Evie Wyld: After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

Leon’s mother shifted feet. He noticed the bluebirds that were painted round the porcelain number 23 that was stuck to the Farrows’ front door. There was a lumping down the stairs and Darren appeared, his nose a strawberry like Leon’s.

Mrs Farrow put her arm round her son’s shoulders. Darren caught Leon’s eye and looked at the floor with a small smile. ‘Now then, Mrs Collard.’ She spoke slowly and loudly. ‘As you can see, any brutalisation that my son visited on your boy was returned doubly. I’d have thought you’d have more pressing issues to think about these days.’ Darren smiled wider at Leon and Leon looked away, knowing Darren was on the brink of laughing.

‘You shouldn’t let your son hurt my little boy.’ Leon’s mother turned to face Darren. ‘Say you are sorry.’ But her voice was softer, as if she’d just then become very tired. Darren looked lost for a second but, looking up at his mother, he gained strength and his smile returned.

‘My boy say sorry to you?’ Her voice rang shrilly in the settling air. ‘Mrs Collard, are you quite retarded? Do you know there is another war going on? Do you know about the Communists, or do you just keep to your own news? My eldest is out there now, waiting to be shipped off. What are you doing? Sitting in your cake shop taking money from the people who put you up when your own country decided they’d had enough? Well, I think that’s rich. It’s you who ought to be apologising; it’s your son who ought to be thanking my boy for letting him stay in his country.’ Leon’s mother had lost the pink of anger, and seemed very small and grey on the doorstep. A neighbour watched lazily from under a sun hat on the other side of the fence. Mrs Farrow was still talking when Leon’s mother turned them both round and started off down the pathway, firmly holding Leon’s hand.

‘Yes, yes, off you go. And if you have a change of heart,’ Mrs Farrow carried on, ‘we’d be more than happy to hear your apology. That’s if you can say the word. Flaming clog wog.’ The door shut and Leon managed to free his hand from his mother’s grip. He reckoned Darren was probably watching from a window, laughing at the sight of him being yanked along. His face boiled. They walked home not talking or touching; even when his nose began to bleed again they both just let it.

The next day at school, Darren had been talking. Briony Caldwell piped up at him as he crossed the playing field, ‘Youse might be the first kid to get a hairy face, Collard, but yer mummy still holds yer hand to cross the road! Does she wipe yer bum too?’ Of all people, Briony Caldwell. Darren smirked from afar.

Amy Blackwell caught Leon’s eye and she held a pencil under her nose and crossed her eyes. For a moment he thought she was doing an impression of him, and he was about to turn away scowling, but then she smiled and he realised she was playing up Briony. Briony noticed too and stared hard at Amy. Amy stuck a finger up at her behind a piece of paper. Only Leon saw, it was only meant for him to see, and it made his breath shallow in his chest.

Someone lobbed a toilet roll at him.

‘Eye ties don’t use toilet paper, they use their hands!’ shrilled Darren happily. ‘He uses his mum’s hand!’

The class erupted and Leon rolled his tongue into his cheek and willed his face not to become red, kept the hidden finger of Amy Blackwell in his mind, the pencil moustache, the crossed blue eyes.

Something was going on with his parents. A few times he’d come home to find a stale silence, his parents avoiding each other, or they might be having a row, which when he entered the room carried on in Dutch. Whatever it was, he could tell that his mother was angry.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked her one night, finding her tucked up on the sofa, a tissue bundled in her fist.

‘Nothing, darling. You know your father. He’s just being a pig head about something.’

‘About what?’

‘Your father thinks he’s more Australian than anything else, that’s all.’ She looked up at him as though she hadn’t seen him before. ‘You’re getting pretty tall there, chicken.’

He smiled because finally she seemed to have noticed. ‘Please don’t call me chicken any more.’

She gave him a blank look that meant she was pretending not to understand.

At the Easter show his father went off alone to talk crumpet with someone, and Leon wandered in and out of stalls. There were kids his age orange-mouthed with fairy floss and wild-eyed with sugar, but somehow it didn’t seem to mean much to him and he drifted home early, reddening at the giggling herds of girls and the clowns and mascots that stalked him.

At home he sat at the kitchen table and sorted through his father’s photographs of brides to be and lined them up with photographs of their cake-top statues. He tried to see what it was that made each face different, what exactly it was — not just the hair or eye colour but the sugar bones underneath the skin, the weight of a tongue in a closed mouth. Upstairs, floorboards creaked like the deck of an old boat under his mother’s feet.

The sky was dark blue before his father returned home, stumbling a little as he came through the door. He was smiling broadly and his cheeks were flushed, and he held a big chocolate egg in the crook of his arm like it was a baby. He set it on the table and Leon could see that there was a fist-sized hole that had been eaten out of it.

‘Ta-da,’ said his father and stood back so that they could both admire it. ‘That’s a Darrell Lee egg.’

Leon nodded. ‘Looks good, Dad.’ It looked dumb, especially the way they were both supposed to look at it and be impressed. His father stepped behind him and all of a sudden put his hands on Leon’s shoulders and breathed through his open mouth. Leon looked up and tried to see his father’s face behind him, but couldn’t quite.

‘It’s all going to be good, you know?’ said his father, his voice a little too loud for the room. ‘We’re going to keep those buggers away. We’re going to look after what’s ours.’ Leon could smell the sweetness on his breath, and wondered who his father thought was going to try and nick a half-eaten Easter egg, even if it was a Darrell Lee. His father stepped to the side so that Leon could see he had raised a finger to bring his attention to what he was about to say. ‘Before you were born, Japanese came into our harbour. Men died to keep us safe.’ He looked at Leon hard as if by looking he might be able to press the weight into him. ‘Me and your mother adopted Australia because our own land became hostile. And they embraced us with open arms.’ He raised his arms and gestured at the ceiling. ‘We have built this shop. We have built a life. And it is a good life. This country has given me your mother and it has given me you, and I mean to defend our good life and our good country.’ He sat down now, heavily, and put his hand on Leon’s arm. For a horrible moment he thought his father might cry. ‘I know you would too if you were just a little bit older.’

From the doorway, his mother asked in a voice that cracked in her throat, ‘What have you done?’

The next few days in the shop passed in silence. Leon took himself off, spending the steamy autumn hours walking into town and watching cars drift over the harbour bridge. He looked at the brown calves of girls but felt like someone might hit him on the back of the head for doing it.

Over tea the next week — pressure-cooked potatoes, a chop each and carrots — his mother broke her silence. She spoke slowly like his father might not understand. She spoke in English so that Leon would. ‘You know what war does. Donald Shannon wasn’t like that before he went away. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to come back.’