Evie Wyld: After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

The lady sold him a camp bed, a sleeping bag, a campervan water tank, a two-ring stove with extra gas and a discounted bag full of broken mosquito coils. Packing it into the back of the Ute, he realised he was still wearing the smile he’d gone in with and his face was smacked red around the cheeks. His hands shook and he held the back flap of the Ute, tried to look like he was securing it, but he just gripped and waited to feel still again. ‘Calm yourself down, you silly bastard,’ he said under his breath. ‘Just calm on down.’

He remembered there being lots of shops on the main street, but apart from the camping place, a baker’s with a couple of aluminium chairs out the front and a closed greengrocer’s there were just empty windows with whitewash or newspaper covering over. He checked his mobile phone, which only seemed to get a signal at certain corners of the town. Of course, there were no messages. Might as well turn the thing off for all the good it’d do him out here. He bought a loaf of bread and thought he would ask the man behind the counter if there was a supermarket nearby, but somehow the words got stuck on their way out, somehow he thought he wouldn’t be able to get them out in the right order. He was going to buy a pie, which he remembered being good from there, but when the man smiled and said ‘Whadcanigettcha?’ he felt shy and his palms sweated as he replied, smiling too widely, ‘Just a loaf, thanks.’

He grasped desperately in his pocket for change, horrified that he might have forgotten to bring any cash, and when his fingertips met with coins he was so grateful that he found himself saying thank you, thank you in his head as he counted them out.

The Bible kid was not at the roundabout as he drove back but he saw a sign for the Bi-Lo Superstore, with a painting of a prawn at the helm of a ship, wearing a crown. Captain King Prawn at your service. Sailing the stormy sea of low prices. He smiled and let it occupy him until he drew into the car park. What had been there before he couldn’t remember. He must have passed by it a hundred times with Bo, it was on the road to the surfing beach, but he couldn’t think what was there before. Hardwood, or cane or maybe a golf course. None of it seemed right. He hadn’t thought about Bo Flowers in years.

The place was huge, and every angle of it caught the sun and shone it back at the sky. Inside, it was freezing cold and there were computer games and fried food and places to sit and drink coffee and eat chips. A brown-ankled girl sat on her friend’s lap and whispered something into his ear, which made him slide a hand up her leg. Three girls next to the couple shared a packet of Cheesy Os and they all laughed watching the two of them. The floors shone smooth and the grocery department was lime green and housed heaps and piles and stacks of oranges, watermelons and nectarines.

Someone called Jack owned most of the shops inside, sometimes he was Crazy Jack, where there was a bargain to be scratched out, some cheap cut of meat to buy, but equally, when sophistication was called for, Jack could rise to the occasion, as in Frère Jacques, the boutique. A woman, stuffed like a peach, tried on hats, looking at herself in the window. She looked right at Frank and the hairs on his arms stood up. There was a smell of glad-wrapped meat, too many people too close. An A4 black and white poster advertised a missing girl, her face a thumb smudge. The posters appeared on every glass surface, even at the meat counter, stuck on from the inside so the paper looked soft with damp.

Nothing in the aisles suggested eating. He had abandoned a shopping list, thinking he’d be able to pick out a few days’ worth of meals by sight, but the foods were oddly arranged, so that bacon was next to cheese, tins of beans next to washing-up liquid, frozen pies next to frozen crinkle-cut carrots. In his basket he had butter, apples and a pack of soap. It was something like the packed lunches his father had made after his mum died, for those first couple of months when he’d still given it a go. Frank would shift nervously on his bottom on the dinner bench, waiting till they’d all said the food prayer before opening the box and seeing what catastrophe was hidden inside. It started as a can of sardines and half a green capsicum. By the end of the next month he was lucky to find anything edible at all in there — a bit of fish batter left over from the chip shop, a sachet of powdered gelatin. Once a balled-up sock and an old tangerine. He walked back to the front of the shop to start again.

Later, he bought calamari and chips and sat on the seafront on the bonnet of the Ute. There was no rush to get back to the shack. A bit of a fix up on the roof was probably in order, but it hadn’t rained in months and the sky was white and high. He’d anticipated that the place would need a bit more work, had thought it might be good for him to keep his body occupied for the first week or so. He saw how clean his fingernails looked, holding a calamari ring. The waves were peppered with surfers, even in the small swell. Seagulls picked through rubbish baskets, fat-throated, and eyeballed the passers-by, scratching out deep croaks now and then, and dancing with their red feet. He threw the last few chips to them and watched as they screamed and shook and picked at the food and each other. A surfer took a big wave too short and smashed himself into the sea spectacularly. Frank smiled to see him surface, shaking the salt out of his nose and ears. It looked good in the water. He and Bo used to hitch a ride out sometimes to surf with an old polystyrene board. It gave an instant rash that stayed around for weeks.

It was bad to admit to, but at school Bo Flowers was not the sort of kid you had any choice about hanging out with. He had a smell around him like he’d been licking his fingers, and the minute you caught his eye you knew that was it — you were friends for good. He told lies, not a bad thing in itself, but it was the kind of lie Bo always went for. ‘I went to the Goldcoast with my dad once and I surfed a nine footer. And I didn’t fall off, and there was a white pointer but it didn’t bother me, we just rode the wave in together. And everyone on the beach was cheering because they said I was the youngest kid ever to do that. They said it might go in the record book. For next year, though.’ The kind of lie that went on and on so that no one felt all right with picking him up on it, so that gradually everyone just went quiet and waited for someone else to talk.

The kid’s old lady beat the shit out of him in a regular way. He was a big lug of a bastard, with soft brown eyes like a calf and a dead dad. Bo had this idea that the two of them were friends because Frank’s mum was dead too. But that wasn’t really why, Frank knew, it was because he was too soft to smack the boy in the mouth, which was the way everyone else dealt with him. It was the thing he understood. But it was good sometimes. They’d bite school together and it was always better getting in trouble with a mate. Frank knew what to do when Bo turned up with black forearms from shielding his face from when his mum’d got hold of a shoe. Do nothing and act like nothing the hell was up.

And the time they snuck into the pub and sat at the back tables with a beer each and felt so big, and then the landlord came out and he lifted Frank up by the collar and said, ‘You tell your old man to keep his filthy grubbing hands off of what isn’t his,’ before breaking Frank’s nose with the ball of his hand and throwing him out of the door with a kick in the arse. June Shannon from the flower shop saw it happen and she gave them a smile that was not meant to be nice. That time, Bo didn’t say anything about it other than ‘We could go pinching at the bottle mart?’ and they both sat on their bums in the gutter outside the pub and laughed hard so that his nose bled to buggery and that only made them laugh harder, and Bo farted loudly from the beer and it set them off again. He was okay, Bo. He couldn’t hit his mum back, after all.