After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s pretty lucky.’ She smiled and her chin dug at him.

  ‘You make me feel less . . . hounded.’

  ‘Explain,’ she said without pausing. He didn’t know what would come out if he tried to. The sound of something scritch-scratching on its claws up behind him, that slunk into the bath with his mother and that crept from bed to bed at night, curling up against the napes of their necks, making the house creak with its footsteps; the thing that licked at his fingers when he slept so that in the morning they were cold and damp.

  ‘Like there’s something trying to sneak up all the time – some kind of thing watching, like it might like to tear everything to pieces.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Amy. ‘Like God, you mean?’

  He snorted. ‘No. Not like that.’ There was a pause.

  He felt the bruise her chin was making getting deeper and was about to roll her off when she said, ‘Like something’s watching?’

  ‘Sort of. Yes.’

  Amy nodded digging her chin deeper into him. ‘I could understand that,’ she said and he breathed out of his mouth.

  ‘It’s like it has these teeth and claws, and it wants to dig them into me, rip something out.’

  ‘I know.’ She lifted her chin and moved up his body. She lay so that her soft cheek was on his chest, which was more comfortable. He wondered what she meant.

  She raised her head and hair covered one of her eyes. ‘I know,’ she repeated and he found that it was all he could ever have wanted.

  When his father arrived one afternoon at the front door, his mother let out a shriek and clung on to him, and he held her tightly too, but stared over her shoulder at Leon. He was a small man all of a sudden, his eyes big as though the skin of his face had retreated. His shirt front ballooned with air when he bent too low and held his arms round Leon like he expected him to be shorter. Leon thought he might laugh, bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself and hunched down over his father and, not knowing what else to do with his hands, held his father’s skull against him and was scared it might crack.

  That night all three of them ate together again and his mother cooked a chicken to celebrate. She wore a dress that puffed out in the skirt and made a crumpling noise when she moved. Her hair was dry and long down her back, and it occurred to him that she hadn’t cut it since his father had left. When it was time to carve, his father nodded at him to cut, handing him the carving things. It was strange to hold the long knife in front of his parents, to feel the heat rise to his face in case he did it wrong. Chook carving had always been his father’s job because he complained so much if Leon’s mother did it. You had to get every slither of meat from the bones, had to turn the carcass over and scoop out the dark fatty meat of the chicken’s back. The bones had to be clean, sucked white by the knife. He managed to separate the leg and wing from the left side, but found the right side troublesome. He could hear that he was splintering the bone.

  ‘Turn it round, my darling,’ said his father softly. He made a circle in the air with one finger and sure enough, when it had been turned he cut through the joint without difficulty. But the word ‘darling’ hung in the air, and it made Leon shrug into his shirt and look round the room as if there were something he needed to be doing that he couldn’t remember. His father drank deeply from his wine glass and refilled it. The meal was quiet, but that was natural. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time. The easy conversations about work, eyes half on a paper, half on the plate, were what he was used to with just his mother. Now her bright questions made the place quieter.

  ‘Did you see many animals in the jungle?’ was the first one that clattered awkwardly against the walls of the back room.

  ‘Yes,’ replied his father, swallowing a mouthful of potato, ‘there were a fair few monkeys about. A jaguar as well, but I didn’t see it.’

  Both his parents smiled in the silence afterwards, then both looked at Leon and Leon smiled back. All three took a mouthful from their forks and all three chewed drily at the same time. Monkeys and a jaguar.

  The meal was short and he felt guiltily relieved. His father said goodnight, that he was tired and his mother went after him, leaving the dishes on the table. All the vegetables from his father’s plate were eaten, but the small amount of chicken he had taken from the dish lay untouched, nudged to the very edge of the plate.

  In the morning his mother’s hair still hung down her back. There was a glow on her, her shoulders were loose, her eyes full.

  His father didn’t come down for breakfast, or even later in the day.

  ‘He’s exhausted,’ said his mother, her palms up like she was feeling for rain.

  During that week news travelled up and down the main street that his father was back, and people asked after him at the counter.

  ‘He’s resting,’ he told the butcher’s wife who stood on tiptoe and tried to see past him into the empty kitchen. By the end of the week his mother looked worried. He saw her watching the ceiling, listening for movement up in the bedroom, but there was none.

  ‘I think what we should do is throw a little party,’ she said, ‘just for his friends on the street.’

  Leon made anzacs and a three-layered cake with pale-green icing. One of the sponge layers was pink, the other two soft white with coffee-coloured cream in between each one. He made a sugar doll of his father to go on top in his army greens, his hat folded up on one side, his fingers soldered to his forehead in a salute. He stood duck-footed and straight, tiny stripes on his shoulders, broad in the chest as he had looked the day he left. The model went in the centre of the cake and behind him Leon planted the Australian flag on a toothpick.

  ‘That’s pretty, chicken,’ said his mother and he let it go, because her eyes were soppy.

  As people arrived, they cooed over the cake, then hovered around the easy chair where his father sat, holding cups of coffee or small glasses of sherry. Leon kept his back to most of them, trying to look busy at the table, rearranging biscuits and filling glasses. He felt itchy in his smart clothes, which were now too small for him. He looked away from the kind type of smiles that everyone seemed to want to give, just before they glanced at their watches. He overheard the butcher complaining to his wife, ‘It’s more like a flamin’ wake than a party,’ and saw his wife stick a meaty elbow in his gut. There was a low rumble of talk in the room, enough people so that no one felt too awkward about the man who sat silent, drinking wine in his easy chair, half the size that they remembered him.

  Amy Blackwell arrived with her mother and they stood together, her mother chatting loudly to the barber. Amy looked silly, her hair in strange sausage-looking ringlets, an ugly little purse that was attached to her wrist and a yellow smock that looked like a pillowcase. She shot him a low look, her eye, underneath her pointed eyebrow, was like the finger she’d given Briony. It was an easy joke, it laughed at the fancy dress her mother had put her in, it asked about his smoothed and parted hairdo, and the tight, itchy jumper he was wearing. He pressed his lips together and smelt the earth of the storeroom, and turned back to the table, spilling a few dots of orange cordial on the cloth. He smiled. Mrs Shannon sat quietly in the corner, her legs crossed. She watched Amy too from behind her small glass of sherry, and there was a look on her face that he couldn’t figure out.

  Soon after the cake was cut the butcher, who had taken charge of the sherry bottle, started singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and everyone joined in to hide how embarrassed they were.

  Leon was clearing plates when the barber touched him on the shoulder. ‘Let’s take that old man of yours upstairs, son, whatd’ ya say?’ and Leon looked over at his father whose face was wet and pale from tears, whose mouth hung open and whose eyes were shut tight. The singers were turned away from him, all attending to the conducting butcher and his sherry bottle.

  They got either side of him and no one turned round as they hefted him from the room. He was led easily up the stairs and Leon’s heart beat fast in his th
roat, and the tears ran out of his father like a squeezed lemon but he made no sound. They laid him on the bed and Leon’s mother appeared in the doorway. The barber took Leon’s father’s shoes off while they both stood there watching. He placed the shoes under the bed and pulled a cover up to his neck, then quickly put his hand to his father’s cheek. As he left the room he smiled at Leon’s mother and nodded.

  ‘It’s all a little bit much for him. Overwhelming,’ said his mother. ‘He’s just a bit overwhelmed.’

  Leon met Amy at Central Station and they took the slow train to Waterfall, and from there they hitched a ride to the beach. Her dress was loose round her shoulders and he saw the man who’d picked them up watching her neck as she looked out of the window. Leon stroked the neck with the backs of his fingers and it was cool. Amy smiled and rested her hand on his leg. The man averted his eyes and Leon sat a little straighter.

  They walked along the shoreline with their naked feet white and sock-marked on the dark yellow sand. Leon rolled up his trousers and felt the wind comb through his hair. The air smelt sweet. A man fishing on the rocks in his underpants waved. This was where, from a little way off, they could have looked like a regular married couple out for a stroll under no obligations from their parents, nothing to worry about but themselves and the business of pushing back the dark, pushing into each other and pushing forward the bright feeling, the warmth and the round salty taste of each other. They tucked themselves under a hustle of Banksia trees next to a creek that ran dark lines into the sand. They rested their feet on the polished stones of the creek bed and lay back, drinking from bottles of beer that Leon had bought from the pub.

  ‘How about a swim?’ said Amy, already standing and pulling him up with her.

  ‘Haven’t got anything to swim in.’ In truth, he could barely swim in a pool, let alone the white froth and glassy-looking waves that sprayed out at the land when they tumbled. The noise of a drum roll. She was a big red smile, laughing at him as he tried to pull her back, slipping out of his hands and racing down to the water, while he was suddenly slow, unable to talk. She went in dress and all, and she dived into a wave and was gone, and he knew that he would never see her again, that some dark moving animal from underneath had taken her and that there was nothing to do. He stood in the shallows, stricken, not breathing, that coldness was back, it lurked underwater as well. And then she was up, bursting up like a snakebird, shaking her hair that ran down on all sides of her. Leon lifted his arms at her, and she laughed again and let herself fall backwards into the foam of a large wave, gone again, a shadow under the surface. When she came out, her dress sticking and showing her brown thighs, and how the tendons at the back stood out, she was still laughing at him.

  ‘You shoulda come in, Collard, it’s sweet in there!’ She draped wet arms round his neck and when they kissed her face was cold and salt water streamed down her. They drew apart and she said, ‘You gotta swim if you come to the beach. It’s the rules.’ And she bowled him over, hooking her ankles behind his knees so that they fell together in the shallows, and the coldness was gone and they laughed, rolling around with the sand in the creases of their clothes scratching quietly against their skin, and the man fishing on the rocks looked over and Leon could see, even from far away, that he was laughing too.

  The picnic was sugar bananas, peaches and treacle tart. A peach warmed by the sun ran juice down their chins and the treacle tart sweated, making the syrup thin so it slid off the knife, got in the webs of their fingers and underneath the ridges of their lips. They ate everything, slowly dipping their hands into the food bag, lazily peeling the skin from a soft peach with their teeth. They talked about things he’d never realised he wanted to know. She told him how she broke her collarbone jumping out of a tree and he showed her the burn mark on the inside of his wrist that he’d got as a kid from ‘messing with cakes that didn’t concern him’. He wished he had a bigger injury to show her, especially when she offered him her clavicle, got him to run a finger along the bone, feel the small ridge where it had healed.

  ‘I’d like to open a tart shop with you,’ he said, skating his fingers across her throat. ‘You with the fruit, me with the pastry.’ He’d meant it to be lightly said, a joke, but he could see it all of a sudden, like it had already happened. He opened his mouth to test a shop name, Amy’s Fruit Pies, could see it in yellow lettering on black, could hear the sound of their own shop bell, but she stood up with her still damp hair in a pile on her head. She looked feral, like she’d just stepped out of the bush, her canines stood out against her bottom lip.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, brushing dirt from the seat of her dress. ‘I’d get fat from all those cakes.’ He held his hand where it was, pretending she was still next to him. With uncharacteristic delicacy she found a bit of wrapper in her pocket and neatly stuck her chewing gum into it, where she folded it over on itself. She looked at him and smiled brightly.

  ‘I don’t think you’re the type to get fat,’ he said and she laughed loudly, but she turned away from him, looking for somewhere to put her gum.

  ‘I’m going away soon,’ she said, tucking her dress underneath her and sitting down again. He felt something dangerous creeping behind him.

  ‘How soon? Where?’ He kept his voice quiet.

  ‘Dad reckons I need a finishing school. I’m off up to Brisbane. To get finished.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  She lay back again with her eyes closed, her arms all over the place about her head, her drying hair spread like syrup. ‘It takes as long as it takes.’

  He saw that he was not allowed to ask anything else, so instead he touched her hair at the ends where it was cold and soft. She opened one eye and smiled at him, a big wide smile that was sticky at its edges. She rolled over and pushed him down into the bark-smelling grass of the creek bank.

  His father decided one day to reclaim the kitchen and Leon bit his lower lip watching him move things about, making things different. He was drunk and his hands trembled when he poured the flour, he banged thickly into the sideboard with his hip. Leon’s mother looked like she’d been holding her breath. They made a very basic bread, working in silence, but not long after they’d started someone came in needing a wedding cake, and needing it quickly. The dog had got into the first one. His father set to baking straight away without making notes, or asking for any particulars. Leon didn’t ask why, he just followed instructions, which were quiet and few. His father didn’t sift the flour, or weigh anything. Leon saw half an eggshell crushed heavily into the lumpen batter. Where normally his father would have divided the mixture between four or even five round tins to stack up on each other, he scraped the lot into one large square loaf tin, usually reserved only for Heavy Date Tractor Cake, and put it straight into a cold oven without checking the time or weighing it.

  After an hour he took it out again and dropped it on the side with a bang. There would be no decorations. ‘It’s enough that we have flour,’ he said, when Leon asked. His father went to the pub, leaving the cake steaming on the counter. Feeling like a traitor Leon pushed a skewer carefully into the guts of the cake. It came out yellow with unmixed eggs.

  His mother stood in front of the cake and wrung her hands, patted down her hair.

  Leon started from scratch. He made an orange and poppy-seed cake, five tiers tall. He painted the whole thing in peach jam before applying a thin royal icing finish. On to the clean sheet of white, he painted stalked clementines and ivy. He made two pairs of figurines and chose the best, the most dignified beautiful couple. The spare couple lost because the bride shifted a little to one side, one hip higher than the other. There was something sarcastic about her smile and, if he was honest, he liked her too much to give her away. Perhaps, objectively, her breasts were a hair too large, her bottom too high and round. Perhaps there was something of Amy Blackwell about her. When the cake was collected, without his father having seen it, no one spotted the difference. His mother put a hand on Leon’s shoul
der but said nothing.

  He had come to the fruit shop with a list of reasons she could give to her parents, but when he started talking she popped her chewing gum, sucked of all flavour but holding the warmth of the inside of her mouth, into his and it shocked him into silence. An elderly woman stared at the two of them, and Amy smiled and stared back until the woman looked away.

  ‘There’s no point,’ she whispered, ‘it’s paid for now anyway. Besides, it means I get away from them.’ She touched his cheek and the old woman cleared her throat. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Amy loudly, standing up tall behind the counter, and the old woman left the shop in a flurry of shopping bags and disgust. Amy rolled her eyes. ‘Well, I’ll be hearing about that later.’ She smiled at Leon, who could only think that she was leaving.

  And soon after, she was gone as simply as she had arrived in the classroom, her finger held up against the sheet of paper. A brown-paper bag holding two peaches that were just on the turn, with the smudged and stained note.

  See you when I’m finished x

  He felt a wind at his back and turned in time to see nothing at all. Something dragged at his insides, low in his chest, and he took the train to Waterfall and thumbed down to the beach. The weather was filth and no one fished from the rocks. The dark lines made by the creek on the sand looked scummy, it could have been sewage, and a wind picked up loose sand and hurled it at the backs of his legs. There was a weight of disgust on his chest.

  After the wedding-cake episode his father stayed mainly in his room, ducking out to the pub regularly for another bottle.

  His mother’s hair was back in its bun. ‘Going to town,’ she announced one morning. ‘Get a hairdo, have a bit of mummy fun. You’ll be alright, chicken?’

  He nodded and smiled, wondering what exactly she meant, seeing as he ran the shop alone as it was. Her face was pale and so he tried not to look annoyed. The bell rang with her departure.