After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,51

thought he’d swallowed a mouthful of heated air from the engine, but all the air was like that and you had to plough through it. In the back of the truck on the way to the base, they’d passed through all those Vietnamese getting on with their stuff, carrying baskets and cycling, just like you saw in the cartoons about China. They even wore those sun hats, the ones you couldn’t fit through a doorway in. So many people squatted by the road in a way he couldn’t imagine his own ankles allowing, and the smell of fumes was unholy and it tickled the back of his nose like no smell he’d known existed. They stopped in traffic by a roadside vendor where old men perched on their haunches, eating something that looked meaty and sticky.

‘Dirty so-and-sos,’ someone said and everyone laughed. Leon recognised rice. Suddenly there was a school of young women on pushbikes catching up to the truck, each one of them pristine in a white outfit, their hair long and black down their backs. The men shouted and stamped their feet as the girls, without so much as a glance in their direction, overtook the truck like a shoal of fish and carried on their way.

For a week they stayed at the compound to get used to the place. Rod woke up spewing one night and when he went to the medic tent they laughed at him. ‘They just said, that’s life, and told me to drink as much water as I could. But then they said it was the water making me spew.’ He looked at Leon for some sort of support. Leon shrugged and Rod held up his canteen of water as a question.

Sleeping was not so easy in the compound. There was a bird that carried on all through the night, uk-hew uk-hew uk-hew, and after each call he waited in the silence, thinking maybe that was the last one. It seemed to be nested in the tree by the cookhouse, but you could never see it, even though you heard it as though it were right in front of your face. On a night when it was particularly loud, and Rod couldn’t stay still for wanting to spew, they sat watching as a few men tried throwing stones into the tree to scare it off, but the thing was stoic and cried back just as loudly UK-HEW.

‘An’ fuck you too you fucking fuck!’ one man shouted, which seemed to give the bird pause for thought.

‘You got much of a family back home?’ asked Rod.

‘Not much of one. But somewhere around I got some parents.’ Funny to say that. But Rod wasn’t really listening. He was drawing with a stick in the dirt. ‘What they think of you coming out here?’

‘Dunno. Guess they’re not that happy about it.’

‘But you knew you wanted to go, right, and you knew it was important?’

‘I was conscripted.’

‘Oh.’ He looked crestfallen.

‘You signed up?’

‘Yeah – but you’ve got to get permission – you’ve got to get your parents to sign something. Like going on a fucking school trip.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen. Soon.’

‘Crikey.’

‘They didn’t want to sign. There were all kinds of tears about it. They didn’t come and say goodbye. Dad was too upset.’ The dirt drawing took on an egg shape and he drilled round and round it with his stick.

‘That’s hard.’

‘Yup. But he signed up, he was in Greece. I’d have thought he’d understand, y’know? All’s I’m asking for is a bit of support.’

Leon nodded. But it seemed like a lot to ask for.

Uk-hew, went the fuck-you bird.

By the end of the week Rod was feeling better, though still liable to vomit without much warning. As the chopper set down to take them to their new patrol, a man came running out of the cookhouse, a brown lizard hacked through with a shovel swinging from his hands. ‘I found the bastard! Found the fuck-you bird! An’ he’s a lizard!’ The man threw the lizard down in the dust in front of the men’s feet, proudly, like he’d made it himself. It still moved slowly, but there wasn’t much left in it. ‘Bastard bit me!’ he said, looking pleased all the same. They watched the lizard become still.

The helicopter made him feel too light, like he might get sucked out of the open door at any minute. Rod was sick into his hand and tried to throw it out, but it caught in the wind and flew back at