Dark Fires Shall Burn (20 page)

‘I'm not going.'

‘Stand up.' Kate pulls the covers off her daughter's bed and hoists her roughly by the arm. ‘And put on your blue dress.'

‘I don't want to go. You can't make me.' Nancy's lip trembles.

Kate wrenches a dress off the hanger and throws it on the chair. She puts white socks and brown leather shoes on the floor and stands in the middle of the room, waiting, arms slack and neck stiff. The outfit looks strange, empty and flat, as if the person who had worn it had just been sitting there a moment ago and had evaporated into a cloud of steam.

‘You'll go because it is the right thing to do,' she says simply.

‘I don't see why. It's all Mrs Reed's fault.' Nancy throws a pillow violently onto the floor.

‘Nancy.' Her mother looks disgusted. ‘That's a horrible thing to say!'

‘It
is
her fault. She was horrible to Frances. Always just banging on about Jesus! Too lazy to get her own bread. It was dark. Frances never would have —'

‘That's enough.' Kate cuts her off sharply. ‘Mrs Reed is not to blame. And we are going to go over there and pay our respects and bring that poor woman some stew. It's the least we can do. What with her husband gone —'

‘Mr Reed is not dead. He ran away. He probably couldn't stand her anymore. Frances said he's working in Queensland.'

‘Regardless, Nancy. That hardly matters now. Where's your charity? The woman is alone with a baby, and her daughter has just been found dead in a field.'

‘A cemetery,' Nancy corrects.

‘Put your dress on.' Her mother's voice is starched with finality.

‘Why do we have to go and talk to Mrs Reed when you wouldn't even let me go to Frances' funeral?'

Kate sighed, exasperated. ‘That weren't up to me, my lass. You know that.'

‘But why?'

‘Mrs Reed was afraid if it was open to the public it would turn into a circus, what with all the papers. It was family only.'

‘I was her family!' Nancy shouts, her voice breaking in her throat, the words coming out almost incoherent.

‘I know.' Her mother stretches out her arms, her composure fracturing.

Nancy goes to her and allows her to comb and plait her hair. Anything to stop her mother from crying — she doesn't think she can bear it this morning. They sit in silence, and her mother's hands shake as she braids, turning out an inevitable mess. After she has left the room, Nancy pulls it out and re-does it neatly.

Downstairs, she accepts Mrs Roberts' white-china pot of stew to carry and sets out into the cold bright day, keeping her eyes on her mother's black heels clacking along in front of her.

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 —
é
tudes 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.