Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Evie Wyld
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgements
Copyright
After the Fire, A Still Small Voice
Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep – every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.
It could be anything. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is Jake’s unknown past, perhaps breaking into the present, a story hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, in a landscape of different colour and sound, a story held in the scars that stripe her back.
Evie Wyld is the author of one previous novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, which was shortlisted for the Impac Prize, the Orange Award for New Writers and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2011, she was named by the BBC as one of the twelve best new British novelists and in 2013 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.
for Roz, Roy and Gus
Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding. Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring out their wings, singing, if you could call it that. I shoved my boot in Dog’s face to stop him from taking a string of her away with him as a souvenir, and he kept close by my side as I wheeled the carcass out of the field and down into the woolshed.
I’d been up that morning, before the light came through, out there, talking to myself, telling the dog about the things that needed doing as the blackbirds in the hawthorn started up. Like a mad woman, listening to her own voice, the wind shoving it back down my throat and hooting over my open mouth like it had done every morning since I moved to the island. With the trees rattling in the copse and the sheep blaring out behind me, the same trees, the same wind and sheep.
That made two deaths in a month. The rain started to come down, and a sudden gust of wind flung sheep shit at the back of my neck so it stung. I pulled up my collar and shielded my eyes with my hand.
Cree-cra, cold, cree-cra, cold.
‘What are you laughing at?’ I shouted at the crows and lobbed a stone at them. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and breathed in and out heavily to get rid of the blood smell. The crows were silent. When I turned to look, five of them sat in a row on the same branch, eyeing me but not speaking. The wind blew my hair in my eyes.
The farm shop at Marling had a warped and faded sign at the foot of its gate that read FREE BABY GUINEA PIGS. There was never any trace of the free guinea pigs and I had passed the point of being able to ask. The pale daughter of the owner was there, doing a crossword. She looked up at me, then looked back down like she was embarrassed.
‘Hi,’ I said.
She blushed but gave me the smallest of acknowledgements. She wore a thick green tracksuit and her hair was in a ponytail. Around her eyes was the faint redness that came after a night of crying or drinking.
Normally the potatoes from that place were good, but they all gave a little bit when I picked them up. I put them back down and moved over to tomatoes, but they weren’t any good either. I looked up out the window to where the farm’s greenhouse stood and saw the glass was all broken.
‘Hey,’ I said to the girl, who when I turned around was already looking at me, sucking the end of her pencil. ‘What happened to your greenhouse?’
‘The wind,’ she said, taking her pencil to the side of her mouth just for a moment. ‘Dad said to say the wind blew it in.’
I could see the glass scattered outside where normally they kept pots of ugly pink cyclamen with a sign that said, THE JEWEL FOR YOUR WINTER GARDEN. Just black earth and glass now.
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘Things always get mad on New Year’s Eve,’ said the girl in an older voice that surprised both of us. She blushed deeper and turned her eyes back to her crossword. In the greenhouse, the man who normally ran the shop sat with his head in his hands.
I took some oranges and leeks and lemons to the counter. I didn’t need anything, the trip was more about the drive than the supplies. The girl dropped her pencil out of her mouth and started to count oranges, but wasn’t sure of herself and started again a few times over. There was a smell of alcohol about her, masked by too much perfume. A hangover then. I imagined an argument with her father. I looked up at the greenhouse again, the man in it still with his head in his hands, the wind blowing through.
‘Are there nine there?’ she asked, and even though I hadn’t counted as I put them in the basket I said yes. She tapped things into the till.
‘Must be hard to lose the greenhouse,’ I said, noticing a small blue bruise at the girl’s temple. She didn’t look up.
‘It’s not so bad. We should have had an order over from the mainland, but the ferry’s not going today.’
‘The ferry’s not going?’
‘Weather’s too bad,’ she said, again in that old voice that embarrassed us both.
‘I’ve never known that to happen.’
‘It happens,’ she said, putting my oranges in one bag and the rest in another. ‘They built the new boats too big so they aren’t safe in bad weather.’
‘Do you know what the forecast is?’
The girl glanced up at me quickly and lowered her eyes again.
‘No. Four pounds twenty please.’ She slowly counted out my money. It took two goes to get the change right. I wondered what new thing she’d heard about me. It was time to leave, but I didn’t move.
‘So what’s with the free guinea pigs?’
The flush came back to her face. ‘They’ve gone. We gave them to my brother’s snake. There were loads.’
‘Oh.’
The girl smiled. ‘It was years ago.’
‘Sure,’ I said.
The girl put the pencil back in her mouth and her eyes fluttered back down to her crossword. She was just colouring in the white squares, it turned out.
In the truck, I found I had left the oranges in the shop. I looked out of my rear-view mirror at the smashed greenhouse and saw the man inside standing up with his hands on his hips looking at me. I locked the doors and drove away without the oranges.
It started to rain heavily, and I turned up the heating and put the wipers on full speed. We drove past the spot I usually stopped to walk Dog and he sat in the passenger seat and stared at me hard, and every time I turned to look at him he put his ears up, like we were mid-conversation and I was avoiding his look. ‘So what?’ I said. ‘You’re a dog.’ And then he turned around and looked out the window.
Midway home it caught up with me and I pulled over into the entrance to an empty field. Dog gazed stoically out the window, still and calm, and I pressed my thumb into the bridge of my nose to try and take away the prickling, clung on to the skin of my chest with the nails of my other hand to melt away that old thudding ache that came with losing a sheep, a bead of blood landing in an open eye. I cried drily, honking and with my mouth open, rocking the truck and feeling something grappling around inside me getting no closer to coming out. Have a good cry; it was the kind of thing Mum’d say to a triplet in the hope a visit to the hospital wasn’t necessary. Like the time Cleve fell out of a tree and cried it out, and we found out later he had a broken arm. But there was nothing good in my crying – it prevented me from breathing, it hurt. I stopped once my nose began to bleed, cleaned it up with the shammy I used on the days the windows were iced on the inside and drove home, calmly. On the Military Road near to the turning home, some teenagers fondled about at the bus stop. When they saw me coming one of the boys pretended to put something in his mouth, another mounted him from behind and humped him while he mimed throwing a lasso. The girls laughed and gave me the finger. As I rounded the corner the boy with the lasso dropped his trousers and showed his white arse.
I put a pot of coffee down on the stove harder than I needed to. ‘Fucking kids,’ I said to Dog, but he had his back to me and wasn’t listening.
I slammed the fridge and leant my head against it. Stupid to have become so comfortable. The fridge hummed back in agreement. Stupid to think it wouldn’t all fall to shit. That feeling I’d had when I first saw the cottage, squat and white like a chalk pebble at the black foot of the downs, the safety of having no one nearby to peer in at me – that felt like an idiot’s lifetime ago. I felt at the side of the fridge for the axe handle.
My sleeve was brown where some of the dead sheep had leaked onto it and I took my jumper off and rubbed the spot with soap in the downstairs bathroom. I smelled like billy goat but the idea of a full wash with the cold deep in my shoulders didn’t interest me, so I just splashed under my armpits. My hands clenched and unclenched to warm up, the right one aching and clicking in the way that it did in damp weather where the bones hadn’t knitted back together.
I smoothed back the skin of my face in the mirror. The last fringe I’d given myself had been an inch too short and I looked like a mad person. I found a blooded thumbprint below my ear.
I lit a cigarette, holding it with my lips and clasping my hands together in front of me to tense my arms as I inhaled to check the muscle tone and it was still there even if I hadn’t sheared in a couple of months. Strong lady. I watched the smoke snake its way out of my mouth and disappear in the cold air. The coffee pot began its death rattle, and I moved to take it off the hob. I still had a fear of the thing exploding.
Out the kitchen window, the flash of a windscreen across the valley. Don in his Land Rover. I spat my cigarette into the sink, ran the water over it, and then bolted out into the yard to get the wheelbarrow, and Dog nipped me on the back of the knee for running. I huffed up to the top of the drive, the barrow squeaking to buggery, and stood, blocking the road. Don pulled up and cut the engine. Midge stayed patiently in the passenger’s seat eyeballing Dog with her pink tongue lolling out.
‘Christ alive. You’re making my balls shrink,’ Don said as he swung himself out of the truck. It was sleeting and I only wore my singlet. He passed a glance at me that I rolled off my shoulders. ‘You look like shit. Not sleeping?’
‘I’m fine.’ I nodded to the wheelbarrow. Don looked at it.
‘What’s that you got there?’
‘Another dead ewe. Reckon it’s those kids.’
He looked at me. Our breath puffed white between us. He shook his head.
‘What’s a kid want to go and do that for?’
‘Why does anyone do anything? Bored and shitful.’
Dog jumped up at Midge sitting in the truck and barked at her while she looked back coolly.
‘No,’ said Don, ‘can’t blame everything on the kids. Even if some of them’s vicious little buggers.’
‘What’s gone on here then?’ he asked the dead sheep, bending forward and taking a closer look; his hands were on his hips. It was very cold. I folded my arms over my chest and tried to look comfortable.
‘I found her this morning out by the woods.’
‘By the woods?’
I nodded.
He shook his head and walked around the wheelbarrow. ‘She’s dead all right.’
‘Oh really? You a vet?’
Don narrowed his eyes at me.
I cleared my throat. ‘These kids . . .’
Don tipped his cap up off his eyes and looked at me. ‘Good night last night – you shoulda come down the pub last night like I said.’
Here we go, I thought. ‘Not my sort of place, Don.’ I pictured the men who would be there, leaning up against the bar and talking in low voices, their eyes flicking up when a woman walked by. The same sort as the three who had showed up in the first week, whistling farmer-wants-a-wife. Don was different. I’d called on him with my first breech birth and he’d come with me, calmly sewed the prolapsed innards back into the ewe and saved her triplets, poured me a drink and said lightly, All gotta learn one way or the other.
Still, he could go on for ever.
‘Three years. You haven’t been out to the pub once.’
This was a lie. I’d been there once, but Don liked to say it so much that he never listened when I told him.
‘You show up, arm in a sling, looking like a lesbian or a hippy or something, and you move in and we don’t have many of either of those round here. You’re not careful, they’re going to use stories about you to scare the nippers.’
I shifted my weight, feeling the cold setting into my jawbone.
‘It’s a lonely enough job sheep farming without putting yourself in isolation.’
I blinked at Don and there was a long pause. Dog whined. He’d heard it all before as well.
‘So what killed my sheep then?’ was all I could say.
Don sighed and squinted at the sheep. He looked about a hundred in the morning light; the age spots on his cheeks were livid. ‘Mink might tear a sheep up, after she’s dead. Or a fox.’ He lifted the ewe’s head to take a look at the eyes. ‘Eyes are gone,’ he said; ‘could be something killed her and then everything else took their pickings.’ He lifted the head higher and looked underneath where her ribs made a cave. He frowned. ‘But I’ve never seen anything round here flense an animal like that.’
I patted the pocket of my trousers, where I kept my cigarettes, then I touched Dog on the top of his greasy head. A crow called out, Caaa-creee; and caaa-creee. Midge stood up on her seat and we all looked over the fence at the dark trees there.
‘Just tell those kids if you see them, and anyone else who wants to hear about it, that if I catch anyone near my sheep I’ll shoot them.’
I turned the wheelbarrow around and started walking back down the hill towards home.
‘Yep,’ said Don, ‘happy new year to you too.’
We are a week from the end of the job in Boodarie. I’m in the shower at the side of the tractor shed watching the thumb-sized redback that’s always sat at the top of the shower head. She hasn’t moved at all except to raise a leg when I turn on the tap, like the water’s too cold for her.
The day has been a long and hot one – the tip of March, and under the crust of the galvo roof the air in the shearing shed has been thick like soup, flies bloating about in it. I’m low on shampoo, but I use a good slug of it, and feel the suds run down my dips and crevices, the water cooling off my lower back where the scars get hot and throb with the sweat. Above me, beyond the redback, is a fast blackening sky – the night comes quickly here, not like in the city where you could spend all night at work and not notice its difference to the day, other than the slowing off of customers. The first stars are bright needles, and in the old Moreton Bay fig that hangs over the tractor shed and drops nuts on the roof while I sleep, a currawong and a white galah are having it out; I can hear the blood-thick bleat of them. A flying fox goes overhead and just like that the smell of the place changes and night has settled in the air. Someone moves outside the pallet-board screen of the shower and I still my hands in my hair.
‘Greg?’ I call, but no answer. I turn the tap off to listen. The redback sets down her leg. ‘Greg?’ The suds are still thick in my hair and they keep up a crackle in my earholes. I think of being found alone and taken away, back there, tied up and left to rot in the long dry grasses. There is a smell of fat and eggs frying. Someone steps quietly around the shower. It could be any of the team, could be Alan who is getting deaf these days, looking for electrical tape or kerosene or batteries or rags. But it is not, that much is clear from the change in the air. ‘Greg?’ I am less than 150km from Otto’s, the closest I’ve been since I left, but still, in seven months, I’ve travelled up and down the country and even if he has a nose like a bloodhound, I’ve covered my tracks. I’ve covered my tracks, I mouth.
The pallet to my right darkens, and through a punched-out knot in the grain of the wood, an eye appears, and I back away from it, my voice gone.
‘I know about you,’ says the eye. ‘You don’t fool me; I know about you and what you’ve done,’ it says and the voice is thick and sticky and there’s the smell of rotten eggs and lanolin together and whisky and unwashed places.
I’ve covered my tracks, it’s been seven months and I covered my tracks, but my heart is beating fast, and I have to put up my hand to the wall to steady myself. The spider reacts, turns in a small circle, settles again. The eye twitches, and I think of driving my thumbnail right into it, but I can’t bring myself to touch it, and there is nothing else sharp to poke with. The eye slides up and down, the iris a milky blue.
‘I know what you’re about,’ says the eye. It disappears and the shadow moves away. My heart drums. I look through the knot in the wood and see Clare staggering off in the direction of the shearing shed. He’s been away the week, and he has found something out.
I bolt from the shower without washing out the suds, round the side of the shed to my sleeping quarters. I pull on pants, shorts and a singlet and then I begin stuffing everything else into my backpack. If you were so sure he’d never find you, says my head, why are you so prepared to leave, why do all your belongings fit in a backpack? Everything is in there except my shears, which I left on the bench next to the wool table, to sharpen in the morning. And the carapace of a cicada that Greg gave me last month when he asked if I’d go to the Gold Coast with him once the job was done. I hold it in my palm and it vibrates with my pulse.
‘Just spend a month at the water. Fishing, swimming, drinking beer,’ he’d said. ‘Get the dust off us before the next job.’
I put the skin back down on the ledge and go to find Greg in the dinner hall.
Almost everyone has gathered for tea, and I scan the bench for Clare, but he’s not there. I sit down next to Greg, who is talking to Connor about boat engines, and I try to make it clear I want to talk to him by putting my hand on his shoulder. He squeezes my thigh under the table but doesn’t turn around, too involved with his conversation.
‘. . . corroded so far, it broke through and dropped down into the bilge,’ he says, and Connor is drinking from his can and he says,
‘Yep. That’s just the way she’ll go – people forget,’ his voice becomes high-pitched and incredulous, ‘as far as an engine is concerned – water’s your enemy.’
‘Yep,’ says Greg and I shift about next to him. I don’t want anyone else to know there’s a problem.
‘You right?’ asks Greg, distracted by my fidgeting.
‘I need to talk to you,’ I say quietly.
Greg looks at me a moment, takes a swig of his drink and snakes his arm around my back.
‘Can we go somewhere?’
‘Tea’s coming out.’
‘Yes but . . .’
‘Whisper it.’
I lean closer to him. People assume we are having some sort of moment I suppose, and no one could be less interested. A grey steak arrives in front of me and trays of boiled potatoes get passed down the line.
My mouth goes dry. ‘Have you seen Clare yet?’
‘His truck’s back, he’ll be around somewhere. Why – what’s he owe you?’
‘Nothing. I just— Look, can we go to the Gold Coast?’
He gives me a hopeless look, like he doesn’t know what on earth is the matter with the woman. ‘Yeah. I suggested it. What, are you having a stroke or something?’ He puts six large potatoes on his plate, passes the tray, which I pass on to Stuart on the other side of me.
‘I mean now. Can we just hop in the truck and go now?’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘Nothing’s happened. I just want to go now.’
Greg looks confused. ‘Well, so do I, but we’ve got to finish the job.’
‘Why?’
Greg is chewing on a lump of steak. ‘Why? Because these are me mates, I’m not leaving them a man down. Besides, we go early, we don’t get the bonus – it’s just a week we’ve got left. Not long.’ He swallows and reaches for one of the rolls that sit in the centre of the table. ‘Sid,’ he shouts, ‘is this bread still made with the arse flour?’ Sid doesn’t reply and Greg shrugs and mops his plate.
‘Can you just trust me that we need to leave now?’ I say.
He puts his bread down. ‘Why do we need to leave now? What is the difference? You rob a bank?’
I open my mouth to speak, but there is nothing I can tell him.
‘See,’ he says, picking up his fork again, ‘there’s no problem. Everything is simple. It’s just hot is all, we’ll be at the Coast in no time.’
Another tray starts to come down, with sausages on it. When I pass this to Stuart he looks at me strangely.
‘No snag for you?’ he says.
‘What?’
‘On Jenny Craig or something?’
I ignore him, but Greg notices too, and waves the sausages back. ‘Wait wait wait, if she’s not eating I’ll have hers,’ and he spears two extra.
‘Why do you get the extra?’ asks Stuart.
‘Because she’s my woman.’
‘What? That’s not right.’
‘Fair dinkum,’ Denis says from down the end. ‘She’s his woman, means the snags pass on to him.’
I wish I had taken the sausages.
I have until the end of tea to convince him.
Greg has eaten my steak, and two large bowls of tinned fruit cocktail with the shining red cherries and the pale cubes of melon are distributed along the table.
Someone barks, ‘What, no ice cream?’ and Sid tosses a couple of bricks of it, the kind you cut with a pallet knife and which are bright yellow like cheese, and Connor hacks off a two-inch slice and dumps a ladle of fruit salad on top.
‘Love it when the ice cream mixes with the syrup,’ he says loudly to anyone who wants to know, and then he picks out the red cherries one by one with his fingers, his pinkie held up high, and lines them up at the side of his dish, ‘but those little fuckers can get bent.’
Clare appears in the doorway with the night behind him. The strip lighting in the shed makes him look like he glows. He holds on to the door frame and scans the long table. I wait for his eyes to settle on me, and when they do I see a look of pleasure on his face that I recognise. I am trapped. Greg’s thigh pumps blood next to mine. Connor scrapes the bottom of his dish with his spoon and Steve, next to him, flicks one of the red cherries so it darts onto Stuart’s lap. Stuart gives Steve the finger without looking up from his bowl. Alan at the top of the table is reading the paper and is not interested. He drinks his beer. And in all of it, Clare looks at me and I know I’m done, I know the end has come. He enters the room and walks slowly past me. I try not to crane to follow him, I try not to anticipate his next move. He puts a hand on Greg’s shoulder and bends down to him, and I tense myself for the end. Greg looks up and Clare hands him a Violet Crumble and Greg’s face opens out into a smile.
‘Good man,’ says Greg. ‘Now I don’t have to get involved with this horse shit,’ he says, nodding at the fruit salad and pinching open the purple wrapper as he does it. Clare ambles on by, saying nothing, just giving me a sidelong glance. Greg breaks the end off his bar and hands it to me. While Greg is turned away from me, I crumble it to dust under the table.
I pick up my shears from the shed, and do not think about what will happen next. The shed smells good. Sweat and dung, lanolin and turps. I can’t imagine being away from it. A possum scratches on the tin roof. I walk slowly back to my quarters, stand for a moment in the dark where I can see the warm slice of light in the dinner shed, where I have a side view of Greg, who is laughing, who brings a beer to his lips, who drinks, who puts it down and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. I bite the tip of my tongue and I try to think of some last-minute plan that can stop this. Nothing comes and I turn away and follow my feet back to my quarters.
Clare is lying on my bed with his boots on, smoking a roll-up. I stop in the doorway, but he’s heard me coming and he’s ready with a toothy smile for me. I stay in the doorway wondering if I can turn around, walk back to the woolshed, hide under a fleece.
‘Know where I was all week?’ he asks, swinging his legs off my bed. ‘Come in out of the doorway, love,’ he says, ‘you look like a prostitute.’ He grins wider, if that is possible. He blows smoke out and it fogs the air between us. ‘Planning a trip?’ he says, in the voice of someone off the TV. He kicks my backpack gently. There is so much excitement in his voice.
‘Ben tipped me off about the posters – pictures of you plastered all around the place down there. Did you know that? I had to go and see for myself – but they’re you all right.’ He pulls from his back pocket a scored and folded piece of paper. He unfolds it slowly, chuckling to himself, and holds it up to show me. There I am in black and white sitting on my pink pony doona cover, smiling for the camera. There’s a stuffed bear on my lap and my hands are digging into it, not that you can see my hands, not that you can see the bear or the doona cover or the old man taking the photograph or the dog guarding me outside. You can only see my face, the smile for the camera. In capital letters it says MISSING at the top and I catch the words ‘granddaughter . . . danger to herself’, at the bottom, but I can’t read it all because things have gone dark.
‘I rang the number, Jake, and you know what I found out?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s not my grandfather.’
‘Oh, I know all that. That poor old bloke, “Otto”. We had a good long chat. I went to see him on his farm, just a pen of dead sheep, and all he can talk about is how you killed his dog and how you took his money and he was only trying to take you off the street. Said you took everything that was dear to him, took his truck even, poor old cracker couldn’t get into town, had to rely on the Salvos to come once a week with groceries until he got his old banger working. Saw what you did to that too, smashed it up pretty bad.’
‘I didn’t, I just—’
‘I saw it. The old bugger cried when he talked about his dog.’
‘I just—’
‘Shhh,’ Clare says, but loudly. He gets up off the bed in one fluid movement and walks towards me slowly, takes my forearms where they hang limply by my sides. He moves me over to stand in front of the workbench and he leans on me, crotch heavy.
‘You might have fooled them, but you don’t fool me.’
My mouth waters. I look over at the doorway. What would happen if Greg appeared in there now?
‘What you’ve got, is you’ve got two options here. Maybe I’d be persuaded to keep my mouth shut.’ Clare’s breath is hot fudge on the side of my face. He whispers in a way that sounds like soon he’ll be shouting. ‘You can show me some of what you’ve shown everyone else at the Hedland . . .’ My heart tumbles around my body. A stupid part of me thinks, He might not say anything, and is quieted by the part of me that knows it will not end, and I cannot stay here. ‘Little bit of affection – I’m not asking for much – I wouldn’t fuck a mate’s lay – maybe just the mouth.’ And I can see exactly how it will all be, the back of the throat, the hair grasped in a ponytail, and the words he will say while he does it, and then afterwards how it will only be worse, how he will be rid of me either way, and with a flourish. ‘Or,’ he says, trailing his finger along the outer curve of my breast, ‘or I can let old Otto know where to find you, and the police.’ He starts to unbutton my shorts, and he tugs my singlet out from them, and puts a hand down, scrabbling with his fingers to get beneath my underwear. ‘I won’t even have to tell Greg, they’ll do it for me.’ He scrapes a finger over my crotch, and like a mechanical game at the fairground, something is triggered and I punch him in the jaw with my right and he goes down, out cold and bleeding on the floor.
I cannot do up my shorts because my hand crunched badly against Clare’s face, and it has turned into a meat fist, throbbing and swollen.
I leave the room without looking back at him, but I can hear him shifting about in the dust and a wet groan comes from him. I am fairly sure that I have broken his jaw.
I watched Don drive down into the valley in the last of the light, stayed there with the wheelbarrow in the sleet, with Dog sheltering behind my legs, until he’d disappeared over the crest of the hill to the other side where he lived. My boots made a crumping sound as I walked back down the path to the woolshed. There were times I felt how unnatural I was in the place, the way my skin still stung at the cold, the way the insides of my nostrils and the back of my throat prickled. The smell of wet wool and rain-dampened sheep shit were aliens to the dust-dry smell of the carpet sheep in their wide red spaces back home. The way the land seemed to be watching me, feeling my foreignness in it, holding its breath until I passed by. I’d asked Mum once, What kind of Aussies are we? Did we come over on the boats, or did someone take us here later on? Mum’d looked up from where she was struggling to get the triplets’ bare white arses into undies, and blew a hank of hair out of her face. ‘I’ve been here for ever, darl,’ she said and swatted one of the kids on the legs to try and get them to keep still. I’d never pushed further than that.
I tried not to look too hard into the trees which were black even in the morning, but from the corner of my eye I saw something flicker and I started, thinking the trees were on fire but there was nothing, just some slight movement in the wind. The sheep coughed and bleated. I parked the wheelbarrow in the woolshed and closed the door. My teeth chattered and when I got inside the house, I pulled on my coat and sat on the sofa. Dog climbed up damply next to me.
I hadn’t called in over a month. The last time no one was in and I let it ring out thinking about the phone in the front room, how the sound of it made the magpies lift off the veranda and then settle back down. How the air moved with the ringer, the air that smelled of washing left too long in the machine, of three young boys and their socks and undies, the long-gone deep-fat fryer whose smell, as I remembered it, still soaked into the walls. Mum’s back-door cigarettes that we weren’t allowed to know about, and somewhere from an open window, the smell of sugar and eucalyptus, the hot breath of the trees.
I dialled the code to withhold my number and tapped in the long sequence that I knew by heart. It took me through the tones and silences of connection to home. It would barely be daybreak there, but Mum was an early riser – always had been. It rang out twice and I stroked the arm of the sofa to hear the sound of Mum’s voice.
‘Hello, 635?’ she said and waited. ‘Hello? Hello hello?’
A sigh, from her chest which sounded shallow and wheezy. It would have been her birthday the week before. Seventy-two.
‘Iris!’ she called. ‘It’s doing that thing again.’ A thickness in her throat, a cold or an allergy. My sister’s voice, muffled, maybe from upstairs.
‘Just hang up the phone, Ma, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Well, what’s wrong with the phone though?’
Iris closer now, down the stairs and entering the room. ‘How the hell should I know.’ The clunk of the phone being taken out of my mother’s deeply veined hands and into Iris’s heavily ringed fingers. ‘Hello?’ My sister’s voice, sharp like always, edged with being the eldest. She listened to my silence. ‘I dunno, Mum, maybe you’ve got a pervert after you.’
On the receiver’s journey through the air into the cradle, I heard the beginning of a butcher bird’s song, ceecaw-ceeceecaw – and the line went dead. Back in my living room with the electric heater on and smelling of burnt dust, I finished the song, whistling. Pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pwee pweeee. Dog raised his ears at the sound but it wasn’t that unusual to him. I started a set of push-ups, but halfway through lay down and stared at the ceiling.
I made some coffee and drank it. After some time had passed, I laid out my paperwork on the kitchen table and worked through it. When that was done I let Dog out to pee, but stayed in the doorway in my socks. I put the paperwork away and folded myself up on the sofa with a book that I held unopened on my lap. The wind moved through the trees, down the chimney and into the front room where it waved through the top sheet of a newspaper.
With the night outside I closed the curtains in the kitchen and put on the radio loud enough to drown out the skittering noises of leaves moving up the stone path. The only programme I could get was the soccer results. I listened to the names of places while I made sardines on toast. Wigan. What was Wigan like? I had a pretty strong sense of it just from the name, and it made me glad that I was not there. I fed a sardine to Dog and it made him sneeze.
The sitting room was cold and so I ate under a blanket. I didn’t look out the window at the dark, but I felt it there.
Burnley, three; Middlesbrough, nil.
When I could find no further reasons for not being in bed, I turned the radio off and whistled tunelessly and loudly on my way up the stairs. On the landing a feather fluttered in a draught. I brushed my teeth and must’ve scraped over a mouth ulcer, because when I spat there was an impressive amount of blood. I washed it away and blew my nose and then rolled on an old T-shirt to sleep in. Dog collected himself at the foot of the bed, and we stared at each other a moment or two before I checked the hammer under my pillow and turned off the light. I closed my eyes so that I wasn’t staring into the dark, and I tried not to take any notice of the sounds that felt unfamiliar, even though I’d heard them a million times before. A sheep’s cough had always sounded just like a person’s. A fox was being made love to somewhere in the woods and her shrieks cut straight into my room.
I fell asleep, because I woke up from a dream where I saw myself opening the bathroom door and finding all of my sheep in there, looking silently back at me. There was no colour or light in the sky, so it wasn’t past five. There was something sick in the air, like someone had lit a scented candle to mask a bad smell. The house was still. Dog stood by the closed door, looking at the space underneath, his hackles up and his legs straight and stiff, his tail rigid, pointing down. And then one creak, on the ceiling, like someone walked there. I held my breath and listened past the blood thumping in my ears. It was quiet and I pulled the covers up under my chin. The sheets chafed loudly against themselves. Dog stayed fixed on the door. A small growl escaped him.
My fingernails dug into my palms.
On the wall behind me came a noise like someone drawing a nail from the ceiling to the top of my bed’s headboard and stopping there, one straight smooth and slow line. Dog slunk over to the bed and growled long and low. I lay still, felt every muscle beat in time with my heart; my back throbbed now. I had the feeling that I had bled onto the bedsheets, that if I moved my back would stick to the material and pull at my skin.
I thought to myself, Rats, there’s rats in the walls or mice, the smaller ones with the soft little brown bodies, that is all it is, or a bit of old timber releasing air, or cracking, the temperature outside has dropped in the night, it is making it crack and the mice are scurrying around, scratching about, or it is the Rayburn’s pipe, doing its thing – the wind has changed direction.
An underwater stillness, no wind or rain, not even a small owl, just a thick blanket of silence. I shut my eyes, and felt the mattress creak as Dog loped up on it, and weaved himself between my feet. The room settled and I counted heartbeats. There was a quiet crackle then silence again.