Dark Fires Shall Burn

by Anna Westbrook

  ‘Did Annie tell you the names of the others?’ Roberta wriggles so she can be closer to Dot. She offers Dot her hand, but Dot does not take it.

  ‘Yes, she did, on one of our first nights together. She told me the names of lots of them. So many I thought she must be making it up. Now I know she was not telling falsehoods.’

  Templeton smiles in the dark at the old-fashioned word. Lies, he wants to tell her, but does not.

  ‘How did your father come to know them all?’ Roberta asks him.

  ‘He told us his father was a sea captain. Before he came to Australia to look for gold. I don’t know if that’s true.’

  ‘I wish my dad had told me things like that,’ Roberta remarks.

  ‘What did he teach you?’ Dot asks.

  ‘Well, I’m from up north. My dad taught me how to ride a horse without falling off. He taught me how to build a solid fence, and how to tie a bow-line and a sheepshank. He taught me how to cut a piece of sugarcane so you can suck out the raw juice. He showed me where to kick a bloke who was messing with you so he couldn’t keep messing with you. But I haven’t seen him for a while. I came down here after Darwin got bombed. Go down to Sydney, he said. Be safe, he said. Been working for Dolly since — ever since I was seventeen.’

  ‘What do you think of her?’ Dot turns so she can see her face.

  ‘Who? Dolly?’

  ‘Is she as bad as Lorraine made out?’

  Roberta considers the question. ‘Yes and no. She’s a queer fish. That story about Edith is true. But then, other times … well, she does things that I just can’t fit with the rest of her behaviour.’

  ‘Like what?’ Templeton asks.

  ‘Like every Christmas she makes an anonymous donation to Royle-ston Boys Home — you know, the orphanage on Glebe Point Road.’

  ‘The boys’ home? Why?’ he asks. He often passes the large Federation house on his escapes to the water, always holding his breath superstitiously. For a time he was fearful he might end up inside it.

  ‘She used to do it in person, marching up there with a great purse of cash, asking to pay for the children to go on a Christmas picnic and for each one to have a gift — a real present they could unwrap themselves. They let her do that a couple of years, until some biddy on some committee got wind of it and started a blue about “dirty money”. Now she has to do it on the sly.’

  ‘I wonder why she does that,’ Dot mused. ‘And why they want to look a horse in the mouth.’

  ‘A gift horse. Not just any old horse,’ Roberta corrects her with a laugh. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘It is not her who I worry about. That mad ape, Errol —’

  ‘Errol? He’s just Dolly’s attack dog. He does what she and Snowy bid him do.’

  ‘I don’t think they have the leash on tight enough. Maybe they ought to give him muzzle as well.’

  ‘He won’t mess with you unless you give him cause.’ Roberta yawns. Beneath their thick lashes, her wide brown eyes blink lazily. ‘Oh, that’s right. You can’t seem to help it, Dot. You find trouble whichever direction you’re pointed,’ she teases lightly, with a playful glance in Dot’s direction. Dot smiles.

  ‘The man’s trouble. I wouldn’t trust him far as I could kick him,’ Templeton offers his opinion, feeling all of a sudden sage and adult.

  ‘You don’t have to trust him, just stay out of his way. Stay out of Lorraine’s way too, for that matter. She don’t like you much either,’ Roberta says.

  Dot takes a large gulp, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

  ‘But don’t worry.’ Roberta reaches up and places her hand in Dot’s. ‘I do.’

  ‘Dziękuję, truskaweczka.’

  ‘That sounds pretty. What does it mean?’

  ‘It means, thank you, little strawberry. That’s what my father used to call me. Or I can say it for you in German, if you’d prefer? Kleine Erdbeere?’

  ‘I like it when you speak in your language.’

  Templeton rolls onto his side, smirking at Dot’s showing off, pulling his coat tighter around his chin. He closes his eyes, their conversation washing over him.

  ‘You awake, Lucky?’ Dot nudges him. He stays silent, the beer catching up with him, content to let them think he is asleep. Roberta reaches over Dot and brushes her hand along the stubble of his scalp. ‘He’s a handsome boy, even like this,’ she says. ‘He looks like he’s fresh from a delousing in the infirmary.’

  ‘He looks like his sister.’

  ‘You care for him, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do. He is my rodzina — my family. He and Annie both are.’

  They fall silent. In the quiet, Templeton begins to doze.

  ‘You ever been in love with a man, Dot?’

  ‘With a man? No.’

  Templeton hears Dot dragging deeply on her cigarette, and there is only the sound of the park around them for a long time. His thoughts wander, dream-like, to his father, a memory of standing on the verandah watching him, stripped to the waist, using a mallet to drive new fence posts into the baked dirt. Then he hears a strange noise, and it takes him some moments to realise it is the sound of kissing, hurried and wet. Roberta makes a little whimper, her breathing heavy. They are trying to be quiet for his sake, he realises, and he is skewered with embarrassment.

  He is wondering how to stay perfectly and casually still in a pantomime of slumber when Dot speaks. ‘I can’t,’ she says in a pinched voice.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just can’t.’

  He listens to the rustle of Dot’s body edging away across the blanket until he feels her back up against his own.

  ‘It’s because of her, isn’t it?’

  ‘You do not know what you are talking about.’

  ‘She doesn’t love you,’ Roberta says, and her voice is barbed. ‘She’s only got eyes for Jackie, that’s obvious.’

  ‘Stop it. You don’t know how it is. You don’t know anything.’

  Roberta starts to sniffle at Dot’s sharpness, and then, after a few horrible moments, Templeton hears the sound of Dot rolling back to hold her, whispering, ‘I’m sorry,’ and Roberta telling her angrily, ‘Don’t.’

  But then she surrenders, and he hears the rustle of Dot’s arms sweeping around her, and soon their breathing finds a rhythm and he knows that they are asleep.

  Templeton wakes with the sag of disappointment. He looks at his empty beer. He is cold and not nearly as drunk as he would like. His mind turns over. It is not yet light, too early to head for Dolly’s. Roberta murmurs from somewhere beneath the tides of sleep. How nice it must be, to moor against another warm, breathing body, and for a moment he is jealous that she gets Dot’s arms around her, that it is she and not he.

  He dreamt of his mother again and can almost feel that familiar taste of muddy dam water in his mouth. He gets up and leans against the stone archway, aware of the possums scrabbling through the branches overhead, fighting and rutting. Without warning, the image of Frances’ body, stretched out half-naked in the grass, lances him. He wants another drink, and the want seizes him.

  It takes an hour, but he walks the long road down to Central Station, where he buys a beer from a tramp drinking with soldiers on the fringes of Eddy Avenue. Their fire flares in a scorched steel drum. Belmore Park looks still and slumbering, but as his eyes adjust he sees ruffles and flickers of movement in the trees on the gentle rises and in the basin. Men, and what look like a few shaggy and rectangular women, are everywhere. Lean-tos and nests of soiled coats and mattresses fill every arbour and hollow. A group in slouch hats eye him as he picks his way through, the whites of their eyes menacing in the firelight. Templeton walks faster. When he hits Elizabeth Street, he exhales in relief.

  He drains his drink as he reaches Hyde Park, wandering towards the fountain while trying to remember the whereabouts of a gin place he’d be
en once with Annie, somewhere off College Street. He dips his hand into the water and leans back to look at the minotaur atop the stream. The light from the streetlights bounces off the water and upon the wide musculature of the monster. Its sinewy human arms strain against Theseus, the bull’s horn tight in his mighty grasp. Sculpted turtles spray glistening hemispheres of water from their mouths, and Apollo, naked and resplendent, looks on.

  After a minute or so, Templeton becomes aware that the man who has taken a seat nearby on the fountain edge is regarding him intently. It is the flash of his gold cufflinks that catches Templeton’s eye. The man is wearing a sharp suit with a silk waistcoat, his hat pulled low, angled over his left eye.

  ‘Do you have a light?’ The man slides over and stretches out a hand with clean, trimmed nails. His voice gravelly, though not coarse, with perhaps a tinge of an English accent. His little fingernail is painted red, Templeton notices with some surprise; he’s never seen a man wearing nail polish before.

  Templeton nods and rummages through his pockets. He takes a cigarette out for himself too. As he does so, he is looking at the man’s finger, staring really, and the matchbook slips from his hand, landing with a plop in the fountain. His cheeks flush. ‘Sorry,’ he mutters. Perhaps he is drunker than he thought.

  ‘Never mind.’ The man reaches into his pocket and produces his own matches. He strikes one and holds it out. Confused, Templeton leans into the flame. The man grins and exhales a stream of smoke. He winks. Templeton turns to survey the park: the paved court around the fountain is strewn with knots of men, in pairs or clusters, smoking and talking, entering and exiting from the underground St James station. Plenty of blokes about to get a light from, so what’s this fella’s game? Templeton pats himself down to make sure his watch and the few coins in his pockets are still there. Outside of the lit circle, the bushes ripple and sway like sea anemones.

  ‘Fancy going some place for a drink?’ The man stands expectantly as he asks the question, assuming a yes.

  ‘Do you know somewhere?’ He is dead keen on another drink, but he’d seen shysters and conmen before. And not many bastards in silk waistcoats stopped to talk to the likes of him.

  ‘Sure I do.’ The man rocks back on his expensive heels and sweeps his arms wide. His teeth glint large and very white.

  ‘Well, umm, alright then.’ Templeton throws down his ember and stamps it out. If this fella wanted to rob him, he would soon find he was wasting his time.

  He follows the man into the trees, a pace or so behind. A murmur of harbour salt from Woolloomooloo Bay mixes with the smell of mulch and the man’s cologne. When they have walked a hundred yards or so to where the Moreton Bay figs huddle densely, they stop. The man leaves the path and ducks behind a tree. Templeton watches as he unbuttons his trousers and urinates. It is too dark for Templeton to see clearly, but he hears the bullish stream against the trunk.

  ‘Come here,’ says a disembodied voice, lower and thicker than it had been at the fountain.

  ‘I thought we’re gettin’ a drink —’

  ‘I’ve got a quart of brandy.’

  ‘Well, come out and let’s drink it.’

  ‘No. You come here.’

  Templeton is too irritated to be wary. He walks into the shadows. The man has his back pressed against the vast fig. He gestures with the bottle and presses it into Templeton’s hand. ‘Have as much as you like.’

  The brandy is hot from being in the man’s breast pocket — cloying — but it’s welcome and he slurps it down. He wipes his moist lips and offers it back. The man doesn’t reach to take it. Instead he has his hand on his crotch, adjusting himself unhurriedly. He has slipped off his hat and now pulls at his tie, allowing Templeton to sees the black hair spreading to his collarbones in a chevron. Templeton stares at the man’s chest, the notch of his collarbone. The man moves towards him and he feels the gust of breath on his neck, fingers groping at his buttons. His soft cock in a cool palm, pulled out. The man slides his hand up to the head of it.

  ‘Get off.’ Templeton reaches suddenly for the man’s collar and pushes him. His open palm slaps skin, marble-hard beneath the cotton of a shirt. The man pushes the heel of his hand into Templeton’s protesting mouth and pulls harder on Templeton’s stiffening cock.

  It only takes a moment. He doesn’t know if it is the panting in his ear, the vigour of the man’s grip or the solidness of the flesh pressing into him. He gasps so violently he grabs a fistful of the man’s hair and twists it as he spends himself in the man’s hand. Afterwards he sags, but almost immediately he senses the pressure on his shoulders, and a soft grunt forces him down onto his knees.

  He tries to struggle, unsure, but the liquor befuddles him. The man manoeuvres him so his head is smacking roughly against the fig trunk. He feels the hard cock prod against his chin, his cheek, trying to find the wet entrance to his mouth. He starts to panic. He tries to knock it away with his hand but the man moves it back again, this time more urgently. Although it is dark amid the trees, he closes his eyes. Then the man is in his mouth — further than his mouth, hitting the back of his throat, hard, angled down, fucking his face, and he is pinned against the tree. He splutters, gags. Wiry hairs are getting caught in his teeth, and hips buck against his nose, smashing it flat.

  ‘Suck it.’

  He chokes and retches loudly, fighting for his breath around the thick cock. The man backs off, allowing him some slack. Templeton can just make out the trouser material bunched under his testicles. The man shoves it deep in his throat one final time and a salty, creamy bitterness coats his tongue.

  ‘Towards your next drink.’ The man picks him up, smoothes him down and pushes a pound note into his coat pocket. Templeton pulls up his trousers. He wants to say something, anything, but he can’t think what. The taste of the man’s seed is potent in his mouth.

  ‘So long,’ the man puts his hat back on, tips it and walks away.

  Templeton does not know how long he stands there, leaning against the tree. He takes the pound note out and gapes at it like a fool. The lights guide him back finally to College Street — a string of beacons along a foreign coast. The forbidding façade of the museum greets him, and the Grecian pillars of the posh boys’ grammar school stand tall and austere. An armada of bats launch out from the canopy behind him, keening. They sweep over the William Street dip. Will they skim the hulked silhouette of the Bridge, or keep east and flock out past the dark headlands until there is nothing but unending sky? He takes the pound from his jacket again, looking at the King’s head as though for the first time, and he breaks a grin, folds the note into tidy quarters and tucks it back.

  NINETEEN

  ‘We must go and pay our respects. We must do our duty, love.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’ Nancy is aghast.

  ‘It’s not a choice. That is what is to be done.’

  ‘I have a pound cake you can take. I’ll put it in a tin,’ Mrs Roberts contributes, ever-present, and mobilised by the plan. But then she rethinks. ‘Perhaps a cake is inappropriate? Oh, no — what do you think? Maybe the lamb stew instead?’ Fretting, she returns downstairs to Izzy in the kitchen.

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘Stand up.’ Kate pulls the covers off her daughter’s bed and hoists her roughly by the arm. ‘And put on your blue dress.’

  ‘I don’t want to go. You can’t make me.’ Nancy’s lip trembles.

  Kate wrenches a dress off the hanger and throws it on the chair. She puts white socks and brown leather shoes on the floor and stands in the middle of the room, waiting, arms slack and neck stiff. The outfit looks strange, empty and flat, as if the person who had worn it had just been sitting there a moment ago and had evaporated into a cloud of steam.

  ‘You’ll go because it is the right thing to do,’ she says simply.

  ‘I don’t see why. It’s all Mrs Reed’s fault.’ Nancy throws a p
illow violently onto the floor.

  ‘Nancy.’ Her mother looks disgusted. ‘That’s a horrible thing to say!’

  ‘It is her fault. She was horrible to Frances. Always just banging on about Jesus! Too lazy to get her own bread. It was dark. Frances never would have —’

  ‘That’s enough.’ Kate cuts her off sharply. ‘Mrs Reed is not to blame. And we are going to go over there and pay our respects and bring that poor woman some stew. It’s the least we can do. What with her husband gone —’

  ‘Mr Reed is not dead. He ran away. He probably couldn’t stand her anymore. Frances said he’s working in Queensland.’

  ‘Regardless, Nancy. That hardly matters now. Where’s your charity? The woman is alone with a baby, and her daughter has just been found dead in a field.’

  ‘A cemetery,’ Nancy corrects.

  ‘Put your dress on.’ Her mother’s voice is starched with finality.

  ‘Why do we have to go and talk to Mrs Reed when you wouldn’t even let me go to Frances’ funeral?’

  Kate sighed, exasperated. ‘That weren’t up to me, my lass. You know that.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Mrs Reed was afraid if it was open to the public it would turn into a circus, what with all the papers. It was family only.’

  ‘I was her family!’ Nancy shouts, her voice breaking in her throat, the words coming out almost incoherent.

  ‘I know.’ Her mother stretches out her arms, her composure fracturing.

  Nancy goes to her and allows her to comb and plait her hair. Anything to stop her mother from crying — she doesn’t think she can bear it this morning. They sit in silence, and her mother’s hands shake as she braids, turning out an inevitable mess. After she has left the room, Nancy pulls it out and re-does it neatly.

  Downstairs, she accepts Mrs Roberts’ white-china pot of stew to carry and sets out into the cold bright day, keeping her eyes on her mother’s black heels clacking along in front of her.