After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,25
that hurt?
His father told him, with closed eyes, ‘Go and play on the beach.’ He tried to pull a stick through the sand the length of the beach, tried to jump the calf-high waves, but ended up watching the sea, trying to keep his eyes on one spot so the water didn’t escape him, but everything changed place, and the spot that he had started watching moved on the second he saw it, disbanded and spread out, rolled over and under and became another spot of water somewhere else. A knot was tight in his stomach as the fingers of the sea spread out and closed up again and again.
After three days they packed up and went back to the shop. His dad set to work immediately, even though they arrived back late in the night. Frank had been asleep in the truck and kept his eyes closed as his dad took him up to bed, held tight against his shoulder, even though Frank suspected he was too old for that sort of carry-on. He heard him moving downstairs, heard the quiet pouring of flour and the click of the whisk in the plastic bowl that his dad used when he didn’t want to make much noise. His eyes, too tired to stay open but too lazy to close the whole way, settled in between as the smell of white sponge and citrus rind leaked into his room, and he had dreamt he was sucking an orange, his feet dangling in the bream hole.
After a shave and a little fresh-water wash with a bucket, things were not too bad. There was the whole day to go and he could hear a whipbird cracking not too far off. That was good. By mid morning he was feeling fine and shimmying around the place giving it a tidy-up. When Bob’s truck drove up to the shack with a fridge strapped down in the back, there was a different lazy wrist hanging out of the window. The wrist belonged to a brown arm and wore green copper bangles.
‘My wife, Vicky,’ explained Bob, pointing as the woman pulled herself up out of the passenger seat.
‘G’day.’ She smiled gappily, pretty brown circles under her eyes.
With the fridge came a chicken, dead and plucked, but not gutted.
‘We leave ’em guts in,’ explained Bob, ‘’cause some fellas get cranky if we don’t.’ This seemed a fair explanation.
The fridge was squattish and elegantly rusted at the edges, and while Vicky looked around the place Frank and Bob walked it into the shack in the same way that Frank had walked the stove out. He had a sense of himself dancing old appliances out of the shack and dancing the new ones in. The fridge fitted neatly below the back window.
‘See this?’ said Bob, holding a tiny pot with a wick poking out of it up to Frank’s nose. ‘That’s the kero and you’ll wanna keep it topped up.’ He took a lighter out of his back pocket and lit it, then gently, like he was holding a live fish in a cup of water, he squatted down, reached under the fridge and placed it down softly. He stood up with a crack of his knees. ‘An make sure you don’t shut all the windows and doors for too long, or you’ll wake up dead.’
‘Terrific,’ said Frank. ‘Drink?’ He’d planned ahead for company this time, had stacked up on light beer and ice. He’d even bought nuts.
Bob looked at his watchless wrist. ‘Not today, mate, got places need going to.’ Making no move to leave, he leant against the fridge like it was a car.
‘Any news on the missing girl?’
‘Not as yet, mate. Not as yet.’
Bob looked like he was about to say something else when Vicky appeared behind him and took his fingers in hers, and Frank was winded by the ease of it. ‘Nice place you’ve got,’ she said, ‘I’d love something cold if it’s going, Franko.’ There was a look between her and Bob that Frank turned away from to dig out a beer from his eski. ‘So, how’d you come by it? Bob tells me you moved down from the city?’ Vicky accepted the drink with a chime of her bracelets.
He inhaled too far, nearly choked. ‘My grandparents bought it up in the fifties. No one’s really lived here since then – just used it as a holiday place when I was a little kid. Haven’t been up since, actually. Not for ages.’