Dark Fires Shall Burn

by Anna Westbrook

  ‘Oh, let the lad take a stroll,’ Tipper says, busy trying to bundle a semi-conscious Nellie into the front seat. Nellie’s head slumps forward, her face pressed against the dashboard. Tipper withdraws a silver money clip and peels off a note.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Templeton shakes his head at the outstretched quid. His fingers close around the pound from the other night in the park, still in his pocket. Able to pay his own way: it gives him a secret sliver of a thrill.

  Tipper looks surprised. ‘Suit yourself,’ she says and climbs into the car. The door clicks shut and the engine stammers to life.

  He walks and smokes, looking in the bright windows of the arcade at mannequins dressed to the nines, at displays of sewing machines, at hats and watches, all sparkling and new. The knowledge that with a few more pounds he could buy some of these things — not for himself, but for Dot — is enticing. He’d like to buy Dot a hat, or some jewellery, something that feels clean, not stolen, and can telegraph the feelings to which he can never give words.

  The night he and Annie came to Sydney, after their mother’s death, everything they could take with them fitted in two carpetbags and his tiny child’s suitcase donated from the church. How Templeton wished they had been on the other side of the platform as the westbound train passed them by, going on through the barren Emu Plains and up into the mountains. He had taken the one headed west with his mother the winter just gone, and when they had disembarked in Katoomba he had clapped his hands to his mouth. His cold breath spun out like yarn on an icy spindle.

  Together they had walked to a great precipice. His mother led him by the hand, away from the gawking picnickers and pinafored girls from the Ladies’ College, down a smaller side-path — a goat track, really — through the dense, crabbed bush, until suddenly the trees fell to nothing and the three towers of naked rock appeared and made him feel tight in the throat. Even as a child, he wanted to lick his lips and hum or shout into the silence. He wanted to throw rocks into the great eventlessness.

  ‘Why are they called that?’ he asked his mother. ‘They look like mountains, not ladies.’

  ‘The Three Sisters?’ she said distractedly, as if surprised he was there, as though in her private world she had forgotten she had a son. ‘When I was a little girl I heard the story that the Aborigines tell about them. Would you like to hear it?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Well then …’ She pushed her sun-streaked hair back. Annie had the same honey eyes. He didn’t; his were green. Annie was indomitable to him back then too, always slapping the table, saying things like ‘Let’s get on with it.’ A trait of brown-eyed people, he had surmised. He was not good at getting on with much at all.

  ‘Well, they say that once upon a time there were three sisters who wanted to marry men from another tribe. There was a big fight. A battle. When the men came to take them. Because their families didn’t want to let them go.’

  ‘Why? Why didn’t they let them?’

  ‘Because they weren’t who they were supposed to marry.’

  ‘Who were they s’posed to marry?’

  ‘Someone else,’ she said, exasperated. ‘Who their parents chose, I imagine, but that doesn’t matter, it’s not the point.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Do you want to hear the rest of the story?’

  ‘Yes.’ He stared down at her feet. Sitting on a boulder, she had cast off her shoes, even though it was bitingly cold, and was rubbing her toes, red as minced meat and swollen. He knew they were the good shoes from the church jumble sale, and that they were more than a size too small.

  ‘So the men took up their fighting spears and they all had a right go at each other,’ she continued. ‘A big blue, with yelling and screaming.’

  ‘Was there blood?’

  ‘I reckon. And then, in the hullabaloo, a sorcerer took the sisters away. He hustled them down here right to this cliff and he turned them into stone.’

  ‘Why? Was he bad?’

  ‘No. He did it to protect them from being hurt in the fight. Or maybe they were trying to run off. Anyway, I can’t remember,’ she continued. ‘But then when it was all over and the dust cleared, the sisters’ tribe saw that the magic man had been killed on his way back! Speared, right through the heart.’

  ‘But how do they get changed back if they were stone?’

  ‘Nobody knew how to change them back.’ She smiled but her voice was thin.

  ‘So they have to stay stone forever?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What did the ones who’d wanted to marry them do? Were they sad?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ His mother sighed. ‘Yes. I’m sure the men were sad. But I can’t see how it’d be all that bad for the sisters. There are worse fates.’

  ‘I think it’s sad.’ He thought about all the things you wouldn’t be able to do if you were turned into a rock. It would be lonely. The wind from the gully buffeted him. He could hear a butcherbird warble in the scrub.

  ‘Can we go now?’ He pulled at her sleeve.

  She treated a high tea at the Paragon before they set off home. He thinks back to his first and only taste of clotted cream, and the viscid blackberry jam that had coated his fingers. It was the nicest place he’d ever been; the nicest until the restaurant tonight. His mother took out a novel from her pocketbook and read it with an index finger keeping the page as she delicately picked up and put down the scone on her plate. The book had a little penguin on the cover but she laughed at him when he asked if that’s what it was about. She dabbed the teaspoon in and out of the jam pot; clusters of dark purple berries stuck to the camber of the spoon. He ate his scone all in one go and eyed his mother’s with the single-mindedness of a piglet.

  ‘You should have made it last,’ she said.

  Templeton whiles away the better part of an hour walking in a long, loose loop, before he finds himself back outside the arcade. Soon the men emerge, still laughing, donning their hats as they file onto the street. Templeton ducks into a doorway and listens as the man says goodbye to his companions. He steps out in front of him and walks around the corner, the man following behind him.

  Suddenly they are pressed close in the shadowed arch. He can smell the brand of his shaving soap, the sharp polish of his shoes, something sweet and grassy on his breath.

  ‘Hello again,’ Templeton says nervously, with a smile.

  The man smiles back. ‘Is there somewhere we can go?’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Newtown police station entrance is menaced from above by the head of a lion, holding a sword lengthwise between bared teeth. Nancy thinks of the ashes of Frances’ diary in the tray of the wheelbarrow, the night wind lifting and dispersing them, as she loiters across the road. She holds the brass lock deep in her pocket, in the perspiring palm of her hand.

  If only her mother could see how impossible it is for her to leave this place without knowing that the man who killed Frances had been caught and is bound to hang. The last time she had seen Frances was when she bundled her down the hallway, brusquely shutting the door on her questions about women’s trouble and what it felt like, too full of jealousy and irritation to answer. It makes Nancy feel sick.

  She watches people enter and leave the station and wonders what is going on inside. She hopes that the police have indefinitely suspended all other matters until they have captured the killer on the loose, that they have mobs of suspects rounded up in the holding cells and that someone — with a heavy club — is rustling out confessions. The papers report less and less every day, as though some candle is coming to the end of its wick.

  Each person to emerge from the building looks disappointingly ordinary, but then she chides herself — what was she expecting, dribbling lunatics? She tries to find a position from where she can glimpse into the vestibule, but the arched doorway seems to have been built to make this impossible. Men in r
umpled suits and dirty collars mix with Brylcreem-types with ties and spit-shined shoes. Nancy admires two lady police officers she recognises as special constables from their blue-and-black uniforms as they leave the building, chatting to each other.

  She should not have burned the diary, she knows it. It’s a valuable clue, one even the police didn’t seem to have found. The guilt is what has drawn her to the station. But what can she say to them now? That she did so — in a babyish tantrum — at being called a baby? Hot shame sticks inside her like heartburn. That is exactly what they would think she is now if she were to present herself and tell them some nonsense about a Pete, or a Jack Tooth, or a ‘Moustache’, for heaven’s sake. Wild speculation. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, as Mr Cameron would say. Signifying nothing.

  She turns her back on Newtown and jumps the tram for the city. She can do her own investigation.

  Down at the Quay near Customs House, Nancy sits on the sandstone wall. Her long white socks are pulled up to her knees, and it’s warm. It is shaping up to be the first warmish day in the whole winter.

  ‘Hi there, girlie. Who you looking for?’ a soldier calls to her from a jostle of returned servicemen.

  ‘You want a smoke-o?’ One holds out a pack of cigarettes to her.

  ‘Hey Ginger Meggs, how ’bout those freckles?’

  ‘You got a big sister, sugar? If she’s as pretty as you tell her to come down here. Ha, I sure do like those copper tops.’

  An officer with prodigious eyebrows that meet in the middle strides out into the square. ‘Alright, you lot. Get back in the queue,’ he roars. Turning to Nancy, he frowns. ‘You move along now. You’re distracting my men. What’s your business here anyway?’

  ‘I’m looking for Pete. Uh, Peter …’ She hops off the wall and squints up at him.

  ‘Peter who?’ the officer asks briskly. ‘What’s his last name? His rank? His company?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, there’s not much I can do then, is there, young lady?’ he says. ‘How many Peters do you think are in this army?’

  ‘I’m Peter!’ a man yells cheekily.

  ‘I know a Peter. In D company. What’s he look like?’ His friend laughs. ‘What’s his last name?’

  ‘No! I’m Peter.’

  ‘No! I’m Peter.’ The troops erupt into a ruckus.

  ‘Right. That is enough,’ shouts the officer.

  Nancy knows she’s not going to get anywhere. After a stern look from the officer, she rolls her eyes and starts to walk away.

  ‘Come back! Come back, little honey!’

  She hears them calling and laughing over the sound of the sea against the harbour.

  As she approaches the water their voices fade, and she rests against the iron fence to watch the ferries swing out from their berths, churning the green water white. It is the gloaming hour, but she has no intention of returning home.

  Faintly, on the breeze, she hears some of the soldiers start to sing. It’s a rowdy, boisterous thing like a footy chant. ‘We had to join Bob Menzies’ army. Two quid a week, fuck all to eat, big leather boots and blisters on your feet.’

  Even after the week or so since it happened, it is still strange to think that Frances is gone. Nancy thinks of the last game of hide-and-seek she played with Frances and how she had crouched, silently, listening to Frances call and call for her. How long she had stayed, enjoying the taste of victory. If only she could take that back.

  Eventually she leaves the Quay and returns to Newtown on the tram, ignoring her empty belly. At the last minute, spurred on by the memory from earlier, she turns up Church Street and heads towards the cemetery.

  Nancy enters the cemetery as the light starts to fail, simply lifting the cordon strung up by the police over the hole in the fence and slipping beneath. She doesn’t know why she’s in there, not really. She doesn’t know how close or far she is from where they found her. Frances. Frances’ body, she corrects herself. Frances no longer. It has rained more than once in the days since, and the earth is supple with moisture. She chooses a flat gravestone and sits down on it to cry.

  But almost immediately the unfairness of it all slakes her sadness and, as has been the case so often in the last ten days, replaces it with white-hot rage. The policeman hadn’t even given her the time of day, hadn’t even thought she had anything important to say. If the police can’t or won’t catch the man who did this, she should. She would. It isn’t fair that Frances’ killer won’t be punished. She is sure that Frances would do the same for her: they’d even made a blood pact to this effect — to always have one another’s backs — when they were children.

  Thinking about all the ways to kill a man and which one is best makes her feel lightheaded. Her wiry determination won’t be enough to fight a grown man, especially a murderer, and she lacks the knowledge of where to stick a knife in someone to do more than just scratch him. There is no one she could pay to do it for her — and she has no money, in any case. How much would it cost anyway to have someone killed, like in the films? She could steal the money, but her mother would soon find out.

  Poison, then. She knows that poison can do the job because it has been in the papers. Thallium: tasteless, odourless, slow-acting. But that had to be fed to someone over a period of time. Some woman had done it to her husband over a year by putting it in his porridge. Nancy imagines the wife quietly watching her piggish husband take unwitting bites of death with each breakfast.

  Nancy wipes her face. A rustle in the bushes makes her seize up with fear. It’s just a rat, running from one hidey-hole to another. ‘Shoo! Get away!’ she yells, partly to make herself feel better.

  She’ll start making poison, she decides. In an empty bean tin in the garden, and add a little more each day. Any poisonous thing she can think of will go in: bleach, petrol, dead spiders, wild mushrooms — the poisonous kind. She will stir the brew with a stick, squatting like a witch. Maybe Lily will join her. But how are you going to make him eat it? Lily would needle. When you even find him …

  Stupid Lily. But she would be right.

  The breeze lifts the limbs of the paperbark, and somewhere nearby a nightbird calls. Amid the cold sweet air, a memory of her father comes unbidden. The time she smashed the perfume on Empire Day; it must have been six years ago. She was too young for the half-day off school but breathless for the cracker night that followed. The streets dangled Union Jacks until she could not see anything for red, white and blue, and through the window all afternoon she’d watched children drag kindling down the street for the fires, the older boys with armfuls of Tom Thumbs and bungers.

  Her mother had been getting ready in the bedroom, laying out dresses, fussing and fixing her hair. Her father was watching from a settee chair in the corner, jiggling his leg, as was his way. He could never be still. A record was on, of course: there was always music back then, constant music. Something unusual. That’s right: it was Louis Armstrong, ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’. She can feel the trill of the trumpet up her spine, like light fingers. Her father had laughed at her mother’s choice. ‘Why’d you put this on, old girl?’

  ‘Because I’m a sentimental fool,’ her mother had said flirtatiously, and twirled on the spot.

  Nancy had wanted desperately to be in her father’s lap, and she climbed up into it and he tapped on her back as if he was playing a set of drums, making the noises of the cymbals and the tom-toms on her shoulders and knees. She batted his hands away, squealing ‘Stop it! Stop it,’ delighted, and he leant and blew a wet raspberry on her neck and bopped her on the head. She wriggled out of his grasp like a greased eel, shrieking and darting away from him.

  He growled, baring his teeth. ‘I’m going to eat you up!’

  She flung herself at her mother, just as Kate lifted the exquisite bottle of inky glass with gold script and red cap, the Joy by Jean Patou — her treasure
. And, when Nancy’s head came smashing into Kate’s legs, the bottle was cast high in the air and her father leapt to his feet and tried to dive to save it, but it was too late. It hit the edge of the dresser, a swathe of precious liquid flying wide, and then it tumbled to the floor and smashed. The cap rolled under the bed like a decapitation.

  She could see her mother start to cry and then her own lip trembled. The smell! She recalled it so vividly even now, as if it had singed her nosehairs. The room heaved with it. Like someone had fired a cannonball of flowers. She could barely breathe, and it was on her clothes and in her hair. Her father, on his knees, took her mother’s hands, and Nancy watched his sombre face twitch and melt, and then he was smiling, and her mother was smiling, through her tears, and spluttering and wiping her nose, and then they were giggling like teenagers and her mother slid off the chair on top of him and they kissed. A proper kiss, with tongues.

  ‘If I knew it smelled like that I never would have bought it. Sweet Jaysus,’ her father said when he could gasp for air again. He liked to mock her mother’s Irish expressions. And her mother whipped him with a handkerchief.

  ‘It’s Bulgarian rose and French jasmine, you bastard. And you’re not supposed to put the whole bottle on!’

  They had gone to cracker night, in the end, all three of them stinking of roses. The street could smell them before they arrived.

  All the men in uniform catch Nancy’s eye as she walks home. Each one of them could be Pete, each one of them Jack Tooth, that sharp-sounding name that the girl who broke the record player had warned her about.

  You’re going crazy, Lily tells her, appearing and trailing a few feet behind.

  Nancy does not speak to her or look at her.

  They’ll send you away. They’ll put you in a facility.

  ‘I’m too old for you, Lily,’ Nancy says finally, whirling around. ‘I’m not a child anymore. I don’t need you.’ She closes her eyes and the world goes dark and faraway. She counts to twenty. Light again. Lily is still there, tongue out of her mouth, her head lolling around as if it is on a stick. That’s what mad people look like, for your information.