Chapter 9: Grass

Grass tells the story, in third-person, of the Southwest National Park ranger known as ‘the ranger’, whose love of nature was developed through being locked out of the house by his mother until dinner time, encouraged to explore the forest. Arnott uses the ranger’s perspective to highlight the wonder that exists in nature, but also that wonder can sometimes be shocking, such as when a seal is killed by a pod of orcas. His recollections segue to the time he was called to Melaleuca and witnessed Charlotte leaking fire, and serve to corroborate some of the manager’s account.

Allen’s farmhands had contacted the ranger requesting assistance to get out, that there had been wombat deaths and Allen had gone mad. The ranger attended and found the farm exactly as the farmhands had described but with the addition of cormorants, whose bills streaked with blood, which reinforced Allen’s account that the cormorants were not fictional. He ordered a plane for the farmhands but it couldn’t leave until the following day due to the wind. The ranger was to remain in a hut near Allen as it was going to take another week for the doctor to come and check on Allen’s welfare. The ranger was sad and tense at Allen’s condition, Allen having been the closest the ranger had to a friend.

During the night, the sound of the farmhands running awoke the ranger, and he saw a huge fire. As the pilot made plans to leave, they all noticed that the fire had emanated from Charlotte’s tears. When Nicola reached out to touch Charlotte’s cheek, miraculously she did not get burnt and, instead, Charlotte appeared to come out of her trance and stopped leaking fire. The group left and at the airport the ranger reports the fire. With the farmhands having disappeared after landing, he gave no information as to how the fire started, deciding that the story would not be believed. Intent on forgetting the fire itself, the ranger focuses on the regenerated wonder that will return to Melaleuca, in the form of new animal and plant life, as a result of the fire.

Chapter 9: Grass Quotes

After school his mother would welcome him by locking him outside, where their cottage bordered a great forest of eucalyptus and sassafras. (the ranger) Chapter 9

… to let the wonder take his soul places it hadn’t been since he was a child in the forest, crouching in a branch-built shelter, thirsty for the taste of all the wild things in the world. (the ranger) Chapter 9

Chapter 10: Snow

The chapter opens in the third-person, with Nicola recalling her father’s love for her and that she had not felt the warmth that brought until she touched Charlotte when Charlotte had leaked fire and the fire had stopped. The narrative outlines how Charlotte had not wanted to talk to the police so the pair left the airport in a car Nicola had parked in the long-term parking before heading north.

Nicola drives while Charlotte sleeps and recollects when Charlotte first came to Melaleuca. Nicola was hoping to have a friend to talk with but Charlotte kept to herself and it was not until the wombat deaths and Allen’s violent mood swings that the pair became something of friends. Nicola stocks up on groceries then drives to a place she considers they’ll be safe, a hut near Crater Lake belonging to a friend of her father’s, the fish trader, Oshikawa. She remembers having come here not long after her father’s seal had died and, with that information, the reader is transported to the story of Karl and learns that Nicola is his daughter.

Part of Nicola’s reason for coming to the lake was that all the stone and snow would be fireproof, in case Charlotte’s fire escaped again, and until they could decide what to do. Nicola awakes early one morning to smoke and sees fire coming out of Charlotte’s ear while she slept. She again touches her and the fire stops. The pair find thermal gear in the hunt and explore their snowy surroundings, seeing the twin peaks of Cradle Mountain. They talked as they walked about Charlotte’s ‘episodes’ and the possibility that Charlotte was unable to control them. Charlotte continues to leak fire at night and Nicola starts sleeping in her bed so she can more easily stop the fire by touching her, even though she gets minor burns in doing so. During the day, Charlotte makes attempts at controlling her fire, summoning it then ‘making odd noises with her throat and nose, and strange movements with her feet and ears’. The pair grow closer and one evening their relationship becomes sexual, however, Nicola’s thoughts of progressing the relationship with Charlotte are soon overrun with sorrow and fear when, the following day, the detective hired by Levi arrives at the hut.

Chapter 10: Snow

She split the face he showed the world, and drew his love towards her. (Nicola about her father’s smile) Chapter 10

Nothing could match the blaze of love in her father’s smile. (Nicola) Chapter 10

Charlotte’s eyes would not drift from the ground or sky. It was as if she was trying to blend in with the fields and snow. Chapter 10

A friendship defined by shared danger, but a friendship nonetheless. (Nicola about Charlotte) Chapter 10

And out of this set of ill-chosen clothes poked the neck and head of a woman. (the detective) Chapter 10

‘You girls got any gin?’ (the detective) Chapter 10

Chapter 11: Wood

This chapter returns to the story of Levi, told in the third-person. He is in Thurston Hough’s house, looking at Thurston’s decomposing body. He notices the water rat pelt in Thurston’s hand and retrieves it. In his hand, the pelt has an invigorating effect on Levi, he no longer feels sick with the stench of Hough’s body, but feels a renewed sense of purpose. He finds the half-finished coffin then leaves, reporting Thurston to the police, before heading west. As he feels the pelt in his hand transfer heat throughout his body, he realises he is going to have to finish the coffin himself. Levi wants to show his sister that she doesn’t have to die and return, changed like their mother, and the coffin would represent that; it would represent how much he loved and cared for her. The self-assurance the pelt had given Levi that his plan is the right course has destroyed any chance in his mind that he could reason with Charlotte using words; Levi has become obsessed and unstable.

Levi heads to his father’s wooden house near Exeter, but its empty. He heads to the beach on the property and remembers happier times with his sister and mother who both loved the water, and his father who didn’t. Levi remembers he left the pelt in the house and heads back, finding his father boiling the kettle. Levi is angry with his father and threatens to call the police. Levi’s father asks after Charlotte and points out that Levi has been unwell since his mother died, and that his sister will need him to be his usual self, reliable and strong, when she returns. Levi’s father tries to explain why he hasn’t been around, but Levi doesn’t care and storms out, resolving to build his sister’s coffin with something more personal than the snowgum that Thurston said would preserve her body.

Chapter 11: Wood Quotes

… he loved her more than he could ever show with words; … the coffin represented … this. (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 11

Levi is not well. Levi is not realising: he could have just spoken to her. In a mind like his, grand acts will always trump honest words. (about Charlotte) Chapter 11

He would wear them whenever he drove, regardless of the weather, and Levi always found this suspicious. (about his father) Chapter 11

It’s where he and Charlotte would come every day of summer, running through the heat to swim and shout, although she did most of the shouting and all of the swimming. (Levi about the beach) Chapter 11

It’s where his mother would sit quietly at the end of most days. (Levi, about the beach) Chapter 11

It’s where his father would not come, not past the gully edge, for he was afraid of the ocean. (Levi, about the beach) Chapter 11

‘Your sister will come home, eventually, and you need to be reliable. Strong. The brother you normally are.’ (Jack to Levi). Chapter 11

…he does not care about the man, not about who he is or what he says or where he goes, because at the mention of his mother he has stopped caring about almost everything … (Levi about his father) Chapter 11

Chapter 12: Coal

The chapter opens in the third-person, with the creation of fire, as a physical being of male gender, when a woman smacks two stones together. As the fire consumes the dead vegetation it is fed, his mind expands and he comes to learn about his natural surroundings. His unending hunger for vegetation is only second to his desire to please his creator, which he does by cooking the flesh of a wallaby the woman, whom he considers to be his mother, has placed over the fire. But, just as the fire begins to think he has been called to life to serve a purpose, the woman teaches him fear, as she scoops water over the file, reducing his form to dying grey ash, before walking away.

But the fire realises he was not dead, only sleeping, and is brought back to life with a lighting strike that leads to a large bush fire. Having learned to steer clear of the hateful sea, the fire is invincible until the rain turns too heavy for him to evaporate it and he is again reduced to ‘gasping smoke’. The fire goes through more lives, confined within a ring of river rocks as families, who look like his mother, use him to warm themselves during the night, and as resin-dipped branch set alight and used to clear grass in a controlled manner.

The fire discovers he doesn’t need a human to summon it but with an act of will can transport himself from flame to coal, and within a few years, has consumed tiny parts of the whole island. Fire ponders his purpose and concludes he exists for the purposes of people.

Another discovery the fire makes is that he can walk among humans when, one day, while watching a man skin a wallaby, he follows a train of thought and, supernaturally, becomes human. The fire man is accepted by the members of the man’s tribe when he tells them he is a traveller in their own language, a language he has heard for years but never used, an allusion to the now-lost Indigenous languages of Tasmania. The fire man enjoys walking with many groups over the next few decades but his inability to relate to the human experience, their love and pain, hate and joy, reminds him that he is not really one of them, so he returns to spending more time in his natural state. He never tired of his life as fire, even after the colonisers came, changing the land in unimaginable ways, their ‘clever cruelty’ inventing new purposes for him in the form of exploding gun powder and firing canons, creating artificial light, branding cattle, lighting, cracking rocks and melting ore. He sees the Indigenous people being hunted in their homeland but decides, selfishly, that he prefers learning the technology of the colonisers more than he wanted to help those he’d known for centuries. He takes human form again but the colonisers treat him poorly because of his dark skin, insulting him and trying to hurt him. He considers making his skin pale but is unable to extinguish his love for his mother’s people and decides instead to interact with the colonisers by lighting sparks in their mind and meddling with their ability to perceive him clearly. He could have gone on like this for centuries, but this all changed until one day in Notley Fern Gorge when he met and fell in love with Edith McAllister, and he made it is his purpose to make her love him back.

After a couple of false starts, fire revealed himself to Edith in the form of a fair-skinned man at a pub and offers to buy her a drink. But Edith rejected his offer and fire did what he knew he shouldn’t, ‘he threw a tiny spark deep into the crinkles of her brain’ and replaced Edith’s ill-feeling toward him with polite confusion, giving himself another chance with her. It took only a few more sparks to convince Edith to meet fire again, after which he took the identity of Jack and used his charms to court her and, eventually, propose marriage. Edith accepted and they settled down on her farm. Jack never lit another spark in Edith’s brain but occasionally had to in the minds of her friends or family when their questions about him became too personal. At times, Jack’s love for Edith was so strong that it would overflow, in the form of fire from his eyes and nose and fingertips, and he would have to slap it out before Edith noticed.

Jack and Edith had two children, Levi and Charlotte. Levi inherited Jack’s sense of duty and purpose but this lead to a confusing love and distant relationship between them that Jack doesn’t realise is because they are so alike. Contrasting his relationship with Levi, Jack has a pure devotion for Charlotte, as seen on the first night home from the hospital when he tucked her in and cried. However, the tear, which was not a tear but fire, accidentally dropped onto Charlotte’s tongue, and Edith, who had been standing at the door, saw it all. To Jack’s surprise, Edith was understanding of his true nature when he he explained it tor her, she considered it to resolve the mysteriousness she held around him, and she even let him perform fire tricks for her. They watched for signs in Charlotte, but she seemed normal.

However, everything changed when during a parent-teacher night, Jack flicked a spark in the teacher’s mind that manipulated the teacher into praising Charlotte rather than criticising her. When Edith later asked if Jack had ever done this to her, he could not lie, and this ended their relationship, Edith throwing Jack out in the middle of the night, telling him never to return.

Jack acquired the wooden house nearby and haunted Elizabeth for the next 15 years, ‘leaping out of every fire she walked past, begging and wheedling and apologising, but she did not relent’. He only learned that she had died when he sprung to life around her funeral pyre. Fire was barely able to finish Edith’s cremation, and when she returned reincarnated to him as Jack, the ‘unknowable look on her face’ before she was gone forever, she left unanswered his questions – did she forgive him? did she still love him?

Fire considered his humanity to have gone with Edith’s death, and he could only look on as Charlotte leaked fire and Levi unravelled. He did not want to be close to them when they inevitably died.

Chapter 12: Coal Quotes

In such a short time he had lived, learned, grown and died. (Fire) Chapter 12

At the sight of the sea he flickered with fear, but the water stayed where it was, and after a while he discovered that as long as nobody introduced them to each other he was safe. (Fire) Chapter 12

It was people, always people; only people that he really cared for. (Fire) Chapter 12

He had helped them took, create, shape and heat themselves, and had come to think of them as not so much a family but as part of himself. (Fire) Chapter 12

For of all the shapes of life he had encountered, they were the only ones who had shown him that he had purpose in this water-edged world. (Fire) Chapter 12

Though he liked people … he couldn’t relate to their problems. He couldn’t know their love and pain and hate and joy. (Fire) Chapter 12

And he couldn’t stay with any group of them for a long time, because he did not age. (Fire) Chapter 12

It was far easier to watch from the coals, to help them with the flames, and be around them but not with them. And besides: it was more fun to be fire. Chapter 12

He never tired of this life, if life is what it was – even when the paler people came, changing the land in ways he could not have imagined. (Fire) Chapter 12

… with these pale, overclothed people he learned now to burn hotter than ever before, as they moulded him into infernos that could crack and melt the ores he hadn’t known hid inside him. (Fire) Chapter 12

The pain was still there, the loss and fear, fury and sorrow, etched into the faces of the people who were being hunted in their own homeland. Chapter 12

It had something to do with attraction, he knew, and kindness and care and devotion. A true kind of love was in itself a version of what he knew best: it was a purpose. (Fire, as Jack) Chapter 12

So he began following his greatest purpose yet: to make her love him. (Jack about Edith) Chapter 12

This love had grown between them, hard and fast, and the strength of the feeling was so strong it sometimes had him spurting fire from his eyes and nose and fingertips, fire he would quickly slap dead before Edith noticed anything. (Fire, as Jack) Chapter 12

All that his son had inherited from him was his love of purpose and his strength of resolve. (Jack, about Levi) Chapter 12

He never realised that this distance grew not because they were different, but because they were so alike – flames or not. (Jack, about Levi) Chapter 12

His feelings for her were of the purest, awe-blinded kind of devotion. (Jack, about Charlotte) Chapter 12

Even when Charlotte grew into a loud, hard-to-handle blur of a child, he could feel nothing but love. (Jack, about Charlotte) Chapter 12

In the end he could barely summon the energy to finish her cremation. He only managed it because he knew that it was what she wanted. (Fire) Chapter 12

Just like their mother, they would eventually die. And he did not want to be close to them when they did. (Jack about his children) Chapter 12

Chapter 13: Grove

Grove is the first-person account of Charlotte which opens with her stated distrust of the detective. She senses behind the tough veneer, a fragile, lonely and hurting person, someone like herself. But she gives into Nicola’s trust of the detective, and listens as she tells her their story. The detective tells the pair that she was hired by Levi to find Charlotte.

Charlotte thinks about her relationship with Levi, they love one another but have never understood one another. She could have tried to talk to Levi about the coffin before running, but felt he wouldn’t listen and only treat her with condescension. Charlotte realises she has been leaking fire ever since her mother burned. She and Levi at least have one thing in common, neither would welcome back their father. The reader learns that Charlotte’s father took a peripheral role in her and Levi’s life, his hour-long visits and cut-short adventures indicative that he never planned to return ‘in any way that matters’.

The trio arrive to Charlotte’s home to find Levi isn’t there, but they locate a map with handwritten notes indicating he’s at Notley Fern Gorge. Charlotte remembers the gorge as the place her mother loved, where her ashes were spread, but as a place Charlotte had always disliked.

The trio take two cars and head to the gorge. They walk for some time though the forest and find an emaciated Levi, felling tree ferns with an axe. On seeing that Charlotte has returned, he smiles manically. She introduces Levi to Nicola and the detective, whom Levi denies having hired. He explains he is building the coffin from wood in the place their mother loved so Charlotte won’t have to be cremated. He can’t hear any of her objections or that she wants him to leave with them, his obsession is clear as all the while he keeps burrowing his fingers into the water rat pelt. Charlotte is getting angry and as she grabs for him, she gets the pelt instead and feels its heat. Levi is angry and the pair pull at the pelt. Nicola grabs for the axe in Levi’s other hand but in the struggle is thrown backwards, hitting her head with a large crack that immobilises her.

In Charlotte’s hand, the pelt is already burning from the fire that is leaking from her. Charlotte’s flames are too hot and huge for the screaming Levi to retrieve the pelt. The pelt burns out and Levi rummages through the ash it has become where Charlotte threw it the dirt. Charlotte’s fire has set the forest alight and Nicola, now conscious, throws herself on Charlotte and remains there until she has stopped Charlotte’s flames. As the detective throws cups of water on a badly burned Nicola, and Levi is in the foetal position rocking, only Charlotte seems to see how big the forest fire has become with orange-red fury. Then, only Charlotte sees the man emerge from the coals as the fire recedes. Her father. She sees the smile she has always found unforgettable and the sadness in his eyes, before he looks up to the sky and disappears into a muddy puddle under the swamping sheets of rain.

Chapter 13: Grove Quotes

The flames of rage and loneliness that burn through her smirk; flames that can’t be put out. She is just like me. (Charlotte, about the detective) Chapter 13

Levi and I have never understood each other. (Charlotte) Chapter 13

But I know that between us there is love. … Love built with his stubborn resolve, with my hot temper, with all the care our mother poured into us. (Charlotte about Levi) Chapter 13

I am a coast person. I don’t like being hemmed by these trees. (Charlotte) Chapter 13

If I am to leave Nicola, I need to control them without her touch. (Charlotte) Chapter 13

… I’ve always found his smile unforgettable; when I think of him it’s always the first thing I see. (Charlotte about her father) Chapter 13

Chapter 14: Cloud

Cloud is a third person account of the monstrous storm that lashed Notley Fern Gorge and spread across the island, collapsing levies and causing widespread flooding, almost submerging the island. It filled the tin mine in Melaleuca and sent a floating flesh and feathered object, the form of Allen Gibson, into Bathurst Harbour and out to the ocean. The storm was unleashed when the Cloud God learned, from the smoke of the pelt, that the river god, ‘the other half of the cloud’s heart’, was dead. Never again would she experience his hopeful worship of her, never again would she nourish him with her rain. This narrative makes links to the effects of human activity on the environment, namely climate change, and the connectedness of all living and non-living matter on earth.

Chapter 14: Cloud Quotes

Only the cloud could have seen. And she was too busy weeping. (whether the flesh and feathered form of Allen Gibson was dead or alive) Chapter 14

A special pelt: a river pelt. A pelt that had belonged to the other half of the cloud’s heart. The pelt of her waterlocked love … Chapter 14

He who owned the river now burned in the flames. Chapter 14

Never again would he climb the dark mountain and stare up in hopeful worship. Never again would she feed his kingdom with her tears of lonesome love. (The Esk and Cloud Gods) Chapter 14

A cloud’s sorrow: … whenever a storm hits the world with uncommon force. When mountains crack and forests flood. When rivers surge and oceans bloat. When there is no true shelter in the world. Chapter 14

Chapter 15: Sea

The final chapter is in the first-person from Levi’s point of view. He is on Karl’s boat, three days after the Notley fire, pondering about his fear of the ocean that he inherited from his father. He recounts the events immediately after the fire, as relayed to him by Charlotte, that the detective had dragged him from the fire and driven him home and that his father had made an appearance. With the pelt now out of his possession, his clarity has returned and he no longer felt the need to act on every impulse. But in truth, he knew he had started to become unstable earlier, after his mother had died. Levi and Charlotte make amends, Levi knowing he needs to earn back her trust. Levi insists on going with Charlotte to the hospital to see Nicola, who suffered the worst burns in the fire. As he apologises to Nicola, he breaks down emotionally, sobbing and punching the floor at the foot of the bed. In response, Nicola comes up with a plan for her dad to take Levi out on the dinghy.

Out in the dinghy, Karl anchors, then directs Levi to put on a wetsuit, get in the water, and wait. Levi thinks he is being taught a lesson. Just when he gets so exhausted he thinks he’ll drown, he sees the object Karl wanted him to meet, a seal pup. Levi obeys Karl’s directions to go easy, and holds his palm out to the seal, as the seal studying his face. The narrative ends with the seal placing his face against Levi’s palm, their eyes locking, and Levi feeling a renewed sense of purpose that has kept him afloat ever since.

Chapter 15: Sea Quotes

I have nothing to forgive. I have only trust to win back. (Levi about Charlotte) Chapter 15