June walked out of the bar.
He slept sitting up in the passenger seat of his truck. His mouth kept falling open and waking him, and when the sun came up he felt the floating heat of his hangover push against his chest. The night echoed grimly and he drove out of Sydney feeling the day cook him. He would have welcomed another storm, something to wash away the baked-bread smell of the inside of the Ute.
The way Frank remembered it, he’d come straight from school, where things had started to even out. Bo hadn’t been there when he went back and Eliza looked away from him if he saw her on the street. The thought of glue or gasoline or even mull made his chest tight under his shirt. The shop door was unlocked, but the sign read ‘Closed’ and no lights were on. The only stock out were the four trays of scones he’d made before the sun was even up. That morning he had got the idea that things could be done, things could fix up. The past month or so, his dad had even got into a cobbled-together routine of laying out the food — shop-bought cakes, mainly, but still — and they’d talked the week he’d got out of hospital about how the shop used to be, about how good it could be made.
And so, when he found the woman in the kitchen wearing the dress with the oranges on it, something hot and sticky had risen at the back of his throat. The dress was not on his mother, so it bagged round the waist and the woman inside it had flesh at the edge of her armpits that sagged over the top. She was making eggs in a pan, which were burning, while she was smoking and looking through the cupboards, bare feet, hair the colour of wet lint.
‘Who are you?’ he’d asked, although there wasn’t an answer she could give that might make the whole thing okay.
She turned to face him with a big smile that showed her teeth were cheesy. ‘Whose yerself?’ she asked, appraising him with one arm crossed at her waist, the other falling free at her side, wrist up holding the cigarette. There was a sort of rash or a pink burn along her forearms, some sort of dry-skin problem that went all the way up to the inside of her elbow. She pointed her fag hand at him like she’d just solved a puzzle. ‘Oh,’ she said, her voice a mix of husk and moisture, ‘you’re the son.’
After a few hours of driving Frank had to stop at a service station and he bent over the toilet, heaving, until nothing more would come out. His eyes streamed. The tick bites itched. He bought a litre of Coke and drank it in the Ute.
Roedale was a mixed bag of dust and meat. Grey weary-skinned cows stood in grass that had turned brown and curled in the sun, while eddies of dust flew up round their worn ankles. Two large palm trees marked the entrance to the town, their heads strange and dark against the sky. You could drive from one end of town to the other in less than a minute and there were roundabouts at each end, so that you could boomerang back in if you were thinking of leaving, or take second thoughts if you were thinking of coming. He didn’t falter, not one bit, he held the address hard between his thumb and index finger, and kept his eyes ahead on the empty road. He stopped at a sandwich bar, the God Bless Café, to ask directions.
The lady behind the counter had glasses that took up three-quarters of her face and below them she had very little chin. ‘How doin’, mate?’ she asked.
‘Good. Thanks,’ he said, pretending to survey the dry sliced meats on display, nodding. He looked at his piece of beer mat. ‘Was wondering if you could tell me where to find Fantail Rise?’
She looked at him, bug-eyed through the thick lenses. ‘End a town; turn left, mate.’
She spoke loudly with long pauses between words, like she’d learnt to speak through a spelling computer. A screw loose or local colour, he wasn’t sure. Too much meat at a young age.
‘Thanks, mate,’ he said, turning to leave.
‘No warries, mate,’ said his friend. ‘God blesses you, mate!’ she called as he stepped back into the sun.
He walked the main street. God’s Own Greens sold fruit and vegetables, and advertised choko like it was a cure for cancer. The butcher’s was called David and Goliath’s, an op shop, I Work for Jesus!
There was no pub and he wondered how that went with his old man. A bottle shop would have been good, just to take the edge off the hangover, but nowhere looked hopeful.
CHRIST ROSE FROM THE DEAD AND IS COMING SOON!! in big fat letters as the town banner. A sign in the window of Saint Shortie’s Snack Bar: ALL MEN EVERYWHERE ARE LOST AND FACE THE JUDGEMENT OF GOD!! Everything seemed to want a couple of exclamation marks after it; all signs were neon.
It didn’t seem possible that a man like his father could live here. The last time Frank had seen him he’d been grey and silent in a doorway with nothing in his face to show there was any kind of thought going on inside. The colour he had been it was hard to imagine there was even blood in there.
Fantail Rise had no rise in it. The road was long and straight and flat, and the houses were sparse, with large front yards bristling with razor grass. He found the house and stood outside while a hot sweat got him. It was white weatherboard, with a porch — not a veranda, somehow. The curtains were bright and lace. It had been a bad idea to walk, it was just past midday and his face burnt; there were dark patches under his arms and on his chest. His feet twitched saltily in their boots.
As he stood in the drive, an orange Holden pulled up behind him and he was trapped. The woman who got out wore a broad smile of old-fashioned red. She was younger than his father, or perhaps she worked very hard to look younger. He wondered suddenly if she’d been shown photographs of him. Closer up the woman’s eyes were blue.
‘Hello, darl, can I help you?’ she said in a voice laced with Perth and Texas. There was a silence. The woman put her hands on her neat hips, glanced behind him at the house.
‘Does Leon Collard live here?’
‘Leo?’ The woman’s smile wilted a little. She moved to the back of the car, opened the boot and started to take out shopping bags. ‘What d’you want with Leo?’ she asked turning round, laden.
‘I’m a friend.’
The woman looked at him and smiled again. She shut her mouth and tilted her head to one side. ‘You’re awfully young to be his friend.’ Her eyes were bright.
‘Well, he was a friend of my father’s.’
‘Well, how about that, darl?’ she asked him softly. He wondered if he should help her with her shopping, but then it might seem as if he wanted to get inside her house. They stood quietly, the shopping bags making a noise against the woman’s leg.
‘So… is he in?’
‘No — but you’d better come in — help me with these, won’t you?’
He took the bags from her, sweatily, and let himself be ushered inside her house, which was unlocked. She stood in the doorway behind him and checked up and down the street before closing the door. He stood, ballasted by the shopping.
The woman smiled large again. ‘Straight through to the kitchen,’ she said, dropping her car keys in a bowl and wiping her eyebrow with one finger. ‘It certainly is a hot one today — did you come far? I’m Merle, by the way. Leo’s wife.’
His face felt sugar-coated, stiffened. ‘Frank,’ he said, still holding the shopping, forgetting he was incognito.
Merle took the bags from him and smiled, her eyebrows raised in perfect ns. She placed the bags on the counter. ‘Now,’ she said, turning her full attention to him. ‘What kind of cordial would you like?’
He sat on the edge of an over-soft sofa that threatened to fold him in two if he sank too deeply and sipped a bright-green drink in a thick glass. Merle was putting away her frozens and he waited, feeling like a grubby child. A black and white portrait of a young man hung over an electric fireplace, the man’s expression seemed to say, infallibly and sternly, yes. Yes to what he wasn’t sure, but definitely yes to something. The picture was backlit so that the man seemed to be coming from the light, looming out in the dark. WILLIAM FRANKLIN GRAHAM, AUGUST 1956 it read on a small gold-leaf plaque in a neat black hand beneath him.