Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s pretty lucky.’ She smiled and her chin dug at him.

‘You make me feel less… hounded.’

‘Explain,’ she said without pausing. He didn’t know what would come out if he tried to. The sound of something scritch-scratching on its claws up behind him, that slunk into the bath with his mother and that crept from bed to bed at night, curling up against the napes of their necks, making the house creak with its footsteps; the thing that licked at his fingers when he slept so that in the morning they were cold and damp.

‘Like there’s something trying to sneak up all the time — some kind of thing watching, like it might like to tear everything to pieces.’

‘Huh,’ said Amy. ‘Like God, you mean?’

He snorted. ‘No. Not like that.’ There was a pause.

He felt the bruise her chin was making getting deeper and was about to roll her off when she said, ‘Like something’s watching?’

‘Sort of. Yes.’

Amy nodded digging her chin deeper into him. ‘I could understand that,’ she said and he breathed out of his mouth.

‘It’s like it has these teeth and claws, and it wants to dig them into me, rip something out.’

‘I know.’ She lifted her chin and moved up his body. She lay so that her soft cheek was on his chest, which was more comfortable. He wondered what she meant.

She raised her head and hair covered one of her eyes. ‘I know,’ she repeated and he found that it was all he could ever have wanted.

When his father arrived one afternoon at the front door, his mother let out a shriek and clung on to him, and he held her tightly too, but stared over her shoulder at Leon. He was a small man all of a sudden, his eyes big as though the skin of his face had retreated. His shirt front ballooned with air when he bent too low and held his arms round Leon like he expected him to be shorter. Leon thought he might laugh, bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself and hunched down over his father and, not knowing what else to do with his hands, held his father’s skull against him and was scared it might crack.

That night all three of them ate together again and his mother cooked a chicken to celebrate. She wore a dress that puffed out in the skirt and made a crumpling noise when she moved. Her hair was dry and long down her back, and it occurred to him that she hadn’t cut it since his father had left. When it was time to carve, his father nodded at him to cut, handing him the carving things. It was strange to hold the long knife in front of his parents, to feel the heat rise to his face in case he did it wrong. Chook carving had always been his father’s job because he complained so much if Leon’s mother did it. You had to get every slither of meat from the bones, had to turn the carcass over and scoop out the dark fatty meat of the chicken’s back. The bones had to be clean, sucked white by the knife. He managed to separate the leg and wing from the left side, but found the right side troublesome. He could hear that he was splintering the bone.

‘Turn it round, my darling,’ said his father softly. He made a circle in the air with one finger and sure enough, when it had been turned he cut through the joint without difficulty. But the word ‘darling’ hung in the air, and it made Leon shrug into his shirt and look round the room as if there were something he needed to be doing that he couldn’t remember. His father drank deeply from his wine glass and refilled it. The meal was quiet, but that was natural. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time. The easy conversations about work, eyes half on a paper, half on the plate, were what he was used to with just his mother. Now her bright questions made the place quieter.

‘Did you see many animals in the jungle?’ was the first one that clattered awkwardly against the walls of the back room.

‘Yes,’ replied his father, swallowing a mouthful of potato, ‘there were a fair few monkeys about. A jaguar as well, but I didn’t see it.’

Both his parents smiled in the silence afterwards, then both looked at Leon and Leon smiled back. All three took a mouthful from their forks and all three chewed drily at the same time. Monkeys and a jaguar.

The meal was short and he felt guiltily relieved. His father said goodnight, that he was tired and his mother went after him, leaving the dishes on the table. All the vegetables from his father’s plate were eaten, but the small amount of chicken he had taken from the dish lay untouched, nudged to the very edge of the plate.

In the morning his mother’s hair still hung down her back. There was a glow on her, her shoulders were loose, her eyes full.

His father didn’t come down for breakfast, or even later in the day.

‘He’s exhausted,’ said his mother, her palms up like she was feeling for rain.

During that week news travelled up and down the main street that his father was back, and people asked after him at the counter.

‘He’s resting,’ he told the butcher’s wife who stood on tiptoe and tried to see past him into the empty kitchen. By the end of the week his mother looked worried. He saw her watching the ceiling, listening for movement up in the bedroom, but there was none.

‘I think what we should do is throw a little party,’ she said, ‘just for his friends on the street.’

Leon made anzacs and a three-layered cake with pale-green icing. One of the sponge layers was pink, the other two soft white with coffee-coloured cream in between each one. He made a sugar doll of his father to go on top in his army greens, his hat folded up on one side, his fingers soldered to his forehead in a salute. He stood duck-footed and straight, tiny stripes on his shoulders, broad in the chest as he had looked the day he left. The model went in the centre of the cake and behind him Leon planted the Australian flag on a toothpick.

‘That’s pretty, chicken,’ said his mother and he let it go, because her eyes were soppy.

As people arrived, they cooed over the cake, then hovered around the easy chair where his father sat, holding cups of coffee or small glasses of sherry. Leon kept his back to most of them, trying to look busy at the table, rearranging biscuits and filling glasses. He felt itchy in his smart clothes, which were now too small for him. He looked away from the kind type of smiles that everyone seemed to want to give, just before they glanced at their watches. He overheard the butcher complaining to his wife, ‘It’s more like a flamin’ wake than a party,’ and saw his wife stick a meaty elbow in his gut. There was a low rumble of talk in the room, enough people so that no one felt too awkward about the man who sat silent, drinking wine in his easy chair, half the size that they remembered him.

Amy Blackwell arrived with her mother and they stood together, her mother chatting loudly to the barber. Amy looked silly, her hair in strange sausage-looking ringlets, an ugly little purse that was attached to her wrist and a yellow smock that looked like a pillowcase. She shot him a low look, her eye, underneath her pointed eyebrow, was like the finger she’d given Briony. It was an easy joke, it laughed at the fancy dress her mother had put her in, it asked about his smoothed and parted hairdo, and the tight, itchy jumper he was wearing. He pressed his lips together and smelt the earth of the storeroom, and turned back to the table, spilling a few dots of orange cordial on the cloth. He smiled. Mrs Shannon sat quietly in the corner, her legs crossed. She watched Amy too from behind her small glass of sherry, and there was a look on her face that he couldn’t figure out.

Soon after the cake was cut the butcher, who had taken charge of the sherry bottle, started singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and everyone joined in to hide how embarrassed they were.