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Leon was clearing plates when the barber touched him on the shoulder. ‘Let’s take that old man of yours upstairs, son, whatd’ ya say?’ and Leon looked over at his father whose face was wet and pale from tears, whose mouth hung open and whose eyes were shut tight. The singers were turned away from him, all attending to the conducting butcher and his sherry bottle.

They got either side of him and no one turned round as they hefted him from the room. He was led easily up the stairs and Leon’s heart beat fast in his throat, and the tears ran out of his father like a squeezed lemon but he made no sound. They laid him on the bed and Leon’s mother appeared in the doorway. The barber took Leon’s father’s shoes off while they both stood there watching. He placed the shoes under the bed and pulled a cover up to his neck, then quickly put his hand to his father’s cheek. As he left the room he smiled at Leon’s mother and nodded.

‘It’s all a little bit much for him. Overwhelming,’ said his mother. ‘He’s just a bit overwhelmed.’

Leon met Amy at Central Station and they took the slow train to Waterfall, and from there they hitched a ride to the beach. Her dress was loose round her shoulders and he saw the man who’d picked them up watching her neck as she looked out of the window. Leon stroked the neck with the backs of his fingers and it was cool. Amy smiled and rested her hand on his leg. The man averted his eyes and Leon sat a little straighter.

They walked along the shoreline with their naked feet white and sock-marked on the dark yellow sand. Leon rolled up his trousers and felt the wind comb through his hair. The air smelt sweet. A man fishing on the rocks in his underpants waved. This was where, from a little way off, they could have looked like a regular married couple out for a stroll under no obligations from their parents, nothing to worry about but themselves and the business of pushing back the dark, pushing into each other and pushing forward the bright feeling, the warmth and the round salty taste of each other. They tucked themselves under a hustle of Banksia trees next to a creek that ran dark lines into the sand. They rested their feet on the polished stones of the creek bed and lay back, drinking from bottles of beer that Leon had bought from the pub.

‘How about a swim?’ said Amy, already standing and pulling him up with her.

‘Haven’t got anything to swim in.’ In truth, he could barely swim in a pool, let alone the white froth and glassy-looking waves that sprayed out at the land when they tumbled. The noise of a drum roll. She was a big red smile, laughing at him as he tried to pull her back, slipping out of his hands and racing down to the water, while he was suddenly slow, unable to talk. She went in dress and all, and she dived into a wave and was gone, and he knew that he would never see her again, that some dark moving animal from underneath had taken her and that there was nothing to do. He stood in the shallows, stricken, not breathing, that coldness was back, it lurked underwater as well. And then she was up, bursting up like a snakebird, shaking her hair that ran down on all sides of her. Leon lifted his arms at her, and she laughed again and let herself fall backwards into the foam of a large wave, gone again, a shadow under the surface. When she came out, her dress sticking and showing her brown thighs, and how the tendons at the back stood out, she was still laughing at him.

‘You shoulda come in, Collard, it’s sweet in there!’ She draped wet arms round his neck and when they kissed her face was cold and salt water streamed down her. They drew apart and she said, ‘You gotta swim if you come to the beach. It’s the rules.’ And she bowled him over, hooking her ankles behind his knees so that they fell together in the shallows, and the coldness was gone and they laughed, rolling around with the sand in the creases of their clothes scratching quietly against their skin, and the man fishing on the rocks looked over and Leon could see, even from far away, that he was laughing too.

The picnic was sugar bananas, peaches and treacle tart. A peach warmed by the sun ran juice down their chins and the treacle tart sweated, making the syrup thin so it slid off the knife, got in the webs of their fingers and underneath the ridges of their lips. They ate everything, slowly dipping their hands into the food bag, lazily peeling the skin from a soft peach with their teeth. They talked about things he’d never realised he wanted to know. She told him how she broke her collarbone jumping out of a tree and he showed her the burn mark on the inside of his wrist that he’d got as a kid from ‘messing with cakes that didn’t concern him’. He wished he had a bigger injury to show her, especially when she offered him her clavicle, got him to run a finger along the bone, feel the small ridge where it had healed.

‘I’d like to open a tart shop with you,’ he said, skating his fingers across her throat. ‘You with the fruit, me with the pastry.’ He’d meant it to be lightly said, a joke, but he could see it all of a sudden, like it had already happened. He opened his mouth to test a shop name, Amy’s Fruit Pies, could see it in yellow lettering on black, could hear the sound of their own shop bell, but she stood up with her still damp hair in a pile on her head. She looked feral, like she’d just stepped out of the bush, her canines stood out against her bottom lip.

‘Anyway,’ she said, brushing dirt from the seat of her dress. ‘I’d get fat from all those cakes.’ He held his hand where it was, pretending she was still next to him. With uncharacteristic delicacy she found a bit of wrapper in her pocket and neatly stuck her chewing gum into it, where she folded it over on itself. She looked at him and smiled brightly.

‘I don’t think you’re the type to get fat,’ he said and she laughed loudly, but she turned away from him, looking for somewhere to put her gum.

‘I’m going away soon,’ she said, tucking her dress underneath her and sitting down again. He felt something dangerous creeping behind him.

‘How soon? Where?’ He kept his voice quiet.

‘Dad reckons I need a finishing school. I’m off up to Brisbane. To get finished.’

‘How long will that take?’

She lay back again with her eyes closed, her arms all over the place about her head, her drying hair spread like syrup. ‘It takes as long as it takes.’

He saw that he was not allowed to ask anything else, so instead he touched her hair at the ends where it was cold and soft. She opened one eye and smiled at him, a big wide smile that was sticky at its edges. She rolled over and pushed him down into the bark-smelling grass of the creek bank.

His father decided one day to reclaim the kitchen and Leon bit his lower lip watching him move things about, making things different. He was drunk and his hands trembled when he poured the flour, he banged thickly into the sideboard with his hip. Leon’s mother looked like she’d been holding her breath. They made a very basic bread, working in silence, but not long after they’d started someone came in needing a wedding cake, and needing it quickly. The dog had got into the first one. His father set to baking straight away without making notes, or asking for any particulars. Leon didn’t ask why, he just followed instructions, which were quiet and few. His father didn’t sift the flour, or weigh anything. Leon saw half an eggshell crushed heavily into the lumpen batter. Where normally his father would have divided the mixture between four or even five round tins to stack up on each other, he scraped the lot into one large square loaf tin, usually reserved only for Heavy Date Tractor Cake, and put it straight into a cold oven without checking the time or weighing it.

After an hour he took it out again and dropped it on the side with a bang. There would be no decorations. ‘It’s enough that we have flour,’ he said, when Leon asked. His father went to the pub, leaving the cake steaming on the counter. Feeling like a traitor Leon pushed a skewer carefully into the guts of the cake. It came out yellow with unmixed eggs.