Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

Frank’s bowels seemed to twang the tripwire of his stomach whenever the tide was high. He felt the full pinch of his gut at a later time every day, until it became too dark and he would chicken at the shoreline, squatting on the sand, then kneeling in the shallows to wash, feeling the familiar shame of being human again.

Early one morning before the sun had taken the pale edge off the place, his guts woke him, and he balanced on his rock like a limpet and yawned at the sky. There was some half-remembered dream still on him, Joyce Mackelly climbing into the top branches of a tree and watching everyone look for her with her smudged newsprint face. The water was still and unusually glassy. Behind him a butcher-bird whistled, and now and then a fat Christmas beetle flew nearby, burring like a motor. A smallish lemon shark came to inspect his toilet. It tilted itself and looked up at him, dog-eyed. He drew up his feet, pulled his bum out of the water and watched as the fish swam around the rock, then around again and then, satisfied with what it had seen, glided back out to sea.

He walked back to the shack feeling lightly drawn against the day. Sleep hadn’t finished with him yet. Back inside, he lay face down on his bed and slept.

Not long later — it seemed, though the sun had moved so it shone right in his eyes — he was woken by a noise, like something with a beak was having a go at his front door, with a regular one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three.

Trying not to squeak the floorboards, he moved across to the door and opened it slowly, in case the bird was perched on it. There was no bird. There was Sal holding what looked like the same carrot, matured in its pink jumpsuit. ‘I bin knocking for ages.’

‘Jesus, Sal. You scared the living shit out of me.’ Amazing that Bob and Vick just let the kid wander off like that. Maybe they’d sent her to check up on him.

She turned one of her feet so she was leaning on the side of it and it must have been calculated because it made him feel bad. She held up a coin. ‘I was knocking with this dollar, so it didn’t hurt my hand.’

‘What do you want?’ He ran a palm over his face, squeezed his eyes shut and opened them. It was the hangover. Not her fault. He breathed in deeply. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said in the friendliest voice he could manage right then.

Evidently it was enough. ‘Came to see you. Do you have any Coke?’ She pushed past his legs.

‘No — you want a drink of water?’

She was silent, so he filled a tin from the tap and offered it. She ignored it and walked around the room looking at things — particularly, it seemed, the cobwebs and the unwashed dishes in the sink.

‘Do your parents know you’re here, Sal?’

‘Oh, sure!’ She was clearly lying.

He wedged the door open, feeling he might have to flee at any minute. ‘Well — what can I do you for?’

‘I’ve come to work on your farm.’

‘Farm? Mate, I don’t have a farm.’

‘What’s that, then?’ She pointed to the paced-out vegetable patch, conspicuously bare, marrow seedlings gingerly sown, weeds creeping up bamboo poles.

‘That’s a veggie patch.’

‘You got chooks, too. You could get a goat and a pig and a dog. Then it’d be better.’

‘Goats stink,’ said Frank.

‘Do not.’

He nearly said ‘do too’, but Sal, fringe black in her eyes, silenced him. She took a package out of her back pocket, carefully wrapped in kitchen towel. She pulled off the paper and held out another large rudely shaped carrot, patted with mud, freshly dug.

‘What’s this?’

‘Carrot.’

‘What’s it for?’

‘You eat ’em.’

He let out a sigh, but she was smiling. ‘Payment for working your farm.’

‘You want to pay me to work on my farm?’

‘Trial run,’ she said, face like thunder again.

Frank took the carrot.

‘It’s a deal,’ she said.

Handling it appeared to be in lieu of a contract. It was a good carrot, it smelt strongly of earth.

‘You grow this yourself, mate?’

‘Yep.’

‘’S a good carrot.’

‘Yep.’

‘Well.’ He put on his best foreman’s voice — the first sting of the hangover was less than he had thought. ‘What’ll I pay you to work on the farm?’

‘Room and board.’

‘Five dollars and tea twice a week.’

‘Hokay.’

He wondered if she knew what room and board meant. ‘The condition is you let your ma know the deal. If it’s okay with her it’s okay with me.’

She nodded and padded down the steps where she picked up her bike, orange with rust, and put her carrot in its jumpsuit gently in the basket. She peddled off down the drive without another word. Kirk ran in a circle in the bike’s wake, chasing the dust.

And that’s the end of that, he thought, relieved. Either Vicky would tell her not to bother him, or Sal’d get sick of the idea.

He rinsed and ate the carrot, and it was good. There was a gentle headache getting at him, right where the bridge of his nose joined his eyes. He pinched at it as he sat on the steps drinking water. He’d ploughed halfway through a box of red wine the night before. But Boxing Day was always a bit like that. When he’d woken up in his bed there’d been the long morning that he lay there for, wondering how the Haydons spent Boxing Day. Maybe they went to the beach. He should have invited them to his for a barbecue or something. A pippie fire. But maybe they spent it as a family, maybe they’d had enough of him — he had been pretty drunk.

Frank wondered if he’d been out of line with Vicky. But nothing happened, did it, so there wasn’t a problem. Unless she didn’t like him and told Bob she thought he was a sleaze. If he had a phone he could ring them up and say thanks, gauge the atmosphere. He could drive round there, but they probably didn’t want disturbing. They were a family doing family things. They would have invited him had they wanted him to be there. It wasn’t enough, he realised, because even if you spent Christmas with people, even if you weren’t alone then, the next day was empty, even more empty for following a day with those people and their good looks. Their easy laughs and bare legs. Frank pressed his wrists into the edge of the step he sat on, so that he could feel something through the small hangover and so that his heart could stop beating so loudly.

When Sal returned an hour later, she had her own trowel and, without a word to Frank or even a glance in his direction, she knelt down and began to dig out his newly planted marrow seedlings. He trotted over, his hands flapping girlishly. ‘Mate, I just planted those.’ It came out louder than he’d meant and he saw the back of her neck tense. A sweat started on his face and he tried to pull his voice back, make it lighter, friendly. ‘Maybe we could have a chat about what needs doing here — you want to feed the chooks?’

She sat back, heels supporting her bottom, and regarded him with a blank stare. ‘Marrows won’t grow in this soil.’

So — a smart-arse. ‘Well, how do you know they won’t grow unless you try them out, mate?’

She blinked at him.

There was a silence and then Sal started to laugh.

The latest postcard had a cartoon pelican on it, wearing a straw hat and cat-eye sunglasses. It peered over the glasses, showing off its long lashes, and gave the kind of wink that made you wonder if it was American. Behind her was another beach, this one filled with small brown bodies and striped umbrellas. Leon turned it over.

Sometimes I don’t know what we do here. We have bought this little place, it was not expensive, this little wooden house in the forest. There’s a young man I see sometimes who delivers groceries for us so that we don’t have to go into town (your father cannot bear to see the people there). This man is a native — I never met one before — fancy that. We talk sometimes. I tell him about you, how grown up you are, your beautiful cakes.