His father put down his knife and his fork. From somewhere, a place Leon had never known to exist in his father, a deep rumbling: ‘Be quiet, woman.’
Hot potato stuffed up the back of Leon’s throat and his feel for his food changed, like it had been turned to bin scrapings.
‘I expect support from my wife, Maureen.’ After a moment’s thought he said, ‘These are not Germans.’
His mother flushed pink and stood up, collecting the plates, still full of steaming food. She said, ‘And what happens when you get killed?’
Leon went upstairs when they began raising their voices and their movements made the glasses in the cabinet clink, and immediately regretted it — he should have gone out of the back door, but now he was trapped. His heart beat a new beat. They both seemed to think the other one was stupid and selfish and awful. There was a shout, a slap, a loud one and then another, and they echoed through the house. He lay on his bed, thinking about who had got hit and who had done the hitting. He wondered if he should get up, say something, but he didn’t know what. He decided it was none of his business. After the slaps the house was quiet and he thought about sneaking out, but he felt drained and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes to try to get them to close. He woke itchy, still wearing his clothes, just as a breath of light was coming into the sky. There was a noise like a dog snuffling in the street and he looked out of his window, but there was nothing to see. When he lay back down there was a whine, a scritch-scratch at the front door and something about it made him climb under his sheets and pull them up to his nose. The noise carried on until he heard someone downstairs open the front door. His father must have slept on the sofa. After the door had opened and closed there was just silence, and Leon slept.
In the morning, things were soft. His mother’s eyes were swollen and there was a red mark on the side of her face. She smiled at Leon and her top lip was puffy. He thought he might be sick. ‘It’s okay, chicken. We were angry. I hit him right back.’
And when his father came down there was a mark on his face too, but he put an arm round her waist, and smelt her hair and kissed her neck. Leon went to school, a feeling in his guts that something had changed in the night.
The day Leon’s father left, his army greens taut over his chest and his hat folded on one side like a listening ear, his mother became stiff. There was something wooden in the way she moved, her hair was coiled in a tight bun.
Tea was still at six, and there was still meat and there were still pressure-cooked potatoes. The same dances carried on through from the shop to the house, recipes were still performed to the letter. The same questions were asked of school, of homework, but they were shrunken, boiled down to the bare bones. He could see the oddness of that empty chair, like a ghost at the head of the table. In the kitchen the smell of burnt sugar was paler, like the way his mother burnt sugar was a less rich version. The angel-hair crowns she made sat gummily on top of tarts and he watched her frown, shaking her head and picking the mess off and dropping it in the bin. A missing ingredient. When his father telephoned Leon tried not to listen to the taut noises she made. She called for him to come and talk but he pretended not to be in and slipped out the back. When the first letter arrived, his mother read it aloud with her hand over her mouth like something might try to jump out of there.
Darlings,
There are exciting things that I would like to tell you, but I will keep it quick, as I want to be sure this reaches you in the next post. Training has been hard but I am confident that we will flatten these buggers just as soon as we get to them. I am well, I have some new friends, a man, North, and a younger boy called Mayhew. He is a keen lad, reminds me of you, son. I tell them all about you, Mayhew is too young to have a family yet, but North is missing his misses too. He has a baby girl, and it makes me happy and proud that I have you at home to look after your mother.
Shortly we will be going into the jungle, but we expect it will be a pretty easy ride. Exciting to be entering a new terrain.
I miss three things — the both of you, and caramel sauce on ice cream. Be sure to have it waiting for my return.
Son, kiss your mother for me, because I cannot for now.
Love to you both
When his mother took her hand away she was smiling toothily. She breathed in and out like she’d been holding it and her eyes were glassy. She kissed Leon on the head and he felt her face wet in his hair. The letters arrived, two a month, cheery, upbeat, full of longing for treacle tart or sugar banana flummery. Complaining about the tapioca they were given, the leeches, the mosquitoes. Leon’s mother took long hot baths that steamed up the whole of the top floor.
At school the teacher said, ‘Hold up your hand whoever’s dad is out in Korea now.’
Leon felt sorry for the kids who looked quietly at their desks, as if they were thinking about something else and didn’t care anyway. He held up his hand so high his shoulder clicked. The teacher showed them a book with photographs of the kind of things you got in Korea. You got muskrats and brown bears and tigers. His dad liked animals, he’d be excited to see a tiger. Leon imagined him lying on his front very still among the ferns and watching a tiger roll with its babies in the long grasses.
At home, he practised sugar dolls. At first they had a look of his mother about them, some long-suffering frown in the eyebrows. Sometimes they had their eyes cast up, their cheeks pale pink and their hair neat to their shoulders. Then he did Amy Blackwell, her weight resting on one hip. You could tell that underneath that dress there was a sock, puddled round her ankle, showing a scratched brown calf. Mrs Kanan from the flat above the butcher’s had wide arms, but as a bride she was lovely, with a half-smile. He found a piece of wood to use as an armrest so that his hand was steady as he went when he painted them.
Christmas snuck up like it’d been watching from the bushes. They put together a window display, strings of wine gums so that when the sun shone through the window in the morning they lit up like fairy lights. There was the set of Banksia men, each one painted to be a different member of the nativity. Father Christmas next to the baby Jesus with his many mouths and eyes, and his hairy sack of toys. Outside it was too hot to be in the city and people sat in their yards with as much of themselves in water as possible. Sometimes just their feet in a bucket, but he had seen a few backyards with swimming pools and the wet noises coming from them spread a breeze over your face.
His mother whisked egg whites so that the muscle on her right arm stood out like a stick of butter. He piped snow icing round the edge of angel cakes and the light tick-tick-tick of her whisk was the only noise in the shop. She slammed down the bowl with a shout and slapped the table with the flat of her palm, then left the kitchen. A bead of sweat tickled the inside of his nose. He picked up the whisk and got the whites close to peaking before she came back in and waved him away like he was meddling in something that didn’t concern him. He made treacle toffee, which he wrapped in the purple cellophane that squeaked like a mouse at every twist.
After his mother had made the pavlova and gone for one of her long baths, Leon moved the wireless into the kitchen and chased carols around the stations. Eartha Kitt sang ‘Santa Baby’ and it made his hands still to hear her. He tried to make a Mrs Christmas Eartha Kitt, but the head was too big and it tended to topple over. At any rate his mother’s response when she came down, her hair wet and heaped on her head, was not enthusiastic either. ‘Mrs Santa Claus is a white lady. A big fat white lady.’
So instead he made a turtle dove to hang above the six-tiered pavlova, so that it seemed to be swooping in to pinch the kiwi fruit from the top. It looked okay, swinging there on its fishing line, but it was no Eartha.