Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
But she ruins it anyway by adding, “And not even one peep! What a gentleman!”
Because we both know I looked.
I wake in the night to the sound of crying. It is not unusual but it kills me just the same. I sit up and put my arms around my oldest son, let him rest his head on my shoulder, and though I love holding him like this, I am panicked at the thought of the inertia within him. If he asks me something, if he wants to talk, I will have no way to help him.
“Let’s get to the bag,” I say.
“I can’t. I don’t want to.”
“Come on.” I pull him up from the bed the two of us have been sharing with Orly; the little fella is still fast asleep as I drag his brother from the room.
It’s very cold in the night; the stairs will do us good. Raff stops twice on the way up, leaning against the wall for support, his grief a physical presence he must fight. “Keep moving,” I order him, and he does so, putting one foot in front of the other until we’ve made it to the top.
His punches are weak and listless and no matter what I say I can’t stir within him the energy it takes to rid his body of the poison. He is too sad, and I don’t know how to help that. I’m good at dealing with his anger, but this sorrow frightens me.
“Dad, I miss him,” he says, forehead resting on the bag.
Panic flails again. If I open my mouth I will make it worse. I need his mother here, she would know how to ease this, but I look and look and can’t find any version of her, and I am useless.
“Keep punching,” I say, and turn for the stairs.
“Dad,” he begs, his voice breaking, but I don’t know what else to do.
I dream of that punching bag, of holding it like an embrace as it swings gently in the wind. Only it isn’t the punching bag I am holding, no, it is a body hanging by its neck from the fuel tanks, its weight almost tender against me as it falls.
I wake a second time to a different son wailing. Raff hasn’t come back to his room-it is Orly who sobs wildly beside me. I shake him gently awake and then hold him close while he cries. I wonder why I am able to do this with him but not with his brother or sister.
“Just a dream,” I tell him. “It wasn’t real.”
“But it is.”
“What is it? Tell me.”
I am expecting a body, eaten by fish and birds. It takes some time to get it out of him, but eventually I am able to establish that he has dreamed of a bushfire, and lost in its flames were animals and plants alike. He’s never had this dream before; I ask him where it’s come from. He explains it is Rowan’s land and house that have burned. And I sit in the dark as every piece of timber she erected turns to ash, and that house I inhabited for an afternoon is gone from around me. Orly says, “Everything will burn or drown or starve, including us.” And it is as though she has brought these deaths with her from a land so hostile I don’t know how I will ever deliver my children back to it.
Rowan
I am greeted, at breakfast, with “You got a screw loose?”
“Huh?” I fumble with the coffee percolator because I have a sense I’m going to need it for whatever this is.
“Telling my nine-year-old that if he doesn’t burn or drown he’ll starve.”
Oh.
I get the coffee onto the stove and light the gas. Then turn to face the simmering man seated at the kitchen table. “That’s not exactly what I said. And I told you not to use this table yet.”
He lifts his hands to show he hasn’t been touching the table. “Why’d you say anything remotely in the realm?”
“He asked. He’s curious.”
Dominic stares at me, astonished, and then he rubs his eyes. “Jesus,” he mutters. “Okay, you don’t have kids.”
“No.”
“Let me explain. You don’t just say to them whatever dark bloody thoughts pop into your head.”
“He’s smart, Dom.”
“Yeah and he’s a child. You think he’s able to cope with the image in his head of animals burning?”
“None of us can cope with that.”
“Too right. He woke up screaming.”
My insides plummet. “Shit. I’m sorry.” I sit down opposite him, holding the coffee mug in my lap. I try to make sense of what possessed me. “It felt wrong. Not to tell him the truth. He hasn’t seen the way the world is but he will. He needs to be prepared.”
Dominic contemplates this, his eyes fixed on the sky above the sink.
“How do you know what to say and not say?” I ask.
He looks back at me. “Bit of common sense’d do the trick.”
I look down at my hands, chastised.
“And just so we’re clear. They’re mine to prepare-or not-in whatever way I reckon.”
“I know that, of course.”
There is a long silence.
“I thought it would be the body,” I admit.
After a moment he says, “So did I.”
You think there will be time, but there isn’t. You get the sprinkler systems going to drench the ground between the forest and the house, the firebreak or so it’s called. You get the hoses ready to fight the flames by hand if you have to. You check that the gutters are clean, you soak them yet again. You pack bags. You pack everything that means anything to you. You think there will be time to pack more but it’s already arrived, tearing through the hills. You think you will fight it but you can’t, you can see that now. There is no stopping this blaze.
I’d set up the property well. My firebreak was wide enough that it should have saved the house. The materials I’d chosen to build with were about as fire resistant as you can get. I had several huge rainwater tanks hooked up to the sprinklers.