CHAPTER FIVE
Small Refusals
Renz
The house was quiet in the particular way it only ever got the night after a gathering, when the last of the packing-up was done and the tables were back in the shed and there was nobody left to be useful to, and Renz sat at his own kitchen table — his grandmother's table, technically, the same one she'd sat him at for Sunday dinners as a boy visiting from Newcastle, inherited whole along with the house when she'd passed and left it to him outright, the only member of the family she'd trusted, she'd said once, not to sell it the second the market looked good — and looked around at a house that had never once, in eleven years of him living in it alone, had anyone else fix anything in it.
He'd done the guttering himself, up a ladder in the wind, because calling someone felt like an extravagance for a job he was perfectly capable of doing badly on his own time.
He'd replastered the ceiling in the spare room after a leak, watched three separate online tutorials to get the technique right, and never once considered ringing a mate who might've done it properly in half the time, because a mate doing you a favour meant a favour owed back, and owing things had never sat easily with him, not even with people who'd have been glad to be owed.
The whole house, every fixed hinge and patched wall and replaced tap washer, was a small quiet museum of a man who had never once let anyone else's hands touch the structure he lived inside, the same way he'd never once let anyone's gratitude touch the structure he lived inside either.
He thought about Cal's toast, coming on Friday, already dreading the specific discomfort of being thanked in front of people, and thought too, unexpectedly, of his grandmother, who'd been the one person in his childhood who'd occasionally, without prompting, done a small thing for him rather than the other way round — a jumper knitted without being asked, a plate kept warm on the stove past everyone else's dinner because she'd noticed he always ran late helping his mother clean up first. He'd never quite worked out, growing up, why her kindness had felt different to him than everyone else's expectation, until much later, sitting exactly where he sat now, some nights, when he finally understood: hers had never once come with an invoice attached.
She'd simply liked doing it. She hadn't needed him to have earned it first.
He wondered, running a thumb along the worn edge of her table, whether it was possible to build a whole house — an actual one, structural, load-bearing — entirely out of things done for other people, and still have room left over, somewhere in the framing, for someone to do something back.
He didn't have an answer. He got up, eventually, and made himself a cup of tea he didn't especially want, because his hands needed something to do, and sat back down at the quiet table in the quiet house that had never once, not in eleven years, had anyone fix a single thing in it but him.
? ? ?
The gathering didn't end so much as loosen, the way it did every year — people peeling off in twos and threes over the following days, some back to the Territory, some down to Queensland, the urgent centre of it thinning out into something quieter and more ordinary, everyday crew life instead of festival, and Renz found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he minded the quiet less this year than he usually did.
Most years the days after a gathering carried a faint flatness for him, the particular comedown of a man who'd spent a weekend fully occupied and useful and was now facing the return of ordinary time, hours that didn't have a job attached to fill them.
This year the flatness didn't quite arrive.
He kept catching himself thinking about a chair by a fire, and a hand he'd held for longer than either of them had strictly needed to hold it, and finding that the thought did something warmer to his chest than any amount of usefulness usually managed.
He still ran the roster. He still remembered whose kid had exams — Wes's eldest, this fortnight, and he'd already dropped a bag of study snacks at their place without being asked, the way he dropped things at people's places, quietly, unclaimed, so that half the crew genuinely believed the local IGA occasionally just gave things away for no reason anyone could quite explain.
He still made too much food. He still, on the Thursday after the gathering, without any particular plan behind it, found himself standing in Rivers with a tray of the good sourdough for the counter, because Layla had mentioned, three weeks ago, in passing, that the café's regular baker had gone on leave, and Renz had filed it the way he filed everything, and acted on it the way he acted on everything, without ever once framing it to himself as a kindness rather than a chore that happened to need doing.
It was Sasha who caught him at it, on the Saturday, at the station — not a fire call, just the ordinary Saturday muster, gear checks and idle talk over the truck bay, the low familiar rhythm of a crew keeping its equipment honest between emergencies — and said, in the dry unbothered way she'd been saying things to him since he was twenty-two and green as anything, fresh out of his probationary period and still flinching at loud noises on the truck floor, "You know Dom's telling everyone it was you who fixed the cot. "
"Wasn't hard. Flat-pack thing, half the screws were in backwards. Anyone could've sorted it in twenty minutes with the right screwdriver."
"He rang round three blokes before he rang you.
All three of them told him to just call Kowalski, save himself the trouble.
" Sasha was checking a hose coupling as she said it, not even looking at him, the way she delivered every hard truth she'd ever handed him, sideways, so a man could pretend he hadn't quite heard it if he needed to, a technique she'd perfected over a decade of managing crews full of blokes who'd rather walk into a burning structure than sit still for direct eye contact during an emotionally inconvenient conversation.
"You know what that is, don't you? That's not 'the bloke who's handy.
' That's the whole crew knowing, without discussing it, that you're the answer to most problems worth having answered.
Three separate blokes, independently, all landed on the same name. "
"Someone's got to be handy."
"Renz." She put the coupling down. Looked at him properly now, the particular look she'd given him a hundred times over twelve years, equal parts exasperated and fond, the look of a woman who'd watched a green kid become the quiet backbone of a whole crew and had never quite worked out how to tell him so without him finding some way to deflect it into a joke about the ice supply.
"When's the last time someone fixed something for you? "
He didn't have an answer ready, which was rare enough in itself that he heard the silence land, heavy, in the space where a flat reasonable sentence usually went.
He thought about it, actually thought about it, standing there with a hose coupling in his own hands now, turning it over without really seeing it.
His car had a rattle in the front left wheel well he'd been meaning to look at for four months.
His gutters needed clearing before the wet season properly set in.
He couldn't, sitting there and genuinely searching, come up with a single instance in the last several years of someone doing for him the kind of unasked-for practical kindness he handed out to half the coast on a weekly basis.
"Cal wants to shout you a beer next Friday," Sasha said, into the silence, watching him work through it and not, for once, filling the gap with something to let him off the hook.
"For the sourdough thing, and the cot, and probably forty other things none of us have kept proper count of.
Just so you know. In case your first instinct's to find a reason you're busy. "
"I'm not busy Friday."
"I know. I checked the roster before I told you, because I know exactly how this works." She almost smiled, the specific dry almost-smile she reserved for moments when she'd successfully out-manoeuvred him at his own game. "Just — let the man buy you a beer, Kowalski. It won't kill you."
"It might," Renz said, and there was enough real uncertainty under the joke that Sasha's almost-smile faded into something gentler, something that looked, for just a second, like actual worry.
? ? ?
The RFS held its quarterly equipment day that same week, the unglamorous but essential business of checking every hose, every coupling, every breathing apparatus across the whole station's kit before the season properly turned, and Pip had taken to volunteering for it the last couple of years, ostensibly because an extra pair of hands sped the job up for everyone, though she suspected, if she was honest with herself, that at least half her motivation involved a particular bloke who ran the whole operation with the same methodical care he brought to everything else.
"You don't have to be here," Renz said, handing her a clipboard and a pen, the crew's standard checklist already half-filled in his own cramped hand from the trucks he'd already worked through that morning.
"I know I don't have to."
"Just saying. Most people find something better to do with a Saturday than count hose couplings."