The air in the shack smelt. Or maybe he smelt, you couldn’t know these things for sure. It was the smell of lots of people pressed in all together, sweating up against each other, breathing their bad breath. Frank took a wander outside; the chickens were nowhere in sight. He couldn’t hear the birds in the trees but he knew they were there, saw the leaves of the blue gums shifting around. He ploughed through the cane, made for the cover of the trees, where maybe the air was thinner, where maybe he wouldn’t notice the silence so goddam much. He’d have to stock up on drink but he was too spliced to drive, even he knew that. With a rambling forward motion he was able to lurch into the coolness of the trees and there was the smell of eucalypt, strong and heavy but medicinal, like it cleaned up his throbbing hand, soothed his eyes.
He contemplated lying down by the creek and passing the rest of the day there, but the creek was low and there were green ants. Besides, he’d need more drink if he was going to avoid the hangover. Maybe he was sick, he thought, as he ambled on, untangling himself from a vine of stay-a-while and feeling genuine surprise at the rash of blood pricks it left round his ankle. An hour or maybe two or maybe ten minutes later, he came to the cane of the Haydons’ boundary. The cane was thin and low, and it was more of a wade than a swim through it to their farm. Bob’s car wasn’t around and it occurred to Frank that maybe it was Vicky he wanted to see anyway. It was hot as buggery, the air was low and wet, and he was still deaf. He could feel sweat creeping down the skin underneath his beard. He scratched at his throat and felt the lumps there — hives, maybe, or boils, something growing under his skin, hatching out.
He stood outside the house and looked at the place. The big veranda all around hung with seashell wind chimes and pot plants that wrapped themselves round the corner posts. A small wind moved his hair, cooled the burn of his beard. Vicky appeared at the door in a loose white shirt, her bare legs flowing out of it, her chafed ankles and scarred brown knees.
She mumbled something that Frank couldn’t understand. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Can’t hear you. Damn water in me ears.’
‘I said,’ she shouted, ‘Jesus, Frank, you look like a fuckin’ monster!’ She jerked her head towards the indoors. ‘Come in and have a sit in front of the air-con!’
She sat him by a machine that he could feel vibrating through his feet, it sounded like a tractor even through the buggered drums of his ears, and she went from the room. The air that came out of it was antiseptic, cold enough to give him an instant headache and burn the tunnels of his nose. It was a beautiful thing. When she came back, she was wearing a pair of worn men’s shorts and holding a jug of water with ice and a glass.
‘You look like you’ve done a pretty good job at dehydrating yourself!’ she called at him from in front of his face. He took the water she poured for him and felt it go sharp down his neck. It was as though there was a spine in his throat, a stuck dry fishbone that he couldn’t get wet. Vicky mumbled something and Frank shook his head at her, closed his eyes to feel the blast of cold on his eyelids. He felt hands on his face and opened his eyes to see she’d brought a basin of soapy water and some scissors. He blinked as she cut away at the tufts of hair round his face, twirling them loose round her fingers. He felt the disgust of himself and it made him angry that she was there to see it, but he couldn’t stop her. He watched her watching where she cut, her tongue pink between her lips, her eyebrows drawn together. When she produced a razor and began to massage warm water into his beard he felt the dirt coming free, watched in amazement as she smiled and the lather grew up round his face. He heard the scraping from inside his body, felt the overpowering itches being scratched. The water in the basin was dark grey with hair and dirt and blood before she switched to a new razor.
She was talking now, softly to herself perhaps, and he could hear a mumble, but not the words. Her frown deepened as she shaved under his chin and he saw her wince at something there. She got up and went to the kitchen and when she came back she had a box of matches, tweezers, and a pin stuck on the end of a cork. Outside there was a roll of thunder and, as it passed over, Frank’s ears cleared and hot seawater ran down his neck. There was a whine from his tear ducts. ‘I can hear,’ he said.
‘It speaks,’ said Vicky.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Ticks. You’re buggered with them.’ She tilted back his head and heated the pin in the flame of a match until it was black, then approached his throat with it. He felt a small warmth, a pressure and Vicky went in with the tweezers, her eyes squinting. Frank held his breath and she moved back. ‘Got ’im,’ she said under her breath and dropped the bud-looking bastard into the water. She heated the pin again and went back to it. With the pin to his throat she said, ‘Bob told me what happened back in Canberra, you know.’ Frank didn’t reply. His face was hot. ‘Reckon you might be making yourself a little bit crazy out there all alone?’
‘What about you?’ He felt angry suddenly, dangerous, the urge to grab her wrist and look her in the eye. But he didn’t.
‘What about me, what?’
‘Bob catches it a bit off you sometimes. Can’t tell me you’re not driving yourself a little bit nuts.’ There was a small sharp pain in his neck and he couldn’t tell if she’d pricked him on purpose.
She smiled softly and there was a silence, an intake of breath. She sat back on her stool, another tick held tight between the jaws of the tweezers. ‘It’s not me that does that to Bob.’
‘You mean it’s not the real you?’
She smiled tightly. ‘No. I mean he does it himself. I’ve had to pull the lock off the bathroom door. He goes in there and hits his face against the sink.’
Frank was silent and Vicky continued removing the ticks. He felt his mouth fill up with spit, swallowed it down.
‘I imagine he told you it was me doing it? Being an hysterical woman all over the place? He sleeps so deeply it doesn’t wake him up when he cries out at night. These real sobs like a kid.’
Another tick out, a plip in the dirty water.
‘I can’t lie there listening to it. When Emmy died there was none of that. We didn’t cry, we just watched and that was all there was.’ The room lit up with lightning and outside the storm started with the sky falling like sand on the roof.
Frank sat in the doorway of his shack, clean-shaven, and drank instant coffee, watching the rain pouring off the corrugated roof in needle stripes of white and feeling the spray of rain on his face as it bounced off the veranda.
In the afternoon, lightning struck a field far off to the north and he heard, above the roar, the sound of trucks speeding towards it, smoke a spear on the horizon.
One storm passed with another right behind and in between the sun shone more furiously than before, trying to clean up the mess, suck up all the extra water before the next one arrived. Mist rose on the top green leaves of the sugar cane. The chickens, fluffed and offended by the storm, ventured out to pull up fat earthworms from the battered soil.
The thunder that night had Frank, Kirk and Mary awake, wide-eyed and indoors: the sound overhead of great concrete wheels rumbling and warping over the shack; the blackness between the lightning, and the flat colour when the lightning stuck; the orange bucket by the blue Ute; the green green green of the cane and the white sky; the frozen water coming down, pale and thick. He imagined at each strike a figure before the darkness and wished there were someone he could crawl into bed with. Someone who would see the rain falling like razor blades and breathe their own breath into the shack so that the window would steam up. He held a candle by the mirror and looked at the marks the ticks had left under his chin. Nine little puncture marks. He wanted to show Lucy. She’d be fascinated. She’d touch them with her cold fingers. He looked at his face and wondered what he’d have to do.