The Gale

Claire watched the smoke and fire on the far hills. Through her camera’s lens, she saw the flames between the distant trees as just a few orange points. The wind came hard off the northern deserts and carried the smell of burning eucalyptus upon it. Claire hoped that the fire would grow by afternoon. The hot wind stoking the flames promised her that it would.

The shutter of her camera fluttered open and closed and she captured dozens of photographs. But they were not photographs of some inferno with that violent strength and scale that would sell so very well. They were mediocre pictures of distant orange lights. Mediocre pictures would not sell and for Claire that would not do.

She stood beside her car at the edge of the road and the radio was on loud. The air conditioner in her old Toyota had long been broken and she kept her windows down. The ABC warned that Claire’s little lights were due to grow. They announced a total fire ban and the evacuation of large towns. They predicted that conditions would worsen through the day. Soon a true firestorm would swell out over the hills and all the towns and homes and people there would burn with the bush. The newspapers and the internet would need images of all the coming violence and all the ruined buildings and the blackened bodies that would come with it. She called her boyfriend.

“Honey. I can’t come over today. It’s like I thought, there are fires on the hills. I’m going to get some photos. Yes, it’s worth the risk. It will be just like the last time, remember that? No, stay at home. I’ll see you when I’m done. I’ll text you later to let you know how I’m doing. OK. Bye.”

Claire returned to her car and set off for the burning hills. Last year the fires had been too small and she had been too late. She had reached the bush only after the heat had crushed it into charcoal and ash. The earth had been cold and all that burned there were little embers with their weak wisps of smoke. This time she would photograph the flames at their highest point. She would capture them as they made light and smoke from the bush.

After some time she left the fields, and the trees became thick alongside her. The hot air that came in through the open windows grew hotter still. But there in the bush she soon found the remains of an accident in the shallow ditch beside the road. A few crumpled cars had been discarded there and the asphalt was still wet where pools of blood had been hosed away. A woman stood at the edge of the road with her car quite intact beside her. Claire saw a photograph in the scene and pulled over to capture it. She hung her camera around her neck and left the car. But as Claire approached the crash she saw that a camera also hung from the neck of this other woman.

“Another photographer?” asked the woman.

She smiled and rose the viewfinder to her eye. She took a photograph of the tangled metal, and then another. Claire let her own camera hang against her chest and she did not turn it on.

“You better be careful if you’re heading in to see the fire,” the woman said.

“I know,” said Claire.

“No, sorry. I mean, the police might stop you if you don’t have a real reason to be there.”

“Do you have a real reason to be here?”

The woman shrugged and said, “I’m a freelancer. They sent me back because nobody is paying me to be here.”

“Did you make it to the fire itself?” said Claire.

“Almost, I missed out. But I got here just after the crash. There was a lot of blood.”

“You shot it all?”

“I did. Lucky timing, I guess.”

The woman turned to take another photo of the wreckage.

“Are you going to try for the fire?” she said.

“No, I’m here to get my cousins,” said Claire.

“Where are they?”

“They’re in Kenford.”

“Kenford? Where’s that?”

Claire motioned to the nearby hills and said, “It’s nearby.”

“I’ve never heard of Kenford,” said the woman.

“It’s nearby.”

The woman laughed.

“Your story will probably work well enough,” she said.

Claire returned to the Toyota and the woman wished her luck. She continued into the hills and the smoky haze that rested there. A fire engine wailed its way past her. She looked to the bush through each window of her car and searched for some distant lick of orange light among the trees that she could follow.

The street signs directed her towards Adamsville, one of the towns that had been selected for evacuation. There were no signs for Kenford. The smoke’s haze became a fog as she reached deeper into the hills and soon there were stands of black trees within the living forest. But she continued on and soon only those leafless trees of ash were everywhere beside the road. Wisps of smoke rose out of a grey dust where the forest’s ferns, grasses, and fallen logs had been. There was no colour left in any of it. She had found the path of the fire but it had already moved over the land. Hours had passed since she had spied the distant orange lights. Those flames had grown and passed and she had missed it all for a second time.

Her disappointment mounted and she advanced further along the road to find the front line where the trees and homes would still be burning. At a sharp turn she was stopped by an old sedan that blocked the way. There were rocks and stones bound up in the steep hillside and the car had swerved out and crashed against them. Its full length blocked Claire’s way. The heat of the fire had melted its rubber, smashed away its glass and bent its frame into disorder. Ragged scraps of metal and plastic hung here and there, and the fire had stripped the colour away. The road was high above a deep gully with steep edges and there was no way past it. But perhaps there was a photo in its ruin.

A light rain of ash and a few hot embers fell around Claire as she left her car. The wind rattled the stiff and leafless trees. She took some photos of the sedan in the fog as she approached and while they were better than those of the little orange lights, they were grey and mediocre and they still would not sell.

There was something upright in the driver’s seat. Claire came up beside it. A corpse rested there slouched against the steering wheel. The fire had pulled all the life and light from it. The features on its face and the forms of its limbs had been lost to the flames; it was ashen and lifeless. She rose her camera to capture it.

Claire looked to the camera’s screen and pushed at its buttons. She searched for the right settings and took a photograph of the corpse with each adjustment. The faceless model posed patiently before her. At first the aperture was too large, then too small, but then the shutter speed was imperfect also. Only perfect photographs sold. She fiddled and tested some more.

She looked at the corpse through her lens and she again sent the shutter fluttering. She moved back and forth, rose and kneeled, and oriented the camera this way and that. She reached for the pain and panic that still hung upon the broken body and groped for that one perfect image. Her heart beat quickly and there were no tears in her eyes.

She made it back to her car with several dozen photographs. A few of the images had appeared good but she would not know for certain until that evening. The subject was not a mediocre one and she may have taken her perfect image. But it would not be the photograph that the radio and the wind had promised her. She started the Toyota again and continued her search for the flames.

There was no way of moving the ruined chassis and the body within it so she turned back. The living forest returned but the fog grew thicker still and she could not see far. A different town, Somerton, became her destination. She sent a text message to her boyfriend and he was glad to know that everything was still fine.

There was a young man on the road to Somerton. He held his thumb up high. As Claire approached he waved to her with the hand that held his phone. There was urgency in his signals. The sight of him and his desperation would not have made a mediocre photo but Claire had spotted him too late. She cursed the fog and stopped her car beside him. He came to the window. His was a young and well pimpled face that was stained black with ash.

“Jesus, thanks for stopping. You’re not going to the fire are you?” he said.

He would want her to turn around, she was sure. If she took him she would not reach Somerton and the hundred shattered homes that rested there. He would take her away from the flames that waited for her camera.

“I’m going to my cousins’ place,” she replied.

It was best to stay consistent.

“Where’s that?” asked the boy.

“Kenford,” she said.

“Where?”

“Kenford. It’s nearby.”

“Whatever. If you keep heading along this road you’re going to run into the fire and you’re going to be fucked. Shit, if you don’t turn around now and take me with you then we’ll probably both be fucked. You don’t want to go any further along this road. Trust me. I’ve just come down from up there.”

“But how far is the fire?” she asked.

“It’s close. Listen.”

She listened through the wind and the idling engine. Dulled by distance there came the unending exhalation of a great inferno.

“It’s so close you can hear it,” said the boy. “And besides, look at the sky.”

She looked up to see low clouds of smoke through the leaves and the fog. They caught the nearby firelight and their glow betrayed the imminence of the firestorm’s violence.

“Come on, let me get in and let’s go. The fire’s just over that hill. Somerton is gone. We’re fucked here.”

“Gone?”

“That’s what I said. It’s over this hill. I just came from there.”

She looked away from him. Her hands held the steering wheel tight and over them she could see a split in the road. There were two signs that pointed in either direction. The sign that pointed right pointed to Somerton. It was only one kilometre away. “When you say that Somerton is gone, do you mean that the fire is very close, or do you mean that the fire has already passed over it?”

“The fire is there right now. I have a photo,” he said.

“Show me,” said Claire.

He swiped at his phone and held it out for her to see. The display was large and bright and she could see the image clearly. It showed the bush in flames and the orange light on the clouds of smoke overhead. A large country house was at the edge of the blaze and it was disappearing into the brilliance of the heat. It was not a mediocre photo.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“Show me more,” said Claire.

“Listen, we’ve really got to go. Can you unlock the door?”

“But do you have more?”

“We have to go.”

She still was not certain of what was ahead on that road, but she did know that the boy would not make it back out of the hills without her. She thought of him alone on the road in the falling embers. The heat and the flames would mount the hill and tumble down upon him. His body would become blackened and burned and there would be no life left in him either. But there was a struggle within Claire as she thought too of the blaze at its peak, of the houses in the flames, of the spent bodies and crushed cars and all the photographs she might take. They would not be mediocre. She looked to the black asphalt and the white lines that stretched along it. They led to the signs that marked the way. There was only one kilometre to Somerton. She pressed her foot against the accelerator and in a moment the boy was lost in the smoke behind her.