Fire danced through a row of trees at the garden’s far end. Flames like the slender arms of chorus girls threaded in and out of the dark veil of trees and premature night. If the wind’s wail reduced a little, we’d hear them laughing.

Harmony stepped closer to me, arms wrapped around her chest. Flames burst through the trees, joined arms, soared higher. Their laughter became raucous, hysterical, raging, thunderous. The 1812 Overture could have begun – the cannons’ exultation. We wouldn’t have heard it.

The roar of fire. Its monstrous bellows. The yard full of embers now. Fire falling from the sky, giant blazing balls. One landed so close, at its – CRASH – I took a giant, involuntary, step backwards.

A crack appeared in the glass. Starting small, spreading out, veins on a leaf, a maniacal child scratching the glass with a key. And the glass buckled inwards.

Harmony screamed. The glass began to give. Heat radiated in as if from an open oven door. I slammed the final screen into place.

Was I too late, or were the screens never going to hold anyway? Through the glass, I watched them buckle.

When the window broke, fire would leap into the room. Nothing here was dampened. The curtains, the carpet, the furniture, all would erupt into flames.

I turned to Leanne. To stay or leave was no longer a riddle. Jack would lose everything – the antiques, his records – but we had time to save ourselves. ‘The house won’t make it. Get water. Tea towels.’

‘We have to go?’

‘We’ll make a chain. We’ll go together.’

Harmony had been holding a book. She slid it into a carrier bag and took her brother Mason’s hand. I picked up the toddler, Isla, and Leanne carried the baby.

Holding wet tea towels over our mouths to filter the air, draped in woollen blankets from Jack’s linen press, we filed from the house. Embers showered around us, the air hot and dry as an oven. Something was wrong with the whole world. We could have been Hansel and Gretel, the evil hag winning.

It was raining leaves. Leaves from trees that shouldn’t lose their leaves. It wasn’t autumn and these were evergreens, but in the heat, they were dying. Flaming bark flew through the air like demented witches on fiery broomsticks.

Caleb, be somewhere safer than this.

We trudged, feet hot, lungs burning, to an old dam on the edge of Jack’s property. Fire crept closer with the menacing stop-start progress of a film monster, moving quickly when we weren’t looking. I glanced away. It expelled fire balls and ember sprays, and spread.

My eyes ached. I concentrated on my feet, one two, left, right, and on guiding the others to the dam. We once gathered there to hear Indigenous elders describe their ancestors grinding kangaroo grass for bread and training fire to be their partner in hunting.

Let it still have water.

It had water.

Strange, dark shapes waited for us. Kangaroos, I saw when we were closer. And cattle. Jack didn’t keep livestock himself, but his nearest neighbour did. The neighbour must have led his cows here before fleeing. Hot air hurt to breathe.