The Best Australian Stories 2010 Read Online Free Page A

from the vehicle through the midsummer grass. The horses circle behind me, quizzical, mesmerised, nostrils flaring at the smoke, as if daring me closer. But it’s too hot here and the sparks make me wary of another explosion. The sound of the crackling. I pull off my coat to thrash the ground where a flame is causing a new patch to smoulder. Luckily the growth is so short from grazing that it doesn’t just flare up like broom straw. Then, at my feet, a piece of my grandmother’s headboard, an ornate hacked-off corner, and at the base of the flames I see more – a dining room chair, the spindly leg of a bridge table thrown onto the bonnet. An outrage whips through me like the earth quaking. Pieces that survived the passage from England haven’t survived Sharen Wills. I stare at the top of my grandmother’s mirrored armoire, cast out like a demon in flames, but it’s too hot to lunge in and salvage anything. Embers float from my grandmother’s bedhead chopped into sections, from the bed where she died with The Book of Common Shrubs on the now-burning end table, her small round specs on the still-open page. When she was alive and this house was as it should still be.
    I turn from the bonfire and make out a shape in the dimly lit bay window, not fifty yards between us. Sharen Wills, gazing at her accomplishment. She who will not be railroded is railroading us. The sight of her makes me want to snatch a burning chair leg and set her alight, but I’m saved from myself by the fire-engine lights turning up into Hopetoun Road, like an ambulance arriving for the already dead. The siren turned off now, just the hissing of vinyl car seats and sparks from lost antiques.
    I slap my jacket at another scorched swath of grass as the truck rattles silently over the cattle grid and sweeps its lights across the paddock. The arch-necked horses canter off and I’m left here alone with my face lit by flames and the charcoal smell in my nostrils. Up in the truck cab it’s Bobby Gennaro. We once played tennis as boys, when my mother allowed me to mix with the townies.
    â€˜You know it’s a total-fire-ban day,’ he shouts at me, jumping down from the running board. He seems invigorated by the blaze, and I sense the divide between us. The two young volunteers unwind the canvas hose. No one asks why a car is on fire in the middle of our paddock; they know weird shit happens out here. My tears are caused by the smoke but my anger is gilded with shame. I might have fled eight thousand miles from this place but it’s a feeling as old as the corduroy coat I flail at the grass. Yes, I’m a Rawson. And they haven’t even noticed the furniture yet. But a new hissing sound and a gust of the high-pressure shoots on the windshield and a burning chair goes flying, charcoaled pieces of French-polished wood. Bobby Gennaro aims lower and smiles to himself as if he’s hit the jackpot. He hoses the flames that light up the delight on his face.
    â€˜Fucking Sharen from the house,’ I shout, as though it has little to do with me, ‘she’s pissed off at my father.’ But my voice feels like kindling in the wind. They know Sharen, surely, the way she shows her tits and midriff, and they must talk about my father, the Eccentric Millionaire from Tindervick, despite the fact he now owns nothing. And despite the fierce sprays of precious water, sparks still fly from Sharen’s old burning car and his burning heirlooms, sprung from the house he rented to her regardless, when my mother called him a loon for leaving it furnished. My mother who knew Kim wouldn’t be enough, that he’d keep a keen eye on his dead mother’s stuff and his hands on his slender new tenant. My frail mother, still out on that far dark veranda, smelling the wind for embers, hosing the remains of her garden or hosing down the cypresses in case this gets away and rips through the rye grass towards her. And