After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

  Must be a school of prawns going around kicking up mud, he thought, hands on hips, watching the spectacle. Next time he was in town he would pick up a net. The shoal moved to his left in front of the bream hole, where he saw the shells of untouched oysters, hundreds of them. He felt the sun cutting off the water and hitting his cheeks, and he waded over, feeling for his knife in his back pocket. Nothing said Christmas like a hatful of wet shells.

  ‘Ta, Mum,’ he said out loud as he gouged at the rocks.

  It was too hot to sleep the night before Christmas and Frank lay on top of his sheet listening to a frogmouth bark and hiss in the banana tree. My Name Is Leonie and a smiley face. My Name Is Leonie’s tongue wetted her bottom lip, which was glitter-pink and thick with plastic colour. She was something between a doll and a person; and less and less a person, the buttons on her pinafore stretched over her breasts. She had a long neck and the sound of her rucking up her pinafore rustled in the cane and came right into the room. She went on for miles, the gingham sliding over her acres of white thigh. She put a finger in her mouth. She put a finger in her knickers. She didn’t wear knickers – no, she did, and she took them off slowly, again and again, her dress unbuttoned from the top and showed her pineapple-sized breasts. She held her vulva open and licked her pink lips. She sucked on a toy cannon as if it were a lolly stick.

  The frogmouth barked.

  She slipped the cannon inside and moaned in time with the banana tree. Her tits her snatch her lips.

  He lay still in the still night and thought for a second he could smell gasoline. The frogmouth barked. A wind blew and he put the heels of his hands over his eyes and pressed until they ached.

  The Haydons had a big house, lifted high up on flood stilts. A veranda ran the whole way round it, with faded hammocks and pot plants dotted about the place. Wind chimes hung silent in the heat. Vicky wore a fancy red Christmas dress that she swelled from, thick in the arms and thighs with a narrow waist, the kind you thought you could get your hands round. She wore the remainder of red lipstick and when she smiled there was a speck on her tooth. She smiled at Frank and held her arms high. ‘Frank! Happy Christmas!’ She moved forward to put the raised arms round him and planted a kiss, hard, on each cheek.

  ‘Good to see you, Vicky. Happy Christmas to you too and thanks for having me over.’

  Vicky waved her hand in front of her face like there was a smell, and from behind the shield of her legs a dark-haired child peered, clutching a large unpeeled carrot. The kid watched him from underneath a heavy brow. It was impossible to tell what sex it was.

  ‘Mum’s drunk,’ said the kid, who was swatted on the head.

  ‘It’s Christmas, Sal, your mum’s allowed a drink at Christmas – this is Sal – the youngest. Now, what’ll it be, Frank? A Bucks Fizz? Bob’s just mixing up a batch.’

  His stomach turned – youngest? Bob’d only mentioned the one kid – what if they were both boys? He couldn’t give a Barbie doll to a boy. And what the hell sex was this first kid anyway?

  ‘That’d be great, thanks, Vicky.’ He worried he was overusing her name. He supposed Sal must be a girl, because Sal was short for Sally, though you wouldn’t know to look at her. She was a Stig of the Dump.

  Walking up the steps of the veranda, he tried to catch Sal’s eye, tried to make some kind of tongue rolling or friendly wink, but the kid was having none of it and frowned deeper still at his efforts, holding up the carrot as if using it as some kind of protective talisman.

  Bob was squeezing oranges, or rather a robot was doing it for him. ‘Vick’s present to me,’ he said proudly, placing a whole orange in the shoot and following its progress down the perspex tube; watching it get pulped and ground into liquid.

  ‘That’s very impressive, Bob,’ said Frank, ‘my gift is a bit less useful.’ He handed the plastic bag to Vicky, who nosed into it hungrily.

  ‘Aw, Frank, youse shouldn’ have! Look, Bob, oysters!’

  He wasn’t sure if she was being overly polite, or was drunk, or really liked oysters, but it seemed a pretty good reaction regardless.

  ‘Goodonya, mate,’ said Bob, not taking his eyes off the journey of the oranges. ‘Oysters make me sick,’ said Sal.

  It became clear pretty soon that there was no other child – or if there was, it had moved out and wasn’t interested in spending Christmas with its parents. Either way, Frank gave Sal the doll and relaxed. The kid seemed quite taken with it, he thought. She disappeared, holding it with a look of having a great many important things to get done.

  The three of them set about shucking oysters and Bob told a long story about his brother that ended cheerfully with, ‘An’ you could see right through the hole in his hand!’

  They sat and ate and gabbled like a troop of magpies. It wasn’t two o’clock before they were all drunk and red in the face.

  ‘For you,’ Vicky said, wobbling over to him and grasping his hand. She pulled him over to the window, yanking him like he was an unwilling child. He glanced at Bob to see what he thought of his wife grabbing hold of someone she hardly knew, but Bob sat in his easy chair, a red paper crown square on his head, beaming at the two of them. Vicky pointed outside at the yard full of chickens. Two young chicks were cordoned off. ‘Kirk and Mary,’ she explained. ‘Only runty ones, I’m afraid, but they should come good.’

  Frank looked at the chickens, a bubble of panic growing in his chest at the idea of caring for the birds.

  ‘Jesus, Frank! Don’t look so pale!’ crowed Vicky, pleased by his shock. ‘It’s a piece of piss – feed ’em and stop the foxes eating ’em, and you’ll be in eggs up to your balls.’

  Frank blinked. ‘Far out, that is a generous gift. I . . . thank you.’

  ‘Can’t live on farmland without chooks. Who’d wake youse up in the morning?’

  ‘Why Mary and Kirk?’

  Bob swilled his Bucks Fizz from cheek to cheek, then swallowed hard. ‘Sal names ’em. See all those chooks?’ He pointed to the yard where about a hundred chickens shucked and scratched and ruffled. ‘Sal names each an’ every one. This arvo, we’ll be sitting down to Simon.’

  Sal appeared in the doorway and looked darkly at her father. She held her carrot close to her chest; it wore the pink jumpsuit that Barbie had worn earlier. Barbie the doll did not reappear for the rest of the day, but Barbie the carrot got by very well, with a seat to herself at the dinner table.

  ‘Who’s yer friend?’ Frank asked when they had all sat down and Simon had been quartered. She fixed him with one large black eye and said nothing. Vicky rolled on her hips to face him, poking her tongue in her cheek to dislodge some food stuck there. ‘That,’ said Vicky, ‘that is a carrot.’ She looked at Sal and Sal looked at her plate, kicking her legs under the table. ‘Ain’t it, sweetie-pie?’

  ‘Vick,’ Bob said quietly.

  Vicky looked down at her plate. ‘Sorry, Sally, love,’ Vicky said, and she reached out across Frank and squeezed her daughter’s fist as it gripped its knife. Vicky tutted a little and leant back in her chair.

  Frank surprised himself by standing up and on standing realised he had become pleb-head drunk. He held up his glass. ‘Thank you for having me,’ he said like a schoolboy, ‘and Happy Christmas!’ which made everyone apart from Sal cheer, although she sat a little straighter in her chair and watched, the hugeness gone from her eyes.

  ‘Happy fuckin’ Christmas!’ roared Vicky and they all snorted with laughter, even Sal, who couldn’t resist the word.

  Vicky was telling a story and Frank couldn’t recall where it had started or what it was about, all he could see was the three of them, the small family feeding together, heads low to their plates, they all held their forks with a cocked little finger. A fogged memory crept in of a time at the shack when his mum had still been alive. The way he remembered it, when they were all three inside, the shack had taken on their smells and noises, soaked it up: the big hooked fish, the endless hand-washing and table-wiping, the filleting, oyster shells, cl
ams in milk and school prawns, until the floor and the ceiling had smelt of burnt seawater.

  In the early dark evening his mother started a game of bloody beetle and the three of them kicked back, inhaling the fug of themselves, eating shellfish with hammers and pokers. In bed, he’d found a dry fish scale stuck to his face, a mother-of-pearl toenail, and he’d put it under his tongue for safe keeping, for luck.

  From nowhere the words came out of him, ‘Still no word on the Mackelly girl?’

  ‘Nah.’ Bob pushed the paper crown on his head back with his fork. ‘Poor Ian. Cripes I’d hate to be in his shoes.’

  Vicky refilled her glass and drank from it deeply.

  Stupid thing to say at Christmas. He felt his food go dry in his mouth. ‘Probably just gone walkabout, don’tcha think? Teenage girl, small-town-type thing?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Bob unconvincingly. ‘Still, that’s not much use to her parents on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Guess not.’ There was more quiet. ‘I made a break for it when I was a grommet. Headed for China.’ It was a lie, he realised once he’d said it.

  ‘China eh? What’s so good about China?’

  Vicky laughed. ‘I’d run away to China just for those little deep-fried mussel parcels they do down at China Jack’s,’ she said, taking her nose out of her glass and focusing on the ceiling.

  The skin of her throat looked soft.

  ‘Be easier, don’tcha think, just to pop down to China Jack’s?’ Bob said.

  ‘Well,’ said Vicky, standing and clearing the plates. ‘If my cheap-as-chips husband would take me out there once in a while I wouldn’t have to run off with the bugger.’

  She winked at Frank.

  ‘Oh, I see!’ boomed Bob. ‘It’s not just his China food you’re after? It’s Jack’s sprats as well!’ Bob roared at his own joke, thumping the table with his fist and Frank smiled, watching Vicky box the crown right off her husband’s head.

  In the early hours of the next day, long after Sal had gone to bed of her own accord, Frank made to leave. He patted Bob’s shoulder; Bob was slumped in an armchair, a beer warmed in his hand, and the black stub of a joint rested blunt and dead between his fingers. His eyelids drooped. Vicky showed Frank to the door and put her hands under his armpits in a strange close hug.

  He knew what was going to happen, because he could feel her breath on his neck. He had the feeling that anything that happened that night wouldn’t be counted and what was the harm in kissing a woman on Christmas night, with her husband and child in the next rooms?

  But he made sure his eyes were fixed well over her head when they untangled, and even though some of her hair caught in his mouth he didn’t look down to her face. He may have kissed her forehead lightly and he may have wanted to kiss her mouth but instead he slurred, ‘Nice Christmas, Vick, ta for the chooks,’ and he wobbled to his Ute in no fit state to drive, and over-gently put his charges, Kirk and Mary, clucking and sleepy, on the passenger seat while Vicky watched from the open lit doorway, so that he could see the dark shapes of her thighs through her dress. As he backed clumsily out of the drive, he saw the naked body of Barbie, folded in half and stuck through a hole in the incinerator.

  6

  Mrs Shannon had her hair cut like Jackie Kennedy. The baby Leon’s mother had predicted never showed up and nothing was said. He always gave her something free and he wondered if it wasn’t for the free treat that she kept returning, but for the chance to be given something. She was beautiful, even though the skin of her chest was dark and stretched from the sun, and sometimes underneath her sunglasses you could see flesh swollen so that it nearly touched the glass of the lens. It didn’t stop her from wearing a green gauze ball gown just to walk down to the shops. She turned up one time with her arm in a sling, home-sewed stitches in her lip.

  ‘How’s the cake trade, kiddo?’

  ‘Just fine, thanks, Mrs Shannon.’

  ‘I’ll have a lamington, please, darl.’ And she held the money in her hand, fragile wrist pointing up, an insistence in the jiggle of her fingers. ‘Go on, take the money. I’ll be bleeding you dry.’

  ‘What’s the use living opposite a bakery if you can’t have a biscuit for free?’ and he gave her a florentine, not a lamington, because he knew that was what she really liked. He wondered what he would do if Mr Shannon ever came into the shop, but he’d never seen him. He’d never even seen the man walk out of his house.

  The rest of the year was wet. The cake shop steamed up on the inside. His mother spent time running errands that involved being out of the shop and he wondered if she was retracing the steps his father had taken all around the city. He didn’t follow her to find out, just waited for something to happen. When she came home, she was pale and thin, and she looked like she would be thrown down in a breeze. She started having the long baths again, but this time there was no steam that filled up the top rooms. He felt the water once as it drained away after she had got out and it was cold.

  After the rain came an envelope with his father’s handwriting on it. He watched from the back room while she stood at the counter and opened it gently, unsticking the paper flap, not tearing, looking frightened of what might be inside. She looked at the letter, her face blank, then the door chimed and she was gone down the street, melting between the parked cars. She left the letter on the table, thin blue paper folded once. There was a dot at the top of the page, like he’d been about to write but couldn’t think of what to say. And then there was his signature and beneath that, in place of where there might have been a cross for a kiss, another dot, this one bigger than the first, the ink blooming from the pen nib and staining through to the other side. The postmark read something northern and when his mother returned a few hours later she took that, not the letter, to tuck into the book she kept by her bed.

  The next morning Leon put a preserved cherry on top of a cake and smiled. When he looked up, he saw Mrs Shannon walk by, a scarf round her face, pulled low over her eyes. She walked like she was only wearing one shoe and then she was gone. His mother appeared in the doorway, her hat pinned to her head, a grey suitcase in her hand, and even though it was warm out she wore her long wool coat. She put a gloved hand in his hair and there was her wet face again, her nose like a beak. She dropped her arm. ‘And suddenly you’re a grown-up man,’ she said. ‘I have to go away, chicken,’ and even though he’d been expecting something like this, he thought she’d insist on him going with her, thought he might have to put his foot down and explain that someone had to keep the shop running. That maybe he could help her look on a Sunday, call up a few lodging houses and give a description of his father. She took a tissue out of her pocket and rubbed her nose with it. ‘I’ll write, of course, when I find him, and then we’ll see.’ Leon felt the smile that was fixed on his face. It hurt his teeth. ‘You understand, chicken?’ He nodded and really he did understand, he could see it in the lines on her face, that to her it was more important to find a man who’d been missing even when he was sitting beside her in his easy chair.

  In bed, Leon lay awake in the empty house. There was the tick of the bedside clock, the beat of his heart and the terrible sound of something coming for him, hoof and claw and tooth grinding in the dirt. Scritch-scratch, snuffle.

  Weeks went by and sleeping was still strange and restless, but his ears didn’t strain to hear anything that might be going on in another room; he didn’t anticipate the arrival of his thin-voiced mother, didn’t leave his spare pillow under the bed any more. There was no one to watch him close up early for a date or to watch him bring a girl back. He did it a few times, but he couldn’t sleep with the girl in his bed. He found himself sitting watching her as she slept, willing her to wake up and leave because looking at her lying there he felt nothing at all. Even when they were beautiful there was nothing, hard though he looked for it. So he stopped bringing them back and sometimes he closed up the shop a little early to spend more time in the Parramatta Hotel with the men who looked darkly into their drin
ks as they laughed over old stories. The man with the claw hand came over and sat with him one afternoon. ‘You’re Collard’s son,’ he said and even if Leon had not been he wouldn’t have been able to say no.

  ‘He’s gone off,’ Leon said, not sure what the man wanted.

  ‘I know. Best thing for it. If a man doesn’t want company he wants to be on his own.’

  ‘Suppose. Mum’s gone to find him.’

  ‘Seen a lot, that man. Cousin of mine was in the same camp.’

  ‘Is he here?’ He wanted to see what other people looked like – how they handled it.

  ‘Nah, mate. He’s not.’ Leon took a long drink from his glass and hoped the man would change the subject. ‘Bit of advice, son,’ he said, waving his claw over his drink. ‘Try and forget about it. No one wants to hear about it, no one wants to talk about it, no one wants to remember it. Let them alone to thrash it out. It’s a healing thing. Think about other things, there’s plenty to go round, plenty of other things need a good bit of thought put into. What about this new lot of oriental types and their Ho-Chee-Man? Just round the corner, mate. Worry about that while you drink ya beer.’

  ‘Right,’ said Leon, and the man winked and got up to return to his friends. As six o’clock approached and the drinking speeded up, Leon watched the claw man laughing and talking with his friends, and he thought it was good to be away from the hopeful eyes of girls. He wondered what would happen to his parents if they found each other again.

  A postcard arrived. The picture on the front showed a drawing of a child in a red and white striped swimsuit and armbands up round his shoulders. He had his hands on his hips, his trunks thrust forward, standing in front of a photograph of a beach somewhere. The child’s eyes were blue and his irises reflected a smiling sunshine. His cheeks were red and humped in front of his eyes.