After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,11
there, trolling – 40-kilo line – light-weighted squid and pilchard duo – bait got monstered, I take off like a steam train; next thing I’m being pulled through a school of bluefins, two or three pretty big bronze whalers feeding in there. Took two hours to get the thing back, had to hold her head out of the water for twenty minutes before I could haul her up. All the time I’m thinking something’s going to come and take the side out of her, or me, or both! Anyway, monster of a thing, 15 kilos. Wife made sashimi the first night and now we’re on to a steak a day. It’s a good freezer.’
Frank’s mouth was dry and he tried to keep up with a look of interest and friendliness.
Bob looked at him. ‘You using an eski? I’ve got a kero fridge you can have if you’re after one.’
Frank felt like a heel. ‘If it’s going spare I could really use it, thanks.’
‘No worries. It’s a nice place you’ve got. Got a nice feeling to it.’ Bob drained the stubbie, unfolded upwards off the step. ‘Righto, Frank – well, you need anything – turn left out the end and we’re second track you come to.’
‘Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘No wuckin furries,’ Bob said, shaking hands again and smiling with a squint that made the sun always in his face. ‘’Sgood to meet youse anyways. I’ll come by some time soon with that fridge.’
It was awkward not knowing how to see the man off, to walk with him all the way to the end of the track seemed a bit much, but he was still talking, so Frank followed.
‘Looking for work?’
‘Will be. Would you know of anything going?’
‘Could be. I work the marina on and off. Usually there’s something a bloke can do. You look a strong enough bloke, Frank.’
‘I do okay.’ He tried not to pink up. ‘Done a bit of labouring around the place.’
Bob looked at the horizon. ‘There’s a fella, Linus, works the marina – he’s a bit older than the usual – might remember your grandparents.’ Frank stopped, surprised. ‘Don’t worry, mate, I just parked me car round the corner so’s I could sneak up on you – you don’t have to walk me home. Aroo,’ Bob said with a wave and disappeared round the tallest cane.
2
The day the king of England died it was all over the wireless and Leon was supposed to care, even in the heat with the cream on the cakes turning sour and the flies making it in through the fly strips. The Pancake Day decorations in the shop were taken down to make way for a Union Jack, a picture of the dead king cut from the paper to hide the centre where his mother had fouled up the lines. That long face and the hair combed over like a pill, that Pom look like he’d eaten too much butter. Even when his father unveiled a red, white and blue tiered ‘Cake of Mourning’ and put it in the window to melt in the sun, and the butcher’s wife balled a hanky up to her face when she saw it, even then, what held Leon’s attention were the fine rabbit-brown hairs that had started to separate his face into sections. He took his time running his fingers over them, knowing that this was it – this was the thing that would save him from the pet names and public cuddles of his mother. This was manhood in all its creeping stinking glory and it had happened to his face. It was one of the best things, that he was the only boy in his year with a hairy face. It was rumoured that Briony Caldwell had one but she shaved it off, dry, with her dad’s cut-throat every morning.
From the downstairs wireless came the sound of the British national anthem and his father singing boldly over the top of it.
God save our great big king
Long live the lovely king
God save our king!
‘You can’t save what’s already dead,’ Leon’s mother’s voice cut over, but it only made his father sing twice as loud and Leon saw out of the bathroom window how the postman shook his head at the foreign voice that rom-pom-pommed out of the bread shop, and slipped his letters under the door like he always did, rather than bringing them into the shop and risk talking to the European type of loonie that lived there.