After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

  ‘So I was thinking we could head over to Sydney for the weekend. There’s the winter fair in Centennial Park, and I was thinking maybe we could hire a stall and get rid of some of the junk in the spare room.’ She put half a teaspoon of her special soup-smelling loose tea in a mug and a normal black tea bag in a cup for him. She put down the spoon.

  ‘Sydney?’ Frank felt his toes grip the floor, his heart took a flutter.

  She looked at him, lips closed but eyebrows moving up, like it was a casual thing all over. ‘Yup, Sydney.’ They regarded each other a moment longer, then she turned to pour the water. The noise of it was a pause.

  ‘Is this about him?’

  Her shoulders squared, her back moved as she breathed in. She unscrewed the milk and poured some over his tea bag. ‘Doesn’t have to be. I mean, it couldn’t hurt just to go and take a look.’ She put the milk down. There she was, standing there, not understanding. ‘I’d like to see where you grew up. I’d like to meet him. It couldn’t hurt.’

  ‘I’ve told you, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  She stirred her cup, wiped the spoon on a tea towel and stirred his. Her voice shook. ‘I think you are being unfair.’

  He didn’t reply. The silence was better than what he was thinking, that she could fuck off out of his business and that not having a family of your own didn’t entitle you to glitch in on everyone else’s. She took his tea bag out with the spoon, squashed it against the side of the mug, stepped on the bin pedal and dropped it in. It made a dull pat in the empty bin bag. She squatted to find the sugar in the cupboard, all in silence, all with her back to him. He knew this quiet, it was when her eyes were filling up and she was steeling herself against speaking. It was the thing she did that was not fair because he hadn’t done anything wrong and she was threatening him with tears anyway.

  She inhaled loudly through her nose. ‘Why can’t we go?’ Still he stayed quiet. One sugar, two and three, and she stirred the cup and a small brown dot of tea spattered on to the sideboard. Her hand trembled and she set down the spoon with a bang. She breathed in again. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. You have this link and you just want to ignore it. You know what it means to me. You know.’ Her voice almost cracked, but she was not crying, she was angry. ‘I mean, what could he have done? Did he kill someone? Did he molest you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he beat you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then for Chrissakes what else is there that is so unforgivable?’

  She rested her hands on the sideboard, hunching her shoulders. He picked at the wax tablecloth. She turned with both mugs in her hands, planted his down in front of him and made to leave the room with hers. ‘Well, you can stay here and be silent all you like. I’m going to Sydney on Friday.’ Frank stood and the chair squeaked on the lino. He looked at her, glowered over her, felt his heart beat in his throat and she avoided his look and walked away. He sat down, put his hand to his forehead, waited until the heartbeat slowed. He pressed his fingernails into his scalp. He looked at his tea, the small bubbles in it and the black specks that had escaped the bag.

  She came running back into the room. ‘Wait!’ she shouted. Her eyes were red.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I forgot to boil the water.’

  She hadn’t gone to Sydney that time and it had blown over.

  A few months later he’d held her face and squeezed it hard, and she was crying. He’d seen the light go out, he’d seen that that was it, his last chance and it was gone.

  ‘Creeeeeee!’ went the Creeping Jesus. ‘Creeeee craaaaa!’

  ‘I don’t really believe it. You don’t seem like the sort of bloke that’s capable of that kind of a thing, mate.’

  ‘Well. You never know.’

  ‘You try and find her?’

  Frank shook his head. ‘We’re better off not knowing each other. New starts.’

  ‘You miss her?’

  ‘I try not to think about her.’

  ‘And what about now?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Now you’re telling me this stuff – now you’re thinking about her. What’s that like?’

  He paused like he was thinking, but inside he was blank. ‘Sometimes I’m worried that if I found her it’d start again. Like I said, we tried before and some of the time it was fine. But it’s always there. I miss her but.’

  The night around them went quiet, even the cicadas turned away, as if the land held its breath to listen.

  Bob stayed until the last of the beer was gone. They should both have been stupid with booze, but it went down like water and made no difference to Frank. Bob did not slur his words and when he got up to leave his walk was straight and casual. He shook Frank’s hand and they shared a smile. You’ve done it now, you silly arsehole, he thought as Bob’s tail-lights disappeared round the corner of the sugar cane. If you hadn’t already done it before.

  She’d talked to him about growing up in the home early on, it poured out of her with the tip of a prod from him. She was one of those doorstep kids, too young to talk when she was left there. She didn’t remember her mum, didn’t remember being taken in. Did remember her first foster family, her foster-dad who insisted she call him daddy and hold his dick for him while he grunted into her hands. She remembered getting sent away from them, back to the home, the interviews as she got older, sets of people coming to see if they liked her, deciding no, they did not, and leaving. And Frank remembered that first time he’d blown up at her and the look on her face, and the thought, Oh God, I’ve made her life worse, not better.

  That last holiday with his mum and dad they’d had a small fire by the shack just as the end of the light went from the sky, and his dad had opened beers, one for himself and one for his mother. Clams hissed and squeaked in a wide billy, letting off the smell of burnt bacon. They sat, the three of them, on legless beach chairs, leaning back and digging out pippie flesh with cake forks. His dad told stories about when he used to be a dag, living out the back with a mob of stupid boys. He told the one about the bloke who went to test the sharpness of his knife on his leg and cut an inch down, through his jeans, and sliced open his thigh.

  When his mother went back inside for more beer from the cold box something shrieked in the cane, but his father didn’t seem to hear it. He looked up at the sky. Frank swapped his mother’s half-full beer bottle for one that was nearly empty and drank from it in the dark. He held the beer in his mouth, an unsure taste like he’d accidentally put diesel or earwax in his mouth.

  ‘It’s a funny place, this place.’ His father spoke quietly, still with his head turned to the sky. He saw that his eyes were closed. ‘There are some things you can’t get away from, Franko. And that’s the pity.’

  Again the thing in the cane. Frank’s mother appeared in the lit doorway with shining bottles of beer.

  16

  The first night of R and R the air smelt of sesame oil and spilt beer. Leon and Cray watched the other men cruising around with the little Viet girls, who smiled happily at the drunk, hysterical men in their big new Hawaiian shirts. They’d drunk rice wine themselves and got drunk quicker than he had expected. They watched a couple, a girl in a long, green, shiny-looking dress who laughed at everything her soldier was saying. His arm was round her neck and she somehow supported him on her tiny shoulders. He was in another place, his eyes rolled forward and back in his head, he pointed at the air like he was pointing at a bird’s nest. There was wet on the man’s face, sweat or wine or tears and spit, Leon couldn’t say. But the little girl laughed and the man liked it, and he nuzzled his head awkwardly against her neck. They weaved away and out of the room, half dancing to the music, which was something hokey and old, a waltz.

  Cray pointed the bottle at them as they went. ‘You could be getting that sort of game on, mate. Nothing to stop you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Leon. ‘Maybe later on. Maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘Christ, mate. You’v
e come on leave too early – if I could I’d be all over it like the itches. I’m having trouble even looking at these women. You’re not nancy or anything, are you? I’ve always suspected.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry, mate,’ said Leon. ‘You’re enough woman for the both of us.’

  Cray put down his drink and clutched at imaginary breasts on his chest. He made to push them up and let his tongue loll out of his mouth, reaching towards his imaginary lady nipples. Leon took a photograph. They laughed and left it alone.

  In the morning the swimming pool was a solid block of blue like it had a lid to it. Leon watched his feet change colour as they went in. Things looked dead under pool water. He tried to imagine his parents sitting out on a beach somewhere, enjoying the sea spray, but he couldn’t. In his imagination they were like cardboard cut-outs, smiles drawn on. He’d have to get to them when he got back, that was clear. He shouldn’t have let her go alone, but truthfully he couldn’t quite bear the thought of the state of his mother. It had been like something was confirmed for her and she gave up in those few strange months; decided it was best to go and live with a man who stalked her in his sleep. She hadn’t mentioned anything in her postcards about Leon going off to Vietnam, but he could see it now, the wobble-eyed look he’d get, the tears and the fights. Like Rod’s mum, who couldn’t bear to acknowledge he still existed in case he stopped. He imagined what her face would look like if she had watched him kill that boy. If she had seen him slapped on the back and known that he was proud of it, and that something at the time had felt right about it.

  No one was up. Cray had caught the dawn plane back home to see the bub and lovely Lena, who maybe fitted back into her flower-print dress by now. Something tickled the back of his neck and he slapped it hard, but his palm came away clean.

  A woman dressed in white wheeled a trolley that rattled with glasses and knives and forks. The smell of breakfast from the kitchens was thick and rich and foreign. A strange bird flew overhead, a cross between a magpie and a parrot, with long red legs that trailed behind it and a thick orange beak. It should have been in the jungle. He missed the covering of the jungle canopy and the heavy understanding of his gun.

  Later on, when people were lolling around thinking about their first drink of the day, Leon took himself off to explore. He walked along the beach where men slept in the sun or smoked, and he wet his feet in the sea, which was shallow and hot. He smoked a cigarette, something he had started to do more and more, whenever his hands felt useless, whenever they remembered the hard weight of his gun. It gave you time as well; if someone asked you a question, you could draw out the answer by lighting up or inhaling deeply and letting the smoke float out of you slowly. The bars on the seafront were open, and the roadside stalls were filling up with people getting bowlfuls of noodles and soup, and roasted meat. Some guy back at the compound had insisted he’d eaten the tail off a dog at one of these places, but the smell was good and it made Leon’s mouth water. The money he’d been given felt fat in his pocket, but he didn’t want to spend it on food or drink. He could drink until beer came out of the pores on his face, but he fancied having something he could hold in his hand and consider.

  He could go to bed with one of those girls with the black hair all the way down to her tailbone, the tiny-waisted women who seemed to find all the dirty, tired men endlessly funny, and who seemed to want nothing more than to look you right in the face and listen, smiling and nodding, and then take you away somewhere where no one else could see. But Leon imagined the wide-awake night while she slept next to him. The too light impression she would leave in the bed. So he found himself in a stall that sold and engraved silver lighters, the ones you flicked open with a jerk of your hand. On the side of the stall were examples of what you could have: Australian flags, American flags, rude little stick figures fucking, slogans that read ‘Kill Them All, Let God Sort Them Out’, ‘36 Days Without a Solid Shat’, and then lighters that were just tallies with the name of provinces.

  The shopkeeper smiled widely at Leon. ‘Zippo, Zippo!’ he said and Leon nodded, smiled back. ‘We can draw any kind sexy lady for you, we can do swearing, we can do skull and cross bones, any-bloody-thing for you!’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Leon and felt that actually he did want one. But he couldn’t think of what inscription he’d have, so he pointed to one from the wall that had writing all the way round it, ‘After the Earthquake, a Fire’, and paid for it and put it in his pocket, then went into a bar to get a drink.

  17

  Frank was feeling for eggs in the nest Mary had made, cunningly hidden in a large old flowerpot under the house, when he saw Bob’s car approaching. He had time to wash his hands and lift two beers from the fridge, relieved to see him after their last conversation, before he’d pulled up and unfolded out of his car. He drew breath to greet Bob, but stalled on the exhale when he saw his face. There was a brown-paper bruise under his eye and his nose was dark in the nostrils with old blood.

  ‘You right?’ Bob shook his head a little, stepped up and took the beer from Frank. Neither spoke as they opened their bottles. Bob drank deeply, breathing out through his open mouth afterwards. The hand holding the bottle shook and Bob lowered the arm to his side. A plume of smoke appeared on the horizon from the sugar factory and dispersed greyly into the sky.

  ‘They found Ian’s girl.’

  ‘She’s all right?’

  ‘Nup.’

  He drank again.

  ‘Oh.’

  A currawong flew blackly across the clearing. The sound of sheets snapping in the wind.

  ‘Jawbone. Up at Redcliff.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’ Frank pressed his fingers into his hairline. ‘Fuck’s sake.’

  Bob nodded. ‘Just a jawbone. The teeth in there as well. They counted her fillings.’

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Bob pointed to his eye. ‘It’s Vick. If you were wondering. She went a cock-a-hoop.’ He touched his face, which peeled open in a smile and a forced laugh that looked dry and painful.

  ‘She okay?’

  ‘Nah. But that’s just the fuckin’ way sometimes. Sometimes people aren’t all right and that’s just how it is.’ Bob squinted into the sun, avoiding his eyes.

  A long silence.

  The Mackelly girl. Her jawbone.

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘Dud hitchhiker most likely. Probably just passing through. Usual.’

  Frank let his head nod, squinted up at the sun with Bob. There was more silence, then more beer. They drank and when their bottles were empty they got more, and when it was all gone they just sat and waited for the end of the day.

  He’d dreamt he was back in Canberra. It was dull. In the dream he woke up, got dressed, ate breakfast and left the flat for work. He walked along the street and it was hot. He thought about the things he had to do when he got in to work. He looked both ways before crossing the road. Then a bird singing shrilly in the night woke him, so that he jolted out of deep sleep and felt the air shooting hotly out of his nose.

  The bird queried once more and was quiet.

  Eucalyptus blanketed the room. He had the feeling that the trees were peering in through the windows, that they had uprooted and crept over to take a peek. The leaves of the banana tree on the roof were a gentle tap tap tap let me in.

  The wind in the cane sounded as if grasses and roots were growing, cradling the shack like a bird’s nest, hugging the soft old wood of the place, creaking and splintering the walls. He thought about the feel of loose dirt on his shoulder blades, of the lick of breezes that could reach right up under the backs of his ears. He stretched out his feet and thought he could feel them take root, thought he could feel his toenails’ growth speed up; the hair on his head tangling and moving as it grew, lifting tiny bits of scalp and taking them with it.

  When the sky lightened he tested his limbs to see if they could move and swung himself out of bed. He pissed long and hard out through the door, his eyes fixed on the scribb
le gums that looked calmly back.

  Juice ran down his chin when he bit into a tomato. Wiping his face, he was surprised by the amount of beard hair he was carrying around. He put a can of tea on to steep and sat on the steps reading the day. A yellow cloud in the north signalled work at the sugar plant had begun. A dog barked distantly and Kirk gobbled as Mary took a bath in the dust. There was nothing for it but to go fishing. He wet his lips with tea, pulled on some dirty shorts and an oil-stained T-shirt with the words DETTOL CLEANS across the back. He threw the remains of last night’s meal to the chickens and slotted his reel into the holder on the nose of the truck. He took a pack of frozen green prawns from the cold box and put them in an ice-cream tub of cold water. ‘Prawn net,’ he said out loud. ‘Prawn net prawn net prawn net.’

  On the way out to the point, the air was thick with dust. He passed a big white cockatoo standing at the side of the road, looking as if it was waiting for a bus. The creases of its wings were lined with red dust. It watched him pass, feathers ruffled by the breeze, but not in the least bit worried about the truck. In the rear-view mirror the bird shook its head and continued looking up the road in the direction he’d come from. It could be hurt; he’d try to remember to check on it on his way home.

  There was no one out at the point and the sea looked soupy. Maybe underneath its surface a dust blew too. He baited up and cast out into the waveless water, the bait plopping like a stone, taking itself down to the bottom with a thud he could feel through the line. There he felt through the pads of his fingers as the prawn rolled in the sand, as it lumbered across small rocks and seaweed. He imagined the sexy-mouthed fish watching it, shaking their heads, rolling their eyes. But he fished on, determined that one of the wrangled tugs on his line would be a fish, not a snag, and that the next cast would be the one. When the sun had melted through the yellow zinc on the tops of his ears he gave himself five more throws.