His memory faded into vague impressions, each as distinct and frozen as a frame in his graphic art. The day ached with heat, earth and air pushing violently against each other in the volcanically carved terrain. He thought he heard something. He must be imagining it. (He hadn’t learned for weeks that Rosie saw him there. He didn’t notice her with her binoculars and camera, looking for another reason to hate him.) But he could almost hear Jack’s voice, his frustration.

Where are you? Come back to the station.

He was hallucinating. Jack wasn’t here. Jack was the CFA captain, needed elsewhere. His voice, over the telephone. What was that? The flash of light like a woman in a white dress, a whisper of pale smoke. Caleb found the sketchbook he’d come for, the one he promised Sean, the one filled with his Sean the Adventurer stories. Perhaps heatstroke had made him delirious. It was his custom; he lit a cigarette and stood and worried. He shouldn’t have come here. He’d been torn. The desire to be here, the desire to find Penelope, both needs really, with risks attached to whatever course he chose to take.

And that was a flame, licking at a tree across Damper Creek. The scent of smoke, then flames. They reminded him of puppies taking their first steps from the stray mother he’d cared for, one summer. Gran hated wild dogs and cats because they attacked native animals. One morning the puppies crept from the miner’s shed where Caleb hid them, like beads of sweat in the heat. Claire, ruthless as the north wind, whisked them away.

‘The RSPCA,’ she told Caleb. ‘They’ll find good homes.’

Caleb had been helpless to stop or believe her.

This was fire. Now it had come, nursed and channelled. He had to move. He raced inside and made his first phone call. ‘There’s a fire,’ he said. He was nervous, scared, terrified, his voice betrayed him, turning into a childish squeak. ‘Near Anzac Avenue. Brunton.’

‘We’re tracking all fires at the moment,’ a woman’s voice told him. Stern and disbelieving. ‘Please be aware it’s a crime to make a false report.’

Caleb mentioned the CFA brochure. It warned that you would see smoke before you heard about fire on the radio or over the internet. But the woman had already hung up.

Through the window Caleb watched an orange grey cloud gather, as menacing as something from a horror film. It was no femme fatale, sucking nicotine from an ashy cigarette. There was nothing womanly about the fire after all. That haze of eucalypt oil and those scents distilled from tea-tree and musk, they were no exotic perfume designed to entice, seduce. They were just fatale, fatal, coalescing into the shape of an enormous mummy’s face as it grew and expanded and sought to eat him alive. It would chase him back to Brunton.