Evie Wyld - After the Fire, a Still Small Voice

For the Stranges

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Laetitia Rutherford for her generous wisdom and guidance and for asking me to write in the first place. Ellah Allfrey, Nikki Christer and Diana Coglianese for their excellent direction, and their enthusiasm for this book. Darren Wall at Wallzo for his beautiful artwork. Sarah Barnes and Roz Simpson and the students of Bacons College for keeping me employed, in the loosest possible sense, and all those friends who, perhaps unknowingly, helped along the way. Excellent teachers I have had, including Rebecca de Pelet, Lucy Sheddon, Colin Edwards and Stephen Knight and all those at Bath Spa University and on the Goldsmiths Creative Writing MA. For help writing on the Australian experience during the Vietnam War, Id like to thank Dr Julian Stallabrass and those who make available the brilliant and accessible online material at Australians at War and the National Archives of Australia.

Very particular thanks go to Tim Strange. I could not have imagined the book at all without his willingness to talk, his openness and warmth. This is however a work of fiction, and all characters are entirely made up, any mistakes mine alone. Thank you Ben Strange for introducing me to Bassey as well as translating fishing and the marina to me. Any mistakes here are, again, all my own. Thanks to my Mum, Dad and Tom who have shown a huge amount of encouragement and support. Thanks, most especially, to Jamie for every thing.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781409079217

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Jonathan Cape 2009

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright Evie Wyld 2009

Evie Wyld has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

Jonathan Cape

Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

www.rbooks.co.uk

Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at:

www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780224088879

The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at

www.rbooks.co.uk/environment

Typeset in Galliard by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

Table of Contents

The sun turned the narrow dirt track to dust. It rose like an orange tide from the wheels of the truck and blew in through the window to settle in Frank Collards arm hair. He remembered the place feeling more tropical, the soil thicker and wetter. The sugar cane on either side of the track was thin and reedy, wild with a brown husk and sick-looking green tops. The same old cane that hadnt been harvested in twenty years swayed like a green sea. Blue gums and box trees hepped out of it, not bothered with the dieback. Once it would all have been hardwood. In the time his grandparents had lived out here, just the two of them, before the new highway, maybe then this place was a shack in the woods.

The clearing was smaller than he remembered, like the cane had slunk closer to the pale wooden box hut. The banana tree stooped low over a corrugated roof. He turned off the engine and sagged in his seat for a moment taking it in. There was a tweak at the back of his neck and when he slapped it his palm came away bloody.

Home again home again diggidy dig.

He could have driven here without thinking. He could have turned the radio up loud and listened to the memorial service at Australia Zoo. They were calling them revenge killings, the stingrays found mutilated up and down Queensland beaches. He could have let his hands steer him to Mulaburry, those same roads hed hitched along as a kid, sun-scarred and spotty, scrawny as a feral dog without the bulky calves and wide hands he had now. But never mind that, hed still pulled over on to the slip road and smoothed out the map and read aloud the places, and he still sent his eyes over and over the landmarks, searching for the turn-offs he knew were not written down. The tension in his arms had got so strong he wanted to bust a fist through the windscreen but instead, as a road train roared by and rocked the Ute in its wake, hed clutched the wheel, crumpling the map as he did it, feeling small tears made by his fingertips. He had gripped the wheel hard so that it burnt, and he pushed like it might relieve the feeling in his arms. But it didnt help and then he was outside, banging his fists on the bonnet for all that he was worth, his nose prickling, his throat closed up, the bloody feel of some bastard terrible thing swimming inside him. And when he was done and spent, he had climbed back into the truck and refolded the buggered map, and when he couldnt make it fit together hed laughed softly and started the engine.

The air outside was thick with insect noise, heavy with heat, and the old gums groaned. The padlock on the door was gone and the idea that some other bastard might have claimed the place as his own nearly made him turn round and shoo all the way back to Canberra. The whole thing was suddenly hare-brained. Tearing through drawers at home trying to find some sort of clue as to what he was supposed to be doing, hed found an envelope with a picture of his mum in, taken on one summer holiday at the shack. There she was, hanging up a sheet in the sun, the same wide teeth as him, the same sort of boneless nose. Different hair, though hers a blonde animal that moved in the wind. He was like his father, wiry, black, not from these parts. By her shoulder was the window and inside you could just make out a jam jar with a flower in it. It was like being smacked on the arse by God. Couldnt have been more than a month after she was hanging up that sheet that theyd been driving in his dads old brown Holden when a truck hadnt stopped at the intersection. When he woke up there was no more mum and no more old brown Holden.

It wasnt difficult getting out of the rental agreement. Hed been late and short in the last three months since Lucy left. A week from then and he was on the road, two suitcases of clothes, the rest of everything in boxes for the op-shop and the padlock keys burning his thigh through his pocket. Hed taken the first part of the journey that evening, ended up in a motel close to midnight, with a sun-faded poster of a lion eating a zebra above his bed. He hadnt slept, hed drunk from a three-quarters empty bottle of Old and hed let himself think about Lucy then. The sick feeling of trying to make it all right. The endless meetings theyd had across the table, to see if there was a way round it. The months afterwards when hed sweated if he dropped a plate, the look on her face. Careful, or Im going. Or when the coat hangers tangled themselves and made a jangling as he shook them, her pointed silence. There were other things he thought of in that wide-awake night. Being alone, fixing himself up. Getting done with the drink, sorting through the things in his head as shed wanted him to.