After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,101

summer. She sat on the floor, now, and he stopped trying to get the dress off, stood back, sick at the look of her. She was laughing fit to split, tears running down her nose, making her weak. He saw himself kicking her square in the face, the feel of his shoe against the smash of her nose. But he didn’t do it. He noticed that her lip was bloody, and she did too and wiped a long streak of orange on to the back of her hand, which only made her shriek harder with laughter. Frank’s fists cramped and he struck himself hard in the face, three punches, one that crunched his nose and brought the taste of blood into his mouth. He turned to leave and saw his dad standing in the doorway, a towel that had once been white hooked round his hips, the liquorice cigarette still in his lips, but grey now, and dead. There was $140 in the till and Frank took it on his way out. The shop bell had rung as he left.

Frank drew breath but didn’t speak, the silence was long and the doctors on the television stared at each other over a boardroom table.

‘Now – Frank. How did you like my speech?’ Merle laughed, tossed her hair, became serious again. ‘I’m just trying to make you see – your father – he’s not the man you knew. He is safe now.’ She bunched one hand into a fist and held it against her pink drink. ‘So if you’re here to cast blame, know that he has been forgiven. Everything he has done has been absolved.’

‘It’s not quite as simple as that.’

She smiled, stonily. ‘I’m afraid that it is, Frank.’

‘You don’t know.’

‘He has told me everything. He is forgiven, Frank.’

‘Wait just a minute, I haven’t forgiven him.’

‘Yes you have. Jesus has forgiven him. You have forgiven him. I can tell.’

‘I tell you what, I have not!’ Words tumbled out tunelessly. His heart beat against his bones and he wanted words that would shock this woman and make her throw him out of her house. ‘My father does not believe in God,’ he said and watched Merle’s face. But there was nothing but a smile, so he went, didn’t look to see if he’d left mud on her carpets.

Striding back to the Ute, his feet wouldn’t move quickly enough. Shit, though, he was angry, his hands clenched, sweat itched his nose, dust in his face, the smell of someone’s tea on the cooker made him want to shout at the elderly woman who crossed the road to get away from the stranger.

Her fucking lime cordial. He spat and his spit was green.

But he didn’t drive straight home as he had thought he would and he didn’t drive to the nearest non-lunatic town and bury himself in the pub. He found himself parking outside Merle’s house, thinking maybe he was going back to say some of the things that were going round in his head – some of the excellent insults that he kept thinking of – but he just sat with his hands on the wheel, pointed his gaze at the middle of the bonnet and waited.

At a quarter to seven a blue Holden pulled up next to Merle’s orange one. A cross hung from the rear-view mirror.

The man who got out of the car was skinny. He recognised his father’s movements but not his face, not his shape. This man was bald apart from a few light strands carefully placed across his head. His shoulders were coathangerish. Frank wound down the window as the porch light came on, even though it wasn’t dark outside. The man moved quickly to the back of the car, brisk and efficient, neat, his hands touching everything after he had moved it, to make it just so. Open the boot, touch the door, take out a briefcase and set it on the hood, touch the briefcase, close the boot, touch the boot. Merle came out on to the porch, in a different blue dress that blew up in a sudden gust and exposed the lace top of a stocking. She batted it down with both hands.

Frank heard the sound of the word ‘Darl!’ and the reply, ‘Sweetheart!’

He watched them embrace, his father on a lower step. Merle shut her eyes and tilted her head upwards with a smile on her lips like she was suckling a baby.

‘You hungry, darl?’ Frank heard as she lifted his head a