Dark Fires Shall Burn

by Anna Westbrook

  Jackie crumples to the floor. Frank and Will look at one another and at Bob aiming the gun at them, and they scramble to be first out the door.

  Templeton emerges from under the table. Jackie lies on his back with a hole in the back of his head, blue eyes forever fixed on the ceiling. Blood spatter is all over the doorframe and the walls.

  ‘You saved our bloody lives!’ Templeton claps Bob on the shoulder. ‘You blew his brains out.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Bob shakes his head, sweat pooling off him. He looks searchingly out the door as if he’s looking for someone. ‘I’ll be damned, but I didn’t shoot first. I was going to shoot him but someone else did it first. He raises his hand. ‘My head. Everything’s foggy.’

  ‘What? No. That’s not right. That can’t be right.’ Templeton shakes his head. ‘There’s no one around. Who could it have been?’

  Dot looks out like a hawk and jogs a few paces into the night, which is just beginning to lighten with the dawn. Through the gloom Templeton sees she has something — somebody — by the shoulder, and she’s dragging them back down with her.

  ‘Look what I found.’ She drops Nancy at their feet. The gun knocks out of her hand with a clatter. Nancy looks up at them fearlessly.

  Templeton jumps back in surprise. ‘Holy hell. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Who in Christ’s name are you?’ Bob bends over, nauseated and in utter incomprehension.

  Nancy doesn’t answer.

  ‘Templeton, help.’ Dot fishes in Jackie’s pockets for the car keys. ‘We need to leave. Now. And take him with us.’

  He takes the body by the armpits and hefts it with a grunt.

  ‘We have to get him into the car. Quickly now!’ says Dot.

  Bob and Templeton pull Jackie’s body abreast with the car and bundle him into the back seat. ‘Cover him up. Cover him up with something. Anything,’ Dot urges. She winces in pain at her useless arm.

  Templeton takes off his coat and spreads it over Jackie. He and Dot look wordlessly at each other over Jackie’s shrouded corpse. After living in fear of him for so long, Jackie is dead. Is it even real?

  ‘Well, who killed him?’ Templeton asks.

  ‘Who killed him?’ Dot echoes, looking at Bob, finding her tongue again.

  ‘I did,’ says Nancy, staring at the gun that Dot kicked out of her reach.

  ‘I could have,’ Bob says, straightening up and smoothing his hair, regaining himself. ‘It’s too hard to know for sure.’

  ‘I did,’ Nancy repeats.

  ‘I think I got him.’ Bob’s mouth sets in a grim line. ‘I did it. I know it. The first shot just broke the window.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Templeton feels a cold floodgate of panic. He notices a light across the street turn on in an upstairs bedroom. They have a dead man in the car, it dawns on him. They are murderers.

  ‘Where are we going to take the body?’ Dot asks.

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s just get out of here and then decide. Coppers might be here soon,’ Bob says.

  ‘What are we going to do with her?’ Dot points.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Nancy says in a small, strong voice. ‘I’ll never tell anyone.’

  Bob looks at the girl, hesitating.

  ‘Come on,’ Templeton beckons Dot and Bob to the car. ‘What else can we do? They are never going to believe it was her. Not in a blue moon.’

  ‘He’s right.’ Dot nods.

  ‘Dot, you get in the front seat with me. Templeton, you sit in the back on top of that bastard and try and cover him as best you can. If the coppers pull us over, you say you’re crook and pretend to chuck up or something. Do it like you’re going for the Academy Award.’

  Templeton looks at Bob’s red face, his eye patch slipped to the side, exposing the empty socket. Dot is climbing into the car and Templeton can see Jackie’s sad boots sticking out under the coat. It’s so absurd. He starts laughing deliriously. Jackie, who he has been so pants-shittingly afraid of all this time, is laid out dead underneath his coat. Then he hears what could be the wail of a siren.

  ‘Leave the girl,’ Bob yells. ‘Here, take her gun.’ He grabs the thing and throws it at Templeton. ‘We have to get rid of it.’

  ‘Why did you shoot?’ Templeton takes Nancy by the shoulders and leans in so their faces are barely an inch apart.

  ‘I heard someone scream.’

  ‘No.’ Templeton looks into her face. ‘Why did you want him dead?’

  ‘Because he killed her,’ she whispers. ‘Frances.’

  He needed to hear her say it, and he doesn’t correct her. Indeed, he wishes it was true. ‘Go on now, run home. Go.’ He slides into the car, sitting on Jackie’s lumpy body, and watches as Nancy takes off up the street, legs pumping, her hair streaming behind her.

  ‘I know where we can go. Drive to South Head,’ Templeton leans over from the back.

  ‘Fast, Bob. Go fast.’ Dot puts her hand over his on the gearshift.

  ‘Bloody oath, or we’re all done for,’ he says and the car lurches and bursts towards King and beyond into the open streets, leaving the siren behind them, heading eastwards, towards the sea.

  THIRTY-THREE

  If Kate is surprised by her daughter’s sudden submission to the prospect of leaving Sydney, she buries it beneath a thick application of high spirits.

  Nancy packs her things dutifully, being especially magnanimous in her decisions about old toys that can be left to the orphanage. She imagines she is St Jerome during each difficult decision.

  On the day of departure, all she has is one suitcase of clothes and a backpack containing some books, letters, Winston and the treasured photograph from the night she and Frances saw Much Ado About Nothing.

  ‘We can buy everything new in Ireland,’ Kate gushes. ‘When we’re settled. You can have lovely new things.’

  Nancy shrugs. She accepts her fate with the stoicism of Mary, Queen of Scots. They are leaving. And there is naught to be done.

  ‘It’s for the best,’ Mrs Roberts says, staring deeply into her eyes and holding her shoulders before clasping Nancy to her bosom. Her face smothered in the pillowy softness, Nancy feels nothing. She thinks of Jack Tooth lying on the footpath with the hole in his head.

  ‘It’s a fresh start,’ Kate says, smiling at Izzy. She is abuzz, her hair set in perfect victory rolls and the colour up in her cheeks. ‘And I feel splendid.’ Considering civility for a moment, she adds, ‘Although I’m sorry to leave you, Mrs Roberts. Such a help you’ve been to us. Through all the … unpleasantness. And you too, Izzy. We’ll miss you both, terribly.’

  In their cabin aboard the ship, Kate hums and chatters, taking things out of her trunk and arranging them. They must share a bed for the six weeks, Nancy is irked to find out. Kate peels off the standard-issue bedclothes and replaces them with Nancy’s red-and-gold quilt, the one that smells of lavender despite washes. ‘It’s so wonderful to be able to take this home again. It’s come a long, long way with me,’ she says. She turns a corner down. ‘Which side would you like, biscuit?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Alright, then,’ Kate says, with determined cheeriness. ‘I’ll take the left. You can have the side closest to the porthole.’

  ‘What’s the point? You can’t see anything out of it.’

  ‘You can’t now. Because we’re just in the harbour. But soon we’ll be at sea! Can you imagine that, Nan? The open ocean. Oh, I remember it from when I came out. Only sixteen, hardly older than you are now. All on my own. I thought Australia’s streets were going to be paved with gold.’

  ‘What happens if the ship sinks?’

  ‘Don’t be silly! The ship isn’t going to sink.’

  ‘The Titanic sunk. And people drowned because they didn’t think it could, and they didn’t have enough lifeboats onboard for everyone to
fit in.’

  ‘Now, there’s a gloomy thought. Well, I’m sure they’ve learned from their mistake and we have all the lifeboats we could ever need.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Nancy mutters, unconvinced. She taps her nails against the porthole glass.

  ‘Would you like to see where we will be stopping?’ Kate asks, taking a large, leather-bound book from the trunk and laying it on the bed.

  Nancy is enticed, despite herself, to the drawings of the world across the pages, carved up into different colours.

  ‘Melbourne first. That won’t take very long. And then, right around the bottom of Australia, to Freemantle.’ She points to a spot in lower Western Australia. ‘Then …’ she affects her actress voice and whispers conspiratorially to Nancy and traces her finger a fair distance. ‘We are going to go right across the Indian Ocean! All the way to the Cape of Good Hope.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Africa.’

  ‘Africa?’ Nancy’s eyes bulge. ‘You didn’t tell me we were going there.’

  ‘We might stop a night in Cape Town. We will probably even be able to get off the ship and stretch our legs.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, trying to downplay the warm tingle of excitement. ‘Why do they call it the Cape of Good Hope?’

  Kate smiles but carries on with the show. ‘I don’t know. But I do know that the Portuguese named it Cabo das Tormentas, or the Cape of Storms.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine,’ Kate says briskly. ‘Then we go up to Lisbon. That’s in Portugal. And finish up in Southampton, England.’

  ‘England!’ Nancy says and wonders if, after all these weeks, Lily might reappear to see what it’s like.

  ‘Yes, darling. England,’ Kate says, as though Nancy is simple.

  Nancy thinks of Lily’s riddle: What lives without a body, hears without ears, speaks without a mouth, to which the air alone gives birth?

  ‘But that’s only where we disembark. Then we shall catch the train to Holyhead, and there get on another boat — much smaller — and finally we shall be in Dublin.’

  Nancy is fatigued merely imagining.

  A few hours after the ship has left Sydney, they take supper in the dining room, sitting on handsome cane chairs with white linen tablecloths and waiters draping starched napkins in their laps. They had missed the moment of departure: exhausted by boarding, they had fallen into a companionable doze after the course had been chartered on the atlas.

  ‘I wanted to say goodbye to Sydney,’ Nancy says, disappointed.

  ‘So did I,’ Kate says. ‘I wanted to watch it fade away.’

  The ship is an incandescent speck in the unvarying dark. They eat roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, and Kate has only one glass of port and no more. Retiring to the cabin, they are shy with each other, putting on nightgowns and climbing under the covers, apologising for getting in each other’s way.

  ‘Good night,’ Kate says and turns off the lamp.

  Nancy lies unsleeping, listening to the sound of her mother’s breathing. She can tell she is also awake.

  ‘Mum?’ she asks. For the most fleeting of moments, she wants to tell her everything. That Frances is avenged. The secret feels like a grenade in her hand and she need only light the fuse. How she had gone to the house on Lennox Street that night and heard the woman screaming and seen the blond boy, and seen Jack Tooth, wanted by the police, and, like a sleepwalker, she had felt the gun in her hand, and the metal was pitiless and the recoil kicked her wrist back.

  ‘Yes?’ her mother asks sleepily.

  But she cannot say it. ‘Umm, how did you and Dad meet?’

  ‘Oh, Nan. What a question. Why ask me this now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just was thinking about it.’

  ‘He was playing “Bye Bye Blackbird” on piano in a jazz club.’

  ‘What?’ Nancy is incredulous. ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes. He wasn’t even supposed to be. They were closing up for the night. He had been tending bar. The orchestra had gone home and he was larking about.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘I was with some girlfriends. But they’d gone home. I hadn’t looked twice at your father all night, even when he had served me drinks. Except when he sat down at that piano. What is that line from As You Like It? I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs. Truer words … He wasn’t even very good. But he closed his eyes as he was playing. And, well, I can’t quite say. Something about his face; he wasn’t like the other men … I decided he was a bit of alright.’

  ‘Yuck,’ Nancy says, laughing.

  ‘Well, you asked.’

  They lie in the black quiet for awhile, and Nancy cannot tell if hours or minutes have passed. The ship moves steadily on the water, and, if it were not for the background thrum of the engine, she would not know they are somewhere in the Pacific, inching across the fathomless deep.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘What is it, Nancy?’

  ‘Do they hang people in Ireland?’

  ‘What?’ Kate asks, shocked, and Nancy can hear the rustle of sheets as her mother turns around to face her.

  ‘Do they hang people in Ireland? Murderers?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, they do,’ Kate says after a while. ‘Why do you want to know that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you worried about murderers?’ Kate’s hand reaches across the dark space of the bed’s equator, crosses it and finds her daughter’s.

  ‘No,’ she says, but lets her hand be held.

  ‘We’re going to be safe there. We’re going home.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone can ever be sure they’ll be safe in any place.’

  ‘But we will be.’ Kate says it with such pluck that Nancy almost believes.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Templeton runs his knuckles over his hair. It almost touches his ears now, grown out from the rough-cut stubble. His beard has grown too, so much that he has to use a razor every morning, or at least every second morning. He still thinks about Frances, and even more often about Jackie. The police investigation into his disappearance has stalled; today’s tiny column on the bottom of page five is the only reminder it’s continuing at all. He takes the skull of the cat in his hands, removing it from its place on the ledge in the cliff’s overhang. It is warm from the September sun and it feels smooth and heavy in his hands.

  They had taken Jackie’s body from the idling car, across the grass and to the cliffs. He remembers how he had carried Jackie by his feet, and he can still smell the leather of Jackie’s shoes, one under each arm. Bob had taken most of the weight, carrying the other end of Jackie, his bloodied head cradled in the crook of his neck, strangely intimate. How they had sweated and strained and grunted, after weighing his pockets with rocks, to throw him far enough from the edge so he would not snag. The horrible one-two-three.

  For weeks, Dot and Templeton had checked the newspapers for reports of bodies washed up off The Gap. He wondered, fretfully, and with a nauseated sense of disquiet, how long it would take for the fish to erase a man’s face and fingertips to make him unidentifiable, to render him just a skull and skeleton in a shirt and pants. But Jackie’s remains never resurfaced. The current must have whipped him right out to sea.

  ‘Eaten by sharks,’ Dot surmised. ‘Kind for kind.’

  ‘Dot?’ he had asked her. ‘Do you feel bad?’

  ‘About Jackie? No. When it is your time, you have to go. And it was past his time.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘“They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”’ She shrugged. ‘I only wish I had killed the son of a bitch.’

  He replaces the bones and shuffles back into the natural curvature of the rock that normally fits his back like a glove. It does n
ot feel so comfortable today. He wonders if he has grown. Annie used to mark his growth spurts on the doorframe at Lennox Street, and before that on the doorframe of the cottage where their mother had died, white as plaster, on a bed stained with an arc of black blood.

  There was no doctor and Annie had done her best, knuckle-deep inside their mother, trying to turn the baby, but it was blue when it came out. He remembers Annie's mouth set firm, her fingers shaking as badly as an old drunk, from where he stood, wet with tears, in the corner.

  The baby had some cord around its neck and Annie cut it with sewing scissors and put the child to their mother’s chest. She said she’d seen it done once with a horse. Their mother cooed to the baby as she shut her eyes and didn’t open them again.

  Annie washed the blood and slop off the child with water heated on the stove. Templeton was banished from the kitchen, and in the dark he had sobbed until he heaved up his porridge, the porridge his mother had made for his breakfast that morning, and then he cried some more until he lay down and slept next to the puddle of sour oats.

  When he woke, the sky was brightening but the sun was slow. He went to milk Sissy, but his fingers squirted most of it onto himself rather than into the pail beneath the goat. He had run the warm bucket into the house, but it was no good. The baby, a girl, wouldn’t drink. The milk slipped down her tiny chin, filling her mouth up till it ran over. She couldn’t swallow. Her eyes rolled back and she spluttered, her body scarcely bigger than Annie’s two fists together. They stopped pouring for fear they would choke her.

  ‘Annie, where’s Mum? Where do you go after —’ Templeton had asked. Annie looked at the ceiling. He wanted to go over to her. He wanted to touch her hair and sit down and put his head in her lap.

  ‘You smell,’ she said when he neared.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He started to cry again. He sniffed himself. His hair was crusted in tufts and his shirt clinging to his skin, yellow with goat milk and vomit.

  Later, when Mr O’Riordan told him to take the baby from her, Annie tensed and Templeton’s hands were stuck. They looked at each other: Templeton, crooked and awkward, and Annie, calm as though she were somewhere else, three steps behind her eyes.