Scrublands(116)

The Commercial Hotel is well alight by the time they make it back to town. Half the top storey is on fire, flames spewing out of windows, the verandah a swirling blaze of orange, smoke and embers spiralling skywards; a bonfire gone awry. Martin slews the car into the kerb on the far side of the road, niceties of reverse parking forgotten. The pub is screaming its distress: shrieking metal, exploding glass, roaring flames. The smoke is tainted: not the clean eucalypt-scented destruction of bushfire, but the industrial exhalation of an incinerator, stinging his eyes and clouding his vision.

Errol Ryding is there with his volunteers, their tanker gleaming in the firelight, water streaming from two hoses into the building. Townspeople are gawking from a safe distance, pointing and muttering; the media are pressing closer, camera crews and photographers lost in the moment, in thrall to the flames and the imagery, careless of their own safety.

Martin rushes over to Errol, standing stoic beneath the bronze Anzac. The statue is uncaring, back to the conflagration, reflected flames rippling across its back like flexing muscles. ‘Errol, what happened?’

‘Who knows? Just went up.’

‘Can you save it?’

A shake of the head. ‘Doubt it. There’s no wind, so we might salvage something. Main thing is to stop it spreading. Give Luigi a hand, will you? Same as the other day.’

Martin nods, moves to the young man struggling to keep his hose trained on the fire. Martin taps him on the shoulder; Luigi turns, acknowledges his presence. Martin takes up the hose a few metres behind the nozzle man, helping him to wrangle it when he moves. Slowly the two men crawl right, Martin following Luigi’s lead. The local pours water into one window, then moves along to its neighbour. The tanker is at the intersection; Luigi is moving them around the corner, opposite Jennings. The fire is upstairs, concentrated on the corner and the rooms above Somerset Street, but with the verandah alight, the whole top storey is threatened.

Behind them, a man pulls up in a farm tanker: good for grass fires, not something on this scale. He looks at the pub, gives Martin a thumbs-up, then turns his attention to Jennings, spraying the untouched shopfront with his hose, then the roof, protecting it from embers.

There’s the slow scream of metal; Martin turns back to the pub, watches as the verandah starts to peel away from the front of the building, Errol striding before it, signalling for the crowd to get back, for the photographers to make themselves safe in case the verandah comes down. Where’s Robbie? Why isn’t he controlling the crowd? Martin begins to feel faint. The heat is intense, the day has been so very hot, the night too young to bring relief, the fire amplifying the temperature, draining the energy from him.

Fran Landers emerges from the bedlam; she’s walking through the crowd, blinking in the smoke, handing bottles of water to the firefighters and media. For half a second, their eyes meet. She takes the top from a bottle, hands it to him, leaves another by his feet. Moves on. Some water goes down his throat, some goes over his head. Relief. Then, through his other arm, wrapped around the canvas hose, he can feel the pressure dropping. They’re running out of water. He looks to the truck; men are attaching a feeder line to a hydrant. Errol is with them.

‘Two minutes and we’ll be back on. Take a break—these other blokes can take over.’

Martin and Luigi hand over the hose. Luigi walks to the far side of the road and slumps down on the gutter. Fran gives him water. Martin looks at the fire. It’s gaining territory. The crew is holding the line along Hay Road but the back half of the pub is beyond saving. It must have started there, close by the rear of the building, near Avery Foster’s apartment.

Martin walks around past the pumper just as it starts up again, twin hoses blasting water into the hotel, the focus now trying to prevent the verandah collapsing into the street. He looks at the door to the staircase. Images come to him: the fox hunt, the chandelier, the painting of the summer storm. He’s still looking as the door bursts open. Claus Vandenbruk is pushing out through the smoke, clearing the way for two younger, fitter officers, who are half carrying Robbie Haus-Jones, his arms around their necks. The constable is coughing uncontrollably, body racked, his face black with smoke, his clothes singed, his hands a red mess, swollen and ugly. They get him onto the street, out to safety. Sit him down.

Martin is frozen to the spot, watching. Doug Thunkleton’s camera crew, all the camera crews, swarm about, Carrie the photographer pushing her lens within centimetres of the policeman’s face, shutter firing like a machine gun, his rescuers standing, breathing in the air, looking at each other in disbelief. And Martin sees D’Arcy Defoe, thin frame silhouetted against the fire, standing slightly back from the throng, taking it all in, writing notes, dispassionate, removed, professional. Like a shadow of a person, like an echo of Martin Scarsden. There’s something in the stance, something in the concentration, the focus, that takes him back. Martin in battlefields, in refugee camps, in field hospitals: present but not present, viewing events through a reporter’s eyes, witnessing the suffering, but not feeling it. It’s D’Arcy Defoe’s silhouette, but it’s himself he sees.

Something explodes deep within the hotel, and as if in answer, the front section of the verandah tears away and starts to fall: slowly at first, then accelerating, like a sinking ship, breaking apart and crashing into the street, embers flying, the crowd retreating. He sees her then, across the road, in front of the bank—Mandy, holding Liam. He moves towards her, but she sees him coming, shakes her head. Her face is wet with tears, shining orange and red in the fire’s reflected glow.