Caleb went to bed. His room was quiet. Beneath his door that dim torchlight still shone. I pressed my ear against it, hearing pages rustle and imagining the scratch of pencil on paper. Caleb, drawing. On normal evenings, I’d hear the clicking of a keyboard too. Once the power was back on, he’d be in touch with Penelope, I hoped, though I couldn’t reach her. Police would want to question him again. I practised ways I could make him refuse to answer.

9

9

STATA MATER | A guardian goddess who protected against fires

Stata Mater’s cult was kindled in the Roman Forum and spread throughout the empire. She was often depicted holding a tamed flame.

There might have been four or eight of us in our house after Caleb’s release, not just Caleb and me. With no power for light, the place seemed unfamiliar, not quite our home. In the light of old torches and emergency candles, our shadows twisted and somehow split from our bodies, elusive, scarcely connected, flickering among the shadows and whatever other ghosts had followed us. Everywhere I looked there was an alternate version of Caleb or myself, born from an action we had not taken, a choice we had not made, an ending to the fire that had not eventuated. But at least we were here, together, in our home. The situation was different, worse, for other people. Jeannie had lost her house. She texted me about it, trying to be bright. I’ve got to move in with my mum. Not ideal. But I won’t have to lug that old fridge out for hard rubbish collection after all!

Life was unlike anything we’d known before. The Yarra Valley had regressed to the standards of early colonisation. Mobile phones became unreliable, sometimes working, sometimes failing, dependent on the whims of the wind or some other unknown force. News passed by word of mouth, door to door. People didn’t know what had happened in Linlithgow, in Melbourne, in the rest of Australia. No one knew how long it would take to restore water or power. Survivors journeyed over mountains to register with the Red Cross and collect basic supplies. They were greeted by local store and restaurant owners carrying boxes of sandwiches and bottles of water, in acts of generosity that no one would forget. They passed collapsed trees with the middle sawn away to clear the road, and car wrecks sprayed with the names of insurance companies.