Leon bought a used Holden off a mechanic in town and parked it proudly outside the shop. His mother frowned at it. ‘It’s ugly in brown, chicken,’ she said, but she took it to visit a friend in Dorrigo whom she had never visited before, or mentioned. She left with a larger suitcase than she needed and she kissed them both more than was necessary, her eyes frantic and sad. The bad thing hunkered down in Leon’s guts and the shop seemed so dark that at times he had to find his way around the kitchen by touch.
His father stopped coming home for supper. His mother came back from her break in Dorrigo and she seemed to have made up her mind to fill up the silence in the house.
‘Mrs Shannon’s pregnant again.’
‘How about a walk just the two of us?’
‘How about a sandwich?’
‘Glass of tea?’
But the quiet answers from his father stopped. His mother tried cooking exotic meals; curried fish, pork in aspic. Anything with meat in it was not eaten and anything that was eaten had no effect on his father’s expression. He started to drink beer alongside his wine. She showed him photographs that she thought might interest him, cut-out from the newspaper — Marilyn Monroe, an elephant swimming, a huge shark washed up on the northern beaches — but he would not look. He stopped lifting his head when she came into the room. He would not look at Leon’s mother, but sometimes Leon would catch him staring at him, as if they had never met before, and he would have to leave the room, get into the kitchen and lose himself in a cake.
Leon followed his father again and this time his route to the train station had extended. It took them until dark to get there, going through West Parramatta, every street, into Rydalmere and through the subway, always with the same heavy steady stride, with no breaks, apart from once when his father disappeared into a public convenience, but Leon couldn’t be sure if he had used it or just walked in and out of each cubicle. It seemed his father was taking a giant run-up at something, like he might try to jump over the harbour.
One day he did not come back from the train station. He was not back that night and he didn’t turn up in the morning. Leon’s mother sat around in her housecoat and slippers. She drank sweet tea and stared at the ceiling as if her eyes were full of liquid and she had to keep them tilted upwards so as not to spill any.
Leon sold bread in the usual way. He watched his mother out of the corner of his eye. He tried putting his arms round her but she waved him off, then pulled him back and pushed him away again. It wasn’t till the end of the week that he saw that the sugar figurines of his parents were gone. His mother saw him looking at the space and smiled feebly. ‘He’s always been a fragile man, even before the war. We propped each other up.’ She held her face in her hands and was silent a long while. ‘I’m sorry, my chicken,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed him so much and he wasn’t even gone.’
He didn’t know where to put the look she gave him.
5
Frank liked the idea of living off the land, and he pictured himself pickling beetroot and biting into sweet capsicum and sun-warmed tomatoes. He’d have an area for experimentation, for exotics — prickly pears, artichokes, watermelons.
He paced out a vegetable garden, planting four sticks as markers in the corners and later in the day browsed the seeds in the camping shop. He took tomatoes, lettuce, leeks, curly beans, spiny cucumber and marrow. He bought a tin watering can and a set of different-sized forks and trowels. The woman did nothing but nod and smile this time, for which he was grateful.
On the drive home, he stopped short of the cane, turned off the engine and walked into the shade of the blue gums, to get a breath of their coolness and have a look around at what was his. Hot sheets of eucalyptus rose from the ground, and he thought of the creek where he and Bo had found the fat pale yabbies, Bo boasting about how he could put his hand underwater and come up with five clinging, one on each finger. If he had wanted to.
The evening he’d left Eliza by the jacaranda tree with the half-empty bottle of rum and crying because he’d shouted, because he’d gone all aggressive, Bo turned up with a bleeding ear and a ropy sleeping bag. ‘I gotta go away, Franko,’ he said. They’d walked out of the suburbs without speaking, Bo’s ear still bleeding down his big neck, Frank with a sleeping bag, two stale loaves and a bagful of the dark syrup stout his old man had taken to drinking, and the gasoline tins that banged against the back of his knee as he walked. They drank steadily and thumbed a lift in the back of a truck with an old cattle dog, which was on the nose, but friendly. The dog put its head in his lap and he played with its cold ears. His old man had been face down at the kitchen table as he left, breathing wetly.
They’d walked the last few miles to Mulaburry, stopping now and again to huff on a gasoline-wet tea towel, then ambling on, blinking in silence, their eyes on the sky, which was black and gold in places. Road trains blasted by them in the dark and Frank could feel the wind from them parting his hair. At Mulaburry beach they put their sleeping sacks on the sand and built a fire to keep off the biting things. Neither of them wanted the feel of a roof over his head.
Bo looked at him in a way that Frank could see he’d already got old on the inside. ‘Can’t hear nothing from me ear,’ he said. ‘Reckon she’s bust it for good.’
Frank opened a fresh bottle and handed it to him. Things beyond the gold ring of the fire moved in and out like black sea anemones.
‘Reckon you should get someone to look at that?’ He hoped not — he didn’t know where they would find a doctor and he didn’t want to be thinking about it. Not now.
‘Nah. The other one’s still going.’ Bo made a honk that might have been a laugh. The waves rumbled on. ‘I hit her back.’ Bo took a dramatic swig of the bottle.
‘Cripes, mate,’ was all Frank could think to say. ‘Well, cripes. It had to happen one day.’
Bo looked at his knuckles. He smoothed them over his lips and closed his eyes.
The air underneath the trees was hot and sweet. Even in the relative cool of the bush, Frank could feel the sun up there crackling in the gum leaves. His feet remembered the sponge of the gum-leaf floor; his back remembered sleeping on it. His wrists remembered the mosquitoes, and his mouth the creek and its crawling cold water.
He rested a hand on the bark of a tree and felt it warm and smooth in the centre of his palm. He felt his skin growing back to cover old bones that had ripped out. Then he felt eyes on him and his skin prickled, and the hair on his arms and his neck stood out. ‘Get out of it, Creepin’ Jesus,’ he said out loud but that only made the feeling worse and he walked quickly to his truck.
Back at the shack he saw that the stove door had swung open again. Not a crack this time: it was wide open like someone had had to manoeuvre a pie dish in there. He stood in front of it. It must have been a tick the stove had, the metal expanding in the heat of the sun. Either way, something had made a meal of the guts, the inside of the oven was licked clean.
When Bob turned up with a chicken-shaped gift wrapped in newspaper and leaking bloodily from one end, Frank realised it must be close to Christmas.