up against the window, and before Bo could draw breath to whine about being tired, Frank had them out of the door and headed back to the creek for bait. Bo was the first to get a fish, a big silver job, neither of them knew what sort it might have been. It wasn’t until the poor bastard was flapping on the rocks in front of the two of them that they realised they didn’t have a knife.
‘I got my door key,’ said Bo.
In the end, rather than bash it with a shoe or stamp on it, they stood back and let it die, each nervously glancing at the other, trying not to flinch every time it flapped like an eppo having a turn.
The shack was neat and clean, and they lit a fire outside and cooked the fish on a grate from the stove. Its skin stuck to the metal and made a good smell. The sun had barely gone down when they turned in, a heaviness in the marrow of their bones. There were two beds, but in the night he’d woken up to find Bo in with him.
‘’S cold,’ Bo said, and Frank turned his back on him and waited tensely, ready to strike out if any part of Bo wound its way round him. Outside it was thick and dark, and inside they slept like they’d been thrown down a well. If it weren’t for the sick look on Bo’s face in the morning, and the girls, they might have stayed for ever.
‘Gotta get back and check in on the old lady,’ he said, trying to sound casual, as if his mother couldn’t cope without him, like he was doing her a favour. Frank wondered if his dad had noticed he was gone. More than likely the shop was still unopened, but it didn’t matter too much anyway as no one bought much from them any more. The place was too dirty, sometimes the bread was stale, sometimes undercooked. His old man seemed to take a certain amount of pride in getting it wrong. He couldn’t understand why he owned a bread shop in the first place if he couldn’t bake.
The barman flicked the lights on and off, and it was time to go home. The girl had disappeared, but the barman still looked pretty happy. Maybe they’d meet later. Maybe they really liked each other. Frank drove home from the pub half cut, feeling after all he was still fifteen. It would have been good to have the company of someone. Even Bo, the open-mouth breather, the fug who couldn’t resist eating his own snots, even when Beth and Eliza were there.
The shack had its own morning alarm system – when the sun started to heat up the roof, the galvanised steel would creak, threatening to fall in. There was a smell, too, that came with it – engine air and dry wood, and all of it exactly the same as when he’d been small. With his eyes closed in the first moments of waking he could have been ten again and waking up with a ten-year-old’s plan of crab-trap baiting and finding good sticks. But when he rolled over he felt the bulk of his body as it sagged the bed, the hairs chafing against each other on his shins, the dull morning erection and the ache in the back of his neck from drinking more than he had intended. His face was dry and he could feel a beard there. Best shave it off soon or he’d end up looking like his dad, always licking his lips like a lizard through that curly-wurly hair.
His dad’s lips were white as he poured his mother’s ashes into the bream hole, and Frank’d asked about God. ‘Dunno about heaven, mate. She’s in the sea.’
A local family had turned up and the mother had crossed herself and he’d wondered what it was, wondered if he should do it too, but there had seemed to be so little to gain by asking. His father had been the same grey as the sea. ‘Everybody dies, mate,’ he’d said.
Those thin days afterwards and their thick silence. How would she come back if all her parts had drifted out to sea? If fishes ate her ashes and if sharks ate the fishes. The fishes he and his father ate, brought to them by the neighbours – had he pawed through the flank of a bream that had eaten his mother? Could