Angus Chapman

Summer, '69

It was December, so the hills were on fire. Colomatta they were called once, those mountains that rose up from the plain. Myle had been told of eucalypt cathedrals, piled high into air so blue it seemed suffused with the very spirit of the gods. But fallen now, and swept away as ash they were remembered only as the hollows and ridges of some great buried monster, grown over with thin, greedy shrubs that spread out from half-yearly burnings, constant as a tide. While a scorched concrete wall kept the flames at bay the smoke spread up, and out, until all the air was a haze and the tendrils that were sucked inside the coach crept under the corners of Myle’s mask, burning his lungs with each breath. As he rattled through the Belt – crushed between the glittering towers standing sentry on the bay and the long, low barns of corrugated iron that stretched out into the firebreak, humming with machines – the night sky was a tie-dyed mass. Garish purples, greens and blues spilled out of floodlights at the tops of the towers that reared over, rising like chemical candles above the squat, blank tenements that lined the street. Though it was midnight the air baked, and most windows hung open, shrill voices tumbling out from television sets and radios. And the coughing, the spluttering, the heaving and the hacking. That was there too, and it never went away.