After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,13

their work side by side. ‘Your bride has a well-rounded bosom,’ he would say, ignoring the fact that she had only one. Looking at his own work, his father would stand with his hand on his chin, sucking his tongue and say, ‘You know – I think I really need to do more work on noses.’

Leon would squint at the perfect tiny woman who stood on the bench top, and his palms would itch to be as large and gentle as his father’s. On his fourteenth birthday he could roll out a perfectly formed woman, but his hands still shook when he tried to paint her. The couple his father had made for his own wedding sat high up on a shelf in a bell jar but Leon knew them by heart. His mother held, for some reason, a stuffed bear against which you could see the tiny pinking of her fingernails. Her lips were bowed and smiling, and she had bitter-chocolate hair that reached to her pencil waist. The toe of one shoe pointed out underneath her skirts and it was blue like a duck egg. His father wore a sugar tuxedo broadly stretched over his chest. On his lapel was a poppy and you could make out the black seeds in its centre. He wore a moustache that he didn’t wear now, two lines neatly executed in black.

At school a fat-necked boy called Darren Farrow announced that world war three was happening and pretty soon it would be the end of everything. He said it with his head tilted back on his neck, he said it looking down his nose, pointing out his chin. ‘My brother’s off fighting ’em an’ pretty soon I’m gonna run off and join him. He says we’ll show those Japs what the carry-on’s about.’

‘I thought Japs lived in Japan?’ said Amy Blackwell, whose father owned the fruit shop, and everyone looked at her.

Darren Farrow fixed her with an ancient and wise look. ‘Those Japs get everybloodywhere. All over the place.’ And she was silenced.

‘It’s like your sort,’ Darren explained, pointing at Leon. ‘All your sort with your dark hair and funny ideas about washing.’ Leon said he didn’t know what ideas Darren thought he had about washing, but he was happy enough to stuff his fat neck with the cream buns he’d made with his two very own stinking hands.

Leon went home after clearing up the blood in his nose, but his mother still noticed and still caused a fuss. ‘With all this going on, and even the babies are at it, trying to kill each other!’ she cried, dabbing at the smear of new blood on his cheek with a Dettol-soaked napkin.

He did not like being called a baby and rubbed his nose till it bled again. His mother came downstairs with her coat and hat on, and marched him out of the door. They nearly crashed into Mrs Shannon from over the road, whose face was always swollen and dark from something that happened in her home, but she still smiled at Leon: it looked like she winked behind her dark glasses. After half an hour on the bus they arrived at the Farrows’ house in Glebe. The Farrows lived in a sandstone building next to a church and it made him hot inside when he thought about their own small rooms above the cake shop, the crumbly walls dark and the smell of toast in the curtains and the blankets. The Farrows’ house had a cream ivory push-button bell, but his mother didn’t like to use it, so instead she knocked hard on the door. No one answered so she knocked harder, until Leon was squeezing her hand in embarrassment. A woman appeared, a look on her face like she couldn’t believe there was someone at her front door. He bit both his lips at the same time and tried not to blink. He saw the end of his nose, red with where he’d been thumped and he could see the tops of his cheeks as well, and they were also red.

‘Mrs Farrow.’

The woman looked Leon’s mother up and down, a blink of recognition showing, she let her face set into a small hard smile. ‘Mrs Collard.’

‘I’d like to talk to you about your son. He’s hit my boy on the nose and gave him blood.’

Mrs Farrow’s eyes came to rest on Leon, and he looked away, like he was thinking about something else. Her English always got worse when