Prologue
IS THIS HOW it ends?
Cupped hands protect a tiny flame from the breeze as it ignites a piece of cloth. Cupped hands – your hands. A line of fire skitters along the ground towards a weatherboard cottage, high set, surrounded by bush. The flame reaches the wall, splices in two and quickly encircles the building. Ethanol-soaked towels laid at the doorways and windows guard the exits.
Nagging doubts had stopped you until tonight. What would happen when the smoke penetrated the house? Would the occupants wake and, in their panic, manage to escape? Or would they be silently overcome? Who else might be inside? Those questions are dead now and you cannot remember feeling so alive. Your heart is steady, resolute.
Last night, you drove along the road searching for a spot to stash your gear. A steep embankment where a drain passes under the road – a spot no one would ever find. A sharp-eyed walker might catch sight of the red canisters and the white material. But no one walked up here anymore. Into the opening you pushed the bag, bulging with towels and bed sheets, cut into strips and tied together to make a twenty-metre wick. Then the fuel: ethanol, not petrol.
Remember the time you found a bullet, when you were a boy? Put it inside a model battleship, doused with lawnmower fuel. Shaking hands struck the match, igniting the vapour first, not the fluid. That second inside the blue fireball was enough to cement the lesson: you needed a safer option – a slow and stable burn. The night comes, warm and moonless. You haven’t slept much when the alarm sounds at three in the morning. Statistically, it’s when people are most likely to be lost in dreams. Between two and four; you split the difference. Deep in the forest, you find another spot to hide the car, unscrew the plates and head back on foot. You have a bivvy bag, water, and a little food in your backpack. The plan: run six kilometres, sleep until dawn, walk to the station and catch the early train into town, catch a flick, keep the receipts, collect the car next night. The plan is solid, you reckon. But foolproof? Well, what is?
You watch for as long as you can ignore the urge to flee, until flames have licked their way into the ceiling cavity and smoke pours from between the roof tiles. Time to go. You step carefully down the hill without using a torch to a little-used track that separates the private land from state forest. Now you run. Each stride an escape. Steal a backward glance – just one. Yellow, orange, and red fingers lash the canopy of trees above the house, a blue flash where the fire is most intense. Heat reaches your face, even at this distance. You gasp at the beauty, the wordless poetry, the answer to the question no one asks.
