bad. Perhaps she could feel the change in the air. If he’d stayed inside her she could have got pregnant right then, in that warm moment.
He opened his eyes to find that the day had turned beautiful on him: the sky a dark pink, while the sun was giving out a last burst of light. A flock of spoonbills were passing over, their shadows zipping like mice over the ground. He stood to watch them go, took off his hat and waved it, holding on to the post of the veranda, leaning out like he was on the prow of a boat, his mouth open to catch the change in the air, to taste the white birds as they coloured everything.
He was drunk by the time Bob arrived, but he held himself straight in his chair.
‘You right?’ asked Bob, smiling.
‘I’m well,’ he said loudly. He got Bob a drink and settled back.
‘Chinarillo,’ said Bob, raising his bottle.
He nodded. ‘’Rillo.’
An ibis flew overhead, white wings soft and her proboscis beak an ink line against the sky, but she was nothing like the spoonbills. The two men sat and drank to the first quarter mark of their beers and the silence was not uncomfortable but not natural either. Kirk and Mary fluffed around to the front veranda.
‘Girls,’ Bob greeted them and raised his drink. Kirk and Mary did not look but scrubbed in the dirt at a line of ants. The low sun bumped off the red track and turned the whole distance cherry. A rosella landed on the veranda, saw them and squeaked in surprise before flying off again.
‘How are your girls?’ asked Frank.
‘Same as ever. Sal reckons we need a goat. So that’s what’s new with her.’
‘You going to get one?’
‘Nah. Nice animals but. Take a heap of looking after. If you want rid of a chook you wring its neck. If we decided we’d had enough of chickens tomorrow it’d take – I dunno – around half a day to get through the lot of them. If we were really on it. But a goat, you’ve got to bleed her. And they’ve got all that personality in them.’
Frank laughed. ‘You look at everything like that? How easy it is to kill?’
‘Means you can move on easier. We like knowing we can just fold up and piss off as the mood takes us.’
Frank leant back in his chair and felt the solidness of the veranda under him. He thought of that last night in Canberra when it hadn’t seemed possible that he was leaving, when he’d sprayed lavender-scented toilet spray to convince himself it wasn’t home any more. He tilted back further in his chair, felt himself go past the point of balance and wobbled forward with a bump to knock the thoughts out of him. A small breeze brought on it the smell of a fresh open custard apple. He looked at his hands. It was quiet. There was the sound of the bottle clipping against Bob’s teeth, of his deep swallow. Bob was looking out at the darkening cane and in the dim light he looked older, like an old-fashioned explorer, like he wasn’t made for Australia at all, but the lonely white tundra of the North Pole or the South Pole or any pole just so long as it was lonely.
‘Must be hard to just fold up and move on when you’ve got a kid.’
‘We’ve done it before. Helps Vick to know she’s mobile, I think.’
The chink again, glass on tooth.
‘How’d you mean?’
Bob turned his head to face Frank. ‘She’s got things on her mind, you know – more than most. She doesn’t sleep – sits up late sometimes. And sometimes she drinks.’ Bob laughed loudly and suddenly, and his bark echoed. ‘Nothing wrong with sitting up and getting off yer face, eh, Frank?’ He raised his bottle again. Frank nodded, smiled and Bob settled back deep in his chair. There was quiet again and this time Frank tried hard to think of something to fill the quiet with, but he couldn’t settle on anything, kept being distracted by the sound of crickets skiffing in the cane, a big moth caught in a web scrabbling against the roof.
‘She’s a strong one, but. She gets on with things for the most part. The daytime. It’s just the nights get at her, you know?’ He took another swallow. ‘I wish I could stay awake. Be some kind of company. But I wake up and I hear her downstairs. An’