Dark Fires Shall Burn

by Anna Westbrook

  ‘Hey Frannie. Where’s your pa?’ His hand pulled away, quick tugs in his lap. ‘You’re just like your mother. Aren’t you?’ His top lip had peeled back dryly, exposing his teeth. ‘Come here.’ He had beckoned to her that one afternoon, in the still quiet.

  Silly! Frances chides herself. What is she, a baby? The memory of his sweating moustache makes her throat clench, but she is not supposed to think of it. She smoothes her cardigan and fixes the bow of the ribbon in her plait and clambers further up the tree. Six or eight feet off the ground, she looks about her. The streetlamps of Lennox Street throw a glimmer into the park, but may as well be far-off lighthouses. The other trees cramp in like old wives whispering, keeping secrets from her. Dryads, she thinks with a shiver. Witches. The boys in her neighbourhood tell stories of a crowd of Banksia Men who gather in the graveyard to see the Devil. That there’s a crack in the side of a tomb beneath a tree, and within it a staircase that descends to the land of the dead.

  ‘Nancy!’ she shouts, peering from between branches. ‘Nancy? Come on now, come out. Hurry up, it’s almost dark.’

  Bad things happen in the graveyard after dark, everyone knows: Yankee soldiers fooling around with girls, tramps in punch-ups where men wager on which one can hammer the other near to death bare-fisted. Some man even died: she’d heard they’d found him the next morning, face beaten in, covered in his own sick. Sometime, early on in the war, she’d heard the boys’ talk about a dog’s head found near the gate, stuck on a post. People said it was a warning, but against what and directed at whom no one seemed to know. They never found the rest of the dog.

  If Nancy doesn’t show up soon, she’ll have to go home alone.

  ‘Nancy! I give up!’ she gives a final shout.

  And finally she hears a rustle, and then her name called exultantly, and sees her friend’s ginger head emerge, vulpine, from the scrub.

  ‘I won! You lost, ha ha. I won!’ Nancy calls, and Frances shimmies down the trunk, light-headed with relief.

  TWO

  Under an old Moreton Bay, Templeton tilts his chin and lets the smoke leak from his mouth. Rain outfoxes the canopy of the tree and rolls down the back of his neck to pool in the deep clavicular basins of the tree roots. He breathes in the smell of it with the last drag of his cigarette.

  He takes another from his pack; grubby fingernails flick a spent match. He tears out half a dozen from the book before a damned one lights. Sheets of rain glance off the vitreous harbour, and men scramble to tie the lines on their fishing boats. Cursing, they grab at tarred ropes thick as their arms.

  His body raked diagonal against the gale, Templeton hunches against the tree and sucks on the limp cigarette. At least he isn’t out there copping a full face of spray. The rain has dug in, and the city will be sopping as the day grinds out. Soon the men will take to the pubs, quickly spending their shillings before six o’clock. Annie will be on her way home, dry, most likely taking advantage of some keen bloke’s umbrella. Glebe Point is far enough from his sister to do as he pleases.

  ‘Get out from under our feet and go flog the papers,’ Annie had told him that morning. ‘If you want your tea, why don’t you go and earn a bob for once? A bit of honest work. Ha!’ She laughed at her own joke. ‘Do you good.’

  The girls were up early, dressing for the stores. Annie had wriggled into her good dress: admiral blue, with white piping and a wide bib collar. ‘Help me with this, would you?’ She looked from Dot to Sally. ‘Come on, hurry up! One of you.’ Her arms were twisted behind her, plucking at the tiny buttons. Catching herself in the mirror, she frowned and pulled a stray roller from her hair. Templeton caught her gaze in the glass. Eyes that snared blokes easy as a cat takes a mouse. They narrowed when she caught him looking. She broadened her lips with pencil and dabbed powder on her nose, skin red and dry from last night’s grog. ‘I’m so blotchy I look like a Dalmatian.’

  ‘You can’t see it.’ Sally squinted at her in the mirror. ‘Put a bit more slap on.’

  ‘I’ve got bags under my eyes the size of plums.’

  ‘But I want to come with you,’ Templeton demanded. ‘Where are you going anyway? David Jones? Be careful. We don’t want the coppers round.’

  ‘Stand still, Sal.’ Dot straightened Sally’s blouse and moved to her hairpins.

  ‘Templeton keeps banging into me,’ Sally complained. She pouted into the mirror, admiring the angle of her smooth jaw and long neck.

  ‘Well, just pinch him then,’ Annie advised. ‘Lucky, get out of the way. Unless you want some of this?’ She pointed the lip pencil at him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you going to do, darling — get a dress on and stand lookout?’ Dot teased him.

  ‘No one’d know the difference,’ said Annie with an abrupt smile.

  ‘Annie,’ he complained, face heating. She went for the soft skin under his ribs and twisted. ‘Ow! Stop it.’ He slapped her hand. ‘Are you going into town?’ He was still talking as the girls hustled to the door, and he was bundled out. ‘Are you catching the tram? David Jones? You’re going to David Jones, aren’t you? I knew it!’

  ‘Lucky, I’m not fooling.’ Annie turned. In the sunlight he could see the powder caught in the lines that fanned from her eyes; the only thing about her that looked old, her eyes — and her hands, and she raised one to him. ‘I’ll give it to you. Don’t try me.’ He could suddenly see in her the stamp of their mother, with her heavier brow and deeper-set eyes.

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘You’ll attract attention, that’s why.’

  ‘Here’s a shilling. Do not get into trouble.’ Dot patted him on the cheek. He coloured at the touch of her fingers on the fair, downy hair that had sprung up in the last weeks. Not quite enough yet to shave; he had been waiting for someone to tease him. But Dot only smiled and tossed him the coin, along with their salute. He rubbed the raised profile of the king’s head, solid and safe in his pocket.

  ‘Hell’s bells. Get away with you,’ Annie said and pushed him off the curb, smack into an iceman plodding up the gutter. The man reeled, his shoulder-load of ice slipping off the hessian sackcloth and fracturing into pieces on the ground.

  ‘Sorry,’ Templeton said, palms up, stepping backwards, the frozen rubble exploding pleasingly underfoot.

  ‘Watch where you’re going, you little bastard! Are you going to pay for that?’

  He dodged and ran, hearing the girls’ laughter fading behind him. Then he was on the tram to Glebe, picturing his sister and Dot and Sally in the ladies department, pulling one over. Annie holding her hands clasped so the holes in her gloves couldn’t be seen, gliding in, her face serene, like Daddy owned a sheep station. He knew their game: stockings and ribbons mostly, easy to hide, easy to sell on. And the occasional luxury, or a fancy hat just for sport. Annie liked the ones with the ostrich feathers, the hardest to smuggle.

  ‘Where do you hide a hat?’ he asked once.

  ‘I’ve got my ways,’ Annie replied, fluttering her fingers like a magician’s assistant.

  ‘What’s an ostrich?’ Sally posed with the hat, flopping plumage over one eye.

  ‘It’s a big parrot,’ Templeton answered.

  ‘No it’s not, you pair of dolts!’ Dot said. ‘It is like an emu, only from Africa. Big.’ She mimed holding reins with a cock-eyed smile. ‘You can ride it like a horse.’

  ‘Surely not. Is that right, Annie?’ asked Sally. ‘Africa?’

  ‘Darned if I know,’ Annie said, and spat on her palm to rub a spot on the hat brim.

  Templeton imagined Annie seducing the salesman, sashaying and twirling, asking this and that and flashing all kinds of charm while the other girls snuck in and put their deep-pocketed dustcoats to use. She always went straight for the men; the women wised up too quickly. And the salesmen were old blokes, or fellows with a finger off or a leg brace or thick, Coke-bottle sp
ectacles. Marks so easy he almost felt sorry for them. ‘Just the codgers, the lame and the sissies left at David Jones,’ Annie liked to say. ‘And even the best of them go to the VDC for three square meals and five bob a day.’

  He knew Annie would cuff him for shirking, for bringing no coin home for the pot, but all he was thinking of was the breeze peeling off the harbour and salting his nostrils. A milk van splashed through the street, flecking passers-by with water. He hated the job at Railway Square selling papers, but more than that he hated the flat grey eyes of the paperboys, known by who their fathers were — Smiths, McKenzies, Ryans. They were younger versions with the same attitudes. They stole his papers come end of day, and his takings too, if they felt like it, and stomped him for good measure. They teased him for his name, Templeton, his mother’s family name. Luckett meant nothing to them — and why should it? He was no one.

  There would be no money to be made on a day like this anyway, when the heavens were open. Annie could go to hell.

  Down at Glebe he likes to watch the oystermen leaning in to the tides’ comings and goings, the slow, quiet rhythm. He buys smokes and hangs about whenever he can get away, and no one pays him mind. The blokes often wave as he pets the mutts that gang the dock. On days he has a sandwich he throws the dogs the torn-up crusts and takes hold of their scruffs and breathes in their comforting stink. Each new morning brings a day so stuffed with hours it makes him churn inside at how to fill them.

  The wind picks up now over the Point and he hears a dog bark and then yelp. The men who tied their boats head off for a beer, and soon there is not a soul on the street, and screen doors grizzle loosely on their hinges behind him on Northcote Road. He chews on the sour end of his cigarette. A baby squalls along with the weather and the cry pricks a memory in him: the blood on the bed, the taste of muddy dam water in his mouth, the sheet with the hem of blue daisies ruined. He digs his nails into his palms, forming scallops.

  Making his way to the harbour’s edge, Templeton slings his cigarette butt into the bobbing crates and fish guts. The filmy rainbow of diesel fuel on top of the water greases the seawall.

  It is almost seven by the time he turns on to King Street from City Road, and his hunger nettles him. What he wouldn’t give for a mixed grill or a plate of steak and eggs, but he is as like to find a bob in his pocket as a diamond. Maybe the girls will have some cherry brandy.

  ‘Oi.’ He hears Dot’s raspy shout as he nears the station. ‘Where you been, sugar?’

  ‘Annie’s gonna have your guts for garters, Lucky,’ Sally calls.

  ‘Aww, have off it, why don’t you?’ He hates it when they call him Lucky. A name his sister made up for him that time long ago when he had locked himself out of the house and got wedged halfway through the window — she had found him and laughed until she’d doubled over, and ‘Lucky’ had stuck ever since.

  Dot and Sally are sitting on the wall they’re not supposed to, outside Newtown station. Last time the police had seen them there, the constable told them to eff off or how’d they like a night in the cells?

  ‘Lookin’ handsome tonight.’ Sally shoves two fingers in her mouth and whistles.

  He smacks his cheek and drops his jaw in mock horror at her audacity. ‘Too handsome for the likes of you.’

  Templeton had met Sally at Central Station the day he and Annie arrived in Sydney, exhausted. She tried to walk off with Templeton’s suitcase, pretending she thought it was hers, until Annie chased her down and pulled her hair to get it back. Sally had pitched such a virtuoso performance that Annie’s anger was diluted by admiration, and she asked Sally where she was staying the night. The three of them walked away from the railway building together. Then the air-raid sirens went off and they were thrown into blackout. Furious men honked their horns, trying to avoid collisions while driving without their headlights.

  ‘Come on! Down here.’ Annie grabbed their hands and hurried to join a stream of people stepping down some dark stairs into a darker hole.

  They spent that night in a shelter dug from soil and sandstone that smelled of tinned beef and sweaty palms and turpentine. ‘Dominoes, anyone?’ a man with a low-slung gut and wide, womanish hips had proposed at one point. They ignored him.

  Sally fished some wilted sandwiches out of her knapsack, thick with margarine and little else. She offered them to Annie and Templeton without a word. The wax paper wrapping crunched loudly as they took unenthusiastic bites. Templeton, imagining the end of a Jap bayonet or being blasted to pieces by a bomb, his mind febrile from the newspaper pictures of flattened, smoking London, ate little. Turn off the bloody lights! Tojo can see them in Tokyo! exclaimed a cardboard sign glued to the wall.

  Sally inserted her hand into the cup of Templeton’s palm, and they fit together tidily, like a lap joint. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, reading his thoughts. ‘At least it’s likely to be quick.’

  In the warm, unexploded morning they had found a place to stay, and that had lasted a few months, and then found another place, and another after that. Moving on after the money ran out and when they couldn’t hock enough to cover rent; moving often in the wee hours, a trio of rats in swift silence, before the landlord knew what was what. Now they shared Lennox Street with Dot, and no one could remember how that came to be. One day she was just there and they couldn’t imagine it otherwise.

  Dot chuckles at Templeton’s attempt to walk past, ignoring them. ‘Here. Drink up.’ She offers him the advocaat liqueur she’s been swigging.

  He checks the street. The cops are sure to be along now. He takes it and sips quickly while looking over his shoulder. The sweetness paints his tongue as he passes the bottle to Sally.

  Sally hands it back to Dot, who takes a long drink. Dot never wears the powders the rest of Annie’s friends fancy. Just kohl. Her soot-rimmed eyes look bottomless, as if you could throw pennies in them and never hear a plink. She keeps her curly hair unfashionably short, lacquered, like the women in the old silent films. Templeton thinks she is handsome, and she is, in a way. She smokes constantly, her hands using the burning tip of the cigarette like a blackboard pointer. A reffo — she’d gotten out before you couldn’t, when Chamberlain had still been banging on about peace in our time. Well, he’d feel a right ass now, wouldn’t he.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Dot asks him. ‘Annie went by the Square in the afternoon and you weren’t there. The boys, they hadn't seen you.’

  He could barely hear her accent now, save a faint corrosion on some vowels. He’d seen Jews up Oxford Street, in Bondi Junction and Bellevue Hill, and heard their peculiar language. ‘Yiddish is what you get if you leave German out in the sun and let it melt,’ Dot had told him once. But it sounded more like rust to him, more like rust than thaw.

  ‘Yeah?’ He shifts from foot to foot. ‘So what? I don’t care. What’s Annie gunna do? I’m not scared of her.’ His big toe is starting to push a hole through one boot, the leather eyelid-thin.

  ‘She wanted to send Jackie out after you,’ says Dot.

  ‘I don’t see why.’ Templeton puts on a show of bravery, although his stomach turns at the thought. ‘The Sunday papers aren’t even worth the trouble! You three can make ten times that in a day. Besides, it was cats and dogs.’ He tips his hat at the sky.

  ‘It’s not about that,’ Dot begins sternly.

  ‘It’s about earning your keep.’ Sally draws out the word keep with a smack of her lips. She sucks on the advocaat bottle and liquid escapes down her chin. She has thick eyebrows and tiny dimples, and when she smiles her bottom lip blooms like a moist peach. She goes to light a cigarette.

  ‘Here, give us some more!’ Templeton grabs the liqueur while she’s fishing for her matches. He never used to get a taste of the good bootlegged stuff, during the war. Just what would make you go blind, they said, but he drank it anyway. Annie and Dot kept themselves in the know as to who had what, while he and Sally usually made d
o with four-penny dark, or foul Barbera gutrot, or the Red Ned from Lorenzini’s down on Elizabeth Street — a raw wine flogged to the rich, dumb Yanks. If you could call it wine. The war grog was normally so bulled you might as well neck a drunk’s piss, Annie liked to say.

  ‘Where’d you disappear to anyway?’ Sally asks with her cigarette dangling off her lip. ‘You got a girl or something?’

  ‘Nah.’ He pushes her but she jumps off the wall, crashing into him, hands cocked for tickling.

  ‘I’m gonna get you,’ she says, grabbing his face and kissing him hard on the cheek with a wet smack.

  ‘Get offa me!’ And then he stops, gasping for air. Two policemen are walking down the road, beaded on them, quickening pace.

  ‘Szybko.’ Dot sees the cops too and propels them across the road by their elbows. ‘Quick!’

  Once they are out of sight, Templeton drops behind Dot and Sally. He watches the way they swish, hips swaying figure eights, heels higher than decent.

  ‘Looking for company for the night, love?’ Sally asks a soldier loitering out the front of the Duke of Edinburgh. His mouth splits merrily, revealing missing front teeth. The hotels loose the punters out at six on the dot like the surge from a storm drain after a downpour.

  ‘Aw, give it a rest, Sal.’ Dot snatches her arm and drags her away before the bloke can respond. ‘Let’s pack it in for the night, yes? Let’s go home and drink.’

  ‘Oh, alright. I suppose we already made a bit between us.’ As they walk, Sal reaches into her blouse, between her breasts, and pulls out a drawstring velvet bag, and from it a clutch of coins and bills.

  Templeton cocks his head. ‘Go on, lend us a couple of bob.’

  Sally raises the loot above her head and twirls. ‘Come and get it.’

  ‘Well, don’t wave it around, at least.’ He feints and then jumps, snatching it from her, and stuffs the money back down her top. ‘You’ll have us knocked over in a second. Christ. What’s the matter with you?’