Evie Wyld: After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

She’d come in the night before, a secret look about her, and Frank had thought for a while that she was pregnant. It had taken him so by surprise, but it all added up — she’d told him she was going to see a friend who was upset and she might end up staying over — she was worried about it, that was all. She wanted time to get used to the idea, had booked into a hotel for the night, or maybe she’d stayed with a friend, talking it through. She was scared, worried about how he might react. He felt his palms tingle and realised he was excited. He wanted to pull her down into a chair and make her tell him. He had it ready what he would say, and how happy the next days would be. This all happened within ten minutes of her getting in the door. He poured her a glass of wine to test her, but she drank it. A glass of red now and again was good, he’d read that, that was fine. But she’d have to stop the cigarettes.

She looked at the red and white tablecloth, rubbed a spot of grease away with her index finger and started. ‘Look, I’ve been to Sydney.’

Were the doctors better there? She caught his eye, smiled and looked down again. She was nervous.

He took her hand. ‘How come?’ He could feel that his eyes were wide open, he didn’t want to miss the moment. She looked at him again. He inhaled.

‘I’ve been to see your father.’ His hold on her hand grew slack but other than that nothing changed. He kept his gaze steady and she must have taken that as encouragement, because she started talking at ninety miles an hour.

‘I had to ask around a bit, but the shop’s still there, and once I found it and I went in, I could tell he was the right one, he looked just exactly like you, it was weird, a bit smaller, tired, but it was like you were there. And I talked to him, I actually bought a pie first, just to be sure, and then we got talking and he really was a nice-seeming guy. Charming. Friendly.’ She paused, thinking Frank might say something but he didn’t, just let his hand hang open on the table. How could she have done that to him? She didn’t seem to notice he’d let go of her hand. His old man, who when he looked at you looked up and to the centre of your forehead like he was reading something printed there, whose body was old, mouth slack and full of dark teeth from drink and banana paddle-pops, the wrappers wet in his pocket. Who still somehow managed to bring home, every so often, a young pretty thing, in between the old and the fish-smelling, the fat and moustached women that he found by the bucketload. The daytime drinkers and their terrible loud voices, their piss, dark and strong in the toilet. That was ten years ago. It was a surprise he was still alive, let alone that he still managed a day’s work.

‘And anyway,’ she went on over his thoughts, ‘I didn’t tell him who I was or anything like that, but I asked for directions back to the train station and he drew me a map.’ She scrabbled around in her handbag and brought out a paper napkin, carefully folded, and laid it on the table like it was a child’s drawing. ‘He knew it just like that.’ She took a long gulp of her drink and pushed the map closer to Frank. ‘He did look tired, though. Really tired. And alone. I really think now’s the time, love. We could just go and say hello, take it from there.’

Where did all this ‘we’ come from? She looked at Frank like he was a puzzle she’d just fitted the last piece into. He sat back in his chair and drained his glass, and when he’d finished he threw the glass on the floor and it smashed. The colour had gone from her face. He held her gaze a moment and hoped that she understood what he thought about what she had done and the anger that was barely kept inside him. He was going to leave the house then, but it wasn’t enough, the smashed glass seemed pathetic, like a tantrum, and she had to know it was not. He found that his hand was holding her face and squeezing it, and he’d been sure he was going to say something, but he just squashed her face with his hand, feeling the teeth through her cheek, feeling her breath hot on his palm and already there were tears, but what did she have to cry about? Then he didn’t want to touch her any more and pushed her away, and there came a noise from her and her hands went up to her face. Still there was something he wanted to say, he heard it rumbling inside him but it wouldn’t come. He left the house leaving the door open, spent the night in the park and knew that she would not be there when he got back and that that had been it, his chance to prove himself, to show that his old overreacting self had gone for good. But she’d seen his father. Christ, she’d talked to him and he had not.

He took shallow breaths. He picked up a back board from an unframed picture and snapped it in two.

There, he thought. At least that’s that taken care of.

He strode into the kitchen, whistling tunelessly, because no songs would come to him. He thought he would take a bath and dragged his clothes off standing at the kitchen sink. He put on some toast and went to the bathroom, but there was a large spider in the bath.

‘Get the fuck out of my bath, you shit!’ he shouted, turning on the hot tap and leaving the room. He picked his clothes off the kitchen floor and put his shirt back on, but he didn’t manage the pants.

The toast pinged up and, crying, he buttered it and daubed it with jam, inhaling deeply and letting out long shaky breaths. He ate it breathlessly between hiccups. His mouth, which at that moment had nothing to do with him, would not stop making the sound ‘Aaaaaaaa’ like a stiff door opening. He lay on the floor, a smear of jam on his cheek, and mashed the last of the bread into a wet pap with an open bawling mouth. The crusts sat on the floor. He swallowed and breathed in sharply, then cooled his crying to a whimper, then to sniffing and then just to staring. The sun moved across the kitchen floor, regardless.

On his last night in the flat he sprayed air freshener until the insides of his nose were raw, to get rid of the smell of her. But still she flooded in, got behind his eyes, up his nose, at the back of his tongue. Those white days in the city when he would wake to condensation fogging up the bedroom window, and from where he lay it looked like the world had left while he was asleep. She smelt faintly of beeswax polish. On those cold mornings when they lay in bed, and he missed Sydney and the things that were there, she pressed her feet into the backs of his calves and even their coldness was comforting. It was enough to leave the blank window of Canberra outside a little longer.

At the roundabout before Mulaburry Town, on the grass verge, a boy sat cross-legged reading a book that could only have been the Bible. Frank watched him in his rear-view mirror. The kid wore boardies and a big yellow T-shirt, his hair was almost white from sun and sea and his arms, long and brown and smooth. Frank shook his head. Cutting school to read the Bible by the road. Things had changed.

Behind the camping shop was a recycling yard and he moved the old bed frames as quietly as he could, gritting his teeth when they clanked together, hoping no one would come and tell him to dick off. He left them leant up against the bottle bank and hurried round to the front of the shop, trying to look like he’d just arrived.

The old lady in the shop said, ‘The council come on a Tuesday and take away the larger refuse.’ But she said it with a wide smile, as though he’d asked.

‘Right,’ he said, smiling back but not knowing what to say, waiting for the feeling of delinquency to run out of him.

‘Need any help, darl?’

‘I’m after a camp bed.’ Move it along, he thought, move it along, make it seem like you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. It was only dumping a couple of bed frames. Is that bad? How bad is that?