Dark Fires Shall Burn (23 page)

Nancy puts the diary down, stunned. Frances hadn't breathed a word. She had been there too, that day in the city! Nancy remembers the look of terror in the rolling, feral eyes of the horse, the people gone wild like they were dancing on the lip of a well and did not care: one man had shimmied up a streetlight and was perched, whooping, on the top. Nancy feared that something precious had broken, that the glue that made people behave themselves had dissolved and forever there might only be this havoc.

She turns the page, but the next is blank. She continues to flick through and finds slips of magazines tucked between the leaves, all cutouts of Frances' blasted movie stars. The next entry is dated months later: 19 December 1945.

Dear diary,

I'm sorry I haven't written in you! I have been very lazy. Mum says that sloth is the second worst sin. The worst is lust. I would have written in you but I've been scared that you will be found and I will get into trouble. Mum got so angry the last time I took the bible cushions off and hid them under the bed she made me take the music box Dad gave me when I was born (that's the only present from him, besides Winston and I am too old for Teddy Bears, and now my father is probably gone forever and I'll never get another one) into the yard and hit it with a hammer until it was broken. Then she said don't look a gifthorse in the mouth. I don't know what that means but I was sad about the music box. It had a ballerina on it that twirled.

I have also been sad because most of the Americans have gone home and it is almost Christmas and there won't be any presents because mum says we can't make ends meet. There still isn't any butter or any nice fabric for dresses and we still have
cupons
coupons. I liked it better when the war was on. At least things were exciting. Now it's back to boring old normal.

Nancy remembers Frances complaining that they still had to use the rationing books, and how each time she came to visit she would ask if there was any butter and, if there was, she would spread her toast imprudently and lick the excess off her fingers. Nancy turns the page and reads on.

3rd April 1946

Dear diary,

I hate Mr Cameron! I hope he gets a boil on his nose and it grows so big it has to be lanced and pus goes all over his face. Today he made me sit in the corner at the back of the room with a paper bag on my head because I brushed my hair during scripture. He said it was vanity and quoted Jeremiah. Ha! I hope his hair falls out and his thingy drops off and he dies.

Nancy laughs, the memory of the day overwhelming her, and then, catching herself laughing, wants to cry.

5th April 1946

Dear diary,

There is a ghost in the cemetery! He's dressed like a Soldier from the olden days in red regimentals like the drawings of the first fleet. It sits on Major Mitchell's grave and looks through a telascope up at the sky. I wasn't frightened. It seemed to be a trick of the light but when I tried to go closer I knew it to be a ghost. He looked right at me and then disappeared!

10th April 1946

Dear diary,

I followed the boy with the long blond hair today. He used to go to my school i think. I don't think he has any parents. Sometimes I catch him spying on me. He's in the cemetery alot. I've seen him feeding all the stray cats in there. He seems nicer than the other boys, who throw rocks at the cats. I know where he lives — with the fast girls. No one talks to them. Mum says they're not well bred. They are really pretty though and they have nice coats, and their hair is always set just so. I want to talk to them but they would probably think I was just an annoying baby like Nancy. She doesn't understand anything. She doesn't even want to talk to boys — she thinks they are disgusting. She still has her made-up friend which everybody knows is so silly, even mum thinks she needs to grow up, but she still talks to her — I've heard her. I couldn't take her with me to meet anyone let alone a boy.

Nancy turns the page with a violent flick of her wrist. Frances thought she was a baby! She is livid with anger. Well, Frances Reed, at least
she
had enough sense not to be in the cemetery late at night with a strange man, to be murdered. But Nancy knows even as she thinks it that this is wrong. Her anger dissolves into guilt. Frances couldn't help what had happened to her. And even if she could, she didn't deserve it. No one did, but especially not her friend, who looked after Thomas and was always worried about the cats in the cemetery.

The next few pages are blank again. Doodles fill the twenty or so more: rough sketches of horses, hats and soldiers.

Who was this Pete? And could he know something about that night Frances walked off into the dark? Nancy considers taking the diary to her mother, but then she remembers the hot humiliation of bringing Frances home when she had the women's troubles, and how clear it was that her mother would have preferred a daughter like Frances over a daughter like Nancy, and it hurts, unexpectedly and vividly.

She rifles through the last pages and finds the diary reconvenes on 27 May 1946.

Dear diary,

Nancy wouldn't go with me to the flicks today but it's just as well because I saw Pete there. He's waiting to get demobbed. He bought me an ice-cream. Afterwards we had a Cigarette together. He said he'd had a girl in England but she'd chucked him when her Pommy
fiancée
fiancé came back from the front. He says he never thought he'd live through the war. Now he's come back he wants to run a hardware store. He is very handsome and tan in his uniform. Not like the Moustache, with his fat potbelly.

Then, abruptly, it ends. The rest of the pages are unmarked; no more mention of Pete. Who was he?

Nancy's mind is at sea. She knows the boy with the long blond hair — Templeton. Frances had been with him and those girls the night before she died, she knew that much. Jack Tooth, the girl had said, but Frances had not mentioned him. And who was ‘the Moustache'?

The lump that has hijacked her throat rises.
She thought I was a baby. She never told me. That's why I wasn't there with her. It's my fault. I wasn't with her. It's all my fault.
The guilt is too strong for her; it hurts, like a kick to the stomach. Amid it, a thought rises:
It should have been me.

Nancy makes sure her bedroom door is locked, the chair firmly in place, before she rips every single page out of the diary and tears them into ribbons, and then she collects the pile of massacred paper, thrusting violent handfuls into a pillowcase. She waits until nightfall before she takes it out into the yard and burns it in the wheelbarrow, just like her mother had burnt Louis Armstrong after Nancy's father had been killed, and the vinyl had melted into an evil black scab, the traces of which are still viscously present in the barrow's basin. She watches the flames eat the paper and the cotton binding until only the little brass lock is left.

It's only then she realises the gravity of what she has done.

TWENTY-TWO

Dolly rises at sparrow's on Sunday, demanding they all attend service at St John's. Templeton can hear her yelling at Lorraine to wake up. He rubs the Sandman from his eyes, feeling rotten, and pads down to the parlour.

Dot is still asleep, or pretending to be, slumped in a chair next to a precarious ashtray, empty bottles and a mirror covered in white residue. He pours himself some cold tea from the pot and swishes it around his foul-tasting mouth. Nellie Flanagan's feather boa wilts on the floor, bald in patches, its owner nowhere to be seen.

‘What is Dolly talking about?' he asks. ‘Why does she want to go to church?'

‘Who knows,
aniołku
, who knows?' Dot opens one eye groggily, her hand to her head. ‘One of her strange fancies. I do not have the strength.'

Templeton can hear Lorraine's loud protests that she has a bad back and can't possibly manage the walk and the hard pews. Dolly emerges from the corridor, dressed in her best in majestic full sail. Annie and Sally slink in after her, looking sour and red-eyed.

‘Uh, I thought I'd do the gutters today. Like you asked me,' Templeton weasels hopefully. Even a couple of cold, wet hours clinging to the roof, squelching out the clogged gum leaves with a rake, is preferable to a sermon. He read in the newspapers about Frances' funeral — the white casket, the hillock of flowers accumulating at the cemetery fence — and it makes him long for a day's hard labour. He wants to go to bed with all his muscles hurting, his mind exhausted, to sink into the jelly of nothingness.

‘Alright. I want to see it shining like the Central Station clockface when I get back,' Dolly warns. ‘Snowy? Snowy! Where is that bloody useless man?'

‘He went out before daybreak,' Roberta tells her, entering the room with a smile. She looks less hungover than the others. ‘He was talking last night about needing to go and sort out a bookie that done him over.'

Dolly purses her lips but says nothing. She walks out to the front door.

Annie brushes a palm over Dot's hair and rests it on her shoulder. ‘I guess you are not coming?'

‘Am I invited? No. I think not.' Dot takes her hand.

Annie slips her hand out of Dot's grip, shrugs like there is nothing she can do, and follows Dolly out onto the street with Sally in tow.

Templeton sits for a while, waiting to see if Dot wants to talk, but she puts her elbows on the kitchen table and clutches her head, wincing.

‘Why didn't you go with them?'

‘I'm not invited,' she tells him flatly.

‘How come?'

‘I'm not a Christian.'

‘Oh.' He thinks on this. He knows she is Jewish, but until this moment it had never really meant anything to him. Everyone he knows is a Christian, whether they believe in God or not.

‘We killed your Lord, Jesus Christ,' she says, lip curling upwards into a cheeky smile as she taps a cigarette on the table without lighting it. ‘And we put your Christian blood into our matzos for Pesach.'

He lights himself one and pours some cold tea. ‘What's it like being a Jew?'

‘Tasty,' she says, unable to help herself, and then puts her hand again to her head, grimacing. ‘Hush up, Lucky. Will you?' She waves him away.

‘What bug crawled up your arse?' he says, hurt. He sits there in silence until his smoke burns out, and then he goes looking for the rake in the cupboard under the stairs to do the gutters.

Dot gathers up the empty glasses scattered around the room, moving automatically. Templeton hears her fill the washing tub with water, the blast of it loud against the tin, and slide the glasses into the suds. He slams the cupboard door and her shaky wet hand slips: a tumbler falls against the kitchen tiles, detonating into a rain of jagged pieces just as he enters the room.

Suddenly she is sobbing. He is aghast. Her face is running with tears — Dot, who almost never cries. Templeton leans the rake against the wall and goes over to her. ‘I'm sorry. It's just a glass.' He grabs her hand to stop her picking up the shards. ‘It's just a glass,' he repeats. But she will not look at him. ‘Are you crying because you're a Jew?' he asks desperately. He thinks of the pictures in the newspapers; the piles of shoes.

‘Oh, Lucky. Don't be silly.' She turns to him, eyes dark blurs. ‘No.'

The front door opens and Snowy walks in. He has a cut on his cheek oozing blood. ‘It's nothing,' Snowy says, seeing them looking. He is sweating and seems wired. He wipes his face with the inside of his arm. ‘What's all this mess doing here?'

‘I did it,' Templeton says. ‘I'm cleaning it up.'

He grunts, uninterested. ‘Has Dolly left? Is Lorraine here?' He doesn't notice Dot's tears. Without waiting for an answer, he starts calling. ‘Lorraine! Lorraine?'

‘Snowy? That you? I'm coming.' Lorraine's voice reverberates down the stairs.

‘What are you looking at like a bloody stunned mullet? What's your name again, boy? Tumbledown? Tinkerbell?' He glares. ‘Go out and get me a bottle of whisky, would ya?' He scrabbles around in the pocket of his trousers for money and waves a smeared note at Templeton. Blood still runs down his face and is staining his collar.

‘It's nine o'clock on Sunday morning,' Templeton observes.

‘Whisky!' He flutters the note in his face as though he is slow. ‘It don't matter what bloody time it is. Go to where Dolly sent you for the beer the other night. You little smart aleck.'

‘I'll clean up this mess.' Dot gestures at the rubble of the glass.

‘No. You go with him,' he tells her brusquely. ‘Lorraine can take care of that.' He steps around her to access the sink. After bending to splash himself, he walks out of the kitchen. Templeton can see he has turned the dishwater a dirty rose.

Out in the daylight, Dot composes herself. ‘Wait,' she says as she takes out her compact mirror and repairs her face. She lifts the money from Templeton. ‘Good. Stupid man has given us twice what we need. That's one bottle for him and one for me.
Na zdrowie
! I need some hair of a dog.'