leaving the dishes on the table. All the vegetables from his father’s plate were eaten, but the small amount of chicken he had taken from the dish lay untouched, nudged to the very edge of the plate.
In the morning his mother’s hair still hung down her back. There was a glow on her, her shoulders were loose, her eyes full.
His father didn’t come down for breakfast, or even later in the day.
‘He’s exhausted,’ said his mother, her palms up like she was feeling for rain.
During that week news travelled up and down the main street that his father was back, and people asked after him at the counter.
‘He’s resting,’ he told the butcher’s wife who stood on tiptoe and tried to see past him into the empty kitchen. By the end of the week his mother looked worried. He saw her watching the ceiling, listening for movement up in the bedroom, but there was none.
‘I think what we should do is throw a little party,’ she said, ‘just for his friends on the street.’
Leon made anzacs and a three-layered cake with pale-green icing. One of the sponge layers was pink, the other two soft white with coffee-coloured cream in between each one. He made a sugar doll of his father to go on top in his army greens, his hat folded up on one side, his fingers soldered to his forehead in a salute. He stood duck-footed and straight, tiny stripes on his shoulders, broad in the chest as he had looked the day he left. The model went in the centre of the cake and behind him Leon planted the Australian flag on a toothpick.
‘That’s pretty, chicken,’ said his mother and he let it go, because her eyes were soppy.
As people arrived, they cooed over the cake, then hovered around the easy chair where his father sat, holding cups of coffee or small glasses of sherry. Leon kept his back to most of them, trying to look busy at the table, rearranging biscuits and filling glasses. He felt itchy in his smart clothes, which were now too small for him. He looked away from the kind type of smiles that everyone seemed to want to give, just before they glanced at their watches. He overheard the butcher complaining to his wife, ‘It’s more like a flamin’ wake than a party,’ and saw his wife stick a meaty elbow in his gut. There was a low rumble of talk in the room, enough people so that no one felt too awkward about the man who sat silent, drinking wine in his easy chair, half the size that they remembered him.
Amy Blackwell arrived with her mother and they stood together, her mother chatting loudly to the barber. Amy looked silly, her hair in strange sausage-looking ringlets, an ugly little purse that was attached to her wrist and a yellow smock that looked like a pillowcase. She shot him a low look, her eye, underneath her pointed eyebrow, was like the finger she’d given Briony. It was an easy joke, it laughed at the fancy dress her mother had put her in, it asked about his smoothed and parted hairdo, and the tight, itchy jumper he was wearing. He pressed his lips together and smelt the earth of the storeroom, and turned back to the table, spilling a few dots of orange cordial on the cloth. He smiled. Mrs Shannon sat quietly in the corner, her legs crossed. She watched Amy too from behind her small glass of sherry, and there was a look on her face that he couldn’t figure out.
Soon after the cake was cut the butcher, who had taken charge of the sherry bottle, started singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and everyone joined in to hide how embarrassed they were.
Leon was clearing plates when the barber touched him on the shoulder. ‘Let’s take that old man of yours upstairs, son, whatd’ ya say?’ and Leon looked over at his father whose face was wet and pale from tears, whose mouth hung open and whose eyes were shut tight. The singers were turned away from him, all attending to the conducting butcher and his sherry bottle.
They got either side of him and no one turned round as they hefted him from the room. He was led easily up the stairs and Leon’s heart beat fast in his throat, and the tears ran out of his father like a squeezed lemon but he made no sound. They laid him on the bed and