After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

There were bodies. The creek was stuffed with them. Women and men and children and babies, adrift. They’d taken on water, become soft like rotten potatoes. Their faces were dark holes pushed in soft fruit. A baby, swaddled still in its shawl, floated alone and he thought of the family he’d pointed the gun at. The moon-faced boy. He thought about the line of tracers he’d sent out over the trees after he’d undone the jam in his gun.

  Daniel shook his head. ‘Why would you get your family along? They always get shot.’

  The section crossed the bridge and no one talked, there was just the clump of boots on the planks, one by one, until only Rod was left on the other side. They waited for him, no one told him to hurry up, they just watched him, tired, as he stood and continued to stand on the wrong side of the creek, with one hand over his eyes.

  You had to breathe with your mouth open.

  21

  There was no sleep for Frank that night and none the next either. His ears were blocked, his sinuses pulsed. He had water on the ear, that was the problem. It was in there rolling about against his eardrum and no amount of head shaking, no amount of fingers in earholes made the slightest difference. His head ached. It looked like the cut on his palm had got infected, small seawater boils had formed round the opening and it throbbed in time with his sinuses. Everything was muffled and hot. He tried to eat some pilchards for breakfast but they turned his stomach and he left them for the hens to pick apart, making their beaks red with tomato juice. His beard itched, felt lumpy round the throat with whorls and clumps of hair, and he couldn’t leave it alone, but the idea of shaving it floored him. He’d have to scissor it first, then the tearing grind of his blunt razor. There’d be blood drawn for sure.

  Frank’s eyes felt salty, the rims of them were tender and he could feel tingles on his lips that might be cold sores coming. He wanted to peel his face off and clean it from the inside. Instead he opened a beer. It was early morning, but what difference did the morning make to a man who hadn’t slept? He stayed on his bed, the dark inside the shack was better on his eyes. The shark two days before was like a story he’d overheard. Every time he thought about it he heard the ticking noise all those crabs had made, their hairy legs scrabbling around in the bottom of the surf ski. They’d eaten blue swimmers for four days solid, then they had started to smell and the last ones had to be chucked, dead, back to the sea. He thought about Pokey’s niece with the red drinking straw, and Joyce Mackelly’s jawbone. He thought about Johno with his black hair and the way he’d disappeared into the long sharp grass. The smell of smoke was still on his skin and so was Vicky’s coat. He thought of Bob, who smiled too often too widely, Linus who watched everything and knew something secret, Stuart and his kids and his fish. It was all sad and lost already, and on top of it sat Lucy and he knew what she would have said. The thought of having her nearby seemed like the most perfect thing. A body that was his to touch and to fit in front of his like a piece of interlocking shell.

  The air in the shack smelt. Or maybe he smelt, you couldn’t know these things for sure. It was the smell of lots of people pressed in all together, sweating up against each other, breathing their bad breath. Frank took a wander outside; the chickens were nowhere in sight. He couldn’t hear the birds in the trees but he knew they were there, saw the leaves of the blue gums shifting around. He ploughed through the cane, made for the cover of the trees, where maybe the air was thinner, where maybe he wouldn’t notice the silence so goddam much. He’d have to stock up on drink but he was too spliced to drive, even he knew that. With a rambling forward motion he was able to lurch into the coolness of the trees and there was the smell of eucalypt, strong and heavy but medicinal, like it cleaned up his throbbing hand, soothed his eyes.

  He contemplated lying down by the creek and passing the rest of the day there, but the creek was low and there were green ants. Besides, he’d need more drink if he was going to avoid the hangover. Maybe he was sick, he thought, as he ambled on, untangling himself from a vine of stay-a-while and feeling genuine surprise at the rash of blood pricks it left round his ankle. An hour or maybe two or maybe ten minutes later, he came to the cane of the Haydons’ boundary. The cane was thin and low, and it was more of a wade than a swim through it to their farm. Bob’s car wasn’t around and it occurred to Frank that maybe it was Vicky he wanted to see anyway. It was hot as buggery, the air was low and wet, and he was still deaf. He could feel sweat creeping down the skin underneath his beard. He scratched at his throat and felt the lumps there – hives, maybe, or boils, something growing under his skin, hatching out.

  He stood outside the house and looked at the place. The big veranda all around hung with seashell wind chimes and pot plants that wrapped themselves round the corner posts. A small wind moved his hair, cooled the burn of his beard. Vicky appeared at the door in a loose white shirt, her bare legs flowing out of it, her chafed ankles and scarred brown knees.

  She mumbled something that Frank couldn’t understand. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Can’t hear you. Damn water in me ears.’

  ‘I said,’ she shouted, ‘Jesus, Frank, you look like a fuckin’ monster!’ She jerked her head towards the indoors. ‘Come in and have a sit in front of the air-con!’

  She sat him by a machine that he could feel vibrating through his feet, it sounded like a tractor even through the buggered drums of his ears, and she went from the room. The air that came out of it was antiseptic, cold enough to give him an instant headache and burn the tunnels of his nose. It was a beautiful thing. When she came back, she was wearing a pair of worn men’s shorts and holding a jug of water with ice and a glass.

  ‘You look like you’ve done a pretty good job at dehydrating yourself!’ she called at him from in front of his face. He took the water she poured for him and felt it go sharp down his neck. It was as though there was a spine in his throat, a stuck dry fishbone that he couldn’t get wet. Vicky mumbled something and Frank shook his head at her, closed his eyes to feel the blast of cold on his eyelids. He felt hands on his face and opened his eyes to see she’d brought a basin of soapy water and some scissors. He blinked as she cut away at the tufts of hair round his face, twirling them loose round her fingers. He felt the disgust of himself and it made him angry that she was there to see it, but he couldn’t stop her. He watched her watching where she cut, her tongue pink between her lips, her eyebrows drawn together. When she produced a razor and began to massage warm water into his beard he felt the dirt coming free, watched in amazement as she smiled and the lather grew up round his face. He heard the scraping from inside his body, felt the overpowering itches being scratched. The water in the basin was dark grey with hair and dirt and blood before she switched to a new razor.

  She was talking now, softly to herself perhaps, and he could hear a mumble, but not the words. Her frown deepened as she shaved under his chin and he saw her wince at something there. She got up and went to the kitchen and when she came back she had a box of matches, tweezers, and a pin stuck on the end of a cork. Outside there was a roll of thunder and, as it passed over, Frank’s ears cleared and hot seawater ran down his neck. There was a whine from his tear ducts. ‘I can hear,’ he said.

  ‘It speaks,’ said Vicky.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Ticks. You’re buggered with them.’ She tilted back his head and heated the pin in the flame of a match until it was black, then approached his throat with it. He felt a small warmth, a pressure and Vicky went in with the tweezers, her eyes squinting. Frank held his breath and she moved back. ‘Got ’im,’ she said under her breath and dropped the bud-looking bastard into the water. She heated the pin again and went back to it. With the pin to his throat she said, ‘Bob told me what happened back in Canberra, you know.’ Frank didn’t reply. His face was hot. ‘Reckon you might be making yourself a little bit crazy out there all alone?’

  ‘What about you?’ He felt angry suddenly, dangerous, the urge to grab her wrist and look her in the eye. But he didn’t.

  ‘What
about me, what?’

  ‘Bob catches it a bit off you sometimes. Can’t tell me you’re not driving yourself a little bit nuts.’ There was a small sharp pain in his neck and he couldn’t tell if she’d pricked him on purpose.

  She smiled softly and there was a silence, an intake of breath. She sat back on her stool, another tick held tight between the jaws of the tweezers. ‘It’s not me that does that to Bob.’

  ‘You mean it’s not the real you?’

  She smiled tightly. ‘No. I mean he does it himself. I’ve had to pull the lock off the bathroom door. He goes in there and hits his face against the sink.’

  Frank was silent and Vicky continued removing the ticks. He felt his mouth fill up with spit, swallowed it down.

  ‘I imagine he told you it was me doing it? Being an hysterical woman all over the place? He sleeps so deeply it doesn’t wake him up when he cries out at night. These real sobs like a kid.’

  Another tick out, a plip in the dirty water.

  ‘I can’t lie there listening to it. When Emmy died there was none of that. We didn’t cry, we just watched and that was all there was.’ The room lit up with lightning and outside the storm started with the sky falling like sand on the roof.

  Frank sat in the doorway of his shack, clean-shaven, and drank instant coffee, watching the rain pouring off the corrugated roof in needle stripes of white and feeling the spray of rain on his face as it bounced off the veranda.

  In the afternoon, lightning struck a field far off to the north and he heard, above the roar, the sound of trucks speeding towards it, smoke a spear on the horizon.

  One storm passed with another right behind and in between the sun shone more furiously than before, trying to clean up the mess, suck up all the extra water before the next one arrived. Mist rose on the top green leaves of the sugar cane. The chickens, fluffed and offended by the storm, ventured out to pull up fat earthworms from the battered soil.

  The thunder that night had Frank, Kirk and Mary awake, wide-eyed and indoors: the sound overhead of great concrete wheels rumbling and warping over the shack; the blackness between the lightning, and the flat colour when the lightning stuck; the orange bucket by the blue Ute; the green green green of the cane and the white sky; the frozen water coming down, pale and thick. He imagined at each strike a figure before the darkness and wished there were someone he could crawl into bed with. Someone who would see the rain falling like razor blades and breathe their own breath into the shack so that the window would steam up. He held a candle by the mirror and looked at the marks the ticks had left under his chin. Nine little puncture marks. He wanted to show Lucy. She’d be fascinated. She’d touch them with her cold fingers. He looked at his face and wondered what he’d have to do.

  The chooks were asleep on the veranda. He emptied out a whole bag of feed around the place – he had seen them get on to the roof with furious flapping, so he figured they’d be safe from foxes. He tippy-toed to the truck, hoping not to wake them as he left.

  Early in the morning the rain stopped and the sky was a leftover ice-blue. Frank stopped at a roadside for breakfast. Over tired eggs and sleepy toast, he watched other people in the truck stop. He didn’t know if they were good or bad, these lives other people had. Large men looked blankly out over the highway, a mess of yellow eggs and coffee in front of them or, for the ones whose stomachs had long forgotten the conventions of breakfast, a meat pie and cola. Their thoughts still seemed to be of the road. He tore at a napkin. It would be good to have something to concentrate on. He asked himself questions that he felt he must know the answers to. They must be somewhere inside his brain. The right thing to do. What will I say? was the one that went round and round, and came out of his mouth with answers that never got beyond hello, because he was stopped by the word Dad. The adverts on the radio spooked him, and he turned it off and ended up counting the white lines in the road as he drove over them, or finding a tune in the engine’s revs.

  The smell of Sydney came rolling at him as he reached the outskirts. The ozone, the diesel and the thick brown river. A ball bounced in his stomach. By the time he reached Parramatta he’d got as far as picturing opening the door to the shop so that he could say hello and hum the British national anthem.

  The streets were black with past rain. The sun was bright now, thick yellow, and it bounded off the pavement taking steam with it. Familiar places started to show themselves. Old bus routes and short cuts to the centre of town. The smell of hot treats from the main streets. Trees lined the streets in countable rows. Smoke and electric light, the hum of aeroplanes, trains and cars, taxis and their beetling movements. It seemed to him everyone was putting on a show of living in a city; that the moment his back was turned the crowds of people, the bustle and movement would stop. The whole place would empty and sand would settle over the slick bitumen, dust clog up the wide windows of the shopping centres, the tide would swallow Bronte Beach and make its way up over the Harbour Bridge. When the Parramatta river appeared he was surprised by its brownness, by the earthiness of it, next to the steel and rust and concrete.

  The Shannons’ florists had closed up, he noted with a slug of pleasure. He’d gone to school with June Shannon, a snub-nosed girl with critical eyes who lived with her grandmother. He parked the truck out at the front, felt his heart slip down into his bowels and knocking, trying to come out the other end. He could walk round the block a couple of times first. But his legs took him straight there, the old grooves dug by walking home from school, from the jacaranda tree and the park at night. The last time he’d seen the place there’d been blood in his mouth, a backward glance over his shoulder to see if his dad was watching. He wasn’t.

  The shop looked different. The glass in the front window was spotless. Signs had been printed out from a computer and white-tacked neatly to the glass, advertising things he’d never imagined his father approving of – cheese twists and smoothies, chicken and mushroom pies, and milky coffees. There was a new sign with a pink halogen light behind it. His palms sweated and he thought about the truck waiting for him round the corner. The door of the shop opened and June Shannon stepped out, whip thin with that upturned nose. She held a fistful of blond child in one hand and a can of light lemon in the other. Frank looked at the ground and rubbed a spot of grease with the toe of his shoe. Don’t recognise me, June. His face got hot. Please don’t fuckin’ recognise me.

  But she had a memory for faces. ‘Frank? Frank Collard?’ She bobbed her head up and down to try to lift his gaze.

  He nodded, collected a smile together. ‘June. How are you?’

  She looked thrilled to see him, but the blond child wriggled and tugged at her. ‘I’m pretty good, Frank – Clay!’ She shook the arm of the wriggling kid. ‘Get back inside!’

  The kid looked up at her from under a heavy brow, sullen and threatening a scream. ‘But Ma!’

  ‘Inside, now – we’ll go later. I have to talk to the man here.’ Little Clay gave him an ugly look up and down, before turning round and stomping back into the shop. Frank’s teeth bit his lip.

  ‘Sorry ’bout that, Frank,’ she said, flattening down her T-shirt. He shrugged, tried to smile. ‘Well, we haven’t seen you around here in a time!’ She was talking like a woman from the deep south of America. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘I’ve moved up north – country sort of thing.’

  She nodded, eyes wide. ‘So, you had a fight with your old man?’

  He blinked, didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. Which didn’t seem to bother her.

  ‘So what d’ya think to the old place? Have we looked after her all right?’ She chuckled and he didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘You want to come on in?’ She squinted into the brightness at him. ‘Give youse a Coon Cheese Twist on the house!’ She chuckled again, stepping back and holding the door open for him. He saw a slice of inside. The counter was in a different place and behind it stood a man, fat and glazed like a doughnut. He wore a green apron.

/>   ‘June – you live here?’

  She looked unsure of herself for the first time, ‘You didn’t know? – Oh. Well,’ she said a bit softer, letting the door swing closed and taking a few paces towards him. ‘Your old man left some months back, Frank. Me an’ Jimmy.’ She nodded in the direction of the doughnut man. ‘We bought it up from him with the money Gran left. Sorry, Frank – were you looking for him? Jeeze, that makes it kind of awkward, eh?’

  He turned round and headed away from the shop without a word. His skin prickled. He worried that June wasn’t as big a bitch as she had been when he was young and perhaps she was hurt by his abrupt departure, but he thought it just as likely that she watched him march away from the shop with a look of having sunk an enemy ship.

  The Parramatta Hotel had been painted cream orange since he’d last seen it. There was an old black dog tied up outside, its water bowl boiling in the sun. He untied it before going in and it sloped off down the street looking over its shoulder at the pub. Inside the dark-blue carpet still stuck to his feet. A blackboard still read STEAK WITCH. It was dark and smoke drooped in the air. He ordered a beer. Horses ran on a black and white television at the bar, but no one watched them. He fidgeted with a beer mat as the drink went down him. Six men sat in quiet communion in the pool room drinking and avoiding each other’s eyes. He felt sick. He tried to think, but all that would come was that last time, busting into his father’s room, the smell of the grey sheets, the air thick and damp like breath. His dad lay underneath the bedsheet, the bare ticking spoiled round his shoulders. He hadn’t sat up, hadn’t moved anything but his eyes, which swivelled towards the door. A liquorish cigarette wilted at the edge of his mouth. Frank had felt the violence leave him because what would he do? Pull the sheets away? Leave his father naked and splayed on the bed like a baby? His father didn’t speak, but there was the smallest twitch from his eyebrow, his lips hanging on to the cigarette.