Evie Wyld: After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

He dragged out the mattresses and afterwards he slung the bed frames in the back of the Ute. The idea of sleeping on either of them filled him with dread. The smell might be there, his mother’s hand cream, or the witch hazel his father used for aftershave, in the days before he stopped bothering. Later it was more of a flaying than grooming. There might be particles of their skin there, he might find a long blond hair and know it was not his. They were things that needed to be forgotten about, for starters.

He’d bought some kerosene with him, and he found a place out of reach of the fingers of the cane and poured it on to the mattresses, knowing he was pouring too much. He threw on a lit match and felt his eyelashes singe, turned away and didn’t watch the beds burning. He moved his suitcases into the shack and tried the taps. Nothing came out, the dead flies skitted around the basin, blown by the breeze of his hand. So he’d need to see to a water tank. There was no fridge, but there’d never been one — they’d kept beer and milk and Cokes cool in a deep rock pool where the water moved gently. They’d caught fish as they needed it, and there were always abalone, oysters and octopus to be had. But things changed. He’d get a cold box in town when he went looking for a camp bed. Chances were the stove was buggered after such a long time, but he gave it a look-over anyway. Something dreadful had happened inside, and nothing he could think of made any sense. A big rat or a bandicoot, something with hair and long yellow teeth, claws and a thick backbone, had been cooked whole and left. The thing looked like it had exploded and then been cooked again, the stuff was black and hard and old. It was long past smelling, which was good. He found a stick and gave it a poke but it was welded on. He straightened up and looked at the stove with his hands on his hips. He rubbed the grit of hair on his face. He wasn’t sure how much he’d want to use it anyway even if he could get the stuff off. Like a man slow-dancing with an orang-utan, he walked the stove and cylinder, corner by corner, out of the shack and well away from the burning mattresses. He left it, squat and angry-looking, at the entrance to the clearing.

The week after his mum had drifted in burnt flakes to the seabed a chill Sydney morning woke him, so that his face was wet and his shoulders were stiff. That was when he’d seen the first one. Padding out of his bedroom, a blanket round his shoulders, thoughts of morning hot chocolate and warm bread, his stomach had sunk and growled as he saw her slip from his parents’ room. The old woman from the flower shop, but for half a second he would have sworn it was his mother, and in that moment he’d wondered if the past weeks had been imagined. There was no explanation for a woman coming out of his parents’ room apart from it being his mother, and he stood with his mouth open, his knees weak and his heart high in his chest. But only the vague shape was hers, only the long hair, the small hands. This woman was old and nearly dead. She met his stare with a look like she’d been caught stealing butter from the fridge, but she was old and so wouldn’t have any trouble about that. Her eyelids were shaded blue, her fingernails were red and her yellow dress was something a lady in a picture might wear, but not her. She hesitated and then smiled at him, and he could see that her teeth were not her own, but belonged to a much younger person with much bigger teeth. She made for the stairs, holding her high heels in one hand, her handbag in the crook of her arm. As she passed him she touched him on the head. ‘Okay, kiddo,’ she had said and tackled the stairs in her stockinged feet, mindful of their slipperiness.

Those women, the ones with the clothes that smelt of piss and smoke, the ham thighs showing through the slits in their skirts, the skin and bone of their chests and the unlikeliness of their make-up, the rouge that seemed to float above the skin of their cheeks, the lipsticked teeth either false or yellow. The smell of his mum was gone from the house a month after she was in the sea, and it was replaced with something wide open and stinking. After his father stopped baking bread there was nothing to mask it apart from the smell of old beer and damp rot, like the house was growing soft and sinking into the ground.

The wood of the dunny shed had turned silver and it snagged the tips of Frank’s fingers when he opened the door. Inside, the porcelain bowl was almost hidden beneath fireweed that geysered out of it, some of the plants five feet tall. Through the green he could see a crack running the whole way down the throat of the toilet, something black, like good soil, pushing behind it. It had been a joke his dad had loved — the porcelain drop dunny. The smell was like a garden shed, no shit, but a gentle manure, potato-y, cool. Spiderwebs coddled the corners, white and flossy, and a skink ran across the cistern. The whole thing looked more like a fancy bird bath than a loo, and he closed the door and let it alone. The burning mattresses gave off a smell of rubber. He watched the fingers that peaked on the fire and snatched at the moths gamely flying over the top, disintegrating them in snaps and pops.

He thought of the morning Lucy left. How he’d sat at the kitchen table, listened to the sound of the schoolkids on their way to soccer practice, the shouts and magpie noises of girls laughing. A line of sunlight cast on to the checked tablecloth, and he had counted the squares. He’d walked his finger on to a red square and thought of her marching towards him, sticks that she found interesting under her long arm, her hat throwing a shadow down to her shoulders. White square; pale hot hair that flew in her face, white clay, dust, and thrash caught in it like a gill net. Red square; the first time they’d had sex, all knuckles and knees. White square — the mole under her breast — red square — the clasp of her eyelashes — white square — the smell of her neck — red square — the sound of her sleeping — white square — the sound of her crying when she thought he was asleep — red square — the silhouette of her hand over her mouth in the dark — white square white square white square.

The sun had moved across the table and on to the floor where it disappeared up the wall. He’d listened to the kids returning from soccer practice, had heard the bell sound in the school up the road and the day ending for them in kicked cans and squabbles. He listened for keys in the front door. He drew his fingernail around a red square so that it stood out from the others.

She did not come back that night, and it was dawn before he’d moved to the toilet where he let out a jet of strong greenish piss. He didn’t flush but went into the bedroom where he’d checked the wardrobe. Plenty of her things were still there, but her pack was gone, along with her good jeans and her work jeans. They were not in the dirty clothes. He avoided the photographs around the house — the ones that he knew off by heart anyway. Three on the mantelpiece, two on the chest of drawers in their bedroom. One by the window trying to catch his eye with its reflection. Taken soon after they met, she wore some terrible yellow dungarees and her hair had blown into Frank’s face. His teeth showed, smiling, through the hair, wide and laughing. You couldn’t see the kink in his nose where it had broken. You could see the crows’ feet, which made him look older than he was, and happy, and the dark line of his eyebrows tilted upwards like he couldn’t believe his luck, not yet thirty and suddenly there was all he’d ever wanted. He looked half a head shorter than her. The picture showed how she couldn’t ever leave him because they held hands.

Opening the desk drawer he saw that her passport, usually bulldog-clipped to his own, had gone too. He tried her mobile for the fifth time, and it went straight to answerphone and he hung up. He spent the rest of the morning with the phone in his hand sitting on the edge of the bed, but nobody called him.