The youngest has their drinking water in a two litre bottle. The cap is missing but she clutches it to her body with one scrawny brown arm, the other rigid around Renee’s neck. The two boys are trying not to cry. Joe was amazed they could not swim, these city kids. They would not let him teach them. Renee is using her arms, her thighs, their T-shirts to hold them all together, to push them against the piles. A foot above their heads the smoke eddies and curls, settles, falls. For once their bodies are united, by prickling nostrils, singed hair, the sandpapery rasp in eyes and throat. Fear.
Joe lays his phone down on the hot planks then lowers himself into the sea, just along from where they huddle. He retrieves the phone and, holding it high, wades away from them. To his right the shoreline is an unbroken line of flame.
‘What you doing, Granpa?’ The oldest boy’s voice is shrill.
The dog patters back and forth on the jetty, barking. Their precious things are buried in the yard, wrapped in tablecloths and towels a foot down. It should have been more but his body has lost its muscle and the ground was fired to metallic rock. The pick and the shovel had suffered, his hands and his heart had suffered more. Not enough room for everything. His late wife’s things, the old photographs, Renee looking away so he could choose, the new life over the old.
He finds the camera setting, turns to face them. Holding the phone above the water he dips down until his shoulders are level with the surface.
‘For Pete’s sake, Joe.’ Renee puffs hair from her sweating scarlet turnip of a face.
Despite the heat, the children’s teeth are chattering. They look to him with wide eyes, Renee’s are narrowed to slits. Her jaw is clenched as she takes the weight of small bodies. He captures the image then struggles towards them.
He thinks how his daughter might take more kindly to Renee now.
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