Ignite

Burning. I can smell burning on the soccer field.

Not gas, but wood. A campfire smell.

“Hey Jakey, do you smell that?”

“What?”

“Smoke.”

Jake stops the ball in its tracks and takes a whiff. “I can’t smell anything.”

“You sure?”

Jake sighs. “Yeah, I’m sure. Don’t worry, Claude, everything’s fine.”

That’s when Jake grabs my shoulders and the world rocks.

I’m not surprised. The timing is just right. Sometimes I don’t even make it this far.

I wait, relieved, as his hands absorb the soccer ball, then the field, the sky, the air. Atoms roll together until everything is black.

Only then do my eyes open to darkness.

Bed sheets form rivulets underneath me, my feet pressed bare against the mattress. Sweat runs down my back and Jake’s hands are heavy on my shoulders.

The breath I let out is ready to burst.

“Hi Jakey.”

His hands leave me and the bed shifts. I can’t see him, but I know he watches the same black space as me, the one that separates us.

“You had the dream again,” he says.

“Yeah.”

He doesn’t speak.

“Was I screaming?”

“Yeah, you were.”

My eyelids fall. “Sorry.”

“S’alright. Had to get up soon, anyway.”

Jake stands up and switches the light on, walking out of my room and towards the shower.

I stand up, switch the light back off, and retreat until I’m pressed against the window. The curtains twitch as I peak through the cracks, watching the night. The faintest pink soaks the horizon, and it fills me with dread.

I don’t want the sun to rise. Not today.

Because today they’re sending us to school. Today is unofficially named the day of forgetting. Today everyone expects Jake and me to move on.

But that only makes me miss it all even more.

...

My name is Claudia Cairns, and I’ve been living in Sydney’s eastern suburbs for fifty-four days. I have a calendar that tells me so. Jake doesn’t like my calendar much. He says because I count towards the future, I hold on to the past, but I know he counts too.

Jake counts everything. He was counting sixteen years ago when he screamed his way out of Mum, then watched me follow thirty minutes later. Those thirty minutes were Jake’s claim to fame and gave him a healthy appreciation of what time can do for someone when treated respectfully.

We used to live in a stop-over town. During summer, cars clogged the main road, rushing east and then heading back two months later coated in sand and salt. Jake and I would watch from our eucalypt-shaded oval, kicking the soccer ball back and forth, dust puffing in our faces.

Sometimes we’d stand beside the highway with the other kids and run between the cars. The closest cut earned the highest respect, and Jake was frequently respected, and I, scared shitless.

When Mum found out, she threw an empty bottle at him.

“You know one day you’ll get hit, not honked,” she yelled.

“No, one day I’ll get a lift out of here.”

Jake’s statement had provoked another bottle into flight and he’d scuttled out the door, calling for me to follow.

That’s the way it had always been. Jake would get into trouble and bolt as I apologised and backed out after him. Sometimes, I’d throw in a ‘what can you do?’ shrug to solidify my good-twin role. Not that anyone ever bought it. Everyone knew Jake and I were a team. We were the troublemakers of our town, the mischief that could not be managed. Infamous.

But then there was one cigarette. One gust of wind. One spark. And our lives changed forever.

“Claudia!”

My face is close enough to the window that when Aunt Sylvia shouts my name, I jerk forward and head-butt the glass.

“Shit!” I curse, grabbing my nose as pain explodes through my sinuses. “Oh my god. My nose! I’ve broken my nose.”

I stumble around to find a blurry Sylvia silhouetted in the doorway.

“Claudia,” she repeats. “Don’t use that language in my house. Why aren’t you changed yet? If you don’t hurry, you won’t have time for breakfast.”

“Argh.” I curl over and blink back the tears. “You’ve broken my nose, woman! How am I supposed to get changed?”

Sylvia huffs and moves over to me, grabbing my cheeks and lifting my face towards hers. She squints at me and then lets go.

“You’re exaggerating. It’s fine. Get dressed and come downstairs. There’s scrambled eggs on the table.”

I blink after her as she leaves, and once she’s gone, I blink at my new uniform instead, hanging on my door.

I let the seconds drag into minutes, standing there staring, because I already know I’m going to hate Randwick Girls High School. The idea of separating boys from girls is distressing to me, and that opinion only solidified after the school tours Sylvia insisted Jake and I attend.

There had been a lot of state-of-the-arts thrown around as they led us through the locker-lined corridors, alongside some world class’s and engaging curriculums, but all I’d seen were bland lifeless buildings surrounded by rubbish strewn fields.

And the girls’ uniforms…

White collared shirt, pleated green skirt, ankle socks, and clumpy black Clarks.

Disgusting.

After another moment of silent distress, I sigh and pull the clothes on, thumping downstairs and tugging at the fabric.

Jake and Uncle Peter are sitting at the kitchen table, shovelling eggs and toast down their throats and listening to the radio. I duck around them into my seat, wedging myself into the corner underneath the staircase, and pick up my fork.

“Have you packed your bags?” Sylvia asks as the kettle hisses.

“Yeah,” Jake and I mumble.

“Good. We’re leaving in ten minutes. I need to be back for Aleisha Meyers’s lesson at nine. She’s singing Ave Maria in her choir group and the poor girl can’t hit the high F.”

Uncle Peter raises an eyebrow, one that is outrageously bushy for a man so bald.

“Do you think you’ll be able to cure her of this shortcoming?”

“I can very well try,” Sylvia says, bustling out of the kitchen and down the corridor to her music studio with a water jug and two cups in hand.

“Oh, Peter,” she calls over her shoulder. “Mary from next door was wondering if you could look at her plumbing today. The pipes are still shaking every time she turns on the water.”

Uncle Peter grunts and gives us a tired smile.

“I guess that’s my cue,” he says, and then he stands and walks back upstairs. Dust shakes loose from the ceiling with every footstep, sprinkling onto my head as he passes overhead.

For a moment, Jake and I sit there quietly, but then he turns to me.

“How are you feeling?”

I shrug, but Jake continues to stare. At first, I pretend not to notice, but then he lifts his fork and pokes my cheek with it.

“That’s not hygienic,” I say.

“I know.”

He falls silent again, and I let out a sigh.

“I’m okay, Jake, really. It’s not awesome I’m dreaming again, but I should’ve expected it today.”

He sits back, his gaze flooded with dark guilt. Jake always blames himself when I have the nightmares. He has no reason to, but he does anyway, as if my inability to recover from what happened is somehow his fault.

“School here might not be so awful,” he says. “We’ll still be able to talk through the fence and stuff.”

I give him a small smile.

“Yeah, I know.”

He waits for me to say more, but I don’t, so he stands, drops his plate into the sink and makes his way upstairs.

Once he’s gone, I stare at the wall, listening to Olivia Dean and contemplating how to best convince Sylvia that I’m deathly sick and consequently unable to attend school.

But then the radio switches over and the news begins.

Investigations into the ignition of the Dark Monday bushfires in eastern Victoria are ongoing as the affected families continue to pressure Victoria Police. The fires tore through 20,000 hectares of agricultural and residential land in the State’s south east on Monday 10th December 2024, killing 112 people and displacing 6,000 more whose homes or commercial properties were destroyed in the event.

“We need answers,” Jessica Green, the sister of a deceased farm worker, Thomas Costa, reports. “We need to know who did this, and we need to know why. Too many people have—”

The radio cuts short and my head jerks up. Sylvia is standing there, the power chord to the radio hanging from her hand.

“Are you alright?”

It isn’t until she asks that I realise I’m shaking. I flush and stand up, knocking the chair into the corner.

“I’m fine,” I mutter, and then I clatter around the table and rush upstairs.

20,000 hectares of agricultural and residential land.

I charge into my room and shut the door, pacing along the metre of carpet I have free between my wardrobe and my bed.

112 killed. 6,000 displaced.

I focus on my breathing, trying to calm something that has already run out of control.

Investigations into the ignition source still ongoing.

I close my eyes, grimacing against the darkness. And I’m there again.

“Hey Jakey, can you smell that?”

“What?”

“Smoke.”

I open my eyes and grab my school bag.

Today was the day of forgetting. Today was the day for moving on.

For a moment, I allowed myself to believe that it could be that simple.

...

Forty-five minutes later, I’m standing at the entrance to Randwick Girls High, staring at the concrete buildings that surround the oval. Randwick Boys sits off to my left, and a street busier and honk-ier than any highway we had in Bellbird Creek is a few meters behind me.

Back home, our houses had been woven into the landscape, surrounded by gnarled eucalypts and red dirt. But here, the buildings and roads encroach onto each other, only leaving cracks in the pavement for grass to spring from.

As I stand there, a school bus pulls up, and I get caught in a rip of pleated green skirts. Their owners tug me forward, sweeping through the front doors and down the hallway until I’m deposited outside the student office.

A greying woman, whose name tag says ‘Brenda’, pops her head over the top of a computer monitor.

“Can I help you?”

I swallow and grab my bag straps.

“I’m Claudia Cairns. Today’s my first day.”

Brenda grunts and moves to a filing cabinet, pulling out a sheet of paper and handing it to me.

“Here you go. You’re in homeroom 2A. If you follow this corridor, it’s the second door on the right. Once you’re there, someone will direct you to your classes.”

I nod and grab the paper, zipping it into the front pocket of my bag as I turn and make my way in the direction Brenda pointed.

When I find room 2A, there are a few girls inside already. I hover at the entrance until I realise I’m attracting attention that way, so I move to an empty table and sit, looking determinedly towards the front of the room.

Their gazes stay on me though, their whispers slipping around the corners of the room, and I realise this is what I’d been dreading; this crawling feeling that only comes when Jake isn’t here and I’m surrounded by strangers.

“Hi!”

I jump when the chair beside me scrapes against the tiles and a small Asian girl plops down into it.

“I’m Emmy. You’re Claudia, right? We heard you’d be starting today.”

She grins at me, her smile all bubbles and sweets.

“Yeah, that’s me. Everyone calls me Claude, though.”

“I’ve been so excited to meet you! Principal Humphrey told me we have most of our classes together and I need a new desk buddy. I always used to sit with Aleisha, but most of her subjects are on different lines this year. It’s dreadful.”

Emmy pauses and looks at me. The silence drags for a second before I realise she’s waiting for me to offer sympathy.

“Oh... I’m, ah, sorry?”

“Oh, it’s nothing.” Emmy waves away my condolences with as much confidence as she’d silently requested them. “Not compared to what you’ve been through. It’s awful what happened. Really horrific.”

She leans forward, her eyes glinting.

“Did you know that apparently they’ve already caught the person who started the fire? My mum said they’re worried about what the public would do if they found out though.”

Emmy’s words hit me like a speeding eighteen-wheeler and, for a moment, I’m reeling.

“Yeah, the police are probably right.”

Emmy nods and pulls back.

“I can’t imagine how terrible the last few months have been for you. But you’re going to love Sydney. There’s so much to do here. I’ll be able to show you around. Is your whole family here?”

“No. Just me and my brother.”

“Is he at Randwick Boys?”

I nod.

“I can’t wait to meet him,” Emmy says, “particularly if he’s even half as attractive as you. Is he also blonde? I’m not super into blondes, personally. Who else are you living with if it’s just you two, though? Are your parents separated? Was one of them already here?”

I’d been staring at Emmy and her fountain of words with mild fascination until she asks about our parents. Then, I look away, the spell snapping quick, like the sharp, jagged crack of a wood beam.

“No, neither of them are here,” I say. “Dad’s never been in the picture, but Mum... she’s not… I mean, the fire…”

My voice grows more pained by the second, and I cut off and clear my throat.

“I’m living with my aunt and uncle now.”

There’s an awful silence and Emmy’s eyes are fixed on my face, wide and wounded.

“Oh,” she breathes out. “Oh, Claudia, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s fine. And it’s Claude, not Claudia.”

She watches me for a moment, and then nods. I’m relieved when she does because the change in her tone was making people stare again.

“Of course,” she says. “I do hope they’ve caught that arsonist. He deserves everything that’s coming to him.”

I look over at her and manage a weak smile.

“Yeah,” I say. “I hope they have too.”