After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

  To our darling son

  It’s been so long. This is where we are, should you ever want or need us.

  All our love

  Your Mother and Father

  The address was northern. He did not tear it up. After he shaved off his beard he took down the orange felt album, grubbied at the edges from being hidden away under the oldest of the cookbooks. He pressed the postcard between the pages of the orange album and put it back in its place. He would deal with it when he’d had time to think.

  There’d been a few requests for wedding cakes since he’d been back, but he’d headed them off, saying he wasn’t quite set up again yet for big orders – that his suppliers were still getting back to him, that his oven was on the blink. Things that he said without really thinking. He couldn’t imagine his hands being useful again. Perhaps that was it. The few girls who had come by, the ones he had taken out for a drink or a walk, had found him clumsy. His hands shook if he tried to spoon cream into their mouths, and his fingers seemed large and ogreish when he unbuttoned a blouse. His hands were cold as if there were no blood in them. They were better suited to holding a gun. Out of habit he had arranged the tarts in pairs like boobs, and looking at them he suddenly felt ashamed.

  A car backfired in the main street and he looked up. Over the road, a girl was framed in the doorway of the butcher’s. She was overdressed and there was a feeling that at any minute a wind might lift up her dress and show the butcher her knickers. She wore white wrist gloves like a virgin from the fifties. Her high heels and her broad-brimmed hat in particular looked ready to turn against her, the one to twist her ankle and make her fall, the other to fly away – she held it firm between two fingers. Leon placed a cherry in the centre of a jam tart just as the bell on the door sounded and she pushed her way in. Her dress had a pattern of oranges and ivy, and her lipstick was fresh on and thicker than it ought to have been. He wanted to hold the back of her hair gently and blot her lips with a napkin; to trace the edges of her mouth with his index finger and neaten her up.

  He looked at a lemon meringue pie and then, suddenly embarrassed, pushed it to one side. ‘G’day,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning,’ said the girl.

  A small smile. His ears popped – he hadn’t realised they were stuffed – his whole head worked better than it had before.

  The girl struggled to take off one of her gloves. She gave away the heat of them by wiping the palms of her hands on her dress. She stood, leaning on one hip, and he saw that she had a ladder in her stocking. ‘I was after a treacle tart.’ And when she spoke he saw that she was Amy Blackwell, and he understood why the air in the place had changed.

  31

  ‘What are you supposed to do?’ Frank asked the spider as it twitched like a sea anemone, its remaining legs relaxing and stiffening and finally folding in on themselves. He had woken to a cold day and before going outside had riffled through a box to find a jumper. The one he found was woollen and grey, and a bit too small. He’d rolled it on, popping his head through the top, the skin on his face scoured by the wool. As he pulled it over his midriff he felt a wriggle against his side, something a little bit frantic was happening. On inspection, he found three hairy-looking legs pasted to his ribs with a bit of sticky in between. They were big enough to make him yank off the jumper roughly, and catch his nose and make it bleed a little. He threw the woolly on the floor and checked in his shorts with horror.

  But he found the spider lying quietly on the floor in its death throes, twitching softly with the rest of its legs. The thing was about the length of a thumb, just a huntsman, nothing poisonous. It still had big fangs though, he noted, impressed, and wondered why it hadn’t bitten him. Perhaps he’d rolled it against himself too roughly for it to have had a chance, or maybe it had known that he hadn’t meant it.

  He picked the thing up with a newspaper and flung it hard outside. It travelled only a short distance, but either way was gobbled up by Kirk the moment it touched the ground. He watched the chicken, a leg still hanging out of its beak, Mary pecking at his face to try to get it.

  ‘Great white fuckin’ death,’ he said as Kirk eyeballed him, wondering if there was more where that had come from.

  He turned back inside to try to get a tidy-up done. Perhaps then he’d go for a swim, maybe take the prawn net down. Fill up his time usefully. He’d been bent over the sink for forty seconds when he heard the sound of a truck coming his way. That was what he needed, he decided with a smile. He went to the ice box and worried the beer to get to the coldest at the back. He broke off two lids, and the person outside stopped the vehicle and climbed the steps of the veranda with heavy boots. He turned to the open door, a beer in each hand.

  Lucy’s lips were pale and dry, and she’d let her hair grow long and yellow. The bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks showed an arc of sunburn, like a shadow cast from a hat. She was heavier than when he had last seen her, her arms were rounded and brown, and there was room in her face for dimples. Her belly lightly touched the front of her dress.

  He did not blink and neither did she. He felt the heaviness of the beer bottles at the end of his arms. There must be something to say, hello at least, but when he opened his mouth with no clue as to what words might happen, a white cockatoo flew low past the house and shrieked his voice away.

  ‘Frank,’ she said and he felt ashamed that he had left the silence to be undone by her on her own. He nodded, gestured towards the chairs on the veranda, still gape-mouthed, still holding the two cold beers, but she stayed standing where she was in the doorway. His heart, his blood and every liquid part set up against him so that he couldn’t speak. He was tired, suddenly, and he could just send her away and lie where he stood, feet out of the door, head propping the fly screen open.

  ‘So this is where you’ve been.’ She held her palms up to the sky.

  ‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’ His first words fell to splinters in the open air. His knees felt hot.

  ‘You just left,’ she said. A strand of hair caught in the corner of her mouth and how appalling it was that he would not be the one who was allowed to free it.

  Red prickled round her eyes and nose, and her voice was a mixture of loud and quiet. ‘I thought you would hunt me down.’

  ‘I didn’t want to hunt you. I’m sorry. I was awful.’

  She put a hand to her forehead and hid her face. She opened her mouth and closed it again with a terrible silent cry. He opened his mouth to speak, but she waved a hand at him and he closed it. She put her hand over her mouth and looked at him. She shook her head and waved him away again as if he had come towards her. ‘You don’t even know what you’ve done to me, do you?’

  Yes I do, he thought. I do know, I do.

  Then she turned round slowly and walked down the steps.

  You are watching her leave, he told himself. You’re watching her leave and if you ran down after her things might be different. But she opened the door of her car and, without looking back, slid in and slammed it behind her. As the car pulled away he said under his breath, ‘Go, go, go,’ but he didn’t know if the instruction was to Lucy or himself, so he stayed put as if she’d never been there, the only difference was that one of the cold beers had slipped from his grasp without him noticing. White froth collected round his toes.

  32

  On a Monday morning a man arrived wearing a grey suit and carrying a briefcase. Leon looked at him and saw that he hadn’t come to buy scones.

  ‘Mr Collard?’

  He met his eyes for a second, hoped to see something a bit light in his bearing. There was nothing. ‘That’s me. What can I get you?’

  ‘Are you the only son of Roman and Maureen Collard?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Mr Collard, my name is Gregory Thorpe, I was your parents’ solicitor. I’m afraid, Mr Collard, it is my sad duty to inform you that your parents are now deceased. I’m so very sorry.’

  Leon leant on the counter. A woman came in and asked for a plum
tart, which he boxed and bagged, counting out the correct change, doing everything exactly as he would have done before.

  The man in the suit stood by politely. When the woman had gone he said, ‘Excuse my presumptuousness, Mr Collard, but perhaps you’d like to close the shop for the next half-hour while we talk? Give yourself some breathing space?’

  He heard Amy moving around in the bathroom upstairs. ‘No. It’s fine. How did it happen?’

  ‘I’m afraid, Mr Collard, I don’t have that information. You’d need to talk to the head of police in Mulaburry for that kind of information.’ There was a look about him, a quick smile and a shrug that said he did know, he just was not going to tell.

  ‘What do I need to do?’ He wasn’t sure what kind of answer he expected.

  ‘Mr Collard, I’m here to inform you of a property that has been left to you. By your parents,’ he added needlessly.

  Leon nodded. From upstairs came the loud clack of something being dropped and he tensed until he heard the sound of Amy swearing at herself.

  Gregory Thorpe smiled pursedly and opened his briefcase, which now rested on the counter. ‘The deeds to the property. Everything has been left just as it was since their deaths, as no one wanted to presume to know what you would want done with their belongings.’

  He handed them over and Leon glanced at the papers. ‘They don’t live so far away from here,’ he said.

  Gregory Thorpe shifted uncomfortably. ‘No. I suppose they didn’t.’ He smiled in what was possibly meant to be a sympathetic way. ‘If you could just sign some things for me, Mr Collard, then I will leave you to your grief.’

  He signed where Gregory Thorpe pointed and Gregory Thorpe looked happy. He snapped his briefcase shut. ‘Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet with you, Mr Collard. And I do hope you will accept my sincerest condolences.’ He began to walk towards the door.

  ‘Wait,’ said Leon.

  Gregory Thorpe turned to him, a look of undisguised impatience on his face. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Haven’t you got some keys for me or something?’

  Gregory Thorpe smiled. ‘There’s no lock on the house, Mr Collard. Just walk right in.’

  The shack was a tribute to his mother’s housekeeping: the surfaces wiped, a dishrag hanging neatly over the tap, bleached back to its original white so many times that it was little more than a transparent net. Amy left him to it, went for a slow walk up the beach, her belly swaying, her hands patting around the base of the bump.

  What the superintendent at Mulaburry had been able to tell them had not been much. Clothes left on the beach, no sign of his parents, not for over two months, since the telegram with news of Amy’s pregnancy had been returned undelivered. There was a selection of things left on the kitchen table, the lemon check tablecloth pinned at the edges for a neater finish. His mother’s grey woollen gloves, a pearly seashell, a photograph of the three of them taken when he was a baby. A hard old loaf of untouched bread, baked to cement. They all seemed to have been laid out exactly and deliberately. He sat at the table and picked up the gloves. He knew what he expected himself to do. He expected to hold them to his face and smell them, smell his mother’s hand cream, feel the touch of her fingers on his face. But instead he held them in his hands, lightly, as though they were made of dust. Then he put them down again. He looked into the faces of the three people in the photograph and came up with nothing. They were just pictures, one of a baby who didn’t even know anything yet. The shell he put on a high shelf, resisting an urge to crush it underfoot, or to put it on his tongue and taste the sea. It was a pretty thing. A shame to ruin it.

  The loaf of bread was heavy and cold. If he threw it, it would smash a good dent in the side of the shack, it would rip a gash in the dark old wood, leave some pale and exposed wound. It had the potential in it, he could feel as he weighed it in his hands, it had the potential to go far with an angry throw. He buried it shallowly behind the house, where either it would disintegrate or if any animal was strong enough to break into it, it could be eaten. The superintendent had been happy with the verdict, although it wouldn’t be official for a few years. They were a quiet couple, queer. Didn’t seem to know a great deal about living out there on their own. They’d been warned about the rips, didn’t seem like the swimming types. A young aboriginal man had sadly shaken his hand and then Amy’s, without saying much. There were a few around here, Leon had seen on the drive out.

  The shoes his parents had never quite got used to being without, still black and polished, the laces unfrayed, the heels unscuffed, both pairs placed neatly by the side of the bed, waiting to be stepped into. On a high shelf were their wedding figurines, ham-fisted inside a glass box, not a speck of dust. There was no evidence of any kind of stove – they must have cooked outside or eaten cold. The bread they must have baked in a camp oven.

  He took the shoes and floated them out to sea. They filled and sank, and he pictured their last walk into the water, barefoot, silent, on a calm day. Holding hands.

  His mother’s hair set.

  From the hush sound of the tops of the trees whistling in the breezes came a cry of some kind of animal, just a cry, long and hollow, and he didn’t turn to look. He watched Amy walking up the beach towards him and he thought about the calf inside that had reshaped her. He worried that it would hurt her, that it would kick when it came out. He worried that it would kill her. He worried he wouldn’t love the calf enough.

  They sat where a deep bite had been taken out of the rock, and the hole filled up with foamy water and emptied away again. The sky pinked and oystercatchers wheeled in the small breezes. The water washed in and out of the hole, and fish swam around their feet flashing belly white to the sun.

  33

  The day had been calm, no wind, no terrible heat. Frank could smell the first washes of winter on the salt air. The sugar cane didn’t seem to tower as much as it had before.

  He padded down to the beach with a plastic bag wrapped carefully round the figurines. It mattered that they didn’t break up any more for some reason. He thought for a while about lobbing them as hard and far as he could, but that would not be very far and he would know that they were there, underwater, dissolving, heavy and sunk.

  Instead, he lined them up on the incoming tidemark and sat back on his haunches to look at them: a strange army.

  His grandparents were funny-faced, illogically weighted and old-fashioned. His grandmother’s nose was too flat, or maybe she had looked that way. The bear she held in one hand had something of her husband about it, who stood arms flat to his body, hair done in old black that had sunk into the sugar and turned grey. One of his eyes looked slightly the wrong way. His shoulders were as broad as his bride’s hips.

  Next to them were the couple who had been his parents. His mother over-bosomed, pink-skinned, beautiful. His father oddly small. Not really like his father at all. More like the man he’d watched climb the stairs to his house in Roedale, someone who had stumbled into being happy, his smile red and overdone. His father’s self-portrait. A comic weakling.

  The seawater soaked into the brides’ dresses. It took the black out of the grooms’ shoes. Began to melt them.

  ‘What are they?’ It didn’t startle him in the least that Sal was at his side. She appeared softly, like a ghost, and he’d got used to it. ‘Just some dolls.’

  ‘Are they yours?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  She was quiet for a while. ‘Why are you drowning them?’

  ‘I’m just letting them dissolve.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Makes things easier having less stuff. See, if I keep them I’ve got to find a place to put them in – probably in a box or something so they don’t get broken. Then I’d have to find something to put them on – I’d probably have to have a whole shelf just for them – or their own special table that I’d have to build. And there’s not too much room in my shack, and I’d probably bust my hip on it every time I walked by. And when you start to get
older that sort of thing gets to be more of a problem.’

  He talked nonsense freely and she didn’t pick him up on it. He enjoyed the feeling of lightness that climbed over him.

  ‘Oh,’ said Sal, and after a moment’s consideration knelt down next to them and planted a withered-looking carrot with a smiling face penned on to the fat end. She stood back. ‘I don’t suppose that will dissolve.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Frank, ‘when the tide comes up the fish’ll take care of it. It’ll be like dissolving.’

  She nodded and they both watched as his grandfather was the first to go, knocked over by the seventh wave.

  ‘We should make something else instead.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Something that you don’t have to carry around and look at all the time.’

  ‘How about a sandcastle?’

  ‘A sand person?’

  ‘Man or a woman?’ asked Sal suspiciously.

  He shrugged. ‘We could make a carrot.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m so over carrots.’

  The two of them started pawing the tide’s edge, blunting their fingernails on pipi shells, pushing up great cakes of sand with the heels of their hands. The work was engrossing and they forgot all about sculpting a man or a woman or a carrot and just concentrated on digging a long shallow trench up along the beach at the tideline. They had been at it for a good twenty minutes, talking each other through the process.

  ‘There it is, now you go ahead of me and bring it down to reach me, and I’ll go ahead of you and start on the next bit.’

  ‘’Sa bit of a china plate.’

  ‘Careful.’

  They looked back to where they had come from. The trench behind them had been washed into nothing more than a thin line by the sea and the five upright figures that marked their starting point had gone – Sal’s carrot had fallen over and rolled in the surf. They left a slight dark stain on the sand.