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told — and found myself kneeling in the corner where I was traditionally sent to contemplate my sins, I remembered Finnigan’s vow to protect and give me courage, and I supposed that he had lied. I might have believed I’d invented him, that I had indeed patted the tiger in the dark, had it not been for the misshapen word carved into the front fence, six small letters on which my faith hung.
    And then one day, when I had turned eleven and a long droughted summer was coming to an end, a bushfire sprang to life high in the ranges and for seven legendary days it burned without mercy, skipping the roads in great leaps and bounds, striding across rivers and dams, skimming over firebreaks to rear triumphant in the oil-filled, gravel-dry forests. The sky above the valley was hooded with grease that blotted out sun and stars; the mountain peaks, miles apart, were linked by cathedrals of flame. Men fought their way up the blackened slopes as kangaroos and deer galloped down, their red hides wafting white smoke. Men fought the fire through the days and nights, although there was no night — the midnight sky was luminescent, incandescent, spangling pink, green, yellow, and orange as if the Devil had swallowed us down. The bushfire screamed an unholy hymn, its cavernous voice riding the heat waves. Women stood on verandas in the breathless evenings, staring hopelessly into the hills; the leaping, singing circle of flame glittered in their eyes. The children loitering beside their mothers were slack-mouthed and enthralled. The school was closed, the church was open. Clothes hung on clotheslines were brought in stiff as planks. The mountain farms were evacuated, the stock loosed to run for their lives.
    I remember that the sound of the fire was a continual roar — I remember blocking my ears to the boom of eucalypts exploding. For seven days and seven nights, scorched leaves fell as hellish rain. I remember the air smelled of everything that had died, that birds dropped like pebbles from the smoke-raddled sky. I remember a truck with the pace of a hearse and on its tray a horror of bloated remains. I remember the farmers watching it pass and how one of them sagged in the gutter, and rested his head on his knees.
    I knew, with the first brilliant flare of sparks, that this was Finnigan’s work. I understood that in these months of silence he’d concentrated his abilities. The fire was Finnigan, talking to me. I hid in my room the day they started saying
arson
. I hunched beneath my bed hearing the air itself burn, praying that our friendship didn’t show on my face. I prayed that, wherever he was, he was better hidden than I. Mostly I prayed, in cowardly panic, that he would stay away from me — that, if caught and interrogated, he would loyally fail to mention me.
    The monstrous blaze was extinguished by a storm that first massed in the west and hung for a while, deliberating, before moving its clouds forward like battleships and dourly pouring rain. The fire leaped and darted, wounded by the drops; it changed direction and tried to escape, racing down a hill. In the face of rain the magnificent firestorm became frantic and flimsy as a fawn. The lightning clouds solemnly pursued it. Men took off their hats and let the water slick down their hair. Women on verandas laid their hands to their eyes. There was a terrible noise, the death rattle of a thousand lions. Dragon tails of soot lashed the sky. People came from their houses to witness the fire die. When the smoke and clouds and smog cleared you could see how hungry the blaze had been, how it left in its wake a crisp ebony nothingness that shone — when moonlight touched the naked hills, the blackness of them
shone
. I stood at my window and studied it night after night for a week, maybe two. Fingers of greenery sprouted across the hills then, and the sleekness of the wasteland was spoiled.
    It was a month or so later that I crouched in the arbor where my father grew his most