‘You can’t tell me half a story.’ I’d never seen him like this before. Maybe it was the heat, the smoke, the ash in the air.

There was no point pursuing it; he wasn’t about to reveal any more. He’d let my dad slip out of his box, and knew he had to go back in. He stopped, surveyed his lawn, then went inside.

Curtis rode past. ‘Forsaken now, like some old, mouldering thing …’

He’d predicted it, I guessed. But if you’re pessimistic enough, you see everything coming. Peter Donnellan was Curtis Burrell’s arch enemy. They fought, and insulted each other in speech bubbles. Good versus evil. Beard versus clean-shaven. See, life is simple. You can boil it down to a comic book plot. Jaysus, and the Baptists’ heaven, versus Dante’s and Curtis’s hell. Even at sixteen years of age, I wondered if everyone saw the world like me.

There was a rosella on the fence. I stepped towards it and held out my hand and it fluttered onto my finger. I looked around; the street was deserted, but the fires were still raging. I picked up my bag, threw it into our yard and crossed the street, bird still perched on my finger. Up the gravel drive to the porch where Les always sat. ‘Mr Champness?’

And a voice, above the wind that had stripped the skin off the road, the sides of tress, the gravel and fences. ‘Round here.’

I walked down the drive and found Les beside his aviary, pegging a sheet to the wire to keep the wind out. ‘I found this one,’ I said.

He studied it. ‘It’s not mine.’

‘Where do you reckon it came from?’

He’d never said more than a few dozen words to me. Just when we were getting in the car, and he was out watering, and Pop called, ‘How are yer, Les?’ and he just waved, or said, ‘Hot.’

‘Eastern rosella. They’re not uncommon.’

‘I’ve never seen one. Nice colours, eh?’

‘Yeah.’ He examined it quickly, but didn’t seem interested. Perhaps because he hadn’t bought it, fed it, adopted it. Still, a bird was a bird.

‘What do you reckon I should do with it?’

‘Let it go.’

I shook my finger, waved it in the air, but it didn’t want to go. ‘How do you …?’

He took it, put it on the top of the fence, and watched it for a while. ‘Doesn’t seem to want to do anything.’

‘Maybe it’s hungry?’

But he just looked at me like I was stupid. ‘Right.’ He reclaimed the bird, opened his aviary and placed it on a perch. ‘Another one to feed.’

Not exactly the response I was hoping for. I turned to the hills, the fires, and said, ‘Pretty bad, eh?’

The same look—like he just didn’t get me.

‘I just remembered … was it true you used to keep rabbits in there?’

‘No.’

A fairly clear message. I walked off.

‘I know you’ve been watching.’