After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

  In the afternoon the sun mellowed and Frank set a beer on the stump table outside. It shone a little yellow light out of it, the colour of a much later sun, and it reminded him of the comfort of being in a beer garden in the city. The smoke and sun on bitumen, the eucalyptus still hanging through the smell of spilt drinks. He had a large packet of chips and he could drink the cold beer and eat chips while he watched the sun settle and the flying foxes go out for the night. He could start reading a book, the one that was dog-eared from where he’d held it open too often and stared into space. Then, after dark, he would light the fire and set a fish on. He was still whole, there were still things that one man alone was worth. The beer hissed open as it always did and he felt a small joy at the luxury of it, the land, the beer, even the Creeping Jesus in the cane. He shut his eyes and let the sun weigh down his eyelids like coins. The butcher-bird gargled and so did its mate.

  ‘I want you to make me pregnant,’ she’d said one morning.

  The sheets were hot and had been pulled down past their hips, just covering their legs. She was on her side then, looking at him, one hand stroking her belly, a look on her face that she’d been away and had just a second before got home. He smiled at her, blinked sleepily. Light from a gap in the curtain made her face pale and wondrous, the inside of an oyster shell. He teetered for a moment on the edge of sleep, but her hand slid from her belly and smoothed its way over his thigh and between his legs, making the hairs lie straight. He’d rolled her on to him like they were both great fat seals, light in the water. The sheets made the sound of the sea drawing back off a pebble beach. Her knees and arms were cool, but the sun had warmed her head and she smelt of hot hair. Her tongue moved in his mouth.

  She’d never mentioned the baby again. It wasn’t long after that morning that he’d started to get bad. Perhaps she could feel the change in the air. If he’d stayed inside her she could have got pregnant right then, in that warm moment.

  He opened his eyes to find that the day had turned beautiful on him: the sky a dark pink, while the sun was giving out a last burst of light. A flock of spoonbills were passing over, their shadows zipping like mice over the ground. He stood to watch them go, took off his hat and waved it, holding on to the post of the veranda, leaning out like he was on the prow of a boat, his mouth open to catch the change in the air, to taste the white birds as they coloured everything.

  He was drunk by the time Bob arrived, but he held himself straight in his chair.

  ‘You right?’ asked Bob, smiling.

  ‘I’m well,’ he said loudly. He got Bob a drink and settled back.

  ‘Chinarillo,’ said Bob, raising his bottle.

  He nodded. ‘’Rillo.’

  An ibis flew overhead, white wings soft and her proboscis beak an ink line against the sky, but she was nothing like the spoonbills. The two men sat and drank to the first quarter mark of their beers and the silence was not uncomfortable but not natural either. Kirk and Mary fluffed around to the front veranda.

  ‘Girls,’ Bob greeted them and raised his drink. Kirk and Mary did not look but scrubbed in the dirt at a line of ants. The low sun bumped off the red track and turned the whole distance cherry. A rosella landed on the veranda, saw them and squeaked in surprise before flying off again.

  ‘How are your girls?’ asked Frank.

  ‘Same as ever. Sal reckons we need a goat. So that’s what’s new with her.’

  ‘You going to get one?’

  ‘Nah. Nice animals but. Take a heap of looking after. If you want rid of a chook you wring its neck. If we decided we’d had enough of chickens tomorrow it’d take – I dunno – around half a day to get through the lot of them. If we were really on it. But a goat, you’ve got to bleed her. And they’ve got all that personality in them.’

  Frank laughed. ‘You look at everything like that? How easy it is to kill?’

  ‘Means you can move on easier. We like knowing we can just fold up and piss off as the mood takes us.’

  Frank leant back in his chair and felt the solidness of the veranda under him. He thought of that last night in Canberra when it hadn’t seemed possible that he was leaving, when he’d sprayed lavender-scented toilet spray to convince himself it wasn’t home any more. He tilted back further in his chair, felt himself go past the point of balance and wobbled forward with a bump to knock the thoughts out of him. A small breeze brought on it the smell of a fresh open custard apple. He looked at his hands. It was quiet. There was the sound of the bottle clipping against Bob’s teeth, of his deep swallow. Bob was looking out at the darkening cane and in the dim light he looked older, like an old-fashioned explorer, like he wasn’t made for Australia at all, but the lonely white tundra of the North Pole or the South Pole or any pole just so long as it was lonely.

  ‘Must be hard to just fold up and move on when you’ve got a kid.’

  ‘We’ve done it before. Helps Vick to know she’s mobile, I think.’

  The chink again, glass on tooth.

  ‘How’d you mean?’

  Bob turned his head to face Frank. ‘She’s got things on her mind, you know – more than most. She doesn’t sleep – sits up late sometimes. And sometimes she drinks.’ Bob laughed loudly and suddenly, and his bark echoed. ‘Nothing wrong with sitting up and getting off yer face, eh, Frank?’ He raised his bottle again. Frank nodded, smiled and Bob settled back deep in his chair. There was quiet again and this time Frank tried hard to think of something to fill the quiet with, but he couldn’t settle on anything, kept being distracted by the sound of crickets skiffing in the cane, a big moth caught in a web scrabbling against the roof.

  ‘She’s a strong one, but. She gets on with things for the most part. The daytime. It’s just the nights get at her, you know?’ He took another swallow. ‘I wish I could stay awake. Be some kind of company. But I wake up and I hear her downstairs. An’ I think, Go down, bring her back, talk to her, join her, hell, get shit-faced at six in the morning with her if it helps. But I can’t help the need to sleep, can I? An’ the bed’s warm. An’ before I’ve made up my mind what to do, I’m asleep again. There’s good places to be in sleep.’

  Bob was still, apart from his eyelids that fluttered like the moth’s wings.

  In the distance a road train rumbled by, the black of its back end just visible.

  Frank laid a hand on Bob’s shoulder as he passed behind him for more beer, but he didn’t seem to notice. ‘We met out west, you know,’ he said as if this explained a lot. ‘She’s younger than she looks. She was working with the Tourist Board down on Rottenest.’

  ‘Funny place.’

  ‘Yeah – she lived on army barracks when I met her. It was winter – lonely sort of a place in winter. Just you an’ the quokkas it feels like. I’d been travelling about with this mob of kids, left them in Perth. You know how it is – there was all the grog, the pills, sharing a sleeping bag in the back of a car with a bloke who smells like piss and mustard. You get to the point you want your privacy.’ Bob laughed.

  Frank thought of that night sharing a bed with Bo when he’d been ready to swing for him at the slightest breath on the back of his neck.

  ‘We got to Perth and I just had enough, they were heading up to Broome to sleep on the beaches, and the weather was filthy. I just split, told them I’d meet them up there. Knew I wouldn’t see them again. That’s a good feeling – like you’re shedding skin. Took the ferry over, crook as a chook all the way. Salt, wind, rain. White sky for as far as you could see, and this black little dot of an island. Funny now – feels like she was waiting there for me, like I was going there just to find her.’

  A paddymelon appeared at the edge of the cane and watched them. It grazed a little.

  Bob went on. ‘She was pregnant within a month. Funny, but it didn’t worry us. Probably should’ve. We felt so easy then, like we could go wherever, do whatever felt good. That’s where the first chooks come from. Rottenest hens. That’s all we took with us. It’s how it’s supposed to work,
you know? We got this chicken empire now. We live off the land we own. We eat out of the sea, dig in our own dirt. We want a holiday we hop in the truck; an hour down the road you could be on a desert island. It’s just all so perfect.’ Bob had his eyes closed and smiled.

  ‘So, what happened?’

  Bob opened his eyes ‘The kid died.’

  ‘Holy.’

  ‘Leukaemia. A couple of years back.’

  ‘Mate.’

  ‘Yep.’

  The silence was back and this time it stayed. Frank felt the foam of too much drink clearing, as he took it in. He felt his bum muscles tighten as he tried to think of something to say. In the end he let it go and the two of them worked through to the last of their beer, and Frank went back to the fridge softly, not letting the screen door close too sharply. Bob rolled a cigarette, appearing to put all his concentration into it, pulling away tobacco fibres, wetting his fingers and tightening the roll. The sound of bottles gasping open.

  ‘Somethin’ about this place. I dunno if it’s something rubbed off from my old man – he was a hippy joker. Long hair ’n’ everything – caravan, the whole fucking Kulu. Anyways, this place’s been good to us – let us live on after.’ Bob looked up at Frank, caught his eye. ‘It was a bad death, y’see. Real bad.’

  Frank plucked at the neck of his T-shirt. ‘I’m sorry to hear it, mate. Really sorry.’

  ‘She was this funny colour, that was the bit that got to me. She kept spewing up all this stuff, lime-grey – same colour as her skin by that time. An’ of course all the hair goes.’ He closed his eyes and let his head fall back. A moth landed in Frank’s hair but he didn’t move to get rid of it.

  ‘The worst thing is you see this little budling of a creature turn into something it makes you sick to look at. You want to cuddle her up, yeah, but you can’t bear the smell. You sweat at the touch of her, and you’re all she’s got, and she makes you feel sick. An’ in the end you’re prayin’ for it, in the end you’re standing over the bed at night holding a pillow thinking about it. An’ the worst is that you don’t do it, because you sort of think while she’s alive there’s a chance, so you don’t and you watch her rip away thread by thread, one pluck at a time. An’ then it’s just the eyes looking at you and you’re supposed to do something but you don’t know what that is.’

  ‘This is terrible,’ said Frank.

  Bob shrugged, took another drink, ran a hand through his hair. Frank didn’t know what in the world to say. Bob went on, ‘This place, it’s got its fair share of ghosts around it, but it doesn’t get to us. I’ve seen hell, mate, I’ve already bin there. Ha! Sounds right out of Jaws.’ Frank noticed Bob’s hand was holding his beer bottle hard enough to make the tips of his fingers green. ‘Seriously. I wouldn’t move from here. It’s a special place, got enough violence in the dirt to strike a cow dead, but I like it here.’

  The man looked exhausted suddenly in the dark.

  Bob said, ‘There’s two hens, the first two Sal named, right after Emmy died. She calls them Mum and Dad.’ He rubbed at his eye so that it looked red. He sucked on a cigarette, keeping the smoke in his mouth, tasting it. ‘Vick’s got this thing about them – won’t let any of their eggs get eaten. All the ones that hatch out are left as layers. That winter she died, Dad must’ve laid ten eggs, and I came home and Vick was sat in front of a fire, her hair all wet, a towel round her middle and an egg under each armpit.’ He looked at Frank and Frank smiled. Bob had creases of laughter round his eyes, but he made no sound. ‘Said she was trying to hatch ’em out herself. First time we’d laughed in a while.’ He closed his eyes like he was feeling the sun on his face, but the sun was out of the sky. Frank shifted, picturing Vicky, the wet hair, the nut brown of her arms and the pale eggs.

  ‘I think that that was the sexiest moment of my whole life. The skin, the smoothness.’ Bob made a line in the air with his cigarette. ‘Everything. A woman and her eggs. Just seemed like the start of something else, like a sign that the whole lot of everything was going to be all right. All perfect. Like an egg.’ Bob looked at Frank and Frank smiled.

  ‘Did they hatch out?’

  ‘Nah. Turned out they were all unfertilised, that lot. Funny to care about eggs so much.’

  ‘There are worse things to worry about.’

  ‘That’s true. Was one of those moments you’re grateful to the place for putting up with you.’ On cue some bird made a sound like applause in the tops of the trees. ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me, what?’

  ‘Your best woman.’

  Frank smiled. ‘I dunno, Bob. Probably bit more obvious than eggs.’

  The morning after they’d first made it into a bed together and he’d woken up with an aching hard-on, he watched the swell of her breath in her breasts, the tight skin round her ribs, the finger-point bruises there; the tips of her hair, cold on the inside of his wrist, the smell of whisky in the room, the toasty taste of their drunken sex the night before, the hope, big in his chest, that when she woke up they would do it again. Then she had rolled over on to her side and backed herself on to him, all apparently without waking, just doing it like it was the natural thing to do, like they’d been doing it for years, like it was the morning ritual. When she came she had stretched out against him, slow and quiet like a cat in the sun, and he’d come straight after, barely able to hold on. And they’d slept like that, face in her hair, eventually shrinking out of her, keeping the heat of her close to him.

  Bob laughed. ‘Carn. You’ve loved a woman haven’t you?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well, you’re pretty quiet about it.’

  Frank squinted at Bob. He looked fiercely earnest. ‘Well. Some things are better off that way.’

  Bob looked down at his drink and back up at Frank. ‘I think you’re wrong there, mate.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Things I’ve kept quiet about, things Vick’s kept quiet about.’ Bob shook his head. ‘Leads to people wandering around in the middle of the night. Leads to all sorts of things. I say the best thing for it is just to say it out loud.’ He paused, looking in the direction of his home, but there was only cane to see. ‘I only just decided that this minute, though. I might be wrong.’ He laughed, a tinkle, staring at the high wall of cane. From far away came an echo of a car horn. Frank’s stomach knotted and he felt a grip of loyalty for the bloke sitting next to him. When he spoke he didn’t listen to his own words, like it wasn’t himself who was speaking but some character in a film. ‘I loved a woman. Was terrible to her. Knocked her about a couple of times and then she left.’ Bob looked up, his expression flat. Frank wanted to say more, to fill the air with noise. But he let it hang there. Why not? He had done it. Let the silence weigh down the words.

  When Bob spoke his voice was careful, measured. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I’ve never felt that. But I mean. You stopped, right? Hell, you just told me about it. You must feel bad.’

  ‘It was only a couple of times.’ Bile rose in his throat as he said it. ‘I don’t mean that as to lessen the significance of the thing.’ The thing. ‘She left me before it got worse.’

  Bob nodded.

  There was the noise of the Creeping Jesus again in the cane, quiet but humping along, stalking like a heavy cat. Bob cleared his throat. ‘What I said before. I wouldn’t want to make you feel like you had to talk about it. I mean. Look. I feel like I’ve tricked you into this.’

  But Frank carried on, strange to say it aloud. Strange to feel his skin recoil at the thought of himself.

  Jesus purred a low, sexy gargle like he was having his belly rubbed.

  ‘You ever take a look at yourself and you’re surprised by the person you’ve become?’

  He didn’t have to talk about the real fights when it felt like his old man was a part of the relationship, waiting in the wings in Sydney until such time as he would be called on to join them. Until Lucy had ‘fixed’ the ‘situation’ and they had Thursday night dinners in front
of the TV the three of them all together.

  ‘I guess a bloke could understand that.’ But Bob’s face did not understand.

  ‘First time, we’d had a row and she’d gone out and stayed the night at a friend’s, left me to think about things.’ All that night, the way he’d counted stripes in the curtains and his anger had built grain by grain like an egg timer. His chest had felt swollen. He’d broken wine glasses into the sink. ‘I think she thought I’d cool off, thought I’d see it her way. But when she came in the next morning I slapped her in the face. I did it twice, once on each cheek.’ Again there was a pause and he wondered what he was doing telling Bob, who was his friend. ‘I suppose that’s the difference. If it’d been in the heat of a fight, and I’d done it once and then stopped. But I did it twice, one, two. Like she was a kid. And I was still angry, God, I was so angry. She just stood there looking at me.’

  Bob was watching the floor. Frank put his tongue on his bottom lip and left it here a long time. He shrugged and Bob looked up.

  ‘Don’t know what you’re supposed to do. Apologise for it? Am I meant to talk about it? Get someone to tell me what a rotten shit I am? I don’t know.’

  ‘Well,’ said Bob evenly, ‘the main thing, I suppose, is that you don’t do it any more.’

  ‘Because she left me, mate. Not straight off. We tried. I got better but then sometimes I got worse. I don’t think she believed it. I think that’s how come she stayed so long.’

  Oh, sure they’d tried. He’d skinned himself with trying, but she was so persistent, even more after that first time. She wanted it bad. He remembered her standing at the sink making tea, something tight about her shoulders, neat in a grey V-neck, her hair drawn back out of her face in an unusually sober ponytail. Her hands moved deliberately, like they were the part of her that had business to discuss.