Home on the Fire Line

CHAPTER ONE

The List

Renz

Renz Kowalski had a list for the gathering the way other men had a superstition, and he would have told you, if you'd pushed him on it, that it wasn't a list at all, just the things that needed doing, written down so nothing got missed — except that the list had forty-one items on it this year, and he had written every one of them himself, in the small cramped handwriting he'd had since primary school, on the back of an old fuel receipt because he'd run out of the proper notepad three items in and hadn't wanted to stop and go looking for another one.

Nobody had asked him to make the list. Nobody ever asked him to make the list. That was rather the point of it.

He had the trestle tables out of the shed by seven, the good tablecloths — the ones Layla kept for this one weekend a year and no other, folded in tissue paper in a cupboard at Rivers that only the two of them had a key to — draped over his forearm in a stack he carried the way a man carries something breakable, which, in a sense, he was.

The headland grass was still wet with the night's dew and it went dark and heavy where he walked, a long trail of footprints back to the shed, and he liked that, liked being the first mark on a morning nobody else had touched yet.

It was the hour he did his best thinking, if you could call it thinking — the hour before anyone arrived to need anything, when the whole of the day was still just a shape he was building with his hands, before it became a thing other people had opinions about.

The sea below the headland was doing the thing it did at this hour in early autumn, going from black to pewter to a kind of hammered silver as the sun came up somewhere behind the hills, and he stopped for a moment with the tablecloths over one arm and watched it, the way he watched it most mornings out here, not because he was a particularly contemplative man — he'd have laughed, genuinely, if you'd called him that — but because some part of him that didn't get much air time otherwise recognised, in the specific quality of early light on water, something worth standing still for.

He didn't stand still for much. He gave himself this much, most mornings, and then got back to it.

Cray pots. He'd need to ring Baz about the cray pots — Baz had promised two dozen fresh out of the water by ten and Baz's promises, while generally honest in intent, had a way of arriving closer to lunchtime, which meant Renz needed to ring him now, early, while there was still enough slack in the morning to absorb the inevitable delay.

Ice — always more ice than you thought, because nobody ever believed him about the ice until the second day of a forty-degree weekend proved him right, again, the way it proved him right every single year, and he'd learned a decade back that the correct response to being right about ice was not to say I told you so but simply to have already bought more, quietly, so the correction never needed making out loud.

The urn, the big one from the RFS shed, because the little one from Rivers couldn't keep up with forty cups an hour and everyone knew it, even if nobody but Renz had ever actually sat down and worked out the maths on it.

The good coffee, not the tin from the servo, because Cal was flying in from the Territory today and Renz had decided, without telling anyone, that a man who flew two thousand kilometres for a weekend like this deserved a decent flat white on arrival rather than instant granules stirred into lukewarm water from a thermos.

Fairy lights strung through the she-oaks for when it got dark, because someone had to think about when it got dark, and it was never, in eleven years, going to be Jax, who thought about fire seasons and roster gaps and crew welfare with a rigour that bordered on the obsessive and never once, not in a single one of those eleven years, about fairy lights.

He set the tables up in the same L-shape they always went in, the long arm facing the sea, the short arm facing the fire pit, because that was how it had gone the very first year — back when there'd only been a dozen of them and two folding tables borrowed from the RFS hall — and some arrangements, once they'd proven themselves, didn't need reinventing just because the crowd around them had tripled.

He straightened a corner. He stood back and looked at it, and felt the particular satisfaction of a thing correctly done — a satisfaction that lived entirely in his hands and his eyes and nowhere else, because Renz Kowalski did not go looking, as a rule, for satisfaction anywhere a person could take it away from him.

Praise could be withdrawn. A tablecloth set square to a table, once you'd done it properly, stayed square whether anyone noticed or not.

He was thirty-four years old and he had organised every birthday this crew had had since he was twenty-six, and not one of his own.

That wasn't a complaint. He'd have been genuinely baffled if you'd called it one — would have looked at you the way you'd look at someone who told you the tide had hurt its own feelings by going out, as though the tide going out were anything other than the tide simply being the tide.

It was just the shape of things. Some blokes ran into fires.

Some blokes flew helicopters into places helicopters had no real business flying.

He set up tables and remembered everybody's coffee order and knew, without being asked, whose kid had exams coming and whose old man wasn't travelling well and whose marriage had a hairline crack in it that hadn't made it to the surface yet, and that was a use, a real one, the same as any other, and a man could build a whole decent life around being useful in the particular way he was useful, without ever once expecting the tables to be set up for him in return.

He hadn't always understood that this was a shape he'd chosen, or been given, rather than simply the shape of the world.

He could remember, if he let himself go looking for it, which he generally didn't, a house in the western suburbs of Newcastle with five kids in it and a mother who worked two jobs and a father who worked a third, and being the middle one, the quiet one, the one who noticed early — earlier than any of his siblings, he was fairly sure — that a house that busy ran better when somebody kept it running, and that keeping a house running was a job nobody assigned you and everybody was grateful for, in the vague unspoken way people are grateful for things they've stopped noticing.

He'd done the dishes without being asked from about age nine.

He'd learned to cook properly by twelve, because someone had to and his mother came home too tired most nights to face it.

He'd minded his younger sister through two divorces — not his parents', hers, later, when she was old enough to have her own — and organised every single one of his siblings' birthdays going back further than he could accurately count, because somebody in that house had always had to be the one who remembered, and it had simply, over the years, without any single decision he could point to, become him.

Nobody had ever sat him down and told him he was only as good as what he did for people.

It had just never once occurred to him that love might arrive without a job attached.

"You're here early even for you," said a voice behind him, and he didn't have to turn around to know it was Layla, coming up from the café with a tray of something that smelled like cinnamon and browned butter and was going to ruin everyone's appetite for lunch in the best possible way.

"Ice," he said, which wasn't an answer to anything she'd asked, but she nodded like it was, because eleven years of running Rivers had taught her that Renz's sentences arrived out of order, the important word first and the rest of the sentence trailing along behind it trying to catch up, and you just had to wait for the rest to arrive.

"You're not on the ice run till three."

"Someone should check the eskies aren't half-melted from last night before three. If they are, I want to know now, not at half-two when Baz's cray pots need somewhere cold to sit and there's nowhere cold left."

Layla put the tray down on the end of the long table — cinnamon scrolls, still steaming, the good kind she only made for gatherings — and looked at him for a second longer than the sentence required, the particular look she'd been giving him more often lately, the one he pretended not to notice because noticing it would have meant doing something about it, and he wasn't sure yet what there was to do.

She had known him eleven years, had watched him arrive as a green twenty-three-year-old still finding his feet in the crew and become, slowly, without any of them quite deciding it, the quiet load-bearing wall the whole structure leaned on, and she had opinions about that, plenty of them, that she mostly kept to herself because eleven years had also taught her that Renz Kowalski could not be pushed anywhere he hadn't already half-decided to go.

"You know," she said, "one year, you could just come to this thing instead of running it."

"I am coming to it."

"You know what I mean."

He did know what she meant. He straightened a corner of a tablecloth that didn't need straightening and did not look at her while he did it, because some conversations went better sideways, the way Sasha had taught him to deliver hard truths, and he'd learned, over the years, that the technique worked in both directions — you could receive one sideways just as easily as give one. "Someone's got to do the tables, Lay."

"There's forty people arriving today who'd do the tables if you let them. Cal would do the tables. Dom would do the tables, badly, and Pri would redo them properly behind him, but he'd have a go."