Dark Fires Shall Burn

by Anna Westbrook

  Would Annie go for it? It would solve their problems, but Templeton doesn’t like the thought of hanging around Errol. His heart beats faster.

  Dot and Annie look at each other in silent consultation. Sally looks at Annie and shrugs. ‘Alright.’ Annie offers her hand. Dolly thumps her hefty rings against the tabletop and reaches out to shake it.

  Snowy refills everybody’s glass. ‘Your good health,’ he toasts.

  ‘You’ll start now, tonight,’ Dolly announces after they have taken a sip. ‘My two upstairs will show you how things work. I —’ Her sentence is obscured by a convulsive cough, and she draws from her pocket a handsome handkerchief and wipes away a speck of blood.

  ‘Must be TB,’ Dot tells Templeton under her breath. Templeton swallows.

  ‘On you go.’ Dolly motions them away up the stairs. Errol watches them pass, tossing the deck of cards from hand to hand with violence, grinning, his eyes red-rimmed and glassy.

  A month here: unthinkable! Templeton wishes to be somewhere else, anywhere else. He follows the others up the airless stairs.

  In the upstairs parlour, with its many doors leading off to shadowy, functional rooms (each containing — at a glance — nothing more than a single bed, a small table and a sink), one girl snags Templeton’s gaze immediately. She wears a cream dress, like an old-fashioned bride, and has black curls. Her pink tongue darts to the corners of her mouth after she sips from her glass, as if the mere act of drinking were indecent. She smoothes the wrinkles of her frock, and his gaze follows her fingers down to where they fuss in her lap. Then she shakes her head, and her knotty ringlets, unbrushed, fall over her face. She tosses them back in a studied manoeuver. He glances at Dot, who is watching too.

  ‘Roberta,’ the girl says.

  ‘Pardon?’ Dot seems ruffled.

  ‘It’s Roberta,’ she repeats with a lopsided smile. ‘My name. Roberta French. How d’you do?’

  ‘Nice to meet you — uh, I’m Dot,’ she offers her hand, wiping her palm first on her thigh. ‘Dorothea Kaczmarek. But Dot, if you like.’

  ‘Annie,’ Annie introduces herself with an affected boredom in her voice.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Roberta says.

  ‘What kind of a name is Kaczmarek?’ demands the other girl.

  Templeton has barely noticed her, even though she occupies the other end of the couch from Roberta, but now he looks her over. She has a large gap between her two front teeth, which he imagines some men might find a fetching peculiarity. She sports elaborately rolled hair, a narrow waist and narrower eyes.

  ‘Watch your manners, Lorraine,’ Roberta tells her.

  ‘We’re not staying long,’ Annie offers. ‘This is a …’ she searches for the right word. ‘A temporary arrangement.’

  ‘I see.’ Roberta nods amiably.

  ‘How temporary?’ Lorraine asks.

  Templeton fiddles with his shirt cuffs in disagreeable silence. He chews on a ragged nail as he sees Lorraine regarding him as he had her moments before. ‘Your brother?’ Lorraine jerks her thumb at him, looking at Annie.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Annie. ‘So what?’

  ‘Is he workin’ here too?’

  ‘Didn’t think this was that kind of establishment.’ Annie’s fingers crush the butt of her cigarette against the side of a tin ashtray.

  ‘Why’s he here then? Don’t he have a mother? How old is he anyway, thirteen?’

  ‘I’ll be sixteen this year,’ Templeton blurts. He knows he has embarrassed himself and feels his cheeks turn red.

  ‘Lorraine doesn’t mean to be impolite,’ Roberta says, smiling at him. ‘Sorry. Raised in a barn, and all that.’

  Lorraine snorts. ‘Well, what does Dolly want with him then?’

  ‘I’m going to do jobs and earn my keep,’ Templeton insists.

  ‘If I wanted to work in a molly-house, I’d go over to Elsie Tipper’s,’ Lorraine hisses. ‘Once you start letting that sort of punter in, those perverts, there’s no telling what’s next.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Dot warns.

  ‘Dolly doesn’t do anything for anyone unless she thinks there’s something in it for her, that much is for sure,’ Lorraine answers nastily.

  ‘He’s here ’cause I’m here. Dolly’s barely even looked twice at him,’ Annie says.

  ‘Young meat like that could fetch a high price in certain circles.’ Lorraine laughs. There is something vicious in her eyes, Templeton thinks.

  ‘He’s quiet as a mouse,’ Roberta says. ‘Have off him. He’s not causing trouble.’

  Templeton toys with the packet of cigarettes in his pocket. Lorraine is still appraising him. He wishes they’d all talk about something else; he feels uncomfortably warm. He’s never heard of a molly-house.

  ‘We had a girl here once, not that long ago, name of Edith,’ Lorraine says after a pause, shifting her gaze from Templeton. ‘Well, Dolly got wind that she was lifting from the till.’

  ‘Was she?’ asks Sally.

  ‘Don’t know. Might have been. Any case, that’s not important. Thing was that Dolly thought she was getting swindled,’ Lorraine says.

  ‘Lorraine, you don’t know what really happened,’ Roberta says tartly.

  ‘Yes I do, and you do too!’ Lorraine raises her voice. ‘Now Edie was a vain little bitch, pretty as anything and didn’t she know it. And the blokes did too, right?’

  ‘Yeah? And?’ Annie asks impatiently. She doesn’t think much of Lorraine, Templeton can tell.

  ‘So one evening Edie comes in and Dolly’s fixing drinks.’ Lorraine slows down, settling in for the story now she commands everyone’s attention. ‘Dolly started saying that Edie had been taking her for granted and that she oughta know better and so on and so forth. Well, Edie tries to stick up for herself, makes up some piss-poor excuse about getting in a bother and needing the money to sort it out down on Murphy Street.’ She winks. ‘But Dolly knows that for a girl in a bother she needs ten pounds to get it fixed, right? As well you all would know.’ Lorraine sniggers.

  Templeton sees the glance slung between Dot and Annie.

  ‘And Dolly also knows that we’d go to her if we were in a sticky situation and she’d see we got taken care of and all that jazz.’ Lorraine pauses. ‘Or you could do it yourself with a bit of tube, some hot gin and half a cup of mustard. Everyone has tried that before, eh?’

  ‘Tell the damn story,’ snaps Dot. ‘What did Dolly do to Edith?’

  ‘So it seems that Dolly isn’t buying a word of this and so without wasting another second she’s got Edie by the throat and put her in a headlock,’ Lorraine says with relish. ‘Next thing you know she’s smashed a bottle on the counter, knocked the bottom off and given the sharp end to Edie right in the face. Goes open slather on her. Blood everywhere. All over the wall, all over Dolly. From here to Sunday, it was like Iwo Jima.’

  Sally squeals and covers her mouth with her hands. Templeton can see Dot’s jaw muscles clench.

  ‘And Dolly’s yelling, “I’ll cut her fucking tits off, the bitch!” ’ Lorraine half-whispers, realising she should lower her voice. ‘She says, “Hold her there, Snowy, while I get my gat.” ’

  ‘What’s a gat?’ Templeton asks.

  ‘A big fuck-off gun, that’s what! A gatling. Jesus, haven’t you seen the newsreels?’ Lorraine lets out something akin to a guffaw. ‘So off runs Edie — she gets clear of Snowy somehow — and off she runs with a busted-up face, out into the street. And Dolly’s screaming from the house, “I’ll put a hole in you if you ever come back here!” ’

  ‘Golly.’ Sally’s face is pale.

  ‘Hey presto, there go her looks. She won’t work around here again. And all Dolly can say is that the blood’s ruined her shoes — ha!’ She sags back into the couch, seemingly spent.

  Roberta looks vexed and even Annie seems impressed.


  ‘And you saw this, did you?’ Dot says with a sniff.

  ‘You bet I did.’

  ‘Just as I’m standing here seeing you now?’

  ‘Are you calling me a liar?’

  ‘No. All I say is that it is a good story … To scare children.’

  ‘Listen here, you dirty Jewess. Don’t think I don’t know what you are.’

  ‘Shut it, Lorraine!’ Roberta says loudly. She mashes her cigarette out in the ashtray and rises. ‘Christ almighty.’

  Dot steps closer to Lorraine, who scrambles up from the couch until they’re inches away, breathing in each other’s faces. Dot has half a head on her and makes full use of it. ‘So, what kind of bottle was it?’ she asks icily, staring her down.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The bottle Dolly hit her with — what was it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I thought you said you saw it.’

  ‘I bloody did. I just don’t know what bottle it was. Brandy. Whisky. What does it matter?’

  ‘I would say it matters a lot because I think you are full of horseshit.’

  ‘Don’t come into my house and call me a liar!’ Lorraine takes a swing and gets Dot right in the mouth.

  Annie darts over. She grabs Lorraine from behind, hoisting her arm up along her back, the way she has seen the police do it. Lorraine grunts. Annie pulls on her arm, hard. ‘Apologise,’ she demands.

  ‘If you have knocked my tooth out I’ll make you sorry,’ Dot spits out. She moves to the other side of the room, cradling her face.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Templeton reaches for Dot.

  ‘Yes, pal. I am fine.’ She runs her finger around her teeth. ‘Still there.’ She smiles a bloody smile for him. Her top lip is split and swelling, and her front teeth are gory.

  Annie drops Lorraine, who backs against the wall, her eyes glassy with fury.

  Roberta has put an arm around Dot and is trying to stop the bleeding with her handkerchief, dabbing it lightly to Dot’s lip. Annie comes over and steps in front of Roberta, and Dot brushes the handkerchief away to show her the cut. ‘Are you alright?’ Annie asks with concern. Dot nods, takes her hand and presses her cheek against it. Annie does not move to wipe the blood now smeared across her palm.

  Lorraine mutters, ‘I was just trying to tell a story.’ She hollers down the stairs. ‘Dolly! I’m coming down. I’m going out.’ She seizes her coat and tramps off.

  Dot lets go of Annie and straightens her shoulders.

  ‘Well!’ Sally sighs when she is sure Lorraine is safely gone. ‘Isn’t she a pill?’

  ‘I’m really sorry about her.’ Roberta reaches across, almost absentmindedly, and smoothes one of Dot’s short curls where it has bucked its lacquer. Annie watches them closely as she does so. ‘Truly sorry. I don’t have any quarrel with Jews. Well, I actually have never met one until now.’ She smiles shyly at Dot.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Dot pulls away from Roberta’s hand but pats her other arm. ‘We do not bite.’ She looks a fright, and Templeton can’t help but wince as she smiles bloodily.

  ‘I’ll thump her so hard,’ Annie blazes. ‘If she ever touches you again —’

  Dolly calls from the stairs. ‘What’s going on up here?’ She hoists herself up the final step, her bust appearing first like a fully rigged galleon. ‘What set Lorraine off screaming like a bloody banshee just now?’

  The women look at each other in silence.

  Dolly’s eyes clamp on Dot’s face. ‘Mmm-hmm.’ She raises an eyebrow.

  The doorbell sounds. Dolly sighs and looks heavenward. ‘Fix up, all of you, and get your scrawny behinds downstairs. And you, let me tell you something.’ She scowls at Dot, moving in so she can put her finger squarely in Dot’s face. ‘This house, my house, works because everyone gets along, right? That means that I make the rules and you follow them. If you don’t like that, well, you come and talk to me. But if you think you can go upsetting the balance after being here all of three minutes, then I think you and me are going to have a problem. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Dot nods but Templeton can tell she is bristling.

  ‘I don’t mind a bit of healthy competition between my girls, but they’re not to go smacking each other up, because I lose money. So whatever row you’re having, sort it out, or you’re both out on your ear. Now, you, boy.’ Dolly turns to him. ‘Go down and answer the door. The rest of you get your faces on. Quick sticks.’

  Roberta goes to her standing bureau and retrieves a bottle of four-penny dark and a pancake of makeup. Dot sets about briskly cleaning up her face. She washes her mouth out with the liquor and spits the watery blood into the ashtray. Turning to the mirror above the dresser, she delicately sponges her busted lip.

  Templeton heads downstairs and opens the door to four braying sailors, so drunk they have to grip one another to stand. He fetches them beers and sits them down at a table. ‘Won’t be long,’ is his feeble, meatless offer thrown to their hungry impatience.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Frances?’

  Her mother is calling. Frances has been lying on her made bed, shoes on, staring at the ceiling since the afternoon, and is now surprised to notice the light has left the room. She stomps as loudly as she dares into the kitchen.

  ‘Yes?’

  Mrs Reed looks at her for a moment then goes to the coat stand and takes out her pocketbook. She grinds some money into Frances’ hand. ‘Here’s a shilling. I need you to go to the store.’

  Frances takes it dumbly. ‘Why? The store …’ she trails off. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘We need bread. I forgot it when I was there. And no wonder. My brain was boiling all day not knowing where you’d gotten to.’

  Frances looks at the clock on the wall. ‘Murray’s will be shut,’ she says hesitantly. ‘It’s half past five.’

  ‘Well, go up to King Street!’ Mrs Reed says. ‘Go to Wheeler’s. Or stop in at Ada’s and see if she will give you some, since you’re so fond of her lately. Oh yes, don’t look at me like that. Wasn’t she full of piss and vinegar when she gave Thomas back. Says you’re out running wild all over town.’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ Frances objects quietly, but she knows that there is little use in arguing when her mother is in a mood like this. ‘I’ll go to the shop.’

  ‘And mind you come straight home this time.’ Her mother turns her back to Frances. ‘I want tea on the table by six-fifteen, or you’re not getting any.’

  Frances sets out, and the streetlights are lit already against the failing sun. The green-and-yellow trams trundle past one another, thick and steady electric caterpillars. It's cold; she rubs some feeling into her arms.

  The pubs are already rowdy and sweaty, and King Street throbs with bodies. Older girls walk three and four abreast, arms linked, their hair rolled elegantly and skirts swishing against their stockings — real stockings, Frances can see, not like the war days. And real blush too, not beet juice from a can. The hotels will soon close and the men will join them, tipsy and full of elbows. Some are on the street already, servicemen mostly, still in their dashing slouch hats, standing about chatting in large gangs that take up the whole footpath so that people have to step in the gutter to pass, but no one dares complain.

  Headlights of passing cars trawl the street. She thinks of the night four years ago when the midget Japanese submarines had slithered through the Heads into Sydney Harbour, their passage quick through the dark, along the muddy bottom. She was in her pyjamas and supposed to be in bed when the shafts of the search beams had stabbed down from the sky while the depth-chargers boomed, lobbing sound around the city’s basin, the machine-gunners raging at shadows, heard as far away as her house in Newtown. The Kuttabul had taken the torpedo meant for the USS Chicago, the papers said, and all those men, burning and kicking, had slid, their lungs filling with water,
down an inky chute through havoc and into silence.

  Her eyes rest on a rumpled elderly man leaning in his doorway, waving westwards, craning his neck. ‘Evening, miss. It’ll be snowing in the mountains tonight.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ Frances asks.

  ‘Clear moon, frost soon.’ He points. ‘And that’s just down here. Snow up on Blackheath, mark my words.’ His craggy face is a jack-o’-lantern lit up by the lamp behind him.

  She hurries on to the store, but when she reaches it, the door is shut and the lights are off. Damn. Beside the store is a peeling billboard with a gigantic smiling mother drinking Bushell’s, and she thinks of Ada’s miserable face and her screaming brats in the kitchen and how she’s never seen anyone look so blissful over a bloody cup of tea.

  In her pocket she holds the sweaty shilling and decides, after a moment’s hesitation, to keep going. A shop further up King Street will be open where she can buy bread, she tells herself. Surely there will be one. She dare not go home to face her mother without it, and time is growing short.

  FOURTEEN

  Once the girls have come down to greet them, he slips his coat on and steals away. To be alone, thank God. It is chilly in the street. Still, he won’t turn back. He thinks about Dot and Annie and Sally and Roberta with the sailors. He’s nauseated, but he lights a cigarette for something else to do with his hands and throws the match, skittering it on the lip of the gutter.

  The streets around Darlinghurst are all dog-legged and confounding, but there’s one place he knows how to get to from here.

  It takes Templeton more than an hour to reach the beach, the trams slow and noisy, full of workers in uniform who bulge out from the side doors, swinging like gibbons from the external handrails. They squash him up against the window; their kit bags knock him with each pitch forward of the carriage and they think it great fun. Alighting is a blessed relief.

  He makes his way along the cliffs from Bondi, heading south past the baths, until he comes to the familiar cave, half-concealed in the dark by a thicket of scrub. He pushes that aside and enters on his haunches, shuffling until he is inside and can squat beneath the lip of the sandstone overhang.