Hold on, he said.
He slammed the car into reverse, backed up towards the fire front a short distance, then took off. He had enough speed up to smash down the picket fence in the garden where the burning tree crown had landed. They were heading straight into the bonfire. Yelling to the others to get down, he double-declutched the engine into first, let the clutch out and flattened the accelerator.
Charge the windmill.
The V8 rose in a roar, tappets clattering, and they crashed into the burning bush at the point closest to the house, where the flames were largest but, Dorrigo had gambled, the branches would be smallest. For a moment all was fire and noise. The engine screamed with wild intent, a heat of such ferocious intensity seemed to penetrate the glass and steel that to breathe hurt, everything was a dull red; there was the crack of flame, of branches snapping, metal scratching and groaning as panels distorted and bent, of wheels losing and gaining traction. The driver’s side rear window smashed. Sparks, embers and a few burning sticks flew into the car, Ella and the children began screaming as the children cowed on the far side of the rear bench seat. For a terrifying second or two the car slowed almost to a halt when something caught underneath its chassis. And then, as quickly, the bonfire was somehow behind them, and they were accelerating towards another decrepit paling fence that Dorrigo also smashed through in a momentary blizzard of breaking timber. The windscreen transformed into a white cloud of fragments, he yelled at Ella to kick it out, and when it fell away they found themselves back on the road, past the fallen tree, heading towards Hobart. He was steering with one hand, while leaning over grabbing burning sticks from the back seat with his other—his surgeon’s hands he had always tried so hard to protect—and tossing them out the smashed window.
As the 1948 Ford Mercury, green paint blackened and blistering, screeched and slithered its way back down that burning mountain, Ella looked across at Dorrigo, the fingers of his left hand already swelling into blisters the size of small balloons, so badly burnt he would later need skin grafts. Such a mystery of a man, she thought, such a mystery. She realised she knew nothing about him; that their marriage had been over before it began; and that it was not in the power of either of them to alter any of this. On what were now three tyres and one disintegrating wheel rim, the Ford Mercury careered round a long corner and, through the smoke, they finally glimpsed before them the sanctuary of the police roadblock.
I think this may be the last time Freddy Seymour invites you for lunch, said Ella Evans.
And in the back seat the three now silent, soot-smeared children absorbed it all—the choking creosote stench, the roar of wind and flame, the wild rocking of a car being driven that hard, the heat, the emotion so raw and exposed it was like butchered flesh; the tormented, hopeless feeling of two people who lived together in a love not yet love, nor yet not; an unshared life shared; a conspiracy of affections, illnesses, tragedies, jokes and labour; a marriage—the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings.
A family.
14
THE OLD ARE filled with remorse, Jodie Bigelow’s father once told her. Her father. Jimmy Bigelow was never quite Jodie’s dad. He seemed absent through not only her life, but much of his own. He worked as a mail sorter and never seemed interested in rising beyond it. One day in high school she had to do a project on Anzac Day, and she had asked her father to tell her what the war had been like for him. He said there wasn’t really that much to tell. This and that. When she grew insistent, he went into his bedroom and returned with an old bugle. He wiped the mouthpiece and made a few farting noises with it to make her laugh. Then he found some real notes. He dropped the bugle, coughed, swelled up, raised his head in a martial manner entirely unfamiliar to his daughter and played the ‘Last Post’.
That’s it?
That’s all I know, he said. That’s about all anyone needs to know.
That’s not a school project, Dad.
No.
It’s sort of lonely, Jodie said.
Jimmy Bigelow thought on this, and then said he guessed it was, but it had never felt that way. It felt the opposite.
Jodie had browsed some books about the POWs.
It must have been hard, she said.
Hard? he replied. Not really. We only had to suffer. We were lucky.
What does that music mean? she asked.