Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

‘I’ve never heard such a troop of bollocks. He doesn’t believe in God.’

‘Maybe, Frank, but I was here. Where were you? You can ask the guy at the bar if you like — he near as well lost his best customer.’

He felt hot and sick. He couldn’t work out why he was having this conversation, why he didn’t leave, get in his car and drive back home, even as drunk as he was. How had she known her name? He tried to picture Lucy talking to June, but it didn’t fit. Lucy would have hated her.

‘Look, Frank, I’m telling you this because you have a right to know. I got the evangelist woman’s address in case they needed mail forwarded. And because, frankly’ — she let the joke hang in the air — ‘I was interested.’

She took a layer of his shredded bar mat and got the stub of a pencil out of her pocket. He recognised the pencil as one that had been kept tucked behind his father’s ear at the shop. Then he thought how ridiculous, how stupid — there must be thousands of millions of pencils the same as that one . Even so he had to fight an urge to collect it from June’s fingers and hold it gently in his palm. He must have drunk more than he realised. She wrote an address on the mat and drew a little box round it. Then she got up to go to the bar again.

‘You seem pretty familiar with where he lives,’ he said as she came back.

‘It’s an interesting place.’

‘Interesting?’

‘A real bunch of loonies. You’ve heard of Billy Graham? He founded it in the fifties. People there are either evangelist or they leave. Apart from that, the place’s got beef.’

He took the piece of paper and looked at it. He didn’t want to put it in his pocket in front of her. ‘You must be pretty bored down here, June.’

For the first time she flinched. ‘Well, fuck you then, Frank.’ She looked like she might leave, but settled back down. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’ She looked poisonous now in the smoke of the bar.

‘Beg pardon?’ he said, amused and letting her know it.

‘So you’ve got nothing, well boohoo, Frank — what about me? Huh? What about me, I’ve got everything now, haven’t I?’

He sat back a little on his stool, not sure where she was headed.

‘I got the shop, I got the family, I got the fucking lump of a useless husband.’ She held her fingers out towards Frank. ‘I married that loser — can you reckon that?’

‘June…’

‘ And on top of that I’ve got kids. Three. An’ one on the way.’

‘You’re pregnant? Don’t you think…’

She held up a hand. ‘Don’t you fucking say it, Frank.’

She drank, her eyes one long rectangle of dark. She put the glass down gently like it was precious. ‘You have no idea… just. You can do what you like. There’s no one. There’s no one to think about. You work on a boat… occasionally ? You’re able to just leave the shop, your old man, Parramatta, fucking Sydney?’

‘It’s not about freedom, June—’

‘Yes it fucking is.’

She stood up. To Frank she swayed, but he wasn’t sure if she really did. ‘You should know,’ she said. ‘She’s pregnant too.’

June walked out of the bar.

He slept sitting up in the passenger seat of his truck. His mouth kept falling open and waking him, and when the sun came up he felt the floating heat of his hangover push against his chest. The night echoed grimly and he drove out of Sydney feeling the day cook him. He would have welcomed another storm, something to wash away the baked-bread smell of the inside of the Ute.

The way Frank remembered it, he’d come straight from school, where things had started to even out. Bo hadn’t been there when he went back and Eliza looked away from him if he saw her on the street. The thought of glue or gasoline or even mull made his chest tight under his shirt. The shop door was unlocked, but the sign read ‘Closed’ and no lights were on. The only stock out were the four trays of scones he’d made before the sun was even up. That morning he had got the idea that things could be done, things could fix up. The past month or so, his dad had even got into a cobbled-together routine of laying out the food — shop-bought cakes, mainly, but still — and they’d talked the week he’d got out of hospital about how the shop used to be, about how good it could be made.

And so, when he found the woman in the kitchen wearing the dress with the oranges on it, something hot and sticky had risen at the back of his throat. The dress was not on his mother, so it bagged round the waist and the woman inside it had flesh at the edge of her armpits that sagged over the top. She was making eggs in a pan, which were burning, while she was smoking and looking through the cupboards, bare feet, hair the colour of wet lint.

‘Who are you?’ he’d asked, although there wasn’t an answer she could give that might make the whole thing okay.

She turned to face him with a big smile that showed her teeth were cheesy. ‘Whose yerself?’ she asked, appraising him with one arm crossed at her waist, the other falling free at her side, wrist up holding the cigarette. There was a sort of rash or a pink burn along her forearms, some sort of dry-skin problem that went all the way up to the inside of her elbow. She pointed her fag hand at him like she’d just solved a puzzle. ‘Oh,’ she said, her voice a mix of husk and moisture, ‘you’re the son.’

After a few hours of driving Frank had to stop at a service station and he bent over the toilet, heaving, until nothing more would come out. His eyes streamed. The tick bites itched. He bought a litre of Coke and drank it in the Ute.

Roedale was a mixed bag of dust and meat. Grey weary-skinned cows stood in grass that had turned brown and curled in the sun, while eddies of dust flew up round their worn ankles. Two large palm trees marked the entrance to the town, their heads strange and dark against the sky. You could drive from one end of town to the other in less than a minute and there were roundabouts at each end, so that you could boomerang back in if you were thinking of leaving, or take second thoughts if you were thinking of coming. He didn’t falter, not one bit, he held the address hard between his thumb and index finger, and kept his eyes ahead on the empty road. He stopped at a sandwich bar, the God Bless Café, to ask directions.

The lady behind the counter had glasses that took up three-quarters of her face and below them she had very little chin. ‘How doin’, mate?’ she asked.

‘Good. Thanks,’ he said, pretending to survey the dry sliced meats on display, nodding. He looked at his piece of beer mat. ‘Was wondering if you could tell me where to find Fantail Rise?’

She looked at him, bug-eyed through the thick lenses. ‘End a town; turn left, mate.’

She spoke loudly with long pauses between words, like she’d learnt to speak through a spelling computer. A screw loose or local colour, he wasn’t sure. Too much meat at a young age.

‘Thanks, mate,’ he said, turning to leave.

‘No warries, mate,’ said his friend. ‘God blesses you, mate!’ she called as he stepped back into the sun.

He walked the main street. God’s Own Greens sold fruit and vegetables, and advertised choko like it was a cure for cancer. The butcher’s was called David and Goliath’s, an op shop, I Work for Jesus!

There was no pub and he wondered how that went with his old man. A bottle shop would have been good, just to take the edge off the hangover, but nowhere looked hopeful.

CHRIST ROSE FROM THE DEAD AND IS COMING SOON!! in big fat letters as the town banner. A sign in the window of Saint Shortie’s Snack Bar: ALL MEN EVERYWHERE ARE LOST AND FACE THE JUDGEMENT OF GOD!! Everything seemed to want a couple of exclamation marks after it; all signs were neon.