Dark Fires Shall Burn (36 page)

‘Oh,' she says, trying to downplay the warm tingle of excitement. ‘Why do they call it the Cape of Good Hope?'

Kate smiles but carries on with the show. ‘I don't know. But I do know that the Portuguese named it Cabo das Tormentas, or the Cape of Storms.'

‘I don't like the sound of that.'

‘I'm sure we'll be fine,' Kate says briskly. ‘Then we go up to Lisbon. That's in Portugal. And finish up in Southampton, England.'

‘England!' Nancy says and wonders if, after all these weeks, Lily might reappear to see what it's like.

‘Yes, darling. England,' Kate says, as though Nancy is simple.

Nancy thinks of Lily's riddle:
What lives without a body, hears without ears, speaks without a mouth, to which the air alone gives birth?

‘But that's only where we disembark. Then we shall catch the train to Holyhead, and there get on another boat — much smaller — and finally we shall be in Dublin.'

Nancy is fatigued merely imagining.

A few hours after the ship has left Sydney, they take supper in the dining room, sitting on handsome cane chairs with white linen tablecloths and waiters draping starched napkins in their laps. They had missed the moment of departure: exhausted by boarding, they had fallen into a companionable doze after the course had been chartered on the atlas.

‘I wanted to say goodbye to Sydney,' Nancy says, disappointed.

‘So did I,' Kate says. ‘I wanted to watch it fade away.'

The ship is an incandescent speck in the unvarying dark. They eat roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, and Kate has only one glass of port and no more. Retiring to the cabin, they are shy with each other, putting on nightgowns and climbing under the covers, apologising for getting in each other's way.

‘Good night,' Kate says and turns off the lamp.

Nancy lies unsleeping, listening to the sound of her mother's breathing. She can tell she is also awake.

‘Mum?' she asks. For the most fleeting of moments, she wants to tell her everything. That Frances is avenged. The secret feels like a grenade in her hand and she need only light the fuse. How she had gone to the house on Lennox Street that night and heard the woman screaming and seen the blond boy, and seen Jack Tooth, wanted by the police, and, like a sleepwalker, she had felt the gun in her hand, and the metal was pitiless and the recoil kicked her wrist back.

‘Yes?' her mother asks sleepily.

But she cannot say it. ‘Umm, how did you and Dad meet?'

‘Oh, Nan. What a question. Why ask me this now?'

‘I don't know. I just was thinking about it.'

‘He was playing “Bye Bye Blackbird” on piano in a jazz club.'

‘What?' Nancy is incredulous. ‘Dad?'

‘Yes. He wasn't even supposed to be. They were closing up for the night. He had been tending bar. The orchestra had gone home and he was larking about.'

‘What were you doing there?'

‘I was with some girlfriends. But they'd gone home. I hadn't looked twice at your father all night, even when he had served me drinks. Except when he sat down at that piano. What is that line from
As You Like It
?
I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs.
Truer words … He wasn't even very good. But he closed his eyes as he was playing. And, well, I can't quite say. Something about his face; he wasn't like the other men … I decided he was
a bit of alright
.'

‘Yuck,' Nancy says, laughing.

‘Well, you asked.'

They lie in the black quiet for awhile, and Nancy cannot tell if hours or minutes have passed. The ship moves steadily on the water, and, if it were not for the background thrum of the engine, she would not know they are somewhere in the Pacific, inching across the fathomless deep.

‘Mum?'

‘What is it, Nancy?'

‘Do they hang people in Ireland?'

‘What?' Kate asks, shocked, and Nancy can hear the rustle of sheets as her mother turns around to face her.

‘Do they hang people in Ireland? Murderers?'

‘Yes. Yes, they do,' Kate says after a while. ‘Why do you want to know that?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Are you worried about murderers?' Kate's hand reaches across the dark space of the bed's equator, crosses it and finds her daughter's.

‘No,' she says, but lets her hand be held.

‘We're going to be safe there. We're going home.'

‘I don't think anyone can ever be sure they'll be safe in any place.'

‘But we will be.' Kate says it with such pluck that Nancy almost believes.

THIRTY-FOUR

Templeton runs his knuckles over his hair. It almost touches his ears now, grown out from the rough-cut stubble. His beard has grown too, so much that he has to use a razor every morning, or at least every second morning. He still thinks about Frances, and even more often about Jackie. The police investigation into his disappearance has stalled; today's tiny column on the bottom of page five is the only reminder it's continuing at all. He takes the skull of the cat in his hands, removing it from its place on the ledge in the cliff's overhang. It is warm from the September sun and it feels smooth and heavy in his hands.

They had taken Jackie's body from the idling car, across the grass and to the cliffs. He remembers how he had carried Jackie by his feet, and he can still smell the leather of Jackie's shoes, one under each arm. Bob had taken most of the weight, carrying the other end of Jackie, his bloodied head cradled in the crook of his neck, strangely intimate. How they had sweated and strained and grunted, after weighing his pockets with rocks, to throw him far enough from the edge so he would not snag. The horrible
one-two-three
.

For weeks, Dot and Templeton had checked the newspapers for reports of bodies washed up off The Gap. He wondered, fretfully, and with a nauseated sense of disquiet, how long it would take for the fish to erase a man's face and fingertips to make him unidentifiable, to render him just a skull and skeleton in a shirt and pants. But Jackie's remains never resurfaced. The current must have whipped him right out to sea.

‘Eaten by sharks,' Dot surmised. ‘Kind for kind.'

‘Dot?' he had asked her. ‘Do you feel bad?'

‘About Jackie? No. When it is your time, you have to go. And it was past his time.'

‘Do you really believe that?'

‘“They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”' She shrugged. ‘I only wish I had killed the son of a bitch.'

He replaces the bones and shuffles back into the natural curvature of the rock that normally fits his back like a glove. It does not feel so comfortable today. He wonders if he has grown. Annie used to mark his growth spurts on the doorframe at Lennox Street, and before that on the doorframe of the cottage where their mother had died, white as plaster, on a bed stained with an arc of black blood.

There was no doctor and Annie had done her best, knuckle-deep inside their mother, trying to turn the baby, but it was blue when it came out. He remembers Annie's mouth set firm, her fingers shaking as badly as an old drunk, from where he stood, wet with tears, in the corner.

The baby had some cord around its neck and Annie cut it with sewing scissors and put the child to their mother's chest. She said she'd seen it done once with a horse. Their mother cooed to the baby as she shut her eyes and didn't open them again.

Annie washed the blood and slop off the child with water heated on the stove. Templeton was banished from the kitchen, and in the dark he had sobbed until he heaved up his porridge, the porridge his mother had made for his breakfast that morning, and then he cried some more until he lay down and slept next to the puddle of sour oats.

When he woke, the sky was brightening but the sun was slow. He went to milk Sissy, but his fingers squirted most of it onto himself rather than into the pail beneath the goat. He had run the warm bucket into the house, but it was no good. The baby, a girl, wouldn't drink. The milk slipped down her tiny chin, filling her mouth up till it ran over. She couldn't swallow. Her eyes rolled back and she spluttered, her body scarcely bigger than Annie's two fists together. They stopped pouring for fear they would choke her.

‘Annie, where's Mum? Where do you go after —' Templeton had asked. Annie looked at the ceiling. He wanted to go over to her. He wanted to touch her hair and sit down and put his head in her lap.

‘You smell,' she said when he neared.

‘I'm sorry.' He started to cry again. He sniffed himself. His hair was crusted in tufts and his shirt clinging to his skin, yellow with goat milk and vomit.

Later, when Mr O'Riordan told him to take the baby from her, Annie tensed and Templeton's hands were stuck. They looked at each other: Templeton, crooked and awkward, and Annie, calm as though she were somewhere else, three steps behind her eyes.

‘Give it over,' Mr O'Riordan bade her. And she gave the baby up mutely, like she was giving over an apron full of potatoes.

Mr O'Riordan strode over, glanced at it, put two fingers to its neck and shook his head. He went to the bedroom, cleared his throat and didn't say anything there either.

Templeton wanted to go in to his mother, but he dared not. He was no fool. He knew what dead things looked like. His father had taken the rifle to Amos, their blue heeler, scarce more than a pup, after it went for Mr O'Riordan's lambs. He had made Templeton watch as he tied the dog to the fence and lined up the sights of the gun.

Annie and Mr O'Riordan dug a six-by-six in the roasted grass. Templeton sat cross-legged, a buzzing in his ears, the sound of dirt against the shovels sharp as fingernails. They wrapped their mother in a bedsheet with a border embroidered with blue daisies, the French one of which she was so proud. Her wedding sheet.

Annie shook when she had to help lift her. She dropped her end not quite at the grave edge, and their mother slid into the hole graceless.

‘It's alright, love.' Mr O'Riordan nodded. Annie and Templeton stood looking down at the shroud in the trench. Flies landed on their lips and they swatted them from their eyes.

‘By Thy resurrection from the dead.' Mr O'Riordan traced a crucifix in the air with the grasping look of a man more used to raising the frame of a church than speaking in one. ‘O Christ, death no longer hath dominion over those who die in holiness.'

When the train arrived to collect him and his sister that day their mother died, it snaked off east to the city, leaving Mr O'Riordan with their chooks and the goat and the shack he would likely tear down and start over.

He feels the sting in his chest again and takes a bottle of beer out of his satchel and uncaps it, the
psssshtt
satisfyingly crisp, and drinks deeply. He has stolen one of Dot's books,
The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
. It's her most prized possession: a smart volume, bound in midnight blue, with a pretty, raised-gilt title. He can't remember one book in the house growing up, not even the Bible. That first night at Lennox Street he had read Dot's book in bed, holding a candle to the pages, not wanting to turn the lamp on and disturb the girls. Wax had dripped on his fingers and a few spots on the sheets. He'd tried, guiltily, to scratch it off with his nails.

He stands and puts his beer down and turns to face the sea. Gulls wheel, looking from this distance as if they are abseiling down the clouds. ‘
While the world is full of troubles and is anxious in its sleep
,' he reads from the text and then bends to take a gulp of beer.

The birds dive and reemerge from the waves. A drove of fish must be close to the skin of the sea. He creeps up to the edge of the cliff and makes himself light-headed staring at the plunge from the brink. The swathe of foam creams on the smashed rocks yards below.

Someone coughs. He whirls around to see a man standing a few paces behind him, standing on the dirt path, blocking the entrance: the tall man from the night at Tipper's, whose name he had never asked.

‘What are you doing?' Templeton almost shouts, furious at being observed, furious at everything, his face heating. ‘What do you want?'

‘Pardon me,' the man says with an air of apology, his lips betraying a tinge of his amusement. ‘I think I must have taken you by surprise. I had no idea I would find you here, believe me. Forgive me — I do not want to interrupt.' He turns, half bowing, to go back down the ragged path.

‘No, wait. You just gave me a start, that's all,' Templeton says, regaining his composure. ‘How did you know I would be here?'

‘Truly, I did not. This a complete surprise. But not an unwelcome one.'

Templeton is not sure whether to believe him. ‘Oh,' he says, self-consciously putting down his beer.

‘But surely you do know that just a little further around the cliffs is a …' He clears his throat. ‘A place where men might meet each other.' Templeton looks at him warily. He is dressed in short sleeves, optimistic for the weather, and light grey trousers with neatly ironed creases down the centre.