When the floors and the furniture are cleaned, and the vacuum cleaner is more than full, I feel a sense of achievement. The sink and the dishes are still a couple of hours’ worth of work waiting for me, but one step at a time is enough. Outside, the autumn sun is making itself popular, and I think that perhaps I should try harder. I take a beer from the fridge, open it, and glug a few mouthfuls down. It tastes and feels terrific.

The phone is ringing. I’m guessing it’s Marko, because he hasn’t rung for a while, and he has tried to make it a habit. I know he will keep calling until I answer. Marko rang me every second day after James’s accident, and visited me on the in-between days, whether I wanted him there or not. He kept it up for a long time, but I guess I broke him. He thought I would get over it after a while, or begin to recover at least. He was probably hurt by the fact that I haven’t, and that I don’t want to hang with him or come to parties or the pub, or even just chat. What is a friend supposed to do?

I pick up the phone, and he is telling me there’s a fire brigade meeting on this afternoon, and I should go. The suggestion is so off-track with what I have just experienced and the stuff going through my head that I nearly hang up. I say, ‘I’ll think about it,’ and he says if I don’t come he’ll come over to stay with me again. I put the phone down, thinking I do not want to go to a fire brigade meeting. Fire brigade meetings are really just an excuse for a yarn and a few beers, even though some official stuff does get done. The meetings are a bit of a joke, because the people who go have generations of experience dealing with bushfires and grassfires. If there’s anything farmers do well in a group, it is fight fires. But at some stage the government decided they needed to be involved in rural fire-fighting. Farmers couldn’t be trusted to put fires out on their own. There needed to be regulations, rules, and training. So now there are inductions, procedures, courses, bright uniforms, bureaucratic levels of importance, and red fire engines. The fire brigade meetings I’ve been to (under Fire Captain Marko) have been opportunities for everyone to show how little attention they have been paying to government rules, and the delight they have in that fact.