‘Right there in their driveway. Blue as an Auschwitz Jew he was, when they pulled him out.’ His voice cracks. ‘Why would you starve and slave through that hell just to top yourself when you got home? Why the fuck would you do that? Weak shithead.’
They all sit in the excruciating hush. Dot looks at Templeton, and he can see the strain to keep quiet in the muscles of her face.
‘And another one, a bloke I knew from me old work. He was top brass, a lieutenant commander or something or other, and I heard, just the other day, that he hanged himself from a tree in the bush out near Epping.’
‘Alright mate, that’s enough,’ says Snowy. ‘The pubs are full enough of this talk. Don’t need to bring it home.’
Errol is relentless. ‘And a pal of a pal, he just crawled on under his mother’s house and cut his own throat. Twenty-three, twenty-four, just a young fella. And what is the government doing about it? Nothing. Bloody useless Labor and that Chifley. Son of a bitch.’
Dolly exhales and percusses her fingernails against the wooden arm of her chair. Roberta is crying without making a sound: Templeton only notices because her cheeks are wet. Dot slips an arm about her shoulder. Snowy, whose face is always red, is starting to look like he is actually choking.
‘I’d give ten of you rotters for an innocent girl-baby like that.’ Dolly dumps the contents of her pipe bowl into a saucer and flicks the charred grime out with a hooked file. She stands abruptly, pushing the chair back noisily. Templeton suddenly sees the years folded into the corners of her eyes. He wonders if she’d had babies, and if they themselves had children. He’d never known his grandmother, on either side. And his father’s father had been a German gold prospector, but the family did not speak of that after the Great War.
‘A dreamer of dreams,’ his mother used to say to him when he was lost in a reverie. Sometimes he daydreams about a proper family, like in the war posters — a pretty blonde mother in an apron and a soldier father. In some of the posters a Japanese octopus stretched its tentacles towards Darwin and Cairns, reaching for the pretty blonde. Sally has a story about her friends in Queensland at the start of the war, saying they’d rather take cyanide than get ravished by the Japs when they invaded.
‘Take him upstairs and put him to bed,’ Dolly orders Snowy.
‘Come on! Up we go, mate. Let’s have a nap.’ Snowy hefts Errol, half-carrying him. ‘A good little lie down, shall we?’
‘They’ll never catch him,’ Errol says. ‘Bastard that killed that girl will get off scot-free. No one saw a hair of him.’
‘That’s what you think,’ Dolly tells him.
‘One for the road.’ Errol lurches out of Snowy’s grip and grabs another bottle. He opens it, lifts it and nods at them all. ‘Cheers! Here’s tae us! Wha’s like us? Damn few and they’re a’ deid!’ His words ring in the air and he takes a noisy drink and stumbles off up the stairs. Templeton wonders why the Scottish, flattened out by decades in Australia, seems to flare up like a rash when Errol is drunk.
Dolly opens a new pouch of American tobacco, a heady blend of hickory and tar, and Templeton strikes a match for her as she fumbles for one in her skirt pockets. Her eyes crinkle and pull her whole face into her smile. ‘Why, aren’t you just the little gentleman?’
‘He’s right, though. Whoever killed Frances Reed is long gone from here.’ Annie sighs, leaning back in her chair. ‘Only a fool would stick around.’
Templeton hovers, his hands quivering as he lights a cigarette for himself, wondering why his sister would think this. Perhaps a cunning man would stick around, wagering he could melt into the background of fools.
‘Excuse me.’ Roberta brushes her face against the sleeve of her dress and sniffs. ‘I’m sorry, I’m … feeling poorly.’ She moves slowly and then quickly up the stairs as if she is going to be ill.
Dot gazes after her.
‘I suppose that’s that, then,’ Annie says, and holds the tip of her tongue between her fine white teeth while she sweeps up the abandoned game, pouring the cards back into a neat pack. Sally sits there sullenly.
Templeton lets the ash on his cigarette build up in a drooping turret. His hands are shaking and he doesn’t know why. ‘Papers reckon it was a drifter, don’t they? Or a foreigner. He couldn’t be a local man, could he? Known to the community?’ The words come out awkwardly. No one replies.
He realises Lorraine has stopped writing her letter and is looking at him. ‘Why would you think it was a local man?’ She places her pencil down and smiles, showing her long gums and large, gappy teeth.
He thinks of Jackie’s face, half-shadowed by the lamplight — his savage agitation and the scent of him — and he wants to be sick. ‘No reason.’
SEVENTEEN
Nancy waits until the conversation downstairs has ceased and the light in her mother’s room has gone out. She slides out of bed and her bare feet scuttle along the frigid floor to the uppermost kitchen cupboard, where she knows her mother hides things in a biscuit tin. Standing on a chair, she reaches in and retrieves the folded newspaper, betting that her mother would not throw it away.
Frances Margaret Reed … Nancy’s hand shoots to her face and she chokes on the next words as she reads them, feeling them burn as they slide back down her clamped throat. Frances Margaret Reed, aged eleven, ravished and strangled, was found in a disused cemetery at Newtown early Wednesday morning.
Nancy feels dizzy. The room tips sideways and she gets down from the chair.
More than 50 men have been questioned. Police have no suspects as yet, although some men questioned have been charged for vagrancy. She had been struck savage blows on the mouth, strangled with strips torn from her singlet. And then outraged. Her body had been mutilated. Nancy reads the last five solid-black words as if they’re in a foreign language. She throws the paper down and curls into a tight, solid knot, where there is only darkness. Frances.
She lies on the kitchen floor for what could be minutes or hours, and some time later she sits upright with a jerk. Getting up and padding back towards her bedroom, she feels numb and yet on fire. Through her mother’s partially open door she spies her dozing in a chair in the corner, still dressed in her funeral clothes. Wisps of hair have straggled from her previously neat waves, and the creases that bracket her mouth look somehow deeper in the dim light.
Nancy returns to her room, sits rigidly on the bed and wishes she were dead. She imagines that Frances was walking ahead of her through the graveyard, the memory-light sticky as glue. She tries calling her name, but Frances will not turn around; as fast as Nancy runs, she cannot catch up. Frances is dressed just as the papers describe, the same clothes she had worn in the cemetery the Sunday just past — pink rayon frock, lemon-coloured cardigan, blue-grey overcoat, black shoes, short blue socks — and she can hear her own voice calling out. Frances! The name flames out and dies.
The door opens a little after dawn, and Mrs Roberts enters behind a tray of tea and toast, wearing an entreating and yet wretchedly heartbroken expression. Nancy quickly shuts her eyes again and burrows into her pillow.
She hears a throat being cleared gently. ‘Oh. That’s kind of you,’ Kate says, looming in the corridor behind her, but makes no move to take the tray. Nancy hears Mrs Roberts set it at the foot of the bed.
‘Still sleeping? Poor lamb.’
‘Yes. She tossed and cried all night.’
A warm palm strokes her forehead. Nancy smells Mrs Roberts’ milky breath close above her face. ‘The Lord bless thee and keep thee,’ Mrs Roberts recites. ‘The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.’
Nancy tries to lie still under Mrs Roberts’ touch, feigning sleep, and, despite her initial compulsion to squirm, the loving pressure of the hand and the voice do give her comfort.
‘There’s more news! Paper’s just come,’
Izzy’s voice carries up the stairs. She had stayed over, spending the night in Aunt Jo’s room. She exhales, reading as she walks. ‘They’ve got the mother’s statement. That poor woman. My goodness, I cannot even imagine …’
Nancy’s eyes flick open, but Mrs Roberts and Kate are looking at Izzy.
‘Peggy! Oh my goodness. She must be beside herself,’ Kate says with a gasp.
‘Should I?’ Izzy glances meaningfully at Nancy.
Kate turns. ‘Morning, biscuit. Oh yes, Izzy. Do. It’s too late for that.’ Kate lifts her hands resignedly. ‘She’ll only read it herself later.’ She holds the crumpled copy of the newspaper Nancy had seized in the night as though it were condemning evidence.
‘I suppose. If you’ll allow it,’ Izzy says grimly. ‘When she did not return in reasonable time — this is Mrs Reed speaking, of course — after I had sent her for a loaf of bread, I had a presentiment that she had been murdered.’
‘What?’ Mrs Roberts says with a low whistle. ‘What a jolly strange thing to say! What kind of a mother says that, I ask you? You send your child out on an errand and if they’re belated you have a “presentiment” they’ve been murdered?’
‘Why would she say that, Mum?’ Nancy asks. ‘Why would Mrs Reed say something like that about Frances?’
‘I don’t know, Nan. I just don’t know.’ Kate shakes her head. ‘Sometimes shock makes people say queer things. And she’s always been a strange one.’
‘If I may,’ Izzy interrupts, clearing her throat. ‘The rest says, Frances loved to mind babies, and she was popular among her classmates at Enmore Public School and around the neighbourhood.’
‘That’s a lie!’ Nancy bursts out. ‘Frances hated babies! She didn’t care a jot for Thomas.’
The adults ignore her.
Kate takes the paper and skims it before she reads aloud. ‘This is … this is what Mrs Reed said to the police: If I could only get my hands for two minutes on the fiend who killed her, there would be no need for a court to deal with him. Oh, I know exactly what she means.’
EIGHTEEN
Dot and Roberta and Templeton lie in the park off Enmore Road, nestled under a horse blanket, by the time the sun finally relinquishes the sky. The night air smells of squashed figs and smoke and their warm, beery breath. Dolly has given everyone the night off — unexpectedly — but Templeton is growing accustomed to her whims and the unpredictability of her fancies. Why Frances’ death upset her so, he can hardly begin to imagine. This evening Sally and Annie went to the pictures, Lorraine to bed, and the three of them to get good and drunk.
The Reed mother’s statement in the morning’s papers set everyone talking, and Newtown is feverish with gossip. More than one hundred men had already been questioned, people said, and yet still no one had been charged with anything more than vagrancy. The crowd waiting outside the police station for news grew so dense and raucous that the police filed out, grim-faced, to push them back and then closed off the road. Premier McKell had announced a five-hundred pound reward for information. Wild theories ricocheted around the pubs: it was a Yank who had killed before in Melbourne; it was a member of the police force; it was a soldier; it was the father — no one knew where he was, did they?
Templeton necks his near-empty bottle, drinking in the last warmish bubbles, and re-reads the paper aloud, although he must have read it three times already. ‘A woman caller said she saw the girl with a man on the corner of King and Georgina Streets near 8:30 p.m. and heard the man say: “Come on, we’ll go down there now,” and her reply: “We can’t go to the party yet, I haven’t got the bread.”’
‘Why would she go to a party at nighttime with a man she never met?’ Roberta props herself up on her elbows and takes hold of the news sheet. Templeton didn’t want to hear more speculation — he was sick to death of it — but they could think of little else to talk about. Murder talk ran hot. Everyone had a theory to declaim or their own private suspicion to coddle. Roberta reads aloud. ‘The Chief of the C.I.B., Superintendent Malcolm, gave the man’s description.’ Her face is illuminated eerily in the submarine glow of the streetlight as she sounds out the words with some effort. ‘About twenty-seven or twenty-eight, five feet eight inches, medium build; fair, suntanned complex— complexion; dark or brown hair; full face; wearing a military overcoat, dirty grey trousers, open neck shirt, and a grey felt hat.’
‘Well, fuck me if that is not near every man in Newtown.’ Dot laughs coldly. ‘A man, average height, with brown hair, wearing a uniform? You mean a needle in a stack full of needles! They will have to interview the entire forces.’
‘Dirty grey trousers? They’d only have said that if they were real dirty, not just regular dirty. Must’a been a tramp, don’t you think, Dot? Some bloke sleeping rough?’ Roberta looks at her.
Merv, Templeton thinks instantly, and draws his coat around himself tighter. In his imagination he sees those iris-less eyes, reflective in the dark.
Dot drapes an arm around her. ‘They want us to think it was a tramp.’ She strikes a match, its smoke tail pluming. She looks leonine in this light.
‘What do you mean?’ Templeton asks.
‘They do not want us to think that such a thing could be done by an ordinary soldier, a brother, somebody’s son. Whoever he was. They want us to think he is not one of us. Not an Aus-sie.’ She fractures the word into two and stumbles on it. ‘Rozumiesz — understand?’
‘Surely it couldn’t have been one of us.’ Roberta’s pupils are inky saucers. She looks up at the sky and shivers.
Dot sweeps Roberta’s fingers up in hers, rubbing them against the cold, and bundles them under her coat. ‘Surely it could indeed.’ She exhales, keeping the ember of her cigarette clear of Roberta’s loose hair. ‘People are stupid.’
‘But she was just a child. And it was so … Who could do that? It must have been a stranger passing through.’ Roberta shakes her head, not wanting to believe it. ‘Personally, I think it was the Yank. Like that lunatic from the US army they hanged in Melbourne a couple of years back for strangling those three broads. What was his name?’
‘Leonski. I will bet you one hundred Yankee dollars it is not.’
‘What makes you say that?’ The hairs on the nape of Templeton’s neck are erect. His hands twitch in his lap. ‘Dot? You don’t think that maybe Jackie —’
‘Lucky!’ Roberta rounds on him, using the nickname he hates. ‘What would make you ask such a thing?’
‘No reason.’
Dot says nothing and won’t look at him.
‘Well, you hush your mouth!’ Roberta chides. They lie on the blanket, each bundled in their overcoat, just their faces peeking out, breath emerging as steam. No one says anything for a while, and the only sounds are the draw of cigarettes and the swallow of beer.
‘Do you see that bright one up there?’ Dot takes Roberta’s hand out from her coat and lifts it in the air. ‘That’s Alpha Centauri.’
‘Which one? There’s millions.’ Roberta laughs. ‘They all look the same.’
‘At the top. Do you see? It’s like a diamond tipped over on its side. Alpha Centauri’s the top, then Beta Centauri.’ She points with Roberta’s finger and sketches a long kite shape. ‘Acrux at the bottom.’
‘That’s the Southern Cross,’ Templeton says.
‘Oh yes, smarty pants! And how do you know that?’ Dot props herself up on her elbow and pokes him.
‘Our father taught us,’ he replies. ‘Not much to do at night on the farm.’
He catches himself as a memory surfaces: the sweet, thick stink of the wattle on a muggy night, a tawny frogmouth somewhere, his tall sister and taller father reciting constellations as he looked up at them.
He has not seen his Dad since just before ’40, when everyone was already sick of the war: the enthusiasm had waned from the weeks when all the folks had crowded around the wireless in
the church hall and cheered at that voice saying, brassy and full of bluster, ‘The lion has roared, the cubs are with you!’ That day he had thought not of war but only of Daniel and the meaty perfume of a cat den, and of the angel God sent to shut the lion’s mouth so that Daniel might survive. He remembered a page in his lettering book, the words he had traced over and over again, in pencil before pen, and how they had frightened him: The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
He did not know what those words meant, but his gut told him it was an invitation to catastrophe. Not that war had touched them much, out in the sticks, back then. They were out on the Parramatta River, in a timber shack with some chickens and a trench yards away for a shitter. He had never even been to Sydney, but he could point which way it was — east, where the sun rose. But when the Japs had looked about to march on the Top End, it wasn’t any longer a phony war, taking place far away in Europe. Nor when men started dying and the papers had nothing else on the front page but lists of names, lists so long they made your eyes swim.
‘It was your sister that taught me!’ Dot laughs, delighted, looking at the stars. ‘But she said that she learnt it from a book.’ She lies back down, her eyes glassy and distant.
‘Annie doesn’t like to talk about Dad,’ Templeton says and Dot nods. ‘He’s in Long Bay for a smash and grab.’ He hesitates; he has never told anyone, but the words feel good as they come out. ‘But he might as well be dead. Armed robbery on the letter they sent, but we hadn’t heard from him for six months before that. He cleared off, left us. We thought he was dead anyway.’ He goes quiet, looking at the sky.
‘The sky looks different here to where I was a girl.’ Dot, sensing Templeton’s sadness, changes the subject. ‘All the stars are in the wrong place, like a kaleidoscope.’ She makes a window through her fingers and mimes shaking it.
Dark Fires Shall Burn Page 13
