Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

‘Girls,’ Bob greeted them and raised his drink. Kirk and Mary did not look but scrubbed in the dirt at a line of ants. The low sun bumped off the red track and turned the whole distance cherry. A rosella landed on the veranda, saw them and squeaked in surprise before flying off again.

‘How are your girls?’ asked Frank.

‘Same as ever. Sal reckons we need a goat. So that’s what’s new with her.’

‘You going to get one?’

‘Nah. Nice animals but. Take a heap of looking after. If you want rid of a chook you wring its neck. If we decided we’d had enough of chickens tomorrow it’d take — I dunno — around half a day to get through the lot of them. If we were really on it. But a goat, you’ve got to bleed her. And they’ve got all that personality in them.’

Frank laughed. ‘You look at everything like that? How easy it is to kill?’

‘Means you can move on easier. We like knowing we can just fold up and piss off as the mood takes us.’

Frank leant back in his chair and felt the solidness of the veranda under him. He thought of that last night in Canberra when it hadn’t seemed possible that he was leaving, when he’d sprayed lavender-scented toilet spray to convince himself it wasn’t home any more. He tilted back further in his chair, felt himself go past the point of balance and wobbled forward with a bump to knock the thoughts out of him. A small breeze brought on it the smell of a fresh open custard apple. He looked at his hands. It was quiet. There was the sound of the bottle clipping against Bob’s teeth, of his deep swallow. Bob was looking out at the darkening cane and in the dim light he looked older, like an old-fashioned explorer, like he wasn’t made for Australia at all, but the lonely white tundra of the North Pole or the South Pole or any pole just so long as it was lonely.

‘Must be hard to just fold up and move on when you’ve got a kid.’

‘We’ve done it before. Helps Vick to know she’s mobile, I think.’

The chink again, glass on tooth.

‘How’d you mean?’

Bob turned his head to face Frank. ‘She’s got things on her mind, you know — more than most. She doesn’t sleep — sits up late sometimes. And sometimes she drinks.’ Bob laughed loudly and suddenly, and his bark echoed. ‘Nothing wrong with sitting up and getting off yer face, eh, Frank?’ He raised his bottle again. Frank nodded, smiled and Bob settled back deep in his chair. There was quiet again and this time Frank tried hard to think of something to fill the quiet with, but he couldn’t settle on anything, kept being distracted by the sound of crickets skiffing in the cane, a big moth caught in a web scrabbling against the roof.

‘She’s a strong one, but. She gets on with things for the most part. The daytime. It’s just the nights get at her, you know?’ He took another swallow. ‘I wish I could stay awake. Be some kind of company. But I wake up and I hear her downstairs. An’ I think, Go down, bring her back, talk to her, join her, hell, get shit-faced at six in the morning with her if it helps . But I can’t help the need to sleep, can I? An’ the bed’s warm. An’ before I’ve made up my mind what to do, I’m asleep again. There’s good places to be in sleep.’

Bob was still, apart from his eyelids that fluttered like the moth’s wings.

In the distance a road train rumbled by, the black of its back end just visible.

Frank laid a hand on Bob’s shoulder as he passed behind him for more beer, but he didn’t seem to notice. ‘We met out west, you know,’ he said as if this explained a lot. ‘She’s younger than she looks. She was working with the Tourist Board down on Rottenest.’

‘Funny place.’

‘Yeah — she lived on army barracks when I met her. It was winter — lonely sort of a place in winter. Just you an’ the quokkas it feels like. I’d been travelling about with this mob of kids, left them in Perth. You know how it is — there was all the grog, the pills, sharing a sleeping bag in the back of a car with a bloke who smells like piss and mustard. You get to the point you want your privacy.’ Bob laughed.

Frank thought of that night sharing a bed with Bo when he’d been ready to swing for him at the slightest breath on the back of his neck.

‘We got to Perth and I just had enough, they were heading up to Broome to sleep on the beaches, and the weather was filthy. I just split, told them I’d meet them up there. Knew I wouldn’t see them again. That’s a good feeling — like you’re shedding skin. Took the ferry over, crook as a chook all the way. Salt, wind, rain. White sky for as far as you could see, and this black little dot of an island. Funny now — feels like she was waiting there for me, like I was going there just to find her.’

A paddymelon appeared at the edge of the cane and watched them. It grazed a little.

Bob went on. ‘She was pregnant within a month. Funny, but it didn’t worry us. Probably should’ve. We felt so easy then, like we could go wherever, do whatever felt good. That’s where the first chooks come from. Rottenest hens. That’s all we took with us. It’s how it’s supposed to work, you know? We got this chicken empire now. We live off the land we own. We eat out of the sea, dig in our own dirt. We want a holiday we hop in the truck; an hour down the road you could be on a desert island. It’s just all so perfect.’ Bob had his eyes closed and smiled.

‘So, what happened?’

Bob opened his eyes ‘The kid died.’

‘Holy.’

‘Leukaemia. A couple of years back.’

‘Mate.’

‘Yep.’

The silence was back and this time it stayed. Frank felt the foam of too much drink clearing, as he took it in. He felt his bum muscles tighten as he tried to think of something to say. In the end he let it go and the two of them worked through to the last of their beer, and Frank went back to the fridge softly, not letting the screen door close too sharply. Bob rolled a cigarette, appearing to put all his concentration into it, pulling away tobacco fibres, wetting his fingers and tightening the roll. The sound of bottles gasping open.

‘Somethin’ about this place. I dunno if it’s something rubbed off from my old man — he was a hippy joker. Long hair ’n’ everything — caravan, the whole fucking Kulu. Anyways, this place’s been good to us — let us live on after.’ Bob looked up at Frank, caught his eye. ‘It was a bad death, y’see. Real bad.’

Frank plucked at the neck of his T-shirt. ‘I’m sorry to hear it, mate. Really sorry.’

‘She was this funny colour, that was the bit that got to me. She kept spewing up all this stuff, lime-grey — same colour as her skin by that time. An’ of course all the hair goes.’ He closed his eyes and let his head fall back. A moth landed in Frank’s hair but he didn’t move to get rid of it.

‘The worst thing is you see this little budling of a creature turn into something it makes you sick to look at. You want to cuddle her up, yeah, but you can’t bear the smell. You sweat at the touch of her, and you’re all she’s got, and she makes you feel sick. An’ in the end you’re prayin’ for it, in the end you’re standing over the bed at night holding a pillow thinking about it. An’ the worst is that you don’t do it, because you sort of think while she’s alive there’s a chance, so you don’t and you watch her rip away thread by thread, one pluck at a time. An’ then it’s just the eyes looking at you and you’re supposed to do something but you don’t know what that is.’

‘This is terrible,’ said Frank.

Bob shrugged, took another drink, ran a hand through his hair. Frank didn’t know what in the world to say. Bob went on, ‘This place, it’s got its fair share of ghosts around it, but it doesn’t get to us. I’ve seen hell, mate, I’ve already bin there. Ha! Sounds right out of Jaws .’ Frank noticed Bob’s hand was holding his beer bottle hard enough to make the tips of his fingers green. ‘Seriously. I wouldn’t move from here. It’s a special place, got enough violence in the dirt to strike a cow dead, but I like it here.’