Dark Fires Shall Burn
Page 27
‘Give it over,’ Mr O’Riordan bade her. And she gave the baby up mutely, like she was giving over an apron full of potatoes.
Mr O’Riordan strode over, glanced at it, put two fingers to its neck and shook his head. He went to the bedroom, cleared his throat and didn’t say anything there either.
Templeton wanted to go in to his mother, but he dared not. He was no fool. He knew what dead things looked like. His father had taken the rifle to Amos, their blue heeler, scarce more than a pup, after it went for Mr O’Riordan’s lambs. He had made Templeton watch as he tied the dog to the fence and lined up the sights of the gun.
Annie and Mr O’Riordan dug a six-by-six in the roasted grass. Templeton sat cross-legged, a buzzing in his ears, the sound of dirt against the shovels sharp as fingernails. They wrapped their mother in a bedsheet with a border embroidered with blue daisies, the French one of which she was so proud. Her wedding sheet.
Annie shook when she had to help lift her. She dropped her end not quite at the grave edge, and their mother slid into the hole graceless.
‘It’s alright, love.’ Mr O’Riordan nodded. Annie and Templeton stood looking down at the shroud in the trench. Flies landed on their lips and they swatted them from their eyes.
‘By Thy resurrection from the dead.’ Mr O’Riordan traced a crucifix in the air with the grasping look of a man more used to raising the frame of a church than speaking in one. ‘O Christ, death no longer hath dominion over those who die in holiness.’
When the train arrived to collect him and his sister that day their mother died, it snaked off east to the city, leaving Mr O’Riordan with their chooks and the goat and the shack he would likely tear down and start over.
He feels the sting in his chest again and takes a bottle of beer out of his satchel and uncaps it, the psssshtt satisfyingly crisp, and drinks deeply. He has stolen one of Dot’s books, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. It’s her most prized possession: a smart volume, bound in midnight blue, with a pretty, raised-gilt title. He can’t remember one book in the house growing up, not even the Bible. That first night at Lennox Street he had read Dot’s book in bed, holding a candle to the pages, not wanting to turn the lamp on and disturb the girls. Wax had dripped on his fingers and a few spots on the sheets. He’d tried, guiltily, to scratch it off with his nails.
He stands and puts his beer down and turns to face the sea. Gulls wheel, looking from this distance as if they are abseiling down the clouds. ‘While the world is full of troubles and is anxious in its sleep,’ he reads from the text and then bends to take a gulp of beer.
The birds dive and reemerge from the waves. A drove of fish must be close to the skin of the sea. He creeps up to the edge of the cliff and makes himself light-headed staring at the plunge from the brink. The swathe of foam creams on the smashed rocks yards below.
Someone coughs. He whirls around to see a man standing a few paces behind him, standing on the dirt path, blocking the entrance: the tall man from the night at Tipper’s, whose name he had never asked.
‘What are you doing?’ Templeton almost shouts, furious at being observed, furious at everything, his face heating. ‘What do you want?’
‘Pardon me,’ the man says with an air of apology, his lips betraying a tinge of his amusement. ‘I think I must have taken you by surprise. I had no idea I would find you here, believe me. Forgive me — I do not want to interrupt.’ He turns, half bowing, to go back down the ragged path.
‘No, wait. You just gave me a start, that’s all,’ Templeton says, regaining his composure. ‘How did you know I would be here?’
‘Truly, I did not. This a complete surprise. But not an unwelcome one.’
Templeton is not sure whether to believe him. ‘Oh,’ he says, self-consciously putting down his beer.
‘But surely you do know that just a little further around the cliffs is a …’ He clears his throat. ‘A place where men might meet each other.’ Templeton looks at him warily. He is dressed in short sleeves, optimistic for the weather, and light grey trousers with neatly ironed creases down the centre.
‘I’m sorry,’ the man says again. He looks from the ledge of skulls to Templeton and back again. ‘Quite a set-up you have here. Is this … is this a hobby of yours? What would you call yourself? Amateur collector? Natural history curator?’
‘I don’t put on airs to call myself anything.’
‘Unexpected.’ He scuffs the sand beneath his feet. ‘Peculiar even, I grant you. But more interesting than your run-of-the-mill numismatics, I’ll give you that.’
‘What’s it to you?’ He can’t help feeling he is being mocked in a way he does not understand.
‘Oh no, nothing. I don’t mean to be rude. I was just on my way down to the beach and I heard you reciting that poem. You said it so beautifully.’ The man’s eyes, the colour of the morning sea, stare into his. ‘Yeats.’ He sits down on the ledge with his legs crossed and hands clasped around one knee. ‘Why are you reciting it?’
‘What do you mean?’ Templeton says stiffly. After a moment of silence, he confesses, ‘Well, it’s … it’s for a friend. Who died. A girl.’
‘I see,’ he nods.
He stays near the precipice, holding the book against his chest. ‘Actually I didn’t know her all that well,’ he blurts. ‘But she died and I found her.’
He taps a cigarette from the pack and holds it out. ‘Would you like one?’
Templeton takes it and lights it with his own match, ignoring the one offered. He bends and picks his beer up from the sand and swigs, aware of the man scrutinising him.
‘I’m going to meet some friends. A few of us like to meet in Marks Park, just south from here.’ The man puffs on his smoke. ‘As I said, a place where men may meet each other. I love it up here. It’s private.’
Templeton keeps necking his beer, not knowing how to respond.
‘My name’s Anthony — Tony, my friends call me.’ The man moves forward to shake his hand. The pads of his fingers press Templeton’s wrist. ‘I never caught yours that night.’
‘Templeton.’
‘Unusual. Is that a family name?’ Tony’s eyes meet his.
‘Yes. My mother’s side. Scottish. From her family in Strathclyde.’
‘So then, Templeton … would you like to come with me and meet my friends?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’
‘You never know. You might enjoy it. If you let yourself.’
‘I don’t know if I should,’ Templeton says, shyly.
‘Come on, now. Hasn’t the world had enough death for one decade? Hell, for one lifetime? It’s just further along the cliffs, over there in the park. Come, please. Come and meet everyone.’
‘Everyone?’ Templeton’s resolve wilts. He lets his arm be taken.
‘There’s a fellow! I bid your esteemed ex-creatures farewell. Goodbye extinct things.’ Tony bows to the circle. ‘Adieu to the obsolete, the defunct, to all those bereft of life.’
Templeton laughs and gives Tony a sideways glance. ‘You’re a funny one.’
‘I’ll show you a new world, if you’ll let me.’
Templeton hesitates. He looks up at Tony’s clear, earnest eyes and then back down at the surf. ‘I think I’ve seen it already. But I’ll come with you all the same.’
He thinks of Frances cheekily asking him for a cigarette in the graveyard, talking about National Velvet with the great stretch of track that was to be her life in front of her, and then her body face down, blue and stiff in the grass, her arms bound, yards from where they had spoken. The last thing her eyes had seen must have been the very grave slab they had stood upon.
Why had she gone with that man that night, as the papers suggested she had, perhaps willing? What had compelled her? He thinks of the cemetery framed by silent bloodwoods, gumtrees and figs, the deep stillness. The secret they w
ould always keep.
He gestures to Tony to wait while he lights a smoke. The match flames and Templeton watches, letting the teardrop of fire burn down. Annie is in his mind, shut up in that dank curtained parlour, drunk and alone, her sharp goodbye to him and Dot as she discarded them as though in a card game of pick-ups, exchanged them for Jackie’s fists disguised as love.
He thinks of the minotaur, with Theseus’ hand around its horn, the reflection of the blade pointed at its throat in the monster’s vanquished eyes, the streetlights loose minnows in the Archibald fountain’s water, and all the hope that held of a life extraordinary.
‘Coming?’ Tony asks, pleasantly, with no impatience.
‘Yes.’ He turns and he says it again. ‘Yes.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my grandmother Barbara, and to Clive Peterson, for a life of stories and an unshakable appreciation of words, especially the phrase ‘screw your courage to the sticking place …’
I would also like to thank my editor, Julia Carlomagno, for her impeccable insight, care, and dedication.
To Paul Dawson for seeing it through, and for the whiskies and hijinks along the way, I thank you. Ineffable gratitude to my readers, Sabine Brix, Amber Jones, Elizabeth King, and Sam Sperring, for their wisdom and encouragement.
For the Polish language and measureless patience (and more), thank you to Anna Antoniak and to Basia Niemczyc. Any errors of translation in the text are mine alone.
Thank you to Georgia Anderson, Teresa Avila, Donmoy Batiz, Tamryn Bennett, Justine Doidge, Kate Dorrell, Charlotte Farrell, Anna Gibbs, Prue Gibson, Jane Gleeson-White, Ashley Hay, Carmen Huehn, Mette Jakobsen, S.A. Jones, Hannah Kent, Viv McGregor, Elizabeth McMahon, Billie Muchmore, Ruth Phillips, Elizabeth Russ, Mal Semple, Emma Thomas, Meredith Williams, and Holly Zwalf.
Thank you to the University of New South Wales, New York University Sydney, Marrickville Council, the Australian Society of Authors, the Red Rattler Theatre, and to Cora Roberts and everyone at Scribe.
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
June 1946 Sydney, Australia
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS