After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Unknown

  ‘You don’t even know what you’ve done, do you?’ Frank had asked.

  The tip of the cigarette had glowed weakly.

  Frank drank and drank some more.

  By the time the street lights came on outside the pub his legs were heavy with beer and the bar nuts did nothing to soak it up. He looked at the dirt under his nails and wanted to go home. Strange to call it home. A voice said movie-like in the gloom of the bar, ‘Thought I might find you here.’ It was June but without her exclamations.

  ‘June.’ He raised his glass, then looked away from her.

  She smiled and he could hear it. ‘You going to buy me a drink, Collard? Thought maybe we could swap stories.’

  He took a ten-dollar note from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Get yerself somethin.’ Crikey, he thought as she moved towards the bar. I’m buyin’ June Shannon a drink. Wonder if I’ll get the change. The thought tickled him and he was smiling when she got back with her own beer. She gave him the change. There was a silence while she got started on her drink and he wondered why she’d come.

  ‘So where’s . . . Jimmy?’

  She drank past the halfway mark of her beer before she answered, ‘Top Pub.’

  Another silence while he turned this over. ‘How come you’re not there?’

  ‘This is my local. Not Jimmy’s. Anyway – I thought you could do with a friendly ear.’ She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her own ear. Then she trailed a finger down her throat and rested it on her collarbone. He felt angry and looked away. She finished her beer, got up wordlessly and went to the bar again. When she came back she had a new one for him too.

  ‘Quick drinking.’

  She shrugged. ‘Thirsty. So!’ The exclamation was back. ‘You’re living up north now then? What do you do there?’

  ‘I work on a boat. Occasionally.’

  ‘So, your woman left you?’ she said, not batting an eyelid.

  He felt his ears move back on his head. Same old June. ‘My woman?’ He tried to make it sound insignificant, something to be snorted at, but he snorted too loudly and sounded angry. ‘What is it that you heard about my woman, June?’

  She shrugged. ‘Lucy, wasn’t it?’

  He pictured himself knocking out June’s front teeth. He drank the rest of his old drink instead, and put the new cold beer in its place. He drew his lips back over his teeth and looked up at her. ‘How did you know her name?’

  ‘You say it like she’s dead.’

  ‘How do you know she’s not?’

  He’d meant to scare her but only scared himself.

  ‘She was here. Looking for you.’

  He breathed out another snort. ‘She was not here,’ he said under his breath like she was a child telling tales. Lucy wouldn’t look for him here. She wouldn’t look for him. He felt sick. She said nothing. Someone turned off the old television and it made a snapping noise.

  ‘She left you?’

  The beer burnt in his chest. ‘That’s nothing to talk about.’ He slapped his palm on the table, spilling the first centimetre of his drink. There was a long silence but June didn’t look uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure if he’d imagined the whole conversation, if he wasn’t just making this up in his head.

  But she was still holding her shit shovel. ‘It must feel weird to come back home and your old man’s gone. I can’t believe he didn’t tell you! We paid fair price on that shop, Frank, I can tell you. I’d be on to him for a fix of it – you worked there for a time, after all.’

  She glittered in the cigarette smoke. He was silent. He wanted to ask questions but then again, he did not. He didn’t want the answers and he especially didn’t want the answers she would give him.

  ‘I can tell you where he’s gone. I can tell you why. And I can tell you with who.’

  He peeled a bar mat; drank his beer. There were pins and needles in his bum bones.

  She took a swallow and ran her tongue over her teeth. ‘Do you know about that, Frank? Know about the woman he went with? An evangelist, Frank. Fucking true. She passed through here like honey on a stick and your old dad stuck to her.’

  ‘I’ve never heard such a troop of bollocks. He doesn’t believe in God.’

  ‘Maybe, Frank, but I was here. Where were you? You can ask the guy at the bar if you like – he near as well lost his best customer.’

  He felt hot and sick. He couldn’t work out why he was having this conversation, why he didn’t leave, get in his car and drive back home, even as drunk as he was. How had she known her name? He tried to picture Lucy talking to June, but it didn’t fit. Lucy would have hated her.

  ‘Look, Frank, I’m telling you this because you have a right to know. I got the evangelist woman’s address in case they needed mail forwarded. And because, frankly’ – she let the joke hang in the air – ‘I was interested.’

  She took a layer of his shredded bar mat and got the stub of a pencil out of her pocket. He recognised the pencil as one that had been kept tucked behind his father’s ear at the shop. Then he thought how ridiculous, how stupid – there must be thousands of millions of pencils the same as that one. Even so he had to fight an urge to collect it from June’s fingers and hold it gently in his palm. He must have drunk more than he realised. She wrote an address on the mat and drew a little box round it. Then she got up to go to the bar again.

  ‘You seem pretty familiar with where he lives,’ he said as she came back.

  ‘It’s an interesting place.’

  ‘Interesting?’

  ‘A real bunch of loonies. You’ve heard of Billy Graham? He founded it in the fifties. People there are either evangelist or they leave. Apart from that, the place’s got beef.’

  He took the piece of paper and looked at it. He didn’t want to put it in his pocket in front of her. ‘You must be pretty bored down here, June.’

  For the first time she flinched. ‘Well, fuck you then, Frank.’ She looked like she might leave, but settled back down. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’ She looked poisonous now in the smoke of the bar.

  ‘Beg pardon?’ he said, amused and letting her know it.

  ‘So you’ve got nothing, well boohoo, Frank – what about me? Huh? What about me, I’ve got everything now, haven’t I?’

  He sat back a little on his stool, not sure where she was headed.

  ‘I got the shop, I got the family, I got the fucking lump of a useless husband.’ She held her fingers out towards Frank. ‘I married that loser – can you reckon that?’

  ‘June . . .’

  ‘And on top of that I’ve got kids. Three. An’ one on the way.’

  ‘You’re pregnant? Don’t you think . . .’

  She held up a hand. ‘Don’t you fucking say it, Frank.’

  She drank, her eyes one long rectangle of dark. She put the glass down gently like it was precious. ‘You have no idea . . . just. You can do what you like. There’s no one. There’s no one to think about. You work on a boat . . . occasionally? You’re able to just leave the shop, your old man, Parramatta, fucking Sydney?’

  ‘It’s not about freedom, June–’

  ‘Yes it fucking is.’

  She stood up. To Frank she swayed, but he wasn’t sure if she really did. ‘You should know,’ she said. ‘She’s pregnant too.’

  June walked out of the bar.

  He slept sitting up in the passenger seat of his truck. His mouth kept falling open and waking him, and when the sun came up he felt the floating heat of his hangover push against his chest. The night echoed grimly and he drove out of Sydney feeling the day cook him. He would have welcomed another storm, something to wash away the baked-bread smell of the inside of the Ute.

  The way Frank remembered it, he’d come straight from school, where things had started to even out. Bo hadn’t been there when he went back and Eliza looked away from him if he saw her on the street. The thought of glue or gasoline or even mull made his chest tight under his shirt. The shop door was unlocked, but the sign read ‘Cl
osed’ and no lights were on. The only stock out were the four trays of scones he’d made before the sun was even up. That morning he had got the idea that things could be done, things could fix up. The past month or so, his dad had even got into a cobbled-together routine of laying out the food – shop-bought cakes, mainly, but still – and they’d talked the week he’d got out of hospital about how the shop used to be, about how good it could be made.

  And so, when he found the woman in the kitchen wearing the dress with the oranges on it, something hot and sticky had risen at the back of his throat. The dress was not on his mother, so it bagged round the waist and the woman inside it had flesh at the edge of her armpits that sagged over the top. She was making eggs in a pan, which were burning, while she was smoking and looking through the cupboards, bare feet, hair the colour of wet lint.

  ‘Who are you?’ he’d asked, although there wasn’t an answer she could give that might make the whole thing okay.

  She turned to face him with a big smile that showed her teeth were cheesy. ‘Whose yerself?’ she asked, appraising him with one arm crossed at her waist, the other falling free at her side, wrist up holding the cigarette. There was a sort of rash or a pink burn along her forearms, some sort of dry-skin problem that went all the way up to the inside of her elbow. She pointed her fag hand at him like she’d just solved a puzzle. ‘Oh,’ she said, her voice a mix of husk and moisture, ‘you’re the son.’

  After a few hours of driving Frank had to stop at a service station and he bent over the toilet, heaving, until nothing more would come out. His eyes streamed. The tick bites itched. He bought a litre of Coke and drank it in the Ute.

  Roedale was a mixed bag of dust and meat. Grey weary-skinned cows stood in grass that had turned brown and curled in the sun, while eddies of dust flew up round their worn ankles. Two large palm trees marked the entrance to the town, their heads strange and dark against the sky. You could drive from one end of town to the other in less than a minute and there were roundabouts at each end, so that you could boomerang back in if you were thinking of leaving, or take second thoughts if you were thinking of coming. He didn’t falter, not one bit, he held the address hard between his thumb and index finger, and kept his eyes ahead on the empty road. He stopped at a sandwich bar, the God Bless Café, to ask directions.

  The lady behind the counter had glasses that took up three-quarters of her face and below them she had very little chin. ‘How doin’, mate?’ she asked.

  ‘Good. Thanks,’ he said, pretending to survey the dry sliced meats on display, nodding. He looked at his piece of beer mat. ‘Was wondering if you could tell me where to find Fantail Rise?’

  She looked at him, bug-eyed through the thick lenses. ‘End a town; turn left, mate.’

  She spoke loudly with long pauses between words, like she’d learnt to speak through a spelling computer. A screw loose or local colour, he wasn’t sure. Too much meat at a young age.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said, turning to leave.

  ‘No warries, mate,’ said his friend. ‘God blesses you, mate!’ she called as he stepped back into the sun.

  He walked the main street. God’s Own Greens sold fruit and vegetables, and advertised choko like it was a cure for cancer. The butcher’s was called David and Goliath’s, an op shop, I Work for Jesus!

  There was no pub and he wondered how that went with his old man. A bottle shop would have been good, just to take the edge off the hangover, but nowhere looked hopeful.

  CHRIST ROSE FROM THE DEAD AND IS COMING SOON!! in big fat letters as the town banner. A sign in the window of Saint Shortie’s Snack Bar: ALL MEN EVERYWHERE ARE LOST AND FACE THE JUDGEMENT OF GOD!! Everything seemed to want a couple of exclamation marks after it; all signs were neon.

  It didn’t seem possible that a man like his father could live here. The last time Frank had seen him he’d been grey and silent in a doorway with nothing in his face to show there was any kind of thought going on inside. The colour he had been it was hard to imagine there was even blood in there.

  Fantail Rise had no rise in it. The road was long and straight and flat, and the houses were sparse, with large front yards bristling with razor grass. He found the house and stood outside while a hot sweat got him. It was white weatherboard, with a porch – not a veranda, somehow. The curtains were bright and lace. It had been a bad idea to walk, it was just past midday and his face burnt; there were dark patches under his arms and on his chest. His feet twitched saltily in their boots.

  As he stood in the drive, an orange Holden pulled up behind him and he was trapped. The woman who got out wore a broad smile of old-fashioned red. She was younger than his father, or perhaps she worked very hard to look younger. He wondered suddenly if she’d been shown photographs of him. Closer up the woman’s eyes were blue.

  ‘Hello, darl, can I help you?’ she said in a voice laced with Perth and Texas. There was a silence. The woman put her hands on her neat hips, glanced behind him at the house.

  ‘Does Leon Collard live here?’

  ‘Leo?’ The woman’s smile wilted a little. She moved to the back of the car, opened the boot and started to take out shopping bags. ‘What d’you want with Leo?’ she asked turning round, laden.

  ‘I’m a friend.’

  The woman looked at him and smiled again. She shut her mouth and tilted her head to one side. ‘You’re awfully young to be his friend.’ Her eyes were bright.

  ‘Well, he was a friend of my father’s.’

  ‘Well, how about that, darl?’ she asked him softly. He wondered if he should help her with her shopping, but then it might seem as if he wanted to get inside her house. They stood quietly, the shopping bags making a noise against the woman’s leg.

  ‘So . . . is he in?’

  ‘No – but you’d better come in – help me with these, won’t you?’

  He took the bags from her, sweatily, and let himself be ushered inside her house, which was unlocked. She stood in the doorway behind him and checked up and down the street before closing the door. He stood, ballasted by the shopping.

  The woman smiled large again. ‘Straight through to the kitchen,’ she said, dropping her car keys in a bowl and wiping her eyebrow with one finger. ‘It certainly is a hot one today – did you come far? I’m Merle, by the way. Leo’s wife.’

  His face felt sugar-coated, stiffened. ‘Frank,’ he said, still holding the shopping, forgetting he was incognito.

  Merle took the bags from him and smiled, her eyebrows raised in perfect ns. She placed the bags on the counter. ‘Now,’ she said, turning her full attention to him. ‘What kind of cordial would you like?’

  He sat on the edge of an over-soft sofa that threatened to fold him in two if he sank too deeply and sipped a bright-green drink in a thick glass. Merle was putting away her frozens and he waited, feeling like a grubby child. A black and white portrait of a young man hung over an electric fireplace, the man’s expression seemed to say, infallibly and sternly, yes. Yes to what he wasn’t sure, but definitely yes to something. The picture was backlit so that the man seemed to be coming from the light, looming out in the dark. WILLIAM FRANKLIN GRAHAM, AUGUST 1956 it read on a small gold-leaf plaque in a neat black hand beneath him.

  He watched in alarm as a crumb of mud fell off one of his boots. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

  ‘I hope you like scotch fingers, Frank!’ Merle said, appearing in the doorway. ‘Your father’s favourite.’ He knew that they were not and thought this before realising she knew who he was. He pretended not to notice and accepted a biscuit from the elaborately decorated plate. The biscuit made a noise when he picked it up, a squeak against the china, which was, for some reason, embarrassing.

  Merle switched on the large television that had a wooden statue of Jesus doing a peace sign on top. She snatched the remote control and muted an advert for turtle wax, then placed the control back on top of the television, next to Jesus and the scotch fingers. She settled in an armchair and made a sighin
g noise, like she had finally been made at ease. Frank saw that she had reapplied lipstick in the kitchen and despite her comfortable sigh, her mouth was firm and shut.

  Merle’s cordial was bright pink – cherry – he could smell it. What he really wanted was a cold beer, something to kill the awkwardness of this strange meeting.

  ‘Thanks for that.’ He gestured to the drink that he couldn’t seem to swallow. She smiled, mouth still closed. Frank’s eyes wandered over to the television, some huge supermarket with a couple gaily pushing their empty trolley towards it. There was a burst of fluorescent stars and then the couple emerged, surprised and jubilant, their trolley full to overflowing. The woman picked out a bottle of shampoo and held it to her cheek. The man inspected some aluminium barbecue tongs as though they were just the weapons he needed.

  ‘So is, um, Leon at work?’ It was weird to use his first name and Merle raised an eyebrow.

  ‘We call him Leo now – like the lion? Due back around seven o’clock tonight, Frank – he’s been away on a trip.’

  ‘A trip?’

  ‘He sells The Book.’

  ‘The Book?’ His brain caught up with him. ‘The Bible Book?’

  ‘The very same.’

  There was a needlework embroidery on the wall – in fact, there were several. They said things like CHRIST IS BEYOND OUR UNDERSTANDING and GLORY IN THY NAME. The one that was the most impressive, that was decorated with hearts and flowers, roses and poppies, vines and oranges, read AFTER THE FIRE, A STILL SMALL VOICE.

  Merle noticed him looking. ‘Leo does those himself,’ she said. Frank was unable to stop the honk of a laugh that came out of him. He immediately thought he would be sick. He imagined his father sitting there in an apron delicately sewing away, a small smile on his lips. ‘Takes time and dedication and love to get those looking so good,’ said Merle. She parted her lips and smiled again, a line of sunlight blanketing her tightly pressed shins. Frank thought about the time he’d opened his lunch box at school to find a tin of sardines, missing the key to open them, and a balled-up sock.

  ‘It must be quite a lot to take in after all these years. I know that he didn’t always believe, Frank.’ A long silence followed during which Merle took a sip of her drink and blotted her lips on a napkin. Frank could not take his eyes off the embroidery. Merle rolled her tongue in to her cheek.