Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

Out in a dry field close to midnight Leon felt the pull of home like a bite on a reel. He was drunk, had spent the afternoon drinking and shooting cans with Colin or Jarred, had even joined in at lazily trying to pick off a chook. The chook was having none of it, and after Leon had taken two lackadaisical shots it had simply walked off round the back of the house and sat smugly in front of the diesel barrel.

The plan hatched when night had fallen and the last of the damp potato chips had been snaffled between them. The idea of rabbits again made Klyde fart dirtily in disgust. Red meat was what was called for. They piled into the back of a Ute and hooned off into the desert, Klyde now and again switching off the headlights, setting them adrift in the cold black air. Leon imagined he was near the sea and that the bellows and grindings of the truck and its passengers were the sounds of water attacking the land, and the high yells of the men were seagulls and plovers.

When they came to a stop they had come up alongside a fence. The headlights were switched on and he could make out the dense square of a cow, her eyes round and green and glowing.

A quiet came over the truck, like boys looking through a window at a girl changing, they hushed each other, nudged and crowded around Klyde, who held the gun.

Another cow, smaller, presumably the cow’s calf, came to stare at the headlights. They wouldn’t shoot a cow with its calf. Those were hunting rules. Give the young a chance. Leon carried on thinking this, as Klyde hopped off the Ute, levelling his gun at the cow, thinking, This is a joke, he’s pissing about , watching because he was certain it would stop, watching Klyde walk towards the animal, aiming as he went, watching the light of the cow’s eye glow, the flickering of her worried ears, her raised eyebrows, the safety clicked off.

The cow’s child gave a soft low moo and before the moo had ended, a shot rang out and the small cow leapt, all feet off the ground, tail straight out, and hurtled off into the darkness, calling raggedly. The mother cow let out a honk, like the noise you would make if someone struck you in the chest with a cannon ball, and fell over sideways, her four legs splaying out as she dropped, her head still looking up and towards her murderers, and the ground shook with another shot and then another and the cow didn’t look up any more, but her great belly sank into itself and her hind legs twitched.

Other cows lowed in the dark, feet trampled away from the noise, and above it all Leon could hear the husky cry of that small cow that had stood by her.

The butchering only took ten minutes. He stayed in the back of the truck as Colin or Jarred cut out enough for a steak each, and the cow still bled heavily and the hands of her butcher were black in the lamplight, and steaming. The sound of the sea rose again in the voices of the men and they whooped and some drew patterns on their faces with blood, and danced a corroboree round the carcass.

He thought about the sound of shop bells, the girls and their lips. The hack and cough of cars in the main street. Sex. The closeness of water, the heavy rain in the streets. The light of night time and the distant sound of music.

He kept his eyes closed on the drive back to the station, listening to the dark, and when they arrived at the house, and the meat was thrown on the fire, and it clenched up and shrank, toughening in the flames, and the smell was of hot grass-fed fat, he kept still so that his thoughts wouldn’t touch the edges of his body. In the morning, before he was sober and before anyone was awake, he swung his sleeping roll into the back of his old brown car and drove thirty-three hours to Sydney, only stopping to refuel.

And on the sixth day Frank noticed a dark stump that sat on the periphery of the cane. In the yellow light, the sun shining each way to get in his eyes, he mistook it for the stove. But the stove was on the other side of the track, still resting on its side, and this dark smudge moved. Not much, but it did move, like a ripple of water over the bottom of a still pool. A wallaby, its ears pricked, listening. It wasn’t a wallaby, he could see that much through the sun. He held up a hand to shield his eyes, wary of making a sudden move. Something carrying a club, it seemed to be, yowie, bunyip, Stig of the Dump. He opened his mouth to say something, something to let it know he was a big man here in his house, something to say he was unafraid of whatever looked at him from inside the thinnest part of the cane. His voice would have made the word ‘Hey!’ but when he recognised the creature with the club and his breath was taken away and his lungs closed for business, he ran towards the cane, his heart thick in his chest.

On his knees in front of the pale small face, he panted through his open mouth, shallow little breaths, creeping forward with his hands out, not touching, just reaching. Sal’s face was only visible where blood and dirt had dried and flaked off. Her hair stuck up like fox ears and down over one eye like a hawk’s beak. The other eye shone wetly, a bottom lip sucked red against black mud. What clothes she had on looked the same as her blood- and mud-caked skin. She stared beyond him, her iris overtaken almost completely by a large black pupil. She did not move and for a moment he couldn’t make himself touch her in case she was a ghost. In her hand, what he’d taken for a club was an animal, dead, dried and wet, flattened like roadkill. He saw the eyes of a march hare, the snubbed snout of a dingo. Slowly he rose so that he was stooped over her and quietly, trying to steady his breath, he touched her shoulder. She did not flinch or disappear as he’d been scared she might, but she did not move either. So he gave her the tiniest of prods in the small of her back and she began to walk. She walked like her bones were sticking to each other. He tried to brush the thing she clutched out of her hand, but she shook her head and hung on, and he did not dare force it.

If there was one moment that he regretted not having a phone this was it. Feeling unable to drive, wanting a mug of whisky and a lie-down, he lifted her into the passenger seat of his truck and climbed in himself. He strapped her in, then himself, and started the motor. Before he drove he turned to her. ‘Sal?’ She looked at him, a good start. ‘Are you all right?’

Sal looked at him a deal longer before she nodded. ‘I’m okay, thank you very much,’ she said.

‘Where’ve you been, kiddo?’

‘Had to get this.’ She nodded to the mess of fur and bone that she clutched to her chest. He looked down at it again and really could not tell what kind of animal it had been. ‘What is that?’

‘Bunyip. Just a little one, but.’

He started the engine and drove slowly to Bob and Vicky’s, feeling every stone under the tyres, certain all the time that he would crash the truck and kill them both.

The curtains that had been pulled over the shopfront were cold and full of dust that floated like flour in the sun when Leon pulled them down. He squinted in the light, saw the butcher’s wife over the road look up at him and slowly raise a hand like she wasn’t sure she was seeing him. There was a postcard propped on top of a large pile of unopened mail. The picture on the front was of a headland, a yellow beach running from it, a bird painted in silhouette on to the blue sky. ‘Mulaburry Heads’ in orange lettering, ‘come swim in the sea’. When he looked closely he could see that someone had also painted in little black surfer figures, dotted on the crests of waves. The postcard, written in long, blue, generously spaced ink, read:

To our darling son

It’s been so long. This is where we are, should you ever want or need us.