Damage case

Hey babe, don't act so scared
All I want is some special care
I'm on the run from some institution
All I want's a little consolation
But I can tell by your face
I'm a total disgrace
Let me inside of your place
Move over for a damage case
- Motörhead, 1979

The Jeff was back to being The Jeff, which was a Good Thing. Laid-back, relaxed, smart-arsed, and just about the most generous host you’d hope for. He and Beck were flirting outrageously over breakfast, which meant other things were back to normal as well. The kids were rampaging around avoiding getting ready for school, the sun was out and the world was made of win. Unless your brain had been turned to custard by a couple of weeks of weapons-grade insanity, in which case you just sipped your coffee and tried to blot out as much of the sharp pointy sensory challenge as possible. It wasn’t just me, of course - Beth had seemingly put herself into some sort of psychological limp-home-mode, just a bit too tired and a bit too shattered to engage. I knew the feeling. But noone seemed to notice, largely thanks to Beck who talked enough to cover for both of us, as per SOP. Eventually, she argued the kids into the car and they all disappeared in the direction of school and work. Just leaving The Jeff, myself and Beth.

“S’pose you guys will be getting on your way?” he mused.

“Yeah,” I replied, “Beth’s got teaching.”

I actually had no idea whether Beth actually had teaching or not, and her non-committal nod-shrug didn’t really indicate either way, but it was a useful enough cover story.

“You’ll be wanting this then,” Jeff grinned. We followed him out to the shed, where deposited next to the dusty, bug-spattered Ducati Monster ‘borrowed’ from Mount Road was a large cardboard box swathed with courier stickers. “Care package from Uncle Mick.”

Inside was a hell of a lot of those little foam things that look like Home Brand cheezy bites, except marginally more tasty and nutritious. A new set of Queensland plates, to replace the trade plates I’d ‘borrowed’ the bike on - with rego docs to match, in the name of Mount Road. A helmet, jacket and jeans. Not my size, but a fair guess at Beth’s. And a handwritten note, on the new Mount Road Motorcycles letterhead - inclusive of the family crests of Aprilia, Moto Guzzi, Piaggio and Vespa. Forza Italia.

Re ‘I told you so’, began Mick’s scrawled note. Watched the show from Perth. That’s me told. Love to both your girls. Sent you this to make sure you look after them, so they might be with you longer than the usual. See you at work. Cheers - Mick.

The ‘show from Perth’ - our second set, in Marty’s Vanity Project main-stage-headliner timeslot - did make it onto Channel [V] and Triple J. In the fullness of time, it’d end up as a live DVD as part of the subsequent Flange Gasket’s Redundancy Package release from Exocet. And, being our last-ever-no-for-reals-this-time performance, we’d gotten a bit self-indulgent, I’d admit. Inviting our girlfriends on stage at one stage of proceedings would probably qualify as such. I might have even said something fairly gushing about her epic fucking awesomeness, but we’ll call that the adrenalin of the moment. Still, it’d made an impression on Mick, which meant I’d won that bet. And the use of the Monster as my new company vehicle, apparently. Just as well it was a two-seater. Suddenly the previous owner’s apparent lunacy in building a pillion-capable Streetfighter rival out of a base model two-seat Monster 900, rather than just buying an off-shelf Monster S4R or something, made sense. For sufficiently marginal values of ‘sense’.

“So you are crazy,” Jeff noted. “Crazy enough to get on that thing with him, anyway.”

“Crazy enough to be in a relationship with him in the first place,” Beth responded lightly.

He grinned. “Safe trip back,” he said, condescendingly patting me Benny Hill-style on the top of my old bug-spattered motocross helmet, which I’d left with the Duke at Lismore Airport. “Give us a shout to let us know you make it home. You know how she gets.” He thumbed over his shoulder.

“Mum?”

“Beck,” he clarified, “though it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish…”

“Don’t wanna know,” I said.

“Oh fuck off,” he groaned. “Go on, get out of here. If that dodgy piece of shit can make it down the driveway without bottoming out.”

“Made it up here…”

“Yeah, on the back of my fuckin’ truck…”

“Really?” I queried earnestly. “You hadn’t mentioned that before…”

The Jeff rolled his eyes. He’d done little but mention it before. How much of a pain in the arse it’d been to head over to Lismore Airport and retrieve the thing, get it on the truck, tie it down - with advice from Mick on the phone complaining about what bits not to scratch - getting it all the way back here, etc etc etc…

“Just get orf mah damn property,” he declared with a grin.

“Yee haa Cletus,” I replied. “See ya champ.”

So we headed off - carefully, with the Monster’s Ohlins shocks set to touring-laden levels of preload and my brain set to Taking It Easy mode. Not really a mode that sat well with the Monster’s razor’s edge throttle response, even dialled back as far as the ECU would allow, but we made do. It actually felt a bit less nervous and a bit more predictable with two people on it - took the vicious cantankerousness off its behaviours. Somehow, accidentally, we’d found what this bike was set up to do. Tour.

So we toured. Up the back roads of the Richmond hinterland, through the rolling green farmland and forest. Through Meerschaum Vale, Rous and Tregeagle, heading towards the eastern side of Lismore. Not because it was the most direct way - far from it - but just because I felt like it. Just because these were the roads of my youth, ones I’d driven in old Toranas and lumbering overladen bandwagons and snarling Monaros bought with Seppo record company advances. And just because the road from Rous to Lismore came out at Goonellabah, and I wanted to show Beth something. We rolled through the curving hillside streets on the northern side of the ridge that had once carried my Skyline and Phil’s Drum Machine between home and uni, the streets we’d staggered along in early mornings long after buses and cabs had stopped running people back from the CBD after the ugly lights had come on at the Powerhouse Niteclub.

And there, at the end of a cul-de-sac, was Chateau Dodgy. The original. Looking more heroically Seventies than Ian Chappell’s mo, and not a little run-down (clearly still scabby student rental digs). And for sale.

Just for a moment, for a fraction of a split-second in time, it seemed like a good idea - with me in need of a new place, given Mick’s place in Bardon was going on the market soon to add liquidity to the Martins’ expansion plans for Mount Road and Scooteria Italia, the working title for the Piaggio/Vespa concept dealership in the Valley. But it’d have made it a hell of a commute to Mount Road... I kinda wished there was an open home scheduled, so I could get in and have a look around with Beth. Tell some stories. Ah well. Another time. Maybe Jeff and I could crash next weekend’s open home. Get the Duffer in. Marty, if he was still around the area on R&R. Take some happy snaps for the Gasket website, or Twunter, or Arsebook...

Oh yeah, I didn’t have to worry about that stuff anymore.

We pushed on, north of Lismore towards Nimbin - just because Beth had never seen the place, and it’d been years since I’d rolled through. Still looked like a party inside the Duffer’s head. North of there, we linked up with the Kyogle-Murwillumbah road, rolling through the astonishingly pretty countryside around Mount Warning. Lunch was at a pub in Murwillumbah, followed by a tankful of 98 for the Monster. Neither of us said much, but it was a contented Zen sort of silence. Or it least it was for me.

From there, the legendary Nerang-Murwillumbah road - a haven for bikers of SEQ and NNSW, spoken about in the same hushed tones as the Mount Glorious/Nebo Road on the front doorstep of Mount Road MCs - was calling. We paused at Natural Bridge to wander about and take some photos. Doing the boyfriend-girlfriend tourist thing. Not too far away to the north-east, though with a big fuck-off mountain range in the way, was Springbrook National Park, where an old girlfriend and I had once attempted to make steaming hot love under the bracing cold waters of Purling Brook Falls. Would have been a good idea on a day like today, which was hot as 40 bastards.

Memories. Like old concert ticket stubs, or flood insurance; nice to have around, but worth two fifths of fuck all in the larger scheme of things.

The road opened up through the Numinbah Valley, and around the back of the Advancetown hydro lake, and pretty soon we were reaching the western fringes of the Gold Coast. Beth wasn’t saying much, and what she was thinking about - me, her brother, her career, how little she was further interested in going around corners quickly on a motorcycle while hanging onto me like a koala with one arm in a cast - remained as enigmatic as her smile, but the tiredness in her eyes - and in my lower back - told me it was time to make a break for the Cleveland ferry.

So after more fuel for the Monster, we rejoined the M1 north of Nerang and did battle with the morons and muppets of SEQ across four lanes of stupidity until the exit for the Beenleigh-Redland Bay Rd offered respite from the shallow end of the gene pool. We made for the coast, then headed north for Cleveland. Finally, after most of a day spent crouched over an angry Italian motorbike, we were able to park it on the deck of the ferry, sit down with a Coke from the vending machine on the back deck and watch the sunset over Mount Cotton.

Fuck, it was hot.

Hadn’t seemed as bad on the bike, with the airflow and all - and we’d also been faffing about in the hinterland, where it was a few degrees cooler. Here, it was stinking hot, even at dusk, even on the water, especially in motorbike gear. Nasty baking westerly straight out of the depths of hell. Bushfires on the horizon - in several directions, out the back of Mt Tambourine, northwards on Moreton and across the bay, somewhere to the south on Straddie, probably in the sandmining leases.

Remind me, why did I live here again?

Answer was, I didn’t. I thought, anyway. Had a house here, which I was belatedly (and reluctantly) checking on, but if I ‘lived’ anywhere, at least in the short term, it was at Mick’s, in Bardon. Presuming the rozzers weren’t hiding in the park out the back of his place, waiting for me to rock back up on this thing, of course. (Hence the proprietor’s decision to update the rego from trade plates, for which I owed him a beverage or nine.) Really, I suppose I was just running Beth back home to Point Lookout, the natural, logical extension of our stated aim at the start of the day: get her back home for teaching tomorrow. If she lived there either, which I wasn’t really sure and hadn’t really asked her about. She was welcome to stay at my place, presuming there was any furniture intact to sleep on after her brother had smashed the place up, of course. He may have been mad, meth-addled and delusional, but at least he’d been committed. Literally.

Had a bit too long to think about things on the ferry, which didn’t help with the sense of foreboding which was beginning to disorient me through the fatigue. Hadn’t thought about Beth’s brother in days, but that brief spark of consideration about what state the house would be in was a sharp kick in the arse from reality. This, I had to remind myself, was my reality. The reality where the house I was meant to be selling had been trashed, along with a fair degree of the expensive rented furniture in it, most probably. The reality where the girl who’d been pretending to be my girlfriend for the past few days was actually, technically, an escapee from the psych ward of a private hospital, damaged both physically and psychologically, who not too long ago had been pointing a speargun at my chest. The reality where I would shortly be obliged to tootle past the police station where the off-duty cop I’d bashed last week kept a desk, and into the small, inward, redneck community his mates in blue patrolled. Sure, none of them were actually his mates, or would even piss on the bloke if he was on fire - but this was the QPS, where loyalty to the badge trumped all.

My reality sucked.

And in reality, I was just heading back to Straddie for three reasons: to get Beth back home to her family and her meds (both of which I assumed would be present and correct), to get the last of my immediate possessions (to wit, the bag in the back of my ute), and to get the fuck out of there.

My arse really wasn’t that keen on another 20 kays or so on the bike, but it was the homeward stretch now, from Dunwich to Point Lookout, once I’d tiptoed past the cop shop on the headland with my heart thumpetathumpeting in tandem with the V-twin throb of the Ducati underneath me. Dunwich was quiet, maybe a little too quiet. Either the heat of the day had sapped the life out of town, or the attentions of the emergency services were targeted elsewhere. The bushfire smoke was further north than I thought, indicating the front was a fair bit closer to Point Lookout than I’d guesstimated from across the bay, but it was still well back into the sandmining leases and given the prevailing winds it probably wasn’t going to be a problem for town itself - it would keep the rural fire services busy, but wouldn’t scare anyone’s houses. Most likely, it’d burn down to the beach and run out of options. I’d faced off against a fair few fires over the years around Broadwater - usually other cowboy canefarmers losing control of their cane burnoffs prior to harvest season - so it wasn’t something that worried me too much. Might have worried Beth, if I’d known what the hell she was thinking about…

Don’t get me wrong. That sounds like I was cool with her apparent indifference. I wasn’t. I wish I was. I was starting to feel like the dude in Betty Blue, who’d do anything to make his girl smile. Anything. Mind you, Beatrice Dalle. Nuff said. Actually, I’m pretty sure the same dude was banging Anne Parillaud in Nikita. That’s the kind of typecasting an actor can live with, I reckon. You need someone to play nice-guy-involved-with-crazy-but-hot-French-chick? Sign me the fuck up. Sophie Marceau. Isabelle Adjani. Emmanuelle Beart. Bring it. And yes, I watched far too much SBS as a teenager, what of it? Tits and football FTW.

What were we talking about again?

Ah yeah. It wasn’t until we reached the outskirts of town that I realised the wind direction was less westerly, more sou-westerly. Recent change, it seemed. I realised this because the smoke was now blowing into town, not out to sea as I’d figured from distance. With the late-afternoon sun blazing through it, the pall of smoke laid an eerie, post-apocalyptic burnt-orange hue over everything, stinging your eyes, burning your lungs. Stakes had been raised. Emergency services were visible, red and blue flashing lights strobing through the glowing haze. Traffic was filing out of town; we were the only people heading in. This didn’t look a good place to be, particularly if that wind change held and the firefront ripped up the heath on the inland side of the beach. I trolled the bike to a stop, needing a moment to gather my thoughts. I started thinking bail-out options, the adrenalin coursing through tired veins and firing reluctant, drained synapses. The ferry would still be running - this was a fire after all, not a bloody cyclone - and if all else failed, Mick’s shed at Amity was still there, and should be into the foreseeable future. It’d take a hell of a fire to burn through Point Lookout, then hang a left and reach all the way through the scrub and heath to Amity. And a hell of an easterly wind change too.

Beth was motionless, staring at the column of smoke rising over the back of town. What she was thinking was concealed by the helmet, but I didn’t get the feeling she was singing the Happy Happy Joy Joy song to herself.

“Don’t know what you’ve got planned for the near future,” I told her, leaning into her so she cold hear me, “but I’m going to grab my stuff and get the fuck out of Dodge.”

She nodded.

“Erm, what have you got planned, just out of interest?”

“Well,” she considered, “seeing as though we passed my parents coming the other way a little while ago, I’m guessing the house is going to be locked up. And seeing as though my keys, handbag and purse all ended up in a burnt-out car which we also passed a little while ago, I’m not real sure how I’m getting in…” Something that might have been a smile, had it not been so distant. “So I guess you’re stuck with me.”

“Worse fates to have,” I said.

We jumped back on the bike, and we slowly motored into town. Thickening smoke, reddening light, thinning populace. The nuclear holocaust vibe was seriously creeping me the fuck out. Not saying I was convinced Zed was on the march, but I was starting to wonder whether a boomstick and chainsaw might be required at some point in the game. A Ducati Monster with a 999RS Superbike motor crammed in the frame probably wasn’t a bad steed to ride into battle against the unwashed undead. Rather a Hypermotard though. That sharp-edged front mudguard would probably work pretty well as a rudimentary scythe for Zed heads. Half the cunts in this town were brain-dead zombies at the best of times anyway, so it was fair bits for open slather. In which case I’d be riding straight for old mate Crittenden’s place.

Beth hopped off, and I leaned the bike against the telegraph pole out the front - no stand, of course. Fuck that smoke’s thick, all of a sudden. It was filling the sky, projecting over the roof from the ridge behind like time-lapse cloud footage on fast forward. It wasn’t yet a threat to life and limb, but it was certainly throwing enough smoke and heat to piss you off. Mission: get inside and get it done. I jogged up the path - with an ironic nod to Don Richardson’s real estate sign, about the only active bit of marketing still associated with the property now - to the outside stairs, which led up to the second-level front door. Which, if I recalled correctly, had been kicked in several nights ago by an enraged member of the constabulary, and as such would probably not need a key. Handy, that, since I didn’t have one on me.

It was showing signs of forced entry all right; it swayed in the breeze, or rather was alternately slammed shut and sucked open by the buffetting sou-westerly which whipped over the ridge behind, bringing searing heat and acrid smoke with it. That shit was getting denser. It wasn’t my imagination, though that didn’t need enough encouragement as it was. Don’t fuck about, mate. Get in, get out. Shit can change real quick in situations like this, and you know it.

I pushed through the door. It was a mess, all right - upturned tables, smashed chairs, fistholes in walls, one big screen plasma that wasn’t going to get its deposit back - but that wasn’t the thing that struck me. It was the smell. Not of burning heath and eucalypts, though that was there, but of something else even more alarming... a stench of indescribable human mank. Of vomit and piss and shit and blood and a thousand rancid fetid things. Some of which were strewn across the kitchen, some of which were spattered on the walls. Even though my senses had already been scorched by the heat of the day and the sting of the smoke, I dry-retched at the stench of it. At the panic of it, too. Because someone had been here. Someone was still here. And somehow, I knew who that someone would be.

He didn’t look well. Neither would you after half a week camping out in a trashed house, doing nothing but smoking ice continuously and purging yourself wherever you chose, but Bradley Toogood took not looking well to Olympian heights. He looked like Skeletor. Not Jessica Rowe either, the REAL one, the camp-as-fuck glow-in-the-dark bony fucker from He-Man. Actually, no, Iron Maiden's little mate Eddie was probably closer to the mark. The flesh had sunk from his bones, his skin was a pallid white, and he stank of amphetamine sweat - the shit was coming out through every pore. The tools-of-trade of his addiction were burning a hole in my carpet, adding to the general stench of destruction and disgust. He was shirtless in stained boxers, with bleeding gouge marks across his chest like he’d gone toe-to-toe with Wolverine, or at least had crash-tackled his way through the glass coffee table, which seemed more likely given the wreckage in the living room.

And he had a gun.

Did I not mention that before? Ah it must have been because I was too busy SHITTING MYSELF. Yeah, he had a gun. Probably his work one, but I wasn’t about to check serial numbers. I was, it’s fair to admit, freaking the fuck out. Deranged, fucked-up ex-copper (Jesus, I hoped he was an EX-copper now) in my house, after a several-day meth binge - however long it’d been since he’d busted out of stir - waving his service revolver at me. And his Glock. With a bushfire bearing down on the place. Gee, I’d really hate for today to turn average on me. It’d been the second time in my life I’d seen the wrong end of a handgun; the last time I’d been too fucked up to care, this time the other guy was too fucked up for me not to.

“Hello, Brad,” I said carefully. “You’ve made yourself at home then.”

Jesus, what the fuck was I saying? It was meant as a little ice-breaker. Who the fuck tries to break the ice in situations like this? I’ll tell you who. A stupid cunt, that’s who.

I’d initially figured he was waving the Glock around in a random, entropic sort of way, but now I realised through the haze - and his - that what he was doing, with a delirious grin on his vom-flecked dial now his long wait for his prey to arrive had finally ended, was sizing up his target spot. Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes... Nup… guts. Nup… balls. I flashed back, randomly, to Priddle being found with shotgun wounds to his limbs and guts, left to bleed out over days in a stolen police truck in a remote NSW forest. And kinda threw up in my mouth a little.

I needed to say something, despite my dry mouth and rising bile. But what was there to say? No words were going to get me out of this. Maybe I could run and take my chances with dodging a bullet in the back, but the lie of the land - the layout of the house, with a pretty straight shot from him to me to the door - meant he had a clear field of fire, if he pinged off enough shots. Jesus, field of fire, listen to me. I’m actually being aimed at by a fucked cunt with a gun.

My reality sucked BALLS.

The realisation was a bowling ball in the pit of my stomach: I’m going to die here. Today. Now. All that pseudo-heroic shit over the past few days - fight, flight, somehow making it across the border, somehow making it to Adelaide and Perth, somehow surviving being kidnapped and flown up the coast, somehow making it back - was for nothing. I was going to die here, now, at the hands of this wasted, fucked up kid. And for what? Because he couldn’t deal with his own reality? Mine sucked more than his did, IMHFO.

Fuck it. Better a bullet in the back than one in the face. You don’t see the fucker coming then. The only question was whether a momentary distraction - even a Christmas panto-style ‘BEHIND YOU, BEHIND YOU’ - would get him off-guard long enough to make any difference. And whether in his current condition he could hit a cow’s arse with a banjo let alone me pissbolting for the door through the smoke haze.

“Put the gun down, Brad,” Beth said gently.

I hadn’t heard her come in. If I had, I would have tried to stop her, of course, but I hadn’t heard. I hadn’t heard much other than the roaring of adrenalized blood in my eardrums. She’d snuck in the open door at the side of the garage - the one I’d wrestled a now-deceased BMW enduro bike out of, most of a week before - and crept up the stairs to emerge at the distant point of a triangle: me, Toogood, Beth, each of us flitting glances between the other two in the triangle.

Except Beth kept narrowing the base of the triangle, the distance between me and her. Because slowly, deliberately, she was walking towards me. Or rather, towards the midpoint between Toogood and me.

“Brad,” she repeated, with a voice so eerily calm and detached she could have been a satnav voiceover, “put the gun down.”

I had no words. Neither did Toogood - he had some sort of indecipherable squeally yammering and stammering which probably made sense to him, or maybe Bobcat Goldthwait - but I should have had them. The ones I was probably closest to using were “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE BETH HE’S GOT A FUCKING GUN!!!1!” but (a) she knew he had a gun given she’d made reference to it and (b) that didn’t seem to dissuade her. I’d like to say I dived in front of her, made her stop, saved the fucking day there and then. I’d like to say I was a hero. I wasn’t. I froze. I’m not a hero, I’m just a stupid cunt. A stupid cunt with a gun pointed at him by an even stupider cunt.

By now she was practically between us, the triangle was near as dammit a straight line, if you had big enough error bars. Hell, I’d presented dodgier data in my honours thesis, which was why Dr Cletus was a proper scienmatist and I played guitar in a rock band for a living. Now I was more scared for Beth, because of that stupid stat about how many victims of firearm death are family members - what a fuck-off-stupid thing to leap into my head at that moment - and because she didn’t look scared at all, she just looked totally Zen. Calm. Collected. In control. That made one of us then.

“Brad,” she reminded him, “what’s this going to solve?”

Finally, something that resembled actual words passed Toogood’s chalk-white lips. Or at least syllables in English.

“He knows,” he whispered, his voice like fingernails on a blackboard.

Beth nodded. “So?”

The words were choked. “He’ll tell,” Toogood mouthed.

“So?” Beth said again.

“Can’t.” Toogood shook his head slowly, but defiantly. The barrel of the Glock was still aimed at me, in case you were wondering. I can definitely confirm that as fact.

“Look, Brad,” she sighed testily, “I’m tired, and I’m over this shit. Are you going to grow the fuck up at some stage? It’s fucking embarrassing.”

His eyes, bloodshot and wan, burned. It’d been a deliberate attempt to get a response. I was hoping like fuck the response she’d planned for was the one she was going to get.

“Move,” he grunted.

“No,” she replied. At which point, I officially threw up in my mouth, because she was standing directly between me and him when she said it. “Put the fucking gun down and stop being a child. Going to jail for killing two people isn’t going to change who you are.”

Counting to two wasn’t Toogood’s strong suit at the moment, because it took him a while to work out what Beth was saying, i.e. that if he expected to kill me he’d have to reasonably expect to have to kill her too. I’d worked it out, hence the throwing up and not being able to say anything like ‘GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY ETC’ which probably wouldn’t have worked anyway because she was a stubborn, headstrong, impossible girl. Impossibly fucking awesome, too.

Beth was not only directly between me and Toogood now, but was closing down the distance between herself and him. Slowly, non-threateningly, but surely. The body language was the subtext: to get to him you need to get through me. The problem was, she might have been the only one in the room who didn’t believe he’d be willing to do that. I can also definitely confirm as fact, from personal experience, the only thing worse than knowing you’re going to die very soon, is knowing you’re probably going to have to watch the girl you love die in front of you.

“Move,” he said sulkily.

“No,” Beth replied.

“MOVE!” A tortured, demonic wail.

“No,” she insisted, her voice still firm and calm, like guiding a toddler away from an unfenced pool. “Put the gun down.”

“He knows,” he said again in a broken voice. No banshee wail this time.

“We all know,” Beth said softly. “Nobody gives a fuck. Except for Gerald, because he’s a bigoted arsehole. Your actual family don’t give a fuck, Brad. We love you to bits. We just wish you did too.”

His face, twisted and tortured by chemicals and fatigue, seemed to soften. For a moment, I thought Beth had gotten through to him. For a moment, she probably thought so too. The gun barrel began to raise, from chest height to head height to ceiling height. I’ll admit I relaxed, just a little. When it reached the point where it was under his chin, I wasn’t relaxing so much. Neither was Beth. She was in mid-air at the time, grasping desperately for the weapon with her good arm. She couldn’t have been more than a fingernail away when it went off.

The bang startled the fuck out of both of them. With the momentum she already had, Beth crashdived into Toogood, forearm to face; he went sprawling backwards, completely off balance (in every way imaginable). The corner of the entertainment unit met the back of his head with enough force to crush the laminate-covered MDF like it was egg-carton cardboard. He sank to the carpet like a punctured li-lo, blood cascading from his head wound, blacked-out, gone. The gun rattled across the floor.

This might be a good time to point out - as I subsequent learned - that Toogood’s superiors at the Dunwich station, being well aware that he and the plot had lost touch and were off each other’s Christmas card lists, had been switching his service ammo for blanks for at least the last three months now.

Silence.

Smoke. And the roar of apocalyptic combustion from the firestorm behind the roofline that signalled our time was limited, and might even be over altogether if we didn’t fuck off with extreme prejudice. Beth was bent over her brother, carefully checking his vitals. I swept the gun up in a discarded shirt - Toogood’s, soaked with sweat and spew - and, for want of any better plan, threw it in a bin. Yeah, calm under pressure, that’s me. Then, with the air and our lungs thickening with smoke, we each grabbed an end of Brad and dragged him bodily out the front door and down the stairs, stumbling and crashing and staggering for the outside world and fresh(er) air. We stumbled at the final step, sprawling across the grass, picking ourselves up and crawling on hands and knees, trying to keep low where the oxygen was and the smoke wasn’t. Behind us, if we’d dared to look back, the bushfire had tore through the heath, vaulted through the back of the ridge, and was on us, filling the sky with leaping orange and black. In the process it’d have probably razed straight through Crittenden’s abominable, financially-stalled Tuscany On Point, so there was some win out of this. Presuming we got to the bottom of the hill before the firestorm did and would live to tell the tale.

Rasping and coughing and dragging Beth’s coma’d little bro by his toes, we made it to the footpath, back to the bike. The flames in the big eucalypts and melaleucas behind my place were already licking at the rooftop. Every so often a melaleuca would ignite as the firefront consumed it, sending a mushroom-cloud WHOOOMP of flame skyward and a shower of blazing paperbark shards high into the searing air, to advance the frontline. Spotfires were sparking all over the place; the houses either side, both empty holiday rentals, were likely just as fucked as mine. Whatever was in that house that I really needed to come back for, I wouldn’t be salvaging it. The photos and CDs and memorabilia stored in the Besser-block shed out the back would have to take their chances, the bag in the ute I’d come all this way back for was lost and gone.

I could hear sirens, but couldn’t see them. We couldn’t take Brad on the bike, and by the time I’d weighed up whether I could get back into the garage to get the ute, there was smoke beginning to billow around the frame of the garage door. And out the upstairs windows. And under the roof. She was an absolute fucking goner.

Finally, after what must have been hours - or at least three minutes - fire and ambulance appeared out of the gloom. No idea who’d called for them. Ambulance probably guessed they’d be needed; fire could probably figure it out from the columns of smoke towering out of the south side of Point Lookout. The fireys could see at a glance what I’d likewise figured: she was toast. I turned from my commisserations with them to see Beth watching Brad being loaded into the back of the ambulance, cradling her bad arm to her chest with her good one. He was in professional hands now. Turned back, and the fireys were hastily enforcing a retreat, us included. They’d set up their frontline further down the street to the east, where they could defend their position better, where they could save what houses were saveable.

“Anything in there you’re gonna miss?” asked one firey, laconically, like he’d seen this all before.

An earsplitting explosion rocked the air, a huge WHUMP like the world’s biggest bass drum had just had the shit kicked out of it. We were both punched backwards, reeling from the shockwave. My grit-flecked eyes watched in burning disbelief as the garage door peeled away like molten alfoil, the roofline above the garage crazing against the fireball. My eardrums maxed out and rang like the Duffer’s crash cymbal at the end of a Big Rock Ending.

“Only my ute,” I remarked flatly, picking myself up.

“LPG?” the firey queried, brow furrowed. That’d fucked his professional detachedness alright.

“Yeah, as it happens.”

He slapped me on the shoulder apologetically, then jogged off down the street in search of his next mission, indicating in no uncertain terms I should GTFO while the GTFOing was good. I swung a leg over the Ducati, fired it up, and idled it down the street to behind the point where the fire truck had parked up, mentally preparing myself to don a spare firefighting kit and take this motherfucker on, if they needed me to. The ambulance split the swarm of people as it tore off into the smoke, headed for Dunwich.

Turned out they didn’t have spare kit, and probably wouldn’t have lent me it anyway. Nobody likes a cowboy amateur in the firefighting game. Even one who’s served on rural volunteer services as a young bloke. So, without much else to do, I watched from a little way down the street, where the air was clearer while my house and my possessions were consumed in flames. Thinking of the napalm bombing scene in Apocalypse Now: this is the end… my only friend, the end…

Not that I’ve actually watched Apocalypse Now, I think it was just a flashback to a Doors filmclip I saw on Rage once.

I don’t know how long I stood there. Could have been hours. Was probably minutes.

“So… no open home next weekend then?”

I turned. Beth, smoke-blackened and blood-spattered, had emerged from the lowering dusk. Motorbike jacket and jeans, broken wrist and all, looking very zombie-flick heroine all of a sudden. Fierce and kick-arse and vulnerable and intense and unstoppable and beautiful and Jesus suffering fuck I was in love with her. Or maybe the pounding in my chest, veins and temples was just me crashing out epically after all the adrenalin and fear. Fastest onset case of PTSD in history.

Anyway, subtext aside, Beth was still here, which made me happy. She was trying to be funny, which I was less happy about. Slowly, I nodded.

“May make it difficult.”

“Oh, I don’t know… Renovators’ delight?” she observed. “Indoor-outdoor flow…”

I shook my head. Slowly. In case it fell off.

“Too soon, babe.”

She frowned. “Sorry. Just trying to cheer you up.”

An ironic half-chuckle, as the roofline began to bow under its own weight.

“You could do that by telling me where the fuck I’m going to live now…” I remarked softly. It actually wounded me to say the words, because that was when (and how) the realisation hit: that’s my home. That was my home. I don’t have one any more.

“You can come and live with me,” she said brightly. And smiled.

I smiled back. Couldn’t help it, despite the throbbing in my head and the taste of sick in my mouth. Yeah. Very badly in love with her. Ah well. Worse fates to have.

“I’d like that,” I said. “Erm, where exactly do you live?”

“Don’t know,” she admitted shyly. “Haven’t figured that out yet.”

With that, she slipped her hand into mine, our fingers intertwined. And together, we watched my house burn to the ground.

Because after all, what’s more romantic than an open fire?