AFTER THE FIRE,A STILL SMALL VOICE

21
There was no sleep for Frank that night and none the next either. His ears were blocked, his sinuses pulsed. He had water on the ear, that was the problem. It was in there rolling about against his eardrum and no amount of head shaking, no amount of fingers in earholes made the slightest difference. His head ached. It looked like the cut on his palm had got infected, small seawater boils had formed round the opening and it throbbed in time with his sinuses. Everything was muffled and hot. He tried to eat some pilchards for breakfast but they turned his stomach and he left them for the hens to pick apart, making their beaks red with tomato juice. His beard itched, felt lumpy round the throat with whorls and clumps of hair, and he couldn’t leave it alone, but the idea of shaving it floored him. He’d have to scissor it first, then the tearing grind of his blunt razor. There’d be blood drawn for sure.
Frank’s eyes felt salty, the rims of them were tender and he could feel tingles on his lips that might be cold sores coming. He wanted to peel his face off and clean it from the inside. Instead he opened a beer. It was early morning, but what difference did the morning make to a man who hadn’t slept? He stayed on his bed, the dark inside the shack was better on his eyes. The shark two days before was like a story he’d overheard. Every time he thought about it he heard the ticking noise all those crabs had made, their hairy legs scrabbling around in the bottom of the surf ski. They’d eaten blue swimmers for four days solid, then they had started to smell and the last ones had to be chucked, dead, back to the sea. He thought about Pokey’s niece with the red drinking straw, and Joyce Mackelly’s jawbone. He thought about Johno with his black hair and the way he’d disappeared into the long sharp grass. The smell of smoke was still on his skin and so was Vicky’s coat. He thought of Bob, who smiled too often too widely, Linus who watched everything and knew something secret, Stuart and his kids and his fish. It was all sad and lost already, and on top of it sat Lucy and he knew what she would have said. The thought of having her nearby seemed like the most perfect thing. A body that was his to touch and to fit in front of his like a piece of interlocking shell.
The air in the shack smelt. Or maybe he smelt, you couldn’t know these things for sure. It was the smell of lots of people pressed in all together, sweating up against each other, breathing their bad breath. Frank took a wander outside; the chickens were nowhere in sight. He couldn’t hear the birds in the trees but he knew they were there, saw the leaves of the blue gums shifting around. He ploughed through the cane, made for the cover of the trees, where maybe the air was thinner, where maybe he wouldn’t notice the silence so goddam much. He’d have to stock up on drink but he was too spliced to drive, even he knew that. With a rambling forward motion he was able to lurch into the coolness of the trees and there was the smell of eucalypt, strong and heavy but medicinal, like it cleaned up his throbbing hand, soothed his eyes.
He contemplated lying down by the creek and passing the rest of the day there, but the creek was low and there were green ants. Besides, he’d need more drink if he was going to avoid the hangover. Maybe he was sick, he thought, as he ambled on, untangling himself from a vine of stay-a-while and feeling genuine surprise at the rash of blood pricks it left round his ankle. An hour or maybe two or maybe ten minutes later, he came to the cane of the Haydons’ boundary. The cane was thin and low, and it was more of a wade than a swim through it to their farm. Bob’s car wasn’t around and it occurred to Frank that maybe it was Vicky he wanted to see anyway. It was hot as buggery, the air was low and wet, and he was still deaf. He could feel sweat creeping down the skin underneath his beard. He scratched at his throat and felt the lumps there – hives, maybe, or boils, something growing under his skin, hatching out.
He stood outside the house and looked at the place. The big veranda all around hung with seashell wind chimes and pot plants that wrapped themselves round the corner posts. A small wind moved his hair, cooled the burn of his beard. Vicky appeared at the door in a loose white shirt, her bare legs flowing out of it, her chafed ankles and scarred brown knees.
She mumbled something that Frank couldn’t understand. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Can’t hear you. Damn water in me ears.’
‘I said,’ she shouted, ‘Jesus, Frank, you look like a f*ckin’ monster!’ She jerked her head towards the indoors. ‘Come in and have a sit in front of the air-con!’
She sat him by a machine that he could feel vibrating through his feet, it sounded like a tractor even through the buggered drums of his ears, and she went from the room. The air that came out of it was antiseptic, cold enough to give him an instant headache and burn the tunnels of his nose. It was a beautiful thing. When she came back, she was wearing a pair of worn men’s shorts and holding a jug of water with ice and a glass.
‘You look like you’ve done a pretty good job at dehydrating yourself!’ she called at him from in front of his face. He took the water she poured for him and felt it go sharp down his neck. It was as though there was a spine in his throat, a stuck dry fishbone that he couldn’t get wet. Vicky mumbled something and Frank shook his head at her, closed his eyes to feel the blast of cold on his eyelids. He felt hands on his face and opened his eyes to see she’d brought a basin of soapy water and some scissors. He blinked as she cut away at the tufts of hair round his face, twirling them loose round her fingers. He felt the disgust of himself and it made him angry that she was there to see it, but he couldn’t stop her. He watched her watching where she cut, her tongue pink between her lips, her eyebrows drawn together. When she produced a razor and began to massage warm water into his beard he felt the dirt coming free, watched in amazement as she smiled and the lather grew up round his face. He heard the scraping from inside his body, felt the overpowering itches being scratched. The water in the basin was dark grey with hair and dirt and blood before she switched to a new razor.
She was talking now, softly to herself perhaps, and he could hear a mumble, but not the words. Her frown deepened as she shaved under his chin and he saw her wince at something there. She got up and went to the kitchen and when she came back she had a box of matches, tweezers, and a pin stuck on the end of a cork. Outside there was a roll of thunder and, as it passed over, Frank’s ears cleared and hot seawater ran down his neck. There was a whine from his tear ducts. ‘I can hear,’ he said.
‘It speaks,’ said Vicky.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Ticks. You’re buggered with them.’ She tilted back his head and heated the pin in the flame of a match until it was black, then approached his throat with it. He felt a small warmth, a pressure and Vicky went in with the tweezers, her eyes squinting. Frank held his breath and she moved back. ‘Got ’im,’ she said under her breath and dropped the bud-looking bastard into the water. She heated the pin again and went back to it. With the pin to his throat she said, ‘Bob told me what happened back in Canberra, you know.’ Frank didn’t reply. His face was hot. ‘Reckon you might be making yourself a little bit crazy out there all alone?’
‘What about you?’ He felt angry suddenly, dangerous, the urge to grab her wrist and look her in the eye. But he didn’t.
‘What about me, what?’
‘Bob catches it a bit off you sometimes. Can’t tell me you’re not driving yourself a little bit nuts.’ There was a small sharp pain in his neck and he couldn’t tell if she’d pricked him on purpose.
She smiled softly and there was a silence, an intake of breath. She sat back on her stool, another tick held tight between the jaws of the tweezers. ‘It’s not me that does that to Bob.’
‘You mean it’s not the real you?’
She smiled tightly. ‘No. I mean he does it himself. I’ve had to pull the lock off the bathroom door. He goes in there and hits his face against the sink.’
Frank was silent and Vicky continued removing the ticks. He felt his mouth fill up with spit, swallowed it down.
‘I imagine he told you it was me doing it? Being an hysterical woman all over the place? He sleeps so deeply it doesn’t wake him up when he cries out at night. These real sobs like a kid.’
Another tick out, a plip in the dirty water.
‘I can’t lie there listening to it. When Emmy died there was none of that. We didn’t cry, we just watched and that was all there was.’ The room lit up with lightning and outside the storm started with the sky falling like sand on the roof.
Frank sat in the doorway of his shack, clean-shaven, and drank instant coffee, watching the rain pouring off the corrugated roof in needle stripes of white and feeling the spray of rain on his face as it bounced off the veranda.
In the afternoon, lightning struck a field far off to the north and he heard, above the roar, the sound of trucks speeding towards it, smoke a spear on the horizon.
One storm passed with another right behind and in between the sun shone more furiously than before, trying to clean up the mess, suck up all the extra water before the next one arrived. Mist rose on the top green leaves of the sugar cane. The chickens, fluffed and offended by the storm, ventured out to pull up fat earthworms from the battered soil.
The thunder that night had Frank, Kirk and Mary awake, wide-eyed and indoors: the sound overhead of great concrete wheels rumbling and warping over the shack; the blackness between the lightning, and the flat colour when the lightning stuck; the orange bucket by the blue Ute; the green green green of the cane and the white sky; the frozen water coming down, pale and thick. He imagined at each strike a figure before the darkness and wished there were someone he could crawl into bed with. Someone who would see the rain falling like razor blades and breathe their own breath into the shack so that the window would steam up. He held a candle by the mirror and looked at the marks the ticks had left under his chin. Nine little puncture marks. He wanted to show Lucy. She’d be fascinated. She’d touch them with her cold fingers. He looked at his face and wondered what he’d have to do.
The chooks were asleep on the veranda. He emptied out a whole bag of feed around the place – he had seen them get on to the roof with furious flapping, so he figured they’d be safe from foxes. He tippy-toed to the truck, hoping not to wake them as he left.
Early in the morning the rain stopped and the sky was a leftover ice-blue. Frank stopped at a roadside for breakfast. Over tired eggs and sleepy toast, he watched other people in the truck stop. He didn’t know if they were good or bad, these lives other people had. Large men looked blankly out over the highway, a mess of yellow eggs and coffee in front of them or, for the ones whose stomachs had long forgotten the conventions of breakfast, a meat pie and cola. Their thoughts still seemed to be of the road. He tore at a napkin. It would be good to have something to concentrate on. He asked himself questions that he felt he must know the answers to. They must be somewhere inside his brain. The right thing to do. What will I say? was the one that went round and round, and came out of his mouth with answers that never got beyond hello, because he was stopped by the word Dad. The adverts on the radio spooked him, and he turned it off and ended up counting the white lines in the road as he drove over them, or finding a tune in the engine’s revs.
The smell of Sydney came rolling at him as he reached the outskirts. The ozone, the diesel and the thick brown river. A ball bounced in his stomach. By the time he reached Parramatta he’d got as far as picturing opening the door to the shop so that he could say hello and hum the British national anthem.
The streets were black with past rain. The sun was bright now, thick yellow, and it bounded off the pavement taking steam with it. Familiar places started to show themselves. Old bus routes and short cuts to the centre of town. The smell of hot treats from the main streets. Trees lined the streets in countable rows. Smoke and electric light, the hum of aeroplanes, trains and cars, taxis and their beetling movements. It seemed to him everyone was putting on a show of living in a city; that the moment his back was turned the crowds of people, the bustle and movement would stop. The whole place would empty and sand would settle over the slick bitumen, dust clog up the wide windows of the shopping centres, the tide would swallow Bronte Beach and make its way up over the Harbour Bridge. When the Parramatta river appeared he was surprised by its brownness, by the earthiness of it, next to the steel and rust and concrete.
The Shannons’ florists had closed up, he noted with a slug of pleasure. He’d gone to school with June Shannon, a snub-nosed girl with critical eyes who lived with her grandmother. He parked the truck out at the front, felt his heart slip down into his bowels and knocking, trying to come out the other end. He could walk round the block a couple of times first. But his legs took him straight there, the old grooves dug by walking home from school, from the jacaranda tree and the park at night. The last time he’d seen the place there’d been blood in his mouth, a backward glance over his shoulder to see if his dad was watching. He wasn’t.
The shop looked different. The glass in the front window was spotless. Signs had been printed out from a computer and white-tacked neatly to the glass, advertising things he’d never imagined his father approving of – cheese twists and smoothies, chicken and mushroom pies, and milky coffees. There was a new sign with a pink halogen light behind it. His palms sweated and he thought about the truck waiting for him round the corner. The door of the shop opened and June Shannon stepped out, whip thin with that upturned nose. She held a fistful of blond child in one hand and a can of light lemon in the other. Frank looked at the ground and rubbed a spot of grease with the toe of his shoe. Don’t recognise me, June. His face got hot. Please don’t f*ckin’ recognise me.
But she had a memory for faces. ‘Frank? Frank Collard?’ She bobbed her head up and down to try to lift his gaze.
He nodded, collected a smile together. ‘June. How are you?’
She looked thrilled to see him, but the blond child wriggled and tugged at her. ‘I’m pretty good, Frank – Clay!’ She shook the arm of the wriggling kid. ‘Get back inside!’
The kid looked up at her from under a heavy brow, sullen and threatening a scream. ‘But Ma!’
‘Inside, now – we’ll go later. I have to talk to the man here.’ Little Clay gave him an ugly look up and down, before turning round and stomping back into the shop. Frank’s teeth bit his lip.
‘Sorry ’bout that, Frank,’ she said, flattening down her T-shirt. He shrugged, tried to smile. ‘Well, we haven’t seen you around here in a time!’ She was talking like a woman from the deep south of America. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘I’ve moved up north – country sort of thing.’
She nodded, eyes wide. ‘So, you had a fight with your old man?’
He blinked, didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. Which didn’t seem to bother her.
‘So what d’ya think to the old place? Have we looked after her all right?’ She chuckled and he didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘You want to come on in?’ She squinted into the brightness at him. ‘Give youse a Coon Cheese Twist on the house!’ She chuckled again, stepping back and holding the door open for him. He saw a slice of inside. The counter was in a different place and behind it stood a man, fat and glazed like a doughnut. He wore a green apron.
‘June – you live here?’
She looked unsure of herself for the first time, ‘You didn’t know? – Oh. Well,’ she said a bit softer, letting the door swing closed and taking a few paces towards him. ‘Your old man left some months back, Frank. Me an’ Jimmy.’ She nodded in the direction of the doughnut man. ‘We bought it up from him with the money Gran left. Sorry, Frank – were you looking for him? Jeeze, that makes it kind of awkward, eh?’
He turned round and headed away from the shop without a word. His skin prickled. He worried that June wasn’t as big a bitch as she had been when he was young and perhaps she was hurt by his abrupt departure, but he thought it just as likely that she watched him march away from the shop with a look of having sunk an enemy ship.
The Parramatta Hotel had been painted cream orange since he’d last seen it. There was an old black dog tied up outside, its water bowl boiling in the sun. He untied it before going in and it sloped off down the street looking over its shoulder at the pub. Inside the dark-blue carpet still stuck to his feet. A blackboard still read STEAK WITCH. It was dark and smoke drooped in the air. He ordered a beer. Horses ran on a black and white television at the bar, but no one watched them. He fidgeted with a beer mat as the drink went down him. Six men sat in quiet communion in the pool room drinking and avoiding each other’s eyes. He felt sick. He tried to think, but all that would come was that last time, busting into his father’s room, the smell of the grey sheets, the air thick and damp like breath. His dad lay underneath the bedsheet, the bare ticking spoiled round his shoulders. He hadn’t sat up, hadn’t moved anything but his eyes, which swivelled towards the door. A liquorish cigarette wilted at the edge of his mouth. Frank had felt the violence leave him because what would he do? Pull the sheets away? Leave his father naked and splayed on the bed like a baby? His father didn’t speak, but there was the smallest twitch from his eyebrow, his lips hanging on to the cigarette.
‘You don’t even know what you’ve done, do you?’ Frank had asked.
The tip of the cigarette had glowed weakly.
Frank drank and drank some more.
By the time the street lights came on outside the pub his legs were heavy with beer and the bar nuts did nothing to soak it up. He looked at the dirt under his nails and wanted to go home. Strange to call it home. A voice said movie-like in the gloom of the bar, ‘Thought I might find you here.’ It was June but without her exclamations.
‘June.’ He raised his glass, then looked away from her.
She smiled and he could hear it. ‘You going to buy me a drink, Collard? Thought maybe we could swap stories.’
He took a ten-dollar note from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Get yerself somethin.’ Crikey, he thought as she moved towards the bar. I’m buyin’ June Shannon a drink. Wonder if I’ll get the change. The thought tickled him and he was smiling when she got back with her own beer. She gave him the change. There was a silence while she got started on her drink and he wondered why she’d come.
‘So where’s . . . Jimmy?’
She drank past the halfway mark of her beer before she answered, ‘Top Pub.’
Another silence while he turned this over. ‘How come you’re not there?’
‘This is my local. Not Jimmy’s. Anyway – I thought you could do with a friendly ear.’ She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her own ear. Then she trailed a finger down her throat and rested it on her collarbone. He felt angry and looked away. She finished her beer, got up wordlessly and went to the bar again. When she came back she had a new one for him too.
‘Quick drinking.’
She shrugged. ‘Thirsty. So!’ The exclamation was back. ‘You’re living up north now then? What do you do there?’
‘I work on a boat. Occasionally.’
‘So, your woman left you?’ she said, not batting an eyelid.
He felt his ears move back on his head. Same old June. ‘My woman?’ He tried to make it sound insignificant, something to be snorted at, but he snorted too loudly and sounded angry. ‘What is it that you heard about my woman, June?’
She shrugged. ‘Lucy, wasn’t it?’
He pictured himself knocking out June’s front teeth. He drank the rest of his old drink instead, and put the new cold beer in its place. He drew his lips back over his teeth and looked up at her. ‘How did you know her name?’
‘You say it like she’s dead.’
‘How do you know she’s not?’
He’d meant to scare her but only scared himself.
‘She was here. Looking for you.’
He breathed out another snort. ‘She was not here,’ he said under his breath like she was a child telling tales. Lucy wouldn’t look for him here. She wouldn’t look for him. He felt sick. She said nothing. Someone turned off the old television and it made a snapping noise.
‘She left you?’
The beer burnt in his chest. ‘That’s nothing to talk about.’ He slapped his palm on the table, spilling the first centimetre of his drink. There was a long silence but June didn’t look uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure if he’d imagined the whole conversation, if he wasn’t just making this up in his head.
But she was still holding her shit shovel. ‘It must feel weird to come back home and your old man’s gone. I can’t believe he didn’t tell you! We paid fair price on that shop, Frank, I can tell you. I’d be on to him for a fix of it – you worked there for a time, after all.’
She glittered in the cigarette smoke. He was silent. He wanted to ask questions but then again, he did not. He didn’t want the answers and he especially didn’t want the answers she would give him.
‘I can tell you where he’s gone. I can tell you why. And I can tell you with who.’
He peeled a bar mat; drank his beer. There were pins and needles in his bum bones.
She took a swallow and ran her tongue over her teeth. ‘Do you know about that, Frank? Know about the woman he went with? An evangelist, Frank. F*cking true. She passed through here like honey on a stick and your old dad stuck to her.’
‘I’ve never heard such a troop of bollocks. He doesn’t believe in God.’
‘Maybe, Frank, but I was here. Where were you? You can ask the guy at the bar if you like – he near as well lost his best customer.’
He felt hot and sick. He couldn’t work out why he was having this conversation, why he didn’t leave, get in his car and drive back home, even as drunk as he was. How had she known her name? He tried to picture Lucy talking to June, but it didn’t fit. Lucy would have hated her.
‘Look, Frank, I’m telling you this because you have a right to know. I got the evangelist woman’s address in case they needed mail forwarded. And because, frankly’ – she let the joke hang in the air – ‘I was interested.’
She took a layer of his shredded bar mat and got the stub of a pencil out of her pocket. He recognised the pencil as one that had been kept tucked behind his father’s ear at the shop. Then he thought how ridiculous, how stupid – there must be thousands of millions of pencils the same as that one. Even so he had to fight an urge to collect it from June’s fingers and hold it gently in his palm. He must have drunk more than he realised. She wrote an address on the mat and drew a little box round it. Then she got up to go to the bar again.
‘You seem pretty familiar with where he lives,’ he said as she came back.
‘It’s an interesting place.’
‘Interesting?’
‘A real bunch of loonies. You’ve heard of Billy Graham? He founded it in the fifties. People there are either evangelist or they leave. Apart from that, the place’s got beef.’
He took the piece of paper and looked at it. He didn’t want to put it in his pocket in front of her. ‘You must be pretty bored down here, June.’
For the first time she flinched. ‘Well, f*ck you then, Frank.’ She looked like she might leave, but settled back down. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’ She looked poisonous now in the smoke of the bar.
‘Beg pardon?’ he said, amused and letting her know it.
‘So you’ve got nothing, well boohoo, Frank – what about me? Huh? What about me, I’ve got everything now, haven’t I?’
He sat back a little on his stool, not sure where she was headed.
‘I got the shop, I got the family, I got the f*cking lump of a useless husband.’ She held her fingers out towards Frank. ‘I married that loser – can you reckon that?’
‘June . . .’
‘And on top of that I’ve got kids. Three. An’ one on the way.’
‘You’re pregnant? Don’t you think . . .’
She held up a hand. ‘Don’t you f*cking say it, Frank.’
She drank, her eyes one long rectangle of dark. She put the glass down gently like it was precious. ‘You have no idea . . . just. You can do what you like. There’s no one. There’s no one to think about. You work on a boat . . . occasionally? You’re able to just leave the shop, your old man, Parramatta, f*cking Sydney?’
‘It’s not about freedom, June–’
‘Yes it f*cking is.’
She stood up. To Frank she swayed, but he wasn’t sure if she really did. ‘You should know,’ she said. ‘She’s pregnant too.’
June walked out of the bar.
He slept sitting up in the passenger seat of his truck. His mouth kept falling open and waking him, and when the sun came up he felt the floating heat of his hangover push against his chest. The night echoed grimly and he drove out of Sydney feeling the day cook him. He would have welcomed another storm, something to wash away the baked-bread smell of the inside of the Ute.
The way Frank remembered it, he’d come straight from school, where things had started to even out. Bo hadn’t been there when he went back and Eliza looked away from him if he saw her on the street. The thought of glue or gasoline or even mull made his chest tight under his shirt. The shop door was unlocked, but the sign read ‘Closed’ and no lights were on. The only stock out were the four trays of scones he’d made before the sun was even up. That morning he had got the idea that things could be done, things could fix up. The past month or so, his dad had even got into a cobbled-together routine of laying out the food – shop-bought cakes, mainly, but still – and they’d talked the week he’d got out of hospital about how the shop used to be, about how good it could be made.
And so, when he found the woman in the kitchen wearing the dress with the oranges on it, something hot and sticky had risen at the back of his throat. The dress was not on his mother, so it bagged round the waist and the woman inside it had flesh at the edge of her armpits that sagged over the top. She was making eggs in a pan, which were burning, while she was smoking and looking through the cupboards, bare feet, hair the colour of wet lint.
‘Who are you?’ he’d asked, although there wasn’t an answer she could give that might make the whole thing okay.
She turned to face him with a big smile that showed her teeth were cheesy. ‘Whose yerself?’ she asked, appraising him with one arm crossed at her waist, the other falling free at her side, wrist up holding the cigarette. There was a sort of rash or a pink burn along her forearms, some sort of dry-skin problem that went all the way up to the inside of her elbow. She pointed her fag hand at him like she’d just solved a puzzle. ‘Oh,’ she said, her voice a mix of husk and moisture, ‘you’re the son.’
After a few hours of driving Frank had to stop at a service station and he bent over the toilet, heaving, until nothing more would come out. His eyes streamed. The tick bites itched. He bought a litre of Coke and drank it in the Ute.
Roedale was a mixed bag of dust and meat. Grey weary-skinned cows stood in grass that had turned brown and curled in the sun, while eddies of dust flew up round their worn ankles. Two large palm trees marked the entrance to the town, their heads strange and dark against the sky. You could drive from one end of town to the other in less than a minute and there were roundabouts at each end, so that you could boomerang back in if you were thinking of leaving, or take second thoughts if you were thinking of coming. He didn’t falter, not one bit, he held the address hard between his thumb and index finger, and kept his eyes ahead on the empty road. He stopped at a sandwich bar, the God Bless Café, to ask directions.
The lady behind the counter had glasses that took up three-quarters of her face and below them she had very little chin. ‘How doin’, mate?’ she asked.
‘Good. Thanks,’ he said, pretending to survey the dry sliced meats on display, nodding. He looked at his piece of beer mat. ‘Was wondering if you could tell me where to find Fantail Rise?’
She looked at him, bug-eyed through the thick lenses. ‘End a town; turn left, mate.’
She spoke loudly with long pauses between words, like she’d learnt to speak through a spelling computer. A screw loose or local colour, he wasn’t sure. Too much meat at a young age.
‘Thanks, mate,’ he said, turning to leave.
‘No warries, mate,’ said his friend. ‘God blesses you, mate!’ she called as he stepped back into the sun.
He walked the main street. God’s Own Greens sold fruit and vegetables, and advertised choko like it was a cure for cancer. The butcher’s was called David and Goliath’s, an op shop, I Work for Jesus!
There was no pub and he wondered how that went with his old man. A bottle shop would have been good, just to take the edge off the hangover, but nowhere looked hopeful.
CHRIST ROSE FROM THE DEAD AND IS COMING SOON!! in big fat letters as the town banner. A sign in the window of Saint Shortie’s Snack Bar: ALL MEN EVERYWHERE ARE LOST AND FACE THE JUDGEMENT OF GOD!! Everything seemed to want a couple of exclamation marks after it; all signs were neon.
It didn’t seem possible that a man like his father could live here. The last time Frank had seen him he’d been grey and silent in a doorway with nothing in his face to show there was any kind of thought going on inside. The colour he had been it was hard to imagine there was even blood in there.
Fantail Rise had no rise in it. The road was long and straight and flat, and the houses were sparse, with large front yards bristling with razor grass. He found the house and stood outside while a hot sweat got him. It was white weatherboard, with a porch – not a veranda, somehow. The curtains were bright and lace. It had been a bad idea to walk, it was just past midday and his face burnt; there were dark patches under his arms and on his chest. His feet twitched saltily in their boots.
As he stood in the drive, an orange Holden pulled up behind him and he was trapped. The woman who got out wore a broad smile of old-fashioned red. She was younger than his father, or perhaps she worked very hard to look younger. He wondered suddenly if she’d been shown photographs of him. Closer up the woman’s eyes were blue.
‘Hello, darl, can I help you?’ she said in a voice laced with Perth and Texas. There was a silence. The woman put her hands on her neat hips, glanced behind him at the house.
‘Does Leon Collard live here?’
‘Leo?’ The woman’s smile wilted a little. She moved to the back of the car, opened the boot and started to take out shopping bags. ‘What d’you want with Leo?’ she asked turning round, laden.
‘I’m a friend.’
The woman looked at him and smiled again. She shut her mouth and tilted her head to one side. ‘You’re awfully young to be his friend.’ Her eyes were bright.
‘Well, he was a friend of my father’s.’
‘Well, how about that, darl?’ she asked him softly. He wondered if he should help her with her shopping, but then it might seem as if he wanted to get inside her house. They stood quietly, the shopping bags making a noise against the woman’s leg.
‘So . . . is he in?’
‘No – but you’d better come in – help me with these, won’t you?’
He took the bags from her, sweatily, and let himself be ushered inside her house, which was unlocked. She stood in the doorway behind him and checked up and down the street before closing the door. He stood, ballasted by the shopping.
The woman smiled large again. ‘Straight through to the kitchen,’ she said, dropping her car keys in a bowl and wiping her eyebrow with one finger. ‘It certainly is a hot one today – did you come far? I’m Merle, by the way. Leo’s wife.’
His face felt sugar-coated, stiffened. ‘Frank,’ he said, still holding the shopping, forgetting he was incognito.
Merle took the bags from him and smiled, her eyebrows raised in perfect ns. She placed the bags on the counter. ‘Now,’ she said, turning her full attention to him. ‘What kind of cordial would you like?’
He sat on the edge of an over-soft sofa that threatened to fold him in two if he sank too deeply and sipped a bright-green drink in a thick glass. Merle was putting away her frozens and he waited, feeling like a grubby child. A black and white portrait of a young man hung over an electric fireplace, the man’s expression seemed to say, infallibly and sternly, yes. Yes to what he wasn’t sure, but definitely yes to something. The picture was backlit so that the man seemed to be coming from the light, looming out in the dark. WILLIAM FRANKLIN GRAHAM, AUGUST 1956 it read on a small gold-leaf plaque in a neat black hand beneath him.
He watched in alarm as a crumb of mud fell off one of his boots. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.
‘I hope you like scotch fingers, Frank!’ Merle said, appearing in the doorway. ‘Your father’s favourite.’ He knew that they were not and thought this before realising she knew who he was. He pretended not to notice and accepted a biscuit from the elaborately decorated plate. The biscuit made a noise when he picked it up, a squeak against the china, which was, for some reason, embarrassing.
Merle switched on the large television that had a wooden statue of Jesus doing a peace sign on top. She snatched the remote control and muted an advert for turtle wax, then placed the control back on top of the television, next to Jesus and the scotch fingers. She settled in an armchair and made a sighing noise, like she had finally been made at ease. Frank saw that she had reapplied lipstick in the kitchen and despite her comfortable sigh, her mouth was firm and shut.
Merle’s cordial was bright pink – cherry – he could smell it. What he really wanted was a cold beer, something to kill the awkwardness of this strange meeting.
‘Thanks for that.’ He gestured to the drink that he couldn’t seem to swallow. She smiled, mouth still closed. Frank’s eyes wandered over to the television, some huge supermarket with a couple gaily pushing their empty trolley towards it. There was a burst of fluorescent stars and then the couple emerged, surprised and jubilant, their trolley full to overflowing. The woman picked out a bottle of shampoo and held it to her cheek. The man inspected some aluminium barbecue tongs as though they were just the weapons he needed.
‘So is, um, Leon at work?’ It was weird to use his first name and Merle raised an eyebrow.
‘We call him Leo now – like the lion? Due back around seven o’clock tonight, Frank – he’s been away on a trip.’
‘A trip?’
‘He sells The Book.’
‘The Book?’ His brain caught up with him. ‘The Bible Book?’
‘The very same.’
There was a needlework embroidery on the wall – in fact, there were several. They said things like CHRIST IS BEYOND OUR UNDERSTANDING and GLORY IN THY NAME. The one that was the most impressive, that was decorated with hearts and flowers, roses and poppies, vines and oranges, read AFTER THE FIRE, A STILL SMALL VOICE.
Merle noticed him looking. ‘Leo does those himself,’ she said. Frank was unable to stop the honk of a laugh that came out of him. He immediately thought he would be sick. He imagined his father sitting there in an apron delicately sewing away, a small smile on his lips. ‘Takes time and dedication and love to get those looking so good,’ said Merle. She parted her lips and smiled again, a line of sunlight blanketing her tightly pressed shins. Frank thought about the time he’d opened his lunch box at school to find a tin of sardines, missing the key to open them, and a balled-up sock.
‘It must be quite a lot to take in after all these years. I know that he didn’t always believe, Frank.’ A long silence followed during which Merle took a sip of her drink and blotted her lips on a napkin. Frank could not take his eyes off the embroidery. Merle rolled her tongue in to her cheek.
‘So this place was actually invented by Billy Graham?’
Merle smiled. ‘We prefer discovered. Or saved.’
‘Right.’ He wondered if he would have it in him to get up and leave, just to pretend he never came, ignore Merle as he crossed the room, leaving his scotch finger and lime cordial untouched, a trail of mud to the door.
‘Billy was the biggest thing to happen in Roedale.’ She shuffled forward a bit, lowered her voice like she was telling a fairy tale. ‘When I was a very young girl, I didn’t even know who Jesus was – thought he was something like Father Christmas, I think.’ She sat back in her seat a little, eyes on Frank’s. ‘See, my family weren’t the believing kind. At Christmas the town’d set up this chocolate wheel, and all the kids would line up and buy tickets and hope their number would be called, hope they’d be the ones eating all that sweet chocolate. Only – that chocolate wheel – all you’d ever win were cuts of meat.’ Merle took another sip, blotted, looked towards the portrait. ‘That was an ill-named wheel.’
Frank took his cordial to his mouth, wetted his top lip and took it away again.
‘But when Billy called your number, that’s when you really got chocolate.’ She looked back at him and held his gaze.
‘Right.’ He nodded. This was a mistake.
‘Do you understand, Frank? A place can’t exist on meat alone.’
‘But meat and Jesus works out for you, does it?’ He meant it to sound rude, but she didn’t flinch. Frank imagined what would happen when his father arrived home to find him there, but found he couldn’t picture what his dad’s face looked like. He thought of the silence and looked at the silent television. A show with doctors, all in blue, masks, scalpels.
‘Frank.’ Merle spoke again, with a voice off Playschool. ‘This place, this town, is made up entirely of believers.’
Believers and meat. He thought he might start to laugh. He knew that if he undid his hands from the glass they would shake. ‘I think, maybe I’ll be off – come back later when he’s here.’ He tensed his legs to stand.
But Merle carried on and somehow it kept him there. ‘People who don’t fit in don’t stay. We are here and we are happy, and we are waiting for Jesus.’ She leant forward, clasping her napkin in her hand. ‘He can know that when He gets here there’ll be a safe place to stay. He can know that there is a place He will feel entirely welcomed, a place He can feel at home.’
‘Right.’
‘Your father is out there.’ She pointed with a stiff finger towards the door. ‘In places with less knowledge and he’s trying to help those people, Frank. He’s found something good, he’s trying to lead those people home. Like Billy did. He led us out into the light of knowledge. He showed us Jesus and once you have seen Jesus, Frank, once you have seen Him, you’ll never go back, because it is too dark.’
Frank had left his father upstairs, lying in his own dirt, and on the way down the stairs the violence had come back to him and he bounced back into the kitchen, the skin on his face stinging, blood fast in his veins. The woman in the kitchen was still smiling, holding the remains of a Mighty White and fried-egg sandwich, which she dipped into the hot fat of the frying pan, smoke still touching the windows.
‘Want some snack?’ she’d asked and he went for her, tearing at the dress to get it off, looking for a fastening to rip at; and she dropped her sandwich on the floor, but was laughing. She was strong for her weight and she fielded his attack, changing each scrabbling blow that landed, giggling like a schoolgirl. She hoisted the dress over her knees. ‘Like father like son, eh?’ she said, and Frank smelt egg and beer, and something strong like the bins in summer. She sat on the floor, now, and he stopped trying to get the dress off, stood back, sick at the look of her. She was laughing fit to split, tears running down her nose, making her weak. He saw himself kicking her square in the face, the feel of his shoe against the smash of her nose. But he didn’t do it. He noticed that her lip was bloody, and she did too and wiped a long streak of orange on to the back of her hand, which only made her shriek harder with laughter. Frank’s fists cramped and he struck himself hard in the face, three punches, one that crunched his nose and brought the taste of blood into his mouth. He turned to leave and saw his dad standing in the doorway, a towel that had once been white hooked round his hips, the liquorice cigarette still in his lips, but grey now, and dead. There was $140 in the till and Frank took it on his way out. The shop bell had rung as he left.
Frank drew breath but didn’t speak, the silence was long and the doctors on the television stared at each other over a boardroom table.
‘Now – Frank. How did you like my speech?’ Merle laughed, tossed her hair, became serious again. ‘I’m just trying to make you see – your father – he’s not the man you knew. He is safe now.’ She bunched one hand into a fist and held it against her pink drink. ‘So if you’re here to cast blame, know that he has been forgiven. Everything he has done has been absolved.’
‘It’s not quite as simple as that.’
She smiled, stonily. ‘I’m afraid that it is, Frank.’
‘You don’t know.’
‘He has told me everything. He is forgiven, Frank.’
‘Wait just a minute, I haven’t forgiven him.’
‘Yes you have. Jesus has forgiven him. You have forgiven him. I can tell.’
‘I tell you what, I have not!’ Words tumbled out tunelessly. His heart beat against his bones and he wanted words that would shock this woman and make her throw him out of her house. ‘My father does not believe in God,’ he said and watched Merle’s face. But there was nothing but a smile, so he went, didn’t look to see if he’d left mud on her carpets.
Striding back to the Ute, his feet wouldn’t move quickly enough. Shit, though, he was angry, his hands clenched, sweat itched his nose, dust in his face, the smell of someone’s tea on the cooker made him want to shout at the elderly woman who crossed the road to get away from the stranger.
Her f*cking lime cordial. He spat and his spit was green.
But he didn’t drive straight home as he had thought he would and he didn’t drive to the nearest non-lunatic town and bury himself in the pub. He found himself parking outside Merle’s house, thinking maybe he was going back to say some of the things that were going round in his head – some of the excellent insults that he kept thinking of – but he just sat with his hands on the wheel, pointed his gaze at the middle of the bonnet and waited.
At a quarter to seven a blue Holden pulled up next to Merle’s orange one. A cross hung from the rear-view mirror.
The man who got out of the car was skinny. He recognised his father’s movements but not his face, not his shape. This man was bald apart from a few light strands carefully placed across his head. His shoulders were coathangerish. Frank wound down the window as the porch light came on, even though it wasn’t dark outside. The man moved quickly to the back of the car, brisk and efficient, neat, his hands touching everything after he had moved it, to make it just so. Open the boot, touch the door, take out a briefcase and set it on the hood, touch the briefcase, close the boot, touch the boot. Merle came out on to the porch, in a different blue dress that blew up in a sudden gust and exposed the lace top of a stocking. She batted it down with both hands.
Frank heard the sound of the word ‘Darl!’ and the reply, ‘Sweetheart!’
He watched them embrace, his father on a lower step. Merle shut her eyes and tilted her head upwards with a smile on her lips like she was suckling a baby.
‘You hungry, darl?’ Frank heard as she lifted his head a little. ‘C’mon in, it’s pork chops for tea.’
They came apart and, holding hands, Merle led him up the steps, a boy for his bath. Frank was gone before the front door closed.