“Ronnie? Is that you?”
“You all right?”
“We’ve got all the petrol for the generator. We haven’t lost power yet.”
“I’m assuming there’s no sport this arvo.”
“All afterschool activities cancelled. They’re already talking about cancelling school tomorrow.”
“Keep me posted.”
“Cheers, love. Ta.”
Next, she called her dad, who didn’t answer. She called Blaise, who said he was at the fire station.
“Tell him there’s heaps of rain headed this way.”
She locked the door of the donga, then drove over to her cousin’s house. His dog was out in the back garden, yapping his head off. She threw him in the truck with Matilda and Maya. The dogs wagged their tails and sniffed each other. She let herself into her cousin’s donga, took his yappy little Chihuahua, too. The tiny one immediately started fighting all three of the others, as she had known he would.
Ronnie went down the line, knocking on every door.
A few elderly people were still at home.
She helped them call their relatives to come pick them up. A few of the elderly people didn’t have relatives nearby, so she called 000 to come help them evacuate.
Women showed up in trucks, started moving boxes out of dongas.
Ronnie drove the dogs and a sweet old nan named Sheila to the farm. Sheila was at least eighty and deaf in both ears.
Nev’s back door was unlocked. Ronnie held onto the white-haired woman with the walker so the dogs wouldn’t knock her over, helping her shuffle to the kitchen in her slippers. “Make yourself at home, Sheila. I’m going back for another run.” Ronnie grabbed a box of PG Tips out of the cupboard and filled the electric kettle. “Make yourself a cuppa. Eat anything you can find.”
“Is this your house?”
“No. This is Nev Bickerman’s place.”
“I thought the view looked familiar. Right down the hill there was the old Shangri-La. Beautiful house. Burnt down in seventy-one or seventy-two. Such a pity.”
Ronnie wrote the address on a piece of paper, and the phone number. She pointed to the landline. “You can use the phone.” Then she hugged the elderly woman and went back out into the rain.
The clock in the empty truck glowed. Where had the last four hours gone? Ronnie turned right onto Boar Pocket road, then right onto the Gillies Range Road. It was getting dark already. Storm dark.
She had to turn on her headlights to see the road. Even then, with the wipes going at top speed, she had to crawl to stay in her lane.
The Gillies was the main road through the mountains, two lanes, on the edge of a sheer cliff. It wasn’t uncommon on clear days to look over the side on a bend in the road and see a car upside down, caught by a tree.
Ronnie pulled over to check her phone. Missed calls from friends and relatives. She called Nev. No answer. She texted her about dropping off the dogs and her eighty-year-old neighbor, then pulled back onto the Gillies.
Fifteen minutes later she drove through Lionheart. The roads were puddles, but passable with four-wheel drive.
Ten minutes later she was back in Tinaroo at the donga village. Several more trucks had appeared: relies helping each other salvage what they could. She picked up where she had left off knocking on doors.
She dropped off a scared kid at the police station. That was hard, brought up memories. He looked like he was about Rainbow’s age, but unlike Rainbow, he wasn’t very talkative. He didn’t know where his mum was. Ronnie could relate. She had been that kid. His mum would be frantic when she returned home and found her kid missing.
She drove back in the dark and left a note on the woman’s kitchen table.
The next time she looked at the clock in the truck she thought it was wrong. Five hours had felt like two. There was still so much work to do. Neighbors were helping each other, though, so she felt all right calling it a night. The only people left in the mobile home park were a few random men moving boxes into utes, a strange man with a pet Amethystine python that probably wasn’t legal, and some teenagers casing the place.
As she was leaving, a patrol car pulled in. Mouth suddenly dry, she gripped the wheel a little tighter.
