He inhaled too far, nearly choked. ‘My grandparents bought it up in the fifties. No one’s really lived here since then — just used it as a holiday place when I was a little kid. Haven’t been up since, actually. Not for ages.’
‘Really?’ She had a nice way of looking interested, the tip of a canine catching on her bottom lip. ‘I never knew anyone owned it. I’m afraid we’ve been trespassing, Frank.’ She gave Bob a sideways glance and a smile. Bob blushed. He took a long drink of her beer but waved away the one Frank offered.
‘So what made you decide to move down here for keeps?’ she asked, taking the beer back off Bob with a small yank.
‘Up here,’ corrected Bob.
‘Dunno — good memories I suppose — bit of a change of scene. Seems like a good place to be…’ He felt his voice soften, but they didn’t seem to notice. Vicky smiled warmly at him, but didn’t help him out.
‘I suppose, I just came to a point — broke up with a girlfriend and I needed a place to just get out of the city.’
‘City’s a bad place to be alone.’ Vicky nodded.
There were a few quiet moments, then Bob punched his fist lightly into his hand and said loudly, ‘Righto, we’ll be off. I’ll drop by some more usefuls as I come across them.’ They got into the car and Bob gave him a wave. ‘Laters,’ he said, raising one hand as he steered with the other.
‘See youse soon,’ called Vicky over the engine. ‘Ta for the drink.’
He watched as the truck hared away, Bob’s arm held out of the window like a flag, Vicky’s wrist turning slowly on its joint. He wondered what they were saying about him as they drove off, if they were laughing.
He opened up his new fridge. And closed it again. And opened and closed. It smelt of bleach and old air. He unloaded the eski. He sat down to write a shopping list. Bread. Margarine. He opened the fridge again and looked at the dead chook. Potatoes. And wondered. Carrots. How he would. Vegemite. Cook it and what it would be like to eat a whole chicken on his own. He closed the fridge and returned to his list and, just to remind himself what kind of a stupid bastard he was, he jabbed himself hard in the palm with his pen, and the pen broke in the cradle of his hand and welled up purple.
He washed up the old camp oven, unused since a trip to the river two years back. He concentrated on cooking the chicken, leaning away from thoughts that the grit in the bottom of the oven was most likely sand from the river bank they’d been to for Australia Day weekend before any of the trouble started. That any blackened dried flake of food still stuck to the side could have been the skin of an onion they had eaten together, that had sat warm in her belly and in his belly as they lay next to each other in their one-man tent. He packed the chicken into the oven with whole potatoes, roughly cut carrots and tomatoes from a sackful of overripes he’d picked up at a roadside stall. Most of them had black centres, but there was plenty of flesh surrounding.
He squatted over the pot with a box of white wine and let a good half-litre squirt out over the chicken. When the fire was mostly embers he made a hole and nestled the pot there. He put on the lid and shovelled hot rocks on top. He stood back, his eyes stinging, and wondered what to do with the giblets he’d wrestled out of the carcass. He picked up the board he’d spread them on and examined them in the light of the fire, the wet, woolly strings that made the bird work. He took them over to the old stove, whose door was slightly ajar, like it was peering at him. He opened the door wide and scraped the entrails inside. They glistened wetly against the matt black of the stove’s gullet and he shut the door, pulling the rusted catch into place, feeling like he was forcing the jaws of a dog closed to get it to swallow a pill. He stood a moment looking at the stove and wondering why he had done that.
A light spun over the top of the cane and an engine battered somewhere nearby but passed his drive without stopping, so he went back to the fire and poured himself a mug of box wine. The Creeping Jesus made a noise in the dark, like things did — an open-mouthed shriek — and he raised his mug of box wine towards it, toasting the shriek and whatever the thing was shrieking for.
When the chicken was cooked, he sat the whole carcass on a tin plate in his lap, with the camp oven in reach for the vegetables and juices that were in it. He pushed a newspaper under the plate to stop it burning his bare thighs and pulled at a leg. The skin slid off the meat and clung to the carcass. The flesh came off the bone with a small persuasion from his tongue. The bird was tough but it was tasty and he cleaned the drumstick cartoon-like — the whole leg went into his mouth and came out clean. He pushed his fingers into the breast and tore off white meat, it came away like bark from a tree. With a mouthful of breast meat, he felt the air come hot and fast out of his nose. He was burning his mouth, but it didn’t matter because he was enjoying himself. The juice ran down his chin and throat, and maybe some of it collected in his belly button for all he cared; it was good. He drained his mug of wine and filled it with the stock from the camp oven. He hadn’t skimmed it and the fat was heavy on the surface, giving him the feeling he was oiling the engine of his body. He swallowed down large hunks of tomato and onion without chewing. The carrots tasted warm and heavy, and he chewed them and swilled them around his mouth to remember the taste for a long time.
When the breastbone of the chook shone like a fin in the moonlight, he leant back in his deckchair and smiled broadly, felt his wide thick teeth glowing in the dark, felt his feet rooted to the ground. I did the right thing, he thought. I did the right flaming thing after all. The small wound in his palm throbbed with chicken juice and it made him laugh out loud, a great crack. Silly old bastard.
Creeping Jesus in the cane mawed again, but this time it gurgled, something between a purr and a grunt that was swallowed by the deep dark of the night. He put the lid on the camp oven and took himself off to bed, dirty and smelling of dinner.
There was work in the morning, which he was happy about. How long had it been since he’d showed up somewhere to the slow wave of a hand, the nod of ‘How are ya?’ It was what he’d imagined when he’d first gone to Canberra, that he’d slot in and be one of those men who weren’t afraid of a bit of hard work, who drank a cup of coffee out of a tin cup and got on with it. But when he’d got to Canberra the contact he had was nowhere to be seen and he was stranded, no place to stay, no hard hat or boots, and he’d had to sleep in a bus shelter the first four nights. He’d found work as a cleaner, doing the post office headquarters where the toilets were filled anew with the runs every morning at four. It had been hard smelling that and still smile at the miserable-mouthed bastards in the canteen, as they wolfed down their eggs and beans and fried bread only to shit it out again later into the freshly scrubbed toilets. He’d got himself a bed at the YMCA with a bunch of other hopeless cases and looked longingly at the men who lunched together at the side of the road in their hard hats and reflective gear.
Charlie stood by the derrick in the flaying heat, wearing a yellow sou’wester. His legs were bare and it looked from the right angle like he wore nothing else underneath. He had the hood up to shade his eyes from the sun and dark lines of sweat ran from his hairline. His cheeks were wet and shiny as polished stones. He was chatting with a plimsole-wearing girl from the marina café, whose apron was longer than her skirt. Frank could hear the sound of their conversation, and it was all smiles and they both giggled at each other. Charlie took the lemon lite from the girl’s hand and had a drink of it before passing it back, and Stuart gave a snort, tried to catch Frank’s eye, but he kept his face turned away.