Dark Fires Shall Burn

by Anna Westbrook

  It is already sliding towards ten on the clock tower and she has been walking for hours up and down the almost-empty King Street. She sidesteps a pool of frothy vomit outside the Shakespeare Hotel. A man watches her as he leans against the hotel wall, eating a meat pie. She can see gravy and morsels of mince clinging to his lip. His gaze follows her for yards. Her hands quiver, and there is a nervous but excited tremble to her stride. She thinks of seeing Nancy’s blood, scarlet on her scanties, and wonders when her own will come. Surely it will be soon.

  She wipes at her cheeks, dry now from her earlier tears. It was silly and childish to bawl on like that. Instead she remembers with fascinated horror the empurpled Mr Langby and his little potbelly jiggling below his shirttails and above his pale legs, shoes and socks still on. An involuntary giggle slips out. Mr Langby is nothing at all like Neptune in her schoolbook. Neptune: pelagic and supple, sliding around those slippery, salty mermaids without their clothes on. Although her mother is a far cry from a mermaid.

  The textbook gives her an idea: the school is a safe place to sleep the night. She can crawl in through the broken window near the infants’ building and sleep under her desk. By morning her mother might have forgiven her, if she’d had a scare that Frances might’ve run away for good. The storm must blow over. She turns to take the shortcut past St Stephen’s as the bell strikes ten.

  SEVEN

  It’s almost ten-thirty that night when Dot locks up Lennox Street, and the group walks towards King. They’re all together: Jackie and Annie; Sally in between Frank and Will, holding their hands; Templeton and Dot a few yards behind. Jackie and his boys have been laying low today apparently, although the difference between that and sleeping off their hangovers isn’t clear to Templeton.

  The men pass the liquor from Dot’s purse back and forth between them, their flask long emptied. Dot’s gaze, Templeton notices, is screwed to the back of Annie’s head. But Annie doesn’t look around. Jackie has an arm around Annie’s waist and steers her along amiably; she rests one white-gloved hand on the small of his back. All seems forgiven, for now. Templeton can feel Dot’s anger in the press of her fingers, curled around his upper arm. He begins a number of conversations with her in his head and aborts each one half-formed.

  Annie is wearing her new violet frock with jet beading, the one she nicked from David Jones, and a tiny, cream-coloured pillbox hat. He can see the trouble she has gone to with her make-up, concealing the bruise on her cheek.

  On a corner, he stops for a moment to strike a new match against the box, but it snaps off. He tries again.

  As the others enter Hordern Lane in front of him, there is a squeal of car wheels spinning hard against the asphalt. Then high beams flash on — the same sickly margarine yellow he recognises from the night before. There is a noise like slaughter in a piggery, and Templeton realises it is Sally screaming. His eyes follow her sightline. The glint of a barrel out a rolled-down window, aimed at them. For a second, Templeton almost wants to laugh: it seems so cheeky peeking out from the darkness, somehow a joke.

  ‘Christ!’ Jackie sees it too. ‘Get down!’

  They all plunge to the ground with the first of the shots. Templeton hears the whistle of a bullet somewhere above him. The window of an abandoned house to their left cracks, and glass rains down over their heads. The automobile angles awkwardly, the lane too tight for a full circle, and a man’s face hangs out of the passenger window. Where one eye should be there is only a milky scar. ‘That’s for you, Jack Tooth, you son of a bitch,’ the one-eyed man shouts as the car blunders and jerks into its U-turn, gains traction, and speeds away, leaving the sharp stench of burnt rubber.

  Templeton gulps oxygen as though he has been pinned underwater. He no longer feels the bizarre twinge of amusement.

  ‘What the bloody hell was that? In the name of Christ,’ Sally yells, trying to pick herself up. ‘Who was that?’

  Templeton, still panting, sees Will struggling to his feet, standing up and falling down, sliding against the wall. He watches Dot rise from her crouch with her back straight and her mouth set in an expression of cold fury.

  ‘I knew it. I knew it,’ Jackie yells, already on his feet and pumping his arms. He pushes up his shirtsleeves, the front of him soaked in sweat and street grime. ‘Fucken Bob Newham! I knew the bastard was after me the second I heard he was getting outta Long Bay. That’s it. It’s on now. It’s war now!’ His face radiates savage excitement.

  ‘Cool it,’ Annie says, going over to him. ‘Calm down. They’re gone, baby.’

  But Jackie is not listening, cannot listen in the state he is in. He lights a cigarette and draws on it like a madman, swearing and trembling. ‘Bob Newham! He couldn’t hit the dags off a fucken dead dingo. Did you see? Did you see that?’

  ‘We were lined up like a bunch of ducks and he still couldn’t hit us!’ yells Frank, holding on to someone’s front fence, almost uprooting it. He lets out a feral whoop to the dark rooftops.

  The others stop, one by one, and look behind him — through him almost — to the gaps in the paling. Frank keeps on, thinking he has an audience, but their collective gaze is drawn to the one thing out of place. They all see it, seemingly at once. A girl. Crouched in the weeds behind the fence. How could no one have seen her until now? As though she materialised from the ether! Young, her face obscured by hair, one knee grazed and bleeding down her leg and into her hand-me-down shoes.

  ‘She’s hurt.’ Sally runs to her. Kneeling to the child, she cups her face in her hands and says, ‘Tell me where it hurts.’

  ‘Jesus. This is brilliant, isn’t it? How much did this little bitch see?’ Jack kicks an empty bottle and it spins noisily in the street and smashes against a gutter. In response a dog barks in the distance, but the girl is mute.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here? What did you see? Huh?’ Frank stands over her. It is of little good. She is insensible, crying, as she slowly stands. He grabs her shoulders, tilting her into the light. ‘You’re in trouble.’ His tone drops an octave and he winks at Jackie. ‘Not bad-looking though.’

  ‘Leave her be, will you?’ Sally shoves him away.

  ‘Bit young, eh mate?’ Will says.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Jackie barks at the girl. ‘Where do you live?’

  The girl sobs.

  ‘Shhh! Let us just call the police ourselves, shall we?’ Dot whispers hoarsely. House lights have started to switch on. The neighbours know better than to come right out and gawp, but the corner of a lace curtain lifts on number thirty-eight; there is the chink of two splayed fingers through a shutter at number forty.

  Jackie and the boys shrink back into the shadows. ‘I can’t have her identifying me,’ Jackie hisses. Templeton can see his jaw muscles work.

  ‘Clear off,’ Annie implores the girl. ‘Get up. You’re alright. Go home.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Help me.’ Dot shoulders past Annie and motions to Templeton to help her pick her up. ‘Shut up, Annie. We cannot send her home like this. Look at her. She will go straight to the policja and lead them right here. We do not want the noses poking in our business. Take care of her tonight. Send her off tomorrow.’

  Annie nods and together Templeton and Dot cart the girl back to Lennox Street, Sally by their side, Jackie and the boys following at a distance. Inside, they lay her out on a day bed in the dining room. Annie yanks her up by her collar into a sitting position and upturns a hefty slug of brandy into her mouth. Some of it gets onto her dress but Annie angles the bottle, filling the girl’s throat until she splutters.

  ‘You will choke her!’ Dot pushes it away. ‘We do not want to kill her, na miłość boską.’

  ‘It’ll do her good.’ Annie bats Dot’s hand off, determined, and then takes a generous gulp herself. ‘For the shock.’

  Dot shakes her head and reaches out to stroke Annie’s hair fondly. She goes back to shut the door, an
d Templeton follows. All that can be seen of the men through the open doorway is the street-lit brims of their hats, three dark figures beneath. Jackie steps into the cone of light. Dot holds the door across the threshold between them. ‘We take care of this now. On you go.’

  ‘Or what?’ Jackie asks. ‘And what if we don’t go?’

  ‘You should leave now.’ Dot meets his glare. ‘The police will be along like it or not. The whole of Newtown heard. You want them to find you? Lock you up for whatever it is you’ve done?’

  ‘Who is she? Have you ever seen her before?’ Jackie’s eyes hook on hers.

  Templeton speaks up from behind Dot. ‘Yes. I’ve seen her. She’s local. No trouble.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘I’ve seen her, that’s all. And I tell you, she won’t be trouble.’

  ‘I didn’t say she’d be trouble. I asked you who she was,’ Jackie says, overly slowly.

  ‘Frances Reed.’ The words fall out before Templeton can stop himself. He hates that he is so terrified of Jackie.

  ‘Reeds, huh?’ Jackie chews the end of his cigarette. ‘Don’t know them.’

  ‘Might have to look into it,’ Frank says with a dirty sneer.

  ‘Will she bring the heat down on us, you reckon?’

  The sound of a car accelerating streets away makes them all flinch. Templeton sees the fingers of Jackie’s left hand curl and slide into his pocket, feeling for the reassurance of the ivory and steel.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here,’ Jackie says to Will and Frank. He calls over his shoulder to Dot: ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the money. You owe me. I’ll be back.’

  ‘Not if Bob Newham finds you first, swołocz.’

  Jackie pauses. ‘Don’t speak that gobbledygook Jew-talk to me, whore.’ He squeezes the last word out through his teeth. Dot tries to shut the door, but he whips around and climbs the steps in two leaps, jamming it open with one stringy forearm. ‘You tell Annie I’ll be round here soon enough. I want that money you owe me. Snow’s not on the house, you know. I’ll hold you all for it. Tell her she better get some cash together.’ His face fills the gap of the doorframe. ‘If she has to sell you molls from here to bloody Goulburn. You tell her she’d better have some ready.’ He steps back and pinches the butt of his cigarette, throwing it like a dart and catching her on her bare neck just above her collarbone. ‘Spread your legs if you know what’s good for you.’

  ‘Go to hell.’ Dot, with her hand to her neck, slams the door and stands in the airless corridor. Her breath is fast and shallow, and it reminds Templeton of the panicked fluttering of a trapped bird’s wings.

  ‘Dot —’ Templeton starts.

  ‘Not now.’ She slides past him to the kitchen, rubbing her neck, her face drawn.

  Hours pass but Templeton cannot sleep. He sifts through thoughts of the one-eyed man with the gun. Would he come back?

  In the early hours he pads barefoot downstairs to find Dot still up with two packets of Lucky Strike, one empty, the other half so, and a bottle of whisky for company. She’s sitting, all bony angles, at the table in the back room downstairs that once was part of the shop. He drops down into the chair beside her. He knows she was saving that whisky, hiding it in a hat behind a row of tins, along with her babcia’s necklace. His hand feels for hers instinctively, as if he is reaching blindly for something in Annie’s purse. Dot pushes him away, but gently, and fills him a chipped teacup of whisky in silence.

  Templeton takes a sip of the spirit, and it scorches his nose and throat. He notices the small, angry cigarette burn on Dot’s neck. He thinks of how handsome she looks in the candlelight, almost regal. He saw her father once and he looked the part of the reffo: long overcoat, much too hot for the weather; a beard; a funny hat — the whole business. At Dot’s family home in Bondi, Templeton had lurked out the back, refusing to come in, keeping his filthy hands in his pockets, ashamed. Dot had been watching him loiter on the cliffs, and one day called out to him, offering a piece of buttered toast on a saucer and a cup of hot, sweet tea. ‘Suit yourself,’ she had shrugged when he had initially shied away. His mother’s voice rang in his head: Don’t take charity from no one.

  His hunger had bested his pride and, when she had gone back inside, he had sat and eaten it on the step like a gypsy, relieved it was normal food, not foreign muck. While dunking the bread in the tea and licking it off his fingers, he saw her babcia come out of the house with an armful of washing. She wore spectacles with wire rims, and her stockings, silvered with age, bagged at the ankles. She was stout and jowly, like a rhinoceros. He didn’t have any grandmothers. He moved closer, creeping on his haunches to spy. With each peg she attached, her brawny arms slapped against her black, sack-like dress.

  When she was done stringing up clothes, she swished past where he hid behind the verandah steps and into the house, and he caught nutmeg and cold cream in her wake. The screen door banged shut and a few moments later opened again. The babcia placed a dish down gently on the first step with something like a cake on it, not looking anywhere but at the plate in her hand — certainly not looking in the direction of his hiding place as she retreated back inside.

  ‘You like apfelkuchen then?’ Dot had smirked upon finding him a couple of minutes later. Templeton was eating the cake with two hands, shoving it in his mouth.

  ‘You’ve got sugar in your eyebrows.’ She wiped a hand over his face. ‘Stop being a blockhead and come in. Don’t worry. They’ve gone out.’

  Nearly every room of her father’s house had books along the walls. Dust rubbed off across the pad of his thumb as he brushed their spines. Templeton had never seen so many books in his life. At school — for the few years he went — he had read above his age and the teacher said he was a quick study, but now, trying to make out the titles, it was like the letters were backwards and upside down. He drew one out and fanned it open, trailing the lines with a finger.

  ‘Cyrillic.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘What’s all the books for, Dot?’

  ‘A whole load of trouble, that is what.’

  ‘What are they about?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have not read them. All Pa’s hoo-ha.’ She pursed her lips testily.

  He took up a pamphlet, which had letters he could recognise, from the table and read aloud. ‘The substitution of the proletarian for the bourgeois state is impossible without a violent revolution.’ He whistled. ‘Blimey. Is he a spy?’ He couldn’t help himself asking. A real live Red!

  ‘And you tell me why the Rosjanie would bother to send anyone to this godforsaken arsehole in the world?’ Dot snorted. ‘Spy on what — some kangaroos? Your country is one sandwich short of a picnic. If that is the expression.’

  But a few weeks later the government put her father and babcia in one of the internment camps, and Dot left Bondi to live with them in Lennox Street with only a suitcase and a face that told them not to ask questions. It was a sorry excuse for a house back then, Templeton remembered, strewn with rugs and old coats to cover the rot. The wallpaper was coming off in long welters like peeling sunburn, and the ceiling sagged, pregnant with damp. Everything had a velvet cover of dust. ‘Blush on an old tart,’ Annie had appraised Dot’s efforts to fix up the place.

  But three years had passed for them to get used to the stained mattresses and, hanging tenaciously to a nail above them, the old crucifix that must have been put up by previous tenants, too high to reach. So they slept overlooked by the tortured Lord in the jaundiced glow of a Chinaman’s lantern some Yank had given to Sally. Still, they had lived in worse places. The bed bugs here were kept at a dull roar. Templeton was bitten scarlet at the previous house, and Annie had to paint him with calamine once a week in the yard. God, that was horrible.

  Templeton has almost finished his whisky. He tries to stand, using the chair as a cru
tch, but falls back heavily into his seat. ‘This whisky works,’ he concludes happily. ‘We should write a commendation letter to the manufacturer.’ He gestures in the air like a toff and giggles.

  ‘Better if you stay here. I’ll sleep down here with you. Don’t you go up there and wake your sister.’ Dot waves in the direction of the stairs.

  ‘Thank Christ Jackie’s not here. That bastard!’ His mood turns savage at the mention of Annie. ‘He did it again! Why does she let him? Why doesn’t she do something?’ This last question comes out hoarse, and he droops, resting his head on his forearms.

  ‘Shh. Come here. Go to sleep.’ She gathers him up, as best she’s able, and heaves him down to the mattress on the floor with her.

  Templeton protests, but weakly. ‘Why? Why does she love him?’

  ‘Hush. Mój śmiały chłopiec.’ Dot breathes hot whisky breath on his cheek.

  ‘Why does she let —’ The words break in his throat. Dot’s skin and her breath and her weight against him feel so nice, he wants to die.

  ‘Your sister is fine. She …’ Dot pauses. ‘She is strong.’ She raises herself enough to take a sip. ‘She will not be told. Trust me, if I could do something I would. I would kill him if I could. And hang for it.’ She arranges Templeton so his head is in her lap and her cup on the floor beside her, with the bottle close at hand. She strokes his hair. ‘Aniołku. Kocham cię.’ He knows what that means. She’s said it to him for years. Little angel. I love you.

  ‘Dot,’ he murmurs from the restless depths of his mind. But he cannot find words for the feelings.