A car backfired in the main street and he looked up. Over the road, a girl was framed in the doorway of the butcher’s. She was overdressed and there was a feeling that at any minute a wind might lift up her dress and show the butcher her knickers. She wore white wrist gloves like a virgin from the fifties. Her high heels and her broad-brimmed hat in particular looked ready to turn against her, the one to twist her ankle and make her fall, the other to fly away — she held it firm between two fingers. Leon placed a cherry in the centre of a jam tart just as the bell on the door sounded and she pushed her way in. Her dress had a pattern of oranges and ivy, and her lipstick was fresh on and thicker than it ought to have been. He wanted to hold the back of her hair gently and blot her lips with a napkin; to trace the edges of her mouth with his index finger and neaten her up.
He looked at a lemon meringue pie and then, suddenly embarrassed, pushed it to one side. ‘G’day,’ he said.
‘Good morning,’ said the girl.
A small smile. His ears popped — he hadn’t realised they were stuffed — his whole head worked better than it had before.
The girl struggled to take off one of her gloves. She gave away the heat of them by wiping the palms of her hands on her dress. She stood, leaning on one hip, and he saw that she had a ladder in her stocking. ‘I was after a treacle tart.’ And when she spoke he saw that she was Amy Blackwell, and he understood why the air in the place had changed.
31
‘What are you supposed to do?’ Frank asked the spider as it twitched like a sea anemone, its remaining legs relaxing and stiffening and finally folding in on themselves. He had woken to a cold day and before going outside had riffled through a box to find a jumper. The one he found was woollen and grey, and a bit too small. He’d rolled it on, popping his head through the top, the skin on his face scoured by the wool. As he pulled it over his midriff he felt a wriggle against his side, something a little bit frantic was happening. On inspection, he found three hairy-looking legs pasted to his ribs with a bit of sticky in between. They were big enough to make him yank off the jumper roughly, and catch his nose and make it bleed a little. He threw the woolly on the floor and checked in his shorts with horror.
But he found the spider lying quietly on the floor in its death throes, twitching softly with the rest of its legs. The thing was about the length of a thumb, just a huntsman, nothing poisonous. It still had big fangs though, he noted, impressed, and wondered why it hadn’t bitten him. Perhaps he’d rolled it against himself too roughly for it to have had a chance, or maybe it had known that he hadn’t meant it.
He picked the thing up with a newspaper and flung it hard outside. It travelled only a short distance, but either way was gobbled up by Kirk the moment it touched the ground. He watched the chicken, a leg still hanging out of its beak, Mary pecking at his face to try to get it.
‘Great white fuckin’ death,’ he said as Kirk eyeballed him, wondering if there was more where that had come from.
He turned back inside to try to get a tidy-up done. Perhaps then he’d go for a swim, maybe take the prawn net down. Fill up his time usefully. He’d been bent over the sink for forty seconds when he heard the sound of a truck coming his way. That was what he needed, he decided with a smile. He went to the ice box and worried the beer to get to the coldest at the back. He broke off two lids, and the person outside stopped the vehicle and climbed the steps of the veranda with heavy boots. He turned to the open door, a beer in each hand.
Lucy’s lips were pale and dry, and she’d let her hair grow long and yellow. The bridge of her nose and the tops of her cheeks showed an arc of sunburn, like a shadow cast from a hat. She was heavier than when he had last seen her, her arms were rounded and brown, and there was room in her face for dimples. Her belly lightly touched the front of her dress.
He did not blink and neither did she. He felt the heaviness of the beer bottles at the end of his arms. There must be something to say, hello at least, but when he opened his mouth with no clue as to what words might happen, a white cockatoo flew low past the house and shrieked his voice away.
‘Frank,’ she said and he felt ashamed that he had left the silence to be undone by her on her own. He nodded, gestured towards the chairs on the veranda, still gape-mouthed, still holding the two cold beers, but she stayed standing where she was in the doorway. His heart, his blood and every liquid part set up against him so that he couldn’t speak. He was tired, suddenly, and he could just send her away and lie where he stood, feet out of the door, head propping the fly screen open.
‘So this is where you’ve been.’ She held her palms up to the sky.
‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’ His first words fell to splinters in the open air. His knees felt hot.
‘You just left,’ she said. A strand of hair caught in the corner of her mouth and how appalling it was that he would not be the one who was allowed to free it.
Red prickled round her eyes and nose, and her voice was a mixture of loud and quiet. ‘I thought you would hunt me down.’
‘I didn’t want to hunt you. I’m sorry. I was awful.’
She put a hand to her forehead and hid her face. She opened her mouth and closed it again with a terrible silent cry. He opened his mouth to speak, but she waved a hand at him and he closed it. She put her hand over her mouth and looked at him. She shook her head and waved him away again as if he had come towards her. ‘You don’t even know what you’ve done to me, do you?’
Yes I do, he thought. I do know, I do.
Then she turned round slowly and walked down the steps.
You are watching her leave, he told himself. You’re watching her leave and if you ran down after her things might be different. But she opened the door of her car and, without looking back, slid in and slammed it behind her. As the car pulled away he said under his breath, ‘Go, go, go,’ but he didn’t know if the instruction was to Lucy or himself, so he stayed put as if she’d never been there, the only difference was that one of the cold beers had slipped from his grasp without him noticing. White froth collected round his toes.
32
On a Monday morning a man arrived wearing a grey suit and carrying a briefcase. Leon looked at him and saw that he hadn’t come to buy scones.
‘Mr Collard?’
He met his eyes for a second, hoped to see something a bit light in his bearing. There was nothing. ‘That’s me. What can I get you?’
‘Are you the only son of Roman and Maureen Collard?’
‘I am.’
‘Mr Collard, my name is Gregory Thorpe, I was your parents’ solicitor. I’m afraid, Mr Collard, it is my sad duty to inform you that your parents are now deceased. I’m so very sorry.’
Leon leant on the counter. A woman came in and asked for a plum tart, which he boxed and bagged, counting out the correct change, doing everything exactly as he would have done before.
The man in the suit stood by politely. When the woman had gone he said, ‘Excuse my presumptuousness, Mr Collard, but perhaps you’d like to close the shop for the next half-hour while we talk? Give yourself some breathing space?’
He heard Amy moving around in the bathroom upstairs. ‘No. It’s fine. How did it happen?’
‘I’m afraid, Mr Collard, I don’t have that information. You’d need to talk to the head of police in Mulaburry for that kind of information.’ There was a look about him, a quick smile and a shrug that said he did know, he just was not going to tell.