‘Shit! Look,’ said Bo, ‘yabbies.’
They made it to the shack and found fishing rods leant up against the window, and before Bo could draw breath to whine about being tired, Frank had them out of the door and headed back to the creek for bait. Bo was the first to get a fish, a big silver job, neither of them knew what sort it might have been. It wasn’t until the poor bastard was flapping on the rocks in front of the two of them that they realised they didn’t have a knife.
‘I got my door key,’ said Bo.
In the end, rather than bash it with a shoe or stamp on it, they stood back and let it die, each nervously glancing at the other, trying not to flinch every time it flapped like an eppo having a turn.
The shack was neat and clean, and they lit a fire outside and cooked the fish on a grate from the stove. Its skin stuck to the metal and made a good smell. The sun had barely gone down when they turned in, a heaviness in the marrow of their bones. There were two beds, but in the night he’d woken up to find Bo in with him.
‘’S cold,’ Bo said, and Frank turned his back on him and waited tensely, ready to strike out if any part of Bo wound its way round him. Outside it was thick and dark, and inside they slept like they’d been thrown down a well. If it weren’t for the sick look on Bo’s face in the morning, and the girls, they might have stayed for ever.
‘Gotta get back and check in on the old lady,’ he said, trying to sound casual, as if his mother couldn’t cope without him, like he was doing her a favour. Frank wondered if his dad had noticed he was gone. More than likely the shop was still unopened, but it didn’t matter too much anyway as no one bought much from them any more. The place was too dirty, sometimes the bread was stale, sometimes undercooked. His old man seemed to take a certain amount of pride in getting it wrong. He couldn’t understand why he owned a bread shop in the first place if he couldn’t bake.
The barman flicked the lights on and off, and it was time to go home. The girl had disappeared, but the barman still looked pretty happy. Maybe they’d meet later. Maybe they really liked each other. Frank drove home from the pub half cut, feeling after all he was still fifteen. It would have been good to have the company of someone. Even Bo, the open-mouth breather, the fug who couldn’t resist eating his own snots, even when Beth and Eliza were there.
The shack had its own morning alarm system — when the sun started to heat up the roof, the galvanised steel would creak, threatening to fall in. There was a smell, too, that came with it — engine air and dry wood, and all of it exactly the same as when he’d been small. With his eyes closed in the first moments of waking he could have been ten again and waking up with a ten-year-old’s plan of crab-trap baiting and finding good sticks. But when he rolled over he felt the bulk of his body as it sagged the bed, the hairs chafing against each other on his shins, the dull morning erection and the ache in the back of his neck from drinking more than he had intended. His face was dry and he could feel a beard there. Best shave it off soon or he’d end up looking like his dad, always licking his lips like a lizard through that curly-wurly hair.
His dad’s lips were white as he poured his mother’s ashes into the bream hole, and Frank’d asked about God. ‘Dunno about heaven, mate. She’s in the sea.’
A local family had turned up and the mother had crossed herself and he’d wondered what it was, wondered if he should do it too, but there had seemed to be so little to gain by asking. His father had been the same grey as the sea. ‘Everybody dies, mate,’ he’d said.
Those thin days afterwards and their thick silence. How would she come back if all her parts had drifted out to sea? If fishes ate her ashes and if sharks ate the fishes. The fishes he and his father ate, brought to them by the neighbours — had he pawed through the flank of a bream that had eaten his mother? Could that hurt?
His father told him, with closed eyes, ‘Go and play on the beach.’ He tried to pull a stick through the sand the length of the beach, tried to jump the calf-high waves, but ended up watching the sea, trying to keep his eyes on one spot so the water didn’t escape him, but everything changed place, and the spot that he had started watching moved on the second he saw it, disbanded and spread out, rolled over and under and became another spot of water somewhere else. A knot was tight in his stomach as the fingers of the sea spread out and closed up again and again.
After three days they packed up and went back to the shop. His dad set to work immediately, even though they arrived back late in the night. Frank had been asleep in the truck and kept his eyes closed as his dad took him up to bed, held tight against his shoulder, even though Frank suspected he was too old for that sort of carry-on. He heard him moving downstairs, heard the quiet pouring of flour and the click of the whisk in the plastic bowl that his dad used when he didn’t want to make much noise. His eyes, too tired to stay open but too lazy to close the whole way, settled in between as the smell of white sponge and citrus rind leaked into his room, and he had dreamt he was sucking an orange, his feet dangling in the bream hole.
After a shave and a little fresh-water wash with a bucket, things were not too bad. There was the whole day to go and he could hear a whipbird cracking not too far off. That was good. By mid morning he was feeling fine and shimmying around the place giving it a tidy-up. When Bob’s truck drove up to the shack with a fridge strapped down in the back, there was a different lazy wrist hanging out of the window. The wrist belonged to a brown arm and wore green copper bangles.
‘My wife, Vicky,’ explained Bob, pointing as the woman pulled herself up out of the passenger seat.
‘G’day.’ She smiled gappily, pretty brown circles under her eyes.
With the fridge came a chicken, dead and plucked, but not gutted.
‘We leave ’em guts in,’ explained Bob, ‘’cause some fellas get cranky if we don’t.’ This seemed a fair explanation.
The fridge was squattish and elegantly rusted at the edges, and while Vicky looked around the place Frank and Bob walked it into the shack in the same way that Frank had walked the stove out. He had a sense of himself dancing old appliances out of the shack and dancing the new ones in. The fridge fitted neatly below the back window.
‘See this?’ said Bob, holding a tiny pot with a wick poking out of it up to Frank’s nose. ‘That’s the kero and you’ll wanna keep it topped up.’ He took a lighter out of his back pocket and lit it, then gently, like he was holding a live fish in a cup of water, he squatted down, reached under the fridge and placed it down softly. He stood up with a crack of his knees. ‘An make sure you don’t shut all the windows and doors for too long, or you’ll wake up dead.’
‘Terrific,’ said Frank. ‘Drink?’ He’d planned ahead for company this time, had stacked up on light beer and ice. He’d even bought nuts.
Bob looked at his watchless wrist. ‘Not today, mate, got places need going to.’ Making no move to leave, he leant against the fridge like it was a car.
‘Any news on the missing girl?’
‘Not as yet, mate. Not as yet.’
Bob looked like he was about to say something else when Vicky appeared behind him and took his fingers in hers, and Frank was winded by the ease of it. ‘Nice place you’ve got,’ she said, ‘I’d love something cold if it’s going, Franko.’ There was a look between her and Bob that Frank turned away from to dig out a beer from his eski. ‘So, how’d you come by it? Bob tells me you moved down from the city?’ Vicky accepted the drink with a chime of her bracelets.