David Malouf - The Complete Stories

One couple was curled spoon-fashion on the sand. In the curve of the woman's body, a child, its plump limbs rosy with firelight.

A little distance away another woman sat on a pile of blankets with a baby at her breast and a boy of six or seven beside her. He had his thumb in his mouth.

Further off, where the darkness began, two men sat cross-legged and facing one another so that their brows almost touched.

One, his long hair over his eyes, his head bent, was playing a mouth- organ, some Country and Western tune, very sad and whining, to which the second man beat a rhythm on his thigh.

All around them, scattered without thought in the sand, were bottles, paper plates, cartons, the remains of their meal.

The group of the man, woman, and baby shifted a little. The man's arm had gone numb. He eased it, and the woman's body moved with his into a new position. She drew the baby in.

The man with the sleeping bag threw another branch on to the fire.

I could sit here for ever, Fran thought. If the fire went on burning and the man fed it and the others slept like that, and those two men kept on playing that same bit of a tune, I could sit here till I understood at last what it all means: why the sea, why the stars, why this lump in my throat.

Still seated in the sand with her skirt tucked between her knees and her spine straight, she saw herself get up and walk slowly to where the man with the sleeping bag stood. He turned, and without surprise, watched her come in out of the dark. She stood before him for a moment, then, as if granted permission, went and lay down on the sand among the others, between the group of the man, woman, and baby and the woman with the small boy, feeling the fire's warmth on one side and the breath of the sea on the other. The tune went on. She slept. And in her dream saw a thin, tight-lipped woman with big eyes like a bush-baby's, sitting far off in the dark of the dunes. Gently she beckoned to her, and the woman got up and came into the circle of light.

Long minutes had passed. They had grown cold. Angie wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. She got to her feet and began to walk on. Fran took up her shoes and followed.

The track led to the crest of the hill. From there a second track would take them down to the horse-paddocks, then the long way round to the house. But as they climbed there was a brighter glow in the sky.

“What is it?” Fran asked. “More bonfires?”

Then they came to the top and saw it. Great shoots of flame over the town.

7

From the house a fleet of cars had already set off, their progress slowed by the many gates that had to be opened. They were barely out of sight when the telephone rang.

“Poor Audley,” Madge said when Milly Gates from the Post Office gave her the news. She sat down in her black frock, closed her eyes and, worn out with all the preparations and the talk and because it was the only way she had of dealing with things, immediately fell asleep, her head back, snoring.

The half-dozen guests who had stayed behind with her were embarrassed, but felt free now to step out on to the deck and watch from a distance the play of flames across the inlet and the reflected glow in the sky.

In the cars they were still in doubt, as they came along the edge of the Lake, what it was that was making such a show.

“Looks like the police station,” Rupe ventured.

“No,” Ralph told him gloomily, having a good idea what it must be, "it's not the cop shop.”

Tommy Molloy, sitting in the back seat between them, said nothing. He knew what it was. So did Audley. A vision of it had appeared spontaneously in Audley's head, the four rooms and all their objects in glowing outline, in a red essence of themselves, a final intensity of their being in the world before they collapsed into ash.

He sat very still in the front seat beside Jonathon, wearing a look, behind the startled eyes, of practised stoicism.

The first one away had been Barney Shannon in his ute, with Lily in the cabin beside him. When they came to the gates it was Barney who leapt out and ran forward in the headlamps’ beam to open them.

In procession they crossed the causeway into town.

The street was jammed with cars. On the roofs of some of them young fellows in boardshorts were standing as if at a football match, with beer cans in their fists. Girls were being hauled up beside them, slipping and shrieking. Further on was the inner circle of those who had pushed in as close as the heat would allow.

Abandoning the cars, they began to ease their way through the crowd, Ralph staying as close as he could to his father's side. People turned to protest, but, when they saw who it was, made way, and Audley finding himself the object of so much attention, felt his heart flutter.

A young fireman came hurrying up. He was in uniform but without his helmet.

“Sorry about this, Mr. Tyler,” he shouted, "she's pretty far gone. Old stuff. That's what done it. Went up like a haystack.”

He was a fresh-faced fellow of twenty-two or — three, recently married. The firebell must have got him out of bed. His hair was wild, his face aglow. There was something hectic and unreliable in his looks. He shouted as if afraid his rather high voice might not carry across the distance he felt between himself and a world that was entirely occupied now by the blaze; all the time casting quick little glances over his shoulder, anxious that if he took his eyes off it for even a second, this conflagration, this star-blaze whose heat he felt between his shoulder blades, and which sent runnels of sweat down his sides under the heavy uniform, might die on him before he had time to savour the excitement it had set off in him. Suddenly, unable to resist any longer the attraction of the thing, he swung round and took the full blast of it on his cheeks. He had, Audley saw, a proprietorial look.

Beautiful! His look said. She's a real beauty! It was his first big do.

If I were a policeman, thought Audley, I'd arrest that boy on the spot.

Surprised by his own excitement, which he had caught from the young fireman and which he felt too in the silent concentration and glow of the crowd, he approached the flames.

Don Wheelwright, the local policeman, materialized. “Don't worry, Mr. Tyler,” he shouted, "we'll get ‘em soon enough, the bastards that done it.”

Audley did not respond. He knew who the fellow was referring to. And Don Wheelwright, feeling snubbed, put another mark in his book of grievances. He had had go-ins with Audley before. His promise of action was a challenge. Well, what about it, Mr. Tyler? Now it's something of yours the bastards have touched. As if, Audley thought, in Clem, he had not been touched already.

All these unofficial reports were an embarrassment to him, he did not want them. He had no doubt Don Wheelwright and his people would come up with a culprit — several, perhaps. There might even be among them the one who had struck the match. But standing here in the crowd was like being in the fire itself, there was such an affinity between the two, such a surge of intensity. It stilled the mind, sucked up attention and subdued the individual spirit in such a general heightening of crowd-spirit, of primitive joy in the play of wind and flame, that he found himself saying, with grim humour, out of the centre of it: "So we got our bonfire after all — want it or not.”

He felt, against all sense or reason, exhilarated, released. He could have shaken his palms in the air and danced.

Looking about quickly to see if anyone, Lily for instance, had noticed, he was struck again by the intensity of the faces. They were like sleepwalkers who had come out, some of them still in their night-wear, to gaze on something deeply dreamed.