After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

  When they trained on the automatics the sergeant slapped Leon on the back and said, ‘That’s the kinda shoot we want, Collard. Good one,’ and he felt his chest expand and looked around to see who else had heard.

  He borrowed some paper off Rod, who wrote to his parents twice a week, letting them know about all the swell stuff they were up to, how he was bunking with this real character of a guy, how he’d been singled out specifically for his navigational skills.

  He leant the paper on his knees and felt oddly formal as he wrote ‘Dear Mother and Father’. He couldn’t remember suddenly if he’d called them something else – Mum and Dad? Had he ever talked to them like this? He might just have said, ‘Hey, you,’ or not spoken to them at all. He felt bad about the next line, ‘I hope this finds you both well’ – was it terrible to ignore that neither one of them sounded well in his mother’s postcards? ‘I have been called to service in Vietnam and am at my training now.’ He would not give the address of the training centre. He wouldn’t like another one of those cards with the cartoon character all Smiley-Dan on the front and a looney message on the back, where anyone could read it. ‘I leave for Saigon in three weeks.’ There was an odd rush when he wrote that. Just writing the word Saigon was like speaking a different language. ‘Mrs Shannon has the keys to the shop and I will of course reopen it on my return.’ He felt carried away with the formality of his voice, but he liked it. ‘Your loving son’, and here he realised he was angry at them both and didn’t sign his name. They’d work it out.

  He addressed it to the Mulaburry post office, wherever that was, and sealed the envelope.

  When the last three weeks were up, he took a photograph of himself in the toilet mirror, feeling like a wind-up toy. The shape of his face was different, he looked reedy and older. His uniform was crisp against his skin and he held his hat in his hand, squeezed the shape out of it. On the hot bitumen with the planes huge against the sky, he had his photograph taken with Rod.

  ‘It’s time,’ Rod said then, and they climbed the tin-sounding steps to the Qantas.

  The lead-weight feeling of flying was not what he’d expected. He’d imagined a lightness, a small leap in the pit of his stomach, then the feeling a trapeze artist might get. But it was like being underwater, something pushed at his ears, tried to get to his brain. He couldn’t concentrate on any one thing. There was the view out of the window, the upside of the clouds, which he hadn’t considered before. They rolled and moved like live things, they reflected a white light into his eyes.

  They levelled above the clouds, and the air and the boom of the engine leant in on his ears, and the freshly shaved skin underneath his nose dried out. He took a photograph out of the cabin window.

  There was a fug about the place that was how the air felt around Christmas when you had to make bread and you couldn’t open a window and let in the flies. The first deep breath, coming off the plane in Saigon, he thought he’d swallowed a mouthful of heated air from the engine, but all the air was like that and you had to plough through it. In the back of the truck on the way to the base, they’d passed through all those Vietnamese getting on with their stuff, carrying baskets and cycling, just like you saw in the cartoons about China. They even wore those sun hats, the ones you couldn’t fit through a doorway in. So many people squatted by the road in a way he couldn’t imagine his own ankles allowing, and the smell of fumes was unholy and it tickled the back of his nose like no smell he’d known existed. They stopped in traffic by a roadside vendor where old men perched on their haunches, eating something that looked meaty and sticky.

  ‘Dirty so-and-sos,’ someone said and everyone laughed. Leon recognised rice. Suddenly there was a school of young women on pushbikes catching up to the truck, each one of them pristine in a white outfit, their hair long and black down their backs. The men shouted and stamped their feet as the girls, without so much as a glance in their direction, overtook the truck like a shoal of fish and carried on their way.

  For a week they stayed at the compound to get used to the place. Rod woke up spewing one night and when he went to the medic tent they laughed at him. ‘They just said, that’s life, and told me to drink as much water as I could. But then they said it was the water making me spew.’ He looked at Leon for some sort of support. Leon shrugged and Rod held up his canteen of water as a question.

  Sleeping was not so easy in the compound. There was a bird that carried on all through the night, uk-hew uk-hew uk-hew, and after each call he waited in the silence, thinking maybe that was the last one. It seemed to be nested in the tree by the cookhouse, but you could never see it, even though you heard it as though it were right in front of your face. On a night when it was particularly loud, and Rod couldn’t stay still for wanting to spew, they sat watching as a few men tried throwing stones into the tree to scare it off, but the thing was stoic and cried back just as loudly UK-HEW.

  ‘An’ fuck you too you fucking fuck!’ one man shouted, which seemed to give the bird pause for thought.

  ‘You got much of a family back home?’ asked Rod.

  ‘Not much of one. But somewhere around I got some parents.’ Funny to say that. But Rod wasn’t really listening. He was drawing with a stick in the dirt. ‘What they think of you coming out here?’

  ‘Dunno. Guess they’re not that happy about it.’

  ‘But you knew you wanted to go, right, and you knew it was important?’

  ‘I was conscripted.’

  ‘Oh.’ He looked crestfallen.

  ‘You signed up?’

  ‘Yeah – but you’ve got to get permission – you’ve got to get your parents to sign something. Like going on a fucking school trip.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Nineteen. Soon.’

  ‘Crikey.’

  ‘They didn’t want to sign. There were all kinds of tears about it. They didn’t come and say goodbye. Dad was too upset.’ The dirt drawing took on an egg shape and he drilled round and round it with his stick.

  ‘That’s hard.’

  ‘Yup. But he signed up, he was in Greece. I’d have thought he’d understand, y’know? All’s I’m asking for is a bit of support.’

  Leon nodded. But it seemed like a lot to ask for.

  Uk-hew, went the fuck-you bird.

  By the end of the week Rod was feeling better, though still liable to vomit without much warning. As the chopper set down to take them to their new patrol, a man came running out of the cookhouse, a brown lizard hacked through with a shovel swinging from his hands. ‘I found the bastard! Found the fuck-you bird! An’ he’s a lizard!’ The man threw the lizard down in the dust in front of the men’s feet, proudly, like he’d made it himself. It still moved slowly, but there wasn’t much left in it. ‘Bastard bit me!’ he said, looking pleased all the same. They watched the lizard become still.

  The helicopter made him feel too light, like he might get sucked out of the open door at any minute. Rod was sick into his hand and tried to throw it out, but it caught in the wind and flew back at him. He looked dismayed. The other men just shook their heads, their faces dark and tired. It was hard to tell where the camouflage ended and their eyes began. Rod stared at the floor, and Leon did the same, deciding not to look too closely at the other men.

  In the jungle you couldn’t tell if the air was getting to your lungs, like a wet sock had been stuffed down there. The other men in his unit wore the same expression as the men in the helicopter.

  Pete was in charge and he seemed like an all right kind of a bloke, although when he saw it was just Rod and Leon getting off to join them, he threw his hat on the floor and shouted ‘Bastard shit!’ before he asked to see their papers and got a bit more friendly. ‘Sorry, fellas, we’re a bit short. Was expecting at least another three. Anyways.’ He turned to four men who looked tired and as if they might carry lice. ‘Here, we’ve got not one, but two men to come and give us a hand. Leon here’s a good shooter, and Rodney here.’

  ‘Rod,’ said Rod.


  ‘Rod here is good on the nav. And by the look of you, Rod, you’d fit down a rabbit hole okay too.’

  Rod tried to smile.

  Pete pointed to the four men. ‘Daniel, Cray, Flood and Clive.’ They all nodded. ‘Cray’s forward scout, Flood gunner, then there’s the rest of us behind.’

  Cray nodded again, Flood did not. Instead he said, not quietly, to Daniel who was standing next to him, ‘Perfect, a dago and a grommet.’

  Daniel looked uncomfortable and turned away.

  ‘Fuck off, Flood,’ Clive and Cray said in unison, and everyone laughed, including Leon and Rod, although Leon was sure Rod was laughing the same as him, out of a need not to throw up.

  Days passed and it was just walking with the sweat pouring through his eyebrows, which mixed with the cammo and stung his eyes. Sometimes there was the sound of far-off fighting and they’d all stop and listen. It was important not to think about breath, to breathe automatically and not panic; let the time pass without comment. When he could, he got out his camera and took pictures of fat leaves and brightly coloured spiders, of the section at rest, and Rod posing with his gun, giving the thumbs up. Looking through the lens you saw it more clearly than usual. Each of them was a rusty brown outside the jungle, but inside their skin glowed white like they’d been rolled in caster sugar, and even colouring in their faces with the thick cammo didn’t help much. The whites of their eyes were luminous. He wondered at Cray at the front, how he stood it, glowing like that, his face a target. Leon pulled his hat down low over his face, but then the back of his neck was exposed. Perhaps in that other jungle his father had had the same problem. He thought of his mother’s hair tight in its bun, the smell of the shop after one of her long hot baths. His knuckles looked like claws on his gun.

  They took little steps, staring hard at the ground, in the trees, looking for something that might not be normal, but everything was extraordinary. The beep of a bird was enough to send rifles swinging in all directions, the echo of a tree shedding its bark made the section stop and hold its breath for twenty minutes. Behind Cray, Flood carried the machine gun and twitched like crazy every time Cray’s pace slowed. Leon carried the ammunition for Flood, and he felt the strings of bullets pressing against his chest, each one a finger, tap-tapping, making that scritch-scratching against his shirt. Rod counted their steps with a clicker and Leon counted his own, just to see how they tallied up. There were so many things to step across and around, and to fall over, things to disrupt the accuracy of counting footsteps. If they hit dense bamboo, there was nothing for it but to walk round it, even though the map said straight, even though the map said three hundred steps and they took well over a thousand.

  They stopped for a meal break and his skin felt like it might start to peel from the heat and the damp. He found that he’d gone almost twice as many steps as Rod and decided not to count any more. He wondered at Rod, carefully moving stones from one pocket to another, counting under his breath in case the clicker got reset, as if their lives depended on it, which they did.

  They opened up their packets of food and there was a low level of talk, some smokes. Flood held up his tin. ‘What kind of an army marches on lima beans?’ When no one responded, he answered himself: ‘A pretty crook one, that’s what kind.’

  The beans were like soft stones on Leon’s tongue. The heat glazed him, if anything happened he might just sit there and watch it all come. Now and then he thought he could smell eucalyptus in among the rubber trees, where birds drilled and carried on like there was nothing the matter. Cray ate his meal a little distance from the others, always watching.

  Leon’s feet were swollen in his boots; he could feel a hot liquid between his toes. The back of Flood’s neck was livid orange and muddled with mosquito bites, and he could feel them at him too, piercing through his hat and collar, drinking through the repellant, different from the ones back home, something deeper in their whine. Some of the men shook out their clothes, unbuttoned their shirts looking for leeches. One man bit his lips into a thin line and tried to look only annoyed by the thick slug that had blown up bloodily on his chest. He poked at it with a lit cigarette and the thing fell off, a pat in the dust. They must be on me too, thought Leon. He checked down the cuffs of his sleeves, rolled up both trouser legs, but couldn’t find any. He decided not to look too much closer; the man, having stripped to his underwear, was now looking palely into his pants.

  ‘This is the fucking life, eh?’ said Cray, catching Leon’s eye.

  ‘My oath,’ said Leon and they both laughed, and it felt good.

  Mail arrived in a chopper with a restock of lima beans. Flood shouted ‘Fuck!’ into an opened tin. Cray had a letter that made him stroke the stubble on his chin hard with his hand and walk away, looking up into the tops of the trees. There was a letter for Leon, another postcard that had been sealed in an envelope. The address on the back was the shop and there was a thin bit of tracing paper inside from Mrs Shannon: ‘All good here. Take care.’ The postcard was not of a beach and there was no smarmy cartoon character on the front. It was a black and white photograph, old – maybe forty years old – so that it was faded and difficult to tell what it was of. The most he could make out was that it was a picture of some gum trees, receding into darkness where the bush got thick.

  One day you will come here and you will know how the fish swim at the surface of the water, so you can see them all the time, and how the big white cockatoos bunch in one tree and shriek the mornings in. These are the things that we see now, my love my love my love.

  Leon folded the little picture in two.

  ‘You got some mail?’ asked Rod in a hopeful sort of a way. He hadn’t been able to keep the disappointment off his face when there’d been nothing for him. But Leon couldn’t help that.

  ‘Not really, mate. Just a bill.’ Rod nodded in a way that Leon could see he was hurt, so he took a picture of him and that made the kid smile again.

  9

  The bugger of it was that he didn’t even like the ugly things. Frank’d brushed past the little table that held the sugar figures to get at a hornet that had billowed in and he’d misjudged it so that his hip had cracked against the corner of the table. The bell jar leant over and fell on the floor, where it smashed.

  ‘Cunt!’ he’d bellowed at the hornet, who drifted out through the door in a leisurely fashion. The dim glints of glass splinters were everywhere. The figurine of his grandfather lay on its side, split from the hand of his bride. His grandmother still held on to the hand, which had broken below the cuff of his wedding jacket. Rubbing the ache in his hip, Frank tried to stand his grandfather up again, but the base of his feet had flaked away and there was no balance left. The sugar was grey on the cut. Where the colouring had faded he could make out thumbprints, which made him stand still for a moment. He picked up the models of his parents and saw the thumbprints there too. Now that he’d seen them he couldn’t throw them away, and he laid all four of them down on their backs. After a second’s thought he gingerly high-stepped over to the sink and found a dry J-cloth, which he covered them over with, before putting on his boots and sweeping up the glass with a newspaper.

  On the way to work Frank drove past the Blue Wren coffee shop. There was a fat, egg-like woman sweeping out the front. He imagined Joyce Mackelly in black and white, her thumb stuck out to the small traffic. Imagined her picture swept away by the breeze of his truck’s wheels as he passed by, knocking up a dust.

  They spent the day loading disposable lighters and telegraph poles, and Frank’s palms became dry and calloused from pushing at the poles and landing them in the right place. The thick gloves he wore made his hands sweat like buggery. It was a long job, because half of the usual ship’s crew were off and the stand-in hatch man just said ‘whateveryareckon’ when anyone asked for his help.

  Afterwards they arranged themselves in the pub, dried out and leathered from the sun, and Stuart talked loudly about trapping foxes, while everyone nodded gravely. F
rank felt a fug behind his eyes that would turn into a headache. Pokey sat at the bar alone, his eyes on the television showing a documentary about female jockeys. Frank watched out of the corner of his eye until there was only a thumb’s depth left in the glass, before getting up and ordering one for both of them. Pokey nodded once in his direction, slid his empty across to him and took hold of the new glass. His attention went straight back to the television. Frank cleared his throat and smiled, but Pokey didn’t look at him and Frank went back to his seat. ‘He’s heaps,’ he said to Bob and Bob rocked back in his chair.

  ‘Yeah, he’s a real funny man. Gruff as two bulldogs fucking.’ He leant forward again, talking quietly. ‘That’s how come we plan to murder the bastard.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Frank, not sure where this was going.

  Stuart rubbed his hands together and produced a notepad. ‘Righto,’ he said. ‘It’s that time again, folks.’ He put on a crappy American accent that set Frank’s teeth on edge. ‘It’s Pokey Lotto time, come on down.’

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Frank, looking behind him at Pokey, who was easily in hearing distance. He watched him take a long slurp of his drink then set it down quietly, the skin of his face glowing blue from the television screen.