Dark Fires Shall Burn (4 page)

‘All I'm saying is it sure isn't sunburnt outside, and I've never seen any open plains in my life,' Frances whispers loudly to Nancy.

‘That is enough, Frances!' Mr Cameron turns from the blackboard, the chalk quivering in his hand. ‘Loose lips sink ships, and in this class they get the cane.'

‘Yes, sir.' But, ‘MacKellar can kiss Stalin's hairy arse,' she whispers from behind her hand to Nancy.

‘What
did you say?' Mr Cameron thunders.

‘Nothing.' Frances smiles sweetly.

They move on to European history but Frances ignores her primer. Instead she's watching the rain streak the window while undoing and finger-combing her plait. Nancy sneaks glances in her direction, neglecting her own primer, yet mindful of Mr Cameron and the cane he keeps leaning against the shelf of the blackboard. She looks at Frances' unremarkably pale skin and dark hair and tries to see the resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor that Frances insists is there.

But then she feels something unusual and frightening, something she cannot explain. She has had a kind of accident — one that she hasn't had since she was a very small child. Dread settles upon her at the feeling of wetness between her legs. She pulls off her uniform jumper and wraps it around her waist, tying the sleeves in a knot. Then she begins to squirm in her chair. ‘Mr Cameron, oh, excuse me. Mr Cameron —' Her arm in the air is straight as a soldier.

‘What's the matter? What are you doing? Shh. You'll get a hiding,' says Frances.

‘Sir?' Nancy flaps her arm at Mr Cameron's oblivious back, as he painstakingly chalks a timeline of the Reformation.

‘Shut it! What's got in to you? He's in a bad mood.'

‘Sir?' she says, louder.

‘What is it, Nancy?' Mr Cameron asks sharply, showing his large overbite. Peter Rabbit, everyone in the class calls him behind his back.

‘Can I be excused, please?'

‘What for?'

Frances interjects: ‘She has to go to the dunny, sir!' And a ripple of giggles passes over the class. Nancy, beet-red, nods.

‘Certainly you may not.' Mr Cameron pronounces his words carefully, as if he has tried to expunge the Australian from his accent. ‘You should have gone at luncheon.'

‘But Mr Cameron —' Nancy begins hesitantly.

‘And it is referred to as the lavatory.'

‘Mr Cameron!' She shifts uncomfortably. ‘I have to go to the lavatory
then. Right. Now.' And she is on her feet before he can argue. One of the boys whistles noisily, and his friends thump their desktops with sweaty hands, affected by the contagious air of rebellion.

‘Sit down!' Mr Cameron jabs the air with his chalk.

Nancy moves towards the door.

‘She's going and it looks like you can't stop her,' Frances hoots.

Mr Cameron continues to roar but Nancy is off out of the classroom, down the corridor. She pulls the toilet door closed, flips the catch, and slams her back against it, yanking down her scanties. She looks at a splotch of rusty-coloured blood on the white cotton and crumples against the wall, cramming her fist into her mouth and biting down on her knuckles. The floor is wet from the smaller children who miss the dunny bowl, but she doesn't care.

Oh, hell. She's just like Mrs Jenkins! Everyone in Sydney knew about her. She thinks of the handkerchief that woman clutched to her lips. Nancy had been with Frances and Mrs Reed, in line, waiting for the man to take the butter out of its glass crock and carve off the Reeds' modest slice with his wire guillotine. Behind them, a lady older than her mother, and very finely dressed, dropped one of the potatoes from her basket. Nancy bent down to pick it up, and as Mrs Jenkins leant to take it, beaming gratefully, her bloody handkerchief slipped to the floor.

‘Keep your filthy hands off my girls,' Peggy Reed had said, gimlet-eyed, and she dragged Frances out of the shop by her elbow, the butter abandoned. Nancy trotted behind, bewildered and trying gamely to keep up.

‘Why's Mrs Jenkins got blood on her hanky, Mum?' Frances asked after a safe-enough distance.

‘Because she's going to Hell, that's why.'

‘Why?' Frances had persisted, foolishly.

‘She plucks young, stupid girls — just like you, Frances,' Mrs Reed had told them, the words almost frothing from her lips, ‘out of their mothers' laps, and puts them to work in her two-bob vice dens. I've seen her standing around Central waiting to pick off poor lost country girls. Like a vulture.'

Frances' mouth gaped open as her eyes met Nancy's. ‘What does she make them do?'

‘She lives nice off their sweat, that she does. And God has seen fit to strike her down with just punishment. That's why she has blood on her handkerchief. It's God's justice.' Frances shivered. Her mother's jaw clenched like she was grinding flour on her back molars. ‘Almighty God will punish her. He will wreak His Vengeance upon her and her whores.' Mrs Reed lengthened her stride, holding her handbag tight against her bosom until the skin of her knuckles blanched.

‘Whores!' Frances slipped in step with Nancy and whispered the word in her ear, her warm breath tickling her neck. She pronounced it like
ho-errrrs
. ‘You know what that means, right?' And she punched Nancy on the arm, grinning.

Nancy nodded, but she didn't know, really. She felt her body go loose and spindly. If she concentrated hard enough she could almost pretend she was somewhere else as Mrs Reed preached all the way home. Later, Frances told Nancy that she saw Mrs Jenkins walking the streets, trailing plumes of cigarette smoke like a locomotive, oversized jewelled rings winking in the sunlight, and she felt a shiver for the woman who was going to burn for an eternity.

Nancy had caught the infernal affliction, but how? She had not even clapped eyes on Mrs Jenkins in months. She feels cold perspiration on her brow and under her arms.

The sound of Frances pounding on the door interrupts her wild thoughts. ‘Nan! Let me in. It's me. What's wrong?'

‘Go away.'

‘Mr Cameron sent me to find out what's wrong with you.'

‘Nothing!' Nancy almost yelps.

‘You've got me scared. Are you crook? Cameron sure is doing his block.'

‘Please go.' Nancy rests her forehead against the flimsy corkwood door. To her embarrassment, she feels her eyes prickle.

‘He's going to cane you yellow and green.' Frances wedges the door open and squeezes her face inside. ‘Golly. Why are you sitting down there on the ground like that? You're going to get muck all over your dress.'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘What do you mean it doesn't matter? My mum would knock me from here to Sunday. Go on, you've got to go back. You don't look crook, except with your face all wet and puffed up like that.'

‘Thanks!'

‘Well, tell me what's wrong.'

‘Okay.' Nancy swallows. ‘I'm dying.'

‘Ha! Nance, no you're not.'

‘I've got the affliction.'

‘What? What in heaven's are you on about?'

‘I'm … bleeding to death.'

‘Did you cut yourself? Quick! Let me in properly. Let me see. I know how to do bandages.'

Nancy gets to her feet and pulls up her scanties with shaking hands and then undoes the catch on the door, almost knocked down by Frances' excitement to get into the cubicle. ‘No. I didn't cut myself.' Nancy, scarlet-cheeked, points to her lap.

‘Blood? From down
there
? Can I — can I see?' Frances blurts, curiosity overcoming her concern.

‘No!'

‘I won't tell anyone. Promise.' Frances shoos Nancy's reluctant hands away and lifts her skirt, peering at the stained scanties.

‘It can't be the affliction, you featherhead! You haven't even kissed a boy.'

‘What, and you have?' Nancy makes a face.

Frances ignores her. ‘I bet if we go see your mum, she'll know what to do.'

‘No.' Nancy blinks moist despair from her eyes. ‘Not Mum. I don't want to tell her.'

‘Why not? Don't be daft. Come on, let's go now. She can write a note to Mr Cameron for us both.'

‘So, so … you don't think I'm going to hell?' Nancy stammered.

‘Ha. Not bloody likely!'

‘Thanks.' Nancy winces at the curse-word and then grins, meeting Frances' smile, and they laugh. Frances offers her an arm and pulls her out of the sad, foul-smelling cubicle and into the desolate playground, rinsed by the clearing rain.

‘What are you doing home from school this early?' Kate asks, disturbed from reading
Death on the Nile
for the umpteenth time when the girls erupt into the house. She is lying on an arterial-red chaise longue — the ‘shays-long', as she calls it. Nursing her glass, she ratchets herself up on the velveteen in confused displeasure.

‘Mumma!' Nancy splutters out the word she has not used for years. ‘Something terrible has happened.'

‘Nan, what are you talking about?' Kate pulls her nightgown closer around her and squints at the girls. To Frances it's a funny sort of nightgown, something foreign.
A
kimono
, Nancy had told her matter-of-factly. Whatever it was seemed wickedly glamorous, cut from sable silk with birds against a vista of blossoming pink trees, even though it was fraying at the cuffs and part of the hem had fallen.

Usually her mother at least bothers to get dressed before Nancy comes home from school. Even if she has lain about all day, as Nancy knows she often does, when Aunt Jo is not about to needle her with questions: When is she going to pick herself up? Doesn't she know she has the wellbeing of a little girl to think about? What will the neighbours say if they see her through the windows in that ragged piece of Chinaman harlotry? John would think she'd turned into a slattern. And so on and so forth until her mother's eyes glaze and she fixes herself a drink.

‘Mrs Durand,' Frances says in her sweetest voice, ‘Nancy was ill so I thought we should come to you.'

‘Ill? What's wrong with you, Nan? Why didn't you go to the school nurse?' Kate sits up and squints at her. ‘Oh, good gracious, bairn. It's probably polio! I knew I shouldn't have let you go to the pictures last Saturday. Breathing in all that bad air.' With real alarm, she takes hold of her daughter and makes to apply a palm across Nancy's forehead to gauge her temperature.

Nancy ducks away and scuffs the rug with her foot. ‘It's not polio.'

‘Don't do that, darling,' Kate tells her, diverted by the rug.

‘She has what I think you call “women's trouble” ,' Frances says knowingly, and Nancy's pointer finger whips out quick as a snake and into Frances' ribs. ‘Ow!' Frances smacks her hand away. ‘What? It's true.'

‘Oh, women's trouble.' Kate is relieved, but her brow remains crinkled. ‘Does Mr Cameron know that you're on the lam?' she composes herself to ask.

‘No, Mrs Durand. Well, he probably does by now,' Frances concedes. ‘I thought it best to come straight to you.'

‘Frannie, you don't have to call me Mrs Durand. At least when no one's around.' She smiles, leaning back against the chaise longue and wetting her lips with another sip of her drink. Frances' mother had never approved of Mrs Durand, not really. She had told Frances the history: Mr Durand met a Tipperary girl called Kate, and Nancy was born six months later. Kate had undergone the passage from Belfast alone, at only sixteen, and was seventeen when she wed. Frances' mother was deeply suspicious of the kind of girl who picks up and moves to the other side of the world. ‘An adventuress,' she told Frances. ‘We're just as good as they are, and I won't have them lording anything about. Papists. Opportunists.'

‘Yes, Mrs … Kate?'

‘Call me Kate,' she says with a laugh. ‘Come here.' Frances, shyly, nears close enough for Kate to lift a hand to comb her fingers through her hair. ‘Forgive me, we're very informal here. Aren't we, Nan?'

Nancy glares at her. ‘Are you going to tell me how to fix it or not?' She has lost her patience with this day, with Frances, and with her mother most of all.

‘We don't go in for all that Mr and Mrs nonsense.' Kate waggles a conspiratorial finger at Frances. ‘Just don't tell your mother. Mustn't be like this at your place, is it? Not by a long shot. How old are you, Frannie? Twelve yet?'

‘In October.'

‘Come and sit here by me.' Mrs Durand pats a place on the couch, and Frances sits obediently. ‘Nancy is already twelve. She was born in March. John brought me gardenias when I was in the hospital. So beautiful. He filled the room with them. You'd never seen so many gardenias.'

Nancy rolls her eyes. The gardenia story is threadbare from telling.

‘She's not dying. Is she?' Frances asks uncomfortably. ‘Nancy will be alright, won't she?'

‘No, she's certainly not dying. Nancy, run in to the kitchen and fix me a drink,' Mrs Durand says breezily, finishing the generous remains of her tumbler in one mouthful. ‘Get the bottle from out of the butter cooler. And get our guest a glass of milk.'