A SINGLE THUD.
So loud that I hear it over the relentless wind battering the house. I listen in the darkness, hoping it’s the front door, hoping it’s Frankie home from the cocktail bar, hoping she won’t be drunk and stumbling and wake the whole family. But there are no other noises, it must have been a falling branch. Unless the thud was inside my head— the tablets I swallowed after dinner haven’t dulled the pounding pain.
Taking the phone from my bedside table, I type a message: Are you on your way? I’m trying to give our eldest daughter the freedom I never had, but it’s a push-pull of emotions: excitement for her to be going to university and enjoying the social life, along with concern for her safety. Late at night, she has to catch two buses and an Uber from the other side of the city back to our house. When I suggested a midnight curfew, Frankie presented me with a philosophical argument from one of her exams. ‘Time isn’t real, Mum,’ she said. ‘It’s an illusion. We only have the present, this moment now. The future doesn’t yet exist so I can’t possibly tell you what time I’ll be home.’ After a year studying philosophy, nineteen-year-old Frankie thinks she has the answer to life, the universe and everything. Ha! At forty-nine, I now have more questions than answers. My phone pings with a reply: Home soon. Can Clio stay? Her train’s cancelled. Sure, I answer, wondering what Frankie means by ‘soon’. Public transport is so unreliable. At the beginning of the year, I’d drive to the bus stop at our local shops and collect her. Tonight, though, she’s with Clio. Safety in numbers. Beside me, Vince shifts slightly in the bed. He always sleeps like the dead. If he were awake, he’d say, ‘Stop worrying, Suze. Close your eyes.’ So I close my eyes and focus on my breathing: in, out, slow and deep. My head throbs with every breath. Bushfires have been burning north of Sydney for weeks and smoke taints the air. I hope Issy took her asthma preventer before bed, she’s been coughing every night. With the strong winds whipping through the gum trees, Vince has been checking the bushfire app even more often than usual. He showed me an update before bed. ‘Only thirty kilometres away now,’ he told me, pointing to the
corridor of bush leading directly from the fire front to our home. ‘Thirty kilometres is a long way.’ I reassured him with logic, even though his fear isn’t logical. ‘The fire would have to jump the six-lane motorway then snake down the valley in a very specific path to get to us. That won’t happen, honey.’ ‘The wind’s pushing it towards us,’ he insisted. ‘Random gusts can spread embers miles ahead of the flames.’ Our house backs on to a national park which is usually clamouring with life, but lately it has been silent: no kookaburras laughing, no wattlebirds chattering.
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