JUDAS MADONNA
TWO YEARS EARLIER
In October, Nev was quizzing eight-year-old Rainbow on spelling words out on the veranda of Stone House when her phone rang.
Bush fire at the Jacobsens. Again. Bloody hippy homesteaders with their twelve blond barefoot children, had a dry underbrush problem, never listened when she warned them to clear it out. Lovely people, always stopping by for a cup of tea.
Ron was inside playing the drums loudly with headphones on, rocking out.
She went inside where Ron could see her. Ron took off the headphones.
“Fire at the Jacobsens. Keep your phone on.”
Nev drove alone up the access road towards the homestead on the hill, smelling smoke, seeing traces of it over the treetops. Sometimes, she forgot whether any of this was real. Reality had stopped making sense again when the State of Queensland revoked the Civil Partnerships Act a few months after it became law. Lawmakers had changed the words “civil partnership” to“relationship” and gotten rid of ceremonies. Nev had been used to the world not making sense, but that was over there; this was here.
Ron appeared half an hour, an hour later; Nev had lost all sense of time. Bush fire generated its own time zone, urgent and all-consuming. The Jacobsens were fighting the fire with water again. One of these days she was going to sit them down and force them to watch a video about firebreaks. Maybe the one with the farmer dragging the plough behind his tractor, corralling the massive wildfire in his neighbor’s wheatfield like it was a hungry dragon tied up by a delicate silver chain. The fire stopped when it reached the bare earth. That only worked if the windspeed was mild or moderate.
Nev shouted commands with gestures.
The Jacobsens followed her directions like wide-eyed sheep watching a shepherd. Ron was scraping out the grass between the fire and the house with the Kubota. “Ron!” No answer. “Dain’y!” The kid looked up, looked where Nev was pointing. Nev pointed to the creekbed next to the drive, where small trees on either bank touched in the middle.
Ron went. The kid took the chainsaw from the tractor bucket and began clearing the bank on the fire side of the creek, felling the small trees without having to be told.
Afterwards, when the leading edge of fire had stopped spreading, and the rainforest uphill was crawling with firefighters, the Jacobsens gave them a cold beer on the veranda. Nev accepted a clean bandana, wiped soot off her nose and mouth. Her clothes were soaking wet, which felt nice, but the sun was setting and the temperature was dropping. She wanted a hot shower.
Mrs. Jacobsen reached over to clink Nev’s glass. Finally not pregnant for once in her life, poor bugger. “You’re a well-oiled machine! How many fires have you fought?”
Nev had to pause to think. “Counting this one? One.”
The beer was nasty, home-brewed shit from the shed out behind the Jacobsen’s pig shed. Why anyone would want to raise pigs was beyond her. But hey, to each their own.
“I can’t believe you’ve never done that before.”
“I have,” she clarified. “Ron’s first time.”
Ron slouched in a wicker chair, glowing like a tomato, barely a hair out of place. Looked happy.
“You’re a natural, Dain’y.” Bone tired, shaking, back sore. “Go sleep twelve hours. See you Wednesday.”
The neighbors knew all the words of the standard folk songs; even the toddlers clapped and sang along. They played ‘Wild Rover,’ jigs and reels. The Jacobsens danced, arm in arm, spinning around the garden without a care in the world.
She drove home in the dark, took a hot shower.
Slept like a baby.
Wednesday, lunchtime. Whistling, Nev assembled sandwiches while Ron studied the row of black and white photos in the hallway. Ron spent the most time on a photo of a European woman in a patterned sundress weeping in the back of a UN truck. In the bottom right-hand corner Nev had writtenJudas Madonnain the cursive she had learned at the Parisian all-girls boarding school, not her usual chook scratch.
“What’s her story?” Ron asked.
“I didn’t ask. The French and the UN evacuated Europeans.”
“Operation Amaryllis.”
“Look at you,” Nev said, surprised that Ron had looked it up. “Curiosity killed the cat.”
“She left her kids behind?”
Nev nodded. “In hindsight I would not have named it that.”Judas Madonnawas a preachy title, a short sermon positioning the artist above the subject.
