Flames Quotes

Back at home the girls showed no interest in hunting Onebloods. Instead, he taught them to push hooks through frozen squid and hurl them out into the water, which they loved as much as he found it boring. And through sharing this banal activity with his daughters he somehow developed an affection for the activity itself, and found himself angling off the rocks even when the girls were away in Devonport, casting and catching and occasionally crying, but only when the mist was clear and he could see past the heads towards the tall spires where the seals still hauled out, or so he assumed.

Charlotte knows he thinks she’s gone crazy—he’s been throwing that jutting look at her every time he’s caught her sobbing in the gullies, flinching at the wind and throbbing in the fields. This look of judgement. This look of control. This look of I need to do something; she needs my help, when really (as far as Charlotte is concerned) he is the one who needs help, because what is she doing but grieving?

Charlotte’s neat nostrils are picking up a scent on the breeze: it smells of cleaning products, starch and artificial sweeteners. It is the smell of white-picket fences, of census-friendly families, of collared shirts at church, of people who gossip and chat and tell everyone everything, and she is marching back into the bus station and asking for a ticket that will take her further south.

He had been here longer than the loud pale apes, longer even than the quieter dark ones who had arrived earlier. He had seen them grow and die and spread, and he knew them far better than they would ever know themselves. With his blunt nose he could smell their foul industries; with the blanched tip of his tail he could feel their intrusions in the water; with his black eyes he could see the iron they sunk into his rivers, building dams, dropping anchors, hooking fish. He had learned the colour and the shape of their callousness, but he could not stop them, for his power was limited to the rivers, while they swamped over everything.

I have long found that the most appropriate material for those who have died young is wood taken from the many-hued whorls of an old snowgum. Its hard, cold-to-the-touch timber does not rot or warp or even fade. Instead it fossilises, and so too does the body it contains. The flesh of the dead turns as hard and unyielding as the stony coffin, and cannot be altered by any natural means.

So come: collect your half-made coffin. I shall not charge you for it, even though I have laboured over its creation. I no longer need the money—the taxman has no chance of getting to me while these creatures plague my doorstep. Come take the flesh-stoning panels of freshly carved snowgum. But the pelt stays with me, moron boy. The only grave it shall adorn is my own.

What case would you like to speak to the senior detective about? He’s very busy. The boy-cop smiled back, and behind his too-white teeth I could see his fragile little thoughts tracing lines, making assumptions, bouncing off words like Duty and Career and Citizen and Safety.

I could’ve gone over, shown them my photo of the McAllister girl and tried to sweet-talk the information out of them, but my gut told me they wouldn’t give me anything. The boorish looks on their faces told me something else. I didn’t like it, but I knew I could handle it.

I suppose if you were to suspect one of us, it would be Charlotte, the new hand—but, hard as I try, I cannot convince myself that she is responsible. Yes, behind her pale face there lurks a curious ferocity; and yet, she often wanders through the freezing fields alone after her work for the day is done; and yes, she occasionally seems to lose control of herself in fits of quiet emotion, eyes closed, hands clenched, small noises leaking through her gritted teeth. But it cannot be her; she loves the wombats more than Nicola does, if that were possible.

They simper after the herd, cooing and frowning at the skinny beasts, treating them as if they were sick children, not mindless marsupials. They are certainly no help in dealing with what is actually threatening them. Each morning I march off, gun in hand and knife in belt, as their eyes follow me filled with what looks more and more like fear. It is futile, feminine softness, and nothing more. I am beginning to regret hiring them.

He was there to stop poachers, maintain trails, preserve the environment, not to be bowled over by the bright, harsh beauty of his surrounds. Yet soon this bowling over became such a common occurrence that he began to accept it, and once he accepted it he allowed himself to enjoy it: to let the wonder take his soul places it hadn’t been since he was a child in the forest, crouching in a branch-built shelter, thirsty for the taste of all the wild things in the world.

But as far as he knew, Allen was fine. A quiet man, but a sane one. A good farmer. A friend, or the closest thing to a friend he had down here. So he didn’t give these women what they wanted, not straight away. He told them he’d visit the farm. He would see it all for himself, and he would sort things out.

Everywhere the world would open up to him as it used to, huge and humbling; he would be dwarfed by its colour and power. He would forget the farmhands and the fire. In the shudder of his skin, in the run of his blood, he would feel the wonder again.

Through her throbbing fingertips she could feel the source of the flame, pulsing out from deep inside Charlotte. Then she felt it waver, slow, and die, and in that instant she knew: she had done this. Her touch had travelled through Charlotte’s heat. She had quenched the rage; she had stopped the fire.

That was it: hide, recover, re-emerge. Nicola hadn’t factored herself or her needs into this plan; that wasn’t her way. Since her days on the deck, cracking open her father’s smile, she had lived by putting others first. Her first instinct was always to help, to shrink back from the front and push others forward. It wasn’t pure selflessness; she drew pleasure from how she could affect others, and when they showed her gratitude she bathed in it, glowing in the knowledge that she, and only she, had made them feel that way.

In a mind like his, grand acts will always trump honest words. There was a chance he’d understand this—a slim chance, but a chance nonetheless—the moment he saw the coffin. An epiphany might have dawned upon him: What am I doing? Is she even worried about her eventual death? What if she just needs someone to talk to? What if she just needs time? But this chance was destroyed the moment Levi picked the golden-brown pelt from Hough’s nibbled fingers. Now, with his fingers tousling the fur, with the uncommon warmth spreading from his fingers to his scalp, he has never been more sure of himself.

He parks beside the cottage and goes inside, where there isn’t much light and even less warmth, but there is, among the dusty shelves and boot-worn floorboards, the unmistakable pillowy feeling of coming home. Even in the midst of his rock-hard resolve, Levi cannot dodge this feeling. It reaches at him from the faded floral curtains. It snags him from the sagging bookshelves. It rises through the chipped tiles behind the old stove.

He even met others like him—beings of rock, of sand, of earth and ice, that lived in much the same way he did, although they weren’t the same, not really. Some wore fur and feathers and watched over the creatures they resembled. Some floated high in the sky and released rain, on a whim, to extinguish him. Some swam through rivers and called themselves gods. Some were kind. Some, like a blood-hungry bird spirit he encountered deep in the southwest, were cruel. Most were calm, seeking only to care for the creatures and land that they felt drawn closest to.

What part of the world had thrown hooks into his soul? The answer, he had learned early in his life, lay in the hands that had clashed two stones together to create him. It was people, always people; only people that he really cared for. He had helped them cook, create, shape and heat themselves, and had come to think of them as not so much a family but as part of himself. For of all the shapes of life he had encountered, they were the only ones who had shown him that he had a purpose in this water-edged world.

They brought pain to the people he’d been helping for centuries—pain that he initially responded to by burning down their buildings, their docks, their great bird-like ships—but they also came with a vast multitude of new purposes for him. With them he was not merely cooking marsupials, sharpening spears and burning scrub; he was exploding black powder and flinging balls of metal through the air faster than any bird could fly.

After all these years he was reduced to the same state he was in at the moment the woman, crouching by the riverbank, had first summoned him with the clash of two smooth stones.

So when Charlotte began leaking the fire he’d given her, he did nothing more than watch. When his son started unravelling, he intervened with only half of his flaming heart.

Just like their mother, they would eventually die. And he did not want to be close to them when they did.

The tree ferns blotted the sky and pawed at my face. Worms and beetles churned across the bracken floor. Water throttled in a stream; I was used to it crashing in waves. My mother found calmness there, down in the reaching, shading fronds, but all I found was a lingering distaste for wet soil.

Give me white-chopped seas full of salt and fury.

He blinks. Mum loved this place. He looks up at the canopy. It seemed right.

I take a gamble; with heat pulsing beneath my nails, I reach out. It’s not. But it’s okay. My palm lands on his naked shoulder. We need to leave. I’ll find you some help.

He looks at my hand. I don’t need help. I’m helping you.

Please, Levi. You can help me by coming with me.

You don’t understand.

The cloud’s rage howled on, pushing the storm east and west, north and south. Fields became bogs; ponds became lakes; wombats swam like water rats, and water rats cavorted like seals, drunk on the storm’s power. A muscly current turned Tunbridge into Nobridge. The Avoca post office was washed clean of all its letters. Hours after it broke over Notley, the storm reached the southern capital’s sprawling suburbs. It lashed the huddled houses before pouring onto the shiny docks, where fortuned of yachts clattered against weathered concrete.

I had not cried since I was a small child—not even at our mother’s cremation. But now my howl was joined by a rapid gurgle of other sobs, and tears, and the occasional moan. I didn’t know what was happening to me; I tried to maintain my composure, but failed; I failed as badly as I’d failed my sister. Somehow I ended up on the squeaky floor at the foot of the bed. My throat ached. I was punching the linoleum.