Dark Fires Shall Burn

by Anna Westbrook

She begins to talk of Kraków, while he feels sleep drag him in. Memories of girlhood in Debrecen, Constanta — Papa wanted to try for Palestine, she says, but it was no good. Then London: rainy, smelly, the people unfriendly, the food inedible — tinned everything! The worst you can imagine, Aniołku. The vast, crowded boat to this ale spelunka — what a shithole!

  He likes how the Polish sounds and tries it on his tongue, mouthing it in the darkness.

  ‘Nineteen thirty-seven, when we came to here. The year they crowned George VI. We listened to it on the radio; so boring, went for hours. Nine years ago, can you believe it? I was just a little baby, like you, only fifteen years old. I thought I was so big, knew everything, no one tells me what to do, et cetera.’ She wiggles her fingers, grimacing. ‘Idiotka.’

  She describes the pitted buildings of her old city, the faces of the people wading about in a tar pit like drowning dinosaurs. But Templeton can’t see it, so far away and so different to the fresh-bricked buildings, everything minted yesterday, the suntanned hopefulness. He cannot imagine.

  ‘The Continent.’ She blows a raspberry and he jerks at the sudden noise. ‘Big problems they have. Big, big problems. Good luck fixing that mess. Jak sobie pościelesz, tak się wyśpisz.’ She repeats it into her drink like an incantation.

  ‘What does that mean?’ he asks sleepily.

  ‘As you make your bed, so you must lie.’

  She talks about her babcia as he drifts in and out of wakefulness. Her babcia, who smelt always of paprika and beeswax, who had a wonderful garden in Poland. Her father’s scent was different — old paper and shoe polish and tobacco. Templeton feels her chest catch, as though she is a flower in one of those presses. He imagines the twin wooden boards compressing her heart and lungs, the elegant iron screws twisting, flattening her down.

  ‘Dot,’ he asks, raising himself up so that his back is still pressing against her and her fingers are still intertwined in his hair. ‘Who tried to shoot us?’

  ‘They were not aiming for you or me. It was Bob Newham. After Jackie.’

  ‘Why? For Bob’s eye?’

  ‘The eye. And other things.’

  ‘What other things?’

  ‘Little one, I would tell you if I knew it all myself. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Jackie’s done some bad in his life. They used to be friends, Jackie and Bob, that’s all I know. And now they want to tear each other to strips. Bob has sworn he will kill him. Good luck Bob, I say.’ And she kisses him on the forehead and falls silent. Soon he hears her snoring.

  The night is soundless. Eventually he sleeps, dreaming he is in a lion’s den. The lion’s paws are heavy as cudgels on his back. The beast turns him over and licks his face. He doesn’t know if it is real or in his dream, but now and then in the darkness pellets of tears dampen his neck.

  EIGHT

  It is just before dawn when Nancy wakes from an awful dream of metal and flames, hurtling towards an upside-down horizon.

  It reminds her of the game the boys play in the street, bracing cardboard boxes around their waists, holding The Sun or The Mirror fanned out like Icarus’ wings. ‘Shoot down the Luftwaffe,’ they yell. ‘Get those Messerschmitts!’ She had come to know the compact flint of German syllables. Why the boys wanted to play games of war when the war itself had been such a drudge was beyond her. The littler boys and the occasional dirty-faced girl crouched in the gutter and pointed their clasped hands up into the air and made the ack-ack sound of the stentorian guns. ‘Yeeeeoooow, yeeeeooow,’ one boy would yell, twirling on the spot, mimicking the ear-bleeding air-raid siren. ‘Brrrrm-pow! Rat-tat-tat-tat-bang! ’ Gangs of scabby kids would erupt from the newsreels at the flicks, knocking over the alleyway milk bottles, their round, plain faces flushed with destruction.

  Nancy had come upon a bunch loitering in Marrickville Park just after the war ended. Urchins, her mother would call them. Mudlarks. They had set up their collections of painted tin soldiers in a dustbowl around an M-80; she only knew what the red tubes were because she had seen the Americans lighting them up for Independence Day. She backed away upon seeing the runnels of kerosene the boys were pouring down into the basin.

  ‘It’s the bomb!’ one kid shouted, punching the sky as he watched his friend, a hare-lipped scoundrel, kneel and drop the match. ‘Burn those stinking Japs!’

  The blast incinerated the soldiers. The boys scattered and disappeared, yelping with delight, foul ash settling in their hair. She waited till the fire burnt itself out and went to see the debris. Stupidly, she bent to pick up a half-melted soldier, a torso sticking out in the dirt. She nursed the blister for days.

  The light is buttery through her curtains. She can hear Pinky again, whining and scratching. Normally Aunt Jo is up by now and has taken him out to do his business.

  Walking past her mother’s bedroom, she notices a dark puddle on the floor. Switching on the light, she can see that there are dresses strewn on the floor. There are photographs on the bed. She doesn’t normally go into her mother’s room — she knows she has to ask permission — yet she crosses the floor and bends over to sweep up the pictures. One in which her father holds her as a baby on the threshold of their house; one of her mother squinting, smiling at the camera with friends, all at a beach in their bathing costumes; one of her parents together at the opening of the Harbour Bridge — at least she thinks it is them: the photographer has had to stand so far back to get the bridge pylon in shot that the figures are little more than homunculi.

  The door to Aunt Jo’s room creaks loudly, and Pinky pushes his way through the gap and is in the bedroom, tongue questing for her hand, joyful. She shakes him off and whispers loudly. ‘Aunt Jo?’ She raps on the door and calls again.

  She pushes the door slightly.

  Aunt Jo is in her rocking chair, face turned away, and Nancy starts, fearing her wrath if she is disturbed. But Aunt Jo looks to be asleep, and is deaf as an old shoe.

  Nancy grows bolder as the figure in the chair does not move. The wireless beside her is murmuring on, and she goes to switch it off. Standing at the woman’s side, she notices a kind of peculiar frozenness to her features. Aunt Jo’s mouth is slightly open, tongue and gums papery and dry, knuckles white and bluish, folded together in her lap. Nancy touches an arm. It is stiff. Something is not right and she feels the knowledge of what has happened strike inside her like metal on metal. Jesus, she thinks, and blushes at the word.

  Pinky yaps suddenly, startling Nancy, and tries to jump up onto Aunt Jo. He cannot get footing on her lap and slides off, his claws tearing a rip in her skirt. Aunt Jo’s hairy calf, the stocking bagged at the ankle, is exposed, and Nancy blushes even deeper. She hastily rearranges the material folds to cover her, while realising, on some level, that this is absurd.

  Anger kindles and takes to the spark. Who would have found her if Nancy had not? And then she feels ashamed: surely she should be crying. She waits to see if any tears might come. They do not. She wonders if God is watching and judging her.

  Should she bother to rouse and tell her mother, or should she just wait until she wakes in her own time, probably calling out meekly for Nancy to bring a cold compress for her head? She looks at Aunt Jo’s poor dead face. Who would come? A doctor certainly, and maybe even police? She shivers. Most likely. What do you do when someone dies? She touches Aunt Jo’s sad arm flesh again and decides: she cannot let anyone see her mother, the state she’s in, out cold on the living room floor.

  Pinky runs in figure eights at her feet as she walks downstairs. Her mother’s hair is fanned in an aureole, her face poised even in stupor, her beauty infuriating even with her lips slightly parted and she snoring quietly. She looks like the postcard of Millais’ Ophelia she has tacked to her dresser mirror, only with redder hair.

  ‘Aunt Jo is dead,’ Nancy announces in a loud, ugly voice. She doesn’t know what else to say. Her mother does not
stir. ‘Dead as a doornail.’

  She stands over her mother and pushes her arm with a toe, at first gently and then not so gently. Her mother stirs and her eyes flutter but do not open. ‘No, John,’ she murmurs in her sleep and smiles a private smile.

  Nancy climbs back to her own chilly bedroom and opens the curtains. The sun appears half-hearted about the dawn. She lies down and draws her knees to her chest and hugs herself on the thin mattress, an even thinner wall separating her from a dead woman. She can’t bear to meet the day and so she puts her head back on her pillow, facing the empty steppe of hours until her mother wakes.

  NINE

  When Frances wakes, she is lying on a coat that reeks of smoke and old sweat and something strange: orange peel, dried apples? She is next to a softly snoring, unfamiliar girl. It is at least mid-morning, judging from the angle of the sun trying to pry its way through the curtains, and her head is a jumble of vexatious pictures: her mother naked underneath Mr Langby, her mouth mashed against his moustache; Thomas wailing; Ada’s haggard glare in the over-lit doorway; the gunshots from the car; men standing over her, yelling; something burning down her throat like medicine.

  She laces her shoes and pulls on her cardigan, wincing at the crankshaft of pain in her head. The yellow wool is stained from her fall in the filthy street. Her mother will have checked Ada’s for her by now and will be mad as a wet hen.

  She looks over at Sally, curled in a ball near the wall, snoring. The girl doesn’t look much older than Frances in this creeping morning light, the dark eyeliner of last night gone. She wonders how old all the girls who live there are.

  Pictures of Clark Gable are stuck on the wall, and she fingers them gently, their edges crisp and brittle. She has the same up in her bedroom, pulled out of Life and Picture Post. Perfume bottles of pale pink and chartreuse glass stand in concert on a dressing table, along with various tubes and pots, and she checks over her shoulder to see if the girl is still sleeping. She is; Frances registers the steady rise and fall of the curve of her back. And so she sits down in front of the mirror and sticks her fingers in the makeup, just to try it. She rubs the colours into her skin — peach on her cheeks and lips, coal-black on her eyes. Her mother doesn’t have any of this stuff. ‘Why would I waste my hard-earned on nonsense like that?’ She can picture her mother’s face, tough as a boilermaker’s elbow.

  The sleeping girl stirs and Frances drops the powder guiltily, an incriminating cloud puffing from the compact. She inches down the stairs, but no one is waiting for her. Breakfast plates are piled in the sink.

  She unlatches the door and gains her bearings, the full memory of the wild night coming back. The shooting did not seem real, like a scene from a gangster picture. Surely it had been some frightful mistake. She walks up Church Street and then without thinking she is in the cemetery again, as if drawn back somehow. St Stephen’s spire crests above her shoulder as she sits in the patchy grass. Her hands knead dirt as she starts to cry. Frances can feel roots from the scraggly bushes spool between her fingers, and a slater meanders over her knuckles. She cries so hard, her whole body seems rubberised, like her jaw can’t close and her eyes open at the same time. Sniffling, her face covered in snot, she decides that a whipping is better than a day and a night alone out here. The squid-tree shakes its branches like a carnival skeleton.

  When she opens the front door, her mother is standing in the corridor, arms full of a squirming Thomas. ‘Oh my good Lord! And where in God’s name have you been?’ she demands, bug-eyed, and grabs a good pinch of flesh from Frances’ upper arm through her cardigan. ‘Where have you been? Hmm? Answer me!’ Thomas starts to grizzle and flail in her arms.

  ‘Owwww!’ Frances twists away, nursing her arm.

  ‘I am going to beat you sorry, Frances Margaret. Teach you to go off like that. Anything could have happened! I’ve been up all night.’

  Frances stares at a spot of dried milky baby sick on the floorboards.

  ‘Look at you, you’re filthy.’

  ‘Sorry, Mum,’ she mutters.

  ‘Getting about the neighbourhood like that. And giving Thomas to Ada! What must people think?’ her mother frets. ‘Who saw you? Where have you been?’ She plucks at her arm again. ‘Hmm? Where have you been?’

  ‘I slept at the school,’ she lies smoothly. ‘Then I just sat near St Stephen’s all morning.’

  ‘The cemetery,’ her mother exclaims. ‘That place is a tip. You’d never know what’s in there. I won’t have you playing in it.’

  ‘Sorry, Mum,’ she repeats dully.

  ‘I’ve had a gutful of you. A gutful,’ Mrs Reed hisses. ‘If I find out you’re fooling around with some lad, Frances, I tell you …’

  ‘No! It’s not like that, Mum, I promise.’

  ‘What —’ Mrs Reed looks at her properly for the first time and turns white with anger. ‘What is that on your face?’

  ‘What? Oh, nothing.’ Frances’ hands shoot up, rubbing at her pinkened lips and cheeks.

  ‘The whoredom of a woman may be known in her haughty looks and eyelids.’

  ‘No, Mum. I swear to you —’ Frances begins but her mother slaps her across the face. The connection is solid. The sound, like a bullwhip, sends her tottering backwards.

  ‘If thy daughter be shameless, keep her in straitly, lest she abuse herself through overmuch liberty,’ Mrs Reed recites, chin quivering.

  Frances presses her palms against the wall and leans her forehead against it for support. She thinks of the toad-mouths and the people sneering at the Negro and the beautiful wound of his woman’s lipsticked mouth and feels the rise of something blazing. ‘I can quote the Bible too, Mum,’ she says in a voice she does not recognise. ‘Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.’

  The words explode forth and she flinches, anticipating the strike. When she opens her eyes she sees her mother has turned her back on her. Mrs Reed stands motionless for a moment or two and then, like a sleepwalker, glides over to a chair and sinks into it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Frances says quietly.

  Mrs Reed flicks her wrist as though at a fly and looks hard at some speck on the ceiling, her face the queerest shade of grey.

  Frances feels winded. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Go to your room.’

  TEN

  The Reed girl is gone when Templeton returns from work in the afternoon. Instead he finds Sally sitting alone on the step of Lennox Street, picking her fingernails, with a record blaring from inside.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asks.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did she talk to you before she left?’

  ‘Who?’ Sally asks, not looking up.

  ‘That girl,’ he says, exasperated. Sally could be so self-involved. ‘Who saw.’

  ‘No,’ Sally says sharply, leaning back against the doorframe.

  ‘Well —’

  ‘Shhh!’ She points in the direction of the music. Fats Waller’s muted trumpet crackles under the needle.

  Just for a thrill you pulled the sun from the sky. Just for a thrill you put rain in my eye.

  ‘Did she say anything?’ he tries again, but Sally smacks him on the leg.

  ‘I said shut up! I’m trying to listen.’

  He glares at her. ‘Ow! What’d you do that for?’

  ‘Shh. Go away, Lucky. I don’t feel like talking to you right now.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you, then?’ he asks, annoyed and confused. ‘I just asked about the girl.’

  ‘I don’t care about her. I don’t care about you. Leave me alone.’

  ‘Outta the way then,’ he says, barging past her into the house. The upstairs room is empty, Annie and Dot nowhere to be seen. He comes back down and sees Sally bent over, head on her knees, nodding in time to the music.

  I held your heart for just a day. But when you left
and snatched it away. You made my heart stand still. Just for a thrill.

  The half-drunk brandy is on the dresser. He goes inside to retrieve it and, sitting on the step near her, holds it out. She ignores it.

  ‘Here. I’m sorry. Have a drink.’

  ‘Don’t want one. My head still hurts from last night.’

  ‘Well, it’ll do you even more good then. Hair of the dog that bit ya. What is that funny thing that Dot says? “He who smokes and drinks doesn’t get roundworms”?’ He guffaws and punches her arm.

  She ignores him, so he helps himself. ‘Don’t mind if I do, in that case.’

  She watches him take a hearty sip and light a cigarette. The music stops and the rotations caesurae.

  ‘Give me some then. I’ll have a smoke as well. I’m out.’ She nudges her empty packet with her shoe.

  ‘Nah.’ He holds the bottle and the cigarettes above his head. ‘Not unless you tell me what you’re upset about.’

  ‘It’s Dot and Annie,’ she says, creasing her face into a scowl. ‘They’re fighting all the time. And Jackie …’ She sighs. ‘Well, let’s just say I liked it better when it was just the four of us.’

  ‘I think Dot wants that too. I think she wants to kill him.’

  ‘She’s been going off like a frog in a sock. She’ll get herself bloody killed more like. Now give it here.’ She kicks him in the shin and puts a palm against his face, taking the packet out of his hand.

  ‘That’s not fair!’ Templeton says in mock outrage. ‘I can’t hit you back. You’re a girl.’

  ‘Since when has that stopped you?’ She lights her cigarette, inhales, and laughs.

  ‘I don’t hit girls.’ He looks up at her seriously. ‘That’s for bastards like Jackie.’ He pauses. ‘And I’m too strong now. I’d hurt you.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Show us ya muscles.’

  ‘No.’ He frowns, crossing his arms.

  ‘Go on then. I reckon I could still take you.’

  ‘Piss off.’