Growing Up in Flames Read online

  I’ve heard of Noah the way you hear about car accidents. A series of whispers, theories and rumours…

  Kenna’s mother Ava was killed in a bushfire not long ago. Now Kenna’s living with her uncle and his young family in the small town where Ava grew up, and she feels like an intruder.

  Noah’s mother has a mental illness that makes him both carer and jailer—constantly watchful, keeping things on an even keel.

  One night Kenna sees the general store on fire, and a boy standing watching as it burns. It takes her a while to notice he’s holding a petrol can, but then things move fast. She’s tackled him and run off with his bag before she even knows what’s happened.

  The bag belongs to Noah, and he really wants it back. Kenna wants something too. To make someone else burn the way her mum did. And there’s something she doesn’t know: how Noah can help her find out the truth about her family.

  To the brave ones

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  KENNA

  NOAH

  JAMES

  KENNA

  NOAH

  KENNA

  JAMES

  KENNA

  JAMES

  KENNA

  JAMES

  KENNA

  NOAH

  KENNA

  JAMES

  NOAH

  KENNA

  KENNA

  NOAH

  JAMES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  Kenna

  Present Day

  I’ve been thinking a lot about fire. Dr Kahn says that’s normal, everything considered. I haven’t told him what I’ve been thinking, though. Not yet.

  I thumb the wheel of my lighter and the flame jumps to life, making shadows dance along the walls. Deformed ballerinas peep from the corners, contortionists unravel in the broken light.

  In my bedroom at home I knew every ridge and bump in the plasterboard. It’s different here. The shadows are unpredictable.

  So much about this place is still so strange to me. It’s like waking up at school camp when the other girls in the cabin had already begun whispering from their bunks. Weeks have passed and nothing feels any more like home yet.

  Home is ten hours south. Home is Mum and me painting our toenails on the lounge on a Friday night.

  That’s all ash now.

  When I flick the lighter shut, I’m plunged back into darkness, but the colours of the flame are imprinted on my eyelids. I blink and stamp the blues and reds onto the black—along the walls, over the ceiling.

  This is how it must have looked when Mum died; fire eating through the walls and the roof, clawing its way inside. They never told me where they found her so I imagine it in every room of the house, one after another. In my mind, the fire is a roaring animal howling at the door. The air is clogged with smoke. I can almost smell it…

  I can smell it.

  I flap at the blankets, but no, I haven’t set fire to my bed. The smell of burnt lighter fluid is still on my fingers, but that’s not what I’m smelling. Something dark and toxic creeps in from outside, wraps its fingers over the windowsill and cups my face. Smothering me.

  I slide out of bed as ashen fingers pull me by my nose to the window. Light flickers somewhere up the street but I can’t see where it’s coming from. The smell is everywhere. I smack my tongue, tasting the bushfires of my childhood and my heart shudders.

  The back door is only a few steps from my bedroom, but the hall floorboards creak, and Rob and Abbey don’t like me wandering at night. I lift the flyscreen from the window and lower it onto the back deck, carefully leaning it against the wall under the window. I follow the smell past Iggy’s bedroom, down into the yard and out. Up the street, my legs gooseflesh below my nightie. I should have grabbed a jumper.

  I stick to the road to avoid the dewy grass and shove my hands in my armpits. I don’t stop until I see what’s happening.

  Hudson’s General Store is burning.

  I know I should scream, wake someone up, but I don’t. A hand of smoke presses against my mouth until I choke. I put an armpit across my face and blink back tears; retreat until I can breathe a little. The hand releases, satisfied I won’t say a word, and evaporates into the blaze.

  The fire is mostly outside the store, on and under the boards of the verandah, poking long tongues through crevices. Licks of flame cling to the walls in a way I know they shouldn’t, and there are scorch marks where some thread of fire has burnt and then run out of fuel.

  I know what that means: accelerant. The lower flames are already claiming this blackened territory, eating the evidence.

  There’s something hypnotic about fire. I’ve always thought so, even before. I used to go into the bush to smoke so Mum wouldn’t know. I’d light a cigarette and sit on a rock looking over the green. Watch as a thin red line worked its way towards me, marking the transition from white paper to powdery grey ash. I’d place my fingers at the filter line and challenge myself to hold it for as long as I could. Sooner or later my fingers would burn, and I’d drop the butt and stomp it out.

  The sound of the fire increases like someone is turning a knob. The snap and crackle of timber up front; a great roar pushing from behind. It won’t be long before lights come on and people turn up to splash water uselessly on the blaze. A building fire can reach up to six hundred degrees Celsius within a few minutes. I know that because I looked it up. What good is a garden hose?

  I catch a shape from the corner of my eye. I turn and blink into the darkness. A figure camouflaged by the flickering shadows. A man—no, a boy. Too slim for a man. Black hoodie pulled over his head, shading his eyes. I can only see the back of him—his head is fixed firmly towards the store. He’s only a few paces in front of me, but I don’t think he’s seen me.

  I almost leave. I figure, he’s here now—he’ll wake everyone up.

  He doesn’t, though. He’s just staring at it, drawn in like a moth. I wonder if he’s been here longer than me, just as captivated by the flames.

  I stop wondering when I see what’s in his hands.

  A red jerrycan.

  He’s not some moth drawn to the light, and he’s not going to call people to stop the fire.

  They told me there was nothing the firemen could do but watch as the fire took my home. They couldn’t put it out. They couldn’t get inside. They couldn’t get to Mum.

  The hooded boy turns away from the flames. I still haven’t got a look at his face. He’ll disappear into the night. The people who own this store won’t ever know who took it from them.

  I understand what that’s like.

  I’ve tried, but I can’t remember my last day with Mum, not completely. Just flashes—her in her pyjamas making breakfast, me heading down to the bush for a smoke. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember it all. I’ve played it over so many times that I don’t even know if what I do remember is real. Was I upset when I went out? What time did I come back? What was the last thing I said to her?

  I’ll never know.

  ‘Hey!’ I yell, and even over the growing roar, the boy hears it. I’m on him before I know what I’m doing. I scratch him as I shove my fingers inside his hood, trying to push it off his face. Trying to see who he is.

  He shoves me away and turns, and his backpack nearly knocks me over. I grab it and hold on. The jerrycan is somewhere under our feet. I’m clutching at his bag, his neck. At some point I bite him. Something connects with my jaw and I taste blood—whose?—and I’m dizzy, but I keep my grip. He tries to shrug me off. When that doesn’t work he grabs at my hands. I tighten my fingers. He’s n
ot hitting me. He’s not trying to hurt me at all, actually. I feel like he could if he wanted to.

  Windows snap from black to yellow in the surrounding houses. His hands pause on mine. The dark space inside his hood casts around frantically, then he’s gone, running. I’m left with the weight of his pack in my hands, alone with an overturned jerrycan in front of the burning store.

  I run too. Behind the houses, through an alley. Carrying the bag.

  I don’t breathe again until I’m back. I lift the flyscreen into place and hope to God no one’s been in to check on me. The hall lights are on—Rob and Abbey might already be over at the fire.

  The store won’t be saved, I know that. The fire has taken hold and it won’t let go. I sit on the bed, clutching the backpack until sirens cross the bridge. They’ll be at the store soon. It won’t matter.

  I hear footsteps, and I quickly shove the bag under my bed and lie down facing the wall. The door creaks open. The sound of breathing. I can’t tell who. I hate that.

  I lie still as someone approaches my bed and pulls a blanket over me. A hand brushes my shoulder. Then the steps move away, the door creaks closed and the only light is the moon through the window. Murmured voices: ‘Kenna’s still asleep.’

  I pull the blanket up higher with a shiver. I never saw his face. I never heard his voice. There’s something dark under my fingernails. Blood or dirt? I’m not game to turn the light on and find out. I massage my chin where it hurts, stretching my jaw. Are any of my teeth loose?

  I can’t sleep.

  When I was little Mum would take me into the backyard before bed. We’d walk out on the stepping stones, halfway to the clothesline, and look up, and she would tell me the story of the little star who danced for the moon, to make her smile.

  ‘Until one day, this little star was careless, so busy dancing that she spun out of her place and went smack’—Mum would clap a hand gently against my back—‘into the moon, and burned her.’

  I could always find the burn. You can find anything in the moon if you look hard enough.

  ‘As her punishment, this star was thrown out of the sky and fell down to Earth, and when she stood up she was just an ordinary little girl. She was sad that she didn’t glow anymore, and that she couldn’t dance in the sky. Most of all, she was sad that she could never make amends. Every night she sang, hoping somehow the moon could hear, and maybe forgive her.’

  That part I could always imagine clearly. The little girl, permanently ash-stained from her fall, gazing up and singing.

  ‘Then one day, the girl was watching some humans hunched around a fire and the flames reminded her of how she used to shine. Maybe, she thought, if she made a fire big enough, she could shine again and go home. So she went to the top of the highest mountain—’

  ‘Like our mountain?’ I’d ask.

  ‘Like our mountain, but much, much taller.’

  I struggled to imagine a bigger mountain than ours. Its gradual slope was my whole world.

  ‘She piled high all the wood she could find. She chopped down trees and rolled huge logs up the hill. She stacked wood and grass and leaves for years and years, until she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a grown woman. And when the pile couldn’t be any bigger, the woman lit a match. The fire she started was so bright that she couldn’t look at it. But even though she’d worked so hard, the fire stayed on the mountain. It didn’t make her a star again.’

  Here, Mum would go quiet and wait. I’d try to be quiet too. It was a game we played. I wanted the end of the story and, no matter how long I held out, I would eventually say: ‘Tell the next part.’

  Mum would smile. ‘But the fire was so big that the moon could see it, and it smiled and moved closer until it heard the woman singing. Every night after that, the moon visited to listen. And the woman who lit the fire, who was a girl who was a star, knew that the moon had forgiven her.’

  That was Mum’s story.

  Good for the moon. I don’t forgive.

  The bag.

  I rummage under my bed and pull the bag onto my lap. I use the torch on my phone to inspect the contents.

  First is a book, an old dog-eared copy of Anthem by Ayn Rand, and it smells the way old books do—like wet wood. I flick through the pages. Handwritten notes scrawled in the margins; sentences underlined.

  There’s a smelly shirt, a half-full plastic water bottle and three small, white pill bottles. They sound full. There are no printed labels like when I’ve had antibiotics from the doctor. Instead, words are written in black marker. I google them.

  Clozapine: A highly effective antipsychotic—only prescribed when the use of two other forms of antipsychotic have proved ineffective. Used in the treatment of schizophrenia.

  Fluoxetine: A selective-serotonin-reuptake-inhibitor antidepressant, commonly used to treat depression as well as obsessive-compulsive disorders and bulimia.

  Lithium: Used to treat the manic episodes commonly experienced by those diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

  Jesus. These are some serious pills.

  They haven’t been prescribed; I can tell that much—they’d have proper pharmacy labels. Schizophrenia. Bipolar. This guy must have some serious problems.

  Of course he does. He set fire to Hudson’s. He watched it burn.

  The worst thing about bushfires is that it’s almost impossible to figure out how they started. There are always theories—broken glass in the bush that focused the sunlight like a magnifying glass, lightning strike, a careless campfire, arson. The truth is, they don’t know. Everything burns, and there’s nothing left to investigate. There’s no way to tell why Mum died, or whose fault it was.

  But this time I know. And I can make sure they pay.

  I reach for the book with a certainty I can’t explain. I set it in my lap, train my torch on the cover, and open to the very first page. Right there, written in blue ink, is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

  His name.

  Noah Hudson. I feel my eyebrows wriggle towards each other like caterpillars in conversation. Hudson. As in the Hudson’s General Store that will be a charred ruin tomorrow. As in the family that owns the rundown house across town with a thousand pot plants scattered across the front lawn and a handpainted sign advertising massages for sixty-five dollars.

  I’ve heard of Noah the way you hear about car accidents. A series of whispers, theories and rumours, after which people hang their heads and say they don’t know where it all went wrong. He went to my school, apparently, before I arrived. Teachers still read his name off the roll at the start of class and cast their eyes around, then move on.

  I’ve been living in the house that Mum grew up in for twenty-seven days. I’ve counted. In that time, I’ve met pretty much everyone in Kimba. I’m what they call a ‘legacy’—my family are from here, so the whole town knows me. Old ladies and grey-bearded men keep touching my hair saying, ‘Oh! You look just like your mother.’ Then they ask me how she is.

  Noah Hudson is a legacy too. His family have been here for however long it takes for everyone to learn to give the same tight-lipped expression when they hear your last name. The general store was his dad’s before he moved away to the mines to make better money. At least, that’s what Rob said when I asked him why the store was never open. You can’t ask anything without hearing three generations of history.

  Now this guy Noah has burnt down his dad’s store. Why? The place was abandoned anyway. Some kind of insurance thing? If so, why was he just standing and watching?

  I think about the way he froze as I held his backpack, the way the space inside his hood searched up and down the street, his body tensed as lights started coming on and front doors opened. Then he ran, leaving me with his book and pills.

  I should call the cops. I know that. I should tell them what I saw and let them take it from there. Surely someone would have found the jerrycan? It must have fingerprints on it. I could explain the name in the book—then they could match his prints and boom—jai
l time.

  I think about it. I really do. It just seems so…easy. Clean.

  No unanswered questions, no uncertainty. No explaining it over and over again when you don’t even understand it yourself. He won’t have to watch the look on people’s faces as they try to figure out what to say to him. After a while, he’ll tell people it was just a dumb prank. He’ll laugh about being ‘wild’ when he was younger.

  Some people don’t deserve to be happy.

  With a dark and sticky pleasure, I pop the lid off one of the pill bottles and empty it onto my bedside table. Pink and white capsules scatter across the wood. I open the next one and pour the small green tablets on top. The last pills are oval; bright blue. They look like Tic Tacs. I take a few photos of the stash and make sure I crop them so that all that can be seen is mixed pills on the wood.

  Fire really isn’t anything. It’s not a substance like wood, or an object like a twig. Fire is change: the process of one thing becoming another. In the end, everything becomes ashes and dust.

  Reputations are like that. We talk about them like they exist—like they’re a thing, but they’re not. They’re just…part of the process of being looked at. They’re changing all the time.

  Noah’s is about to change in a big way.

  I stalk him online, the way I used to with the guys who asked Mum out. There isn’t much there. His Facebook page has no photos. The profile pic is a sketch of a man chained to a rock with a bird flying over him. The top of the page is a white banner with just the word ‘We’, written in grey. He has a YouTube channel with one school assignment on the city of Pompeii uploaded (twelve views, including mine). And that’s it.

  A trickling joy cranks my lips into a smile. I work in the darkness, blankets over my knees and my phone in my lap. I facebook and google and do things that they haven’t invented the verbs for yet, and I make Noah Hudson an Instagram account.

  It is easy. I take the information from his Facebook page, download some of the sketches he’s put there, and re-upload them to a brand-spanking-new account branded with his name. I’m certain there’ll be enough of his stuff there to convince people that it’s his. People don’t really know him anyway.