AFTER THE FIRE,A STILL SMALL VOICE

AFTER THE FIRE,A STILL SMALL VOICE by Evie Wyld

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Laetitia Rutherford for her generous wisdom and guidance and for asking me to write in the first place. Ellah Allfrey, Nikki Christer and Diana Coglianese for their excellent direction, and their enthusiasm for this book. Darren Wall at Wallzo for his beautiful artwork. Sarah Barnes and Roz Simpson and the students of Bacon’s College for keeping me employed, in the loosest possible sense, and all those friends who, perhaps unknowingly, helped along the way. Excellent teachers I have had, including Rebecca de Pelet, Lucy Sheddon, Colin Edwards and Stephen Knight and all those at Bath Spa University and on the Goldsmiths Creative Writing MA. For help writing on the Australian experience during the Vietnam War, I’d like to thank Dr Julian Stallabrass and those who make available the brilliant and accessible online material at Australians at War and the National Archives of Australia.
Very particular thanks go to Tim Strange. I could not have imagined the book at all without his willingness to talk, his openness and warmth. This is however a work of fiction, and all characters are entirely made up, any mistakes mine alone. Thank you Ben Strange for introducing me to Bassey as well as translating fishing and the marina to me. Any mistakes here are, again, all my own. Thanks to my Mum, Dad and Tom who have shown a huge amount of encouragement and support. Thanks, most especially, to Jamie for every thing.


1
The sun turned the narrow dirt track to dust. It rose like an orange tide from the wheels of the truck and blew in through the window to settle in Frank Collard’s arm hair. He remembered the place feeling more tropical, the soil thicker and wetter. The sugar cane on either side of the track was thin and reedy, wild with a brown husk and sick-looking green tops. The same old cane that hadn’t been harvested in twenty years swayed like a green sea. Blue gums and box trees hepped out of it, not bothered with the dieback. Once it would all have been hardwood. In the time his grandparents had lived out here, just the two of them, before the new highway, maybe then this place was a shack in the woods.
The clearing was smaller than he remembered, like the cane had slunk closer to the pale wooden box hut. The banana tree stooped low over a corrugated roof. He turned off the engine and sagged in his seat for a moment taking it in. There was a tweak at the back of his neck and when he slapped it his palm came away bloody.
‘Home again home again diggidy dig.’
He could have driven here without thinking. He could have turned the radio up loud and listened to the memorial service at Australia Zoo. They were calling them revenge killings, the stingrays found mutilated up and down Queensland beaches. He could have let his hands steer him to Mulaburry, those same roads he’d hitched along as a kid, sun-scarred and spotty, scrawny as a feral dog without the bulky calves and wide hands he had now. But never mind that, he’d still pulled over on to the slip road and smoothed out the map and read aloud the places, and he still sent his eyes over and over the landmarks, searching for the turn-offs he knew were not written down. The tension in his arms had got so strong he wanted to bust a fist through the windscreen but instead, as a road train roared by and rocked the Ute in its wake, he’d clutched the wheel, crumpling the map as he did it, feeling small tears made by his fingertips. He had gripped the wheel hard so that it burnt, and he pushed like it might relieve the feeling in his arms. But it didn’t help and then he was outside, banging his fists on the bonnet for all that he was worth, his nose prickling, his throat closed up, the bloody feel of some bastard terrible thing swimming inside him. And when he was done and spent, he had climbed back into the truck and refolded the buggered map, and when he couldn’t make it fit together he’d laughed softly and started the engine.
The air outside was thick with insect noise, heavy with heat, and the old gums groaned. The padlock on the door was gone and the idea that some other bastard might have claimed the place as his own nearly made him turn round and shoo all the way back to Canberra. The whole thing was suddenly hare-brained. Tearing through drawers at home trying to find some sort of clue as to what he was supposed to be doing, he’d found an envelope with a picture of his mum in, taken on one summer holiday at the shack. There she was, hanging up a sheet in the sun, the same wide teeth as him, the same sort of boneless nose. Different hair, though – hers a blonde animal that moved in the wind. He was like his father, wiry, black, not from these parts. By her shoulder was the window and inside you could just make out a jam jar with a flower in it. It was like being smacked on the arse by God. Couldn’t have been more than a month after she was hanging up that sheet that they’d been driving in his dad’s old brown Holden when a truck hadn’t stopped at the intersection. When he woke up there was no more mum and no more old brown Holden.
It wasn’t difficult getting out of the rental agreement. He’d been late and short in the last three months since Lucy left. A week from then and he was on the road, two suitcases of clothes, the rest of everything in boxes for the op-shop and the padlock keys burning his thigh through his pocket. He’d taken the first part of the journey that evening, ended up in a motel close to midnight, with a sun-faded poster of a lion eating a zebra above his bed. He hadn’t slept, he’d drunk from a three-quarters empty bottle of Old and he’d let himself think about Lucy then. The sick feeling of trying to make it all right. The endless meetings they’d had across the table, to see if there was a way round it. The months afterwards when he’d sweated if he dropped a plate, the look on her face. Careful, or I’m going. Or when the coat hangers tangled themselves and made a jangling as he shook them, her pointed silence. There were other things he thought of in that wide-awake night. Being alone, fixing himself up. Getting done with the drink, sorting through the things in his head as she’d wanted him to.
He stopped the Ute and opened the door. Holding his hat on to his head, he stepped into the sound of cicadas that shrilled like pushbike bells from the cane. He slammed the door louder than he’d meant to and walked towards the shack. The smell of sweet ozone and the clump of his boots in the dust was alien. It was darker and smaller than he remembered. It tilted inwards a little like a sagging tent. He cleared his throat.
‘Hey!’ he called before reaching for the door. Inside it hadn’t changed, and it made his chest tight to see. There should have been broken windows, mess left by kids, dust and leaks, mould on the walls. But there was not. The shack had a feeling about it like it’d been waiting. There were no wildflowers in jars, it wasn’t swept, there wasn’t the sparkle of sand in the cracks of the floorboards, but the placement of things was just the same. It was like the last person there could have been his grommet self fifteen years ago and it made a warmth at the back of his throat. No one was there. There were no other belongings, just the old things that had lived there for ever. On a high shelf a grey elephant, a kewpie doll and a mother-of-pearl shell. The wedding-cake figurines of his parents and grandparents that had always stood on the telephone table, dustless inside their glass bell jar. There was no telephone – he’d forgotten that. Sat on the stack of plastic chairs in the corner, a Father Christmas with a felt body and a rubber face. The wood-burning stove that had been put together a little wrong and now and again used to chug black smoke into the room, which would have his mother up and in the doorway coughing and flapping with a tea towel. He took a step inside and heard the familiar creak of the floor. The place wouldn’t recognise him this heavy or hairy. The sink was dry, with a sprinkling of dead flies upside-down in it. The beds were there too, a double and a rickety single all close together so that as a kid he’d lain awake, wide-eyed at the sound of his parents at night, wondering what is that and why are they doing it? A thin blue and white striped blanket covered his old bed, tucked at the feet in the way he hated, where you’d have to kick your way free, so your feet didn’t pin you down.
He dragged out the mattresses and afterwards he slung the bed frames in the back of the Ute. The idea of sleeping on either of them filled him with dread. The smell might be there, his mother’s hand cream, or the witch hazel his father used for aftershave, in the days before he stopped bothering. Later it was more of a flaying than grooming. There might be particles of their skin there, he might find a long blond hair and know it was not his. They were things that needed to be forgotten about, for starters.
He’d bought some kerosene with him, and he found a place out of reach of the fingers of the cane and poured it on to the mattresses, knowing he was pouring too much. He threw on a lit match and felt his eyelashes singe, turned away and didn’t watch the beds burning. He moved his suitcases into the shack and tried the taps. Nothing came out, the dead flies skitted around the basin, blown by the breeze of his hand. So he’d need to see to a water tank. There was no fridge, but there’d never been one – they’d kept beer and milk and Cokes cool in a deep rock pool where the water moved gently. They’d caught fish as they needed it, and there were always abalone, oysters and octopus to be had. But things changed. He’d get a cold box in town when he went looking for a camp bed. Chances were the stove was buggered after such a long time, but he gave it a look-over anyway. Something dreadful had happened inside, and nothing he could think of made any sense. A big rat or a bandicoot, something with hair and long yellow teeth, claws and a thick backbone, had been cooked whole and left. The thing looked like it had exploded and then been cooked again, the stuff was black and hard and old. It was long past smelling, which was good. He found a stick and gave it a poke but it was welded on. He straightened up and looked at the stove with his hands on his hips. He rubbed the grit of hair on his face. He wasn’t sure how much he’d want to use it anyway even if he could get the stuff off. Like a man slow-dancing with an orang-utan, he walked the stove and cylinder, corner by corner, out of the shack and well away from the burning mattresses. He left it, squat and angry-looking, at the entrance to the clearing.
The week after his mum had drifted in burnt flakes to the seabed a chill Sydney morning woke him, so that his face was wet and his shoulders were stiff. That was when he’d seen the first one. Padding out of his bedroom, a blanket round his shoulders, thoughts of morning hot chocolate and warm bread, his stomach had sunk and growled as he saw her slip from his parents’ room. The old woman from the flower shop, but for half a second he would have sworn it was his mother, and in that moment he’d wondered if the past weeks had been imagined. There was no explanation for a woman coming out of his parents’ room apart from it being his mother, and he stood with his mouth open, his knees weak and his heart high in his chest. But only the vague shape was hers, only the long hair, the small hands. This woman was old and nearly dead. She met his stare with a look like she’d been caught stealing butter from the fridge, but she was old and so wouldn’t have any trouble about that. Her eyelids were shaded blue, her fingernails were red and her yellow dress was something a lady in a picture might wear, but not her. She hesitated and then smiled at him, and he could see that her teeth were not her own, but belonged to a much younger person with much bigger teeth. She made for the stairs, holding her high heels in one hand, her handbag in the crook of her arm. As she passed him she touched him on the head. ‘Okay, kiddo,’ she had said and tackled the stairs in her stockinged feet, mindful of their slipperiness.
Those women, the ones with the clothes that smelt of piss and smoke, the ham thighs showing through the slits in their skirts, the skin and bone of their chests and the unlikeliness of their make-up, the rouge that seemed to float above the skin of their cheeks, the lipsticked teeth either false or yellow. The smell of his mum was gone from the house a month after she was in the sea, and it was replaced with something wide open and stinking. After his father stopped baking bread there was nothing to mask it apart from the smell of old beer and damp rot, like the house was growing soft and sinking into the ground.
The wood of the dunny shed had turned silver and it snagged the tips of Frank’s fingers when he opened the door. Inside, the porcelain bowl was almost hidden beneath fireweed that geysered out of it, some of the plants five feet tall. Through the green he could see a crack running the whole way down the throat of the toilet, something black, like good soil, pushing behind it. It had been a joke his dad had loved – the porcelain drop dunny. The smell was like a garden shed, no shit, but a gentle manure, potato-y, cool. Spiderwebs coddled the corners, white and flossy, and a skink ran across the cistern. The whole thing looked more like a fancy bird bath than a loo, and he closed the door and let it alone. The burning mattresses gave off a smell of rubber. He watched the fingers that peaked on the fire and snatched at the moths gamely flying over the top, disintegrating them in snaps and pops.
He thought of the morning Lucy left. How he’d sat at the kitchen table, listened to the sound of the schoolkids on their way to soccer practice, the shouts and magpie noises of girls laughing. A line of sunlight cast on to the checked tablecloth, and he had counted the squares. He’d walked his finger on to a red square and thought of her marching towards him, sticks that she found interesting under her long arm, her hat throwing a shadow down to her shoulders. White square; pale hot hair that flew in her face, white clay, dust, and thrash caught in it like a gill net. Red square; the first time they’d had sex, all knuckles and knees. White square – the mole under her breast – red square – the clasp of her eyelashes – white square – the smell of her neck – red square – the sound of her sleeping – white square – the sound of her crying when she thought he was asleep – red square – the silhouette of her hand over her mouth in the dark – white square white square white square.
The sun had moved across the table and on to the floor where it disappeared up the wall. He’d listened to the kids returning from soccer practice, had heard the bell sound in the school up the road and the day ending for them in kicked cans and squabbles. He listened for keys in the front door. He drew his fingernail around a red square so that it stood out from the others.
She did not come back that night, and it was dawn before he’d moved to the toilet where he let out a jet of strong greenish piss. He didn’t flush but went into the bedroom where he’d checked the wardrobe. Plenty of her things were still there, but her pack was gone, along with her good jeans and her work jeans. They were not in the dirty clothes. He avoided the photographs around the house – the ones that he knew off by heart anyway. Three on the mantelpiece, two on the chest of drawers in their bedroom. One by the window trying to catch his eye with its reflection. Taken soon after they met, she wore some terrible yellow dungarees and her hair had blown into Frank’s face. His teeth showed, smiling, through the hair, wide and laughing. You couldn’t see the kink in his nose where it had broken. You could see the crows’ feet, which made him look older than he was, and happy, and the dark line of his eyebrows tilted upwards like he couldn’t believe his luck, not yet thirty and suddenly there was all he’d ever wanted. He looked half a head shorter than her. The picture showed how she couldn’t ever leave him because they held hands.
Opening the desk drawer he saw that her passport, usually bulldog-clipped to his own, had gone too. He tried her mobile for the fifth time, and it went straight to answerphone and he hung up. He spent the rest of the morning with the phone in his hand sitting on the edge of the bed, but nobody called him.
She’d come in the night before, a secret look about her, and Frank had thought for a while that she was pregnant. It had taken him so by surprise, but it all added up – she’d told him she was going to see a friend who was upset and she might end up staying over – she was worried about it, that was all. She wanted time to get used to the idea, had booked into a hotel for the night, or maybe she’d stayed with a friend, talking it through. She was scared, worried about how he might react. He felt his palms tingle and realised he was excited. He wanted to pull her down into a chair and make her tell him. He had it ready what he would say, and how happy the next days would be. This all happened within ten minutes of her getting in the door. He poured her a glass of wine to test her, but she drank it. A glass of red now and again was good, he’d read that, that was fine. But she’d have to stop the cigarettes.
She looked at the red and white tablecloth, rubbed a spot of grease away with her index finger and started. ‘Look, I’ve been to Sydney.’
Were the doctors better there? She caught his eye, smiled and looked down again. She was nervous.
He took her hand. ‘How come?’ He could feel that his eyes were wide open, he didn’t want to miss the moment. She looked at him again. He inhaled.
‘I’ve been to see your father.’ His hold on her hand grew slack but other than that nothing changed. He kept his gaze steady and she must have taken that as encouragement, because she started talking at ninety miles an hour.
‘I had to ask around a bit, but the shop’s still there, and once I found it and I went in, I could tell he was the right one, he looked just exactly like you, it was weird, a bit smaller, tired, but it was like you were there. And I talked to him, I actually bought a pie first, just to be sure, and then we got talking and he really was a nice-seeming guy. Charming. Friendly.’ She paused, thinking Frank might say something but he didn’t, just let his hand hang open on the table. How could she have done that to him? She didn’t seem to notice he’d let go of her hand. His old man, who when he looked at you looked up and to the centre of your forehead like he was reading something printed there, whose body was old, mouth slack and full of dark teeth from drink and banana paddle-pops, the wrappers wet in his pocket. Who still somehow managed to bring home, every so often, a young pretty thing, in between the old and the fish-smelling, the fat and moustached women that he found by the bucketload. The daytime drinkers and their terrible loud voices, their piss, dark and strong in the toilet. That was ten years ago. It was a surprise he was still alive, let alone that he still managed a day’s work.
‘And anyway,’ she went on over his thoughts, ‘I didn’t tell him who I was or anything like that, but I asked for directions back to the train station and he drew me a map.’ She scrabbled around in her handbag and brought out a paper napkin, carefully folded, and laid it on the table like it was a child’s drawing. ‘He knew it just like that.’ She took a long gulp of her drink and pushed the map closer to Frank. ‘He did look tired, though. Really tired. And alone. I really think now’s the time, love. We could just go and say hello, take it from there.’
Where did all this ‘we’ come from? She looked at Frank like he was a puzzle she’d just fitted the last piece into. He sat back in his chair and drained his glass, and when he’d finished he threw the glass on the floor and it smashed. The colour had gone from her face. He held her gaze a moment and hoped that she understood what he thought about what she had done and the anger that was barely kept inside him. He was going to leave the house then, but it wasn’t enough, the smashed glass seemed pathetic, like a tantrum, and she had to know it was not. He found that his hand was holding her face and squeezing it, and he’d been sure he was going to say something, but he just squashed her face with his hand, feeling the teeth through her cheek, feeling her breath hot on his palm and already there were tears, but what did she have to cry about? Then he didn’t want to touch her any more and pushed her away, and there came a noise from her and her hands went up to her face. Still there was something he wanted to say, he heard it rumbling inside him but it wouldn’t come. He left the house leaving the door open, spent the night in the park and knew that she would not be there when he got back and that that had been it, his chance to prove himself, to show that his old overreacting self had gone for good. But she’d seen his father. Christ, she’d talked to him and he had not.
He took shallow breaths. He picked up a back board from an unframed picture and snapped it in two.
There, he thought. At least that’s that taken care of.
He strode into the kitchen, whistling tunelessly, because no songs would come to him. He thought he would take a bath and dragged his clothes off standing at the kitchen sink. He put on some toast and went to the bathroom, but there was a large spider in the bath.
‘Get the f*ck out of my bath, you shit!’ he shouted, turning on the hot tap and leaving the room. He picked his clothes off the kitchen floor and put his shirt back on, but he didn’t manage the pants.
The toast pinged up and, crying, he buttered it and daubed it with jam, inhaling deeply and letting out long shaky breaths. He ate it breathlessly between hiccups. His mouth, which at that moment had nothing to do with him, would not stop making the sound ‘Aaaaaaaa’ like a stiff door opening. He lay on the floor, a smear of jam on his cheek, and mashed the last of the bread into a wet pap with an open bawling mouth. The crusts sat on the floor. He swallowed and breathed in sharply, then cooled his crying to a whimper, then to sniffing and then just to staring. The sun moved across the kitchen floor, regardless.
On his last night in the flat he sprayed air freshener until the insides of his nose were raw, to get rid of the smell of her. But still she flooded in, got behind his eyes, up his nose, at the back of his tongue. Those white days in the city when he would wake to condensation fogging up the bedroom window, and from where he lay it looked like the world had left while he was asleep. She smelt faintly of beeswax polish. On those cold mornings when they lay in bed, and he missed Sydney and the things that were there, she pressed her feet into the backs of his calves and even their coldness was comforting. It was enough to leave the blank window of Canberra outside a little longer.
At the roundabout before Mulaburry Town, on the grass verge, a boy sat cross-legged reading a book that could only have been the Bible. Frank watched him in his rear-view mirror. The kid wore boardies and a big yellow T-shirt, his hair was almost white from sun and sea and his arms, long and brown and smooth. Frank shook his head. Cutting school to read the Bible by the road. Things had changed.
Behind the camping shop was a recycling yard and he moved the old bed frames as quietly as he could, gritting his teeth when they clanked together, hoping no one would come and tell him to dick off. He left them leant up against the bottle bank and hurried round to the front of the shop, trying to look like he’d just arrived.
The old lady in the shop said, ‘The council come on a Tuesday and take away the larger refuse.’ But she said it with a wide smile, as though he’d asked.
‘Right,’ he said, smiling back but not knowing what to say, waiting for the feeling of delinquency to run out of him.
‘Need any help, darl?’
‘I’m after a camp bed.’ Move it along, he thought, move it along, make it seem like you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. It was only dumping a couple of bed frames. Is that bad? How bad is that?
The lady sold him a camp bed, a sleeping bag, a campervan water tank, a two-ring stove with extra gas and a discounted bag full of broken mosquito coils. Packing it into the back of the Ute, he realised he was still wearing the smile he’d gone in with and his face was smacked red around the cheeks. His hands shook and he held the back flap of the Ute, tried to look like he was securing it, but he just gripped and waited to feel still again. ‘Calm yourself down, you silly bastard,’ he said under his breath. ‘Just calm on down.’
He remembered there being lots of shops on the main street, but apart from the camping place, a baker’s with a couple of aluminium chairs out the front and a closed greengrocer’s there were just empty windows with whitewash or newspaper covering over. He checked his mobile phone, which only seemed to get a signal at certain corners of the town. Of course, there were no messages. Might as well turn the thing off for all the good it’d do him out here. He bought a loaf of bread and thought he would ask the man behind the counter if there was a supermarket nearby, but somehow the words got stuck on their way out, somehow he thought he wouldn’t be able to get them out in the right order. He was going to buy a pie, which he remembered being good from there, but when the man smiled and said ‘Whadcanigettcha?’ he felt shy and his palms sweated as he replied, smiling too widely, ‘Just a loaf, thanks.’
He grasped desperately in his pocket for change, horrified that he might have forgotten to bring any cash, and when his fingertips met with coins he was so grateful that he found himself saying thank you, thank you in his head as he counted them out.
The Bible kid was not at the roundabout as he drove back but he saw a sign for the Bi-Lo Superstore, with a painting of a prawn at the helm of a ship, wearing a crown. Captain King Prawn at your service. Sailing the stormy sea of low prices. He smiled and let it occupy him until he drew into the car park. What had been there before he couldn’t remember. He must have passed by it a hundred times with Bo, it was on the road to the surfing beach, but he couldn’t think what was there before. Hardwood, or cane or maybe a golf course. None of it seemed right. He hadn’t thought about Bo Flowers in years.
The place was huge, and every angle of it caught the sun and shone it back at the sky. Inside, it was freezing cold and there were computer games and fried food and places to sit and drink coffee and eat chips. A brown-ankled girl sat on her friend’s lap and whispered something into his ear, which made him slide a hand up her leg. Three girls next to the couple shared a packet of Cheesy Os and they all laughed watching the two of them. The floors shone smooth and the grocery department was lime green and housed heaps and piles and stacks of oranges, watermelons and nectarines.
Someone called Jack owned most of the shops inside, sometimes he was Crazy Jack, where there was a bargain to be scratched out, some cheap cut of meat to buy, but equally, when sophistication was called for, Jack could rise to the occasion, as in Frère Jacques, the boutique. A woman, stuffed like a peach, tried on hats, looking at herself in the window. She looked right at Frank and the hairs on his arms stood up. There was a smell of glad-wrapped meat, too many people too close. An A4 black and white poster advertised a missing girl, her face a thumb smudge. The posters appeared on every glass surface, even at the meat counter, stuck on from the inside so the paper looked soft with damp.
Nothing in the aisles suggested eating. He had abandoned a shopping list, thinking he’d be able to pick out a few days’ worth of meals by sight, but the foods were oddly arranged, so that bacon was next to cheese, tins of beans next to washing-up liquid, frozen pies next to frozen crinkle-cut carrots. In his basket he had butter, apples and a pack of soap. It was something like the packed lunches his father had made after his mum died, for those first couple of months when he’d still given it a go. Frank would shift nervously on his bottom on the dinner bench, waiting till they’d all said the food prayer before opening the box and seeing what catastrophe was hidden inside. It started as a can of sardines and half a green capsicum. By the end of the next month he was lucky to find anything edible at all in there – a bit of fish batter left over from the chip shop, a sachet of powdered gelatin. Once a balled-up sock and an old tangerine. He walked back to the front of the shop to start again.
Later, he bought calamari and chips and sat on the seafront on the bonnet of the Ute. There was no rush to get back to the shack. A bit of a fix up on the roof was probably in order, but it hadn’t rained in months and the sky was white and high. He’d anticipated that the place would need a bit more work, had thought it might be good for him to keep his body occupied for the first week or so. He saw how clean his fingernails looked, holding a calamari ring. The waves were peppered with surfers, even in the small swell. Seagulls picked through rubbish baskets, fat-throated, and eyeballed the passers-by, scratching out deep croaks now and then, and dancing with their red feet. He threw the last few chips to them and watched as they screamed and shook and picked at the food and each other. A surfer took a big wave too short and smashed himself into the sea spectacularly. Frank smiled to see him surface, shaking the salt out of his nose and ears. It looked good in the water. He and Bo used to hitch a ride out sometimes to surf with an old polystyrene board. It gave an instant rash that stayed around for weeks.
It was bad to admit to, but at school Bo Flowers was not the sort of kid you had any choice about hanging out with. He had a smell around him like he’d been licking his fingers, and the minute you caught his eye you knew that was it – you were friends for good. He told lies, not a bad thing in itself, but it was the kind of lie Bo always went for. ‘I went to the Goldcoast with my dad once and I surfed a nine footer. And I didn’t fall off, and there was a white pointer but it didn’t bother me, we just rode the wave in together. And everyone on the beach was cheering because they said I was the youngest kid ever to do that. They said it might go in the record book. For next year, though.’ The kind of lie that went on and on so that no one felt all right with picking him up on it, so that gradually everyone just went quiet and waited for someone else to talk.
The kid’s old lady beat the shit out of him in a regular way. He was a big lug of a bastard, with soft brown eyes like a calf and a dead dad. Bo had this idea that the two of them were friends because Frank’s mum was dead too. But that wasn’t really why, Frank knew, it was because he was too soft to smack the boy in the mouth, which was the way everyone else dealt with him. It was the thing he understood. But it was good sometimes. They’d bite school together and it was always better getting in trouble with a mate. Frank knew what to do when Bo turned up with black forearms from shielding his face from when his mum’d got hold of a shoe. Do nothing and act like nothing the hell was up.
And the time they snuck into the pub and sat at the back tables with a beer each and felt so big, and then the landlord came out and he lifted Frank up by the collar and said, ‘You tell your old man to keep his filthy grubbing hands off of what isn’t his,’ before breaking Frank’s nose with the ball of his hand and throwing him out of the door with a kick in the arse. June Shannon from the flower shop saw it happen and she gave them a smile that was not meant to be nice. That time, Bo didn’t say anything about it other than ‘We could go pinching at the bottle mart?’ and they both sat on their bums in the gutter outside the pub and laughed hard so that his nose bled to buggery and that only made them laugh harder, and Bo farted loudly from the beer and it set them off again. He was okay, Bo. He couldn’t hit his mum back, after all.
Frank drove right off the dirt road to the shack and down to his beach, feeling full and heavy. The small bay was a mix of rock and brick clay, run off from the last floods marbling the sand with mud. No footprints, no tyre tracks on the road down. The smell that prickled the insides of his nostrils was hot salt fish and oranges, and the sound was of a long exhale. He unpeeled himself from his shirt and shorts, and stepped out of his pants, happy to be free of the wet heat of them. He caught them on his foot and flung them up into the air.
He clambered ape-like to a high rock and looked down at his beach. The bream hole, his mother’s spot, was full of white salt foam. Standing there cooking the first inch of his own flesh, he squinted at the glare that came off the sea. It was ugly somehow, the sand a bit too deep in colour, the water a fleck too grey and sharky, imperfect. He stood like Peter Pan; hips thrust forward, naked apart from his old hat thumbed to the back of his head, fists on his waist, smiling like a split melon because all of a sudden things felt good.
‘Mine,’ he said out loud so that his voice bounced off the rocks. This is what it is to have land, he thought, his eyes following the line of the shore. He did a small low jump and ran, his hat flying off and settling somewhere down the beach, feeling the enthusiastic sock of his dick bouncing from side to side as he ran for the water. He dived into the base of the first small wave that came in, thinking only as he hit the water face first that it would have been a good idea to check for rocks. But he came up in one solid lump, making a clean ‘boc’ sound with his mouth. It was colder than the water he was used to swimming in, there was a tightness in his chest, which was good. He floated on his back, feeling like a fat otter, letting the salt water into his mouth, to clean right inside him, where city dust lay on the tops of his lungs. The currents were strong, and he kept half an eye on the shore while he grabbed up handfuls of sand and scrubbed himself raw. When he was pink and shining, the sky was a low purple and the heat had gone out of it. He took a wave all the way into the sand, the foam bubbling at his chest.
With the sea still streaming from his ears, he found his hat and dragged his shorts on to wet legs while sandflies and mosquitoes bit and blew by him. He ignored them and poked around in a rock pool, squatting by its side. There used to be abalone on the rocks, but not now. Fingernails of crab shell floated among the weed, an empty hairy leg – octopus dinners. His insides garbled with the thought of clean fresh food. Sea animals would fill him up with goodness, push out the jam rolls and meat pies of the city.
‘Yars yars yars,’ he said into the rock pool, stirring up sand with a stick. The sky rolled in the moon and then it was night time.
He woke in the dark with the feeling that there had been some noise or movement in the shack, like a soundless bird had flown in one window and out the other ruffling the air as it went. He listened for feathers landing on the floor. Past the frogs and insects, the drill of night things, he heard it again. The night sounds dipped and let the noise through – a faraway cry, something prehistoric like the noise of a pterodactyl in an old plasticine movie. His ears became full of the sound of his own blood and he ticked off in his head all the explanations. ‘Bird’ was what he arrived at. Some kind of bird was what the Creeping Jesus was. Owl. Jabiru. Cockatoo. He listened past his own breathing, past his own blood, then past the outside noise, banana leaves on corrugated iron, past the scrubbing of the gum trees in the little wind, he listened so that his body went stiff, though he didn’t dare clench his fists for the noise it might make.
Again, like wind dropping, the nightbirds tucked their heads under their wings and the sound echoed from far away in the bush, a siren, a vowel noise that was long and thin, and when it reached its peak it broke and turned into a low howl, tailing off like a sad question. He kept his eyes open until they wouldn’t any more and when he slept there was nothing.
At dawn something scrambled across his feet in the snub end of the sleeping bag and he fell on the floor kicking the air furiously. He didn’t find a spider or a mouse, but a pair of balled-up women’s toe socks that had been hidden at the bottom of the bag. He held them in both hands, resisting the urge to bring them up to his face. Those shapes, those spaces between her toes. He went outside to the burnt-out fire, holding the socks between his index finger and thumb now, like they might sting. He put them in the ashes of the mattresses, then fossicked around for a piece of wood to put on top of them and hide them from view. He used a few twigs to make a pyramid over the socks and lit them, watching until they were on fire.
The sky was pale and the morning dew had already burnt off. A troop of magpies gurgled in the blue gums and he could smell hot eucalyptus and salt water. From the borders of the cane came a crumping noise as something large sloped off towards the trees. A lost cow, maybe, or a feral sheep down from the hills. He threw more wood on top of the socks and made a billyful of tea to start the morning off.
Before the iron roof turned to a griddle he was up on a ladder, patching up the rust-bitten roof. Even in the first sheets of sun the metal began to expand and shift, creaking and popping in the heat, and he couldn’t rest his hand in one place for too long, feeling that he would leave the skin behind. On the roof were all kinds of uglies: leaf insects, their tails up and ready to strike, spiders – redbacks, huntsmen, fat black-bodied ones and hard little yellow jumpers. A whitetail nestled in a rusted pipe, which he gingerly rolled off the roof, then watched as the bugger tottered away after the pipe hit the ground. The banana tree nodded softly, making a sound like rain on the roof. It was a good sound. He filled his lungs with hot air and stood upright to piss in the direction he had thrown the spider. He rolled an orange between his palms, softening it, then bit into it with his front teeth and sucked it hard so that stars came to his eyes. He looked at the cane flowing softly in the breeze that never seemed to reach him, saw the tops of three or four tractor sheds like capsized boats above the level of the cane. He took a strong back swing and hurled the sucked-out orange in the direction of one of the roofs, saw it swallowed up and was surprised for a second that there were no ripples.
When he turned round and saw the face watching him from the edge of the clearing he had to crouch down, his heart fat and loud, to stop from falling over. The person slipped out of the cane and strode forward, and Frank clutched his hammer tightly. The man walked quickly and lightly towards the shack, one hand up in what was possibly a friendly gesture. He let his hammer go and stood up. ‘A-roo, a-roo, a-roo!’ called the man, jogging a bit now to come and stand at the bottom of the ladder.
‘Hello,’ said Frank and the man beamed with brilliant white teeth. He had the look of a young boy dropped into a grown man’s body. The skin of his face was salt-rubbed, his eyes red and bright from the sun.
He squinted up at Frank ‘How is it?’ he asked, presenting a bronzed hand so that Frank had to come down the ladder and shake it. ‘Bob Haydon – heard a noise someone was moving in around here.’
Frank took the hand which was cool and big. ‘Frank Collard,’ he said in what he hoped was a friendly tone. Unable to think of what else to say he added, ‘I’ve moved in.’
‘Can see that, mate!’ Bob talked in a shouty way, like a welcoming dog. ‘Sorry for sneaking up on you, was having a bit of a ramble and wondered what was going on – sometimes you get kids around here, you know, up to no good and that sort of thing.’
Frank nodded and smiled, wondering how long Bob would stay for. ‘Can I getcha a drink?’ he asked, thinking Bob would probably say no, that he couldn’t and had to be getting on.
Bob looked at his wrist where there was no watch. ‘Why not? Wet the head?’
Rooting through the cold box Frank’s stomach moaned, but he found the beers anyway, floating among sliced cheese and wet bread. Beer for breakfast. Not a great start.
Bob perched on the steps and lit up a cigarillo. He flapped out a match and delicately put it back into the match box after testing it was completely out with his fingers. ‘Ta,’ he said, accepting the bottle, and seeing as his other hand was full, he angled the bottle head on to the skin of his inside elbow removing the screw top with a quick jerk of his forearm. ‘It’s a good place you’ve got yourself, mate. Always wondered who it belonged to.’
‘Was my grandparents’, long time ago – haven’t been here since I was a grommet, though. Don’t think my old man would’ve either.’
‘Ah – well – I’ve only been here meself a year or so – me an’ the wife are westies, tell the truth. Perth. Other side of the bloody world it feels like some days.’
Frank nodded. ‘’S a big place.’
A fly landed on the outside corner of Bob’s eye and he blinked it away. ‘Good-oh. ’S just you, Frank? You’re not fixing her up for the family or nothing?’
Frank tightened his bum and swallowed his beer in a lump. ‘Just me, I’m afraid . . .’ he was going to go on and wing it, say something jovial.
But Bob said, ‘Seems like a pretty lonely thing to do.’
Frank looked up at an aeroplane that glinted cleanly.
Bob smiled and shook his head. ‘Look, I’m sorry, mate, I’m going on like a lunatic. Thing is we’re all a bit jumpy at the minit. A friend’s girl’s gone missing, been gone a fortnight and we’re all pretty pip to it just now. ’S why I was lurking in the cane there.’
‘Sorry to hear it,’ said Frank. ‘You reckon she’s just done a bolt? Saw the posters in town, she looks about the age to.’
‘Yeah,’ said Bob, not agreeing but being polite. ‘Yeah, let’s hope so.’ There was silence and Bob looked into the middle distance.
‘So, do you work the cane?’ asked Frank, the question coming to him like a lightning bolt.
‘Nah, tried it for a bit, but if you don’t know what you’re up to it’s a bugger’s muddle. I do a bit of fixing up of cars, but my wife keeps chooks. We get by – less work than proper farming. We live over east.’ Bob pointed with his chin. ‘You can see our water tower from here – connected by the cane.’
Frank looked, knowing that he wasn’t tall enough to see over the cane. He nodded. ‘Chook farm, eh? Meat or eggs?’
‘Both. You got any need for a couple of hens? Dead or alive?’
‘I could definitely think about it.’
‘You do that. So,’ said Bob, with the look of someone who had finally come to the meat of the conversation, ‘are you a fishing man, Frank?’
Frank shrugged.
‘Some good shores around here. Get your nice pelagic type, come in close to the bays, you can get out there on the right day on a surf ski with a hand line and come back a happy man. Just last week I was out there, trolling – 40-kilo line – light-weighted squid and pilchard duo – bait got monstered, I take off like a steam train; next thing I’m being pulled through a school of bluefins, two or three pretty big bronze whalers feeding in there. Took two hours to get the thing back, had to hold her head out of the water for twenty minutes before I could haul her up. All the time I’m thinking something’s going to come and take the side out of her, or me, or both! Anyway, monster of a thing, 15 kilos. Wife made sashimi the first night and now we’re on to a steak a day. It’s a good freezer.’
Frank’s mouth was dry and he tried to keep up with a look of interest and friendliness.
Bob looked at him. ‘You using an eski? I’ve got a kero fridge you can have if you’re after one.’
Frank felt like a heel. ‘If it’s going spare I could really use it, thanks.’
‘No worries. It’s a nice place you’ve got. Got a nice feeling to it.’ Bob drained the stubbie, unfolded upwards off the step. ‘Righto, Frank – well, you need anything – turn left out the end and we’re second track you come to.’
‘Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘No wuckin furries,’ Bob said, shaking hands again and smiling with a squint that made the sun always in his face. ‘’Sgood to meet youse anyways. I’ll come by some time soon with that fridge.’
It was awkward not knowing how to see the man off, to walk with him all the way to the end of the track seemed a bit much, but he was still talking, so Frank followed.
‘Looking for work?’
‘Will be. Would you know of anything going?’
‘Could be. I work the marina on and off. Usually there’s something a bloke can do. You look a strong enough bloke, Frank.’
‘I do okay.’ He tried not to pink up. ‘Done a bit of labouring around the place.’
Bob looked at the horizon. ‘There’s a fella, Linus, works the marina – he’s a bit older than the usual – might remember your grandparents.’ Frank stopped, surprised. ‘Don’t worry, mate, I just parked me car round the corner so’s I could sneak up on you – you don’t have to walk me home. Aroo,’ Bob said with a wave and disappeared round the tallest cane.