Dark Fires Shall Burn (11 page)

He sniffs and wipes his nose on his cuff. ‘Ah! Got smoke in my eyes, that's all.' He coughs into his gin and mutters. ‘I don't know how you and Dot and Annie can …'

‘What? Don't you judge, mister. Better money than I'd get in a shop — not that anyone would give a girl like me a job. And what else am I supposed to do? There's no factory work now. And even if there were, I wouldn't fancy blowing myself up tinkering about with munitions or coming out dyed bright orange, like some girls what I've heard, from all them chemicals.' She curls her lip. ‘No, thank you. I'd rather not glow in the dark. Or should I go back to Brisbane to my dad who punched me yellow and green?'

‘I didn't mean to —' he begins, but she cuts him off.

‘Well, don't start. Annie takes care of us. I'd never had it so good until she came along.'

He snorts. ‘She doesn't do a very good job at taking care of herself.'

‘Don't talk about your own kin like that.' Sally slaps him on the arm. ‘She does the best she can with what she's got. And besides, she has Dot to look after her. Annie takes care of us. Dot takes care of Annie.'

‘She cried herself to sleep last night,' Templeton says with a spite that surprises him. He regrets telling Sally as soon as it passes his lips.

‘Dot, crying? Well, that's a first. I doubt she cried when she came out of her mother,' Sally says.

‘Well, not really crying. Angry tears, like.' He feels guilty now, wishes he could take it back.

‘Over Annie.' Sally nods, as if unsurprised. ‘That'd be right.'

‘She was angry that Jackie bloody clobbered her again!'

‘It's that. And more.' Sally takes his hand and turns her round, doll-like eyes on him.

‘Hullo,' Dot hollers brightly as she appears in the doorway, causing them both to jump. ‘What are you little mice up to, heads together? Plotting? Dreams and schemes?' She smiles and looks around. ‘Where is Annie?'

‘Annie went to the Tradesman's to rustle up an emergency fund in case those bastards come knocking. I'll tell you, was she in a mood!' Sally stood up, smoothing her dress. ‘She should be back soon.'

‘Want a gin?' Templeton offers.

‘Why thank you, Little Lord Fauntleroy.' Dot winks and takes the bottle from him. ‘Where's the girl?'

‘Gone,' Templeton tells her.

‘Well, cheers to that!' She pours herself a nip in Templeton's empty cup, and she and Sally knock their glasses together and drink.

ELEVEN

‘Step on a crack, break Hitler's back.' Nancy bounces down the hopscotch chalked onto the paving stones of her front yard. The squares blur, lacteal under the light drizzle. Clouds hang in the west, ripe and low as mulberries, and she imagines them snagging on the tips and barbs of the mountains.

Her mother's histrionics are maddening — she didn't even like Aunt Jo. Nancy had left her weeping in the lounge room with Mrs Roberts and a cup of tea.

‘One, two, three.' She stamps on the numbers as she sings them out.

She had not been at school today. Her mother said she needn't go as they were in mourning. She wondered if she would have to wear black; she didn't have anything. ‘We'll buy you a nice dress for the funeral,' her mother had said. She hadn't imagined a funeral. The reality of Aunt Jo's death was sharpening as the hours went on, and she had even managed to muster a tear watching the two men taking out the body on a stretcher, covered in a white sheet.

The last time she had not been to school was last August: the day the news broke and everyone got it off anyway. That time she had the chickenpox, and was cross-legged on the floor gluing pictures of knights and castles into her scrapbook, trying not to scratch, when Chifley's voice came over the wireless. ‘Fellow citizens, the war is over.'

Mrs Roberts, who was looking after her while Aunt Jo was out and her mother was ‘resting up', gave a strangled cry in the next room and ran in to turn the volume knob, wiping her hands on her apron.

‘The Japanese government has accepted the terms of surrender imposed by the Allied Nations, and hostilities will now cease,' Chifley intoned.

A queer mist instead of what she suspected should be joy settled on Nancy. Mrs Roberts was shaking her clasped hands. She even broke out into a little dance, coaxing Nancy, itchy and covered in scabs, to join in. ‘Oh Lord! Oh God be praised!' Mrs Roberts danced about the kitchen with her skirt hitched up above her knees.

Nancy felt a sliver of something like fear shake itself loose in her heart. What life was like before the war started, she couldn't say, but retrieving the memory of it was like groping on hands and knees in the shadows for a black button. War was all she'd known.

‘At this moment, let us offer thanks to God,' the radio continued. ‘Let us remember those whose lives were given that we may enjoy this glorious moment and may look forward to a peace which they have won for us. Let us remember those whose thoughts, with proud sorrow, turn towards gallant loved ones who will not come back …'

At once, all the industrial sirens blew and Nancy jumped. She could hear yelling and singing outside. She was struck by conflicting impulses to go outside and witness the pandemonium or get into bed and pull the covers up over her head. ‘I don't feel well,' she said.

But Mrs Roberts was barely listening. Instead, she flung the door open and raced out into the street where the neighbourhood was beginning to congregate. Nancy followed her but stalled at the doorway. She watched as a young woman dragged out a record player and set it up on a doorstep, and the stirring snare drum of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic' came through the vinyl crackle until someone yelled, ‘That's enough of the Yank shite!' And soon the few local men still around, old blokes and teenagers and returned servicemen, had thrown their hats in the air and started up a bawling rendition of ‘Waltzing Matilda', gripping each other tightly, and longnecks of beer had materialised and were being passed around.

Mrs Roberts had been in the middle of the throng, laughing and clapping. Nancy wondered where Frances might be, and knew that if she could get away from her mother she'd be in the city where the soldiers were. It was a half-spun impulse, to find Frances, but she slipped out the front door and down the street, Mrs Roberts none the wiser. She rode the surge of the crowd from Newtown into the centre of Sydney.

In Martin Place, she was nearly knocked down by a woman vigorously banging a wooden spoon against a cake tin. This
bang-bang-bang
was the beat for people in a conga line.

Around her, it was like someone had punched open a bag of diamonds and they were raining on everybody, their glisten getting inside people and lighting them up: drunk, half-mad, raving — everyone. Confetti fell from the high windows of the office buildings, the streets turning white with paper snow. People lurched about, throwing confetti snowballs at each other. Nancy tripped and almost fell, but under her armpits came hands hoisting her back to her feet — a policeman's hands, and he was grinning like a fool, off his horse and leading it behind him, and Nancy saw the streamers draped over the mount and caught around the saddle, and a woman writing on the animal's white flank with her lipstick in wide, ragged crimson letters.
Victory.
She saw the horse's eyes rolling in fear.

The horse's companionless terror struck something in her and, even though she knew she was supposed to be happy, all she wanted to do was go home. She scanned the crowd for Frances — for her bobbing brown plait — but it was impossible; she was nowhere to be seen in the thousands upon thousands. The trams had stopped running due to the amount of people on the street, clogging the tracks, and so she waded the weary miles back down George Street and onto City Road and then, finally, onto King Street.

At home it was another world. The gate stuck in her hand and she had to kick it open. Weeds were forcing the walkway pavestones apart, and mail was piled up on the front step in dissolving glaciers. Her mother knocked a vase off the kitchen table, startled, when Nancy burst through the door. Kate ignored it, drew the curtains and fixed herself another whisky. Nancy bent down to clean up the flowers and broken glass.

‘Leave it.' The water pooled and the petals floated around, dirty gondolas. Nancy went again for the dishrag to mop it up, but her mother's hand caught her wrist.

‘Oh please, Mum.' She started to sob. ‘Will you come outside and see the parade? All the factories have shut. The ladies look so beautiful! There's kissing and dancing and everyone is yelling and laughing. Everyone is kissing everyone, black, white, brindle — you'd scarce believe it.' The words poured out on top of one another.

Her mother turned her head away and reached for her glass. Pinky padded into the room and dipped his tongue in the vase water thirstily.

‘The war's over! The Japs are licked!' Nancy waited a long time. Her mother still said nothing, so she said it again. She wanted the words to be magic spells; spells that could puff into the air like doves from sleeves and make her mother happy.

Instead, the roar of aircraft passing over intruded upon the still house. The fast tick of the mantelpiece clock sounded as loud as the planes.

‘So?' her mother asked, looking through her as though at something else, something not solid. The widow's brooch she wore on her collar glinted, revealing its cheapness. The silence stretched like a piece of chewed gum.

‘Go outside. Go on then. Celebrate. Please yourself,' she said finally.

‘Won't you come?' Nancy yearned, suddenly and incomprehensibly, to be back in the thick, lusty scrummage, yearned even for the lunatic woman drumming on the cake tin and the terrified horse. Anything, instead of this. ‘Please?'

Whisky slid down her mother's throat, the tears clinging to her lip mixed in. ‘Why would I want to go, Nancy? And see that?'

‘But there's not going to be any more fighting,' Nancy said quietly. ‘No one else needs to die.'

‘What do you mean?' Her mother eyed her dangerously.

‘I mean …' She faltered. She picked gingerly at a chicken pock on her arm. ‘All the soldiers get to come home. The rest of the soldiers.'

‘The war ended months ago. In a jungle, with men dying in their own blood as it went spilling out in the mud, crying for their mothers. For nothing. You understand me?'

Nancy stared at her.

‘May the devil swallow them sideways! They could only finish the damned thing by dropping bombs that wiped out whole cities full of Japanese. Whole cities! What next? Who do the damned Americans think they are? Those Japanese weren't soldiers, they were mothers and children and babies and old people. They should be ashamed. I'm ashamed! I'm ashamed that we're out there, cheering.'

Nancy was aghast. She had never heard her mother, or anyone, speak like that before. The Yanks were here for our own good, to help protect us; everyone knew it. Australia looks to America and all that. She had heard it so many times she'd lost count. No one cared about the filthy Japanese. Yellow dwarves, Churchill had called them.
Why stop at Hiroshima?
she had heard people say.
Burn them all; bomb Tokyo.

‘But it's history. No one will ever forget this day. They'll write about it for centuries,' she said, thinking of her scrapbook of knights and their conquests.

‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' Her mother's eyes creased shut.

‘But —' Nancy began to say something just as her mother's eyes opened, and her terrible, twisted face cut Nancy short.

‘Nancy! I've had you up to here,' she said, and raised her hand to her chin.

Nancy had stood in the shelter behind the lintel of the doorway, not knowing what to do, the world's cacophony and the horse's panicked, bulging eye consuming her mind. She looked up to see Aunt Jo mounting the front steps excitedly, but Jo's smile turned into a thin tight elastic band upon seeing Nancy there alone. Aunt Jo placed a hand on Nancy's shoulder and said nothing. She slipped her warm, dry palm into hers, and gave it the softest of squeezes. ‘Come on, my girl,' Jo said with mustered pluck. ‘Your daddy would have wanted you to see this.'

A Scottish regiment was marching through the street playing ‘Highland Laddie'; the infectious bagpipe drone and cascade of the snare made her hold Aunt Jo tight, worried that if she let go she might lift into the air like some cut-string balloon. Jo clicked her heels together and saluted as they passed, her chin so high she wouldn't even have been able to see their handsome tartan. But Nancy did. And she saw the girls who had found yellow flowers and strung them into garlands and strewn them through their hair, and she saw a man who leapt like a stag, pirouetting around them, with his hat clutched in his hand.

Nancy jumps the hopscotch crucifix and finds herself sore in the chest, thinking of Aunt Jo. She hadn't been so bad after all. Once her mother finally woke up, there had been chaos. The house had been picked over by officials. When she realised that the school day would have ended, Nancy's thoughts had drifted over to Frances. She asked her mother if she could go to the Reeds' house and was declined. ‘I need your help here,' her mother had told her, and she could see that this was right.