Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

Frank sighed. ‘Okay; you’ve got a kangaroo’s tail — the size of an emu.’ He thought a bit — some children’s book from when he was a kid. ‘Sort of a beak, I think, and these funny bobbles on his head. Feathers — but no wings. Scales. And maybe fins. Big sharp teeth.’

‘Is it always a man?’

‘What?’

‘Is there only one bunyip and is it a he?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose there might be more than one. And maybe he has a girlfriend.’

Sal was unimpressed and turned her face away. ‘You’re making it up. You don’t know anything about it.’

‘Well, be fair. I’ve never met one.’

‘Ha! So it does exist!’

‘I didn’t say that. Eat your sandwich.’

She picked up a prawn and galloped it round the plate. ‘Anyway. I know he exists,’ she said, teeth clenched together.

‘And how’s that?’

‘Bunyip got my sister.’

The sheets bunched damply under his ribs, and his eyelids were light and wouldn’t close. It was hot, the air in the shack hadn’t moved since the sun had breathed into the room that morning. He thought about trying to sleep on the veranda, but Jesus roamed the cane and it made him less inclined to move from his sagging bed. He remembered wading through that cane, leaving Bo by the fire. He had been fogged up to the neck with gasoline and the leaves of the cane threatened to cut open his eyes. He’d sat in the firelight the night Bo’s ear was bleeding all over the place, and they’d passed the gas and rag back and forth between them.

Bo’d talked to billy-o. ‘I dunno, man,’ he’d been saying, ‘we should shoot through, move up north, there’s jobs for people like us up there, there’s fruit picking and farm work, and we could pick up a new couple of chicks just like that. Or the girls could come with us. Could hitch up there, or even if it’s just the two of us, I dunno which is best. Man, we could get fish outta the sea and we could get us a tent or maybe we’ll get a VW and we can sleep in that, self-contained like.’ And he went on and on like that, and to Frank it seemed like there was something evil in the fat-mouthed idiot all of a sudden. Sat there with blood crusted round his earhole, his fat neck creasing at the back, he looked like someone you’d see molesting dogs in the park. He thought of his dad’s nose, the nostrils black with dried blood, a busted blood vessel in his eye, after the pub.

Something heavy was on Frank’s chest. ‘I’m going to go,’ he interrupted Bo, who was still talking about how their sleeping quarters would look, how they could get one of those chemical toilets or they could do their craps in paper bags and throw them out the window.

Bo blinked. ‘Going where? How d’you mean?’ He cocked his head to look up at Frank, shielded the bad side of his face with his hand against the fire. ‘Jeeze, you look like your old man tonight.’

Frank took a heave on the gasoline rag and ink spilled out of the dark that twitched and churned at the edge of the fire. It looked like things beetled all around them, and when he turned his head they flowed from Bo’s mouth and attached themselves to his eye sockets then disappeared back in again. And there was one big one that chewed at Bo’s ear, drooled and snotted and rapped his skull with its fingernails, which split and then multiplied and its eyes were the eyes of a cooked fish, white and blind and popping out of their sockets. And Bo was fat and content to let it lick at his face, let it eat from inside his mouth, pull on his tongue, this terrible fat lump with a bloody ear.

Frank stood up and walked slowly round Bo, looking him over, and Bo looked back dully, thickly. Frank kicked some sand at the fire and Bo flinched. He kicked sand at Bo and Bo shielded his face. ‘Fuckoff.’

But Frank kicked some more and Bo roared, but it wasn’t anger, he was just scared and then he was even more repulsive, and Frank kicked him in the fat gut to see what would happen, and Bo rolled on to his side and lowed like a cow, his face wet, and he kicked him again and then went running into the thick black, and the sounds of the bush got louder and something far away crowed a victory.

The thing that really scared him was the pit toilet. He could smell it, he could imagine the thick-backed beetles that lived down there, the little ticking crabs and the bandy-legged rats. How far down was it? It was far, it was far enough that there’d be no getting out, and the sides were slime shit and you’d be up to your waist in it, if you were lucky. And all there’d be would be that crescent moon of the toilet hole all the way up there, where the lid peeped open. It felt like his next step would be into that hole and for a time he stood still on the spot, sweating, too scared to put his foot out into the dark. Then he got a hold on himself. It was the gasoline he could smell, still all up in his nose, and he could aim himself towards the bush through the cane and that way he wouldn’t even come close to the dunny. He listened to the cicadas and went towards them, then when the cane started flicking past his ears and across his eyes he ran full tilt at the sound, the rib-rib-rib, and he felt the air, wet around him. He heard the strange crow again and headed for it, deep into the deep black.

He’d slept a night, or perhaps a night and a day, on the dry leaf ground. Ants had tickled at his neck, mosquitoes had made his eyes pinholes. Watched by a million different things that didn’t expect him to stay so long. The sound of something hopping through the dry leaves like a thing on a spring, of a nightbird mooing like a calf. The swish of a snake in the dark. And past all that he’d been listening for something else.

He woke in an apple-pie bed at a hospital and his old man was there, pale and red but sober. He’d touched Frank’s foot through the blankets. Frank wanted to speak, wanted to know what had happened, but he couldn’t, a kind of lockjaw. Before he fell back to sleep his father said, ‘We’ll have to chain youse to the bloody radiator, mate,’ and inside Frank had felt a sarcastic laugh at his dad who kept a photo album of dead men under his bed, a grubby little cache of death porn to look at on nights he wasn’t screwing some drunk woman who made the whole house smell.

It could only have been his imagination, but in the dark he felt things moving. Things too lumpy and heavy to be held up by their thin legs, things with brown spines and slits for eyes, cat-sized rodents with teeth that grew as long as their bodies, things that reached out for his face with their blind hands with claws like knitting needles. He felt air move close to his face and shut his eyes, waiting between the howls of Jesus in the bush, waited for the claws to close in on his cheek, to poke up a nostril and push into his mouth. At points he thought he heard it get closer and once he heard a scraping at the door, a snuffling, a scritch-scratch, and all that he could do was close himself up, his eyes, his palms and his ears, and hide in bed like a child. If it thinks I’m asleep it’ll leave me alone, as long as I don’t move it will drag itself past my bed .

Leon’s feet felt wet in his boots even though he’d just towelled them, even though he’d wiped out the insides and let them dry overnight. When he’d banged them against the ground in the morning, a red centipede as thick as his thumb rizzled out, its stalk antennae up and pointing like two warning fingers. Rod cleaned his feet with his towel, which he’d managed to keep fairly free of dirt, considering. Delicately, he threaded the stubby end of it between each of his toes and then round the nails, wincing at the little toe, which looked pretty red. Leon smoked a cigarette — the ritual was too much to pass up — a cup of bad coffee, a mouthful of biscuit and a smoke. It dried you out so that your insides felt drier than your outsides. With half an inch of cold coffee left in his tin, he dipped his fingers in and rubbed it into his chin and cheeks for a bit of a shave. His razor was not sharp and it tugged at his hairs, but it was another good thing, he decided. The noise was like stripping wallpaper, but it was good to imagine yourself in a bathroom, foamed up to the gills and rinsing your razor in warm water, not old coffee, and as long as there was no mirror, well, that was okay. He finished it off with a wipe from his towel, which had been everywhere, foot and bum and face, and he felt pampered as all get-out.