The wattles grew back first—thick walls of them. They came up out of the ash so quickly that Leo didn’t know where to start chopping, so he didn’t for a while. It wasn’t until the trees reached chin-height that he began to really worry. Helen had noticed her husband spending more time at the kitchen sink—peering out the window and over the block, towards the valley below. “I should get on top of it Hel,” he’d sometimes say, not checking if she was about to hear first. Helen was just happy to see regrowth— in the beginning anyway. She’d take her foldout chair onto the patio and watch for birds. Most, however, had disappeared along with the neighbors.
The days were particularly long that first summer back; it didn’t get dark until eight, sometimes half past. The house the couple had rebuilt—two years now after the fire —looked like it had almost nestled itself into the newly bushy hillside. Recently retired, Helen spent a lot of time in the new sunroom, playing Mahjong; or in the kitchen with shiny cookbooks, experimenting with all the new appliances. Despite missing their old home, Helen liked the smells of the new one: fresh wood and decking oil. Once a lover of the bush, Helen had even found comfort in the chainsaw dust towards the end. She sometimes smelt in the air—which was most days, once the first trees got taller than Leo.
Like Helen, Leo knew that it wouldn’t make a difference if a fire were to roll over the hill again—that all the piling and burning-off wouldn’t stop much. The clearing, however, would allow the pair to tell friends—when they dropped by for all the usual occasions—that something was being done about it all; they didn’t want details anyway. Also, as Leo had recently stepped down to part-time hours, he’d had to fill his days back up with something; he had never been able to sit still for long, like Helen had.
Not long after they moved back Leo began following the weather too—once a day in the beginning, more regularly later, once he stopped being able to see the ground through grass and burr . Sometimes Helen would sit with him, in the shell of the old shed, and listen as well—the radio humming out across the ridge. Helen noticed her husband’s spine take on a new curve from the long days of clearing—all the stooping and crouching amongst the thicker, second, even third layer of regrowth. As a result Helen—concerned about most things most of the time—began dropping two chalky calcium tablets into his newly calloused palms each morning, before he went back out into the sprouting bush, the tiny burrs stuck all over the tops of his woollen socks.
By the following January neither the Chuffs nor the Cicada bugs had returned—the neighbours hadn’t either. The days had slowed even further for Helen and she struggled to fill them, especially with Leo out in the yard and Mahjong long exhausted. She resorted to crafts—crocheting flowers at first and then terrariums, which were surprisingly low maintenance. Her habit of wine at night provided her with the glass; and cuttings weren’t hard to come by. Upon noticing the wattle-filled bottles lined up along the sink Leo didn’t say a thing.
Helen was sitting on the deck on a Monday, maybe a Tuesday, when she noticed it all first; it was the bits of sediment in her cup of tap water that marked the beginning. Leo was a dot to her, halfway down the hill below—in his navy blue work overalls, his small orange chainsaw quiet at his hip. The taste of the dirty water made Helen look, really look, for the first time out over the block. Despite the endless hours of work Leo had put in, the creepers had started making their way up the trunks of the tallest, blackest trees—stubborn and still standing. The wattle too, was still coming up out of the ground—thick. However when Leo came up for a sandwich as usual, covered in dirt, Helen decided not to worry him.
That spring the wattles flowered more than ever, all around the small sections Leo had cleared. Helen had been reminded the fire more often. When Leo came to the door after a days work, she saw silver ash in his eyelashes instead of the yellow wattle powder that it was. At the end of each day, his shoulders and his white hair were covered with the stuff. It started getting in with the washing and covering their sheets. Showering at night, Helen noticed roots—as thin as daddy long legs limbs— growing down through the showerheads but, again, she kept it to herself. Leo began talking about the possibility of another bad season, and of roundup, before starting to working even later into the evenings.
In the meantime, Helen had stopped wondering when others would come back to the ridge. The For Sale signs had faded and dried up, along with most interest in the area. Initially Leo had promised Helen a grand housewarming, or house cooling, as he once joked—with chicken skewers and punch—out amongst the tallest, blackest trees. However, as Leo’s days spent clearing got longer—sometimes eight, even nine hours—Helen began to realise the party would never go ahead. She had recently found some fungi in the guest bedroom anyway, growing out from behind the cabinets.
One day, well one morning really, Helen woke up sweating. Flipping her legs over the side of the bed she noticed the puffy veins of her shins, milky blue in the dawn. She left the bedroom with plans to get a drink from the new water filter, maybe get a wet face washer for her chest. Walking down the hall she heard the dog whimpering in its sleep. She then stubbed her toe on the sideboard, which woke her up enough to realise that Leo wasn’t in the house, hadn’t been beside her in bed all night. The dog, awakened by Helen’s shuffling, followed her—first as she struggled with the sliding doors, and then out into the night.
And it was as Helen went out onto the patio for the cooler air that she felt it first; the wooden boards wet, soft with moss and rot beneath her feet. Before she had made it to the tree line, the looked back to the lit kitchen to see the terrariums, well vases really, shiny in the night. Helen, if she stood still enough, could just hear the faint whine of the chainsaw—floating up from the valley below.
