Torched

Kimberley Starr

An explosive, haunting and utterly compelling crime novel about mothers and sons and the ties that bind them.

A small Yarra Valley town has been devastated by a bushfire, and Reefton Primary School Principal Phoebe Warton can’t sleep. She’s the single mother of Caleb who is accused of starting the fire – on purpose. Twelve people are dead, students from her school among them; only a monster would cause such carnage. But where was her son that day? No one knows but Caleb, and he’s not talking.

Against mounting community rage, Phoebe sets out to clear her son. But every avenue leads back to Caleb. Why did he vanish from his Country Fire Authority shift? Who else was at the abandoned goldmine that day? Why is Caleb refusing to speak?

Phoebe will be forced to confront the nature of guilt and redemption, and decide what boundaries she is willing to cross to save the son she loves.

29 January 2020

Dear Reader,

As Torched goes to print, Australia faces what feels like a never-ending wave of firestorms threatening both country towns and major cities. The evening news is filled with images of burning coasts and mountainsides, with dangers faced by firefighters, defence force members, and ordinary Australians desperately attempting to save their homes. Again and again witnesses try to express the scale of what they’ve experienced, trauma so huge it stretches the facilities of English to describe. I wonder, what is a natural disaster? Have we changed the world so much that bushfires can no longer be described as natural? Can the flames that burned schools and dictionaries also have burned the meaning out of language? Maybe we need new words, and indeed scientists speculate that we stand at the dawn of a new geological era. Some have coined the term Anthropocene from a belief that we inhabit a new age, that the layers of sediment we will leave – equivalent to ash from the meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs – will be agricultural and industrial and nuclear and plastic evidence of humanity, with all our ingenuity and carelessness.

Writing and editing this manuscript has been complicated for me by a recent health scare of my own. I’m waiting for pathology results while brown rain falls outside, trying to avoid feeling like the damaged piece of a damaged whole, myself part of the great helplessness of a planet sighing in distress. We’re seeing what happens if we treat Earth as though her health doesn’t matter. I’m a high school teacher as well as a writer. I see students frustrated that the power to make a change resides in the hands of people scared to use it. Political arguments attempt to drown the science. Bushfires seem unpredictable, but that they would happen was not. Students say they feel helpless, that choices about what they can do are limited in scope and usefulness. I hear them describe these fires, and the continuing unwillingness to prevent further climate change, as evidence of democracy not working. But everyone can do something. Writers still write out of a belief that stories can still achieve something. Fiction shows us the world according to other people. Studies have shown that literature makes people more empathetic. I’m presenting a story, an intimate story about the relationship between a parent and a child. Family members, individuals who – like each individual reader – have to find a way to cope with the magnitude of the results of collective action and inaction. Every life is a story. Maybe something we say can encourage some change. Maybe those changes will add up to enough.

I can’t end this letter without a mention of the fireys, defence force members, emergency service workers, and the people who have helped look after their neighbours, sometimes by as simple a thing as making a pile of sandwiches. You are our heroes. Thank you.

Kimberley Starr

TORCHED

KIMBERLEY
STARR

Contents

Prologue

Part One

Part Two

Acknowledgements

Book club questions

Author Biography

Sons are the anchors of a mother’s life.

Sophocles

Who lies for you will lie against you.

John Locke

For my family

RED BELLY BLACK SNAKE

I remember running through

fire blanket air, humid, heavy. Rotting sweet

sick mangoes. Fruit bat wings

rattling open, heavy curtains on

frail white rods. Running, like a

river slithers through cane fields, a

black snake

in flames. A hissing

match struck, and running.

Shirley Blakely, from Sugarcane Poems, 1958

PROLOGUE

AURORA | Goddess of Morning

Protector of childbirth. Often portrayed in Roman art as a young woman with wings like the dawn sky. She killed her own son in a jealous rage.

from Images of Women in Roman Art, by Phoebe Wharton

PHOEBE

You are not a firebug. If you killed anyone, I’d know. I know you. All those hours with your warm infant self damp against my shoulder, all that time cooking vegetables in ways you ate only once, all those afternoons cheering your team to football losses, frustrated over incomplete homework, holding you while you cried over grazed knees or the unkindness of schoolgirls – our shared umbilical cord must have left a residual connection, a spiritual navel. No one could be more sure of anything than me, of this. You are not a firebug.

Your committal hearing starts tomorrow. Of course I can’t sleep. I lie here, now and then reaching for my notebook or getting up to pace through the house. Like a trial, every bushfire tells a story. Every bushfire has a beginning, a middle, an end. A year ago, smoke from the Brunton fire twisted around our window frames, slid under the door, forced its fingers through keyholes. I’ve been unable to keep the outside world out since then. Fire didn’t destroy our home, but the rumours that came afterwards did. Attacks continue whenever I check my email or the news. Your lawyer says it isn’t wise for us to begin your defence yet. But I must defend you, get my thoughts in order. Every fire has a beginning, but not every fire is begun by an arsonist. Every trial has an ending, not every ending is just.

Before teaching, I studied art history. Now, in my notebook, information about ancient Roman mosaics has been supplanted by research about accelerants, motives for arson, rising global temperatures, wind patterns, the forensic distribution of burned eucalyptus leaves. Now, instead of wondering what excavated art reveals about Roman life, I wonder how anything withstands time or fire. I once studied a mosaic showing the goddess Demeter abandoning the Earth to drought while she rescued her child from the kidnapper Hades. It’s the judicial system that has kidnapped you, but I am just as maddened by the need to rescue you. You’ve been in custody. Even on bail, darkness has imprisoned you. You might be returned to jail, this time for years. I need strength to keep you home.

It’s months since the first kookaburra returned to our yard, perched on a ruined manna gum branch. Other animals have returned to the Yarra Valley – cattle, sheep, kangaroos. I see them when I’m out running. Again in the mornings, I hear the warbling of magpie song through air unstained by smoke. Later in the day, once again currawongs squawk. New leaves grow on surviving trees. Along the dark ground and up the towering ghosts of eucalypts, new leaves grow, a bright surprising green. Though our neighbours and the council have fought them, imported weeds have also sprung to life: thistles, asphodel, turnip weed, blackberries. Your grandmother’s old car, the one you tried so disastrously to drive, is now part of a Bushfire Art collection at the gallery where I once volunteered. Its puddles of aluminium and steel, once melted over our driveway, have resolidified into uncanny shapes on a polished wood floor. Meanwhile, in this valley where city and bush overlap, we’ve endured the encouraging and uncomprehending visits of religious leaders and minor royals offering symbolic seed packets and platitudes. Country Clubs have relit their tennis courts and re-laid their croquet grass over land that even before the fires had already been purposed and repurposed. It might appear peaceful country but this is a restless, changing place. The world is changing and we have to deal with it. Those who don’t want to look instead for targets like you.

I’ll never sleep. I wrap myself in my dressing gown and pace the hall to your bedroom. I stand at your window. Lights from the nearby Retirement Home and the further away town blink across the night-dark dry creek bed, site of your alleged crimes.

Other fires have lapped at Brunton’s outskirts, singeing its fabric, burning off its loose threads. But this one caught the entire community, destroying its warp and weft, leaving nothing but ashes, as surely as it destroyed the people who died. Every local family has regrets. Beneath every rooftop and buried in every building site is the story of some small decision that could have been made differently and saved a life – or cost one. Few people truly survived: police are increasingly called to deal with domestic violence and alcohol. The house right next door to ours pulses with poisonous emotions. Its owner, Rosie Henderson, hates you. I still believe there’s some truth I can find to free you, but it seems I’m alone.

I know all your movements on the day of the bushfire; from the window I stare into unrevealing darkness, all but seeing your ghost stride through our backyard, clutching your sketchbook to your chest. In my mind’s eye, I see you push your bicycle along Damper Creek Road to our house, heading for the dry creek bed and the old fossicker’s hut beyond.

This is the closest I’ve come to despair. Questions peck my consciousness, throwing me into a fluttering panic of denial. How can I learn about you? I should know everything. Could I be wrong? Could you be responsible? – I can’t let myself wonder. I can’t stop wondering. When did this impossible distance erupt between us? Did you look out on the sunburned paddocks whose dryness frightened everyone and decide to…

If you won’t defend yourself, then I have no choice but to defend for you. Beyond my lifetime of mother’s griefs – the losses of your forceful baby mouth suckling, your skinny arms clinging to my neck, your little hands waving as your bus slid off to school, the moments when kisses better stopped working and Santa slipped quietly away – I have lost my idea of your infinite, magical future. We imagine we can control time like we imagine we control fire but both flames and time consume everything they touch. Time leaves a fine layer of ash over what it leaves behind, a fine cloud of the past haunting the present, a reminder of our current global state of flux and change. I’m haunted by all those losses felt, the sting once eased by equally precious gains. The sight of you in your school uniform, the wisdom revealed when you whispered, Mum, can I have two dollars now instead of waiting for you to play tooth fairy?, your muddy-faced pride at kicking a goal, your first shave and first whiskery kiss. (God, I love you.) But now all is loss, nothing gained. Out on remand, you hang around the house, surly, unemployed and unemployable. You play computer games and eat too much pizza. My own life has become lost in the need to clear you. As Brunton Primary principal, once I had a standing in the community, but that’s gone. Parents who once asked for advice don’t speak to me anymore. Once, I spent evenings planning classes with colleagues, attending parent meetings. I performed some of my own songs in the front bar of the Brunton Hotel. I filled in many meaningless Education Department forms. Sometimes I mulled over the meaning of life and the vastness of the universe. I dated a couple of men between my divorce and meeting my current partner, those memories are fuzzy now. The empty universe isn’t a problem anymore, no more than the forms or dates. At least, they aren’t my problem. My drive now focuses on my overwhelming need to clear your name, to understand you, to prove everyone wrong. You are not a firebug.

CALEB

He lay, bare, in sheets Mum kept changing like that might make a difference. She worried too much. His soft fingers, charcoal-stained, picked at each other over his bloated stomach. Sometimes all he wanted in the world was to escape the metronome sound of her footsteps in the hall. His new suit hung, a headless man, over the open wardrobe door. In the morning, he’d put it on, prepare for his own hanging. In a few days, it would be over. He’d made Mum a promise that he would not confess, at least not this week. Once this farce was over, she would have to see how ridiculous it was to fight and to understand the guilty plea he needed one day to make. The teeth of his guilt monster gnawed mostly on his gut but caused pain everywhere – from his hands to his feet. He raised one scarred arm, so much fatter than when he used to come here to visit Gran. His increased size still surprised him. He was taller, fatter, generally bigger than he felt. From year to year his relationship with the world changed, the ground receded from his eyes, the distance between things shrank.

One summer, not long before Gran left the house to him, Caleb slipped over in Damper Creek, where moss grew over ash and the ground was least likely to hold. He remembered crashing into shallow water, his ankle twisted, knees grazed. The world splashed, mocking him – that earlier drought broke with a string of deluges. He’d felt like a giant upturned insect, a beetle that couldn’t right itself. Except his arms and legs then were more fitted to a spider, a daddy-long-legs that shivered from the cold. He’d been thin then, as skinny as his empty suit. Damage wasn’t always from fire. Now his body showed the corpulence of overeating, the scars of being burned. He should have an old man’s voice, to match his old man’s hands, hands he had already, though he wasn’t even twenty. If he kept his voice really, really low, then maybe he could tell the truth without screaming.

He had spent a lot of this time in his room, drawing charcoal versions of Brunton’s trees in their black funeral dresses. On later sketchbook pages, the seared valley moved out of mourning. With his watercolour pencils, the grey-toned world on his pages gradually developed hints of a single shade of bright green. It was inevitable. One thing led to the next. The world was aging. Time blew through their lives, as destructive as a northerly wind in a firestorm. Mum did nothing but prepare for the committal hearing. Caleb had been to all the meetings she demanded. He knew what was coming. He’d face the people who’d been hurt and the people who loved them and, if justice existed in the world, he’d finally go to jail.

But even if the court would only let him get as far as Dad’s place in Hawthorn, he had to escape the sound of Mum’s pacing.

PART ONE

JUNO | Queen of Heaven

Goddess of both love and beginnings. The mother of the god Mars, she protected all women and in Roman iconography she often looks as warlike as her son.

FOURTEEN MONTHS EARLIER

PHOEBE

A magpie woke me early, its warbling carried on waves of heat that sat on my chest like a nightmare. My curtains hung limp and open, like patterns painted around a sky shimmering with heat and foreboding. Beside me rested the manuscript pages of an amateur History of Brunton I’d promised to look over.

Even before my clock radio turned on, the premier’s warning message, delivered yesterday, was constantly replaying in my mind:

Victoria’s weather will be extremely dry and hot, reaching well into the 40s. There’s a total fire ban. Any fire that begins could quickly become lethal. Warning signs will be set to catastrophic. Be prepared and survive.

The premier’s advice amounted to one commandment: stick to your plan. Which meant leave early, if we planned to leave, and be prepared to defend our home – possibly alone – if we stayed. As far as I was aware, Caleb and I were safe. This area had never burned before. I didn’t know then how long it would be before the sky was blue again, how long before the sun would lose its smoky orange haze, or I’d hear another magpie. I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. Time to wake him.

Torched

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