After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,15

row, which when he entered the room carried on in Dutch. Whatever it was, he could tell that his mother was angry.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked her one night, finding her tucked up on the sofa, a tissue bundled in her fist.

‘Nothing, darling. You know your father. He’s just being a pig head about something.’

‘About what?’

‘Your father thinks he’s more Australian than anything else, that’s all.’ She looked up at him as though she hadn’t seen him before. ‘You’re getting pretty tall there, chicken.’

He smiled because finally she seemed to have noticed. ‘Please don’t call me chicken any more.’

She gave him a blank look that meant she was pretending not to understand.

At the Easter show his father went off alone to talk crumpet with someone, and Leon wandered in and out of stalls. There were kids his age orange-mouthed with fairy floss and wild-eyed with sugar, but somehow it didn’t seem to mean much to him and he drifted home early, reddening at the giggling herds of girls and the clowns and mascots that stalked him.

At home he sat at the kitchen table and sorted through his father’s photographs of brides to be and lined them up with photographs of their cake-top statues. He tried to see what it was that made each face different, what exactly it was – not just the hair or eye colour but the sugar bones underneath the skin, the weight of a tongue in a closed mouth. Upstairs, floorboards creaked like the deck of an old boat under his mother’s feet.

The sky was dark blue before his father returned home, stumbling a little as he came through the door. He was smiling broadly and his cheeks were flushed, and he held a big chocolate egg in the crook of his arm like it was a baby. He set it on the table and Leon could see that there was a fist-sized hole that had been eaten out of it.

‘Ta-da,’ said his father and stood back so that they could both admire it. ‘That’s a Darrell Lee egg.’

Leon nodded. ‘Looks good, Dad.’ It looked dumb, especially the way they were both supposed to look at it and be impressed. His father stepped behind him and all of a sudden put his hands on Leon’s shoulders and breathed through his open mouth. Leon looked up and tried to see his father’s face behind him, but couldn’t quite.

‘It’s all going to be good, you know?’ said his father, his voice a little too loud for the room. ‘We’re going to keep those buggers away. We’re going to look after what’s ours.’ Leon could smell the sweetness on his breath, and wondered who his father thought was going to try and nick a half-eaten Easter egg, even if it was a Darrell Lee. His father stepped to the side so that Leon could see he had raised a finger to bring his attention to what he was about to say. ‘Before you were born, Japanese came into our harbour. Men died to keep us safe.’ He looked at Leon hard as if by looking he might be able to press the weight into him. ‘Me and your mother adopted Australia because our own land became hostile. And they embraced us with open arms.’ He raised his arms and gestured at the ceiling. ‘We have built this shop. We have built a life. And it is a good life. This country has given me your mother and it has given me you, and I mean to defend our good life and our good country.’ He sat down now, heavily, and put his hand on Leon’s arm. For a horrible moment he thought his father might cry. ‘I know you would too if you were just a little bit older.’

From the doorway, his mother asked in a voice that cracked in her throat, ‘What have you done?’

The next few days in the shop passed in silence. Leon took himself off, spending the steamy autumn hours walking into town and watching cars drift over the harbour bridge. He looked at the brown calves of girls but felt like someone might hit him on the back of the head for doing it.

Over tea the next week – pressure-cooked potatoes, a chop each and carrots – his mother broke her silence. She spoke slowly like his father might not understand. She spoke in English so that Leon would. ‘You know what war does. Donald Shannon wasn’t like that before he went away. And that’s