After the Fire, A Still Small Voice Read online

  ‘Don’t get many of those boys in the city, eh?’ Stuart was at his elbow and he felt an extra heat rise in his face.

  ‘Suppose not.’ He bent down to collect the chains he’d been untangling.

  At the pub after work he bought a round and made a point of sitting next to Linus. He didn’t look in Stuart’s direction. Charlie and a couple of others had sailed with the ship to unload at the other end. The rest of the men were watching a women’s weightlifting comp on a small black and white screen.

  ‘Bob Haydon mentioned you might have been around at the same time as my grandparents – lived down at the bay in that little shack?’

  Linus nodded at the beer, took a mouthful and fixed Frank with a powerful eye. ‘Did he just?’ Linus looked across the table at Bob, who glanced briefly at him and then went back to the television. ‘Course my tribe’d never be too friendly with your lot.’

  ‘Oh?’ Frank swallowed a large mouthful of beer and it burnt on its way down.

  ‘Course – your little shack’s built on midden land. Sacred aboriginal meeting place. Blood spilt over that land.’

  ‘Right. I didn’t know that.’ He felt a sweat break out.

  Linus smiled. ‘Shittingya, mate! By cripes that had ya! Nah – maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, I couldn’t give the shit’s tinkle.’ Linus cackled hard and whacked him across the shoulder with a hand that felt like a plank of wood.

  When everyone had left, Frank had one more drink alone, just to be sure. A girl with sunburnt calves leant against the bar and talked to the barman, who squeaked a rag inside a glass. They looked an easy couple, with a history. They both laughed at something, and the barman put down the glass and leant both hands on the bar top. The girl glanced around the room, seeing if anyone was watching. She was surprisingly young. She leant forward so her shorts rode up the backs of her thighs and said something into the barman’s ear that made him put his tongue into the side of his mouth and look at her like he was thinking something over. The smile was big on his chops. She was young to be having sex. The thought surprised Frank as he was pretty sure he couldn’t have cared less.

  What had he been – fourteen, fifteen? They’d had their first girls together, him and Bo, in the back room of the pie shop, two older girls who thought they were a funny pair. ‘Couple of homo boys, I reckon,’ his one, Eliza, had said, a smile round her orange lips.

  ‘One way to find out,’ her friend, Beth, had joined in, lifting her hair on to the top of her head, showing off yellowish stains under the arms and bumping Bo with her hip. Eliza had been a reedy sort, but she had a curve to her back and bottom that he’d replayed for weeks to come in his head; the way it’d tightened and relaxed as they’d rutted on the floor with the flour and the dead cockies at eye level. The lino that squeaked under his arse. Bo’d lit a cigarette afterwards, like in the films, and Frank had felt ashamed of him in front of the girls. The pair of them all rags and flesh and both on the nose, but they laughed and Beth drank milk from the fridge and it spilled down her arm. It wasn’t long after that he and Bo had headed out to the shack for the first time, thumbing up to Crescent and walking in the peeling sun, cans of gasoline and chicken biscuits in a plastic bag. Frank’d had the keys away with no trouble and the route they took was remembered from the funeral, in the car with the urn, his father silent and sober. It was the only time Bo ever mentioned his old man, and all he said as they sat in the back of a Ute that was driving them past the town, with the wind back-combing their hair and sunset starting to happen behind them, all he’d said was, ‘Dad would’a liked this,’ and Frank had wondered what sort of a man would make a person such as Bo. They’d made Mulaburry by nightfall, getting lost and inhaling the gas on the way, spending time on beaches where it looked as if nobody ever went, drinking warm beer that Bo had bought and seeing the night sky as it was for the first time. The sex and the girls didn’t seem important then, they’d messed about like ten-year-olds, telling scare stories about sharks and men with axes.

  As they were falling asleep Bo said, ‘There’s no crocodiles around here, is there?’ and he’d answered, ‘Dunno, might be,’ even though he knew they were too far south for salties.

  They slept in the sand, and woke up freezing and sore like they’d been dropped on bitumen, but the sea was something else, and neither of them talked as they watched it turn from white and peach to blue as the sky righted itself.

  They stripped naked and crashed around in the waves, dared each other out beyond the breakers, cried shark a hundred times and pretended they were being yanked at from below. They had a lunch of chicken crimpies and hot beer, and Frank felt his eyes swell up with the heat and the sand and the fun of it. They let the gasoline alone because they couldn’t have stood it, the tops of Bo’s jubberly boobs went red and Frank felt it cut about his face. To escape the wide-open burn of the sky they barrelled into the bush, their hair dried to a salt crisp. About the time Frank started to feel sick from thirst they found a shallow creek, shaded by the tall ghost gums and the two of them lay down in it like dogs, their mouth open, the cold water crawling all over, the sand in their underpants rinsing out and their bellies swelling up with the drink.

  ‘Shit! Look,’ said Bo, ‘yabbies.’

  They made it to the shack and found fishing rods leant up against the window, and before Bo could draw breath to whine about being tired, Frank had them out of the door and headed back to the creek for bait. Bo was the first to get a fish, a big silver job, neither of them knew what sort it might have been. It wasn’t until the poor bastard was flapping on the rocks in front of the two of them that they realised they didn’t have a knife.

  ‘I got my door key,’ said Bo.

  In the end, rather than bash it with a shoe or stamp on it, they stood back and let it die, each nervously glancing at the other, trying not to flinch every time it flapped like an eppo having a turn.

  The shack was neat and clean, and they lit a fire outside and cooked the fish on a grate from the stove. Its skin stuck to the metal and made a good smell. The sun had barely gone down when they turned in, a heaviness in the marrow of their bones. There were two beds, but in the night he’d woken up to find Bo in with him.

  ‘’S cold,’ Bo said, and Frank turned his back on him and waited tensely, ready to strike out if any part of Bo wound its way round him. Outside it was thick and dark, and inside they slept like they’d been thrown down a well. If it weren’t for the sick look on Bo’s face in the morning, and the girls, they might have stayed for ever.

  ‘Gotta get back and check in on the old lady,’ he said, trying to sound casual, as if his mother couldn’t cope without him, like he was doing her a favour. Frank wondered if his dad had noticed he was gone. More than likely the shop was still unopened, but it didn’t matter too much anyway as no one bought much from them any more. The place was too dirty, sometimes the bread was stale, sometimes undercooked. His old man seemed to take a certain amount of pride in getting it wrong. He couldn’t understand why he owned a bread shop in the first place if he couldn’t bake.

  The barman flicked the lights on and off, and it was time to go home. The girl had disappeared, but the barman still looked pretty happy. Maybe they’d meet later. Maybe they really liked each other. Frank drove home from the pub half cut, feeling after all he was still fifteen. It would have been good to have the company of someone. Even Bo, the open-mouth breather, the fug who couldn’t resist eating his own snots, even when Beth and Eliza were there.

  The shack had its own morning alarm system – when the sun started to heat up the roof, the galvanised steel would creak, threatening to fall in. There was a smell, too, that came with it – engine air and dry wood, and all of it exactly the same as when he’d been small. With his eyes closed in the first moments of waking he could have been ten again and waking up with a ten-year-old’s plan of crab-trap baiting and finding good sticks. But when he rolled over he felt the bulk of his body as it sagged the bed, the hairs chafing against each
other on his shins, the dull morning erection and the ache in the back of his neck from drinking more than he had intended. His face was dry and he could feel a beard there. Best shave it off soon or he’d end up looking like his dad, always licking his lips like a lizard through that curly-wurly hair.

  His dad’s lips were white as he poured his mother’s ashes into the bream hole, and Frank’d asked about God. ‘Dunno about heaven, mate. She’s in the sea.’

  A local family had turned up and the mother had crossed herself and he’d wondered what it was, wondered if he should do it too, but there had seemed to be so little to gain by asking. His father had been the same grey as the sea. ‘Everybody dies, mate,’ he’d said.

  Those thin days afterwards and their thick silence. How would she come back if all her parts had drifted out to sea? If fishes ate her ashes and if sharks ate the fishes. The fishes he and his father ate, brought to them by the neighbours – had he pawed through the flank of a bream that had eaten his mother? Could that hurt?

  His father told him, with closed eyes, ‘Go and play on the beach.’ He tried to pull a stick through the sand the length of the beach, tried to jump the calf-high waves, but ended up watching the sea, trying to keep his eyes on one spot so the water didn’t escape him, but everything changed place, and the spot that he had started watching moved on the second he saw it, disbanded and spread out, rolled over and under and became another spot of water somewhere else. A knot was tight in his stomach as the fingers of the sea spread out and closed up again and again.

  After three days they packed up and went back to the shop. His dad set to work immediately, even though they arrived back late in the night. Frank had been asleep in the truck and kept his eyes closed as his dad took him up to bed, held tight against his shoulder, even though Frank suspected he was too old for that sort of carry-on. He heard him moving downstairs, heard the quiet pouring of flour and the click of the whisk in the plastic bowl that his dad used when he didn’t want to make much noise. His eyes, too tired to stay open but too lazy to close the whole way, settled in between as the smell of white sponge and citrus rind leaked into his room, and he had dreamt he was sucking an orange, his feet dangling in the bream hole.

  After a shave and a little fresh-water wash with a bucket, things were not too bad. There was the whole day to go and he could hear a whipbird cracking not too far off. That was good. By mid morning he was feeling fine and shimmying around the place giving it a tidy-up. When Bob’s truck drove up to the shack with a fridge strapped down in the back, there was a different lazy wrist hanging out of the window. The wrist belonged to a brown arm and wore green copper bangles.

  ‘My wife, Vicky,’ explained Bob, pointing as the woman pulled herself up out of the passenger seat.

  ‘G’day.’ She smiled gappily, pretty brown circles under her eyes.

  With the fridge came a chicken, dead and plucked, but not gutted.

  ‘We leave ’em guts in,’ explained Bob, ‘’cause some fellas get cranky if we don’t.’ This seemed a fair explanation.

  The fridge was squattish and elegantly rusted at the edges, and while Vicky looked around the place Frank and Bob walked it into the shack in the same way that Frank had walked the stove out. He had a sense of himself dancing old appliances out of the shack and dancing the new ones in. The fridge fitted neatly below the back window.

  ‘See this?’ said Bob, holding a tiny pot with a wick poking out of it up to Frank’s nose. ‘That’s the kero and you’ll wanna keep it topped up.’ He took a lighter out of his back pocket and lit it, then gently, like he was holding a live fish in a cup of water, he squatted down, reached under the fridge and placed it down softly. He stood up with a crack of his knees. ‘An make sure you don’t shut all the windows and doors for too long, or you’ll wake up dead.’

  ‘Terrific,’ said Frank. ‘Drink?’ He’d planned ahead for company this time, had stacked up on light beer and ice. He’d even bought nuts.

  Bob looked at his watchless wrist. ‘Not today, mate, got places need going to.’ Making no move to leave, he leant against the fridge like it was a car.

  ‘Any news on the missing girl?’

  ‘Not as yet, mate. Not as yet.’

  Bob looked like he was about to say something else when Vicky appeared behind him and took his fingers in hers, and Frank was winded by the ease of it. ‘Nice place you’ve got,’ she said, ‘I’d love something cold if it’s going, Franko.’ There was a look between her and Bob that Frank turned away from to dig out a beer from his eski. ‘So, how’d you come by it? Bob tells me you moved down from the city?’ Vicky accepted the drink with a chime of her bracelets.

  He inhaled too far, nearly choked. ‘My grandparents bought it up in the fifties. No one’s really lived here since then – just used it as a holiday place when I was a little kid. Haven’t been up since, actually. Not for ages.’

  ‘Really?’ She had a nice way of looking interested, the tip of a canine catching on her bottom lip. ‘I never knew anyone owned it. I’m afraid we’ve been trespassing, Frank.’ She gave Bob a sideways glance and a smile. Bob blushed. He took a long drink of her beer but waved away the one Frank offered.

  ‘So what made you decide to move down here for keeps?’ she asked, taking the beer back off Bob with a small yank.

  ‘Up here,’ corrected Bob.

  ‘Dunno – good memories I suppose – bit of a change of scene. Seems like a good place to be . . .’ He felt his voice soften, but they didn’t seem to notice. Vicky smiled warmly at him, but didn’t help him out.

  ‘I suppose, I just came to a point – broke up with a girlfriend and I needed a place to just get out of the city.’

  ‘City’s a bad place to be alone.’ Vicky nodded.

  There were a few quiet moments, then Bob punched his fist lightly into his hand and said loudly, ‘Righto, we’ll be off. I’ll drop by some more usefuls as I come across them.’ They got into the car and Bob gave him a wave. ‘Laters,’ he said, raising one hand as he steered with the other.

  ‘See youse soon,’ called Vicky over the engine. ‘Ta for the drink.’

  He watched as the truck hared away, Bob’s arm held out of the window like a flag, Vicky’s wrist turning slowly on its joint. He wondered what they were saying about him as they drove off, if they were laughing.

  He opened up his new fridge. And closed it again. And opened and closed. It smelt of bleach and old air. He unloaded the eski. He sat down to write a shopping list. Bread. Margarine. He opened the fridge again and looked at the dead chook. Potatoes. And wondered. Carrots. How he would. Vegemite. Cook it and what it would be like to eat a whole chicken on his own. He closed the fridge and returned to his list and, just to remind himself what kind of a stupid bastard he was, he jabbed himself hard in the palm with his pen, and the pen broke in the cradle of his hand and welled up purple.

  He washed up the old camp oven, unused since a trip to the river two years back. He concentrated on cooking the chicken, leaning away from thoughts that the grit in the bottom of the oven was most likely sand from the river bank they’d been to for Australia Day weekend before any of the trouble started. That any blackened dried flake of food still stuck to the side could have been the skin of an onion they had eaten together, that had sat warm in her belly and in his belly as they lay next to each other in their one-man tent. He packed the chicken into the oven with whole potatoes, roughly cut carrots and tomatoes from a sackful of overripes he’d picked up at a roadside stall. Most of them had black centres, but there was plenty of flesh surrounding.

  He squatted over the pot with a box of white wine and let a good half-litre squirt out over the chicken. When the fire was mostly embers he made a hole and nestled the pot there. He put on the lid and shovelled hot rocks on top. He stood back, his eyes stinging, and wondered what to do with the giblets he’d wrestled out of the carcass. He picked up the board he’d spread them on and examined them in the light of the fire, the wet, woolly strings that made the b
ird work. He took them over to the old stove, whose door was slightly ajar, like it was peering at him. He opened the door wide and scraped the entrails inside. They glistened wetly against the matt black of the stove’s gullet and he shut the door, pulling the rusted catch into place, feeling like he was forcing the jaws of a dog closed to get it to swallow a pill. He stood a moment looking at the stove and wondering why he had done that.

  A light spun over the top of the cane and an engine battered somewhere nearby but passed his drive without stopping, so he went back to the fire and poured himself a mug of box wine. The Creeping Jesus made a noise in the dark, like things did – an open-mouthed shriek – and he raised his mug of box wine towards it, toasting the shriek and whatever the thing was shrieking for.

  When the chicken was cooked, he sat the whole carcass on a tin plate in his lap, with the camp oven in reach for the vegetables and juices that were in it. He pushed a newspaper under the plate to stop it burning his bare thighs and pulled at a leg. The skin slid off the meat and clung to the carcass. The flesh came off the bone with a small persuasion from his tongue. The bird was tough but it was tasty and he cleaned the drumstick cartoon-like – the whole leg went into his mouth and came out clean. He pushed his fingers into the breast and tore off white meat, it came away like bark from a tree. With a mouthful of breast meat, he felt the air come hot and fast out of his nose. He was burning his mouth, but it didn’t matter because he was enjoying himself. The juice ran down his chin and throat, and maybe some of it collected in his belly button for all he cared; it was good. He drained his mug of wine and filled it with the stock from the camp oven. He hadn’t skimmed it and the fat was heavy on the surface, giving him the feeling he was oiling the engine of his body. He swallowed down large hunks of tomato and onion without chewing. The carrots tasted warm and heavy, and he chewed them and swilled them around his mouth to remember the taste for a long time.