After fifteen minutes of broken conversation June sighed and took his hand, leading him out of the pub, away from his drinks. He wondered if maybe the reason he had turned up to see her was that he didn’t dislike her so much after all. They found a children’s playground secluded from the road by mertyl bushes and didn’t kiss, but he smelt the overripe-melon odour of her, smelt her neck and made her laugh with his sniffing.
But when she bucked against him it was like a competition to see who could fuck the hardest, and he thought that maybe he did hate her and she hated him, and he put his palm flat in the sand by her head so that it caught some of her hair. Her teeth made blood in his mouth and he could feel his chin doing damage to her cheek.
Explain that to Jimmy, he thought, but she rasped her face harder against his, like she wanted to shed her skin over him, and he was surprised to have the weaker stomach for what she wanted.
He made no sound coming and did not pull out. She made no comment, but in the first ten heartbeats afterwards he thought he might cry for her baby and he said ‘Sorry’, but not so that she could hear. Sand weevils moved beneath them, and mosquitoes started to bite at their ankles and move the air by their faces, but for a few more moments they clung together with claws and June said quietly, ‘I did see her. But she wasn’t pregnant. Not as far as I could tell.’
When the moment was up, she rolled over and wiped off her thighs with her balled-up knickers.
Tired and sick and full of driving, Frank stopped at an empty beach by the highway as the night paled. He took off his clothes and washed shallowly, squatting and rinsing off June and sand, cooling the mosquito bites on his legs. He wondered if Lucy would ever find out. He held his penis in the palm of his hand, tired and soft, looked at it, then out to sea again. What a bloody achievement. Plovers bolted at him from the shoreline. A flock of seagulls dive-bombed a hairy-looking patch of water and he imagined the feeding frenzy going on underneath. If he floated out on the marble-grey water now, something would tear him to shreds.
He watched the swell and thought that somewhere, hundreds of kilometres away, this water touched his own land. He felt the sand underneath the balls of his feet gently spilling away. He felt everything that was not him moving and when a truck drove past, giving him a blast of its horn, he put his clothes back on and drove home.
24
With mosquito bites still lumping his arms, Leon got stuck in wrist-deep to kneading dough. It was like he’d never left; people came and bought hot-cross buns and strawberry cream cakes. He waved at Mrs Shannon, who now walked with a permanent hobble, but with the freedom of a woman whose husband had left. Sometimes in the middle of it, though, he would see the long tube of ash from a burnt-out cigarette; Rod with his hand over his eyes; that matt black road. They were like dirty pictures and he needed to choose his time to look at them properly. At night he would sit on the side of his bed with a beer and just look at the pictures in his head, make it so that he understood every curve of Rod’s hand, so that he could smell the ash, so that he felt an ache at the back of his eyeballs, the ache of trying to see distance in the black. He knew he ought to write another letter to his parents, let them know he was back, but for now, just for now, he told himself, he wanted to be left alone.
The album he bought was bound in orange felt. It had a pattern of large yellow flowers sewn on the front. ‘Quite the thing, don’t you know,’ he said out loud as he set it on the table next to the photographs and glue. He didn’t suppose he knew what the appropriate design might be — a black leather number perhaps, something more like death than a child’s pencil case, but the orange felt had stood out to him. It was disposable, silly. No one would guess the contents from the jacket.
He glued the corners of the first photograph in the pile. He hadn’t looked through them, and there wasn’t any point in sifting through them and picking out the good ones, throwing out the blurs. They were all the same thing. He stuck them neatly down with a press of his fist. He saw green, fat leaves and strange flowers; an enormous spider with colours that had been bright, but in the photograph looked dull and no bigger than the huntsmen that lived in the larder. A group photograph that someone else had taken: he saw his own face smiling out from a crowd, down on one knee, his rifle at his side. There were thumbs up to the camera. He couldn’t remember what they had been smiling at. One man — was it Flood? — held something that could have been a small bone to his face, imitating a moustache. Cray’s face, closed and quiet — he had laughed after the picture was taken, but not during. Somebody swore, someone else pulled down their pants, showed a white arse, whipped by shrapnel. His own face freshly shaved in a toilet mirror, sweaty. Cray on his own, smoking a cigarette, shortly before he turned to Leon and asked something like ‘You a gay boy or something?’ Cray in a Hawaiian shirt, pouting for the camera, caressing imaginary breasts, the next, his tongue strained towards his imaginary nipple. More green. A blackened patch of grass. Red smoke. More green. A lemon-coloured snake. A dead guy. A dead guy with Leon standing over him, grinning like he’d bagged a prize antelope. A perfectly black square of night. More green. He carried on sticking and pressing, a small sweat pushing at his top lip.
There were thirty photographs, some overexposed, just dark-brown rectangles, and they all went in, then two that were not his own. The photograph, torn at the top, of the dead Cong’s wife and child. Yellow and black and grey, it smelt like repellant and old books. The girl was shoeless, but the mother wore small black plimsoles that cut just below her ankle bones. Her feet were placed in a sort of ballet style, neat and balanced, heels together toes apart. The child’s toes spread on the ground. Her hands were clenched at her sides. Then, Lena Cray with the baby inside her. A smooth, colour photograph, rounded edges that had turned white with dog-earing. The waratah dress, the small white points of her teeth. Sometimes — a trick of the pattern of her dress — you seemed to be able to see the baby moving. The sugar doll he made wore a waratah in her hair. He’d had to guess the silhouette of her bump, shaped it low on her belly like ripe fruit hanging. Her small hands supported her back, her toes turned inwards as if the balls of her feet were aching and hot. Her mouth was wide and open in a laugh. Of course, the baby was out of her now, but whenever he thought of Lena Cray it was with that bump that must have been warm and dense, that must’ve knocked the breath out of her husband when he leant to kiss her. On the dresser in the back room was Cray’s machete, its wooden birds dark with lemon oil.
He closed the orange felt album, took it to the bookshelf and slid it in. Then he drank a large glass of water and it came back up, just as clean as it went down.
He didn’t know if it was at all appropriate, but he thought of the kid and boxed two small passion-fruit tarts. Then he unboxed them, thinking that having two small portions might highlight the fact that there were two tarts and not three, that someone was missing and so was his pudding. He put in a full-sized treacle tart, took it out — treacle was over-friendly. He settled at last on a strawberry cheesecake, which was special enough to be a gift and strawberry seemed like a fruit that would be universally appreciated, a fruit that no one could accuse him of being over-personal with. He laid slices of strawberry round the edges, was careful not to make too much of the centre of the tart, so that it didn’t seem like a celebratory cake but rather one that was meant for eating. He tied the box with a red ribbon, then cut it off and found a yellow one. The machete he wrapped in a pillowcase, then in brown paper. He put no ribbon on it — it wasn’t his gift to give.