Dark Fires Shall Burn (14 page)

‘Hey presto, there go her looks. She won't work around here again. And all Dolly can say is that the blood's ruined her shoes — ha!' She sags back into the couch, seemingly spent.

Roberta looks vexed and even Annie seems impressed.

‘And you saw this, did you?' Dot says with a sniff.

‘You bet I did.'

‘Just as I'm standing here seeing you now?'

‘Are you calling me a liar?'

‘No. All I say is that it is a good story … To scare children.'

‘Listen here, you dirty Jewess. Don't think I don't know what you are.'

‘Shut it, Lorraine!' Roberta says loudly. She mashes her cigarette out in the ashtray and rises. ‘Christ almighty.'

Dot steps closer to Lorraine, who scrambles up from the couch until they're inches away, breathing in each other's faces. Dot has half a head on her and makes full use of it. ‘So, what kind of bottle was it?' she asks icily, staring her down.

‘What?'

‘The bottle Dolly hit her with — what was it?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I thought you said you saw it.'

‘I bloody did. I just don't know what bottle it was. Brandy. Whisky. What does it matter?'

‘I would say it matters a lot because I think you are full of horseshit.'

‘Don't come into my house and call me a liar!' Lorraine takes a swing and gets Dot right in the mouth.

Annie darts over. She grabs Lorraine from behind, hoisting her arm up along her back, the way she has seen the police do it. Lorraine grunts. Annie pulls on her arm, hard. ‘Apologise,' she demands.

‘If you have knocked my tooth out I'll make you sorry,' Dot spits out. She moves to the other side of the room, cradling her face.

‘Are you alright?' Templeton reaches for Dot.

‘Yes, pal. I am fine.' She runs her finger around her teeth. ‘Still there.' She smiles a bloody smile for him. Her top lip is split and swelling, and her front teeth are gory.

Annie drops Lorraine, who backs against the wall, her eyes glassy with fury.

Roberta has put an arm around Dot and is trying to stop the bleeding with her handkerchief, dabbing it lightly to Dot's lip. Annie comes over and steps in front of Roberta, and Dot brushes the handkerchief away to show her the cut. ‘Are you alright?' Annie asks with concern. Dot nods, takes her hand and presses her cheek against it. Annie does not move to wipe the blood now smeared across her palm.

Lorraine mutters, ‘I was just trying to tell a story.' She hollers down the stairs. ‘Dolly! I'm coming down. I'm going out.' She seizes her coat and tramps off.

Dot lets go of Annie and straightens her shoulders.

‘Well!' Sally sighs when she is sure Lorraine is safely gone. ‘Isn't she a pill?'

‘I'm really sorry about her.' Roberta reaches across, almost absentmindedly, and smoothes one of Dot's short curls where it has bucked its lacquer. Annie watches them closely as she does so. ‘Truly sorry. I don't have any quarrel with Jews. Well, I actually have never met one until now.' She smiles shyly at Dot.

‘Don't worry.' Dot pulls away from Roberta's hand but pats her other arm. ‘We do not bite.' She looks a fright, and Templeton can't help but wince as she smiles bloodily.

‘I'll thump her so hard,' Annie blazes. ‘If she ever touches you again —'

Dolly calls from the stairs. ‘What's going on up here?' She hoists herself up the final step, her bust appearing first like a fully rigged galleon. ‘What set Lorraine off screaming like a bloody banshee just now?'

The women look at each other in silence.

Dolly's eyes clamp on Dot's face. ‘Mmm-hmm.' She raises an eyebrow.

The doorbell sounds. Dolly sighs and looks heavenward. ‘Fix up, all of you, and get your scrawny behinds downstairs. And you, let me tell you something.' She scowls at Dot, moving in so she can put her finger squarely in Dot's face. ‘This house,
my
house, works because everyone gets along, right? That means that I make the rules and you follow them. If you don't like that, well, you come and talk to me. But if you think you can go upsetting the balance after being here all of three minutes, then I think you and me are going to have a problem. Is that clear?'

‘Yes, ma'am.' Dot nods but Templeton can tell she is bristling.

‘I don't mind a bit of healthy competition between my girls, but they're not to go smacking each other up, because
I
lose money. So whatever row you're having, sort it out, or you're both out on your ear. Now, you, boy.' Dolly turns to him. ‘Go down and answer the door. The rest of you get your faces on. Quick sticks.'

Roberta goes to her standing bureau and retrieves a bottle of four-penny dark and a pancake of makeup. Dot sets about briskly cleaning up her face. She washes her mouth out with the liquor and spits the watery blood into the ashtray. Turning to the mirror above the dresser, she delicately sponges her busted lip.

Templeton heads downstairs and opens the door to four braying sailors, so drunk they have to grip one another to stand. He fetches them beers and sits them down at a table. ‘Won't be long,' is his feeble, meatless offer thrown to their hungry impatience.

THIRTEEN

‘Frances?'

Her mother is calling. Frances has been lying on her made bed, shoes on, staring at the ceiling since the afternoon, and is now surprised to notice the light has left the room. She stomps as loudly as she dares into the kitchen.

‘Yes?'

Mrs Reed looks at her for a moment then goes to the coat stand and takes out her pocketbook. She grinds some money into Frances' hand. ‘Here's a shilling. I need you to go to the store.'

Frances takes it dumbly. ‘Why? The store …' she trails off. ‘What do you want?'

‘We need bread. I forgot it when I was there. And no wonder. My brain was boiling all day not knowing where you'd gotten to.'

Frances looks at the clock on the wall. ‘Murray's will be shut,' she says hesitantly. ‘It's half past five.'

‘Well, go up to King Street!' Mrs Reed says. ‘Go to Wheeler's. Or stop in at Ada's and see if she will give you some, since you're so fond of her lately. Oh yes, don't look at me like that. Wasn't she full of piss and vinegar when she gave Thomas back. Says you're out running wild all over town.'

‘That's a lie,' Frances objects quietly, but she knows that there is little use in arguing when her mother is in a mood like this. ‘I'll go to the shop.'

‘And mind you come straight home this time.' Her mother turns her back to Frances. ‘I want tea on the table by six-fifteen, or you're not getting any.'

Frances sets out, and the streetlights are lit already against the failing sun. The green-and-yellow trams trundle past one another, thick and steady electric caterpillars. It's cold; she rubs some feeling into her arms.

The pubs are already rowdy and sweaty, and King Street throbs with bodies. Older girls walk three and four abreast, arms linked, their hair rolled elegantly and skirts swishing against their stockings — real stockings, Frances can see, not like the war days. And real blush too, not beet juice from a can. The hotels will soon close and the men will join them, tipsy and full of elbows. Some are on the street already, servicemen mostly, still in their dashing slouch hats, standing about chatting in large gangs that take up the whole footpath so that people have to step in the gutter to pass, but no one dares complain.

Headlights of passing cars trawl the street. She thinks of the night four years ago when the midget Japanese submarines had slithered through the Heads into Sydney Harbour, their passage quick through the dark, along the muddy bottom. She was in her pyjamas and supposed to be in bed when the shafts of the search beams had stabbed down from the sky while the depth-chargers boomed, lobbing sound around the city's basin, the machine-gunners raging at shadows, heard as far away as her house in Newtown. The
Kuttabul
had taken the torpedo meant for the
USS Chicago
, the papers said, and all those men, burning and kicking, had slid, their lungs filling with water, down an inky chute through havoc and into silence.

Her eyes rest on a rumpled elderly man leaning in his doorway, waving westwards, craning his neck. ‘Evening, miss. It'll be snowing in the mountains tonight.'

‘How can you tell?' Frances asks.

‘Clear moon, frost soon.' He points. ‘And that's just down here. Snow up on Blackheath, mark my words.' His craggy face is a jack-o'-lantern lit up by the lamp behind him.

She hurries on to the store, but when she reaches it, the door is shut and the lights are off.
Damn
. Beside the store is a peeling billboard with a gigantic smiling mother drinking Bushell's, and she thinks of Ada's miserable face and her screaming brats in the kitchen and how she's never seen anyone look so blissful over a bloody cup of tea.

In her pocket she holds the sweaty shilling and decides, after a moment's hesitation, to keep going. A shop further up King Street will be open where she can buy bread, she tells herself. Surely there will be one. She dare not go home to face her mother without it, and time is growing short.

FOURTEEN

Once the girls have come down to greet them, he slips his coat on and steals away. To be alone, thank God. It is chilly in the street. Still, he won't turn back. He thinks about Dot and Annie and Sally and Roberta with the sailors. He's nauseated, but he lights a cigarette for something else to do with his hands and throws the match, skittering it on the lip of the gutter.

The streets around Darlinghurst are all dog-legged and confounding, but there's one place he knows how to get to from here.

It takes Templeton more than an hour to reach the beach, the trams slow and noisy, full of workers in uniform who bulge out from the side doors, swinging like gibbons from the external handrails. They squash him up against the window; their kit bags knock him with each pitch forward of the carriage and they think it great fun. Alighting is a blessed relief.

He makes his way along the cliffs from Bondi, heading south past the baths, until he comes to the familiar cave, half-concealed in the dark by a thicket of scrub. He pushes that aside and enters on his haunches, shuffling until he is inside and can squat beneath the lip of the sandstone overhang.

Forty feet below him the high tide works the cliff-face like a boxer, sending relentless jets of spray upward on the wind, and his face is soon misted with salt. A liquid contentment disperses itself about his body. It is private here, it is his, and he does not have to fight for any patch of it.

He has arranged a lot of wooden boxes, some dozen or so taken from laneway trash, in lines. Flicking a match, he carefully lifts a box from the cavern's gritty floor. Underneath is a dead rat.
Very dead
, Dot or Annie might have quipped, for it is stiff as jerky, the straps of shrivelled meat the Yanks chewed on. Its little yellow overbite is almost comical.

Templeton looks the rodent over, admiring how the flesh has retracted over the thin white needles of ribcage. It smells, but only faintly, of dried fruit. Not at all like death.

It's been a while since his last visit. Weeks must pass for the conditions to be right; he can't abide the sight or the smell if he comes too soon. It is much better in wintertime and so he comes more often now, even though the wind is fierce and the ocean below knife-grey, as it is tonight.

He smokes a cigarette as he checks on the rest of his collection. Mostly rats, as they were the easiest to get, but there is also a magpie, a ring-tailed possum, a rainbow lorikeet, a seagull and some other small birds, the names of which he does not know.

He doesn't much care for the possum, it being the only creature he had killed, rather than a true find. Some boys had hit it with a rock and near-brained it in one of the fig trees near the beach, and it was bleeding and panting with its tongue out when they left. He had tried to strangle it but the damned thing struggled and screeched and ripped a chunk out of his finger, so he had been forced to snap its neck. Quick, like his father had shown him on rabbits. He remembered their svelte velvet bodies dangling from the man's fist.

He replaces the box and sits for a while, smoking and watching the surf churn in the dark.

‘Go out and bathe in the dam. Wash your clothes too,' Annie had said that day, after his father had left, and he had skinned himself of his puked-on shirt, of his putrid singlet and breeches, and left them on the rocky lip of the dam. He stood naked and alone but for the roos drinking and scratching nearby, untroubled.

The dam had been low. No rain in months. He had to wade far from the edge into the brown water, barely even liquid, to get wet, and yet in the centre it still suddenly turned deep, and it sucked him under like he had a gut full of stones. When his head broke the surface, he gulped air but tasted mud. He crouched on the bank and a low moan quivered across the span of him.

Almost mechanically, Templeton rinsed his clothes, pounding them with flat rocks and putting them back on wet, as though he was watching himself from some treetop eyrie. Mr O'Riordan held the next stead, an hour away on foot. He had walked there fast, dumb and snot-smeared. The fields stretched and the sun had scorched his arms and brow, baking his clothes stiff as paper. He let the flies land on his face. He could barely get words out when he staggered up and pounded on the screen door. Mr O'Riordan had had to thump him on the back and give him a dram.