After the fire, a still small voice - By Evie Wyld Page 0,91

become soft like rotten potatoes. Their faces were dark holes pushed in soft fruit. A baby, swaddled still in its shawl, floated alone and he thought of the family he’d pointed the gun at. The moon-faced boy. He thought about the line of tracers he’d sent out over the trees after he’d undone the jam in his gun.

Daniel shook his head. ‘Why would you get your family along? They always get shot.’

The section crossed the bridge and no one talked, there was just the clump of boots on the planks, one by one, until only Rod was left on the other side. They waited for him, no one told him to hurry up, they just watched him, tired, as he stood and continued to stand on the wrong side of the creek, with one hand over his eyes.

You had to breathe with your mouth open.

21

There was no sleep for Frank that night and none the next either. His ears were blocked, his sinuses pulsed. He had water on the ear, that was the problem. It was in there rolling about against his eardrum and no amount of head shaking, no amount of fingers in earholes made the slightest difference. His head ached. It looked like the cut on his palm had got infected, small seawater boils had formed round the opening and it throbbed in time with his sinuses. Everything was muffled and hot. He tried to eat some pilchards for breakfast but they turned his stomach and he left them for the hens to pick apart, making their beaks red with tomato juice. His beard itched, felt lumpy round the throat with whorls and clumps of hair, and he couldn’t leave it alone, but the idea of shaving it floored him. He’d have to scissor it first, then the tearing grind of his blunt razor. There’d be blood drawn for sure.

Frank’s eyes felt salty, the rims of them were tender and he could feel tingles on his lips that might be cold sores coming. He wanted to peel his face off and clean it from the inside. Instead he opened a beer. It was early morning, but what difference did the morning make to a man who hadn’t slept? He stayed on his bed, the dark inside the shack was better on his eyes. The shark two days before was like a story he’d overheard. Every time he thought about it he heard the ticking noise all those crabs had made, their hairy legs scrabbling around in the bottom of the surf ski. They’d eaten blue swimmers for four days solid, then they had started to smell and the last ones had to be chucked, dead, back to the sea. He thought about Pokey’s niece with the red drinking straw, and Joyce Mackelly’s jawbone. He thought about Johno with his black hair and the way he’d disappeared into the long sharp grass. The smell of smoke was still on his skin and so was Vicky’s coat. He thought of Bob, who smiled too often too widely, Linus who watched everything and knew something secret, Stuart and his kids and his fish. It was all sad and lost already, and on top of it sat Lucy and he knew what she would have said. The thought of having her nearby seemed like the most perfect thing. A body that was his to touch and to fit in front of his like a piece of interlocking shell.

The air in the shack smelt. Or maybe he smelt, you couldn’t know these things for sure. It was the smell of lots of people pressed in all together, sweating up against each other, breathing their bad breath. Frank took a wander outside; the chickens were nowhere in sight. He couldn’t hear the birds in the trees but he knew they were there, saw the leaves of the blue gums shifting around. He ploughed through the cane, made for the cover of the trees, where maybe the air was thinner, where maybe he wouldn’t notice the silence so goddam much. He’d have to stock up on drink but he was too spliced to drive, even he knew that. With a rambling forward motion he was able to lurch into the coolness of the trees and there was the smell of eucalypt, strong and heavy but medicinal, like it cleaned up his throbbing hand, soothed his eyes.

He contemplated lying down by the creek and passing the rest of the day there, but the creek was low