Here, the Earth had given us gold to mine, native trees to feed sawmills and nutrients for our orchards. We imagined the world exists for our purposes. Decades after the rush ostensibly ended, alluvial gold was still fossicked with spades, tubs and cradles. Even trees seemed purposeful: Eucalyptus globulus were cultivated for paper production, for pages in my files and Caleb’s sketchbooks. Last century, the Great Depression forced Melbourne men into jobs in deep-forest sawmills. Sixty-nine of those sawmills were destroyed in the Black Friday bushfires of 1939. My schoolhouse survived but was constructed of timber cut and milled by men who did not. Dozens of them, men who that year seemed destined for another kind of war, were killed.
And there, near the fossicker’s hut, I spotted Caleb. An awkward dark figure shadowing the white manna gum that shed its bark each year in bundles like an old miner struggling out of his overalls. In earlier years, we’d go down there together. We’d sit on the creek bank. After checking the grass for snakes, I’d help Caleb roll his jeans and we’d splash through dappled water that covered our ankles. Sometimes my mother-in-law, Caleb’s gran, would come, too.
‘He’s so much like Stephen!’ Claire would exclaim, as though my genes contributed nothing.
She would bring fragrant fresh-baked scones wrapped in a red and white checked tea towel, and a little dish with scoops of butter and jam. After eating, I’d encourage Caleb to crouch in the water while I splashed melted butter and jam from his face. He resisted. Perhaps the painted-face goth had always existed, one layer of skin down, waiting to be born.
‘Caleb!’ I called. ‘I’m making breakfast!’
Over the months before the fire, a skinny pale Caleb had been carved out of the outdoorsy, clumsy boy I loved. He had metamorphosed. His earphones routinely buzzed; Kafka’s insect turned electronic. As though he knew what I imagined, he took to reading books about people who had got into strange trouble. Kafka, of course. Bram Stoker. Horror novels in illustrated form, as graphic as possible. He borrowed my black eyeliner and purchased white face powder. Magically, I had to be blind to the cigarettes he puffed.
I called through the flyscreen. ‘Caleb! Do you want coffee?’
He turned. Carefully, with the heavy sole of a black boot, he stubbed out his cigarette. Stubbed it out, carefully. I remember that. I can’t answer for every moment of his time that day. But he did stub the butt out. He was vigilant about embers. He understood the danger. Then he shook out his too-long, black-dyed hair, and stomped through the fallen bark and sun-baked leaves to our house. He burst through the door and slid into a kitchen chair. Its solid legs creaked over slate tiles. Across the breakfast table, black rimmed but pink with the ghosts of tears, his eyes met mine.
‘Mum, you look angry.’
‘I was thinking, you have your father’s eyes.’ Stephen’s eyes, but clear of Stephen’s promises and betrayals.
Caleb slouched; refusing to eat was one way to wound me. Then he spoke. ‘That’s not surprising. We know he’s my father. How many other kids he has is the mystery.’
I chose to ignore that. There was something new and shocking about Caleb’s face. His lower lip was bloody. Two rings punctured its full redness. The piercings could have been designed for attaching to wires, to pull him along. Unlike the pale powder and the eyeliner, the cigarettes, I couldn’t pretend the lip rings didn’t exist. I held his gaze and touched, with an extended fingertip, my own lip.
Caleb scowled. ‘It’s called a snakebite, Mum.’
‘Will a law firm take you on, with a snakebite?’
‘Who says I want to be a lawyer?’
I was careful. ‘You applied for a law degree.’
‘That was last year. I was just a kid. I always preferred art.’
Lips are so sensitive! Once again, I remembered the grazed knees and tears. When had he become so brave? ‘Won’t they scar?’
His upper lip twitched. I always said the wrong thing.
‘It won’t matter. As long as the hardware stays in.’
How could scars matter? He was eighteen and emo and unhappy, and imagined he’d be eighteen and emo and unhappy forever.
‘You were in my room,’ he said. ‘I saw you in the window.’
‘I was looking for you. It’s nearly time to go.’
After moving food around his plate for a while, Caleb pulled a hair straightener through his fringe until it hung flat over his kohl-lined eyes. He was increasingly like one of the anime characters from his bedroom wall – black-haired, white-faced boys, and girls with long hair the shades of feathers. Wide-eyed and startled, they gazed in disbelief at his mess.
‘Do you think we’re ready?’ I asked him, my beautiful, strange child. ‘I’ve checked the water pump.’
‘And blocked the drains? Jack said that was the most important thing.’ Caleb looked thoughtful, trying to remember the rest of the advice he’d received. He always took Jack Laskin seriously.
‘Tennis balls. Yesterday.’
Every water-safe vessel in the house, even Caleb’s old blue plastic baby bath, was full of water. My hose was attached to a tap at the side of the house, with an extra one on standby.
‘Fire won’t come here. It won’t reach our house,’ Caleb said.
‘You’re very sure.’
He began to smile, but when the expression reached his new piercings, pain washed over him. Dots of blood appeared around the hardware. Speaking, he slurred. ‘Remember three years ago?’
‘Yep.’ He’d been fifteen. We’d just moved here the last time bushfire came near. I’d discussed preparations with Grade 6 at the school where I taught, brainstorming the importance of fire, of humans first domesticating flame, of the Aboriginal use of fire to hunt, for agriculture, for bush regeneration.
‘Fire didn’t reach us then.’ Caleb looked out
