4
On his sixteenth birthday Leon was confronted by a heart-shaped cake that his mother had baked. ‘We can have a party, chicken, if you’d like,’ she said in a way that made his toes grip the insides of his shoes. ‘You can invite your friends, we can have maybe some sherry and cake.’ To look at it, so bright and red, made him uncomfortable.
‘Thanks, Ma, but I’d rather not, ta.’
‘Why, sausage? Are you embarrassed?’
He cleared his throat. ‘No, a few friends – man friends – want to take me out somewhere, is all. I’m just busy, and . . .’ He let the ‘and’ fill the room.
‘Oh? And who is taking you out?’
‘Oh, you know, the usual crowd.’ He tried hard to think of who that might be. ‘Darren, Sid, Johnny. Des. Mark.’ He said boys’ names as they came to him.
‘Darren Farrow? That boy who hit you?’
‘That’s a long time ago, Mum. It’s fine.’
The last time he’d seen him, Darren had been leaning solidly against a girl behind the Four Square at night. He’d seen Leon looking and given him the finger, which he trailed down the girl’s front and hooked under her shirt, all the while meeting Leon’s eyes. His fat had turned hard and he was thought of as a dangerous kind of a bloke now. It was a pity that he’d never got around to running off to Korea. Leon imagined them having a drink together and it almost made him smile.
His mother shook her head, but cut the cake for him anyway, and he ate a piece in front of her. It had too much colouring in it and it was dense and far too sweet; it made his teeth sing. She smiled and cut herself a piece and left immediately to have her bath, leaving her slice dead on the table, and he went to chop the date slabs that had cooled on the shop counter.
A moment later a girl put her head round the door of the shop.
‘Got some black pears for youse.’
She smiled as she bumped her way through the door, ricocheting it off her hip so that the bell rang several times before she got through. It took him a minute to recognise Amy Blackwell. She took up her space differently, as if she’d been taken apart and put back together in another way somehow. Her hair was piled on top of her head out of her face, her cheeks were pink from hefting the box of pears. She wore a pair of brown work overalls that were filthy, streaked with dirt and a pinch too small for her. She chewed gum and he could smell it on her breath. He looked at her chest in amazement. They’d just grown, like potatoes do.
‘Thought you could make a tart out of them,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ he said, frowning hard at the pears – it seemed important to look interested in the fruit. Amy blinked and shifted her weight under the box. The chewing gum cracked in her mouth.
A woman came in wearing a hat and gloves, and frowned deeply when she saw Amy in her overalls. She averted her eyes and said, ‘Four rock cakes and a white loaf, please.’ And her eyes flickered across to Amy again, the corners of her mouth turned down. Leon put her bread in a bag and counted out her change. He could see Amy smiling with her box of pears, she was standing tall and straight, and she didn’t move when the woman tried to make out that she was in her way. She just smiled wider and the woman stared back at him like she wanted him to say something. Leon looked away. She marched out of the shop, her handbag hung in the crook of her arm. Amy rolled her eyes and he smiled.
‘Um, you think I could put this down somewhere?’ He fumbled from behind the counter and tried to take the box from her. Putting his hands underneath it, he trapped her finger under his, and remembered the day at school with Briony Caldwell and the secret up yours. Amy Blackwell looked him in the eye and he shifted again and had the box, but all that was in his head was the smell of her, earth, gum, sweat and old pears. The coldness of her finger clamped under his.
She brushed a hair off her forehead. ‘Ta,’ she said. ‘Haven’t seen you around school in a while.’
‘Stopped going. I pretty much run this place now.’
‘How’s that?’
‘’Sgood, thanks.’
‘Great.’
‘Yep.’ Leon shifted his weight under the box.
‘Well . . . see youse later then . . .’
He stood clutching the pears, feeling like a handicapped. He should have given her a piece of cake. He should have offered her a drink, she looked hot and tired. He should have called the woman that gave her a dirty look an old cow and he should have looked happier about the pears and he should have got her to stay longer, asked her out for his imaginary birthday drinks. But the smell, the fug of pear and dirt and spearmint, made a change in the room. Something like light, like white fresh icing. Amy’s spearmint gum cleared all the tubes and passages inside him, and the cold dark something had gone from the door, he’d felt it leave. He blinked a few times as the feeling faded. The warm smell of bread and cake seemed stronger, like he hadn’t realised it before. It was a lovely smell.
On a piece of newspaper he squeezed sugar roses and thought about what he would say the next time she came into the shop. He paid more attention to his work, he perfected his cherry slices, took minute care about the placement, the overlap of strawberries on the gateau, the thickness of the gelatin glaze. He thought about how he would present them to her if she ever came in again with her light like sun in a copper pan.
His mother fitted her hair bun back in place, always wet from a bath. She bothered Leon now and again about going back to school. ‘There’s more to life than just cakes and sweets,’ she’d say, but then would trail off as if something else had caught her attention. She’d rub her eyes and blink, then smile at him and walk into the back room where he would hear her looking through the bookshelves, flipping through the books one by one, picking things up and putting them down again, finding herself extra housework before the next bath time.
At the malt bar the kids dressed up like Yanks with spit in their hair and the girls had tits like paper hats. On his day off Leon passed the place by and went into the pub where, if he sat with a cherry soda for long enough, the barman would serve him a glass of beer. ‘Cos I can see you’re a drinker,’ he said as he put it down. ‘But anyone asks and you’re pinching dregs.’
The men at the bar were dangerous-looking sorts, some missing a limb or two, one who only had a thumb and little finger left on his right hand, and he would press the thumb up to his nose and point at people.
That slow thick feeling crept up on him often, but it was all right in the pub. It didn’t seem out of place that his mouth moved ten times slower than everyone else’s when he talked, and after a drink the feeling just melted into the alcohol and no one could tell the difference anyway, because they were concentrating on getting the grog inside them before the pub closed. When he swayed to the toilets, carefully placing one foot in front of the other, no one looked at him funny. When he returned, the man with the lobster claw slapped him on the back and handed him another drink, without ever turning to look at him or stopping his conversation with his friend.
‘Thank you,’ said Leon clearly and he slowed himself back to his seat.
Amy Blackwell did come again and this time she brought plums. He had been making the curd for a lemon tart, grating in the rind of a green lemon stroke by stroke and tasting in between. When the bell rang he barely broke his rhythm. ‘Beauty,’ he said, as he took the box of plums from her.
‘How’s it goin’?’ she asked.
‘Good,’ he said, this time really looking at the plums, knocking one of them on to its back, feeling it give. They were the dark purple type and he thought of upside-down caramel plum tarts.
He got her some water and, with one hand leaning on the counter, she drained the glass and put it down heavily on the side, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.
‘How’s school going?’ he asked, as she put down the glass.
‘It’s dumb and nuts,’ she answered, smiling, chewing her spearmint. ‘They reckon they want us to learn how to iron.’
He moved back to the bowl. ‘You’ve come in the nick of time,’ he said. The room was rousing itself into a glow, he felt it at the back of his head, the lightness, the clearing. It made him stand straight, breathe deeply. He picked up a twist of pastry to dip it into the curd and absently wiped a finger round the outside edge of the bowl, collecting a stray thread of yellow that had trailed over the side. He offered her the pastry and the glow off her was sun off water. She leant forward but passed the pastry twist and took the other hand, holding it in both of hers. She put his lemon-covered finger in her mouth, standing on tiptoe over the counter. His breath stayed in his chest and a breeze came into the shop, and he could smell the lemon and the plums and the scent of the skin of her throat.
She looked at him the way she had when he’d caught her finger under the crate of pears. That finger raised behind the sheet of paper at school. She drew her lips to the tip of his finger, letting them make a pop sound at the end. ‘’S pretty nice,’ she said, dropping back on to her heels and wiping her mouth with the inside of her wrist. The shop bell rang and she left him, finger still held in mid-air, eyes round and big, the room a white flash in her wake.
Later that week he took a plum crumble and two spoons round to Blackwell’s Grocers. They ate it in the dark of the storeroom, among the potato mud and the huntsman spiders, where even her breath smelt of wet earth. He could see the silhouette of her like a halo, and he put out a hand to touch the light on her hair and heard the unzipping of her overalls. The top of his nose prickled when she touched his skin, the warmth of her belly on his. She was hot inside so that he thought it might burn him but the white light that burst was cool and clearing like a swim in the sea. She laughed between deep breaths. They chewed gum afterwards, and there was the simple fact of it popping and cracking in the darkness, the white gum in their dark mouths.
‘I like it here with you,’ he said.
She rolled herself on to him so that her chin rested just below his chest. Her chin was sharp and it hurt, but he let it alone, because it would be nice to have a bruise to remember the moment.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s pretty lucky.’ She smiled and her chin dug at him.
‘You make me feel less . . . hounded.’
‘Explain,’ she said without pausing. He didn’t know what would come out if he tried to. The sound of something scritch-scratching on its claws up behind him, that slunk into the bath with his mother and that crept from bed to bed at night, curling up against the napes of their necks, making the house creak with its footsteps; the thing that licked at his fingers when he slept so that in the morning they were cold and damp.
‘Like there’s something trying to sneak up all the time – some kind of thing watching, like it might like to tear everything to pieces.’
‘Huh,’ said Amy. ‘Like God, you mean?’
He snorted. ‘No. Not like that.’ There was a pause.
He felt the bruise her chin was making getting deeper and was about to roll her off when she said, ‘Like something’s watching?’
‘Sort of. Yes.’
Amy nodded digging her chin deeper into him. ‘I could understand that,’ she said and he breathed out of his mouth.
‘It’s like it has these teeth and claws, and it wants to dig them into me, rip something out.’
‘I know.’ She lifted her chin and moved up his body. She lay so that her soft cheek was on his chest, which was more comfortable. He wondered what she meant.
She raised her head and hair covered one of her eyes. ‘I know,’ she repeated and he found that it was all he could ever have wanted.
When his father arrived one afternoon at the front door, his mother let out a shriek and clung on to him, and he held her tightly too, but stared over her shoulder at Leon. He was a small man all of a sudden, his eyes big as though the skin of his face had retreated. His shirt front ballooned with air when he bent too low and held his arms round Leon like he expected him to be shorter. Leon thought he might laugh, bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself and hunched down over his father and, not knowing what else to do with his hands, held his father’s skull against him and was scared it might crack.
That night all three of them ate together again and his mother cooked a chicken to celebrate. She wore a dress that puffed out in the skirt and made a crumpling noise when she moved. Her hair was dry and long down her back, and it occurred to him that she hadn’t cut it since his father had left. When it was time to carve, his father nodded at him to cut, handing him the carving things. It was strange to hold the long knife in front of his parents, to feel the heat rise to his face in case he did it wrong. Chook carving had always been his father’s job because he complained so much if Leon’s mother did it. You had to get every slither of meat from the bones, had to turn the carcass over and scoop out the dark fatty meat of the chicken’s back. The bones had to be clean, sucked white by the knife. He managed to separate the leg and wing from the left side, but found the right side troublesome. He could hear that he was splintering the bone.
‘Turn it round, my darling,’ said his father softly. He made a circle in the air with one finger and sure enough, when it had been turned he cut through the joint without difficulty. But the word ‘darling’ hung in the air, and it made Leon shrug into his shirt and look round the room as if there were something he needed to be doing that he couldn’t remember. His father drank deeply from his wine glass and refilled it. The meal was quiet, but that was natural. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time. The easy conversations about work, eyes half on a paper, half on the plate, were what he was used to with just his mother. Now her bright questions made the place quieter.
‘Did you see many animals in the jungle?’ was the first one that clattered awkwardly against the walls of the back room.
‘Yes,’ replied his father, swallowing a mouthful of potato, ‘there were a fair few monkeys about. A jaguar as well, but I didn’t see it.’
Both his parents smiled in the silence afterwards, then both looked at Leon and Leon smiled back. All three took a mouthful from their forks and all three chewed drily at the same time. Monkeys and a jaguar.
The meal was short and he felt guiltily relieved. His father said goodnight, that he was tired and his mother went after him, leaving the dishes on the table. All the vegetables from his father’s plate were eaten, but the small amount of chicken he had taken from the dish lay untouched, nudged to the very edge of the plate.
In the morning his mother’s hair still hung down her back. There was a glow on her, her shoulders were loose, her eyes full.
His father didn’t come down for breakfast, or even later in the day.
‘He’s exhausted,’ said his mother, her palms up like she was feeling for rain.
During that week news travelled up and down the main street that his father was back, and people asked after him at the counter.
‘He’s resting,’ he told the butcher’s wife who stood on tiptoe and tried to see past him into the empty kitchen. By the end of the week his mother looked worried. He saw her watching the ceiling, listening for movement up in the bedroom, but there was none.
‘I think what we should do is throw a little party,’ she said, ‘just for his friends on the street.’
Leon made anzacs and a three-layered cake with pale-green icing. One of the sponge layers was pink, the other two soft white with coffee-coloured cream in between each one. He made a sugar doll of his father to go on top in his army greens, his hat folded up on one side, his fingers soldered to his forehead in a salute. He stood duck-footed and straight, tiny stripes on his shoulders, broad in the chest as he had looked the day he left. The model went in the centre of the cake and behind him Leon planted the Australian flag on a toothpick.
‘That’s pretty, chicken,’ said his mother and he let it go, because her eyes were soppy.
As people arrived, they cooed over the cake, then hovered around the easy chair where his father sat, holding cups of coffee or small glasses of sherry. Leon kept his back to most of them, trying to look busy at the table, rearranging biscuits and filling glasses. He felt itchy in his smart clothes, which were now too small for him. He looked away from the kind type of smiles that everyone seemed to want to give, just before they glanced at their watches. He overheard the butcher complaining to his wife, ‘It’s more like a flamin’ wake than a party,’ and saw his wife stick a meaty elbow in his gut. There was a low rumble of talk in the room, enough people so that no one felt too awkward about the man who sat silent, drinking wine in his easy chair, half the size that they remembered him.
Amy Blackwell arrived with her mother and they stood together, her mother chatting loudly to the barber. Amy looked silly, her hair in strange sausage-looking ringlets, an ugly little purse that was attached to her wrist and a yellow smock that looked like a pillowcase. She shot him a low look, her eye, underneath her pointed eyebrow, was like the finger she’d given Briony. It was an easy joke, it laughed at the fancy dress her mother had put her in, it asked about his smoothed and parted hairdo, and the tight, itchy jumper he was wearing. He pressed his lips together and smelt the earth of the storeroom, and turned back to the table, spilling a few dots of orange cordial on the cloth. He smiled. Mrs Shannon sat quietly in the corner, her legs crossed. She watched Amy too from behind her small glass of sherry, and there was a look on her face that he couldn’t figure out.
Soon after the cake was cut the butcher, who had taken charge of the sherry bottle, started singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and everyone joined in to hide how embarrassed they were.
Leon was clearing plates when the barber touched him on the shoulder. ‘Let’s take that old man of yours upstairs, son, whatd’ ya say?’ and Leon looked over at his father whose face was wet and pale from tears, whose mouth hung open and whose eyes were shut tight. The singers were turned away from him, all attending to the conducting butcher and his sherry bottle.
They got either side of him and no one turned round as they hefted him from the room. He was led easily up the stairs and Leon’s heart beat fast in his throat, and the tears ran out of his father like a squeezed lemon but he made no sound. They laid him on the bed and Leon’s mother appeared in the doorway. The barber took Leon’s father’s shoes off while they both stood there watching. He placed the shoes under the bed and pulled a cover up to his neck, then quickly put his hand to his father’s cheek. As he left the room he smiled at Leon’s mother and nodded.
‘It’s all a little bit much for him. Overwhelming,’ said his mother. ‘He’s just a bit overwhelmed.’
Leon met Amy at Central Station and they took the slow train to Waterfall, and from there they hitched a ride to the beach. Her dress was loose round her shoulders and he saw the man who’d picked them up watching her neck as she looked out of the window. Leon stroked the neck with the backs of his fingers and it was cool. Amy smiled and rested her hand on his leg. The man averted his eyes and Leon sat a little straighter.
They walked along the shoreline with their naked feet white and sock-marked on the dark yellow sand. Leon rolled up his trousers and felt the wind comb through his hair. The air smelt sweet. A man fishing on the rocks in his underpants waved. This was where, from a little way off, they could have looked like a regular married couple out for a stroll under no obligations from their parents, nothing to worry about but themselves and the business of pushing back the dark, pushing into each other and pushing forward the bright feeling, the warmth and the round salty taste of each other. They tucked themselves under a hustle of Banksia trees next to a creek that ran dark lines into the sand. They rested their feet on the polished stones of the creek bed and lay back, drinking from bottles of beer that Leon had bought from the pub.
‘How about a swim?’ said Amy, already standing and pulling him up with her.
‘Haven’t got anything to swim in.’ In truth, he could barely swim in a pool, let alone the white froth and glassy-looking waves that sprayed out at the land when they tumbled. The noise of a drum roll. She was a big red smile, laughing at him as he tried to pull her back, slipping out of his hands and racing down to the water, while he was suddenly slow, unable to talk. She went in dress and all, and she dived into a wave and was gone, and he knew that he would never see her again, that some dark moving animal from underneath had taken her and that there was nothing to do. He stood in the shallows, stricken, not breathing, that coldness was back, it lurked underwater as well. And then she was up, bursting up like a snakebird, shaking her hair that ran down on all sides of her. Leon lifted his arms at her, and she laughed again and let herself fall backwards into the foam of a large wave, gone again, a shadow under the surface. When she came out, her dress sticking and showing her brown thighs, and how the tendons at the back stood out, she was still laughing at him.
‘You shoulda come in, Collard, it’s sweet in there!’ She draped wet arms round his neck and when they kissed her face was cold and salt water streamed down her. They drew apart and she said, ‘You gotta swim if you come to the beach. It’s the rules.’ And she bowled him over, hooking her ankles behind his knees so that they fell together in the shallows, and the coldness was gone and they laughed, rolling around with the sand in the creases of their clothes scratching quietly against their skin, and the man fishing on the rocks looked over and Leon could see, even from far away, that he was laughing too.
The picnic was sugar bananas, peaches and treacle tart. A peach warmed by the sun ran juice down their chins and the treacle tart sweated, making the syrup thin so it slid off the knife, got in the webs of their fingers and underneath the ridges of their lips. They ate everything, slowly dipping their hands into the food bag, lazily peeling the skin from a soft peach with their teeth. They talked about things he’d never realised he wanted to know. She told him how she broke her collarbone jumping out of a tree and he showed her the burn mark on the inside of his wrist that he’d got as a kid from ‘messing with cakes that didn’t concern him’. He wished he had a bigger injury to show her, especially when she offered him her clavicle, got him to run a finger along the bone, feel the small ridge where it had healed.
‘I’d like to open a tart shop with you,’ he said, skating his fingers across her throat. ‘You with the fruit, me with the pastry.’ He’d meant it to be lightly said, a joke, but he could see it all of a sudden, like it had already happened. He opened his mouth to test a shop name, Amy’s Fruit Pies, could see it in yellow lettering on black, could hear the sound of their own shop bell, but she stood up with her still damp hair in a pile on her head. She looked feral, like she’d just stepped out of the bush, her canines stood out against her bottom lip.
‘Anyway,’ she said, brushing dirt from the seat of her dress. ‘I’d get fat from all those cakes.’ He held his hand where it was, pretending she was still next to him. With uncharacteristic delicacy she found a bit of wrapper in her pocket and neatly stuck her chewing gum into it, where she folded it over on itself. She looked at him and smiled brightly.
‘I don’t think you’re the type to get fat,’ he said and she laughed loudly, but she turned away from him, looking for somewhere to put her gum.
‘I’m going away soon,’ she said, tucking her dress underneath her and sitting down again. He felt something dangerous creeping behind him.
‘How soon? Where?’ He kept his voice quiet.
‘Dad reckons I need a finishing school. I’m off up to Brisbane. To get finished.’
‘How long will that take?’
She lay back again with her eyes closed, her arms all over the place about her head, her drying hair spread like syrup. ‘It takes as long as it takes.’
He saw that he was not allowed to ask anything else, so instead he touched her hair at the ends where it was cold and soft. She opened one eye and smiled at him, a big wide smile that was sticky at its edges. She rolled over and pushed him down into the bark-smelling grass of the creek bank.
His father decided one day to reclaim the kitchen and Leon bit his lower lip watching him move things about, making things different. He was drunk and his hands trembled when he poured the flour, he banged thickly into the sideboard with his hip. Leon’s mother looked like she’d been holding her breath. They made a very basic bread, working in silence, but not long after they’d started someone came in needing a wedding cake, and needing it quickly. The dog had got into the first one. His father set to baking straight away without making notes, or asking for any particulars. Leon didn’t ask why, he just followed instructions, which were quiet and few. His father didn’t sift the flour, or weigh anything. Leon saw half an eggshell crushed heavily into the lumpen batter. Where normally his father would have divided the mixture between four or even five round tins to stack up on each other, he scraped the lot into one large square loaf tin, usually reserved only for Heavy Date Tractor Cake, and put it straight into a cold oven without checking the time or weighing it.
After an hour he took it out again and dropped it on the side with a bang. There would be no decorations. ‘It’s enough that we have flour,’ he said, when Leon asked. His father went to the pub, leaving the cake steaming on the counter. Feeling like a traitor Leon pushed a skewer carefully into the guts of the cake. It came out yellow with unmixed eggs.
His mother stood in front of the cake and wrung her hands, patted down her hair.
Leon started from scratch. He made an orange and poppy-seed cake, five tiers tall. He painted the whole thing in peach jam before applying a thin royal icing finish. On to the clean sheet of white, he painted stalked clementines and ivy. He made two pairs of figurines and chose the best, the most dignified beautiful couple. The spare couple lost because the bride shifted a little to one side, one hip higher than the other. There was something sarcastic about her smile and, if he was honest, he liked her too much to give her away. Perhaps, objectively, her breasts were a hair too large, her bottom too high and round. Perhaps there was something of Amy Blackwell about her. When the cake was collected, without his father having seen it, no one spotted the difference. His mother put a hand on Leon’s shoulder but said nothing.
He had come to the fruit shop with a list of reasons she could give to her parents, but when he started talking she popped her chewing gum, sucked of all flavour but holding the warmth of the inside of her mouth, into his and it shocked him into silence. An elderly woman stared at the two of them, and Amy smiled and stared back until the woman looked away.
‘There’s no point,’ she whispered, ‘it’s paid for now anyway. Besides, it means I get away from them.’ She touched his cheek and the old woman cleared her throat. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Amy loudly, standing up tall behind the counter, and the old woman left the shop in a flurry of shopping bags and disgust. Amy rolled her eyes. ‘Well, I’ll be hearing about that later.’ She smiled at Leon, who could only think that she was leaving.
And soon after, she was gone as simply as she had arrived in the classroom, her finger held up against the sheet of paper. A brown-paper bag holding two peaches that were just on the turn, with the smudged and stained note.
See you when I’m finished x
He felt a wind at his back and turned in time to see nothing at all. Something dragged at his insides, low in his chest, and he took the train to Waterfall and thumbed down to the beach. The weather was filth and no one fished from the rocks. The dark lines made by the creek on the sand looked scummy, it could have been sewage, and a wind picked up loose sand and hurled it at the backs of his legs. There was a weight of disgust on his chest.
After the wedding-cake episode his father stayed mainly in his room, ducking out to the pub regularly for another bottle.
His mother’s hair was back in its bun. ‘Going to town,’ she announced one morning. ‘Get a hairdo, have a bit of mummy fun. You’ll be alright, chicken?’
He nodded and smiled, wondering what exactly she meant, seeing as he ran the shop alone as it was. Her face was pale and so he tried not to look annoyed. The bell rang with her departure.
Not long afterwards his father came down the stairs and made for the door. ‘There’s some things I need to get done today,’ he said, wrapping half a loaf of breakfast bread in a tea towel and putting it in a paper bag.
‘I made some croissants, if you’d like one,’ Leon offered.
‘Bread is good enough. Thank you. Must get going now. Have a good day.’
‘You too.’
He waited until his father had gone out of the door and disappeared round the corner, before jumping the counter and turning the shop sign to closed. He locked up and ran down the street after him, his feet slapping hard on the bitumen. He followed at a distance and was led all over the suburbs. They circled every block of Parramatta, leaving no road uncrossed. They went down every alleyway and under every tunnel, over every bridge. A few times his father went into cul-de-sacs and Leon had to wait anxiously behind a bush for him to come out again, always with his head down, so that he could have stood right in front of him and he wouldn’t have noticed. Finally, with the sun way over west, they came to the train station, which was, on a straight walk, only ten minutes from the shop.
For the first time his father raised his head. He sat on a bench on the platform. Trains entered and left the station but his father’s only movement was to take a hip flask out of his pocket and bring it again and again to his mouth. People were met and seen off, they crowded the platform, then left it and crowded it again. The loudspeaker announced trains to Waterfall, Green Point, Central. People were met and kissed, were waved off, left with luggage, left with nothing. People waited and ate chips, smoked cigarettes, drank milk drinks and left all the smells behind when they went. In the middle of it all sat his father on a red bench, looking straight ahead, bread tucked safely into the crook of his arm, fingers pressed white on his flask. Leon left him there and walked home. All the way he felt something following, but each time he turned there was nothing to see.
He wondered what to say to his mother. When his father came in, he sat at the kitchen table with a newspaper that looked fished out of a bin. He unfolded it in front of him and did not turn the pages, but stared hard at it, drinking his way steadily through a bottle of sweet sherry. Leon kneaded dough for the next morning’s bread and didn’t know what it meant. His mother came home and she had a new hairdo, shorter with a wave over one eye. She wore lipstick and a camel wool dress, even in the heat.
‘You look pretty, Maureen,’ his father said, looking up for the first time from his paper. His mother glowed like she’d won the thirty-dollar lotto.
In the mornings, with the sun bright in the kitchen, the place looked dark, but he knew it was not. It was like he’d been in the sun too long and burnt his eyes. His chest throbbed and his stomach felt tight; something sat on his ribs, peering down and breathing foully in his face.
He kissed a girl behind the boat shed at the harbour and he felt it die a small bit. But she was not Amy, and she took his hands from her breasts and straightened her handbag and her hair with one hand. He walked home alone, feeling the terrible thing rolling over and dragging itself after him in the dark.
That night he woke to his mother pulling on his sleeve. She put a finger to her lips and motioned for them to get under the bed. She’s gone mad, thought Leon, but he did it anyway because she looked scared.
‘What are we doing?’ he whispered close to her ear.
‘It’s not good to wake them up when they sleepwalk,’ she said and on the landing the floor creaked. The whites of her eyes shone in the dark and Leon saw the naked feet of his father pace slowly round the room. The air under the bed was thick and sweet. The feet moved close to the bed and Leon wondered if they were found, and then he saw that on his father’s right foot the two smallest toes were missing. What was left was ugly grey skin. The feet receded and left the room, and they slept there under the bed. In the morning his mother made pancakes and his father sat silently at the breakfast table.
‘At least he’s getting out of the house, chicken,’ his mother said to him as they watched his father lope down the street, away from them, his towelled bread held tightly to his body. He would go out until lunchtime and then come back, so that his mother could run her fingers through his hair, straighten his collar and sit him down to a sandwich or a piece of cake. After lunch he would go out again, mumbling something about looking for work, but the work was never found, and with Leon running the place they had no need of extra money anyway. When his father returned he’d be wobbly and thick-mouthed, looking at his tea as though it were dangerous, picking and sorting through the food rather than eating it. Then the routine became worn and thin in the middle so that he returned later and later for lunch, glassy-eyed and drunk, and then not at all, only for supper, when he would be anxiously and darkly stared at by his wife, and he’d look at the floor, his eyes as wide as they could open, his breath hard in the back of his throat. Those nights he had to be herded to bed by Leon’s mother and she said quietly, ‘hup, hup,’ as they climbed the stairs. Leon watched out of the corner of his eye as his mother touched his father’s face, only to have him flinch away; then her sad look made him pat her hand, but quickly like she would burn him.
Leon bought a used Holden off a mechanic in town and parked it proudly outside the shop. His mother frowned at it. ‘It’s ugly in brown, chicken,’ she said, but she took it to visit a friend in Dorrigo whom she had never visited before, or mentioned. She left with a larger suitcase than she needed and she kissed them both more than was necessary, her eyes frantic and sad. The bad thing hunkered down in Leon’s guts and the shop seemed so dark that at times he had to find his way around the kitchen by touch.
His father stopped coming home for supper. His mother came back from her break in Dorrigo and she seemed to have made up her mind to fill up the silence in the house.
‘Mrs Shannon’s pregnant again.’
‘How about a walk just the two of us?’
‘How about a sandwich?’
‘Glass of tea?’
But the quiet answers from his father stopped. His mother tried cooking exotic meals; curried fish, pork in aspic. Anything with meat in it was not eaten and anything that was eaten had no effect on his father’s expression. He started to drink beer alongside his wine. She showed him photographs that she thought might interest him, cut-out from the newspaper – Marilyn Monroe, an elephant swimming, a huge shark washed up on the northern beaches – but he would not look. He stopped lifting his head when she came into the room. He would not look at Leon’s mother, but sometimes Leon would catch him staring at him, as if they had never met before, and he would have to leave the room, get into the kitchen and lose himself in a cake.
Leon followed his father again and this time his route to the train station had extended. It took them until dark to get there, going through West Parramatta, every street, into Rydalmere and through the subway, always with the same heavy steady stride, with no breaks, apart from once when his father disappeared into a public convenience, but Leon couldn’t be sure if he had used it or just walked in and out of each cubicle. It seemed his father was taking a giant run-up at something, like he might try to jump over the harbour.
One day he did not come back from the train station. He was not back that night and he didn’t turn up in the morning. Leon’s mother sat around in her housecoat and slippers. She drank sweet tea and stared at the ceiling as if her eyes were full of liquid and she had to keep them tilted upwards so as not to spill any.
Leon sold bread in the usual way. He watched his mother out of the corner of his eye. He tried putting his arms round her but she waved him off, then pulled him back and pushed him away again. It wasn’t till the end of the week that he saw that the sugar figurines of his parents were gone. His mother saw him looking at the space and smiled feebly. ‘He’s always been a fragile man, even before the war. We propped each other up.’ She held her face in her hands and was silent a long while. ‘I’m sorry, my chicken,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed him so much and he wasn’t even gone.’
He didn’t know where to put the look she gave him.