Dark Fires Shall Burn

by Anna Westbrook

  The last time she had tried to tell Frances about Lily — how sometimes when Nancy was alone at night in her room, she would wish for Lily and she would come — Frances stared at Nancy as if she were a shrunken head from the cannibals or had sprouted a tail like P.T. Barnum’s ‘Feejee’ mermaid.

  Lily used to be around more, after it happened. They had been at Ash Wednesday Mass that morning before they received the telegram.

  Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return. She kept touching her forehead to check her cross was still there and had smeared it. ‘Keep going and you’ll have a swastika,’ her mother had joked. Nancy had not thought that funny at all.

  After mass they were sitting in the kitchen with a lunch of cold curried eggs, her least favourite, and instead of eating she had been chattering on about The Wind in the Willows when the knock came. Her mother opened the door and took the telegram from the squeamish boy’s hand, looked it over, and then ripped it into smaller and smaller pieces, standing at the sink with her back turned. Nancy, unable to get a word from her, had run for Mrs Roberts next door.

  Aunt Jo — well, great aunt, really — had come from Tuggeranong so she could keep an eye on the family. Jo was Nancy’s father’s aunt, and she felt the duty, having mostly raised him, his mother having died a long while ago in Perth. Kate mostly avoided her: often whole days went by without her stirring from the darkened bedroom, dampening the pillows, wearing only her kimono, not eating and not talking. In contrast, Aunt Jo was a muscular, always active woman, who was ‘made of sterner stuff’, as she liked to remind Nancy. She moved busily around the house, often quoting Shakespeare and telling Kate to screw her courage to the sticking place.

  Nancy gives the backgammon tiles another go-round before the candle gutters and goes out and she’s sitting in the dark. Cold fingers pass across her. Answer me this, Lily says, her voice silvery, slippery.

  ‘No.’ Nancy shivers. ‘I don’t want to play now. Why didn’t you come

  before?’

  What lives without a body, hears without ears, speaks without a mouth, to which the air alone gives birth? Lily continues, dauntless.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nancy replies, and turns on her belly and clamps the pillow over her head.

  Think on it. Hears without ears, speaks with no mouth …

  ‘I don’t know. A ghost?’ Her voice is swallowed by the pillow.

  Wrong! Stupid! Lily crows. Guess again.

  ‘No.’

  Guess again, Lily insists.

  ‘God?’

  That answer’s even thicker than the last. Lily cackles meanly.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  Suit yourself.

  Car headlights turning into the street rake the room through the window, and Lily’s shadow breaks like a dozen rabbits gone to ground.

  Nancy wakes from a sleep and realises she has not eaten. ‘Mum?’ she calls out, to no answer.

  The house is dark. ‘Mum?’ she calls again. ‘Aunt Jo?’ she tries reluctantly, but there is still no reply.

  She goes downstairs to the kitchen. It is approaching midnight, the clock tells her, and she has a neglected ache in her belly from missing tea. No one has been to the store — no one has really gone since Aunt Jo had the fall a few weeks ago and twisted her back.

  The kitchen is empty except for a chop that Mrs Roberts had brought over three days ago, still wrapped in butcher’s paper on the bench, wearing a shawl of ants.

  Nancy walks down the corridor and opens the doors to the sitting room. The fire in the hearth has dwindled down to a glowing scree. A cigarette butt perches on a trunk of ash in a bowl, next to a matchbook and a tumbler with a veneer of whisky remaining. At the foot of the bookshelf, her mother lies on her back. Nancy gets down on her knees. She lowers her ear close to her mother’s lips, straining to hear her breath.

  ‘What on earth!’ Kate’s eyes suddenly widen at Nancy’s levitating face.

  ‘Uh — sorry!’ Nancy leaps up. ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ Kate grapples with the floor, trying to drag herself into a sitting position. She takes Nancy by the shoulders and briskly shakes her. ‘I’m alright, you goose. Is that what you needed to know? Did you think I’d gone and done myself in?’ She laughs, but it comes out more like a bark.

  Nancy, not knowing what to say, mumbles, ‘No.’

  ‘Well, not quite yet, my love.’ She ignites a cigarette and draws her kimono around her. ‘I’m still in the land of the living,’ she says in an affected, ghostly voice and raises her hand to her face, undulating her fingers like a spiritualist. ‘Ooooooooh.’

  Without warning, Nancy begins to cry. She sags to the floor, gripping her mother’s thighs, leaving the impression of her tear-splattered face like the shroud of Turin on the silk of her mother’s gown. She cannot remember ever holding her like this, but all at once it is too much. Her mother lifts her chin with her long fingers and stares at her, bewildered. ‘What is it, biscuit?’ she asks, trying to sound soothing. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Nancy cannot form a sentence — everything is wrong! Lily is back. And her mother hasn’t called her ‘biscuit’ since she was a bairn.

  ‘Oh goodness me, how you look like John,’ she says faintly, reaching for and gripping Nancy’s shirt collar. ‘While you’re alive your father will never be dead. You have his eyes, his jaw.’

  Nancy tries to disengage her mother’s stubborn fingers from her face. Talk like this makes her itch. She thinks about him too; he was her father, not that her mother seems to remember she might miss him. Anything will set her off sometimes: a particular teacup in the cabinet, a song on the wireless, the kookaburra that sometimes comes down into the yard because her father once gave it some chicken giblets. Such seemingly small things make her mother rage or cry or, worst of all, turn mute for hours. The kookaburra sometimes perches, calling for food, and her mother runs out, hysterical: ‘Shoo it away, shoo it away, Nancy. I can’t bear it!’

  ‘I might have another. Get me one, would you, darling?’

  Nancy, with resigned obedience, picks up the tumbler and takes it to the kitchen. She stares at the perfect lipstick print on the rim of the glass for several long minutes. She wonders why her mother bothered wearing it today when there is no one to see.

  When Nancy returns, her mother is snoring quietly. She puts the glass down.

  Back in the kitchen, Nancy retches a little as she unwraps the chop. She can’t even feed it to Pinky. Still, there are powdered eggs in the cupboard, and she spreads what is left of the margarine onto some stale bread. She turns the stove and gas sputters to life. Lighting a match, she holds it to the ring, which catches aflame with a potent whoof. There is some Bovril that she heats, mixing it gingerly with her finger — hot, hot — and when it’s ready, she drinks it sitting down on the floor. All the cutlery in the house lies in a fetid tub of water, cold beneath a film of soap.

  The kitchen light is dim, so she sits in the semi-darkness and forces the miserable meal down her throat. She can hear the mice scratching in the walls, and what may be Pinky’s claws clacking on the floorboards upstairs, and she imagines herself deep in the hull of a ship, its timbers sighing in the wind, and thinks of Jonah 2:3: You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me.

  SIX

  Frances does not notice Thomas’ cries, so consumed is she by thoughts of Kate Durand’s little talk yesterday and Nancy’s bloody scanties, and if that makes Nancy a woman then where does that leave her, until she is right at the front gate. Nancy wasn’t in school today, and Frances bet she got to stay home because of her ‘women troubles’.

  The garden fence is bashed in from two years ago when a Yank snub-nosed Chevrolet had taken the bend too hard and plowed it to the ground. She steps gingerly ove
r the recumbent palings and the thriving clump of dandelions that has grown between them.

  ‘Mum?’ she calls as she pushes open the unlatched door.

  She drops her bag in her bedroom, by the front door, and shuffles up the corridor towards the kitchen. Out through the kitchen is the back door, from which a paved passageway leads to the dunny and laundry in the yard. The floor they occupy has only three rooms, and they share the bog with a Greek family upstairs, a fact her mother hates. Everyone only found out they were Greeks because during the war the family told anyone who’d listen that they weren’t Italian, even putting up a sign in their shop window: We’re Greek.

  ‘I don’t care if they’re from Timbuktu! Greeks, Italians: wogs all the same. To think that those heathens will never get to meet God in heaven,’ her mother said. Frances had tried to tell her that she had seen crucifixes on their walls, beautiful ones made of silver, when she’d peeked in one day. ‘Not the right kind,’ her mother had replied. ‘They believe more in hocus pocus than they do in the Lord.’

  ‘Mum?’ she calls again, deeper into the house. No answer. Thomas is flushed as a beet and furious in his crib. She picks him up and shushes him, planting him on her hip. A strange sound emanates from her mother’s room.

  ‘Oh, Peggy.’ She can hear a man’s voice now, low and queer.

  ‘Mum?’ She tries again, softer. She nudges the door open.

  There on the stripped, sheetless mattress is her mother with her skirt and petticoat up around her waist, drawers pulled down. On top of her is Mr Langby, making little grunts of pleasure, snuffling at her mother’s neck like a hog at a trough. Frances gasps in surprise, smacking her hand over her mouth, nearly dropping the baby.

  ‘Christ!’ Mr Langby roars upon turning to see her, hurtling backwards, his trousers hobbling his ankles. He gropes for them, tottering, as if in some silent movie farce, except it is not funny and the look on her mother’s face is murderous.

  ‘Get out!’ Mrs Reed yells.

  Frances moves on pure instinct: she catapults out of the house and up the road, and runs on, hot-cheeked, barely noticing that she still carries Thomas, who is howling so much he looks near to asphyxiation.

  Far up along the railway line, Frances pauses to catch her breath. She sets her brother on the ground. He clenches his fists into tiny white cauliflowers. She slumps down by him on the side of the road, wiping her leaking nose along her forearm. She had not realised she was crying, and the breeze stings against her tears. The spire of St Joseph’s is visible from where she sits: she wonders if she should dump Thomas on the step and bang on the shuttered door, wailing for sanctuary, like in a romance. But they probably wouldn’t open up for a dirt-smeared schoolgirl and a baby.

  She looks over at Thomas, whose eyes are still half-moons of tears. Oh, did he howl for his country! Just for an instant she imagines putting her hands over his little mouth: she thinks of the swift, stiff silence seizing the tiny body. But a lady in Chippendale had killed a baby doing that only last year. The papers had called the woman a fiend and said she should hang. Frances’ mum would kill her if anything happened to Thomas.

  Her eyes shear the street for revelation. Suddenly she thinks of Ada, her mother’s cousin, barely ten minutes’ walk away. Frances scoops up Thomas, shushing him helplessly as he continues to bawl in her face. She shifts him onto her hip and cuts down the alley towards Ada’s.

  When she arrives she is wilted and exhausted, her hair loose from Thomas pulling on her braid.

  ‘What do you want?’ Ada serves up a face that could curdle milk. Grubby-mouthed little ones strain at Ada’s legs to spill out onto the street. Frances never could remember their names; sometimes she doubts that even Ada can.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ada,’ she says, thinking quickly. She hasn’t considered this part of the plan. ‘But Mum asks can you take Thomas for the night?’

  ‘What’s happened to you? What’s the matter with your mum?’ Ada stands firm and suspicious in the doorway.

  Frances holds Thomas under his chubby arms, offering him like an over-stuffed parcel. ‘She’s sick. Please!’

  Ada looks her up and down and sighs. ‘God Almighty. Well, come in then, and have some toast at least. Have you had your tea? You look scrawny as a stray. Hasn’t your mother been feeding you?’ Ada takes hold of Thomas and shushes him. The children push past her, jabbering and grasping at Frances, but she picks them off like burrs. Two have noses streaming snot, and one of the twins — she can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl, Trudie or Graham — has a nasty-looking purple lump on its head.

  ‘No. No, thank you. I’m alright.’ Frances says this last from over her shoulder. She is already heading off down the street, breaking into a run as soon as she is around the corner and out of sight. Ada is not worth the toast. She reaches King Street at the corner of Missenden Road and stops. She has nowhere to go. Sucking at her lower lip, she almost starts to cry again.

  ‘Where you going, little miss?’ One of two men in zoot suits shouts from across the street in a bunged-on Yank accent. ‘What’s wrong? You lost? We’ll take you home. Come on over here, sugar.’

  Their accents are rubbish — they are about as American as she is. Frances keeps her eyes bolted to her feet and begins to walk fast. If a girl fell for that, she was dumb as a bag of hair. One of the men hoots like a cartoon coyote. She swallows. Stop being a sissy, Frances Margaret.

  She can hear the men’s laughter fading as she hurries down her side of the street. She yearns to get off the road, but she daren’t go home or to Nancy’s, even though Mrs Durand had been so kind, despite her heavy-lidded eyes and liquor-dipped breath, despite — to Frances’ acute embarrassment — wearing the kimono that gaped a touch and allowed a lunar sliver of bosom to escape.

  The men are in the distance now; they’re not following her. She shuffles along the road more slowly.

  Frances had watched as Mrs Durand, Kate, had given Nancy the belt made of a kind of elastic pyjama cord tied to a towel like a baby’s nappy, the belt that catches her most secret blood. Frances had watched in disbelief as Kate held it between thumb and forefinger. Did women really have to wear this once a month, every month? Why hadn’t her mother ever told her? ‘Fasten it into your scanties and wash it out when it gets soiled,’ Kate told Nancy matter-of-factly.

  Frances wonders if men can smell it. Like dogs. It should be she, Frances, who got her women’s trouble first, not Nancy. Nancy is still a child, with her silly games and even sillier invisible friend: that ridiculous Lily. If it wasn’t so babyish there would be something queer about it. Nancy really should know better. Frances remembers Corinthians, her mother’s voice snaking through her head: ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child …’

  She thinks of gorgeous, laughing girls — the girls with black lines drawn straight down the tan flesh of their legs, which fool nobody that they’re stockings but still reek of glamour, even on melting summer nights when they warp and smear. She covets their Yank Catcher heels and their heady, swoony clouds of Evening In Paris. Nancy doesn’t understand. ‘I don’t see why you’re so keen on all those pictures of boring ladies’ dresses,’ Nancy had complained only last Tuesday when Frances had produced the new-season fashion catalogue from London, light-fingered from the handbag of a woman at church.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand, Nan,’ she had told her airily. She had a real, grown-up vision of herself in one of these dresses, sailing down the street like a swan, breaking every one of her mother’s mysterious rules: not to talk to the boys down at the brick pit, not to talk to soldiers, not to engage with the tram-men. The Americans sometimes hollered out to Frances from their Chevrolets and stretched their arms out, holding packets of chewing gum. A Negro in an ike jacket had once called her little lady. He’d given her a drag of his cigarette and told her about his Momma in Baltimore as she sat swinging her feet on th
e waist-high wall of the train station. The cigarette had made her feel queer: wobbly but stiff all at once, like a chicken in aspic.

  Frances had once overheard Mrs Roberts talking about a certain house on Myrtle Street that was known to entertain Negros. She had wondered if they all sat down and played Gin Rummy or Pontoon like her parents had before her mother found God again, when they used to entertain.

  One day, Frances was going to get her hair set in curls just like the woman with the red lips she had seen holding the Negro’s arm as they strolled down King Street. The woman flounced her hip out with each step, her shoulders back. Her lips were so red they looked like a beautiful wound. People stopped to watch them go by. Frances felt ashamed that the woman might have thought that her stare was like every other person’s, ugly and full of spleen, but it wasn’t. She wanted to be on her way to jitterbug at the Booker T. Washington too.

  What would it be like to kiss a coloured Yankee soldier, not just on the swarthy cheek but even on the lips, like Beatrice kissed Benedikt? The idea makes her quiver. She hopes the Yanks will still be here when she is a few years older so they can take her to the flicks every Friday night. What a sight she would be! She would startle all those old church biddies, yammering and licking their toad-mouths in the parish hall. Frances detested their inedible fruitcakes, their eggless recipes that always tasted like grease. She plotted her escape over margarine and corned-beef sandwiches, studying their liver spots and sun-ruined faces as they talked about the bride ships cramming the Quay, and the girls on them — some already with a baby — deserting ‘our boys’ for a glamorous life in Great Britain or the United States of America.

  And now Nancy was a woman before her, closer to adulthood than she was. It wasn’t fair. Is it a punishment for seeing what she saw Mr Langby doing last year? Or is it, darker and more secret still, because of that glistening new shame? She had discovered it a mere month ago when her mother instructed her to make sure her ‘down there’ was clean as a whistle. She’d blush to say it, but ever since then her ‘down there’ had been shinier than the windows in Mark Foy’s arcade.