‘So, what happened?’
Bob opened his eyes ‘The kid died.’
‘Holy.’
‘Leukaemia. A couple of years back.’
‘Mate.’
‘Yep.’
The silence was back and this time it stayed. Frank felt the foam of too much drink clearing, as he took it in. He felt his bum muscles tighten as he tried to think of something to say. In the end he let it go and the two of them worked through to the last of their beer, and Frank went back to the fridge softly, not letting the screen door close too sharply. Bob rolled a cigarette, appearing to put all his concentration into it, pulling away tobacco fibres, wetting his fingers and tightening the roll. The sound of bottles gasping open.
‘Somethin’ about this place. I dunno if it’s something rubbed off from my old man — he was a hippy joker. Long hair ’n’ everything — caravan, the whole fucking Kulu. Anyways, this place’s been good to us — let us live on after.’ Bob looked up at Frank, caught his eye. ‘It was a bad death, y’see. Real bad.’
Frank plucked at the neck of his T-shirt. ‘I’m sorry to hear it, mate. Really sorry.’
‘She was this funny colour, that was the bit that got to me. She kept spewing up all this stuff, lime-grey — same colour as her skin by that time. An’ of course all the hair goes.’ He closed his eyes and let his head fall back. A moth landed in Frank’s hair but he didn’t move to get rid of it.
‘The worst thing is you see this little budling of a creature turn into something it makes you sick to look at. You want to cuddle her up, yeah, but you can’t bear the smell. You sweat at the touch of her, and you’re all she’s got, and she makes you feel sick. An’ in the end you’re prayin’ for it, in the end you’re standing over the bed at night holding a pillow thinking about it. An’ the worst is that you don’t do it, because you sort of think while she’s alive there’s a chance, so you don’t and you watch her rip away thread by thread, one pluck at a time. An’ then it’s just the eyes looking at you and you’re supposed to do something but you don’t know what that is.’
‘This is terrible,’ said Frank.
Bob shrugged, took another drink, ran a hand through his hair. Frank didn’t know what in the world to say. Bob went on, ‘This place, it’s got its fair share of ghosts around it, but it doesn’t get to us. I’ve seen hell, mate, I’ve already bin there. Ha! Sounds right out of Jaws.’ Frank noticed Bob’s hand was holding his beer bottle hard enough to make the tips of his fingers green. ‘Seriously. I wouldn’t move from here. It’s a special place, got enough violence in the dirt to strike a cow dead, but I like it here.’
The man looked exhausted suddenly in the dark.
Bob said, ‘There’s two hens, the first two Sal named, right after Emmy died. She calls them Mum and Dad.’ He rubbed at his eye so that it looked red. He sucked on a cigarette, keeping the smoke in his mouth, tasting it. ‘Vick’s got this thing about them — won’t let any of their eggs get eaten. All the ones that hatch out are left as layers. That winter she died, Dad must’ve laid ten eggs, and I came home and Vick was sat in front of a fire, her hair all wet, a towel round her middle and an egg under each armpit.’ He looked at Frank and Frank smiled. Bob had creases of laughter round his eyes, but he made no sound. ‘Said she was trying to hatch ’em out herself. First time we’d laughed in a while.’ He closed his eyes like he was feeling the sun on his face, but the sun was out of the sky. Frank shifted, picturing Vicky, the wet hair, the nut brown of her arms and the pale eggs.
‘I think that that was the sexiest moment of my whole life. The skin, the smoothness.’ Bob made a line in the air with his cigarette. ‘Everything. A woman and her eggs. Just seemed like the start of something else, like a sign that the whole lot of everything was going to be all right. All perfect. Like an egg.’ Bob looked at Frank and Frank smiled.
‘Did they hatch out?’
‘Nah. Turned out they were all unfertilised, that lot. Funny to care about eggs so much.’
‘There are worse things to worry about.’
‘That’s true. Was one of those moments you’re grateful to the place for putting up with you.’ On cue some bird made a sound like applause in the tops of the trees. ‘What about you?’
‘What about me, what?’
‘Your best woman.’
Frank smiled. ‘I dunno, Bob. Probably bit more obvious than eggs.’
The morning after they’d first made it into a bed together and he’d woken up with an aching hard-on, he watched the swell of her breath in her breasts, the tight skin round her ribs, the finger-point bruises there; the tips of her hair, cold on the inside of his wrist, the smell of whisky in the room, the toasty taste of their drunken sex the night before, the hope, big in his chest, that when she woke up they would do it again. Then she had rolled over on to her side and backed herself on to him, all apparently without waking, just doing it like it was the natural thing to do, like they’d been doing it for years, like it was the morning ritual. When she came she had stretched out against him, slow and quiet like a cat in the sun, and he’d come straight after, barely able to hold on. And they’d slept like that, face in her hair, eventually shrinking out of her, keeping the heat of her close to him.
Bob laughed. ‘Carn. You’ve loved a woman haven’t you?’
‘Yep.’
‘Well, you’re pretty quiet about it.’
Frank squinted at Bob. He looked fiercely earnest. ‘Well. Some things are better off that way.’
Bob looked down at his drink and back up at Frank. ‘I think you’re wrong there, mate.’
‘Oh?’
‘Things I’ve kept quiet about, things Vick’s kept quiet about.’ Bob shook his head. ‘Leads to people wandering around in the middle of the night. Leads to all sorts of things. I say the best thing for it is just to say it out loud.’ He paused, looking in the direction of his home, but there was only cane to see. ‘I only just decided that this minute, though. I might be wrong.’ He laughed, a tinkle, staring at the high wall of cane. From far away came an echo of a car horn. Frank’s stomach knotted and he felt a grip of loyalty for the bloke sitting next to him. When he spoke he didn’t listen to his own words, like it wasn’t himself who was speaking but some character in a film. ‘I loved a woman. Was terrible to her. Knocked her about a couple of times and then she left.’ Bob looked up, his expression flat. Frank wanted to say more, to fill the air with noise. But he let it hang there. Why not? He had done it. Let the silence weigh down the words.
When Bob spoke his voice was careful, measured. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I’ve never felt that. But I mean. You stopped, right? Hell, you just told me about it. You must feel bad.’
‘It was only a couple of times.’ Bile rose in his throat as he said it. ‘I don’t mean that as to lessen the significance of the thing.’ The thing. ‘She left me before it got worse.’
Bob nodded.
There was the noise of the Creeping Jesus again in the cane, quiet but humping along, stalking like a heavy cat. Bob cleared his throat. ‘What I said before. I wouldn’t want to make you feel like you had to talk about it. I mean. Look. I feel like I’ve tricked you into this.’
But Frank carried on, strange to say it aloud. Strange to feel his skin recoil at the thought of himself.
Jesus purred a low, sexy gargle like he was having his belly rubbed.