Dark Fires Shall Burn

by Anna Westbrook

  How has she never noticed the ugliness of the street before? It’s everywhere. Weeping red boils on men’s necks peek from grubby collars. A dog squats and shits in a doorway. Women on a corner block her way, squawking their gossip, and her mother is forced to elbow through them.

  She looks hard at each fellow that passes: the soldiers, the workmen, the toffs in their nice suits and clean hats. Did he do it? Was it him? A gang of skinny children clogs the street, and she notices the rivers of greenish snot clinging to their upper lips, unwiped. Where are their mothers?

  By the Town Hall Hotel, a soldier with no bottom half sits on a wheeled board. He rattles a near-empty-sounding tin at them. Her mother pays him no regard.

  They walk the familiar route to Frances’ house, the one Nancy’s feet have traced so many times, but nothing seems familiar about it now. Nancy’s good shoes hurt her toes, and the strap on the left one flaps loosely because of the broken buckle from when she threw them down the stairs.

  As they open the old gate, they see a clutter of casseroles and flowers untouched on the stoop. Nancy is immediately ashamed of the stewpot in her arms.

  At the front door, Kate knocks, loudly. No answer. The curtains twitch. She knocks again, even more forcefully this time. ‘Mrs Reed? Peggy? Are you home?’

  Nancy stands witlessly, holding onto the pot. She hopes Mrs Reed does not open the door and they can simply turn around and go home. She leans down to put the stew with all the others, but her mother halts her. ‘She’s in there,’ she whispers. She says, over-loudly, ‘Mrs Reed, it’s Kate Durand.’ Then she pauses. ‘Peggy? Open the door.’

  Inside, a baby wails.

  Passers-by slow down to gawk, and Nancy feels her face burning. How dare they all stand around gaping? She wishes they would all leave and go to hell.

  ‘She’s probably not here — someone is probably looking after Thomas,’ she tells her mother.

  Kate draws her close and knocks again, and just as Nancy feels her determination sapping, there is a shuffle and the sound of a turning key. Mrs Reed’s face emerges, painstakingly made up, with her upswept hair tightly tucked into a spotted kerchief. Nancy has never seen her wearing makeup.

  If Kate is surprised, she masks it well. ‘Oh, Peggy. I am so, so deeply sorry,’ she says in her special stage voice. She takes one of Mrs Reed’s stringy, freckled hands.

  ‘Mrs Durand. Good of you to visit,’ Mrs Reed replies crisply, withdrawing her hand. ‘And with Nancy.’ Nancy thinks she can hear a crack spread through Mrs Reed’s voice when she says her name.

  No one seems to know what to say next. Kate and Nancy stand on the doorstep, being nipped by the wind. From the corner of her eye Nancy can see the man next door, pulling weeds from his fence on his hands and knees, stop to watch them surreptitiously. A clump of dandelion root, scattering dirt on his trousers, hangs in mid-air, forgotten.

  ‘Won’t you come in?’ Mrs Reed finally surrenders.

  They step inside, and she pulls the door shut smartly behind them.

  The hallway is dim. Nancy gives her the stew and Mrs Reed looks down at the pot as though Nancy has put a dead frog in her hands. Kate takes it away gently and sidles around her to put it down in the pantry. Nancy does not like the way Mrs Reed is looking at her.

  ‘Would you —’ Mrs Reed begins to say but falters. She runs a tongue over her scaly, peeling lipstick. It is not drawn on very well, Nancy can see; it’s missing the corners and the interior, so it looks more like an idea of lipstick.

  She tries again, this time addressing Kate, as though this is easier. ‘Would Nancy like to go and choose something?’

  Nancy looks from Mrs Reed to her mother hesitantly, unsure of what she means.

  ‘Choose something to take, I mean … a keepsake. The police have already visited, of course. And poked their noses in our business. They told me they put her room back together the way they found it. I — I haven’t been in there since —’

  ‘Oh!’ Kate exclaims. ‘Of course she would. How generous.’ She presses Nancy’s back resolutely. ‘Off you go, Nan.’

  ‘But —’ A flutter of panic hits Nancy’s chest.

  ‘Go on now. Do what Mrs Reed says.’

  Nancy’s feet propel her down the corridor and into Frances’ room. It is cramped and messy, just like she remembers, and the sight makes her well up with something pulsating and awful. Frances will never sleep in the bed again. She will never touch her things or wear her clothes or look out her window, the only window, which stares out at the redbrick flank of the neighbouring house.

  She regards Frances’ bed, made and, of course, unslept in. There are old copies of Pix strewn across it; perhaps the police had examined them for evidence. The real pillows drown in the throw cushions her mother was always giving her, embroidered with bible verses. When they used to come here after school, Frances would sweep them all up and shove them under the bed. But Mrs Reed only replaced them, just as they were, like a colony of fungi that grew again each morning.

  Nancy picks up a cushion, cream with pale-pink stitching. Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. Proverbs 22:15. She lets it drop back onto the covers.

  On the wall above her are cutouts and magazine covers Frances had stuck up. The face of a beautiful girl lying back on a picnic rug, hands tucked behind her perfect hair, smiles down dopily in black and white. Nancy recognises it from the cover-girl competition in Pix a year or so back, which Frances followed slavishly. It had bored her to tears the way Frances chattered on about it. Women posed on beaches, hanging from yachts, in physical-culture outfits. Their inexhaustible rows of white teeth, red lips and coquettish eyes had made Nancy feel dizzy.

  She sits down on the bed. It smells harsh, cleansed, like laundry. Not at all of Frances.

  She opens the drawer of the beechwood table beside the bed and peers in. There, folded immaculately, behind the King James, sit all the letters she had written to Frances when she had been forced to visit Aunt Jo for nine weeks before her father died. She pulls out the papers and cradles them, reading over her drivel about the horses she’d ridden in Tuggeranong, her long tracts detailing the ennui of flyblown, sun-bleached days, Aunt Jo’s inedible cooking and the freezing, ‘character-building’ showers Jo had forced her to take.

  Only one reply had come in all those weeks, and it had been so flighty and vague, mostly about seeing Lassie Come Home at the pictures and how desperately she wished her mother would buy her a rough collie. Nancy had assumed that Frances had barely read her letters and had been, privately, hurt.

  Beneath the correspondence lies a photograph of the two of them taken the night they had gone to see Nancy’s mother in Much Ado About Nothing. Both in their Sunday dresses — impossible to tell in the black and white, but Frances in yellow and Nancy in blue — cheeks touching, caught in laughter, standing outside having lemonades at interval. A ribbon is looped in a bow around the picture. Nancy slips the photo into the pocket of her pinafore and closes the drawer.

  On the top of the table is a stack of books, and she runs her fingers along the spines. The Magic Faraway Tree; she has the same copy. It was their shared favourite until last year, when Frances declared it was for babies and Moonface was an idiot, and similarly the fate of The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, the next in the tower. On top of that the newly beloved The Naughtiest Girl in the School sits, well thumbed.

  Nancy crouches to look underneath the bed. The floor is bare and clean save for a painted macaroni necklace ringed in dust. Lifting the mattress from the bedframe, she slides a palm into the crack, scanning — again nothing. She walks to the cupboard and feels a hot surge at the sight of Frances’ few clothes hanging there, and runs her fingers over the sleeves and hems. Frances’ brown cotton first-aid sack is propped in the corner, and Nancy reaches forward and carries it over to the bed
to empty it. They had not had to lug these around for years now. She wonders why Frances kept hers. The government had issued them when they must have been only five years old. She touches the roll of bandages, the safety pins, the earplugs, and the mouthguard made of foul-tasting rubber tubing. She remembers how Frances had slipped the mouthguard in during assembly once last year and scared the daylights out of Mr Cameron. She had come up to accept a certificate, rolled her eyes back in her head and grimaced with a mouthful of orange rubber. Frightened the bejesus out of him! Nancy giggles at the memory of her gloriously grotesque face and Mr Cameron’s girlish scream of surprise. She inspects the little bottle of Sal Volatile — you waggled it under peoples’ noses if they fainted — then finds the ripped-open, empty package of glucose jellybeans that obviously Frances had not preserved for emergencies.

  Suddenly she remembers that Frances had told her there was a secret drawer under the false top of the cupboard, where she hid things from her mother. She glances around. The only other piece of furniture is a chair, and she pushes it until it touches the side of the cupboard and then clambers up. Her hands reach above her head, and she feels a heavy mix of dread and anticipation when they hit something. She lifts out an Arnott’s tin from where it lies, nestled in the depression of wood. The brassy colours on the lid are painful — just the sort of thing Frances would have liked — but she takes it down with care and closes the bedroom door with a quiet click. Prizing off the lid, she finds tear-outs from Man magazine on top. These must have been filched from her father before he went away — études des femmes is printed on one page, and there are at least fifteen pages, creased infinitely, as though they had been folded, opened and re-folded innumerable times. Nancy looks in shock at the drawings: women talking into telephones, lying languid on beds in sheer nightdresses, or standing with a leg cocked, their breasts and buttocks cartoonishly large, at least compared to her mother and Mrs Reed. At the bottom of the pile, she finds a picture of two pilots in full aviator gear, one with a girl — naked — in his lap, arms clasped about his neck. She has devilish red hair and large, pert nipples. The caption reads ‘The Gremlin’. Frances had shown her this one before. Nancy remembers her sliding across the picture beneath the desk at school and her giggling at the look of alarm on Nancy's face.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ she’d hissed. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘I found it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the cemetery.’

  ‘I think it’s filthy,’ Nancy said.

  ‘Don’t be such a baby.’ Frances snatched it back and stuffed it in her pinafore.

  Her words had the sizzle of a fire-charged poker. Nancy was ashamed of her innocence but also furiously indignant.

  The rest of the tin sports two hand-rolled, filterless cigarettes; two shillings and sixpence; an empty gold locket, which Nancy fingers delicately; a man’s broken pocket watch; and a little locked diary. Nancy is examining its clasp when she hears voices, muffled but raised, and she hastily swipes the diary, shoving it in the pocket of her jacket. She glances for something to take out that she could safely present as the keepsake she was commissioned to retrieve. Frances’ old teddy bear, Winston, has fallen off the bed. She grasps him by a threadbare paw and opens the door. ‘I’ve got something!’ she yells down. ‘I’m coming. Just a minute.’

  She squashes the contents of the tin back in and jams the rosella lid on, almost stumbling as she climbs to put it back into the dark where she found it. No doubt Mrs Reed will get her hands on it sooner or later.

  ‘Oh Peggy, you can’t mean that,’ Kate is saying to Mrs Reed, who is busy at the grout between the kitchen tiles, down on all fours with a scourer. Nancy hovers in the doorway, staring. One didn’t clean one’s house with company.

  ‘What did you choose, darling?’ There is welcome relief upon Kate’s face as she looks up at her daughter.

  Nancy holds Winston out. ‘The teddy,’ she says lamely.

  ‘Oh, that old thing. Her father bought that. It’s cheap. Is that really what you want to take?’ Mrs Reed says, hardly looking up, scrubbing with conviction.

  Nancy shrugs. ‘I guess.’

  Her mother picks up the neglected, whimpering Thomas and puts him on her lap, jiggling him, allowing him a crook of her knuckle to suckle on. The baby looks like a greedy white grub. ‘Speaking of Mr Reed, have you — have you notified him? I mean, has word been sent to … where he might be?’ Kate clears her throat.

  ‘S’pose he will read it in the papers like everybody else. Whole world knows about Frances now. It’s national news, they keep telling me. She would have liked that. She always told me she was going to be famous.’

  Nancy watches her mother’s brow crinkle in disgust at the remark.

  ‘Oh … well, perhaps I can talk to the police, if you like. About getting word sent to him.’ Unusually, Kate seems awkward and lost for words. ‘If that would be a help to you.’ Mrs Reed does not answer. ‘Perhaps if you could provide me with his address …’

  ‘Don’t have any address.’ Mrs Reed’s words bounce metallically around the room. Her upper arm wobbles with each stroke of the scouring pad.

  ‘His last known whereabouts?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’ Mrs Reed stops scrubbing, puts both hands on her knees and stares up at her.

  ‘It’s just that, as her father, he would want to … I imagine … be here.’

  ‘If I get word from him, I’ll tell him.’

  ‘Why don’t you stop that now, Peggy? What do you say? Shall I fix us both a drink? You look like you sure could use one,’ Kate says, unable to contain herself.

  ‘I don’t keep liquor in this house.’ Mrs Reed hoists herself upright and turns, flinging the scourer into the sink.

  ‘Of course you don’t. Silly me.’

  Nancy knows that Mrs Reed is not telling the truth because there is liquor in the house. Frances had shown her one Sunday when she had stayed home from church, pretending to be sick. She’d fished out a bottle of crème de menthe from behind the porridge oats, and they’d tasted the luminous contents.

  ‘Ugh! Squid juice,’ Frances had gagged.

  ‘Mmm, no. It’s fairy cordial. This is what Oberon and Titania would drink.’ Nancy had stuck her green tongue out in delight.

  ‘This is Puck’s love potion. It makes people fall in love and kiss.’ Frances had turned her back to Nancy and crossed her arms, running her hands up and down her own sides, tossing her head about and moaning. Nancy understood it was meant to look like she was locked in a passionate embrace, as in the movies, and it did rather.

  ‘Stop it! That’s wicked,’ Nancy had squealed. And they both giggled helplessly.

  Nancy watches her mother rise and place the baby down delicately in his crib. He starts to cry. Mrs Reed does not move to pick him up. She remains with her back turned, her shoulders taut. ‘Righto then.’

  ‘Our deepest condolences,’ Kate says hurriedly. ‘Peggy, please reconsider. Please think about it.’ She turns for the door. ‘We’ll show ourselves out.’

  ‘Wait.’ Mrs Reed walks over to the hall cupboard and opens a drawer. In her hands she has some letters that she spreads on the table. Kate stoops to regard them and her lips move over the words but no sound issues.

  ‘Read them aloud,’ Mrs Reed tells her. Nancy can see a vein in her forehead pulsing.

  ‘I’d rather not.’ Kate’s eyes dart over the words and she turns a letter face-down in her hand.

  ‘Read them, if you please. And then tell me what you make of the wretched things.’

  Kate contemplates for a moment and swivels to look at Nancy. ‘Nan, hon, go back to Frances’ room.’

  ‘But I don’t want to.’

  ‘Now!’

  Nancy pretends to walk back up the corridor. She makes sure to step heavily to Frances’ door and then she slips her shoes off and
creeps back down the passageway in only her socks.

  ‘Peggy, where have these come from?’

  ‘Please, Kate, I need someone to read them out to me, so I know I’m not going crazy. I’ve read them so many times, the words are swimming in front of me.’

  ‘Alright. Of course,’ Kate says, with tenderness. ‘Dear Missus Reed.’ Kate clears her throat and continues hoarsely. ‘I know who killed your daughter. He has killed others too and he will do again. Put fifty pounds in an envelope and leave it on the bench in a paper bag at St Peter’s station. DO NOT CONTACT THE POLICE. I will write again with his name. To prove this is true: the girl had one shilling in the pocket of her cardigan when she died.’ Frances strains to hear her mother’s voice, low with concern: ‘Peggy, you can’t believe this. It’s clearly a load of rubbish. Anyone could have read in the papers she’d been sent on an errand. Have you shown the police?’

  There is a long silence. Nancy wishes she could see what is happening. Mrs Reed coughs and says something Nancy cannot catch.

  ‘Well, if you haven’t you should take them at once!’ her mother exclaims. ‘You shouldn’t have to bear being pestered by fraudsters and lunatics. After all you’ve been through.’

  ‘Read the others,’ Mrs Reed says thinly, as though whatever resin holding her voice together is wearing out.

  ‘There are more of these? Peggy, I don’t think I need to. I don’t think you need to either. You don’t need to subject yourself to any more of this nonsense. This is a madman.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Really, I must insist —’

  ‘Please!’ Mrs Reed's voice strains in an ugly fashion.

  Nancy hears the slick of paper unfolding. ‘Dear Missus Reed, your little girl got what was coming to her — oh my!’ Kate breaks off. There is a crumpling sound like she is throttling the paper. ‘Who could write such a thing? When did these come?’

  ‘One a day since it was in the news.’

  Nancy waits as the moments drag infinitely. Were these letters real? From him, the murderer? She dares to peep around the corner. Kate is hugging Mrs Reed and wiping at her wet eyes. Mrs Reed isn’t hugging back, just standing with her hands stiff at her sides.