A woman in pink surgical scrubs sat behind a window, beneath a sign reading, Please check in for triage upon first arrival.

‘Over there,’ I said to Caleb.

People arrived, screaming, with skin coming off, especially from their feet. Some were silenced by masks delivering oxygen. I heard a nurse explain that one man’s lungs were so damaged he was in danger of suffocating, even here. Others had the hue of aliens, their skin hypoxia-blue. Immediately in front of us were a middle-aged man and a boy with a packet of frozen peas pressed against his eye. Beneath his mantle of ashes, the boy wore a sleeveless football uniform. Caleb had once had a uniform just like it.

Through his good eye, the younger boy gave me a suspicious look. Perhaps he’d once come to Brunton Primary. Perhaps he knew Caleb from his own playing days.

‘Nasty game, footy,’ the nurse said to the boy.

‘It wasn’t footy,’ the father said. ‘The game was this morning. He’s hurt because our house collapsed.’

It all felt unreal – I was there, but not there. My day might have been images on a cinema screen. Emotions and feelings existed, but for other people. Me, I was exhausted.

The boy pulled the frozen peas from his face for long enough for the nurse to have a fleeting look at his swollen, purple eye. ‘That’ll go black for sure,’ she said. ‘Sit over there and a doctor will come out to have a look.’

She wrote a few lines on a medical form and slid it into a plastic pocket on the wall behind her. Then she turned to Caleb with a blank form. ‘What seems to be the matter with you?’

I pointed at Caleb’s head. His bandana was darkened with ashes and heat, as if he bled black.

‘I see. Good thing you came. You need to be careful with concussion.’

She sent Caleb for a long wait and an X-ray. We traversed a white hallway punctuated with grey doors. Arrows on the floor and brightly lit signs overhead provided the only colour. Caleb collapsed again, this time into a set of hard plastic chairs beneath the X-ray sign.

I watched him close his eyes but didn’t dare close my own. I never slept well and only nightmares waited. What if I hadn’t found him? What if he’d still been out there, dazed and wandering alone, with this terrible injury? Instead, I checked the news on my phone, reading that hospitals all over Melbourne were receiving victims of burns and smoke. Politicians said it wasn’t the right time to talk about climate change. Police were suspicious that some fires resulted from arson. It was the second time I’d heard the word that day, a day of disastrous words. Fire. Missing people, PAN, burnover, concussion. Skull fracture. Arson meant nothing in particular to me. I put my phone away.

A television set, suspended from the ceiling, gave nonstop fire coverage to the small gathering of viewers awaiting X-rays. On TV I saw police officers and fireys, office-workers in their shirtsleeves milling around before a bank of other screens. Behind them all was a large weather map, informing them of what they still had to deal with: the wind direction and speed, the temperature and humidity levels.