angry to quietly sink.
From the district to the north, you can hear
the spotter pilot’s chatter. She’s talking about whales. Dead whales. Parks and
Wildlife are still cleaning up after the last stranding. Then she calls in some
smoke from a place where smoke shouldn’t be. Then another whale. A humpback
this time, not a pilot whale, washed up on the long, wild Cootamurrup Beach. It
feels apocalyptic, these wildfires and dead whales. A karri tree crashing to
earth below the mountain sounds like a bomb going off.
‘Juliet Kilo one five one,’ your spotter calls
in his position and you realise he is close to the mountain. You can hear the
steady drone of the plane but you can’t see it yet. And then, there it is,
ambling through the blue sky like a tinny bee, wings shuddering on the
mountain’s updraft. ‘Morning Spotter Pete, this is Sarah on Tower,’ you radio
to the pilot. You feel absurdly pleased with yourself as he calls in the smokes
you’ve already reported. Gloamy dust from the fallen karri hangs still in the
air. Orange butterflies begin to cluster at the base of the firetower. Maybe
the nankeen kestrels will visit you today.