His mother stood in front of the cake and wrung her hands, patted down her hair.
Leon started from scratch. He made an orange and poppy-seed cake, five tiers tall. He painted the whole thing in peach jam before applying a thin royal icing finish. On to the clean sheet of white, he painted stalked clementines and ivy. He made two pairs of figurines and chose the best, the most dignified beautiful couple. The spare couple lost because the bride shifted a little to one side, one hip higher than the other. There was something sarcastic about her smile and, if he was honest, he liked her too much to give her away. Perhaps, objectively, her breasts were a hair too large, her bottom too high and round. Perhaps there was something of Amy Blackwell about her. When the cake was collected, without his father having seen it, no one spotted the difference. His mother put a hand on Leon’s shoulder but said nothing.
He had come to the fruit shop with a list of reasons she could give to her parents, but when he started talking she popped her chewing gum, sucked of all flavour but holding the warmth of the inside of her mouth, into his and it shocked him into silence. An elderly woman stared at the two of them, and Amy smiled and stared back until the woman looked away.
‘There’s no point,’ she whispered, ‘it’s paid for now anyway. Besides, it means I get away from them.’ She touched his cheek and the old woman cleared her throat. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Amy loudly, standing up tall behind the counter, and the old woman left the shop in a flurry of shopping bags and disgust. Amy rolled her eyes. ‘Well, I’ll be hearing about that later.’ She smiled at Leon, who could only think that she was leaving.
And soon after, she was gone as simply as she had arrived in the classroom, her finger held up against the sheet of paper. A brown-paper bag holding two peaches that were just on the turn, with the smudged and stained note.
See you when I’m finished x
He felt a wind at his back and turned in time to see nothing at all. Something dragged at his insides, low in his chest, and he took the train to Waterfall and thumbed down to the beach. The weather was filth and no one fished from the rocks. The dark lines made by the creek on the sand looked scummy, it could have been sewage, and a wind picked up loose sand and hurled it at the backs of his legs. There was a weight of disgust on his chest.
After the wedding-cake episode his father stayed mainly in his room, ducking out to the pub regularly for another bottle.
His mother’s hair was back in its bun. ‘Going to town,’ she announced one morning. ‘Get a hairdo, have a bit of mummy fun. You’ll be alright, chicken?’
He nodded and smiled, wondering what exactly she meant, seeing as he ran the shop alone as it was. Her face was pale and so he tried not to look annoyed. The bell rang with her departure.
Not long afterwards his father came down the stairs and made for the door. ‘There’s some things I need to get done today,’ he said, wrapping half a loaf of breakfast bread in a tea towel and putting it in a paper bag.
‘I made some croissants, if you’d like one,’ Leon offered.
‘Bread is good enough. Thank you. Must get going now. Have a good day.’
‘You too.’
He waited until his father had gone out of the door and disappeared round the corner, before jumping the counter and turning the shop sign to closed. He locked up and ran down the street after him, his feet slapping hard on the bitumen. He followed at a distance and was led all over the suburbs. They circled every block of Parramatta, leaving no road uncrossed. They went down every alleyway and under every tunnel, over every bridge. A few times his father went into cul-de-sacs and Leon had to wait anxiously behind a bush for him to come out again, always with his head down, so that he could have stood right in front of him and he wouldn’t have noticed. Finally, with the sun way over west, they came to the train station, which was, on a straight walk, only ten minutes from the shop.
For the first time his father raised his head. He sat on a bench on the platform. Trains entered and left the station but his father’s only movement was to take a hip flask out of his pocket and bring it again and again to his mouth. People were met and seen off, they crowded the platform, then left it and crowded it again. The loudspeaker announced trains to Waterfall, Green Point, Central. People were met and kissed, were waved off, left with luggage, left with nothing. People waited and ate chips, smoked cigarettes, drank milk drinks and left all the smells behind when they went. In the middle of it all sat his father on a red bench, looking straight ahead, bread tucked safely into the crook of his arm, fingers pressed white on his flask. Leon left him there and walked home. All the way he felt something following, but each time he turned there was nothing to see.
He wondered what to say to his mother. When his father came in, he sat at the kitchen table with a newspaper that looked fished out of a bin. He unfolded it in front of him and did not turn the pages, but stared hard at it, drinking his way steadily through a bottle of sweet sherry. Leon kneaded dough for the next morning’s bread and didn’t know what it meant. His mother came home and she had a new hairdo, shorter with a wave over one eye. She wore lipstick and a camel wool dress, even in the heat.
‘You look pretty, Maureen,’ his father said, looking up for the first time from his paper. His mother glowed like she’d won the thirty-dollar lotto.
In the mornings, with the sun bright in the kitchen, the place looked dark, but he knew it was not. It was like he’d been in the sun too long and burnt his eyes. His chest throbbed and his stomach felt tight; something sat on his ribs, peering down and breathing foully in his face.
He kissed a girl behind the boat shed at the harbour and he felt it die a small bit. But she was not Amy, and she took his hands from her breasts and straightened her handbag and her hair with one hand. He walked home alone, feeling the terrible thing rolling over and dragging itself after him in the dark.
That night he woke to his mother pulling on his sleeve. She put a finger to her lips and motioned for them to get under the bed. She’s gone mad, thought Leon, but he did it anyway because she looked scared.
‘What are we doing?’ he whispered close to her ear.
‘It’s not good to wake them up when they sleepwalk,’ she said and on the landing the floor creaked. The whites of her eyes shone in the dark and Leon saw the naked feet of his father pace slowly round the room. The air under the bed was thick and sweet. The feet moved close to the bed and Leon wondered if they were found, and then he saw that on his father’s right foot the two smallest toes were missing. What was left was ugly grey skin. The feet receded and left the room, and they slept there under the bed. In the morning his mother made pancakes and his father sat silently at the breakfast table.
‘At least he’s getting out of the house, chicken,’ his mother said to him as they watched his father lope down the street, away from them, his towelled bread held tightly to his body. He would go out until lunchtime and then come back, so that his mother could run her fingers through his hair, straighten his collar and sit him down to a sandwich or a piece of cake. After lunch he would go out again, mumbling something about looking for work, but the work was never found, and with Leon running the place they had no need of extra money anyway. When his father returned he’d be wobbly and thick-mouthed, looking at his tea as though it were dangerous, picking and sorting through the food rather than eating it. Then the routine became worn and thin in the middle so that he returned later and later for lunch, glassy-eyed and drunk, and then not at all, only for supper, when he would be anxiously and darkly stared at by his wife, and he’d look at the floor, his eyes as wide as they could open, his breath hard in the back of his throat. Those nights he had to be herded to bed by Leon’s mother and she said quietly, ‘hup, hup,’ as they climbed the stairs. Leon watched out of the corner of his eye as his mother touched his father’s face, only to have him flinch away; then her sad look made him pat her hand, but quickly like she would burn him.