Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

In the early hours of the next day, long after Sal had gone to bed of her own accord, Frank made to leave. He patted Bob’s shoulder; Bob was slumped in an armchair, a beer warmed in his hand, and the black stub of a joint rested blunt and dead between his fingers. His eyelids drooped. Vicky showed Frank to the door and put her hands under his armpits in a strange close hug.

He knew what was going to happen, because he could feel her breath on his neck. He had the feeling that anything that happened that night wouldn’t be counted and what was the harm in kissing a woman on Christmas night, with her husband and child in the next rooms?

But he made sure his eyes were fixed well over her head when they untangled, and even though some of her hair caught in his mouth he didn’t look down to her face. He may have kissed her forehead lightly and he may have wanted to kiss her mouth but instead he slurred, ‘Nice Christmas, Vick, ta for the chooks,’ and he wobbled to his Ute in no fit state to drive, and over-gently put his charges, Kirk and Mary, clucking and sleepy, on the passenger seat while Vicky watched from the open lit doorway, so that he could see the dark shapes of her thighs through her dress. As he backed clumsily out of the drive, he saw the naked body of Barbie, folded in half and stuck through a hole in the incinerator.

Mrs Shannon had her hair cut like Jackie Kennedy. The baby Leon’s mother had predicted never showed up and nothing was said. He always gave her something free and he wondered if it wasn’t for the free treat that she kept returning, but for the chance to be given something. She was beautiful, even though the skin of her chest was dark and stretched from the sun, and sometimes underneath her sunglasses you could see flesh swollen so that it nearly touched the glass of the lens. It didn’t stop her from wearing a green gauze ball gown just to walk down to the shops. She turned up one time with her arm in a sling, home-sewed stitches in her lip.

‘How’s the cake trade, kiddo?’

‘Just fine, thanks, Mrs Shannon.’

‘I’ll have a lamington, please, darl.’ And she held the money in her hand, fragile wrist pointing up, an insistence in the jiggle of her fingers. ‘Go on, take the money. I’ll be bleeding you dry.’

‘What’s the use living opposite a bakery if you can’t have a biscuit for free?’ and he gave her a florentine, not a lamington, because he knew that was what she really liked. He wondered what he would do if Mr Shannon ever came into the shop, but he’d never seen him. He’d never even seen the man walk out of his house.

The rest of the year was wet. The cake shop steamed up on the inside. His mother spent time running errands that involved being out of the shop and he wondered if she was retracing the steps his father had taken all around the city. He didn’t follow her to find out, just waited for something to happen. When she came home, she was pale and thin, and she looked like she would be thrown down in a breeze. She started having the long baths again, but this time there was no steam that filled up the top rooms. He felt the water once as it drained away after she had got out and it was cold.

After the rain came an envelope with his father’s handwriting on it. He watched from the back room while she stood at the counter and opened it gently, unsticking the paper flap, not tearing, looking frightened of what might be inside. She looked at the letter, her face blank, then the door chimed and she was gone down the street, melting between the parked cars. She left the letter on the table, thin blue paper folded once. There was a dot at the top of the page, like he’d been about to write but couldn’t think of what to say. And then there was his signature and beneath that, in place of where there might have been a cross for a kiss, another dot, this one bigger than the first, the ink blooming from the pen nib and staining through to the other side. The postmark read something northern and when his mother returned a few hours later she took that, not the letter, to tuck into the book she kept by her bed.

The next morning Leon put a preserved cherry on top of a cake and smiled. When he looked up, he saw Mrs Shannon walk by, a scarf round her face, pulled low over her eyes. She walked like she was only wearing one shoe and then she was gone. His mother appeared in the doorway, her hat pinned to her head, a grey suitcase in her hand, and even though it was warm out she wore her long wool coat. She put a gloved hand in his hair and there was her wet face again, her nose like a beak. She dropped her arm. ‘And suddenly you’re a grown-up man,’ she said. ‘I have to go away, chicken,’ and even though he’d been expecting something like this, he thought she’d insist on him going with her, thought he might have to put his foot down and explain that someone had to keep the shop running. That maybe he could help her look on a Sunday, call up a few lodging houses and give a description of his father. She took a tissue out of her pocket and rubbed her nose with it. ‘I’ll write, of course, when I find him, and then we’ll see.’ Leon felt the smile that was fixed on his face. It hurt his teeth. ‘You understand, chicken?’ He nodded and really he did understand, he could see it in the lines on her face, that to her it was more important to find a man who’d been missing even when he was sitting beside her in his easy chair.

In bed, Leon lay awake in the empty house. There was the tick of the bedside clock, the beat of his heart and the terrible sound of something coming for him, hoof and claw and tooth grinding in the dirt. Scritch-scratch, snuffle.

Weeks went by and sleeping was still strange and restless, but his ears didn’t strain to hear anything that might be going on in another room; he didn’t anticipate the arrival of his thin-voiced mother, didn’t leave his spare pillow under the bed any more. There was no one to watch him close up early for a date or to watch him bring a girl back. He did it a few times, but he couldn’t sleep with the girl in his bed. He found himself sitting watching her as she slept, willing her to wake up and leave because looking at her lying there he felt nothing at all. Even when they were beautiful there was nothing, hard though he looked for it. So he stopped bringing them back and sometimes he closed up the shop a little early to spend more time in the Parramatta Hotel with the men who looked darkly into their drinks as they laughed over old stories. The man with the claw hand came over and sat with him one afternoon. ‘You’re Collard’s son,’ he said and even if Leon had not been he wouldn’t have been able to say no.

‘He’s gone off,’ Leon said, not sure what the man wanted.

‘I know. Best thing for it. If a man doesn’t want company he wants to be on his own.’

‘Suppose. Mum’s gone to find him.’

‘Seen a lot, that man. Cousin of mine was in the same camp.’

‘Is he here?’ He wanted to see what other people looked like — how they handled it.

‘Nah, mate. He’s not.’ Leon took a long drink from his glass and hoped the man would change the subject. ‘Bit of advice, son,’ he said, waving his claw over his drink. ‘Try and forget about it. No one wants to hear about it, no one wants to talk about it, no one wants to remember it. Let them alone to thrash it out. It’s a healing thing. Think about other things, there’s plenty to go round, plenty of other things need a good bit of thought put into. What about this new lot of oriental types and their Ho-Chee-Man? Just round the corner, mate. Worry about that while you drink ya beer.’

‘Right,’ said Leon, and the man winked and got up to return to his friends. As six o’clock approached and the drinking speeded up, Leon watched the claw man laughing and talking with his friends, and he thought it was good to be away from the hopeful eyes of girls. He wondered what would happen to his parents if they found each other again.