After the Fire, A Still Small Voice Read online

  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 fuck 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 quie
tly 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 th
eir 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.