Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

When earth and dust and leaves had settled, when there seemed nothing left, he let his gun run dry. The screaming had stopped. A mosquito bothered Leon’s eyelid and he let it.

The chopper landed and there were two baddies dead, their bodies eaten by bullets; the others had melted away. Pete held his claw hand, spitting dirt and blood and tooth on to the ground. The screaming man turned out to have been Rod, his legs both gone below the knee. Thick blood leaked from his mouth and his eyes were wide and dead.

Cray sat propped against a tree, a small leak of blood coming from between his fingers where he held on to his stomach. He smoked a cigarette. ‘Flesh wound, I should think,’ he said quietly. ‘Bit of shrapnel scraped by me. Leave a pretty scar, but.’ He looked up at the tops of the trees, watching his smoke mix with rising mist and get carried up. He waved Leon away. ‘I’ll be right after a smoke,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay and keep Daniel company.’ Daniel nodded to him, his hand on his smashed knee.

Leon and Pete carried Rod to where the green marker smoke of the helicopter waited. The medics arranged Rod on a stretcher and tucked him into it like he might have been cold. Someone bandaged up Pete’s messy fingers. ‘Well, that’s it for you, mate,’ he said, ‘no more trigger finger. Time to get home.’

‘I’ll never play the flute again either,’ said Pete and chuckled in a way that echoed and then faded out. ‘Reckon you’ll have to take us all back — Leon here he’s the only bugger not wounded.’

The medic raised his eyebrows injecting something yellow into Pete’s wrist. ‘How many you got?’

‘We were only five to begin with.’

‘That’s rough. Think you’d be better off getting out of here now, mate. We’ll send someone else to pick up the rest.’

Pete nodded at Leon. ‘You happy with that?’ Leon nodded back, and they touched each other’s shoulders and Pete handed over the radio. The chopper took off and Leon watched as Pete closed his eyes and held up his bandaged hand to cover his face from the dust.

Leon led the way for the stretcher bearers, just a couple of minutes away. Their radio buzzed and a voice said there was a chopper zero five minutes away. It was amazing, in just a couple of hours they would be in a hotel room. He’d have a drink for Rod and Clive, then he’d have a drink for himself.

They returned to find that Cray was dead, a long tube of cigarette ash next to him.

Daniel was tight-mouthed. ‘He had one through the throat too,’ he said. ‘Don’t know why the bastard didn’t tell anybody.’

‘Probably nothing to be done anyways,’ said the medic, shaking his head.

Leon spat into the grass.

On the bitumen of the base airport he felt an awkward jab in his pocket. As stinking tired men poured around him, he looked at the mud baby that rested in his palm. Somehow it was still in one piece, brittle as pulled sugar. An eye had rolled out of its socket, but the baby still smiled.

It was dark when Frank knocked on the door of the shop. Jimmy was at the bowling club and their kids were watching TV with the sound so loud that he had to hammer on the door. June didn’t ask questions, didn’t invite him in, just slipped through the door, calling after herself that she was out for while. They didn’t talk on the way to the pub, didn’t discuss where to drink, what to drink. Inside, everyone’s attention was on the television, where some other kid had gone missing in some country town. Frank didn’t want to know about it. June ordered, dramatically, four whiskies but he found that he could hardly get through the first and felt sick, like his stomach wanted to crawl into his mouth.

After fifteen minutes of broken conversation June sighed and took his hand, leading him out of the pub, away from his drinks. He wondered if maybe the reason he had turned up to see her was that he didn’t dislike her so much after all. They found a children’s playground secluded from the road by mertyl bushes and didn’t kiss, but he smelt the overripe-melon odour of her, smelt her neck and made her laugh with his sniffing.

But when she bucked against him it was like a competition to see who could fuck the hardest, and he thought that maybe he did hate her and she hated him, and he put his palm flat in the sand by her head so that it caught some of her hair. Her teeth made blood in his mouth and he could feel his chin doing damage to her cheek.

Explain that to Jimmy , he thought, but she rasped her face harder against his, like she wanted to shed her skin over him, and he was surprised to have the weaker stomach for what she wanted.

He made no sound coming and did not pull out. She made no comment, but in the first ten heartbeats afterwards he thought he might cry for her baby and he said ‘Sorry’, but not so that she could hear. Sand weevils moved beneath them, and mosquitoes started to bite at their ankles and move the air by their faces, but for a few more moments they clung together with claws and June said quietly, ‘I did see her. But she wasn’t pregnant. Not as far as I could tell.’

When the moment was up, she rolled over and wiped off her thighs with her balled-up knickers.

Tired and sick and full of driving, Frank stopped at an empty beach by the highway as the night paled. He took off his clothes and washed shallowly, squatting and rinsing off June and sand, cooling the mosquito bites on his legs. He wondered if Lucy would ever find out. He held his penis in the palm of his hand, tired and soft, looked at it, then out to sea again. What a bloody achievement. Plovers bolted at him from the shoreline. A flock of seagulls dive-bombed a hairy-looking patch of water and he imagined the feeding frenzy going on underneath. If he floated out on the marble-grey water now, something would tear him to shreds.

He watched the swell and thought that somewhere, hundreds of kilometres away, this water touched his own land. He felt the sand underneath the balls of his feet gently spilling away. He felt everything that was not him moving and when a truck drove past, giving him a blast of its horn, he put his clothes back on and drove home.

With mosquito bites still lumping his arms, Leon got stuck in wrist-deep to kneading dough. It was like he’d never left; people came and bought hot-cross buns and strawberry cream cakes. He waved at Mrs Shannon, who now walked with a permanent hobble, but with the freedom of a woman whose husband had left. Sometimes in the middle of it, though, he would see the long tube of ash from a burnt-out cigarette; Rod with his hand over his eyes; that matt black road. They were like dirty pictures and he needed to choose his time to look at them properly. At night he would sit on the side of his bed with a beer and just look at the pictures in his head, make it so that he understood every curve of Rod’s hand, so that he could smell the ash, so that he felt an ache at the back of his eyeballs, the ache of trying to see distance in the black. He knew he ought to write another letter to his parents, let them know he was back, but for now, just for now, he told himself, he wanted to be left alone.

The album he bought was bound in orange felt. It had a pattern of large yellow flowers sewn on the front. ‘Quite the thing, don’t you know,’ he said out loud as he set it on the table next to the photographs and glue. He didn’t suppose he knew what the appropriate design might be — a black leather number perhaps, something more like death than a child’s pencil case, but the orange felt had stood out to him. It was disposable, silly. No one would guess the contents from the jacket.

He glued the corners of the first photograph in the pile. He hadn’t looked through them, and there wasn’t any point in sifting through them and picking out the good ones, throwing out the blurs. They were all the same thing. He stuck them neatly down with a press of his fist. He saw green, fat leaves and strange flowers; an enormous spider with colours that had been bright, but in the photograph looked dull and no bigger than the huntsmen that lived in the larder. A group photograph that someone else had taken: he saw his own face smiling out from a crowd, down on one knee, his rifle at his side. There were thumbs up to the camera. He couldn’t remember what they had been smiling at. One man — was it Flood? — held something that could have been a small bone to his face, imitating a moustache. Cray’s face, closed and quiet — he had laughed after the picture was taken, but not during. Somebody swore, someone else pulled down their pants, showed a white arse, whipped by shrapnel. His own face freshly shaved in a toilet mirror, sweaty. Cray on his own, smoking a cigarette, shortly before he turned to Leon and asked something like ‘You a gay boy or something?’ Cray in a Hawaiian shirt, pouting for the camera, caressing imaginary breasts, the next, his tongue strained towards his imaginary nipple. More green. A blackened patch of grass. Red smoke. More green. A lemon-coloured snake. A dead guy. A dead guy with Leon standing over him, grinning like he’d bagged a prize antelope. A perfectly black square of night. More green. He carried on sticking and pressing, a small sweat pushing at his top lip.