After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

  Chicken, my son,

  I’ve found your father. He is better than he was, and so am I to see him. He sleeps now, and I watch him, the quiet is good for both of us. He drinks less. We are staying in a little wooden house with a tin roof near the sea and there are gum trees all around, and so it smells good too. Once he feels better, in a little bit of time, perhaps I will try to bring him back and we will all three get going again. Until then I like to let him sleep and he likes to be away from the people.

  He sends his love and of course so do I,

  Mother and Father

  xxx

  It made sense to send a postcard if you didn’t have much to say. Perhaps she had thought the picture of the overexcited colourful child would make him think she was just having a holiday. He tucked it in between the pages of a book along with all the other important correspondence that was lost in their small bookshelf, pressed and captured. He washed his face in the bathroom and afterwards looked long and still into the mirror. It was like someone had drawn over his face with another, the face he recognised swam in and out, a dark impression of something else shaded over the top. He found his father’s Leica and felt the weight of it in his palm, and its heavy mechanic comfort. He held it at arm’s length and took a picture of himself as proof.

  When the pictures were developed a few weeks later, there was his face, normal and his own, and it was good to see it.

  The paper’s shouty headlines were all about the new war, but Leon liked to turn to the quieter stories inside, the local heroes, the record barramundi, a new nail factory to be opened by some stiff-haired boy evangelist preacher. He shaped a figure as he read, using the warmth of his hands from his coffee mug because the marzipan had passed its time.

  Mrs Matsue Matsuo, mother of Commander Matsuo, one of the Japanese midget submarine men who was killed when he attacked Sydney Harbour in 1942, came today to place a wreath on Sydney cenotaph in remembrance of her son.

  Mrs Matsuo wept as she was handed the charm belt that her son had been wearing when he died. The vessel, containing Commander Matsuo and Tsuzuku, was sunk with depth charges. When recovered four days later they were found to have shot themselves. The ceremony only serves to heighten negative feeling about Australia’s involvement in the war in Vietnam.

  The figurine in Leon’s hands grew a kimono, the hair, long to the middle of the back, straight. The arms disappeared up the draping sleeves and the head was lightly bowed. When he painted the face the eyes would be closed.

  Someone knocked at the door and he looked up to see one of the older Shannon kids. She stood like a straw doll, straight up and down, a conspicuous bump in her middle, she supported herself with one hand on her lower back. He opened the door with a jangle, ‘Sorry – bit late opening this morning.’

  ‘Kay.’

  He put himself back behind the counter. ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘Four buns, please.’

  ‘Sultana? Or apple?’

  ‘Apple, thanks.’

  She looked skinny in the arm and face. The more he looked at her the more she looked like a sea horse, with that balloon bump. Her hands looked large and red compared to the rest of her. He put six buns in a bag. She saw but pretended not to. It wasn’t like with her mother – he felt that if he offered them for free she wouldn’t accept, and worse than that she would be embarrassed. She handed over the money and he gave her 20 cents too much change and again she kept her eyes above it. He closed the till and the girl still stood there.

  She looked at the paper open on the counter. She saw the figurine too, but glanced away before she could have understood it. ‘They gave her back his belt, y’know.’ Her words were sudden and sharp as if she hadn’t really meant for them to come out.

  ‘I heard that,’ said Leon, not really sure how he should respond. He tried to gauge how old she was, but with her pregnancy and her young face he couldn’t tell. She stood with the paper bag of apple buns in one hand, change clutched in the other. It seemed she would say something else. He smiled encouragingly, but felt the flush of embarrassment on his face. She had caught him off-guard. Nothing would come in response to, ‘They gave her back his belt, y’know.’ She gave a small nod, turned and walked out of the shop. Her dress was too small for her and rode up on her legs so that he could see bruises the size of navel oranges on the backs of her knees.

  She almost collided with the postman who, for the first time ever, shuffled into the shop. He didn’t look at Leon or speak, but slapped four letters down on the counter.

  ‘G’day,’ said Leon, surprised. Still the postie didn’t look up, but he gave the letters one last pat, sighed and headed off again.

  The brown envelope was creaky with officialdom. A roar started up in Leon’s head. He stood still at the counter. It slunk in the door. Everything will be changed.

  The radio sang:

  Through the years my love will grow,

  Like a river it will flow.

  It can’t die

  Because I’m so

  Devoted

  To you.

  He turned the envelope over in his hands, looked at where it had been sealed by some unknown tongue. He heard a small hiss, a growl. Maybe it was just the shop sign creaking in the breeze. He would have liked to put the letter aside and carry on with his day. He would have liked to head out right that minute, find a date and screw her up against a tree in the park with the fruitbats hanging all around, put the bastard thing back in its place, get just a little purchase on the good quiet feeling, even if it didn’t last. But it was early and there were lamingtons to dip; and the letter couldn’t stay unopened, it demanded him. He opened it carefully, leaving a clean rip in the top. The paper inside was thin and the black type showed through to the other side. He read it, then closed his eyes for the longest time.

  He opened them when the bell to the shop rang and a short man he had never seen before walked in. The man stood in the middle of the shop floor blinking from the brightness outside. He was neat, his hair was combed and flat to his scalp, the cuffs of his shirt were spotless. ‘How’s the day treating you, son?’ he asked, smiling, and there was a slight whiff of something old, like he’d put his immaculate clothes on over a dirty body.

  ‘I’ve been conscripted.’

  The man’s smile stuck and Leon noticed that the rims of his eyes were scarlet. ‘Sorry to hear that.’ The man walked closer to the counter and Leon could smell beer on him.

  ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘Just a loaf.’

  ‘Big one?’

  ‘Small.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The man stayed silent until his bread was wrapped, the money exchanged. ‘It does something to a man,’ he said, not looking Leon in the eye, as if he didn’t want to say it, but someone was making him. ‘They get you to murder people out there, son. There’s no reason for it. You can’t fix those people.’

  He could think of nothing to say. The man left, after a second’s eye contact. The bell rang and he was gone. Leon watched him cross the street and push open the door of the Shannon house before disappearing inside. So Donald Shannon was a small man after all.

  That night he dreamt he was a kid, the Russian spaceship passing by overhead. Nothing exciting, just a slow-moving star. Standing outside the shop in the dark with the taste of sweet date slab in his throat and his father’s hand on the back of his neck, the warmth, the easy touch. The smell of his mother nearby – apricots. The tick-tock of the whole street turning their lights on and off, the black the green the black the green. Cheers started houses away, rippling down the street until they became one voice that cried out, shrieked, ‘Hello!’ as it trundled by, waited for some return message, but of course there was none. He walked a few steps into the street, hoping it might do something. At the time he’d held it against the Russians. They could have done a loop de loop, but all it’d done was pass slowly by ignoring the flashing lights of Parramatta, and the candlelit vigil on the bridge that wonkily
spelt out ‘SYDNEY’ in weak flame. In among the hallooing, in among the songs about Australia, the flashing house lights, was the doorway of the shop, dark and silent where he could make out the lines of his parents watching the sky and he pretended not to see.

  7

  Frank’s bowels seemed to twang the tripwire of his stomach whenever the tide was high. He felt the full pinch of his gut at a later time every day, until it became too dark and he would chicken at the shoreline, squatting on the sand, then kneeling in the shallows to wash, feeling the familiar shame of being human again.

  Early one morning before the sun had taken the pale edge off the place, his guts woke him, and he balanced on his rock like a limpet and yawned at the sky. There was some half-remembered dream still on him, Joyce Mackelly climbing into the top branches of a tree and watching everyone look for her with her smudged newsprint face. The water was still and unusually glassy. Behind him a butcher-bird whistled, and now and then a fat Christmas beetle flew nearby, burring like a motor. A smallish lemon shark came to inspect his toilet. It tilted itself and looked up at him, dog-eyed. He drew up his feet, pulled his bum out of the water and watched as the fish swam around the rock, then around again and then, satisfied with what it had seen, glided back out to sea.

  He walked back to the shack feeling lightly drawn against the day. Sleep hadn’t finished with him yet. Back inside, he lay face down on his bed and slept.

  Not long later – it seemed, though the sun had moved so it shone right in his eyes – he was woken by a noise, like something with a beak was having a go at his front door, with a regular one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three.

  Trying not to squeak the floorboards, he moved across to the door and opened it slowly, in case the bird was perched on it. There was no bird. There was Sal holding what looked like the same carrot, matured in its pink jumpsuit. ‘I bin knocking for ages.’

  ‘Jesus, Sal. You scared the living shit out of me.’ Amazing that Bob and Vick just let the kid wander off like that. Maybe they’d sent her to check up on him.

  She turned one of her feet so she was leaning on the side of it and it must have been calculated because it made him feel bad. She held up a coin. ‘I was knocking with this dollar, so it didn’t hurt my hand.’

  ‘What do you want?’ He ran a palm over his face, squeezed his eyes shut and opened them. It was the hangover. Not her fault. He breathed in deeply. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said in the friendliest voice he could manage right then.

  Evidently it was enough. ‘Came to see you. Do you have any Coke?’ She pushed past his legs.

  ‘No – you want a drink of water?’

  She was silent, so he filled a tin from the tap and offered it. She ignored it and walked around the room looking at things – particularly, it seemed, the cobwebs and the unwashed dishes in the sink.

  ‘Do your parents know you’re here, Sal?’

  ‘Oh, sure!’ She was clearly lying.

  He wedged the door open, feeling he might have to flee at any minute. ‘Well – what can I do you for?’

  ‘I’ve come to work on your farm.’

  ‘Farm? Mate, I don’t have a farm.’

  ‘What’s that, then?’ She pointed to the paced-out vegetable patch, conspicuously bare, marrow seedlings gingerly sown, weeds creeping up bamboo poles.

  ‘That’s a veggie patch.’

  ‘You got chooks, too. You could get a goat and a pig and a dog. Then it’d be better.’

  ‘Goats stink,’ said Frank.

  ‘Do not.’

  He nearly said ‘do too’, but Sal, fringe black in her eyes, silenced him. She took a package out of her back pocket, carefully wrapped in kitchen towel. She pulled off the paper and held out another large rudely shaped carrot, patted with mud, freshly dug.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Carrot.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘You eat ’em.’

  He let out a sigh, but she was smiling. ‘Payment for working your farm.’

  ‘You want to pay me to work on my farm?’

  ‘Trial run,’ she said, face like thunder again.

  Frank took the carrot.

  ‘It’s a deal,’ she said.

  Handling it appeared to be in lieu of a contract. It was a good carrot, it smelt strongly of earth.

  ‘You grow this yourself, mate?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘’S a good carrot.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well.’ He put on his best foreman’s voice – the first sting of the hangover was less than he had thought. ‘What’ll I pay you to work on the farm?’

  ‘Room and board.’

  ‘Five dollars and tea twice a week.’

  ‘Hokay.’

  He wondered if she knew what room and board meant. ‘The condition is you let your ma know the deal. If it’s okay with her it’s okay with me.’

  She nodded and padded down the steps where she picked up her bike, orange with rust, and put her carrot in its jumpsuit gently in the basket. She peddled off down the drive without another word. Kirk ran in a circle in the bike’s wake, chasing the dust.

  And that’s the end of that, he thought, relieved. Either Vicky would tell her not to bother him, or Sal’d get sick of the idea.

  He rinsed and ate the carrot, and it was good. There was a gentle headache getting at him, right where the bridge of his nose joined his eyes. He pinched at it as he sat on the steps drinking water. He’d ploughed halfway through a box of red wine the night before. But Boxing Day was always a bit like that. When he’d woken up in his bed there’d been the long morning that he lay there for, wondering how the Haydons spent Boxing Day. Maybe they went to the beach. He should have invited them to his for a barbecue or something. A pippie fire. But maybe they spent it as a family, maybe they’d had enough of him – he had been pretty drunk.

  Frank wondered if he’d been out of line with Vicky. But nothing happened, did it, so there wasn’t a problem. Unless she didn’t like him and told Bob she thought he was a sleaze. If he had a phone he could ring them up and say thanks, gauge the atmosphere. He could drive round there, but they probably didn’t want disturbing. They were a family doing family things. They would have invited him had they wanted him to be there. It wasn’t enough, he realised, because even if you spent Christmas with people, even if you weren’t alone then, the next day was empty, even more empty for following a day with those people and their good looks. Their easy laughs and bare legs. Frank pressed his wrists into the edge of the step he sat on, so that he could feel something through the small hangover and so that his heart could stop beating so loudly.

  When Sal returned an hour later, she had her own trowel and, without a word to Frank or even a glance in his direction, she knelt down and began to dig out his newly planted marrow seedlings. He trotted over, his hands flapping girlishly. ‘Mate, I just planted those.’ It came out louder than he’d meant and he saw the back of her neck tense. A sweat started on his face and he tried to pull his voice back, make it lighter, friendly. ‘Maybe we could have a chat about what needs doing here – you want to feed the chooks?’

  She sat back, heels supporting her bottom, and regarded him with a blank stare. ‘Marrows won’t grow in this soil.’

  So – a smart-arse. ‘Well, how do you know they won’t grow unless you try them out, mate?’

  She blinked at him.

  There was a silence and then Sal started to laugh.

  8

  The latest postcard had a cartoon pelican on it, wearing a straw hat and cat-eye sunglasses. It peered over the glasses, showing off its long lashes, and gave the kind of wink that made you wonder if it was American. Behind her was another beach, this one filled with small brown bodies and striped umbrellas. Leon turned it over.

  Sometimes I don’t know what we do here. We have bought this little place, it was not expensive, this little wooden house in the forest. There’s a young man I see sometimes who delivers groceries for us
so that we don’t have to go into town (your father cannot bear to see the people there). This man is a native – I never met one before – fancy that. We talk sometimes. I tell him about you, how grown up you are, your beautiful cakes.

  Your poor father still wakes sometimes and sometimes there are things he does that he does not remember in the morning.

  ‘Love, Mum’ was crushed into the corner of the card and there were two kisses, barely visible. The postal stamp was Mulaburry. Leon bit his cheek. He held the camera at arm’s length, looked into the lens and clicked the shutter open. He wouldn’t have time to develop this one before he went north for training, but at least he knew it was there. He wondered if Don Shannon remembered in the morning.

  On the day he left the shop, closed up and with a notice on the door that had taken him three goes to figure out – Closed for the Time Being – Mrs Shannon stroked his arm and squeezed it. She didn’t say much more than ‘You’ll be right, kiddo’, but it was strangely draining and he was glad to hand over the keys to her and hop on to his bus. He wondered if Amy was done with being finished yet and where she might be. He would have liked to have sent a message to her but the Blackwells had shut up and moved away not long after she left, and there was nowhere to write to.

  At the training compound up in Taroom, a bum-numbing twenty-two hours on a silver bus, they were asked if anyone had any useful experience. Construction workers were needed to renovate the R and R camp in Saigon, cooks and bakers would be especially useful there too. He didn’t know why he didn’t put his name forward and his palms sweated.

  The uniform was good, it was a sound thing to see everyone dressed the same. You had a space that you had to keep clean and neat, and a gun that you were taught how to take apart, how to feel for the pieces of it that slotted into each other. It weighed the same as the paddle he used to get bread out of the ovens. A kid called Rod, who looked younger than he said he was, bunked above him. He’d hang his head over his bunk and watch Leon clean his gun, telling him all about his family back home, his sisters and how his father was a big deal in the city. Leon smiled and nodded back, tried on occasion to return a story, which he made up somewhat. It was strange to be so close to other people, all the time. The early mornings and the exercise meant that at night he slept like a stone, and when he woke it was good to see all those neat men with their neat boots and neat hair. After a few weeks, the flesh of his stomach shrank back and he could feel his muscles reaching out underneath his skin. His uniform didn’t feel tight around the middle. He hadn’t realised until he lost it that he’d had a paunch.