After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

  ‘So this place was actually invented by Billy Graham?’

  Merle smiled. ‘We prefer discovered. Or saved.’

  ‘Right.’ He wondered if he would have it in him to get up and leave, just to pretend he never came, ignore Merle as he crossed the room, leaving his scotch finger and lime cordial untouched, a trail of mud to the door.

  ‘Billy was the biggest thing to happen in Roedale.’ She shuffled forward a bit, lowered her voice like she was telling a fairy tale. ‘When I was a very young girl, I didn’t even know who Jesus was – thought he was something like Father Christmas, I think.’ She sat back in her seat a little, eyes on Frank’s. ‘See, my family weren’t the believing kind. At Christmas the town’d set up this chocolate wheel, and all the kids would line up and buy tickets and hope their number would be called, hope they’d be the ones eating all that sweet chocolate. Only – that chocolate wheel – all you’d ever win were cuts of meat.’ Merle took another sip, blotted, looked towards the portrait. ‘That was an ill-named wheel.’

  Frank took his cordial to his mouth, wetted his top lip and took it away again.

  ‘But when Billy called your number, that’s when you really got chocolate.’ She looked back at him and held his gaze.

  ‘Right.’ He nodded. This was a mistake.

  ‘Do you understand, Frank? A place can’t exist on meat alone.’

  ‘But meat and Jesus works out for you, does it?’ He meant it to sound rude, but she didn’t flinch. Frank imagined what would happen when his father arrived home to find him there, but found he couldn’t picture what his dad’s face looked like. He thought of the silence and looked at the silent television. A show with doctors, all in blue, masks, scalpels.

  ‘Frank.’ Merle spoke again, with a voice off Playschool. ‘This place, this town, is made up entirely of believers.’

  Believers and meat. He thought he might start to laugh. He knew that if he undid his hands from the glass they would shake. ‘I think, maybe I’ll be off – come back later when he’s here.’ He tensed his legs to stand.

  But Merle carried on and somehow it kept him there. ‘People who don’t fit in don’t stay. We are here and we are happy, and we are waiting for Jesus.’ She leant forward, clasping her napkin in her hand. ‘He can know that when He gets here there’ll be a safe place to stay. He can know that there is a place He will feel entirely welcomed, a place He can feel at home.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Your father is out there.’ She pointed with a stiff finger towards the door. ‘In places with less knowledge and he’s trying to help those people, Frank. He’s found something good, he’s trying to lead those people home. Like Billy did. He led us out into the light of knowledge. He showed us Jesus and once you have seen Jesus, Frank, once you have seen Him, you’ll never go back, because it is too dark.’

  Frank had left his father upstairs, lying in his own dirt, and on the way down the stairs the violence had come back to him and he bounced back into the kitchen, the skin on his face stinging, blood fast in his veins. The woman in the kitchen was still smiling, holding the remains of a Mighty White and fried-egg sandwich, which she dipped into the hot fat of the frying pan, smoke still touching the windows.

  ‘Want some snack?’ she’d asked and he went for her, tearing at the dress to get it off, looking for a fastening to rip at; and she dropped her sandwich on the floor, but was laughing. She was strong for her weight and she fielded his attack, changing each scrabbling blow that landed, giggling like a schoolgirl. She hoisted the dress over her knees. ‘Like father like son, eh?’ she said, and Frank smelt egg and beer, and something strong like the bins in summer. She sat on the floor, now, and he stopped trying to get the dress off, stood back, sick at the look of her. She was laughing fit to split, tears running down her nose, making her weak. He saw himself kicking her square in the face, the feel of his shoe against the smash of her nose. But he didn’t do it. He noticed that her lip was bloody, and she did too and wiped a long streak of orange on to the back of her hand, which only made her shriek harder with laughter. Frank’s fists cramped and he struck himself hard in the face, three punches, one that crunched his nose and brought the taste of blood into his mouth. He turned to leave and saw his dad standing in the doorway, a towel that had once been white hooked round his hips, the liquorice cigarette still in his lips, but grey now, and dead. There was $140 in the till and Frank took it on his way out. The shop bell had rung as he left.

  Frank drew breath but didn’t speak, the silence was long and the doctors on the television stared at each other over a boardroom table.

  ‘Now – Frank. How did you like my speech?’ Merle laughed, tossed her hair, became serious again. ‘I’m just trying to make you see – your father – he’s not the man you knew. He is safe now.’ She bunched one hand into a fist and held it against her pink drink. ‘So if you’re here to cast blame, know that he has been forgiven. Everything he has done has been absolved.’

  ‘It’s not quite as simple as that.’

  She smiled, stonily. ‘I’m afraid that it is, Frank.’

  ‘You don’t know.’

  ‘He has told me everything. He is forgiven, Frank.’

  ‘Wait just a minute, I haven’t forgiven him.’

  ‘Yes you have. Jesus has forgiven him. You have forgiven him. I can tell.’

  ‘I tell you what, I have not!’ Words tumbled out tunelessly. His heart beat against his bones and he wanted words that would shock this woman and make her throw him out of her house. ‘My father does not believe in God,’ he said and watched Merle’s face. But there was nothing but a smile, so he went, didn’t look to see if he’d left mud on her carpets.

  Striding back to the Ute, his feet wouldn’t move quickly enough. Shit, though, he was angry, his hands clenched, sweat itched his nose, dust in his face, the smell of someone’s tea on the cooker made him want to shout at the elderly woman who crossed the road to get away from the stranger.

  Her fucking lime cordial. He spat and his spit was green.

  But he didn’t drive straight home as he had thought he would and he didn’t drive to the nearest non-lunatic town and bury himself in the pub. He found himself parking outside Merle’s house, thinking maybe he was going back to say some of the things that were going round in his head – some of the excellent insults that he kept thinking of – but he just sat with his hands on the wheel, pointed his gaze at the middle of the bonnet and waited.

  At a quarter to seven a blue Holden pulled up next to Merle’s orange one. A cross hung from the rear-view mirror.

  The man who got out of the car was skinny. He recognised his father’s movements but not his face, not his shape. This man was bald apart from a few light strands carefully placed across his head. His shoulders were coathangerish. Frank wound down the window as the porch light came on, even though it wasn’t dark outside. The man moved quickly to the back of the car, brisk and efficient, neat, his hands touching everything after he had moved it, to make it just so. Open the boot, touch the door, take out a briefcase and set it on the hood, touch the briefcase, close the boot, touch the boot. Merle came out on to the porch, in a different blue dress that blew up in a sudden gust and exposed the lace top of a stocking. She batted it down with both hands.

  Frank heard the sound of the word ‘Darl!’ and the reply, ‘Sweetheart!’

  He watched them embrace, his father on a lower step. Merle shut her eyes and tilted her head upwards with a smile on her lips like she was suckling a baby.

  ‘You hungry, darl?’ Frank heard as she lifted his head a little. ‘C’mon in, it’s pork chops for tea.’

  They came apart and, holding hands, Merle led him up the steps, a boy for his bath. Frank was gone before the front door closed.

  22

  Something exploded right on top of them and Leon thought he would be buried alive. Clods of earth smashed down on him, the wind went from his lungs. The noise was hot, it burnt his eardrums. Somewhere he couldn’t see,
someone was screaming. With no time to set up he leant the gun against his hip and fired. A figure ran fast away from him, and he walked the tracer bullets across the man’s back and he fell bucking like a sliced fish. Pete was at his side, replenishing the ammunition, missing three fingers from his left hand. His face was limestone, his mouth black. He handed Leon the bullets with his good hand and bled with his bad, holding the radio in the crook of his neck calling, ‘Dustoff, dustoff!’ Banana leaves shredded over them, hot green smoke, it seemed to last for hours.

  When earth and dust and leaves had settled, when there seemed nothing left, he let his gun run dry. The screaming had stopped. A mosquito bothered Leon’s eyelid and he let it.

  The chopper landed and there were two baddies dead, their bodies eaten by bullets; the others had melted away. Pete held his claw hand, spitting dirt and blood and tooth on to the ground. The screaming man turned out to have been Rod, his legs both gone below the knee. Thick blood leaked from his mouth and his eyes were wide and dead.

  Cray sat propped against a tree, a small leak of blood coming from between his fingers where he held on to his stomach. He smoked a cigarette. ‘Flesh wound, I should think,’ he said quietly. ‘Bit of shrapnel scraped by me. Leave a pretty scar, but.’ He looked up at the tops of the trees, watching his smoke mix with rising mist and get carried up. He waved Leon away. ‘I’ll be right after a smoke,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay and keep Daniel company.’ Daniel nodded to him, his hand on his smashed knee.

  Leon and Pete carried Rod to where the green marker smoke of the helicopter waited. The medics arranged Rod on a stretcher and tucked him into it like he might have been cold. Someone bandaged up Pete’s messy fingers. ‘Well, that’s it for you, mate,’ he said, ‘no more trigger finger. Time to get home.’

  ‘I’ll never play the flute again either,’ said Pete and chuckled in a way that echoed and then faded out. ‘Reckon you’ll have to take us all back – Leon here he’s the only bugger not wounded.’

  The medic raised his eyebrows injecting something yellow into Pete’s wrist. ‘How many you got?’

  ‘We were only five to begin with.’

  ‘That’s rough. Think you’d be better off getting out of here now, mate. We’ll send someone else to pick up the rest.’

  Pete nodded at Leon. ‘You happy with that?’ Leon nodded back, and they touched each other’s shoulders and Pete handed over the radio. The chopper took off and Leon watched as Pete closed his eyes and held up his bandaged hand to cover his face from the dust.

  Leon led the way for the stretcher bearers, just a couple of minutes away. Their radio buzzed and a voice said there was a chopper zero five minutes away. It was amazing, in just a couple of hours they would be in a hotel room. He’d have a drink for Rod and Clive, then he’d have a drink for himself.

  They returned to find that Cray was dead, a long tube of cigarette ash next to him.

  Daniel was tight-mouthed. ‘He had one through the throat too,’ he said. ‘Don’t know why the bastard didn’t tell anybody.’

  ‘Probably nothing to be done anyways,’ said the medic, shaking his head.

  Leon spat into the grass.

  On the bitumen of the base airport he felt an awkward jab in his pocket. As stinking tired men poured around him, he looked at the mud baby that rested in his palm. Somehow it was still in one piece, brittle as pulled sugar. An eye had rolled out of its socket, but the baby still smiled.

  23

  It was dark when Frank knocked on the door of the shop. Jimmy was at the bowling club and their kids were watching TV with the sound so loud that he had to hammer on the door. June didn’t ask questions, didn’t invite him in, just slipped through the door, calling after herself that she was out for while. They didn’t talk on the way to the pub, didn’t discuss where to drink, what to drink. Inside, everyone’s attention was on the television, where some other kid had gone missing in some country town. Frank didn’t want to know about it. June ordered, dramatically, four whiskies but he found that he could hardly get through the first and felt sick, like his stomach wanted to crawl into his mouth.

  After fifteen minutes of broken conversation June sighed and took his hand, leading him out of the pub, away from his drinks. He wondered if maybe the reason he had turned up to see her was that he didn’t dislike her so much after all. They found a children’s playground secluded from the road by mertyl bushes and didn’t kiss, but he smelt the overripe-melon odour of her, smelt her neck and made her laugh with his sniffing.

  But when she bucked against him it was like a competition to see who could fuck the hardest, and he thought that maybe he did hate her and she hated him, and he put his palm flat in the sand by her head so that it caught some of her hair. Her teeth made blood in his mouth and he could feel his chin doing damage to her cheek.

  Explain that to Jimmy, he thought, but she rasped her face harder against his, like she wanted to shed her skin over him, and he was surprised to have the weaker stomach for what she wanted.

  He made no sound coming and did not pull out. She made no comment, but in the first ten heartbeats afterwards he thought he might cry for her baby and he said ‘Sorry’, but not so that she could hear. Sand weevils moved beneath them, and mosquitoes started to bite at their ankles and move the air by their faces, but for a few more moments they clung together with claws and June said quietly, ‘I did see her. But she wasn’t pregnant. Not as far as I could tell.’

  When the moment was up, she rolled over and wiped off her thighs with her balled-up knickers.

  Tired and sick and full of driving, Frank stopped at an empty beach by the highway as the night paled. He took off his clothes and washed shallowly, squatting and rinsing off June and sand, cooling the mosquito bites on his legs. He wondered if Lucy would ever find out. He held his penis in the palm of his hand, tired and soft, looked at it, then out to sea again. What a bloody achievement. Plovers bolted at him from the shoreline. A flock of seagulls dive-bombed a hairy-looking patch of water and he imagined the feeding frenzy going on underneath. If he floated out on the marble-grey water now, something would tear him to shreds.

  He watched the swell and thought that somewhere, hundreds of kilometres away, this water touched his own land. He felt the sand underneath the balls of his feet gently spilling away. He felt everything that was not him moving and when a truck drove past, giving him a blast of its horn, he put his clothes back on and drove home.

  24

  With mosquito bites still lumping his arms, Leon got stuck in wrist-deep to kneading dough. It was like he’d never left; people came and bought hot-cross buns and strawberry cream cakes. He waved at Mrs Shannon, who now walked with a permanent hobble, but with the freedom of a woman whose husband had left. Sometimes in the middle of it, though, he would see the long tube of ash from a burnt-out cigarette; Rod with his hand over his eyes; that matt black road. They were like dirty pictures and he needed to choose his time to look at them properly. At night he would sit on the side of his bed with a beer and just look at the pictures in his head, make it so that he understood every curve of Rod’s hand, so that he could smell the ash, so that he felt an ache at the back of his eyeballs, the ache of trying to see distance in the black. He knew he ought to write another letter to his parents, let them know he was back, but for now, just for now, he told himself, he wanted to be left alone.

  The album he bought was bound in orange felt. It had a pattern of large yellow flowers sewn on the front. ‘Quite the thing, don’t you know,’ he said out loud as he set it on the table next to the photographs and glue. He didn’t suppose he knew what the appropriate design might be – a black leather number perhaps, something more like death than a child’s pencil case, but the orange felt had stood out to him. It was disposable, silly. No one would guess the contents from the jacket.

  He glued the corners of the first photograph in the pile. He hadn’t looked through them, and there wasn’t any point in sifting through them and picking out the good one
s, throwing out the blurs. They were all the same thing. He stuck them neatly down with a press of his fist. He saw green, fat leaves and strange flowers; an enormous spider with colours that had been bright, but in the photograph looked dull and no bigger than the huntsmen that lived in the larder. A group photograph that someone else had taken: he saw his own face smiling out from a crowd, down on one knee, his rifle at his side. There were thumbs up to the camera. He couldn’t remember what they had been smiling at. One man – was it Flood? – held something that could have been a small bone to his face, imitating a moustache. Cray’s face, closed and quiet – he had laughed after the picture was taken, but not during. Somebody swore, someone else pulled down their pants, showed a white arse, whipped by shrapnel. His own face freshly shaved in a toilet mirror, sweaty. Cray on his own, smoking a cigarette, shortly before he turned to Leon and asked something like ‘You a gay boy or something?’ Cray in a Hawaiian shirt, pouting for the camera, caressing imaginary breasts, the next, his tongue strained towards his imaginary nipple. More green. A blackened patch of grass. Red smoke. More green. A lemon-coloured snake. A dead guy. A dead guy with Leon standing over him, grinning like he’d bagged a prize antelope. A perfectly black square of night. More green. He carried on sticking and pressing, a small sweat pushing at his top lip.

  There were thirty photographs, some overexposed, just dark-brown rectangles, and they all went in, then two that were not his own. The photograph, torn at the top, of the dead Cong’s wife and child. Yellow and black and grey, it smelt like repellant and old books. The girl was shoeless, but the mother wore small black plimsoles that cut just below her ankle bones. Her feet were placed in a sort of ballet style, neat and balanced, heels together toes apart. The child’s toes spread on the ground. Her hands were clenched at her sides. Then, Lena Cray with the baby inside her. A smooth, colour photograph, rounded edges that had turned white with dog-earing. The waratah dress, the small white points of her teeth. Sometimes – a trick of the pattern of her dress – you seemed to be able to see the baby moving. The sugar doll he made wore a waratah in her hair. He’d had to guess the silhouette of her bump, shaped it low on her belly like ripe fruit hanging. Her small hands supported her back, her toes turned inwards as if the balls of her feet were aching and hot. Her mouth was wide and open in a laugh. Of course, the baby was out of her now, but whenever he thought of Lena Cray it was with that bump that must have been warm and dense, that must’ve knocked the breath out of her husband when he leant to kiss her. On the dresser in the back room was Cray’s machete, its wooden birds dark with lemon oil.