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.
33
The day had been calm, no wind, no terrible heat. Frank could smell the first washes of winter on the salt