Wildfire

Chapter Three

The stage of the conference centre had been set up with two big red chairs. It was the Jonny Cale interview slot and the chairs were his trademark. Each morning he picked somebody who was in the news and interviewed them.

Bel hadn’t seen Jonny Cale’s work before, but one look at the set-up told her his style might not be indepth journalism. She sat in the chair, a microphone clipped to her green lapel, and waited for the first question.

Jonny watched the director count down, then turned to the camera and went into his introduction. ‘I saw an interesting bit of graffiti on my way in today. I was in the dunny, and I’ll spare you any more details, but next to the toilet roll someone had written “Weather forecasts, please take one”. Dr Bel Kelland, you’re here in town with a bunch of weather experts. Just last week we had a mini-tornado that took the roof off a building at the airport and grounded planes for four hours. And yet the forecast had been for fine weather all day. Shouldn’t you all pack up and go home?’

Inwardly Bel cringed. Cale wasn’t a proper news presenter; he was more like a vaudeville comedian. She didn’t have time to swap banter with him — she needed to make some serious points. But if she handled it wrongly she’d just look prim and humourless. The director pointed to her. Time to reply.

‘Jonny, I’d stick to the day job if I were you,’ she said, her tone deliberately light. ‘If you try to make it as a stand-up comic you’re going to starve. But I agree with your underlying point. Weather forecasting is a joke at the moment. I could add many more examples — the ferry to Tasmania that sank in storms last month, the hailstorm in the middle of the Melbourne Carnival. All on days that were supposed to be fine. Weather forecasting is going wrong, and we need to ask why.’

Jonny replied, ‘Why do we need weather forecasters at all?’

‘For just the reasons you gave. Airlines need to know if their routes are going to be safe. So do shipping companies. Farmers and wine makers need to protect their crops.’

Jonny decided the discussion was getting too serious. He changed the subject. ‘What about global warming? I always think it must be good news for somebody. People who make air conditioning?’ He glanced at the camera and gave it a wink.

Bel cringed again. Jonny was obviously imagining the viewers at home chuckling appreciatively. She answered crisply, ‘It will probably be very good news for people who build nuclear fallout shelters. When the weather goes loco, there’s nowhere to hide. This planet was having tsunamis, hurricanes and ice ages long before mankind even rubbed two sticks together. But now we’re taking this temperamental system and we’re warming it up — and fast. Don’t you think we should be more careful?’

Jonny moved on to another subject swiftly. ‘So what is this I hear about weird US weather experiments?’

‘What US experiments?’ said Bel.

‘As I was coming in this morning, I saw a lot of people with placards outside. They gave me this.’ He got a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket and passed it to Bel. ‘It says “Stop US experiments, come to the debate at 2 p.m. today”. I ask again, what US experiments?’

Bel smoothed out the sheet of paper and glanced at it. It was a flyer from an environmental group called Oz Protectors, which she had never heard of. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. She looked at Jonny and smiled sweetly. ‘But really, Jonny, I’m surprised. Someone gave you a piece of paper and they didn’t want your autograph?’

The Oz Protectors — a group of five young people — were having a busy morning. They were putting leaflets through the doors of all the houses they could in Adelaide to encourage people to come to the public debate at the conference centre. Two members were in the town centre, handing out leaflets to passers-by. The other three — Timi, his girlfriend Amy, and her brother Joseph — were driving around the suburbs.

They’d started with the big, grand houses near the botanical gardens. As the three campaigners walked up long drives past sweeping lawns, they had met people leaving for work or collecting their mail. Some of them even chatted before taking a leaflet. Further away from the botanical gardens, the houses became smaller and more closely packed. The residents here were less friendly, but perhaps that was because Timi, Amy and Joseph were starting to look a bit frazzled in the heat. They had already been trudging up and down roads for two hours and Timi’s battered red Golf didn’t have air conditioning. Their yellow campaign T-shirts, which had started the morning crisp and fresh from the printers, were stained with sweat and smudged with red dust. Amy’s long blonde dreadlock braids were curling up in the heat.

But still there was more to do. Timi parked his car in yet another street. Amy handed him a bottle of water and he drank a few mouthfuls before passing it to Joseph in the back seat and getting out of the car. The others joined him at the back door and loaded up their canvas satchels with leaflets before settting off again.

The houses here, built in the 1960s, were small and close together. They showed neglect: a lot of the white paintwork was peeling; the tiny front gardens were overgrown.

Timi stepped over an upturned rubbish bin to put a leaflet through a front door. The curtains in the window were closed, but as he lifted the flap of the letter box, a fat woman in a faded floral dress pulled the curtain aside and looked at him suspiciously.

As Timi stepped over the bin again, his phone rang. He didn’t take it out, but peered into his trouser pocket to look at the screen. It showed that he’d received a text with a picture attachment. He’d get it out later to read; there was something about the area that made him uneasy about showing an expensive new phone.

Amy ran over to him from the other side of the road, her dreadlocks bouncing. She looked excited.

‘Wez just texted me. He managed to give one of our flyers to Jonny Cale just before he went on air!’

Timi’s handsome Korean features wrinkled in disgust. ‘I don’t see what he’s getting so excited about — Jonny Cale’s an idiot.’

‘Oi, you!’

They turned round to see Joseph hurdling a small white gate. He’d dropped his bag and was running in the direction of their car, shouting. Before he could reach it, the engine coughed into life and the car door slammed.

Timi and Amy gave chase but they were too slow. They stared in disbelief as the red hatchback roared off down the road and screeched round a corner, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.

‘Oh, brilliant!’ shouted Amy. ‘We’re here trying to do some good, and a joyrider steals your blinking car.’

She heard a crunch behind her. When she looked round, Timi was kicking down a white picket fence.

‘Tim!’ she exclaimed. ‘What are you doing?’

Joseph grabbed Timi by the arm and pulled him away. ‘Hey, man, that doesn’t help anyone.’

Timi swore at him in Korean, a furious sound like an animal snarling. His foot kicked out like a whiplash, splintering the white wood to smithereens. The violence of it made Joseph flinch.

‘I’d just finished making the down payments on that car,’ Timi snarled.

‘Mate, it’s not these people’s fault,’ said Joseph, looking at the ruined fence.

Timi whirled and grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt. ‘No? They just look away — turn the other cheek, whether it’s petty crime or the rape of the whole planet! It’s all their bloody fault!’

He reached over the splintered fence, grabbed a garden gnome and dashed it to the ground. Plaster fragments shot everywhere. ‘We’re just wasting our time!’ Timi was screaming. ‘The world’s going to hell and nobody wants to know.’

The noise was attracting attention. Amy saw grubby curtains twitching in the house next door. ‘Timi, please — people can see …’ she said quietly.

But Timi was in a blind rage. He didn’t care whether people could see or not. He was caught up in his own world of fury.

Dodge took the hatchback around the streets at breakneck speed. That was good for about five minutes, but he soon got bored. The car had the reactions of a possum in a coma and it didn’t even have air conditioning — he would have taken a tyre iron to it if he’d had the energy. But the two beers he’d drunk that morning, coupled with the heat, were making him feel a little sleepy. He drove to the municipal park, stopped and lay back in the car for a snooze.

He was awoken by a tap on the window. He saw a pale face and greasy dark hair. Snoopy. Dodge looked at his watch. Eleven a.m. That figured. Eleven was about the time Snoopy normally got up.

Dodge got out. ‘Hey, Snoop, want to buy a car?’ Snoopy was holding a can of lager. Dodge grabbed it and took a swig. With his other hand he clapped Snoopy on the shoulder. ‘You can pay me later.’

Snoopy looked in through the window. ‘Anything interesting in there?’ He noticed the boxes of leaflets in the back. ‘What’re all these? And what’s all this about?’ He gestured at the windows, where there were several stickers. NUCLEAR POWER — NO THANKS! STOP GLOBAL WARMING. OZ PROTECTORS FOR A HEALTHY PLANET.

Dodge went round to the rear and opened the door. He finished the beer, tossed the can into the car and lit a cigarette. With his free hand he picked up a couple of loose leaflets and touched the flame of his lighter to them. ‘Yeah, stop global warming, eh?’ he said to Snoopy, and sniggered.

‘Hey,’ said Snoopy, pointing to the flaming sheet of paper. ‘Did you see that?’

‘What?’ Dodge replied. The flames reached his fingers and he dropped the burning paper, waving his fingers and blowing on them.

‘The flame went kinda funny,’ said Snoopy. ‘Do it again.’

Dodge picked up another leaflet and lit it. The flames licked up the page, turning it black and crisp. Where they met the green Oz Protectors logo, they glowed bluey green.

Dodge grinned at Snoopy. ‘Hey, pretty colours.’

‘Told you,’ said Snoopy.

He picked up some more of the leaflets, put them down on the parched grass and lit them with his lighter. They watched the flames intently, waiting for them to change colour when they reached the green printer’s ink. When it happened, they grinned and took some more out of the box. A light breeze stirred the trees and fanned one of the flaming pages in Snoopy’s hand. Curls of paper floated away across the grass like scraps of burning lace …