Dark Fires Shall Burn (9 page)

‘Cyrillic.'

‘What?'

‘Never mind.'

‘What's all the books for, Dot?'

‘A whole load of trouble, that is what.'

‘What are they about?'

‘I don't know. I have not read them. All Pa's hoo-ha.' She pursed her lips testily.

He took up a pamphlet, which had letters he could recognise, from the table and read aloud. ‘
The substitution of the proletarian for the bourgeois state is impossible without a violent revolution
.' He whistled. ‘Blimey. Is he a spy?' He couldn't help himself asking. A real live Red!

‘And you tell me why the Rosjanie
would bother to send anyone to this godforsaken arsehole in the world?' Dot snorted. ‘Spy on what — some kangaroos? Your country is one sandwich short of a picnic. If that is the expression.'

But a few weeks later the government put her father and
babcia
in one of the internment camps, and Dot left Bondi to live with them in Lennox Street with only a suitcase and a face that told them not to ask questions. It was a sorry excuse for a house back then, Templeton remembered, strewn with rugs and old coats to cover the rot. The wallpaper was coming off in long welters like peeling sunburn, and the ceiling sagged, pregnant with damp. Everything had a velvet cover of dust. ‘Blush on an old tart,' Annie had appraised Dot's efforts to fix up the place.

But three years had passed for them to get used to the stained mattresses and, hanging tenaciously to a nail above them, the old crucifix that must have been put up by previous tenants, too high to reach. So they slept overlooked by the tortured Lord in the jaundiced glow of a Chinaman's lantern some Yank had given to Sally. Still, they had lived in worse places. The bed bugs here were kept at a dull roar. Templeton was bitten scarlet at the previous house, and Annie had to paint him with calamine once a week in the yard. God, that was horrible.

Templeton has almost finished his whisky. He tries to stand, using the chair as a crutch, but falls back heavily into his seat. ‘This whisky works,' he concludes happily. ‘We should write a commendation letter to the manufacturer.' He gestures in the air like a toff and giggles.

‘Better if you stay here. I'll sleep down here with you. Don't you go up there and wake your sister.' Dot waves in the direction of the stairs.

‘Thank Christ Jackie's not here. That bastard!' His mood turns savage at the mention of Annie. ‘He did it again! Why does she let him? Why doesn't she do something?' This last question comes out hoarse, and he droops, resting his head on his forearms.

‘Shh. Come here. Go to sleep.' She gathers him up, as best she's able, and heaves him down to the mattress on the floor with her.

Templeton protests, but weakly. ‘Why? Why does she love him?'

‘Hush.
Mój śmiały chłopiec
.' Dot breathes hot whisky breath on his cheek.

‘Why does she let —' The words break in his throat. Dot's skin and her breath and her weight against him feel so nice, he wants to die.

‘Your sister is fine. She …' Dot pauses. ‘She is strong.' She raises herself enough to take a sip. ‘She will not be told. Trust me, if I could do something I would. I would kill him if I could. And hang for it.' She arranges Templeton so his head is in her lap and her cup on the floor beside her, with the bottle close at hand. She strokes his hair. ‘
Aniołku. Kocham cię.
' He knows what that means. She's said it to him for years.
Little angel. I love you.

‘Dot,' he murmurs from the restless depths of his mind. But he cannot find words for the feelings.

She begins to talk of Kraków, while he feels sleep drag him in. Memories of girlhood in Debrecen, Constanta — Papa wanted to try for Palestine, she says, but it was no good. Then London: rainy, smelly, the people unfriendly, the food inedible — tinned everything! The worst you can imagine,
Aniołku
. The vast, crowded boat to this
ale spelunka
— what a shithole!

He likes how the Polish sounds and tries it on his tongue, mouthing it in the darkness.

‘Nineteen thirty-seven, when we came to here. The year they crowned George VI. We listened to it on the radio; so boring, went for hours. Nine years ago, can you believe it? I was just a little baby, like you, only fifteen years old. I thought I was so big, knew everything,
no one tells me what to do
, et cetera.' She wiggles her fingers, grimacing. ‘
Idiotka
.'

She describes the pitted buildings of her old city, the faces of the people wading about in a tar pit like drowning dinosaurs. But Templeton can't see it, so far away and so different to the fresh-bricked buildings, everything minted yesterday, the suntanned hopefulness. He cannot imagine.

‘The Continent.' She blows a raspberry and he jerks at the sudden noise. ‘Big problems they have. Big, big problems. Good luck fixing that mess.
Jak sobie pościelesz, tak się wyśpisz
.' She repeats it into her drink like an incantation.

‘What does that mean?' he asks sleepily.

‘As you make your bed, so you must lie.'

She talks about her
babcia
as he drifts in and out of wakefulness. Her
babcia
, who smelt always of paprika and beeswax, who had a wonderful garden in Poland. Her father's scent was different — old paper and shoe polish and tobacco. Templeton feels her chest catch, as though she is a flower in one of those presses. He imagines the twin wooden boards compressing her heart and lungs, the elegant iron screws twisting, flattening her down.

‘Dot,' he asks, raising himself up so that his back is still pressing against her and her fingers are still intertwined in his hair. ‘Who tried to shoot us?'

‘They were not aiming for you or me. It was Bob Newham. After Jackie.'

‘Why? For Bob's eye?'

‘The eye. And other things.'

‘What other things?'

‘Little one, I would tell you if I knew it all myself.
Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.
Jackie's done some bad in his life. They used to be friends, Jackie and Bob, that's all I know. And now they want to tear each other to strips. Bob has sworn he will kill him. Good luck Bob, I say.' And she kisses him on the forehead and falls silent. Soon he hears her snoring.

The night is soundless. Eventually he sleeps, dreaming he is in a lion's den. The lion's paws are heavy as cudgels on his back. The beast turns him over and licks his face. He doesn't know if it is real or in his dream, but now and then in the darkness pellets of tears dampen his neck.

EIGHT

It is just before dawn when Nancy wakes from an awful dream of metal and flames, hurtling towards an upside-down horizon.

It reminds her of the game the boys play in the street, bracing cardboard boxes around their waists, holding
The Sun
or
The Mirror
fanned out like Icarus' wings. ‘Shoot down the Luftwaffe,' they yell. ‘Get those Messerschmitts!' She had come to know the compact flint of German syllables. Why the boys wanted to play games of war when the war itself had been such a drudge was beyond her. The littler boys and the occasional dirty-faced girl crouched in the gutter and pointed their clasped hands up into the air and made the
ack-ack
sound of the stentorian guns. ‘
Yeeeeoooow, yeeeeooow
,' one boy would yell, twirling on the spot, mimicking the ear-bleeding air-raid siren. ‘
Brrrrm-pow! Rat-tat-tat-tat-bang!
' Gangs of scabby kids would erupt from the newsreels at the flicks, knocking over the alleyway milk bottles, their round, plain faces flushed with destruction.

Nancy had come upon a bunch loitering in Marrickville Park just after the war ended.
Urchins
, her mother would call them.
Mudlarks
. They had set up their collections of painted tin soldiers in a dustbowl around an M-80; she only knew what the red tubes were because she had seen the Americans lighting them up for Independence Day. She backed away upon seeing the runnels of kerosene the boys were pouring down into the basin.

‘It's the bomb!' one kid shouted, punching the sky as he watched his friend, a hare-lipped scoundrel, kneel and drop the match. ‘Burn those stinking Japs!'

The blast incinerated the soldiers. The boys scattered and disappeared, yelping with delight, foul ash settling in their hair. She waited till the fire burnt itself out and went to see the debris. Stupidly, she bent to pick up a half-melted soldier, a torso sticking out in the dirt. She nursed the blister for days.

The light is buttery through her curtains. She can hear Pinky again, whining and scratching. Normally Aunt Jo is up by now and has taken him out to do his business.

Walking past her mother's bedroom, she notices a dark puddle on the floor. Switching on the light, she can see that there are dresses strewn on the floor. There are photographs on the bed. She doesn't normally go into her mother's room — she knows she has to ask permission — yet she crosses the floor and bends over to sweep up the pictures. One in which her father holds her as a baby on the threshold of their house; one of her mother squinting, smiling at the camera with friends, all at a beach in their bathing costumes; one of her parents together at the opening of the Harbour Bridge — at least she thinks it is them: the photographer has had to stand so far back to get the bridge pylon in shot that the figures are little more than homunculi.

The door to Aunt Jo's room creaks loudly, and Pinky pushes his way through the gap and is in the bedroom, tongue questing for her hand, joyful. She shakes him off and whispers loudly. ‘Aunt Jo?' She raps on the door and calls again.

She pushes the door slightly.

Aunt Jo is in her rocking chair, face turned away, and Nancy starts, fearing her wrath if she is disturbed. But Aunt Jo looks to be asleep, and is deaf as an old shoe.

Nancy grows bolder as the figure in the chair does not move. The wireless beside her is murmuring on, and she goes to switch it off. Standing at the woman's side, she notices a kind of peculiar frozenness to her features. Aunt Jo's mouth is slightly open, tongue and gums papery and dry, knuckles white and bluish, folded together in her lap. Nancy touches an arm. It is stiff. Something is not right and she feels the knowledge of what has happened strike inside her like metal on metal. Jesus, she thinks, and blushes at the word.

Pinky yaps suddenly, startling Nancy, and tries to jump up onto Aunt Jo. He cannot get footing on her lap and slides off, his claws tearing a rip in her skirt. Aunt Jo's hairy calf, the stocking bagged at the ankle, is exposed, and Nancy blushes even deeper. She hastily rearranges the material folds to cover her, while realising, on some level, that this is absurd.

Anger kindles and takes to the spark. Who would have found her if Nancy had not? And then she feels ashamed: surely she should be crying. She waits to see if any tears might come. They do not. She wonders if God is watching and judging her.

Should she bother to rouse and tell her mother, or should she just wait until she wakes in her own time, probably calling out meekly for Nancy to bring a cold compress for her head? She looks at Aunt Jo's poor dead face. Who would come? A doctor certainly, and maybe even police? She shivers. Most likely. What do you do when someone dies? She touches Aunt Jo's sad arm flesh again and decides: she cannot let anyone see her mother, the state she's in, out cold on the living room floor.

Pinky runs in figure eights at her feet as she walks downstairs. Her mother's hair is fanned in an aureole, her face poised even in stupor, her beauty infuriating even with her lips slightly parted and she snoring quietly. She looks like the postcard of Millais' Ophelia she has tacked to her dresser mirror, only with redder hair.

‘Aunt Jo is dead,' Nancy announces in a loud, ugly voice. She doesn't know what else to say. Her mother does not stir. ‘Dead as a doornail.'

She stands over her mother and pushes her arm with a toe, at first gently and then not so gently. Her mother stirs and her eyes flutter but do not open. ‘No, John,' she murmurs in her sleep and smiles a private smile.

Nancy climbs back to her own chilly bedroom and opens the curtains. The sun appears half-hearted about the dawn. She lies down and draws her knees to her chest and hugs herself on the thin mattress, an even thinner wall separating her from a dead woman. She can't bear to meet the day and so she puts her head back on her pillow, facing the empty steppe of hours until her mother wakes.

NINE

When Frances wakes, she is lying on a coat that reeks of smoke and old sweat and something strange: orange peel, dried apples? She is next to a softly snoring, unfamiliar girl. It is at least mid-morning, judging from the angle of the sun trying to pry its way through the curtains, and her head is a jumble of vexatious pictures: her mother naked underneath Mr Langby, her mouth mashed against his moustache; Thomas wailing; Ada's haggard glare in the over-lit doorway; the gunshots from the car; men standing over her, yelling; something burning down her throat like medicine.

She laces her shoes and pulls on her cardigan, wincing at the crankshaft of pain in her head. The yellow wool is stained from her fall in the filthy street. Her mother will have checked Ada's for her by now and will be mad as a wet hen.