2
The day the king of England died it was all over the wireless and Leon was supposed to care, even in the heat with the cream on the cakes turning sour and the flies making it in through the fly strips. The Pancake Day decorations in the shop were taken down to make way for a Union Jack, a picture of the dead king cut from the paper to hide the centre where his mother had fouled up the lines. That long face and the hair combed over like a pill, that Pom look like he’d eaten too much butter. Even when his father unveiled a red, white and blue tiered ‘Cake of Mourning’ and put it in the window to melt in the sun, and the butcher’s wife balled a hanky up to her face when she saw it, even then, what held Leon’s attention were the fine rabbit-brown hairs that had started to separate his face into sections. He took his time running his fingers over them, knowing that this was it – this was the thing that would save him from the pet names and public cuddles of his mother. This was manhood in all its creeping stinking glory and it had happened to his face. It was one of the best things, that he was the only boy in his year with a hairy face. It was rumoured that Briony Caldwell had one but she shaved it off, dry, with her dad’s cut-throat every morning.
From the downstairs wireless came the sound of the British national anthem and his father singing boldly over the top of it.
God save our great big king
Long live the lovely king
God save our king!
‘You can’t save what’s already dead,’ Leon’s mother’s voice cut over, but it only made his father sing twice as loud and Leon saw out of the bathroom window how the postman shook his head at the foreign voice that rom-pom-pommed out of the bread shop, and slipped his letters under the door like he always did, rather than bringing them into the shop and risk talking to the European type of loonie that lived there.
Work could start on a wedding cake up to a month in advance. Leon was sous chef and he took the job seriously. Even when he’d been younger there had never been a time when it had been okay to lick the bowl.
‘That is for inbreeders. If you are happy to eat the batter, why bother cooking it at all?’
His father taught him to prick the cake using the thinnest skewer, to make sure it was properly baked. The ritual was carried out with every cake, even though no cake had ever been too wet. ‘It’s all mathematic formula – like Albert Einstein,’ he would say, weighing up the ratio of flour to egg and the weight to the wetness. ‘You make a mistake and it’s only down to your own stupidity,’ sagely extracting the perfectly clean skewer, steaming hot, and fixing Leon with a look that conveyed that something of grave importance was going on.
The icing was white like light in a copper pan or the sun off the water. It burnt a flash into your eye. It was shaped into a brick and rolled out flat like a pillowcase, then folded back in on itself until it was thin and could be draped over the cake in one piece. Dressing the lady, his father called it, and he thumbed the sheet gently into the creases of the cake, like he was circling a narrow waist. Then he would line up his coloured dyes, each thumb-sized bottle with a handwritten label, every shade of colour separately explained: Buck-eye Brown – the approximate softness of antler moss; Baker’s Rose – a warm cheek; Australian Copper – flesh tone; Holiday Red – a fun-time girl’s lips.
Glancing at the notes he had made about the couple to be married and talking the process through with Leon, his father would add tiny amounts of dye to the unset marzipan.
‘She had a beautiful mouth, that young lady – almost the same colour as her cheeks, but so big, those lips.’ A single drop of red dye would spider out, an ink spot on white linen, and find its way into the creases of white sugar. Pounded with a wooden spoon, the pops and cracks of air bubbles bursting against the side of the stoneware bowl would reach the shopfront where his mother served the everyday cakes. From the blanket of white would come the hue of skin. A dot of blue and yellow produced the lawn for the couple to stand on, the earth that cemented them to their wedding day, the memory of wet grass, the touch of each other’s hands, damp from attention.
Once the marzipan had rested, his father took pinches of each colour and lined them up on the back of a hard-backed cookery book, which he would hand to Leon. He’d talk him through rolling and kneading, teaching him, not too much, but just enough – don’t make the sugar sweat.
Out of Leon’s paws came a crumbling mess, a mix of nose and hat, of shoe and skin that ran together from the heat of his palms, blending grey in the middle. Out of his father’s hands a tiny sculpture, a person in a pleated dress, with a nose like a blade, grasping her wedding handkerchief, thin as a leaf, perfectly able to stand on her own two feet. Undiluted dye picked out the lips and eyes. The black dye was used only on the man – for his hair and shoes, sometimes a moustache if his father was feeling playful. He never used black on the bride. ‘Black is black,’ he would say quietly, his face close to the statue he was working on, his eyes fixed, ‘but brown is a mixture of everything. Brown is better for a woman. When painting a woman you must dip your brush in a rainbow.’ He would look at Leon here, stop his work to ask, ‘You know who said that?’ When Leon shook his head he would go back to work, as if he’d decided not to tell him a great secret. ‘Well, whoever it was, he knew his women.’
When he was younger Leon would poke his tongue out of the side of his mouth and frown as his hand shook with the effort of stillness, and his paint-brush gave his monster bride a red slash on the head, a beard instead of eyebrows or a target on her chest instead of a flower.
His father would sit the pair next to each other, and examine their work side by side. ‘Your bride has a well-rounded bosom,’ he would say, ignoring the fact that she had only one. Looking at his own work, his father would stand with his hand on his chin, sucking his tongue and say, ‘You know – I think I really need to do more work on noses.’
Leon would squint at the perfect tiny woman who stood on the bench top, and his palms would itch to be as large and gentle as his father’s. On his fourteenth birthday he could roll out a perfectly formed woman, but his hands still shook when he tried to paint her. The couple his father had made for his own wedding sat high up on a shelf in a bell jar but Leon knew them by heart. His mother held, for some reason, a stuffed bear against which you could see the tiny pinking of her fingernails. Her lips were bowed and smiling, and she had bitter-chocolate hair that reached to her pencil waist. The toe of one shoe pointed out underneath her skirts and it was blue like a duck egg. His father wore a sugar tuxedo broadly stretched over his chest. On his lapel was a poppy and you could make out the black seeds in its centre. He wore a moustache that he didn’t wear now, two lines neatly executed in black.
At school a fat-necked boy called Darren Farrow announced that world war three was happening and pretty soon it would be the end of everything. He said it with his head tilted back on his neck, he said it looking down his nose, pointing out his chin. ‘My brother’s off fighting ’em an’ pretty soon I’m gonna run off and join him. He says we’ll show those Japs what the carry-on’s about.’
‘I thought Japs lived in Japan?’ said Amy Blackwell, whose father owned the fruit shop, and everyone looked at her.
Darren Farrow fixed her with an ancient and wise look. ‘Those Japs get everybloodywhere. All over the place.’ And she was silenced.
‘It’s like your sort,’ Darren explained, pointing at Leon. ‘All your sort with your dark hair and funny ideas about washing.’ Leon said he didn’t know what ideas Darren thought he had about washing, but he was happy enough to stuff his fat neck with the cream buns he’d made with his two very own stinking hands.
Leon went home after clearing up the blood in his nose, but his mother still noticed and still caused a fuss. ‘With all this going on, and even the babies are at it, trying to kill each other!’ she cried, dabbing at the smear of new blood on his cheek with a Dettol-soaked napkin.
He did not like being called a baby and rubbed his nose till it bled again. His mother came downstairs with her coat and hat on, and marched him out of the door. They nearly crashed into Mrs Shannon from over the road, whose face was always swollen and dark from something that happened in her home, but she still smiled at Leon: it looked like she winked behind her dark glasses. After half an hour on the bus they arrived at the Farrows’ house in Glebe. The Farrows lived in a sandstone building next to a church and it made him hot inside when he thought about their own small rooms above the cake shop, the crumbly walls dark and the smell of toast in the curtains and the blankets. The Farrows’ house had a cream ivory push-button bell, but his mother didn’t like to use it, so instead she knocked hard on the door. No one answered so she knocked harder, until Leon was squeezing her hand in embarrassment. A woman appeared, a look on her face like she couldn’t believe there was someone at her front door. He bit both his lips at the same time and tried not to blink. He saw the end of his nose, red with where he’d been thumped and he could see the tops of his cheeks as well, and they were also red.
‘Mrs Farrow.’
The woman looked Leon’s mother up and down, a blink of recognition showing, she let her face set into a small hard smile. ‘Mrs Collard.’
‘I’d like to talk to you about your son. He’s hit my boy on the nose and gave him blood.’
Mrs Farrow’s eyes came to rest on Leon, and he looked away, like he was thinking about something else. Her English always got worse when she was nervous or angry. He would have liked to have run off then, left his mother to deal with it herself. ‘I think you’re trying to tell me your boy had a nosebleed, Mrs Collard.’
‘Yes, well, fine, but it was your boy, and we’d like him to sorry.’
‘To a-polo-gise,’ Mrs Farrow corrected.
His mother clutched his hand and he tried to slip it out from her grasp. The shame, he could taste it.
Mrs Farrow gave them a prim smile and called out behind her, ‘Darren! Come down here, please. I need you to assist Mrs Collard with her enquiry.’
Leon’s mother shifted feet. He noticed the bluebirds that were painted round the porcelain number 23 that was stuck to the Farrows’ front door. There was a lumping down the stairs and Darren appeared, his nose a strawberry like Leon’s.
Mrs Farrow put her arm round her son’s shoulders. Darren caught Leon’s eye and looked at the floor with a small smile. ‘Now then, Mrs Collard.’ She spoke slowly and loudly. ‘As you can see, any brutalisation that my son visited on your boy was returned doubly. I’d have thought you’d have more pressing issues to think about these days.’ Darren smiled wider at Leon and Leon looked away, knowing Darren was on the brink of laughing.
‘You shouldn’t let your son hurt my little boy.’ Leon’s mother turned to face Darren. ‘Say you are sorry.’ But her voice was softer, as if she’d just then become very tired. Darren looked lost for a second but, looking up at his mother, he gained strength and his smile returned.
‘My boy say sorry to you?’ Her voice rang shrilly in the settling air. ‘Mrs Collard, are you quite retarded? Do you know there is another war going on? Do you know about the Communists, or do you just keep to your own news? My eldest is out there now, waiting to be shipped off. What are you doing? Sitting in your cake shop taking money from the people who put you up when your own country decided they’d had enough? Well, I think that’s rich. It’s you who ought to be apologising; it’s your son who ought to be thanking my boy for letting him stay in his country.’ Leon’s mother had lost the pink of anger, and seemed very small and grey on the doorstep. A neighbour watched lazily from under a sun hat on the other side of the fence. Mrs Farrow was still talking when Leon’s mother turned them both round and started off down the pathway, firmly holding Leon’s hand.
‘Yes, yes, off you go. And if you have a change of heart,’ Mrs Farrow carried on, ‘we’d be more than happy to hear your apology. That’s if you can say the word. Flaming clog wog.’ The door shut and Leon managed to free his hand from his mother’s grip. He reckoned Darren was probably watching from a window, laughing at the sight of him being yanked along. His face boiled. They walked home not talking or touching; even when his nose began to bleed again they both just let it.
The next day at school, Darren had been talking. Briony Caldwell piped up at him as he crossed the playing field, ‘Youse might be the first kid to get a hairy face, Collard, but yer mummy still holds yer hand to cross the road! Does she wipe yer bum too?’ Of all people, Briony Caldwell. Darren smirked from afar.
Amy Blackwell caught Leon’s eye and she held a pencil under her nose and crossed her eyes. For a moment he thought she was doing an impression of him, and he was about to turn away scowling, but then she smiled and he realised she was playing up Briony. Briony noticed too and stared hard at Amy. Amy stuck a finger up at her behind a piece of paper. Only Leon saw, it was only meant for him to see, and it made his breath shallow in his chest.
Someone lobbed a toilet roll at him.
‘Eye ties don’t use toilet paper, they use their hands!’ shrilled Darren happily. ‘He uses his mum’s hand!’
The class erupted and Leon rolled his tongue into his cheek and willed his face not to become red, kept the hidden finger of Amy Blackwell in his mind, the pencil moustache, the crossed blue eyes.
Something was going on with his parents. A few times he’d come home to find a stale silence, his parents avoiding each other, or they might be having a row, which when he entered the room carried on in Dutch. Whatever it was, he could tell that his mother was angry.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked her one night, finding her tucked up on the sofa, a tissue bundled in her fist.
‘Nothing, darling. You know your father. He’s just being a pig head about something.’
‘About what?’
‘Your father thinks he’s more Australian than anything else, that’s all.’ She looked up at him as though she hadn’t seen him before. ‘You’re getting pretty tall there, chicken.’
He smiled because finally she seemed to have noticed. ‘Please don’t call me chicken any more.’
She gave him a blank look that meant she was pretending not to understand.
At the Easter show his father went off alone to talk crumpet with someone, and Leon wandered in and out of stalls. There were kids his age orange-mouthed with fairy floss and wild-eyed with sugar, but somehow it didn’t seem to mean much to him and he drifted home early, reddening at the giggling herds of girls and the clowns and mascots that stalked him.
At home he sat at the kitchen table and sorted through his father’s photographs of brides to be and lined them up with photographs of their cake-top statues. He tried to see what it was that made each face different, what exactly it was – not just the hair or eye colour but the sugar bones underneath the skin, the weight of a tongue in a closed mouth. Upstairs, floorboards creaked like the deck of an old boat under his mother’s feet.
The sky was dark blue before his father returned home, stumbling a little as he came through the door. He was smiling broadly and his cheeks were flushed, and he held a big chocolate egg in the crook of his arm like it was a baby. He set it on the table and Leon could see that there was a fist-sized hole that had been eaten out of it.
‘Ta-da,’ said his father and stood back so that they could both admire it. ‘That’s a Darrell Lee egg.’
Leon nodded. ‘Looks good, Dad.’ It looked dumb, especially the way they were both supposed to look at it and be impressed. His father stepped behind him and all of a sudden put his hands on Leon’s shoulders and breathed through his open mouth. Leon looked up and tried to see his father’s face behind him, but couldn’t quite.
‘It’s all going to be good, you know?’ said his father, his voice a little too loud for the room. ‘We’re going to keep those buggers away. We’re going to look after what’s ours.’ Leon could smell the sweetness on his breath, and wondered who his father thought was going to try and nick a half-eaten Easter egg, even if it was a Darrell Lee. His father stepped to the side so that Leon could see he had raised a finger to bring his attention to what he was about to say. ‘Before you were born, Japanese came into our harbour. Men died to keep us safe.’ He looked at Leon hard as if by looking he might be able to press the weight into him. ‘Me and your mother adopted Australia because our own land became hostile. And they embraced us with open arms.’ He raised his arms and gestured at the ceiling. ‘We have built this shop. We have built a life. And it is a good life. This country has given me your mother and it has given me you, and I mean to defend our good life and our good country.’ He sat down now, heavily, and put his hand on Leon’s arm. For a horrible moment he thought his father might cry. ‘I know you would too if you were just a little bit older.’
From the doorway, his mother asked in a voice that cracked in her throat, ‘What have you done?’
The next few days in the shop passed in silence. Leon took himself off, spending the steamy autumn hours walking into town and watching cars drift over the harbour bridge. He looked at the brown calves of girls but felt like someone might hit him on the back of the head for doing it.
Over tea the next week – pressure-cooked potatoes, a chop each and carrots – his mother broke her silence. She spoke slowly like his father might not understand. She spoke in English so that Leon would. ‘You know what war does. Donald Shannon wasn’t like that before he went away. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to come back.’
His father put down his knife and his fork. From somewhere, a place Leon had never known to exist in his father, a deep rumbling: ‘Be quiet, woman.’
Hot potato stuffed up the back of Leon’s throat and his feel for his food changed, like it had been turned to bin scrapings.
‘I expect support from my wife, Maureen.’ After a moment’s thought he said, ‘These are not Germans.’
His mother flushed pink and stood up, collecting the plates, still full of steaming food. She said, ‘And what happens when you get killed?’
Leon went upstairs when they began raising their voices and their movements made the glasses in the cabinet clink, and immediately regretted it – he should have gone out of the back door, but now he was trapped. His heart beat a new beat. They both seemed to think the other one was stupid and selfish and awful. There was a shout, a slap, a loud one and then another, and they echoed through the house. He lay on his bed, thinking about who had got hit and who had done the hitting. He wondered if he should get up, say something, but he didn’t know what. He decided it was none of his business. After the slaps the house was quiet and he thought about sneaking out, but he felt drained and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes to try to get them to close. He woke itchy, still wearing his clothes, just as a breath of light was coming into the sky. There was a noise like a dog snuffling in the street and he looked out of his window, but there was nothing to see. When he lay back down there was a whine, a scritch-scratch at the front door and something about it made him climb under his sheets and pull them up to his nose. The noise carried on until he heard someone downstairs open the front door. His father must have slept on the sofa. After the door had opened and closed there was just silence, and Leon slept.
In the morning, things were soft. His mother’s eyes were swollen and there was a red mark on the side of her face. She smiled at Leon and her top lip was puffy. He thought he might be sick. ‘It’s okay, chicken. We were angry. I hit him right back.’
And when his father came down there was a mark on his face too, but he put an arm round her waist, and smelt her hair and kissed her neck. Leon went to school, a feeling in his guts that something had changed in the night.
The day Leon’s father left, his army greens taut over his chest and his hat folded on one side like a listening ear, his mother became stiff. There was something wooden in the way she moved, her hair was coiled in a tight bun.
Tea was still at six, and there was still meat and there were still pressure-cooked potatoes. The same dances carried on through from the shop to the house, recipes were still performed to the letter. The same questions were asked of school, of homework, but they were shrunken, boiled down to the bare bones. He could see the oddness of that empty chair, like a ghost at the head of the table. In the kitchen the smell of burnt sugar was paler, like the way his mother burnt sugar was a less rich version. The angel-hair crowns she made sat gummily on top of tarts and he watched her frown, shaking her head and picking the mess off and dropping it in the bin. A missing ingredient. When his father telephoned Leon tried not to listen to the taut noises she made. She called for him to come and talk but he pretended not to be in and slipped out the back. When the first letter arrived, his mother read it aloud with her hand over her mouth like something might try to jump out of there.
Darlings,
There are exciting things that I would like to tell you, but I will keep it quick, as I want to be sure this reaches you in the next post. Training has been hard but I am confident that we will flatten these buggers just as soon as we get to them. I am well, I have some new friends, a man, North, and a younger boy called Mayhew. He is a keen lad, reminds me of you, son. I tell them all about you, Mayhew is too young to have a family yet, but North is missing his misses too. He has a baby girl, and it makes me happy and proud that I have you at home to look after your mother.
Shortly we will be going into the jungle, but we expect it will be a pretty easy ride. Exciting to be entering a new terrain.
I miss three things – the both of you, and caramel sauce on ice cream. Be sure to have it waiting for my return.
Son, kiss your mother for me, because I cannot for now.
Love to you both
When his mother took her hand away she was smiling toothily. She breathed in and out like she’d been holding it and her eyes were glassy. She kissed Leon on the head and he felt her face wet in his hair. The letters arrived, two a month, cheery, upbeat, full of longing for treacle tart or sugar banana flummery. Complaining about the tapioca they were given, the leeches, the mosquitoes. Leon’s mother took long hot baths that steamed up the whole of the top floor.
At school the teacher said, ‘Hold up your hand whoever’s dad is out in Korea now.’
Leon felt sorry for the kids who looked quietly at their desks, as if they were thinking about something else and didn’t care anyway. He held up his hand so high his shoulder clicked. The teacher showed them a book with photographs of the kind of things you got in Korea. You got muskrats and brown bears and tigers. His dad liked animals, he’d be excited to see a tiger. Leon imagined him lying on his front very still among the ferns and watching a tiger roll with its babies in the long grasses.
At home, he practised sugar dolls. At first they had a look of his mother about them, some long-suffering frown in the eyebrows. Sometimes they had their eyes cast up, their cheeks pale pink and their hair neat to their shoulders. Then he did Amy Blackwell, her weight resting on one hip. You could tell that underneath that dress there was a sock, puddled round her ankle, showing a scratched brown calf. Mrs Kanan from the flat above the butcher’s had wide arms, but as a bride she was lovely, with a half-smile. He found a piece of wood to use as an armrest so that his hand was steady as he went when he painted them.
Christmas snuck up like it’d been watching from the bushes. They put together a window display, strings of wine gums so that when the sun shone through the window in the morning they lit up like fairy lights. There was the set of Banksia men, each one painted to be a different member of the nativity. Father Christmas next to the baby Jesus with his many mouths and eyes, and his hairy sack of toys. Outside it was too hot to be in the city and people sat in their yards with as much of themselves in water as possible. Sometimes just their feet in a bucket, but he had seen a few backyards with swimming pools and the wet noises coming from them spread a breeze over your face.
His mother whisked egg whites so that the muscle on her right arm stood out like a stick of butter. He piped snow icing round the edge of angel cakes and the light tick-tick-tick of her whisk was the only noise in the shop. She slammed down the bowl with a shout and slapped the table with the flat of her palm, then left the kitchen. A bead of sweat tickled the inside of his nose. He picked up the whisk and got the whites close to peaking before she came back in and waved him away like he was meddling in something that didn’t concern him. He made treacle toffee, which he wrapped in the purple cellophane that squeaked like a mouse at every twist.
After his mother had made the pavlova and gone for one of her long baths, Leon moved the wireless into the kitchen and chased carols around the stations. Eartha Kitt sang ‘Santa Baby’ and it made his hands still to hear her. He tried to make a Mrs Christmas Eartha Kitt, but the head was too big and it tended to topple over. At any rate his mother’s response when she came down, her hair wet and heaped on her head, was not enthusiastic either. ‘Mrs Santa Claus is a white lady. A big fat white lady.’
So instead he made a turtle dove to hang above the six-tiered pavlova, so that it seemed to be swooping in to pinch the kiwi fruit from the top. It looked okay, swinging there on its fishing line, but it was no Eartha.
Christmas day was tense, full of wide fake smiles and the smell of too many cloves in the pudding. They went to midnight Mass and prayers were said for all those husbands and sons in foreign places. That was when Leon counted in his head and found that there’d been no letter from his father that month. The red smile on his mother’s lips trembled as if the muscles of her mouth were tired.
Over the holiday the shop closed, and Leon went to the bridge and watched people strolling through the harbour in their Christmas outfits. Women with legs the colour of sweet nut glaze, their dresses high and tight to their throats, the clip of their short steps. The girls with the secrets under their skirts, fingernails like preserved cherries. Something watched him from under the bridge, he could feel it, something that snuffled and scritch-scratched. It threw him looks from the coolest bit of shade. A breeze from the water raised the hem of a tutti-frutti skirt and it wavered in slow motion in front of the bridge. His ears growled at him. His mouth was dry, then flooded with spit like he might be sick. People criss-crossed in front of him but his eyes stayed only on the dark under the bridge. He wanted to look at the girls again, the warm softness of them, but his eyes were too tired to move, too lazy to blink, like they had nothing to do with him. That thing threatened to swim out at any second and drag him under, drown him in the cold shade, scritch-scratching. When he got home that night his face and forearms were tight with sunburn. He lay awake in bed feeling his skin dry, feeling it tighten notch by notch, licking his lips to taste the sun and the heat, to keep back the cold thing that waited there, under the bridge.
‘Not my husband,’ he heard his mother say into the telephone later that week. ‘He wouldn’t just stop writing.’
Mrs Shannon came into the shop, her dark glasses off for a change. She had shaded in her eyelids a light-blue colour, with a line of black that ran outwards from the corners of her eyes. She had on red lipstick and a dark-blue type of dress that he might have seen before on a younger girl. On Mrs Shannon it fitted perfectly so that her cleavage was easy to see, and it clung to her thighs and waist in a way that looked nice.
‘Hey, sweetie, you bin sun-baking?’ she said, a smile of perfect straight white teeth that were a little too big for her mouth.
‘What can I get you, Mrs Shannon?’
‘Always so polite, kiddo. I’ll have a florentine, thanks, darl.’ Her voice was so deep that parts of words melted before they left her mouth.
He leant into the counter and picked up a biscuit with a piece of greaseproof paper. His eyes looked for her chest, she caught him looking and he blushed, but she smiled widely.
‘Um, it’s on the house.’ He thought he’d die of embarrassment if she gave him money.
‘Ahh. Thanks, kiddo. You’re a doll. So how’s things in the Bunhouse?’
‘They’re okay, thanks, Mrs Shannon.’
‘You’re looking pretty grown-up these days.’
‘Yeah, well.’ He smiled and blushed and puffed out his chest. He thought for a moment he might try standing on tiptoe, but he didn’t.
‘Guess that’s what happens when the man of the house goes away, uh? The next man steps in. I only had girls, y’see, when Don went away. Not much you can do about that though, an’ he’s back now, so whose complainin’? Would have been good to have a nice strong man like you around the place.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Shannon.’
She shrugged. ‘Just an observation, kiddo.’ Up close, he could make out a mark on her face, close to her eye on her cheekbone. Like something had stained her there, a tea bag or a some brown chalk. A little blueing showed through the make-up as if the flesh there was off, and he realised he was staring at it.
Mrs Shannon just smiled. ‘Not to worry, chickadee. He hasn’t done me in yet.’ She unwrapped her florentine and took a bite. ‘Sa nice bit of biscuit-making, kiddo. Yummie. See you later.’
She turned and walked slowly to the door, and he watched her bottom as she went, guiltily because he had just been looking at the bruise on her face. She turned at the door and gave him a look that might have been playful. But it wasn’t quite pulled off and, framed in the doorway, she looked like someone about to wade out to sea.
He turned away from the look, heard the shop bell ring signalling that she was gone and saw that his mother was watching her go from behind the fly strips of the kitchen. For a moment he felt like he’d been caught out doing something he shouldn’t, but her focus was all on the woman in blue who sashayed down the street. His mother held on to a fly strip, wound it round her finger and unwound it. Her face was pale and tight, her hair wet from the bath.
Eventually a letter came and his mother paused before reading it. Her face darkened, or perhaps a shadow passed over the sun. She leant on one hip, then the other. ‘Your father misses you and he misses walnut and coffee cake with morning tea. He is looking forward to seeing how you have grown. The jungle is hot. He says sorry for not writing sooner. He has been busy. With the war.’
The words came carefully and slowly like his handwriting was difficult to read. She got up and left the room, gripping the letter in her fist. Over the next two days he watched its path, saw it read and reread, while he wiped down the counters in the kitchen, saw it folded and opened and folded again, her nails sharpening the fold in its middle. It was placed between the pages of a book, shut inside a drawer, put in the bin, taken out and put back in a different book. When she took charge at the front of the shop for half an hour he took it from between the pages of Moby Dick and unfolded it.
Mayhew is dead.
They slit his throat.
North is missing. Just upped and went into the jungle.
If either side find him now, he’s dead.
It can’t be stood this jungle. It’s full of scratches.
R
Leon put the letter back in the book and the book back on the shelf. He felt the toothache cold of a shadow at his back, heard a snuffle, but when he turned round it was only his mother standing in the doorway looking at him. She held the wooden spatula that they used to pick up the cakes at the front of the counter. It dangled like a broken arm. Her face was old, all the years she’d been alive seemed to have come on all at once, just that second. She gave him a smile, dull as watered-down milk, then walked to the front door and turned the sign to closed, locked the door. She took off her apron as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom and left it lying over the banister. He waited, his fingertips still holding the taste of the letter. Then he followed her up, found the door to her bedroom open and his mother a lump under the covers. He climbed in too and they stared at the ceiling together.
‘Your father is an only child.’ She smiled, ran a finger along her eyebrows. ‘Like you.’
He raised his head to look at her. The bun of her hair meant that her head was tilted at an odd angle, that there was space underneath her neck. He wanted to fill the space with something soft.
‘I had four brothers. Harold, David, Thomas and Charlie.’ She spoke the names like they were precious things, noises that weren’t often sounded. She raised her hand and put it over her face. ‘Then there was my mother, my father. My aunt and uncles. My sister and her children. We weren’t even proper Jews – just the children of Jews. We never really went to temple, only on the big occasions. But still.’ He felt the windows darkening, closed his eyes and his skin burnt hot where it lay close to hers. The thing was at the door again, but she didn’t seem to hear it. The smell of the room was different, like ashes, like hot dry sand.
‘I was smuggled out early. Just me, the girl. Your father the same, except he was an only child so that was precious. We lived in the same city back home but we never met. Out here it was the one good thing, that we met. And then he goes and does a stupid bitch thing like signing up. I couldn’t believe it.’ The word ‘bitch’ in his mother’s mouth sounded like the most foreign thing she had ever said. She sighed. ‘He didn’t see those photographs. He didn’t want to look, but I did, I saw. I looked close at those photographs, I wanted to see my brothers’ faces. But they all looked the same.’
There was a photograph he’d found a long time ago, hidden between the pages of an atlas, cut from the paper. At first he’d thought he was looking at a record catch of fish, a netful dumped on a wharf somewhere. But then he’d seen the wax eye sockets and empty mouths, the arms and legs smooth and white. He’d seen the nakedness and that had been the worst part, that he’d wanted to see those parts, between the legs where everything sank into darkness. They’d seen other pictures at school, but there the people were alive, wrapped in shawls, saved. No look of relief in their faces. Nothing. He stayed still and watched the skin of her throat stretch and relax as she swallowed. ‘But this is a different war. Yes. This is a different thing altogether.’ She looked at Leon and her eyes were black marbles.
The next week a young man stood smartly at the door. Leon watched as his mother gripped him to her, heard a noise from her throat and thought, he’s dead. The young man stood very straight, his face red, his cap in his hand, blinking over her shoulder. He said, ‘There, there, ma’m,’ like a Yank. Then he left.
His mother sat holding Leon’s hands in front of her, her eyes bright, and white and red. ‘He’s been taken. Trapped. Caught. Now, this doesn’t mean anything, nothing at all,’ she said, her face a stone in a creek. ‘This is not like the last war – these are different people. It doesn’t mean anything at all, nothing, you hear?’
He nodded, shook free a hand and touched her shoulder. It was awkward, it seemed like some part of her he shouldn’t go near. Her eyes closed and she pulled him towards her so that they collided with their chests, and there was a hard ache in his throat. He breathed wetly into her shoulder, felt the same breath going back into his lungs, thought he’d like to shake her off and run out of the shop, tear down the street, run all the way to the bridge and find the thing in the ice-cold shadows, let it eat him whole. But instead he breathed in and out, counting the breaths, swallowing, his throat compressed against her shoulder. At least he was alive. They don’t shoot you in prison, they just keep you till it’s time to be let out.
In the next weeks, Leon would come across his mother staring into the open refrigerator, hanging there as though something unexpected had been put inside, the eggs replaced with light bulbs. Sometimes her lips moved soundlessly. He wondered what she saw then – whether she was talking to his father. Was it him in there? She still called Leon chicken and worried about the stiffness of his collar when he went out, fussed at the edge of his mouth with a wet hanky as if there were some grub there. But when she was in the bath or at night when she closed the door to her bedroom things became very quiet, like she had sat down just inside the room and stayed still until morning. Sometimes he looked through the keyhole to check she was actually there and she would be lying in bed, the covers up to her throat, with hardly a crease in them. She lay bone straight, her chest barely rising and falling, her eyes wide open. She stared at the ceiling like she was stopping it from falling on her. Once she sat in a chair, rigid, a wax creature with a tin frame. The chair was turned into the corner of the room, right up against the wall, so that her toes must have touched the skirting board. The back of her neck tense, still as the hot air.
At school things caught at his hair and plucked at the back of his trousers. His pen moved slowly across the page, ink swelled into the paper. He felt himself trapped between the bone and flesh of his face, and he couldn’t move. Everyone else’s hands moved at impossible speed over their work, the noises of the classroom were high-pitched and speeded up, made no sense. He felt his own body, a sluggish weight, pale and thick, a rock with a wooden shell. With effort he stood up, ignored the squealed noises of the teacher, the weird electric sound of laughter, saw only that Amy Blackwell’s blue eyes watched him as he walked out of the classroom, away from the school, heavy enough that he might sink into the ground and suffocate, or else fall on the pavement and shatter into splinters.
At home his mother was sitting on the kitchen floor, the fridge door open, flour sprayed all over, eggs smashed and warming up on the linoleum.
He squatted down by her, moved a damp curl of hair that tangled in her eyelashes. ‘I don’t reckon I’ll go back to school, Ma,’ he said slowly and she looked up at him, as if seeing him for the first time.
She put her hands over his ears, bent her neck so that their foreheads were touching. ‘If you’re sure, sweet chicken. If you’re sure.’