Dark Fires Shall Burn (3 page)

‘Where do you hide a hat?' he asked once.

‘I've got my ways,' Annie replied, fluttering her fingers like a magician's assistant.

‘What's an ostrich?' Sally posed with the hat, flopping plumage over one eye.

‘It's a big parrot,' Templeton answered.

‘No it's not, you pair of dolts!' Dot said. ‘It is like an emu, only from Africa. Big.' She mimed holding reins with a cock-eyed smile. ‘You can ride it like a horse.'

‘Surely not. Is that right, Annie?' asked Sally. ‘Africa?'

‘Darned if I know,' Annie said, and spat on her palm to rub a spot on the hat brim.

Templeton imagined Annie seducing the salesman, sashaying and twirling, asking this and that and flashing all kinds of charm while the other girls snuck in and put their deep-pocketed dustcoats to use. She always went straight for the men; the women wised up too quickly. And the salesmen were old blokes, or fellows with a finger off or a leg brace or thick, Coke-bottle spectacles. Marks so easy he almost felt sorry for them. ‘Just the codgers, the lame and the sissies left at David Jones,' Annie liked to say. ‘And even the best of them go to the VDC for three square meals and five bob a day.'

He knew Annie would cuff him for shirking, for bringing no coin home for the pot, but all he was thinking of was the breeze peeling off the harbour and salting his nostrils. A milk van splashed through the street, flecking passers-by with water. He hated the job at Railway Square selling papers, but more than that he hated the flat grey eyes of the paperboys, known by who their fathers were — Smiths, McKenzies, Ryans. They were younger versions with the same attitudes. They stole his papers come end of day, and his takings too, if they felt like it, and stomped him for good measure. They teased him for his name, Templeton, his mother's family name. Luckett meant nothing to them — and why should it? He was no one.

There would be no money to be made on a day like this anyway, when the heavens were open. Annie could go to hell.

Down at Glebe he likes to watch the oystermen leaning in to the tides' comings and goings, the slow, quiet rhythm. He buys smokes and hangs about whenever he can get away, and no one pays him mind. The blokes often wave as he pets the mutts that gang the dock. On days he has a sandwich he throws the dogs the torn-up crusts and takes hold of their scruffs and breathes in their comforting stink. Each new morning brings a day so stuffed with hours it makes him churn inside at how to fill them.

The wind picks up now over the Point and he hears a dog bark and then yelp. The men who tied their boats head off for a beer, and soon there is not a soul on the street, and screen doors grizzle loosely on their hinges behind him on Northcote Road. He chews on the sour end of his cigarette. A baby squalls along with the weather and the cry pricks a memory in him: the blood on the bed, the taste of muddy dam water in his mouth, the sheet with the hem of blue daisies ruined. He digs his nails into his palms, forming scallops.

Making his way to the harbour's edge, Templeton slings his cigarette butt into the bobbing crates and fish guts. The filmy rainbow of diesel fuel on top of the water greases the seawall.

It is almost seven by the time he turns on to King Street from City Road, and his hunger nettles him. What he wouldn't give for a mixed grill or a plate of steak and eggs, but he is as like to find a bob in his pocket as a diamond. Maybe the girls will have some cherry brandy.

‘Oi.' He hears Dot's raspy shout as he nears the station. ‘Where you been, sugar?'

‘Annie's gonna have your guts for garters, Lucky,' Sally calls.

‘Aww, have off it, why don't you?' He hates it when they call him Lucky. A name his sister made up for him that time long ago when he had locked himself out of the house and got wedged halfway through the window — she had found him and laughed until she'd doubled over, and ‘Lucky' had stuck ever since.

Dot and Sally are sitting on the wall they're not supposed to, outside Newtown station. Last time the police had seen them there, the constable told them to eff off or how'd they like a night in the cells?

‘Lookin' handsome tonight.' Sally shoves two fingers in her mouth and whistles.

He smacks his cheek and drops his jaw in mock horror at her audacity. ‘Too handsome for the likes of you.'

Templeton had met Sally at Central Station the day he and Annie arrived in Sydney, exhausted. She tried to walk off with Templeton's suitcase, pretending she thought it was hers, until Annie chased her down and pulled her hair to get it back. Sally had pitched such a virtuoso performance that Annie's anger was diluted by admiration, and she asked Sally where she was staying the night. The three of them walked away from the railway building together. Then the air-raid sirens went off and they were thrown into blackout. Furious men honked their horns, trying to avoid collisions while driving without their headlights.

‘Come on! Down here.' Annie grabbed their hands and hurried to join a stream of people stepping down some dark stairs into a darker hole.

They spent that night in a shelter dug from soil and sandstone that smelled of tinned beef and sweaty palms and turpentine. ‘Dominoes, anyone?' a man with a low-slung gut and wide, womanish hips had proposed at one point. They ignored him.

Sally fished some wilted sandwiches out of her knapsack, thick with margarine and little else. She offered them to Annie and Templeton without a word. The wax paper wrapping crunched loudly as they took unenthusiastic bites. Templeton, imagining the end of a Jap bayonet or being blasted to pieces by a bomb, his mind febrile from the newspaper pictures of flattened, smoking London, ate little.
Turn off the bloody lights! Tojo can see them in Tokyo!
exclaimed
a cardboard sign glued to the wall.

Sally inserted her hand into the cup of Templeton's palm, and they fit together tidily, like a lap joint. ‘Don't worry,' she said, reading his thoughts. ‘At least it's likely to be quick.'

In the warm, unexploded morning they had found a place to stay, and that had lasted a few months, and then found another place, and another after that. Moving on after the money ran out and when they couldn't hock enough to cover rent; moving often in the wee hours, a trio of rats in swift silence, before the landlord knew what was what. Now they shared Lennox Street with Dot, and no one could remember how that came to be. One day she was just there and they couldn't imagine it otherwise.

Dot chuckles at Templeton's attempt to walk past, ignoring them. ‘Here. Drink up.' She offers him the advocaat liqueur she's been swigging.

He checks the street. The cops are sure to be along now. He takes it and sips quickly while looking over his shoulder. The sweetness paints his tongue as he passes the bottle to Sally.

Sally hands it back to Dot, who takes a long drink. Dot never wears the powders the rest of Annie's friends fancy. Just kohl. Her soot-rimmed eyes look bottomless, as if you could throw pennies in them and never hear a plink. She keeps her curly hair unfashionably short, lacquered, like the women in the old silent films. Templeton thinks she is handsome, and she is, in a way. She smokes constantly, her hands using the burning tip of the cigarette like a blackboard pointer. A reffo — she'd gotten out before you couldn't, when Chamberlain had still been banging on about peace in our time. Well, he'd feel a right ass now, wouldn't he.

‘Where've you been?' Dot asks him. ‘Annie went by the Square in the afternoon and you weren't there. The boys, they hadn't seen you.'

He could barely hear her accent now, save a faint corrosion on some vowels. He'd seen Jews up Oxford Street, in Bondi Junction and Bellevue Hill, and heard their peculiar language. ‘Yiddish is what you get if you leave German out in the sun and let it melt,' Dot had told him once. But it sounded more like rust to him, more like rust than thaw.

‘Yeah?' He shifts from foot to foot. ‘So what? I don't care. What's Annie gunna do? I'm not scared of her.' His big toe is starting to push a hole through one boot, the leather eyelid-thin.

‘She wanted to send Jackie out after you,' says Dot.

‘I don't see why.' Templeton puts on a show of bravery, although his stomach turns at the thought. ‘The Sunday papers aren't even worth the trouble! You three can make ten times that in a day. Besides, it was cats and dogs.' He tips his hat at the sky.

‘It's not about that,' Dot begins sternly.

‘It's about earning your keep.' Sally draws out the word
keep
with a smack of her lips. She sucks on the advocaat bottle and liquid escapes down her chin. She has thick eyebrows and tiny dimples, and when she smiles her bottom lip blooms like a moist peach. She goes to light a cigarette.

‘Here, give us some more!' Templeton grabs the liqueur while she's fishing for her matches. He never used to get a taste of the good bootlegged stuff, during the war. Just what would make you go blind, they said, but he drank it anyway. Annie and Dot kept themselves in the know as to who had what, while he and Sally usually made do with four-penny dark, or foul Barbera gutrot, or the Red Ned from Lorenzini's down on Elizabeth Street — a raw wine flogged to the rich, dumb Yanks. If you could call it wine. The war grog was normally so bulled you might as well neck a drunk's piss, Annie liked to say.

‘Where'd you disappear to anyway?' Sally asks with her cigarette dangling off her lip. ‘You got a girl or something?'

‘Nah.' He pushes her but she jumps off the wall, crashing into him, hands cocked for tickling.

‘I'm gonna get you,' she says, grabbing his face and kissing him hard on the cheek with a wet smack.

‘Get offa me!' And then he stops, gasping for air. Two policemen are walking down the road, beaded on them, quickening pace.

‘
Szybko
.' Dot sees the cops too and propels them across the road by their elbows. ‘Quick!'

Once they are out of sight, Templeton drops behind Dot and Sally. He watches the way they swish, hips swaying figure eights, heels higher than decent.

‘Looking for company for the night, love?' Sally asks a soldier loitering out the front of the Duke of Edinburgh. His mouth splits merrily, revealing missing front teeth. The hotels loose the punters out at six on the dot like the surge from a storm drain after a downpour.

‘Aw, give it a rest, Sal.' Dot snatches her arm and drags her away before the bloke can respond. ‘Let's pack it in for the night, yes? Let's go home and drink.'

‘Oh, alright. I suppose we already made a bit between us.' As they walk, Sal reaches into her blouse, between her breasts, and pulls out a drawstring velvet bag, and from it a clutch of coins and bills.

Templeton cocks his head. ‘Go on, lend us a couple of bob.'

Sally raises the loot above her head and twirls. ‘Come and get it.'

‘Well, don't wave it around, at least.' He feints and then jumps, snatching it from her, and stuffs the money back down her top. ‘You'll have us knocked over in a second. Christ. What's the matter with you?'

‘Turning into a right bludger, aren't you?' Sally teases.

‘Leave her alone. Not your money, is it?' Dot chides him.

‘Yeah, not yours, is it?' Sally repeats, and she sways on her feet.

‘Go on.' He looks at Dot and changes tack. ‘You know I won't get any tea from Annie.' He lifts his grimy shirt and sucks in his belly. ‘I'm wasting away.'

‘All prick and ribs like a drover's dog, aren't you? What happened to what I gave you this morning? Hmm?' Dot pokes him imperiously.

‘I spent it.' He taps out a cigarette from his pack and offers one to her. ‘On smokes.'

‘Well, serves you right, don't it,' Sally says with a laugh. ‘Serves
me
right for waving it about. Skinny little bugger. Go get yourself a feed.' She drops a few coins into his hands. ‘Here you go.'

Templeton pecks her on the cheek. ‘I'll be off.'

‘You're soft in the head, you are.' Dot rolls her eyes at Sally. ‘Don't encourage him. And you!' she yells after Templeton, who is already yards away. ‘Stay right there. Tell me, where did you sneak to today?'

‘Nowhere much. I'm fine. See ya.' He holds one arm up, their salute.

‘Will you be coming home later?'

‘I dunno.' He shrugs. ‘Is Jackie about?'

‘Of course.'

‘And what temper is he in?'

‘Same as usual.'

‘Then nah. I don't reckon.'

‘What should I tell your sister?'

‘Just say you didn't see me. All I want is an evenin' of peace and quiet, y'know?'

‘I know,' she says, with the lick of an odd smile on her face. But he does not see. He has taken off up the road, a bowed, loping figure, his collar high about his chin, jingling the coins in his pocket, lost in the crowded night.

THREE

It is a drizzling Monday afternoon and Nancy and Frances have spent the last half-hour intoning ‘My Country' with the rest of their classmates
.