After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,37

of his arm, fingers pressed white on his flask. Leon left him there and walked home. All the way he felt something following, but each time he turned there was nothing to see.

He wondered what to say to his mother. When his father came in, he sat at the kitchen table with a newspaper that looked fished out of a bin. He unfolded it in front of him and did not turn the pages, but stared hard at it, drinking his way steadily through a bottle of sweet sherry. Leon kneaded dough for the next morning’s bread and didn’t know what it meant. His mother came home and she had a new hairdo, shorter with a wave over one eye. She wore lipstick and a camel wool dress, even in the heat.

‘You look pretty, Maureen,’ his father said, looking up for the first time from his paper. His mother glowed like she’d won the thirty-dollar lotto.

In the mornings, with the sun bright in the kitchen, the place looked dark, but he knew it was not. It was like he’d been in the sun too long and burnt his eyes. His chest throbbed and his stomach felt tight; something sat on his ribs, peering down and breathing foully in his face.

He kissed a girl behind the boat shed at the harbour and he felt it die a small bit. But she was not Amy, and she took his hands from her breasts and straightened her handbag and her hair with one hand. He walked home alone, feeling the terrible thing rolling over and dragging itself after him in the dark.

That night he woke to his mother pulling on his sleeve. She put a finger to her lips and motioned for them to get under the bed. She’s gone mad, thought Leon, but he did it anyway because she looked scared.

‘What are we doing?’ he whispered close to her ear.

‘It’s not good to wake them up when they sleepwalk,’ she said and on the landing the floor creaked. The whites of her eyes shone in the dark and Leon saw the naked feet of his father pace slowly round the room. The air under the bed was thick and sweet. The feet moved close to the bed and Leon wondered if they were found, and then he saw that on his father’s right foot the two smallest toes were missing. What was left was ugly grey skin. The feet receded and left the room, and they slept there under the bed. In the morning his mother made pancakes and his father sat silently at the breakfast table.

‘At least he’s getting out of the house, chicken,’ his mother said to him as they watched his father lope down the street, away from them, his towelled bread held tightly to his body. He would go out until lunchtime and then come back, so that his mother could run her fingers through his hair, straighten his collar and sit him down to a sandwich or a piece of cake. After lunch he would go out again, mumbling something about looking for work, but the work was never found, and with Leon running the place they had no need of extra money anyway. When his father returned he’d be wobbly and thick-mouthed, looking at his tea as though it were dangerous, picking and sorting through the food rather than eating it. Then the routine became worn and thin in the middle so that he returned later and later for lunch, glassy-eyed and drunk, and then not at all, only for supper, when he would be anxiously and darkly stared at by his wife, and he’d look at the floor, his eyes as wide as they could open, his breath hard in the back of his throat. Those nights he had to be herded to bed by Leon’s mother and she said quietly, ‘hup, hup,’ as they climbed the stairs. Leon watched out of the corner of his eye as his mother touched his father’s face, only to have him flinch away; then her sad look made him pat her hand, but quickly like she would burn him.

Leon bought a used Holden off a mechanic in town and parked it proudly outside the shop. His mother frowned at it. ‘It’s ugly in brown, chicken,’ she said, but she took it to visit a friend in Dorrigo whom she had never visited before, or mentioned. She left with a larger suitcase than she needed and she kissed them