After the Fire, A Still Small Voice Read online

  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.’

  3

  The foreman of the marina, Pokey, was a pirate from a picture book, a scratchy beard and a cap that made his sun-cankered ears stick out like rudders. When Bob introduced the two of them there was a papery handshake and Pokey’s eyes focused on something over Frank’s shoulder. ‘The new fella, Fred or something,’ he announced to the rest of the men before turning his back and walking squatly into the cargo shed and shutting the door.

  Bob cleared his throat and smiled, punching Frank softly on the arm, ‘Frank here lives down on the Mulaburry flats. Out past my place.’

  ‘Just moved there,’ agreed Frank. He shifted his feet.

  Bob pointed to an aboriginal-looking man who as far as Frank could see was too old to work on a dockyard, but who had shoulders like an ox and a waistline like a berry. ‘This one’s Linus,’ said Bob. Linus winked at Frank like they’d met before and it was a secret. Next to Linus was another darker man. ‘Then we’ve got young Charlie. He’s sometimes crew, sometimes with us on the marina.’ Charlie was long and thin, with hair curled midway between his ears and his shoulders. The skin of his face shone in the heat, and he smiled widely and quickly at Frank, then looked away at the sun.

  ‘Stuart,’ said Bob, nodding at a white man, freckled-faced with straw hairs poking from his cap. His eyes were red in the whites from salt and there was a small swelling on his lip where something had been burnt or cut away recently.

  ‘You a fishing man?’ Stuart asked Frank, gripping his hand fiercely.

  ‘Don’t know too much about it.’ He held up his fingers as if they might show polished nails. ‘City slicker up till recently.’

  Stuart seemed happy about this.

  ‘And these two’ – Bob nodded to the last two men – ‘are what we call the twins, Sean and Alex.’ They stood flat-footed in yellow worn thongs, their toes spread, grabbing on to the ground. They had the same thin lips coated in white zinc like cricketers, and they said nothing.

  ‘They’re boat crew,’ said Bob behind his hand but loudly, ‘they don’t make friends easily.’ Frank wasn’t sure of the joke, but he laughed anyway. The twins did not.

  For a working marina the place had a good feel about it. There was a dark rainbow to the surface of the water, and the familiar smell of diesel overhung the sea and warmed his chest. Boats moored about the place, white yachts with fancy names Rosalind, Pengerrith, Serendipity, painted in navy on their sides. The slipways were white and someone had gone to the trouble of stencilling a small anchor on to every fifth plank. From the spot where they loaded he could see a sailing-club-style café that opened out on to the water, where a few couples lunched in knee-length shorts and deck shoes.

  Stuart clapped him on the shoulder with a burst of laughter. ‘Didn’t you know you was in Florida, mate!’

  The cargo was coolant and oranges, and Frank was put on the ship with the twins to be shown the ropes. You had to push the pallets as they were lowered by the derrick, had to make them swing into just the right place, bring it down straight so no space was wasted. The twins worked in silence apart from a few well-placed yups. It was satisfying work and it didn’t seem odd that no one talked. Bob came and swapped places with him so he could get to know the wharf, and the twins raised their hands to him, nodded. On the wharf he directed Linus on the forklif
t, which was a bit more hairy. Linus liked to pretend every so often he was going to run you through with the fork prongs. Frank smiled each time and the old bloke let it up.

  He found himself falling into the rhythms of working again, enjoying the loud engines and shouting hoarsely over them. The heavy-set men and their zinc-white noses dancing in time with each other, hand signals, bending at the knees, twisting to take the hook and thread the rope round it, slapping the crates so they echoed and the crane took them up, the huge boxes twisting on the rope, bulking into the hull of the ship. The pallets held row on row of the same shape, the same colour. A hive of oranges, an army of freezer coolant.

  Back in Canberra, there’d been the sauerkraut factory. For nine months he’d screwed the lids on jars of pickled cabbage. There, when he was bad, it had been a terrible thing to see all the lids of all those jars, piling up on the conveyor belt, relentless, rolling against each other. There had been something awful in knowing that every one of those jars would end up in someone’s cupboard, would sit smugly on the dinner table, in the picnic hamper, coldly in the fridge of someone’s home.

  The heat was flat but the edge was taken off it by the water, even if it was oiled. The sun burnt red strips on to the tops of his arms where sunscreen and T-shirt did not meet, but he was outside, and there was no stink of vinegar and farts, no pruned fingers from leaky jars, none of the bad breath of the other people on the line, no watery eyes following jars down a conveyor belt.

  At the marina, the day passed with rope burns, the light clink of the white moored boats above the engine noise of forks and the continual flushing out of work boats. His hands tingled with baby calluses and he felt the skin of his palms creak as he spread out his fingers. Charlie stood in the full glare of the sun smoking a cigarette and Frank wondered how he could stand it, the blast of that heat and on top of that the cigarette drying him out on the inside. The smoke came blue out of his mouth.