After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,50

feel for the pieces of it that slotted into each other. It weighed the same as the paddle he used to get bread out of the ovens. A kid called Rod, who looked younger than he said he was, bunked above him. He’d hang his head over his bunk and watch Leon clean his gun, telling him all about his family back home, his sisters and how his father was a big deal in the city. Leon smiled and nodded back, tried on occasion to return a story, which he made up somewhat. It was strange to be so close to other people, all the time. The early mornings and the exercise meant that at night he slept like a stone, and when he woke it was good to see all those neat men with their neat boots and neat hair. After a few weeks, the flesh of his stomach shrank back and he could feel his muscles reaching out underneath his skin. His uniform didn’t feel tight around the middle. He hadn’t realised until he lost it that he’d had a paunch.

When they trained on the automatics the sergeant slapped Leon on the back and said, ‘That’s the kinda shoot we want, Collard. Good one,’ and he felt his chest expand and looked around to see who else had heard.

He borrowed some paper off Rod, who wrote to his parents twice a week, letting them know about all the swell stuff they were up to, how he was bunking with this real character of a guy, how he’d been singled out specifically for his navigational skills.

He leant the paper on his knees and felt oddly formal as he wrote ‘Dear Mother and Father’. He couldn’t remember suddenly if he’d called them something else – Mum and Dad? Had he ever talked to them like this? He might just have said, ‘Hey, you,’ or not spoken to them at all. He felt bad about the next line, ‘I hope this finds you both well’ – was it terrible to ignore that neither one of them sounded well in his mother’s postcards? ‘I have been called to service in Vietnam and am at my training now.’ He would not give the address of the training centre. He wouldn’t like another one of those cards with the cartoon character all Smiley-Dan on the front and a looney message on the back, where anyone could read it. ‘I leave for Saigon in three weeks.’ There was an odd rush when he wrote that. Just writing the word Saigon was like speaking a different language. ‘Mrs Shannon has the keys to the shop and I will of course reopen it on my return.’ He felt carried away with the formality of his voice, but he liked it. ‘Your loving son’, and here he realised he was angry at them both and didn’t sign his name. They’d work it out.

He addressed it to the Mulaburry post office, wherever that was, and sealed the envelope.

When the last three weeks were up, he took a photograph of himself in the toilet mirror, feeling like a wind-up toy. The shape of his face was different, he looked reedy and older. His uniform was crisp against his skin and he held his hat in his hand, squeezed the shape out of it. On the hot bitumen with the planes huge against the sky, he had his photograph taken with Rod.

‘It’s time,’ Rod said then, and they climbed the tin-sounding steps to the Qantas.

The lead-weight feeling of flying was not what he’d expected. He’d imagined a lightness, a small leap in the pit of his stomach, then the feeling a trapeze artist might get. But it was like being underwater, something pushed at his ears, tried to get to his brain. He couldn’t concentrate on any one thing. There was the view out of the window, the upside of the clouds, which he hadn’t considered before. They rolled and moved like live things, they reflected a white light into his eyes.

They levelled above the clouds, and the air and the boom of the engine leant in on his ears, and the freshly shaved skin underneath his nose dried out. He took a photograph out of the cabin window.

There was a fug about the place that was how the air felt around Christmas when you had to make bread and you couldn’t open a window and let in the flies. The first deep breath, coming off the plane in Saigon, he