Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

Leon handed the picture back, nodding. ‘She’s a lovely-looking woman.’

‘Careful.’

‘I mean she looks lovely.’

Cray looked at the photograph and smiled, his chest rose. ‘Haven’t seen the boy yet. S’posed to be a picture coming, but what with the post…’

Leon nodded. ‘How old would that make him?’

‘Seventeen days.’

Leon bit the barley sugar in half and blinked away an image he didn’t want to know about. Cray sprayed with bullets against dark green, blood leaking from his mouth. He looked away and breathed through his nose. Something coursed through the leaves to one side of them, but Cray didn’t seem to hear it.

The sound of the Hewie caught in the wind. When he was hoisted up, they all waved but Flood was still, a crust of a man, his mouth a hole.

‘Pretty crook way for a soldier to go, I reckon,’ said Pete but Leon wasn’t sure he agreed. He thought about the clean sheets Flood would be tucked into, about the quiet at night, the soft touches of nurses.

‘Life is a cabaret, old chum. Come to the cabaret. Life is a cabaret, old chum. Come to the cabaret,’ sang Sal to no tune, so that Frank stopped blocking up the mouse holes behind the bed and watched her pushing canes into the ground for tomatoes to grow up. The vegetable patch looked good, nothing fruiting, but green tips were popping up and the soil was black and freshly turned of weeds. She was setting up an arrangement of chicken wire so that the new shoots would be safe. She moved about like a black beetle, feeling through the soil with her fingertips, scrabbling at loose stones and roots as she came across them. On days when she was over, he found himself busying around, doing little jobs he felt she might approve of: like sanding down a large tree stump for an outdoors table, clearing the guttering and setting a barrel at the edge of the house to catch rainwater for the garden.

At the mosquito-biting time of day she appeared in the doorway dragging the machete behind her like a big fish. ‘What do you use this for?’ she asked.

Controlling a bark, he took the knife off her and lobbed it into a stump by the side of the shack. ‘That’s to scare the chooks with. Remind them to keep laying eggs.’

She nodded gravely.

Once they were sitting down at the new table, Frank served up lunch. ‘Hope you like omelettes!’ he said as he slid the mess on to her plate. She did not reply.

It was strange to eat at a table. Normally, he’d wander around shovelling the food in and not taking much notice.

‘Do you know how to kill a chook?’ she asked, forking the food around her plate.

‘Whose chook do you want to kill?’

She shrugged. ‘Any chook. Just wondered if you knew how.’

‘Your mother never showed you how?’

‘She takes them mostly into the shed and I’m not supposed to watch.’

‘How come you want to know?’

She shrugged again.

‘Well, you can wring their necks, or you can chop their heads off.’

‘With an axe?’

‘With an axe.’

She looked through the open doorway at Kirk and Mary, scratching in the dust.

Frank felt tense. ‘What d’ya need to know that sort of thing for?’

‘Just like to know. What else do you know?’

‘I know how to fish.’

‘I already know that.’

‘Light a fire?’

‘I know that too.’

‘Well, okay. Tell me what you know, then.’

Sal sighed. ‘How to fish, how to make a fire, how to build a bivouac, how to hold a crocodile, how to change a tyre, how to get water in the desert, how to dress a crab, how to peel a prawn, how to peel a prickly pear, how to skin a pineapple.’ She took a deep breath. ‘How to get a stamp off a letter, how to make damper, how to spell SOS with flags, how to get a fish hook out of a lip, who Ned Kelly was and how to kill a chook.’ She sat back, her plate now empty, and arranged her knife and fork neatly in the centre.

Frank’s eyebrows were far up his forehead. He could feel them there. ‘Tell you what, kiddo, I’d ask for a bit of help with that last one.’

Sal looked again at Mary and Kirk.

‘I’ll show you how to gut a fish next time I knock a few on the head, eh?’

Sal studied his eyes. ‘Hokay,’ she said as she slid from her chair. At the door she turned back. ‘I like omelettes with capsicum in.’

‘That one didn’t have capsicum in it.’

‘No.’

She took off down the steps, hopped on her bike and hared off down the track to home, leaving a line of red dust in her wake.

‘Hokay,’ he said and to fill up the still space she’d left he wandered outside with a beer to talk at the chooks.

Sea mist ghosted through the yellowed evening, painting the blue gums and wetting his face. A sea eagle coasted just above him, eyeing where the water’s surface ripped up, white and hairy, probably a feeding school of bream. He cast to that spot and sensed the wobble of fish sucking his bait. He felt expectant and a little bit drunk, his feet wide apart, the tips of his fingers resting on the drag. He’d been fishing with Lucy on a few occasions — once, before he’d got bad, they’d taken a long weekend and camped next to a river, a little inland, and there were a few windless days when the place seemed to be there entirely for their benefit. They’d caught fish from the river when they were hungry. A jabiru stalked them as they sat by the bank, taking off and flying close enough for them to feel the wind move on their faces. There were no other people at the spot and it was easy to imagine, when the sun started to go down and deer and echidna and paddymelon melted out of the bush, that they shared some secret with the land, that they and they alone lived in a way that set the precedent for all future campers. The two most perfect people on the planet. They made love in the open on a quilt that he wrapped round her afterwards, keeping the fading rays of the sun from touching her shoulders. He stayed awake, feeling the trees and dirt and water and breathing in the gloaming air. Even the mosquitoes gave them room, barely wingeing, just a whisper by his ear that made him put his hand over hers in case the noise woke her.

When the sun was fully down he carried her to the tent and laid her on the mattress, where she opened her eyes. She’d smiled, and locked her arms round his neck and grabbed at the hair there. ‘Beautiful boy,’ she’d said and he’d kissed the sand from her belly.

By the time he saw what was going to happen it was too late. A regular tugging at his line that he had taken for the ambling of his bait over rocks became the urgent yank of a caught fish. The fish had swum up to the surface and the eagle was swooping for it, as he stood there, gormless, his mouth working around words his brain hadn’t instructed him to say yet. Just too late, he let out as much line as he could, hoping the fish would take it and swim back down, but the eagle was keen and it easily grabbed hold of the fish in both claws, not missing a beat with its huge black-tipped wings. The drag screamed and he watched in amazement as his line began to go, his rod bouncing like old buggery and he yelled at the bird, ‘Let go, you idiot!’ but the eagle only angled its head at him, giving him no more of a look of understanding than it would have a rival bird.

Frank floundered, holding the rod firmly in one hand, searching for a knife with the other, thinking in horror of how it would feel to reach the end of the drag, to have the bird pull and then plummet down into the water, tangled in line. With one hand he found the knife handle and held the blade to the line, and there was an elastic snap as the line was cut. The eagle kept on flying as if nothing had happened, the long string of line trailing from its claws, the fish still weaving in its grasp, shining silver where the sun caught it. The eagle flew out of sight round the bend that was the mouth of the river and Frank knelt down, his hands on his knees, breathing hard, a lump in his throat.