Dark Fires Shall Burn (2 page)

She sees a figure a short way off, the shape of a boy, his back against a tree. As she gets closer, she can tell he is smoking. His fair hair falls across his face and he tucks it behind his ear in a sudden sweep.

She's seen him before but doesn't know his name. Yet she knows the tatty peacock Enmore girls he follows about: they are
prostitutes
, although she isn't game enough to say that word aloud. She read it in a book and looked it up in the dictionary at school, with her finger on
proscenium
in case Mr Cameron came up behind her.

The boy must have come in off Australia Street, where someone has pried the fence apart to force a gap wide enough for a grown man; he must have slipped straight through. Once she'd seen him walking down King Street, blond hair fluttering from under his hat like a pennant in the breeze, a parcel of fish under his arm, and looking pleased as punch, as though he were a cat with a live one in its mouth.

‘Hello!' She calls. ‘Oi — hey, you?'

He looks at her for a moment, and flicks his cigarette butt before turning to leave.

‘Come here,' she entreats and is surprised and pleased when he hesitates and circles back to her. ‘What's your name?' she asks when he stands, regarding her, a few feet away, pushing his fingers through his hair and scooping it out of his face. When he does not answer, she changes tack. ‘Have you seen my friend? The redhead? She's hiding from me somewhere,' she says, and rolls her eyes. ‘She thinks we're playing a game. But I'm bored now.'

‘Right,' he says, non-committal.

‘My name's Frances.'

‘I know that,' he says, nodding.

‘How?'

‘I see you playing in here with your friend all the time. She calls out your name.'

‘Ha! We're just fooling around. Nancy likes kids' games like that.' Frances feels her cheeks turning red.

He taps another cigarette from his pocket and lights it with a practised fluidity.

‘May I have one?' she asks.

‘This is my last.'

‘Oh. Never mind.'

He considers for a moment and then takes a long drag and hands it to her. She takes it eagerly, holds it between index finger and thumb, and inhales.

‘Thanks,' she says, breathing out, proudly, her eyes watering only slightly; she has been practising. She passes it back to him. Aiming at nonchalance, she asks, ‘Do you like the pictures?'

He nods, looking at her sidelong.

‘What's your favourite?'

His brow furrows as though he's giving the question serious thought. ‘I like
The Spider Woman
. Flicks with monsters.
House of Frankenstein
, things like that.'

‘Oh. My mother won't let me see those.' She speaks without thinking and then blushes deeper. She inhales too quickly and coughs.

‘Right.'

‘I like
National Velvet
. Did you see that one?' She tries to hold back but the words tumble out. ‘It's about a girl who trains a horse for a big race in England — and
she
rides him! In the race, that is. But, well, it's about more than that. And it's brilliant. I just love it.'

‘About a girl and a horse?' he says, eyebrow raised.

‘Ahem.' Frances winks at him and then becomes serious. She throws back her shoulders and attempts Elizabeth Taylor's British accent. ‘“I want it all quickly 'cause I don't want God to stop and think and wonder if I'm getting more than my share.”' She is impressed with herself and looks up coyly to see if he is.

‘I haven't seen it.'

They stand in silence for a few moments until he clears his throat. ‘Well, see ya,' he says, grinding his cigarette into the dirt. ‘Hope you find your friend.'

‘Maybe I'll see you at the pictures sometime?' Frances calls after him.

But he walks away without looking back, and she is alone again in the quiet paddock of graves. The shadows of trees are growing taller on the ground. It's getting late, and Nancy remains nowhere to be found. Where the blazes has she got to?

‘Nancy?' she yells but hears no reply. ‘Come on now, let's pack it in. I want to go home.'

Frances walks to the tree, the one she's afraid of. She'd always disliked it, with its many-fingered limbs, but if she can climb the lower branches she'll get a better view. It will only take one big jump to get to the nearest. She hoists herself and lands a foothold.

The tree reminds her of when her Uncle Stanley took her rock fishing on the harbour years ago. The day was punctured by huge booms from the artillery batteries on the foreshore in gunnery practice. Explosions made the air vibrate like the glue of the world was coming unstuck. Uncle Stanley pulled something from the water, something with thin, loose limbs, far too many. ‘That there's a squid. Isn't he a big fella?' Stanley splattered the animal at her feet. Frances was horrified. She was sure nothing on God's earth could look so alien. It was still moving, squirming and peach-pink. It flailed near her toes on the bleached wood of the jetty. The feral boys who hung around the docks saw it and ran up, and one of them prodded it with a stick. It spewed black liquid. ‘Yuck, it did a shit!' The boys laughed.

Uncle Stanley belted the squid with the handle of his gutting knife. He held up the dead monster by its beaky head and waggled it at Frances. ‘Those Eye-talians would eat this. Wog food. Me? I wouldn't feed it to me dog.'

Uncle Stanley was proud to have been one of the mob that smashed the windows of the Cellini fruit shop on King Street back in '41. He told everyone. He had even pissed in the till drawer, he had bragged to Frances once after a couple of beers.

Something about the sick feeling that gives her also makes her remember that day she had opened the front door and stepped into the living room to find the crib next to the fireplace empty and her mother's basket of piecework sitting on the rocking chair. A shuffle and a bump heard as if someone were in the bedroom. Seeing Mr Langby, sitting on the rumpled quilt with his trousers around his ankles, she didn't know what to do, whether or not to run, whether she would get in trouble.

‘Hey Frannie. Where's your pa?' His hand pulled away, quick tugs in his lap. ‘You're just like your mother. Aren't you?' His top lip had peeled back dryly, exposing his teeth. ‘Come here.' He had beckoned to her that one afternoon, in the still quiet.

Silly! Frances chides herself. What is she, a baby? The memory of his sweating moustache makes her throat clench, but she is not supposed to think of it. She smoothes her cardigan and fixes the bow of the ribbon in her plait and clambers further up the tree. Six or eight feet off the ground, she looks about her. The streetlamps of Lennox Street throw a glimmer into the park, but may as well be far-off lighthouses. The other trees cramp in like old wives whispering, keeping secrets from her. Dryads, she thinks with a shiver. Witches. The boys in her neighbourhood tell stories of a crowd of Banksia Men who gather in the graveyard to see the Devil. That there's a crack in the side of a tomb beneath a tree, and within it a staircase that descends to the land of the dead.

‘Nancy!' she shouts, peering from between branches. ‘Nancy? Come on now, come out. Hurry up, it's almost dark.'

Bad things happen in the graveyard after dark, everyone knows: Yankee soldiers fooling around with girls, tramps in punch-ups where men wager on which one can hammer the other near to death bare-fisted. Some man even died: she'd heard they'd found him the next morning, face beaten in, covered in his own sick. Sometime, early on in the war, she'd heard the boys' talk about a dog's head found near the gate, stuck on a post. People said it was a warning, but against what and directed at whom no one seemed to know. They never found the rest of the dog.

If Nancy doesn't show up soon, she'll have to go home alone.

‘Nancy! I give up!' she gives a final shout.

And finally she hears a rustle, and then her name called exultantly, and sees her friend's ginger head emerge, vulpine, from the scrub.

‘I won! You lost, ha ha. I won!' Nancy calls, and Frances shimmies down the trunk, light-headed with relief.

TWO

Under an old Moreton Bay, Templeton tilts his chin and lets the smoke leak from his mouth. Rain outfoxes the canopy of the tree and rolls down the back of his neck to pool in the deep clavicular basins of the tree roots. He breathes in the smell of it with the last drag of his cigarette.

He takes another from his pack; grubby fingernails flick a spent match. He tears out half a dozen from the book before a damned one lights. Sheets of rain glance off the vitreous harbour, and men scramble to tie the lines on their fishing boats. Cursing, they grab at tarred ropes thick as their arms.

His body raked diagonal against the gale, Templeton hunches against the tree and sucks on the limp cigarette. At least he isn't out there copping a full face of spray. The rain has dug in, and the city will be sopping as the day grinds out. Soon the men will take to the pubs, quickly spending their shillings before six o'clock. Annie will be on her way home, dry, most likely taking advantage of some keen bloke's umbrella. Glebe Point is far enough from his sister to do as he pleases.

‘Get out from under our feet and go flog the papers,' Annie had told him that morning. ‘If you want your tea, why don't you go and earn a bob for once? A bit of honest work. Ha!' She laughed at her own joke. ‘Do you good.'

The girls were up early, dressing for the stores. Annie had wriggled into her good dress: admiral blue, with white piping and a wide bib collar. ‘Help me with this, would you?' She looked from Dot to Sally. ‘Come on, hurry up! One of you.' Her arms were twisted behind her, plucking at the tiny buttons. Catching herself in the mirror, she frowned and pulled a stray roller from her hair. Templeton caught her gaze in the glass. Eyes that snared blokes easy as a cat takes a mouse. They narrowed when she caught him looking. She broadened her lips with pencil and dabbed powder on her nose, skin red and dry from last night's grog. ‘I'm so blotchy I look like a Dalmatian.'

‘You can't see it.' Sally squinted at her in the mirror. ‘Put a bit more slap on.'

‘I've got bags under my eyes the size of plums.'

‘But I want to come with you,' Templeton demanded. ‘Where are you going anyway? David Jones? Be careful. We don't want the coppers round.'

‘Stand still, Sal.' Dot straightened Sally's blouse and moved to her hairpins.

‘Templeton keeps banging into me,' Sally complained. She pouted into the mirror, admiring the angle of her smooth jaw and long neck.

‘Well, just pinch him then,' Annie advised. ‘Lucky, get out of the way. Unless you want some of this?' She pointed the lip pencil at him.

‘No.'

‘What are you going to do, darling — get a dress on and stand lookout?' Dot teased him.

‘No one'd know the difference,' said Annie with an abrupt smile.

‘Annie,' he complained, face heating. She went for the soft skin under his ribs and twisted. ‘Ow! Stop it.' He slapped her hand. ‘Are you going into town?' He was still talking as the girls hustled to the door, and he was bundled out. ‘Are you catching the tram? David Jones? You're going to David Jones, aren't you? I knew it!'

‘Lucky, I'm not fooling.' Annie turned. In the sunlight he could see the powder caught in the lines that fanned from her eyes; the only thing about her that looked old, her eyes — and her hands, and she raised one to him. ‘I'll give it to you. Don't try me.' He could suddenly see in her the stamp of their mother, with her heavier brow and deeper-set eyes.

‘But why not?'

‘You'll attract attention, that's why.'

‘Here's a shilling. Do not get into trouble.' Dot patted him on the cheek. He coloured at the touch of her fingers on the fair, downy hair that had sprung up in the last weeks. Not quite enough yet to shave; he had been waiting for someone to tease him. But Dot only smiled and tossed him the coin, along with their salute. He rubbed the raised profile of the king's head, solid and safe in his pocket.

‘Hell's bells. Get away with you,' Annie said and pushed him off the curb, smack into an iceman plodding up the gutter. The man reeled, his shoulder-load of ice slipping off the hessian sackcloth and fracturing into pieces on the ground.

‘Sorry,' Templeton said, palms up, stepping backwards, the frozen rubble exploding pleasingly underfoot.

‘Watch where you're going, you little bastard! Are you going to pay for that?'

He dodged and ran, hearing the girls' laughter fading behind him. Then he was on the tram to Glebe, picturing his sister and Dot and Sally in the ladies department, pulling one over. Annie holding her hands clasped so the holes in her gloves couldn't be seen, gliding in, her face serene, like Daddy owned a sheep station. He knew their game: stockings and ribbons mostly, easy to hide, easy to sell on. And the occasional luxury, or a fancy hat just for sport. Annie liked the ones with the ostrich feathers, the hardest to smuggle.