Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

The man looked exhausted suddenly in the dark.

Bob said, ‘There’s two hens, the first two Sal named, right after Emmy died. She calls them Mum and Dad.’ He rubbed at his eye so that it looked red. He sucked on a cigarette, keeping the smoke in his mouth, tasting it. ‘Vick’s got this thing about them — won’t let any of their eggs get eaten. All the ones that hatch out are left as layers. That winter she died, Dad must’ve laid ten eggs, and I came home and Vick was sat in front of a fire, her hair all wet, a towel round her middle and an egg under each armpit.’ He looked at Frank and Frank smiled. Bob had creases of laughter round his eyes, but he made no sound. ‘Said she was trying to hatch ’em out herself. First time we’d laughed in a while.’ He closed his eyes like he was feeling the sun on his face, but the sun was out of the sky. Frank shifted, picturing Vicky, the wet hair, the nut brown of her arms and the pale eggs.

‘I think that that was the sexiest moment of my whole life. The skin, the smoothness.’ Bob made a line in the air with his cigarette. ‘Everything. A woman and her eggs. Just seemed like the start of something else, like a sign that the whole lot of everything was going to be all right. All perfect. Like an egg.’ Bob looked at Frank and Frank smiled.

‘Did they hatch out?’

‘Nah. Turned out they were all unfertilised, that lot. Funny to care about eggs so much.’

‘There are worse things to worry about.’

‘That’s true. Was one of those moments you’re grateful to the place for putting up with you.’ On cue some bird made a sound like applause in the tops of the trees. ‘What about you?’

‘What about me, what?’

‘Your best woman.’

Frank smiled. ‘I dunno, Bob. Probably bit more obvious than eggs.’

The morning after they’d first made it into a bed together and he’d woken up with an aching hard-on, he watched the swell of her breath in her breasts, the tight skin round her ribs, the finger-point bruises there; the tips of her hair, cold on the inside of his wrist, the smell of whisky in the room, the toasty taste of their drunken sex the night before, the hope, big in his chest, that when she woke up they would do it again. Then she had rolled over on to her side and backed herself on to him, all apparently without waking, just doing it like it was the natural thing to do, like they’d been doing it for years, like it was the morning ritual. When she came she had stretched out against him, slow and quiet like a cat in the sun, and he’d come straight after, barely able to hold on. And they’d slept like that, face in her hair, eventually shrinking out of her, keeping the heat of her close to him.

Bob laughed. ‘Carn. You’ve loved a woman haven’t you?’

‘Yep.’

‘Well, you’re pretty quiet about it.’

Frank squinted at Bob. He looked fiercely earnest. ‘Well. Some things are better off that way.’

Bob looked down at his drink and back up at Frank. ‘I think you’re wrong there, mate.’

‘Oh?’

‘Things I’ve kept quiet about, things Vick’s kept quiet about.’ Bob shook his head. ‘Leads to people wandering around in the middle of the night. Leads to all sorts of things. I say the best thing for it is just to say it out loud.’ He paused, looking in the direction of his home, but there was only cane to see. ‘I only just decided that this minute, though. I might be wrong.’ He laughed, a tinkle, staring at the high wall of cane. From far away came an echo of a car horn. Frank’s stomach knotted and he felt a grip of loyalty for the bloke sitting next to him. When he spoke he didn’t listen to his own words, like it wasn’t himself who was speaking but some character in a film. ‘I loved a woman. Was terrible to her. Knocked her about a couple of times and then she left.’ Bob looked up, his expression flat. Frank wanted to say more, to fill the air with noise. But he let it hang there. Why not? He had done it. Let the silence weigh down the words.

When Bob spoke his voice was careful, measured. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I’ve never felt that. But I mean. You stopped, right? Hell, you just told me about it. You must feel bad.’

‘It was only a couple of times.’ Bile rose in his throat as he said it. ‘I don’t mean that as to lessen the significance of the thing.’ The thing. ‘She left me before it got worse.’

Bob nodded.

There was the noise of the Creeping Jesus again in the cane, quiet but humping along, stalking like a heavy cat. Bob cleared his throat. ‘What I said before. I wouldn’t want to make you feel like you had to talk about it. I mean. Look. I feel like I’ve tricked you into this.’

But Frank carried on, strange to say it aloud. Strange to feel his skin recoil at the thought of himself.

Jesus purred a low, sexy gargle like he was having his belly rubbed.

‘You ever take a look at yourself and you’re surprised by the person you’ve become?’

He didn’t have to talk about the real fights when it felt like his old man was a part of the relationship, waiting in the wings in Sydney until such time as he would be called on to join them. Until Lucy had ‘fixed’ the ‘situation’ and they had Thursday night dinners in front of the TV the three of them all together.

‘I guess a bloke could understand that.’ But Bob’s face did not understand.

‘First time, we’d had a row and she’d gone out and stayed the night at a friend’s, left me to think about things.’ All that night, the way he’d counted stripes in the curtains and his anger had built grain by grain like an egg timer. His chest had felt swollen. He’d broken wine glasses into the sink. ‘I think she thought I’d cool off, thought I’d see it her way. But when she came in the next morning I slapped her in the face. I did it twice, once on each cheek.’ Again there was a pause and he wondered what he was doing telling Bob, who was his friend. ‘I suppose that’s the difference. If it’d been in the heat of a fight, and I’d done it once and then stopped. But I did it twice, one, two. Like she was a kid. And I was still angry, God, I was so angry. She just stood there looking at me.’

Bob was watching the floor. Frank put his tongue on his bottom lip and left it here a long time. He shrugged and Bob looked up.

‘Don’t know what you’re supposed to do. Apologise for it? Am I meant to talk about it? Get someone to tell me what a rotten shit I am? I don’t know.’

‘Well,’ said Bob evenly, ‘the main thing, I suppose, is that you don’t do it any more.’

‘Because she left me, mate. Not straight off. We tried. I got better but then sometimes I got worse. I don’t think she believed it. I think that’s how come she stayed so long.’

Oh, sure they’d tried. He’d skinned himself with trying, but she was so persistent, even more after that first time. She wanted it bad. He remembered her standing at the sink making tea, something tight about her shoulders, neat in a grey V-neck, her hair drawn back out of her face in an unusually sober ponytail. Her hands moved deliberately, like they were the part of her that had business to discuss.

‘So I was thinking we could head over to Sydney for the weekend. There’s the winter fair in Centennial Park, and I was thinking maybe we could hire a stall and get rid of some of the junk in the spare room.’ She put half a teaspoon of her special soup-smelling loose tea in a mug and a normal black tea bag in a cup for him. She put down the spoon.

‘Sydney?’ Frank felt his toes grip the floor, his heart took a flutter.

She looked at him, lips closed but eyebrows moving up, like it was a casual thing all over. ‘Yup, Sydney.’ They regarded each other a moment longer, then she turned to pour the water. The noise of it was a pause.