Evie Wyld - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

He met his eyes for a second, hoped to see something a bit light in his bearing. There was nothing. ‘That’s me. What can I get you?’

‘Are you the only son of Roman and Maureen Collard?’

‘I am.’

‘Mr Collard, my name is Gregory Thorpe, I was your parents’ solicitor. I’m afraid, Mr Collard, it is my sad duty to inform you that your parents are now deceased. I’m so very sorry.’

Leon leant on the counter. A woman came in and asked for a plum tart, which he boxed and bagged, counting out the correct change, doing everything exactly as he would have done before.

The man in the suit stood by politely. When the woman had gone he said, ‘Excuse my presumptuousness, Mr Collard, but perhaps you’d like to close the shop for the next half-hour while we talk? Give yourself some breathing space?’

He heard Amy moving around in the bathroom upstairs. ‘No. It’s fine. How did it happen?’

‘I’m afraid, Mr Collard, I don’t have that information. You’d need to talk to the head of police in Mulaburry for that kind of information.’ There was a look about him, a quick smile and a shrug that said he did know, he just was not going to tell.

‘What do I need to do?’ He wasn’t sure what kind of answer he expected.

‘Mr Collard, I’m here to inform you of a property that has been left to you. By your parents,’ he added needlessly.

Leon nodded. From upstairs came the loud clack of something being dropped and he tensed until he heard the sound of Amy swearing at herself.

Gregory Thorpe smiled pursedly and opened his briefcase, which now rested on the counter. ‘The deeds to the property. Everything has been left just as it was since their deaths, as no one wanted to presume to know what you would want done with their belongings.’

He handed them over and Leon glanced at the papers. ‘They don’t live so far away from here,’ he said.

Gregory Thorpe shifted uncomfortably. ‘No. I suppose they didn’t.’ He smiled in what was possibly meant to be a sympathetic way. ‘If you could just sign some things for me, Mr Collard, then I will leave you to your grief.’

He signed where Gregory Thorpe pointed and Gregory Thorpe looked happy. He snapped his briefcase shut. ‘Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet with you, Mr Collard. And I do hope you will accept my sincerest condolences.’ He began to walk towards the door.

‘Wait,’ said Leon.

Gregory Thorpe turned to him, a look of undisguised impatience on his face. ‘Yes?’

‘Haven’t you got some keys for me or something?’

Gregory Thorpe smiled. ‘There’s no lock on the house, Mr Collard. Just walk right in.’

The shack was a tribute to his mother’s housekeeping: the surfaces wiped, a dishrag hanging neatly over the tap, bleached back to its original white so many times that it was little more than a transparent net. Amy left him to it, went for a slow walk up the beach, her belly swaying, her hands patting around the base of the bump.

What the superintendent at Mulaburry had been able to tell them had not been much. Clothes left on the beach, no sign of his parents, not for over two months, since the telegram with news of Amy’s pregnancy had been returned undelivered. There was a selection of things left on the kitchen table, the lemon check tablecloth pinned at the edges for a neater finish. His mother’s grey woollen gloves, a pearly seashell, a photograph of the three of them taken when he was a baby. A hard old loaf of untouched bread, baked to cement. They all seemed to have been laid out exactly and deliberately. He sat at the table and picked up the gloves. He knew what he expected himself to do. He expected to hold them to his face and smell them, smell his mother’s hand cream, feel the touch of her fingers on his face. But instead he held them in his hands, lightly, as though they were made of dust. Then he put them down again. He looked into the faces of the three people in the photograph and came up with nothing. They were just pictures, one of a baby who didn’t even know anything yet. The shell he put on a high shelf, resisting an urge to crush it underfoot, or to put it on his tongue and taste the sea. It was a pretty thing. A shame to ruin it.

The loaf of bread was heavy and cold. If he threw it, it would smash a good dent in the side of the shack, it would rip a gash in the dark old wood, leave some pale and exposed wound. It had the potential in it, he could feel as he weighed it in his hands, it had the potential to go far with an angry throw. He buried it shallowly behind the house, where either it would disintegrate or if any animal was strong enough to break into it, it could be eaten. The superintendent had been happy with the verdict, although it wouldn’t be official for a few years. They were a quiet couple, queer. Didn’t seem to know a great deal about living out there on their own. They’d been warned about the rips, didn’t seem like the swimming types. A young aboriginal man had sadly shaken his hand and then Amy’s, without saying much. There were a few around here, Leon had seen on the drive out.

The shoes his parents had never quite got used to being without, still black and polished, the laces unfrayed, the heels unscuffed, both pairs placed neatly by the side of the bed, waiting to be stepped into. On a high shelf were their wedding figurines, ham-fisted inside a glass box, not a speck of dust. There was no evidence of any kind of stove — they must have cooked outside or eaten cold. The bread they must have baked in a camp oven.

He took the shoes and floated them out to sea. They filled and sank, and he pictured their last walk into the water, barefoot, silent, on a calm day. Holding hands.

His mother’s hair set.

From the hush sound of the tops of the trees whistling in the breezes came a cry of some kind of animal, just a cry, long and hollow, and he didn’t turn to look. He watched Amy walking up the beach towards him and he thought about the calf inside that had reshaped her. He worried that it would hurt her, that it would kick when it came out. He worried that it would kill her. He worried he wouldn’t love the calf enough.

They sat where a deep bite had been taken out of the rock, and the hole filled up with foamy water and emptied away again. The sky pinked and oystercatchers wheeled in the small breezes. The water washed in and out of the hole, and fish swam around their feet flashing belly white to the sun.

The day had been calm, no wind, no terrible heat. Frank could smell the first washes of winter on the salt air. The sugar cane didn’t seem to tower as much as it had before.

He padded down to the beach with a plastic bag wrapped carefully round the figurines. It mattered that they didn’t break up any more for some reason. He thought for a while about lobbing them as hard and far as he could, but that would not be very far and he would know that they were there, underwater, dissolving, heavy and sunk.

Instead, he lined them up on the incoming tidemark and sat back on his haunches to look at them: a strange army.

His grandparents were funny-faced, illogically weighted and old-fashioned. His grandmother’s nose was too flat, or maybe she had looked that way. The bear she held in one hand had something of her husband about it, who stood arms flat to his body, hair done in old black that had sunk into the sugar and turned grey. One of his eyes looked slightly the wrong way. His shoulders were as broad as his bride’s hips.

Next to them were the couple who had been his parents. His mother over-bosomed, pink-skinned, beautiful. His father oddly small. Not really like his father at all. More like the man he’d watched climb the stairs to his house in Roedale, someone who had stumbled into being happy, his smile red and overdone. His father’s self-portrait. A comic weakling.