After the Fire, a Still Small Voice - Couverture rigide

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 Collard’s 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 hadn’t 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 he’d 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, he’d 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, he’d 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 didn’t 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 couldn’t make it fit together he’d 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, he’d 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. Couldn’t have been more than a month after she was hanging up that sheet that they’d been driving in his dad’s old brown Holden when a truck hadn’t stopped at the intersection. When he woke up there was no more mum and no more old brown Holden.

It wasn’t difficult getting out of the rental agreement. He’d 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. He’d 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 hadn’t slept, he’d drunk from a three-quarters empty bottle of Old and he’d let himself think about Lucy then. The sick feeling of trying to make it all right. The endless meetings they’d had across the table, to see if there was a way round it. The months afterwards when he’d sweated if he dropped a plate, the look on her face. Careful, or I’m 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 she’d wanted him to.

He stopped the Ute and opened the door. Holding his hat on to his head, he stepped into the sound of cicadas that shrilled like pushbike bells from the cane. He slammed the door louder than he’d meant to and walked towards the shack. The smell of sweet ozone and the clump of his boots in the dust was alien. It was darker and smaller than he remembered. It tilted inwards a little like a sagging tent. He cleared his throat.

‘Hey!’ he called before reaching for the door. Inside it hadn’t changed, and it made his chest tight to see. There should have been broken windows, mess left by kids, dust and leaks, mould on the walls. But there was not. The shack had a feeling about it like it’d been waiting. There were no wildflowers in jars, it wasn’t swept, there wasn’t the sparkle of sand in the cracks of the floorboards, but the placement of things was just the same. It was like the last person there could have been his grommet self fifteen years ago and it made a warmth at the back of his throat. No one was there. There were no other belongings, just the old things that had lived there for ever. On a high shelf a grey elephant, a kewpie doll and a mother-of-pearl shell. The wedding-cake figurines of his parents and grandparents that had always stood on the telephone table, dustless inside their glass bell jar. There was
no telephone – he’d forgotten that. Sat on the stack of plastic chairs in the corner, a Father Christmas with a felt body and a rubber face. The wood-burning stove that had been put together a little wrong and now and again used to chug black smoke into the room, which would have his mother up and in the doorway coughing and flapping with a tea towel. He took a step inside and heard the familiar creak of the floor. The place wouldn’t recognise him this heavy or hairy. The sink was dry, with a sprinkling of dead flies upside-down in it. The beds were there too, a double and a rickety single all close together so that as a kid he’d lain awake, wide-eyed at the sound of his parents at night, wondering what is that and why are they doing it? A thin blue and white striped blanket covered his old bed, tucked at the feet in the way he hated, where you’d have to kick your way free, so your feet didn’t pin you down.

He dragged out the mattresses and afterwards he slung the bed frames in the back of the Ute. The idea of sleeping on either of them filled him with dread. The smell might be there, his mother’s hand cream, or the witch hazel his father used for aftershave, in the days before he stopped bothering. Later it was more of a flaying than grooming. There might be particles of their skin there, he might find a long blond hair and know it was not his. They were things that needed to be forgotten about, for starters.

 

“Haunting and brilliant.”
—San Francisco Chronicle (recommended reading)

"A superb first novel."
—Times (London)

"Just sometimes, a book is so complete, so compelling and potent, that you are fearful of breaking its hold. This is one . . . With awesome skill and whiplash wit, Evie Wyld knits together past and present, with tension building all the time. In Peter Carey and Tim Winton, Australia has produced two of the finest storytellers working today. On this evidence, Wyld can match them both."
—Daily Mail

"After the Fire, a Still Small Voice has the kind of dark shimmer that mesmerizes as it disturbs . . . What distinguishes Wyld is her incandescent empathy for her male characters and the things they are unable to say, the assurance with which she reaches for a rough-edged authenticity over the easy pleasures of lyricism."
—Vogue

"At last, in a world that shouts, a novel that doesn't need to. A revelation and a joy—wild, wise and wonderful."
—Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee 
“A mesmerising novel . . . This adroit examination of loss, lostness and trauma is the beginning of great things.”
— Independent
 
“An astonishingly assured debut . . . A stunning work from a brilliant new voice.”
—Esquire (UK)
 
“A jewel of a book . . . Will keep you reading past bedtime.”
—Grazia
 
"A terrifically self-assured debut . . . It's a cauterising, cleansing tale, told with muscular writing."
—Guardian

"Fiction writing at its best with characters so vividly drawn, they seem to literally leap off of the printed pages . . . An enticing debut novel."
—Tucson Citizen
 
"It's not often that I fall for a novel from the very first page, but the controlled and expressive opening to After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is utterly irresistible . . . It is a superb novel."
—Guardian.co.uk

"The searing descriptions of the changeable land and seascapes make this gritty, passionate novel stand out."
—Bookpage
 
"I loved it. Just stunningly good . . . It has a whole dark and brilliant life of its own. And Jesus, there's not a single false note in the whole book: it's totally convincing, and written with incredible toughness, sureness and maturity. A terrifyingly good debut."
—Peter Hobbs, author of The Short Day Dying
 
"A sensational debut, rich in literary fireworks and human drama. There are moments here that still the breath—all you can hear is your own heart beating."
—Christopher Kremmer, author of The Carpet Wars
 
"Evie Wyld has dual nationality [British and Australian] and with the publication of her first novel it is likely both countries will want to claim her as their own . . . A fine debut."
—Bookseller and Publisher (Australia)
 
"Ravishingly atmospheric and wisely compassionate . . . There's no doubt that Wyld is a writer of immense abilities and depth."
—Booklist
 
"At times startling, Wyld's book is ruminative and dramatic, with deep reserves of empathy colored by masculine rage and repression . . . The two narrative threads stay separate until the final pages, and, refreshingly, their connection isn't overplayed."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
 
"A brilliant, transporting novel of such warmth and stunning evocative language that I wanted to read it all over again. Evie Wyld has a deft way of capturing the light, the nature of the place, of the natives. This is a rich account of two men's lives, separated through time and their own inability to reach out. The two plots, which are two parts of a whole, are ambitious and held together with delicacy and skill. Time does funny things in the book as it would in the desert; it undoes things, rather like this book has done to me."
—Karen McLeod, author of In Search of the Missing Eyelash
 
"Evie Wyld's book is dark, intense and haunting. The descriptions of Australia's East Coast are vivid, the landscapes, the language, the settings, the feelings are real and palpable. Her prose reminded me of Patrick White's, her imagery of Les Murray and Judith Wright—like all these writers Wyld is both lyrical and tragic, uncompromising in her evocation of that sad, strange, complicated country. She belongs to a tradition of serious Australian literature that is now being taken as seriously as it deserves."
—Sophie Gee, author of The Scandal of the Season