Dark Fires Shall Burn (28 page)

Thinking about all the ways to kill a man and which one is best makes her feel lightheaded. Her wiry determination won't be enough to fight a grown man, especially a murderer, and she lacks the knowledge of where to stick a knife in someone to do more than just scratch him. There is no one she could pay to do it for her — and she has no money, in any case. How much would it cost anyway to have someone killed, like in the films? She could steal the money, but her mother would soon find out.

Poison, then. She knows that poison can do the job because it has been in the papers. Thallium: tasteless, odourless, slow-acting. But that had to be fed to someone over a period of time. Some woman had done it to her husband over a year by putting it in his porridge. Nancy imagines the wife quietly watching her piggish husband take unwitting bites of death with each breakfast.

Nancy wipes her face. A rustle in the bushes makes her seize up with fear. It's just a rat, running from one hidey-hole to another. ‘Shoo! Get away!' she yells, partly to make herself feel better.

She'll start making poison, she decides. In an empty bean tin in the garden, and add a little more each day. Any poisonous thing she can think of will go in: bleach, petrol, dead spiders, wild mushrooms — the poisonous kind. She will stir the brew with a stick, squatting like a witch. Maybe Lily will join her.
But how are you going to make him eat it?
Lily would needle.
When you even find him …

Stupid Lily. But she would be right.

The breeze lifts the limbs of the paperbark, and somewhere nearby a nightbird calls. Amid the cold sweet air, a memory of her father comes unbidden. The time she smashed the perfume on Empire Day; it must have been six years ago. She was too young for the half-day off school but breathless for the cracker night that followed. The streets dangled Union Jacks until she could not see anything for red, white and blue, and through the window all afternoon she'd watched children drag kindling down the street for the fires, the older boys with armfuls of Tom Thumbs and bungers.

Her mother had been getting ready in the bedroom, laying out dresses, fussing and fixing her hair. Her father was watching from a settee chair in the corner, jiggling his leg, as was his way. He could never be still. A record was on, of course: there was always music back then, constant music. Something unusual. That's right: it was Louis Armstrong, ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street'. She can feel the trill of the trumpet up her spine, like light fingers. Her father had laughed at her mother's choice. ‘Why'd you put this on, old girl?'

‘Because I'm a sentimental fool,' her mother had said flirtatiously, and twirled on the spot.

Nancy had wanted desperately to be in her father's lap, and she climbed up into it and he tapped on her back as if he was playing a set of drums, making the noises of the cymbals and the tom-toms on her shoulders and knees. She batted his hands away, squealing ‘Stop it! Stop it,' delighted, and he leant and blew a wet raspberry on her neck and bopped her on the head. She wriggled out of his grasp like a greased eel, shrieking and darting away from him.

He growled, baring his teeth. ‘I'm going to eat you up!'

She flung herself at her mother, just as Kate lifted the exquisite bottle of inky glass with gold script and red cap, the Joy by Jean Patou — her treasure. And, when Nancy's head came smashing into Kate's legs, the bottle was cast high in the air and her father leapt to his feet and tried to dive to save it, but it was too late. It hit the edge of the dresser, a swathe of precious liquid flying wide, and then it tumbled to the floor and smashed. The cap rolled under the bed like a decapitation.

She could see her mother start to cry and then her own lip trembled. The smell! She recalled it so vividly even now, as if it had singed her nosehairs. The room heaved with it. Like someone had fired a cannonball of flowers. She could barely breathe, and it was on her clothes and in her hair. Her father, on his knees, took her mother's hands, and Nancy watched his sombre face twitch and melt, and then he was smiling, and her mother was smiling, through her tears, and spluttering and wiping her nose, and then they were giggling like teenagers and her mother slid off the chair on top of him and they kissed. A proper kiss, with tongues.

‘If I knew it smelled like that I never would have bought it. Sweet Jaysus,' her father said when he could gasp for air again. He liked to mock her mother's Irish expressions. And her mother whipped him with a handkerchief.

‘It's Bulgarian rose and French jasmine, you bastard. And you're not supposed to put the whole bottle on!'

They had gone to cracker night, in the end, all three of them stinking of roses. The street could smell them before they arrived.

All the men in uniform catch Nancy's eye as she walks home. Each one of them could be Pete, each one of them Jack Tooth, that sharp-sounding name that the girl who broke the record player had warned her about.

You're going crazy
, Lily tells her, appearing and trailing a few feet behind.

Nancy does not speak to her or look at her.

They'll send you away. They'll put you in a facility
.

‘I'm too old for you, Lily,' Nancy says finally, whirling around. ‘I'm not a child anymore. I don't need you.' She closes her eyes and the world goes dark and faraway. She counts to twenty. Light again. Lily is still there, tongue out of her mouth, her head lolling around as if it is on a stick.
That's what mad people look like, for your information.

‘Go. Away.'

That's what you look like.

‘Go away!'

Make me
, Lily says and dances on tiptoes, her face suddenly grotesque, like a carnival mask.

Nancy runs into a woman walking towards her. ‘I'm sorry,' she mumbles.

‘Watch where you're going, miss,' the woman says angrily.

Ha ha ha
. Lily contorts herself.
They'll put you in Callan Park Mental Hospital.

‘They will not! They don't put children there.'

They do if they kill someone. Bet you that's where they'll send you. Or to the gallows. They hang women too, you know. Murderesses
.

‘I'm not listening to you anymore.' Nancy walks the rest of the way home with her fingers jammed in her earholes, ignoring the perplexed looks of passers-by.

She charges through the front door, planning to go straight up to bed, but the sight of the house causes her to halt. Everything is different. Her mother, made-up and dressed, is wrapping crockery in newspaper and packing it away into boxes. She would have been careful not to use any paper showing Frances, Nancy knows before she even sees the dark spidery print crunched up around a serving platter.

‘What are you doing?' Nancy tries to sound calm. ‘Where's Izzy?' Izzy had been around every day lately.

‘Oh, thank God you're home. I was starting to get quite worried. Izzy left hours ago. Where have you been? I asked you not to go out anywhere without telling me.'

‘I was just out playing on the street.'

‘Well, I'm packing up. Getting a headstart, at least. Most of this is going to auction. We simply won't be able to take it on the ship.'

‘We're not really going!'

‘Yes. We are. Nan, what did you think? That I was joking?'

‘But not now! Not when we still don't know.' Nancy chokes on the gross unfairness of it all.

‘When we still don't know what?'

‘Who killed her. When we still don't know who killed her!'

‘Nan, sweetheart. The police are looking. But we may never know that.'

‘Don't say that,' Nancy hisses, furious.

‘The sooner we put this all behind us, the better, as they say.' Kate's mouth is determined. ‘Iced tea on the table if you'd like some.'

‘I can't believe you are giving up. Why is everybody giving up? No one even tried!'

‘Giving up? Don't be ridiculous. What can you or I possibly do?' Kate looks Nancy in the eye before turning away. ‘Now. That's enough of that kind of talk. I need to get organised. The auctioneer needs to evaluate what is going to sale, and what's … oh, I don't know. What's going in the bin, I suppose. You look frightful: you're covered in muck. Take those socks off to give me to wash. Why don't you go upstairs and draw yourself a bath?'

Nancy stands at the foot of the stairs, feeling as if she is about to throw up.
This is not happening
. She wants to howl and kick and bite.

Aunt Jo's room is already cleared out, the space suddenly huge. How quickly one moment of time is overwritten by the next, and what trace is left? Not even a ghost in the wallpaper. The people who live here next will never know Aunt Jo, never know she died quietly right there in the corner. Nancy shivers, remembering the stiff form in the rocker and Pinky yapping at her blue feet.

Passing the door to her mother's, she sees the room already half-packed, the rest in disarray. Empty glasses rest in rings of condensation, cluttering her vanity and bureau tops. Nancy examines the perfume bottles. Her mother never bought Joy again, and swore for years she could still smell the rose and jasmine soaked into the floorboards.

She picks up the bottle her mother uses now, Yardley's English Lavender, and twists it open to breathe in the scent. Then she sees a small box at the foot of the bed. Nancy picks it up and shakes it. It is locked. Something heavy rattles inside. A leather-bound pouch of keys lies on the table. She tries key after key. After three or four attempts, a large brass one twists obligingly and the lid springs open.

The box is lined with green velvet, and sitting snug in the custom-made depression is a handsome pistol. She stares at it, breathing deeply. Careful not to touch the trigger, heart suspended in the roof of her mouth, she takes out the gun: her father's. She flicks the curlicue at the top of the barrel and it pops out to the side. There are five empty sockets and one bullet in a chamber. She closes the box and locks it, leaving it exactly as she found it.

TWENTY-SIX

Templeton carefully rinses clean each skull and arranges it on the ledge in the cliff descending in size order from possum to mouse. He sweeps the rest of the bones into one box and takes it further back up the cliff to the scrub, where there is not just sand and rock but soil, and partially buries it.

His skulls watch him eyelessly as he sits smoking on the cliff, as close to the edge as he dares. He likes to peer down at the dark green spume and make himself giddy with flirtation.

There was a picture of a mushroom cloud today in the papers, and copies sold like hotcakes. The Yanks are testing bombs on Bikini Atoll to scare the Soviets, apparently. He'd never heard of the place, but he'd been more than slightly relieved to learn it wasn't off the coast of Sydney. The news said that people's flesh had melted off their bones in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wasn't that a good-enough test for the Americans?

‘We will all be dead before we know what hits us,' one man, on his way to platform two, had said dourly. ‘I can't see the point of worrying about it.'

Even so, Templeton is in good spirits. He has money in his pocket — another three pounds to add to the first — and he is starting to think of what he should save for. A new suit, certainly, and a silver cigarette case with his initials embossed on the side, and a hairpin for Dot, or perhaps a brooch. Screw Annie and Sally.

On the tram back from Bondi, he marvels at how little people care that bombs are blowing up in the Pacific, as though it were happening on another planet. Everyone going about their daily business. There are rainbow lorikeets in Paddington, darting like green missiles, breasts ablaze in sunset colours, waiting to shriek his arrival as he rounds the gate at Tipper's place on Glenmore Road.

Bob Newham stands across the road in case of any troublemakers, a favour he's been doing for Tipper these past couple of nights, and he pats the bulge in his jacket where his Colt sits in its holster. ‘What they call a man-stopper,' Bob says.

Nellie and Dot are downstairs, drinking and smoking and listening to 78s in the parlour. He could hear ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do' from outside. There is a piano in the corner for folks to play if they fancy, but he'd heard no one except Tipper take a crack at it. Tipper loves nothing better than to tell the story of when, ‘wet behind the ears', as she describes herself, she'd followed a girl to Chicago in the early Thirties and ended up bouncing at a jazz club in Kansas City.

‘Deal me in.' Templeton draws up a chair to the table where Dot and Nellie are playing Blackjack.

‘Shilling gets you in.' Nellie barely looks up, and sounds ill-tempered. Judging from the pile of money at Dot's elbow and the diminutive stack of coins at Nellie's, she is losing badly.

‘Spot me?' Templeton asks Dot. ‘You look like you're flush.' He doesn't want her to know that he's got his own coin and have to explain where it came from.

‘Here you go, you little bludger.' Dot laughs. ‘Good fortune smile on you. I want that back!'

They play a few rounds, Nellie getting steadily drunker, and Dot not far behind. Winning is easy.