After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,26

a nice way of looking interested, the tip of a canine catching on her bottom lip. ‘I never knew anyone owned it. I’m afraid we’ve been trespassing, Frank.’ She gave Bob a sideways glance and a smile. Bob blushed. He took a long drink of her beer but waved away the one Frank offered.

‘So what made you decide to move down here for keeps?’ she asked, taking the beer back off Bob with a small yank.

‘Up here,’ corrected Bob.

‘Dunno – good memories I suppose – bit of a change of scene. Seems like a good place to be . . .’ He felt his voice soften, but they didn’t seem to notice. Vicky smiled warmly at him, but didn’t help him out.

‘I suppose, I just came to a point – broke up with a girlfriend and I needed a place to just get out of the city.’

‘City’s a bad place to be alone.’ Vicky nodded.

There were a few quiet moments, then Bob punched his fist lightly into his hand and said loudly, ‘Righto, we’ll be off. I’ll drop by some more usefuls as I come across them.’ They got into the car and Bob gave him a wave. ‘Laters,’ he said, raising one hand as he steered with the other.

‘See youse soon,’ called Vicky over the engine. ‘Ta for the drink.’

He watched as the truck hared away, Bob’s arm held out of the window like a flag, Vicky’s wrist turning slowly on its joint. He wondered what they were saying about him as they drove off, if they were laughing.

He opened up his new fridge. And closed it again. And opened and closed. It smelt of bleach and old air. He unloaded the eski. He sat down to write a shopping list. Bread. Margarine. He opened the fridge again and looked at the dead chook. Potatoes. And wondered. Carrots. How he would. Vegemite. Cook it and what it would be like to eat a whole chicken on his own. He closed the fridge and returned to his list and, just to remind himself what kind of a stupid bastard he was, he jabbed himself hard in the palm with his pen, and the pen broke in the cradle of his hand and welled up purple.

He washed up the old camp oven, unused since a trip to the river two years back. He concentrated on cooking the chicken, leaning away from thoughts that the grit in the bottom of the oven was most likely sand from the river bank they’d been to for Australia Day weekend before any of the trouble started. That any blackened dried flake of food still stuck to the side could have been the skin of an onion they had eaten together, that had sat warm in her belly and in his belly as they lay next to each other in their one-man tent. He packed the chicken into the oven with whole potatoes, roughly cut carrots and tomatoes from a sackful of overripes he’d picked up at a roadside stall. Most of them had black centres, but there was plenty of flesh surrounding.

He squatted over the pot with a box of white wine and let a good half-litre squirt out over the chicken. When the fire was mostly embers he made a hole and nestled the pot there. He put on the lid and shovelled hot rocks on top. He stood back, his eyes stinging, and wondered what to do with the giblets he’d wrestled out of the carcass. He picked up the board he’d spread them on and examined them in the light of the fire, the wet, woolly strings that made the bird work. He took them over to the old stove, whose door was slightly ajar, like it was peering at him. He opened the door wide and scraped the entrails inside. They glistened wetly against the matt black of the stove’s gullet and he shut the door, pulling the rusted catch into place, feeling like he was forcing the jaws of a dog closed to get it to swallow a pill. He stood a moment looking at the stove and wondering why he had done that.

A light spun over the top of the cane and an engine battered somewhere nearby but passed his drive without stopping, so he went back to the fire and poured himself a mug of box wine. The Creeping Jesus made a noise in the dark, like things did – an open-mouthed shriek – and he raised his