head, was not enthusiastic either. ‘Mrs Santa Claus is a white lady. A big fat white lady.’
So instead he made a turtle dove to hang above the six-tiered pavlova, so that it seemed to be swooping in to pinch the kiwi fruit from the top. It looked okay, swinging there on its fishing line, but it was no Eartha.
Christmas day was tense, full of wide fake smiles and the smell of too many cloves in the pudding. They went to midnight Mass and prayers were said for all those husbands and sons in foreign places. That was when Leon counted in his head and found that there’d been no letter from his father that month. The red smile on his mother’s lips trembled as if the muscles of her mouth were tired.
Over the holiday the shop closed, and Leon went to the bridge and watched people strolling through the harbour in their Christmas outfits. Women with legs the colour of sweet nut glaze, their dresses high and tight to their throats, the clip of their short steps. The girls with the secrets under their skirts, fingernails like preserved cherries. Something watched him from under the bridge, he could feel it, something that snuffled and scritch-scratched. It threw him looks from the coolest bit of shade. A breeze from the water raised the hem of a tutti-frutti skirt and it wavered in slow motion in front of the bridge. His ears growled at him. His mouth was dry, then flooded with spit like he might be sick. People criss-crossed in front of him but his eyes stayed only on the dark under the bridge. He wanted to look at the girls again, the warm softness of them, but his eyes were too tired to move, too lazy to blink, like they had nothing to do with him. That thing threatened to swim out at any second and drag him under, drown him in the cold shade, scritch-scratching. When he got home that night his face and forearms were tight with sunburn. He lay awake in bed feeling his skin dry, feeling it tighten notch by notch, licking his lips to taste the sun and the heat, to keep back the cold thing that waited there, under the bridge.
‘Not my husband,’ he heard his mother say into the telephone later that week. ‘He wouldn’t just stop writing.’
Mrs Shannon came into the shop, her dark glasses off for a change. She had shaded in her eyelids a light-blue colour, with a line of black that ran outwards from the corners of her eyes. She had on red lipstick and a dark-blue type of dress that he might have seen before on a younger girl. On Mrs Shannon it fitted perfectly so that her cleavage was easy to see, and it clung to her thighs and waist in a way that looked nice.
‘Hey, sweetie, you bin sun-baking?’ she said, a smile of perfect straight white teeth that were a little too big for her mouth.
‘What can I get you, Mrs Shannon?’
‘Always so polite, kiddo. I’ll have a florentine, thanks, darl.’ Her voice was so deep that parts of words melted before they left her mouth.
He leant into the counter and picked up a biscuit with a piece of greaseproof paper. His eyes looked for her chest, she caught him looking and he blushed, but she smiled widely.
‘Um, it’s on the house.’ He thought he’d die of embarrassment if she gave him money.
‘Ahh. Thanks, kiddo. You’re a doll. So how’s things in the Bunhouse?’
‘They’re okay, thanks, Mrs Shannon.’
‘You’re looking pretty grown-up these days.’
‘Yeah, well.’ He smiled and blushed and puffed out his chest. He thought for a moment he might try standing on tiptoe, but he didn’t.
‘Guess that’s what happens when the man of the house goes away, uh? The next man steps in. I only had girls, y’see, when Don went away. Not much you can do about that though, an’ he’s back now, so whose complainin’? Would have been good to have a nice strong man like you around the place.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Shannon.’
She shrugged. ‘Just an observation, kiddo.’ Up close, he could make out a mark on her face, close to her eye on her cheekbone. Like something had stained her there, a tea bag or a some brown chalk. A little blueing showed through the make-up as if the flesh there was off, and he realised he was staring at it.
Mrs Shannon just smiled. ‘Not to worry, chickadee. He hasn’t done me