After the Fire, A Still Small Voice Page 4

  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 diff
erent, 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 s
ugar 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.’