Dark Fires Shall Burn (6 page)

Jackie withdraws the razor from his pocket and palms it, the ivory handle yellowed to mustard in the sickly cone of the streetlight. Everyone looks at the thing. ‘Your wallet,' he demands in a voice blunt as a cricket bat.

‘Alright, mate. Steady on now. I don't want any trouble.' The poor dolt rifles inside his coat and withdraws a worn leather billfold. ‘You can have it.' He extends it towards them in one hand, the other hand up in submission.

Will plucks it out of his grasp and opens it greedily. ‘There's a few quid in here, Jackie.'

‘Clear off!' Jackie commands and cocks his head. The man wastes no time, and scrambles away from them and into a sprint.

Dot appears in silhouette on the step. ‘Annie?' She is at her side in two swift steps. She does not ask what happened; there is no need.

Annie nods at her gamely. ‘It's alright.' She speaks quietly, but Templeton can read her lips.

The two women touch palms, as if they are about to launch off dancing, and Dot takes her by the waist. They stand still like that, close. Templeton can see the fury straining in Dot's neck. She does not look at Jackie, or cannot. ‘What are you thinking, fleecing the trade?' she flares at Will. ‘Word gets out that you are playing that game and we will never get another customer! It is a slow-enough night as is. Don't you have better things to do?'

‘Have a nice knee-trembler, did we?' Frank leers.

‘Why don't you go home and give one to your mother?'

‘Well, don't you just have more hide than Jessie this evening?' Jackie looks up from inspecting the contents of the wallet and addresses Dot.

‘What did she do this time, Jackie?' Dot gestures at Annie, bristling. ‘What did she do?'

Annie disentangles herself from Dot and begins to walk away. ‘I want some air,' she says.

Suddenly they hear the shrill whirl of tyres as a car careens around the corner. Margarine-yellow headlights dip around the corner, framing Annie's face in light. The car is going too fast for these streets at this time of night. Before Templeton can understand what's happening, Jackie looks up and he and his boys spring into action, pivoting away, lowering the brims of their hats and sinking their chins into their collars. Templeton shifts just in time to avoid being trodden on by Jackie. The car slows down as it passes them and the headlights dim, but it's still going too fast to make out who is in it. Jackie stares after the vehicle, craning his neck to get a better look, face puckered in the reflected light. ‘Let's get off the street,' he says tersely.

They move inside together, the six of them. Templeton straggles behind for a minute, looking back after the car, and at the hole in the fence through which the fox disappeared into the rip of blackness. Something is in the air tonight, and it's nothing good.

Dot takes the cigarette Sally rolls for her, lights it and sucks in the smoke. It comes back out her nose, reminding Templeton of a dragon in a picture book. Her shaded eyes blink before they alight on him. He feels a hot gush of something soft for her — perhaps it is affection — like he felt for his mother.

Annie has regained her composure. ‘Why don't we all go on over to Dolly's, huh? Play some cards. Have a drink,' she suggests with a false note of brightness, breaking the silence. ‘You boys can hide out there. No one's going to mess with you at Dolly's.'

‘Snowy Thompson will see to that,' Sally says, walking over to Frank and running a hand down his chest with a smile. ‘Make your silly getaway in the morning.' She flicks him on the nose with her little finger.

‘Who's Snowy Thompson?' Templeton leans in towards Dot's lacquered hair and mutters.

‘Dolly's bloke,' she whispers back. ‘Used to box.'

Frank looks to Jackie, who sums up his sorry pair of mates with a hefty protracted spit. He has sobered up remarkably, it appears. ‘Nah, we'll stay here and sleep it off,' Jackie says, considering. ‘With the two of you full as a couple of boots.' He chucks his cigarette at them, and the sparks scatter a corona. ‘Bloody useless.'

FIVE

Nancy can hear the clicks and scratches of her mother's record player floating up through the floorboards as she plays backgammon alone in her room. ‘My Funny Valentine' plodding behind the closed door of the sitting room, the seventh time since it annoyed her enough to start counting. It's late but no one has come to check on her, not even Aunt Jo, and her guts feel sore and twisted. The thing she has on between her legs, that her mother taught her how to fasten, repulses her.

She fixed a snack after Frances left, toast and dripping and another glass of milk. Without Frances there her mother had looked at her, just the two of them in the room, as if she were some strange jungle creature wandered in the house. She had her stage smile on, the one that seemed far too big, when she patted Nancy's shoulder and excused herself upstairs with a headache.

‘You're a woman now,' she called, halfway up the stairs. ‘Congratulations.'

Nancy rolls the dice with more force than needed, and they clatter against the wooden board. She moves her pieces. Her room is sparse: a narrow bed against one wall, with a gold-and-red quilt her mother brought with her on the ship from Ireland that smells of lavender; a writing table; a chest of drawers, and little else. No pictures on the walls. She didn't want to put up film stars like Frances and the other girls at school.

‘Lily,' she whispers. ‘Lily, are you there?'

She rolls the dice again and moves the white pieces of her imaginary opponent, and then her own again. She likes the game, and likes best her own munificence in determining who shall win. Which self shall she deny this week, the white player or the black?

She did not like the way Frances had slid in next to her mother or the way she had let Kate stroke and fuss with her hair. Nancy had barely said a word when she showed her out, not answering any of Frances' questions about what the blood felt like or if she felt more grown up. At least she finally had something to capture Frances' interest: lately Frances seemed bored of her stories, tired of her games, when a year ago she would come roaring out to play. Her mind turns on the spindle of Frances and she wonders how it is that she can miss her friend when she has gone nowhere.

The milk swills in her stomach and the toast rises in her throat as she thinks of the gore seeping out of her. If this is what being a woman means, she does not want it.

There is a pause and then ‘My Funny Valentine' starts again in the next room, and she can hear her mother's muffled movements through the floor, a crash as she bumps into something.

Lily would keep her company. ‘Lily,' she calls softly. She knows that other people cannot see Lily; that Frances thinks she is a nut, calls her drool-case if ever she talks about her. ‘It was fine when you were a babby,' her mother had said. ‘A wee friend of the imagination. But not anymore.' She had told her not to talk about Lily else people think her simple-minded.

Even Nancy does not really believe. It is more like a comforting secret game, if rarely secret, or a game. Lily comes from England, straight out of the picture books Nancy has all about the place. She likes to roll the fancy words like
London
and
Wimbledon
around in her mouth as if they are bright marbles, along with
Dover
,
Bristol
,
Kent
, the words from the newspapers and the magazines. Nancy loves the grand, gay British sounds of
ticklish
,
envelope
and
liquorice
. Even though her mother hates the English, Nancy and Lily play milkmaids in the street, filling their pails with puddle water and manhandling the udders of imaginary cows to bring their labours to the court of King George.

The last time she had tried to tell Frances about Lily — how sometimes when Nancy was alone at night in her room, she would wish for Lily and she would come — Frances stared at Nancy as if she were a shrunken head from the cannibals or had sprouted a tail like P.T. Barnum's ‘Feejee' mermaid.

Lily used to be around more, after it happened. They had been at Ash Wednesday Mass that morning before they received the telegram.

Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return
. She kept touching her forehead to check her cross was still there and had smeared it. ‘Keep going and you'll have a swastika,' her mother had joked. Nancy had not thought that funny at all.

After mass they were sitting in the kitchen with a lunch of cold curried eggs, her least favourite, and instead of eating she had been chattering on about
The Wind in the Willows
when the knock came. Her mother opened the door and took the telegram from the squeamish boy's hand, looked it over, and then ripped it into smaller and smaller pieces, standing at the sink with her back turned. Nancy, unable to get a word from her, had run for Mrs Roberts next door.

Aunt Jo — well, great aunt, really — had come from Tuggeranong so she could keep an eye on the family. Jo was Nancy's father's aunt, and she felt the duty, having mostly raised him, his mother having died a long while ago in Perth. Kate mostly avoided her: often whole days went by without her stirring from the darkened bedroom, dampening the pillows, wearing only her kimono, not eating and not talking. In contrast, Aunt Jo was a muscular, always active woman, who was ‘made of sterner stuff', as she liked to remind Nancy. She moved busily around the house, often quoting Shakespeare and telling Kate to screw her courage to the sticking place.

Nancy gives the backgammon tiles another go-round before the candle gutters and goes out and she's sitting in the dark. Cold fingers pass across her.
Answer me this
, Lily says, her voice silvery, slippery.

‘No.' Nancy shivers. ‘I don't want to play now. Why didn't you come

before?'

What lives without a body, hears without ears, speaks without a mouth, to which the air alone gives birth?
Lily continues, dauntless.

‘I don't know,' Nancy replies, and turns on her belly and clamps the pillow over her head.

Think on it. Hears without ears, speaks with no mouth …

‘I don't know. A ghost?' Her voice is swallowed by the pillow.

Wrong! Stupid!
Lily crows.
Guess again.

‘No.'

Guess again
, Lily insists.

‘God?'

That answer's even thicker than the last
. Lily cackles meanly.

‘I don't want to.'

Suit yourself.

Car headlights turning into the street rake the room through the window, and Lily's shadow breaks like a dozen rabbits gone to ground.

Nancy wakes from a sleep and realises she has not eaten. ‘Mum?' she calls out, to no answer.

The house is dark. ‘Mum?' she calls again. ‘Aunt Jo?' she tries reluctantly, but there is still no reply.

She goes downstairs to the kitchen. It is approaching midnight, the clock tells her, and she has a neglected ache in her belly from missing tea. No one has been to the store — no one has really gone since Aunt Jo had the fall a few weeks ago and twisted her back.

The kitchen is empty except for a chop that Mrs Roberts had brought over three days ago, still wrapped in butcher's paper on the bench, wearing a shawl of ants.

Nancy walks down the corridor and opens the doors to the sitting room. The fire in the hearth has dwindled down to a glowing scree. A cigarette butt perches on a trunk of ash in a bowl, next to a matchbook and a tumbler with a veneer of whisky remaining. At the foot of the bookshelf, her mother lies on her back. Nancy gets down on her knees. She lowers her ear close to her mother's lips, straining to hear her breath.

‘What on earth!' Kate's eyes suddenly widen at Nancy's levitating face.

‘Uh — sorry!' Nancy leaps up. ‘Sorry, Mum.'

‘What in God's name are you doing?' Kate grapples with the floor, trying to drag herself into a sitting position. She takes Nancy by the shoulders and briskly shakes her. ‘I'm alright, you goose. Is that what you needed to know? Did you think I'd gone and done myself in?' She laughs, but it comes out more like a bark.

Nancy, not knowing what to say, mumbles, ‘No.'

‘Well, not quite yet, my love.' She ignites a cigarette and draws her kimono around her. ‘I'm still in the land of the living,' she says in an affected, ghostly voice and raises her hand to her face, undulating her fingers like a spiritualist. ‘
Ooooooooh
.'

Without warning, Nancy begins to cry. She sags to the floor, gripping her mother's thighs, leaving the impression of her tear-splattered face like the shroud of Turin on the silk of her mother's gown. She cannot remember ever holding her like this, but all at once it is too much. Her mother lifts her chin with her long fingers and stares at her, bewildered. ‘What is it, biscuit?' she asks, trying to sound soothing. ‘What's wrong?'

Nancy cannot form a sentence — everything is wrong! Lily is back. And her mother hasn't called her ‘biscuit'
since she was a bairn.