‘You don’t even know what you’ve done, do you?’ Frank had asked.
The tip of the cigarette had glowed weakly.
Frank drank and drank some more.
By the time the street lights came on outside the pub his legs were heavy with beer and the bar nuts did nothing to soak it up. He looked at the dirt under his nails and wanted to go home. Strange to call it home. A voice said movie-like in the gloom of the bar, ‘Thought I might find you here.’ It was June but without her exclamations.
‘June.’ He raised his glass, then looked away from her.
She smiled and he could hear it. ‘You going to buy me a drink, Collard? Thought maybe we could swap stories.’
He took a ten-dollar note from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Get yerself somethin.’ Crikey, he thought as she moved towards the bar. I’m buyin’ June Shannon a drink. Wonder if I’ll get the change. The thought tickled him and he was smiling when she got back with her own beer. She gave him the change. There was a silence while she got started on her drink and he wondered why she’d come.
‘So where’s… Jimmy?’
She drank past the halfway mark of her beer before she answered, ‘Top Pub.’
Another silence while he turned this over. ‘How come you’re not there?’
‘This is my local. Not Jimmy’s. Anyway — I thought you could do with a friendly ear.’ She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her own ear. Then she trailed a finger down her throat and rested it on her collarbone. He felt angry and looked away. She finished her beer, got up wordlessly and went to the bar again. When she came back she had a new one for him too.
‘Quick drinking.’
She shrugged. ‘Thirsty. So!’ The exclamation was back. ‘You’re living up north now then? What do you do there?’
‘I work on a boat. Occasionally.’
‘So, your woman left you?’ she said, not batting an eyelid.
He felt his ears move back on his head. Same old June. ‘My woman?’ He tried to make it sound insignificant, something to be snorted at, but he snorted too loudly and sounded angry. ‘What is it that you heard about my woman, June?’
She shrugged. ‘Lucy, wasn’t it?’
He pictured himself knocking out June’s front teeth. He drank the rest of his old drink instead, and put the new cold beer in its place. He drew his lips back over his teeth and looked up at her. ‘How did you know her name?’
‘You say it like she’s dead.’
‘How do you know she’s not?’
He’d meant to scare her but only scared himself.
‘She was here. Looking for you.’
He breathed out another snort. ‘She was not here,’ he said under his breath like she was a child telling tales. Lucy wouldn’t look for him here. She wouldn’t look for him. He felt sick. She said nothing. Someone turned off the old television and it made a snapping noise.
‘She left you?’
The beer burnt in his chest. ‘That’s nothing to talk about.’ He slapped his palm on the table, spilling the first centimetre of his drink. There was a long silence but June didn’t look uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure if he’d imagined the whole conversation, if he wasn’t just making this up in his head.
But she was still holding her shit shovel. ‘It must feel weird to come back home and your old man’s gone. I can’t believe he didn’t tell you! We paid fair price on that shop, Frank, I can tell you. I’d be on to him for a fix of it — you worked there for a time, after all.’
She glittered in the cigarette smoke. He was silent. He wanted to ask questions but then again, he did not. He didn’t want the answers and he especially didn’t want the answers she would give him.
‘I can tell you where he’s gone. I can tell you why. And I can tell you with who.’
He peeled a bar mat; drank his beer. There were pins and needles in his bum bones.
She took a swallow and ran her tongue over her teeth. ‘Do you know about that, Frank? Know about the woman he went with? An evangelist, Frank. Fucking true. She passed through here like honey on a stick and your old dad stuck to her.’
‘I’ve never heard such a troop of bollocks. He doesn’t believe in God.’
‘Maybe, Frank, but I was here. Where were you? You can ask the guy at the bar if you like — he near as well lost his best customer.’
He felt hot and sick. He couldn’t work out why he was having this conversation, why he didn’t leave, get in his car and drive back home, even as drunk as he was. How had she known her name? He tried to picture Lucy talking to June, but it didn’t fit. Lucy would have hated her.
‘Look, Frank, I’m telling you this because you have a right to know. I got the evangelist woman’s address in case they needed mail forwarded. And because, frankly’ — she let the joke hang in the air — ‘I was interested.’
She took a layer of his shredded bar mat and got the stub of a pencil out of her pocket. He recognised the pencil as one that had been kept tucked behind his father’s ear at the shop. Then he thought how ridiculous, how stupid — there must be thousands of millions of pencils the same as that one. Even so he had to fight an urge to collect it from June’s fingers and hold it gently in his palm. He must have drunk more than he realised. She wrote an address on the mat and drew a little box round it. Then she got up to go to the bar again.
‘You seem pretty familiar with where he lives,’ he said as she came back.
‘It’s an interesting place.’
‘Interesting?’
‘A real bunch of loonies. You’ve heard of Billy Graham? He founded it in the fifties. People there are either evangelist or they leave. Apart from that, the place’s got beef.’
He took the piece of paper and looked at it. He didn’t want to put it in his pocket in front of her. ‘You must be pretty bored down here, June.’
For the first time she flinched. ‘Well, fuck you then, Frank.’ She looked like she might leave, but settled back down. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’ She looked poisonous now in the smoke of the bar.
‘Beg pardon?’ he said, amused and letting her know it.
‘So you’ve got nothing, well boohoo, Frank — what about me? Huh? What about me, I’ve got everything now, haven’t I?’
He sat back a little on his stool, not sure where she was headed.
‘I got the shop, I got the family, I got the fucking lump of a useless husband.’ She held her fingers out towards Frank. ‘I married that loser — can you reckon that?’
‘June…’
‘And on top of that I’ve got kids. Three. An’ one on the way.’
‘You’re pregnant? Don’t you think…’
She held up a hand. ‘Don’t you fucking say it, Frank.’
She drank, her eyes one long rectangle of dark. She put the glass down gently like it was precious. ‘You have no idea… just. You can do what you like. There’s no one. There’s no one to think about. You work on a boat… occasionally? You’re able to just leave the shop, your old man, Parramatta, fucking Sydney?’
‘It’s not about freedom, June—’
‘Yes it fucking is.’
She stood up. To Frank she swayed, but he wasn’t sure if she really did. ‘You should know,’ she said. ‘She’s pregnant too.’