Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

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 forklift, 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.

‘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.