And Jess, still wearing her record player cum hair dryer plastic cap, speckled with black holes from sparks and cinders, held up in the gloom the forty-five Gene Pitney record she had carried all that way. In the heat it had drooped into the shape of a pudding bowl.
Look at Gene, kids, Ella said. Just look at Gene.
After a few minutes it was hotter than ever but the noise had died down and the flames had stopped licking under the door. They heard a strange noise. Very slowly, Ella opened the door. No one moved. They looked out.
Nothing made sense. The house was gone. Next to where its remains were smoking, the apple tree was still there, a little singed but otherwise okay, while the forest on the other side of the road was burning ferociously.
They heard the strange noise again and realised it was a car horn growing weaker as the car continued on, away from them. Ella hauled Stewie into her arms, and her daughters ran out with her, all of them yelling through the flames, but the car had already gone past and was disappearing into the smoke up the road. They yelled harder.
And then the car stopped. It was a green 1948 Ford Mercury with white-walled tyres. None of the children would ever forget it. The driver’s door opened and a man got out. And when he turned around, they saw that it was their father, come to find them.
They started running to him and he to them, through the smoke and heat and flames. When they met, Dorrigo grabbed Stewie, swinging him with one arm onto his hip. His free hand he opened out wide, cupped Ella’s head and clutched her face hard against his. He held her against him and the girls against them both, as if they were entwined roots holding up a decayed tree. It was only a moment before he let her go and they all fled to the car. But it was more affection than his three children had seen their father show their mother in a lifetime.
13
REASONING THAT THEIR best chance of survival now lay in heading deeper into the forest that had already partly burnt, rather than heading into the fire that was now sweeping into Hobart, Dorrigo drove on in the direction from which his family had fled. Some houses and forest remained, but where the old woman who had not wanted them had saved her good boys’ clothes for someone else, there was now nothing except smoking tin and ash and a naked chimney. Where Mrs McHugh had been chopping down her fence to save her house, it was hard to know in the smoke where either had been.
They found themselves driving into a strange night. Coming round a corner the black sky gave way to a huge, red wall of fire, perhaps half a mile away, flames rising far above them. This was a new fire, roaring up from a different direction, and it seemed to be joining several smaller fires into a single inferno. The noise of it was overwhelming. For a moment longer they continued staring as they kept driving. Ella broke the spell.
It’s the fire front, she said.
Dorrigo braked, threw the Ford Mercury into a wild reverse swerve, crashed it into first and took off back down the road from where they had just come. Past the fallen wires and flaming car wrecks he drove like a man possessed. Within minutes though the fire front had caught up with them, and now he drove between walls of flame on either side, around burning tree limbs falling everywhere, past houses exploding, alternately speeding as fast as he could go when there was a clear stretch of road, and slewing and slowing when he had to. A fireball, the size of a trolley bus and as blue as gas flame, appeared as if by magic on the road and rolled towards them. As the Ford Mercury swerved around it and straightened back up, Dorrigo found he had no choice but to ignore the burning debris that appeared out of the smoke and hurtled at them—sticks, branches, palings—sometimes hitting and bouncing off the car. He grunted as he worked the column shift up and down, spinning the big steering wheel hard left and right, white-walled tyres squealing on bubbling black bitumen, the noise only occasionally audible in the cacophony of flame roar and wind shriek, the weird machine gun-like crackling of branches above exploding.
They came over a rise to see a huge burning tree falling across the road a hundred yards or so in front of them. Flames flared up high along the tree trunk as it bounced on landing, its burning crown settling in a neat front yard to create an instant bonfire that merged into a burning house. Wedging his knee into the door, Dorrigo pushed with all his strength on the brake pedal. The Ford Mercury went into a four-wheel slide, spinning sideways and skidding straight towards the tree, slewing to a halt only yards from the flaring tree trunk.
No one spoke.
Hands wet with sweat on the wheel, panting heavily, Dorrigo Evans weighed their options. They were all bad. The road out in either direction was now completely cut off—by the burning tree in front of them and the fire front behind them. He wiped his hands in turn on his shirt and trousers. They were trapped. He turned to his children in the back seat. He felt sick. They were holding each other, eyes white and large in their sooty faces.