Jack was a tall man. His fire safety gear added to his bulk. He’d been helping me, one way or another, since I first met him during a CFA visit to my school. Jack had approached and raised his helmet. I’d immediately noticed his blue-grey eyes, the crinkled skin around them. It was a successful visit. My pupils loved the fireys. They swarmed over his visiting red engine like ants over a fallen sandwich. Jack was relaxed, entertaining, fun. I’d flirted with him before they left. There were sparks. ‘I’ll have to call you out some time,’ he’d promised.

Sparks. Such a common little word, now with the power to make me wince.

‘Not for a fire, touch wood,’ I’d responded. ‘Next time a cat gets stuck up a tree…’

‘Or a school mum locks her keys in the car.’ His long gaze nearly had the cheek of a wink.

I grinned. ‘I could always lock my own keys in the car. I’ll have to remember that.’

I had no idea then how I’d come to rely on him. Caleb had been going through a bad stage, worse after his accident, worse again after he encountered Jack not as Sean’s saviour but as his mother’s new… boyfriend? He was sixteen, angry, awkward, struggling to get over Stephen leaving us. ‘I saw this behaviour with soldiers in Iraq,’ Jack had said to me when he brought up recruiting Caleb. ‘Helping people might help him.’

The afternoon before the fire, Jack and I had met in the front bar of the Brunton Hotel. He’d spent the day preparing. In my memory, like so much else that day, a heat haze gave the pub a weird shimmer. Can buildings be fey? Not that I’m superstitious. But life was about to change for everyone and we had only the most basic intimation, warnings that didn’t seem extraordinary because we’d heard them before.

Jack had rested his hand over mine on the table. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ I told him. ‘Apart from the heat.’

Later, he came home with me to check our preparations, he said. I drove ahead and waited inside, feeling a little secret thrill watching his ute reverse into the driveway. He checked windows, drainpipes, hoses.

‘We’ll be safe,’ I said, mostly to reassure myself.

‘It’s impossible to know.’ He collapsed into my sofa. Pink chintz, Claire’s choice, not mine. But Jack was all my own. I passed him a beer. ‘You know history doesn’t go back far enough. The image we have of the country is kangaroos. It should be fire. Eucalypts are flooded with flammable resins. They need fire. It releases nutrients the soil needs. Normal fire. Not a firestorm like this. This is devastating for trees as well as people. But some people will be safer than others.’

‘People involved with fireys?’ I asked, flirting.

But Jack had been deadly serious. ‘People who know what to do. Families who’ve been out here for generations know fire is dangerous, but they’re practical. It’s a frontier mentality. They get by on their own like their grandparents did, fighting fire with hessian sacks and green tree boughs. There are people who lose their homes and refuse help because they don’t want charity. They look after themselves even if it means breaking rules about trees they aren’t supposed to cut down. They don’t appreciate tree-changers arriving with greenie ideas.’