Fire Song (12 page)

She heard his panting and could see his eyes and pink tongue even before she could make out the rest of his friendly face in the moonlight. He came bounding up from Neville
Frank’s overnight bag, which he was guarding on her account, so pleased to see her.

‘Oh Blackie, darling.’ She sank down and allowed herself the luxury of brushing her hot cheek against the softness of his coat. ‘You wouldn’t be so glad to see me if you knew what I was about to do.’

He licked her arm, her face, as if he understood what was upsetting her. Exhausted, and with no more tears to cry, she lay on the grass. She breathed deeply and, lying there, felt her mad world slowing. Then accountably the words of old Mrs Roche from the hospital suddenly came back to her. What she had said to Mum about teenagers. ‘Your children are really adults in my book. That’s how I treated mine, you know, more or less as equals, and that’s how they treated me.’ She was kind of grown up at nearly thirteen. Grown up enough to make up her own mind about things and not keep reaching out for people to save her. Mum or Daddy or the Kleins. Or Dom! She thought of his anger, but it wasn’t up to him and he’d said as much.

Blackie stretched out beside her – not like this was a game, but like he was a dog on the alert and protective, from time to time giving a low growl to show her he was still on guard. The wind was dropping away now and she glanced up and saw that the clouds had moved southward across the sky, and through the clean cold air she could see the stars, quite bright. One star stood out, and she fixed her gaze on it just as she used to fix on that morning star sometimes. It suddenly seemed to go so quiet here. And this was the moment she found the courage that she hadn’t known she could muster.

‘Blackie,’ she said, all at once sitting bolt upright. She needed to say something else, but had no more words, as
she patted him so vigorously he jumped to his feet. Then she hugged him hard. ‘Blackie, Blackie, Blackie.’

She walked back into
Emoh Ruo,
and this time she let the dog walk by her side. He should be part of this. There’d be no joyous bounding; just the two of them, quiet as quiet and determined. She walked across the verandah, and glanced at the Williams’s house that still had a light on somewhere, and then stood in the doorway to her own kitchen.

Right now, that kitchen was the most beautiful room in the entire world. Grandma’s fuel stove, cold now, but its ample proportions glinting in the lamplight; the scrubbed wooden sink with its smart checked curtain; the old pine dresser with its line of neat hooks and blue and white cups hanging in a row; the curtains at each window, holding back the night; even the saucepan stand with its gleaming pots looked lovely to her at this moment. She looked up to the set of jugs on the mantel, Grandpa Logan’s collection, smallest to largest, still standing there as they always had, and best of all her gaze fell on the big friendly kitchen table. Right in the centre of the room. Beautiful!

She could see them all. As if they were gathered round that old cedar table. Mum and Pippa, of course, but also Freddy and Charlie and even Daddy, who’d be so glad to know there was a house to come to, even if it was only to visit from time to time. And Grandma Logan was hovering over them, but looking now and then at Ingrid and nodding yes. Yes!

She’d found courage at last, just looking at an old star with its bright cold light, a thing so far out of her life, and yet shining into it. She’d found the courage to do what she was
about to do. Her heart was full with it as she picked up the dog bowl at her feet, that Blackie had not even attempted to investigate, stepped to the sink and poured the kero triumphantly down the plughole.

She did the same with the bowl in the lounge room and even then it occurred to her that it was a dreadful waste of kero. But of course there’d be no way to find the concentration it would take to restore the stuff to the drum on the side verandah, her hands were so shaky. ‘Sorry, Daddy,’ she kept thinking, but at the same time resolving that there had to be another way to help him, and she’d find it.

It was as she gathered the twisted rags together that something occurred to her. Words that had been spoken as she tried to make her escape from Ward 3 tonight. ‘Frederick in Queensland. ‘Thinking back she was sure that was Mum was whispering to Mr Fratelli – part of her own story. And it clicked into place that Daddy must not be in Sydney hiding like a thief. Not at all. Clearly Mum had lied to her about that. Dad was living with Auntie Ivy in Queensland safe and sound, something Mum didn’t want to face up to at all. And maybe the story about his gambling wasn’t true either and he didn’t even owe a penny! Oh, Mum!

She took the sodden rags outside and dumped them with gusto into the garbage tin. Blackie, curious and constant at her side, seemed to pick up on her changed mood. He gave a few spirited barks at a possum that lurched from a tree scraping its branches on their rooftop.

It was clear as day, or clear as that star, that Mum had been wrong all along. She had known that long before Dom’s angry outburst, of course she had! Daddy’s troubles or not, she had known it was wrong in her heart of hearts.
It had taken her all day long to work this out for herself. All day to work up the courage to say no. She would explain all of this to Dom sometime soon, because unintentionally he had become part of it and because she wanted him to understand she was not weak, not the spineless thing she herself suspected she was. Not anymore.

This was about making her own decision and now that she had done it, things seemed to be falling into place and she knew exactly what to do next. Before the Williamses and a long explanation if she was caught coming back inside, she’d go right back there to the hospital tonight. She’d find the courage to tell Mum she wouldn’t do it, that she was wrong about burning the house down, and much more than that besides. Mum had been wrong about Mrs Winnie Williams, for a start.

She’d remind Mum that she’d be thirteen soon and Mrs Roche had said she thought her kids were pretty well grown up when they reached their teens. And she’d tell her another thing she’d just remembered. Grandma Logan said she went to work when she was thirteen in a factory in Sydney and so did lots of kids at the time. Thirteen was considered grown up in Grandma’s day and, all right, you couldn’t leave school until you were fifteen these days, but thirteen was well on the way to grown up if you had to be.

She’d tell Mum what she really thought about Pippa’s not speaking, about Freddy and Charlie being sent away – all of it – and Mum would listen just like she’d listened to Mr Fratelli, she’d be so amazed. She’d say that somehow they’d find a way, just like Grandma Logan always said. She could remember her trying to comfort Mum after some new disaster with that soft but determined voice of hers.
‘Sometimes you’ve got to go round things, to find another way, but there’s always a way, you know. Just be strong about it. Where there’s a will there’s a way.’

The fire song in her head had finished, replaced by a sense of relief, so hard to contain, Ingrid turned to speak to her faithful companion once again.

It was going to be hard and horrible to tell Mum she was wrong, and then tell her everything else she thought, with the same conviction.

Mum wouldn’t be easy, she’d probably never be easy, but something had happened to Ingrid. Even if at the hospital bed in Ward 3 she
didn’t
get to tell Mum all of what she wanted to say tonight, something had changed ‘for well and good,’ as Grandma Logan would put it. She knew she would be able to tell Mum no and tell her why. And that made all the difference. It suddenly made all kinds of possibilities, too. She could see a party at
Emoh Ruo.
A party on their own back lawn with Pippa and Charlie playing together, with Ma talking her head off, sitting beside Mrs Klein in her wheelchair pulled right up to the trestle table, and with Dom and his dad and Mr Klein at the barbecue. She could see Mrs Winnie Williams and Gracie coming across the lawn and beaming at them, while she and Ruth and Freddy made a salad big enough for everyone.

Ingrid looked up to check that star once more, as she swung in through the hospital gates and took a good deep breath before she went inside.

Yes, the star was there. And it always would be.

Libby Hathorn is an award-winning author of more than fifty books for young readers. Her stories have been published around the world in English and in translation, and have been adapted for stage and screen. Libby’s work has won honours in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. She was awarded a Centenary Medal in 2001.

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  Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is used
  under licence by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia.

First published in Australia in 2009
by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
This edition published in 2011
by HarperCollins
Publishers
Australia Pty Limited

Copyright © Libby Hathorn 2009

The right of Libby Hathorn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the
Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000
.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the
Copyright Act 1968
, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Libby Hathorn
  Fire Song / Libby Hathorn.
  ISBN: 978-0-7333-2420-8 (pbk.)
  ISBN: 978-0-7304-9544-4 (ePub)
  For primary school age.
A823.3