Dark Fires Shall Burn (17 page)

SIXTEEN

‘All this fuss over one dead girl,' Errol carps as he sprawls on Dolly's sofa, idly stroking the English roses embossed on the wallpaper above his head. He takes a sip from the longneck under his arm, boots resting on the table, relishing the passive attention he commands.

Annie and Sally are playing bridge with Roberta and Dolly, but no one is concentrating, and all are failing to remember the auction and neglecting to count. Snowy is pacing idly, and his restlessness and inability to sit down is like a serrated knife across Templeton's nerves. Lorraine had declined cards and is, as she mentioned more than once, writing a letter to her sweetheart serving in London.

‘Hope he comes home and takes her away,' mutters Dot as she stocks the stove in the corner with more wood and shuts the door, blowing on her hands.

‘It's cold as a nun's cunt in here,' Errol says. He's only in his shirtsleeves, the buttons undone to mid-chest, exposing a grayish singlet and a snarl of chest hair. The singlet leaves his tattoos on display: on his right bicep he boasts a roughhewn heart with a dagger buried in it, and on his left forearm a topless woman with lips and nipples filled in red.

‘Well, put some more clothes on, you daft bastard,' Dot says. She does not shy from sparring with him. Templeton knows she's aware he is unlikely to hit her — at least unlikely to go for her face, as he'd have to reckon with Dolly. ‘Watch out for the Scot. He is no good. The
Szkoci
, mean drunks, all of them,' Dot had warned Templeton yesterday.

Snowy takes a long drink from his tall bottle and Templeton watches the rise and fall of the powerful barrel of his ribs. Snowy looks at Errol and pops his knuckles one by one.

They had all seen it in the papers: that dead girl in the cemetery, killer on the loose. Dolly had sat silent and lugubrious for an hour, sucking on her pipe. ‘It's a shame. Bloody dog that did that!' she says now, puffing away. ‘Somebody's baby.'

The questions are still turning over in his head. He does not know how long he slept out there so close to her body, dying or dead — no more than a solid hour, surely, two or three at most. He twitches with guilt.

‘I knew her,' he says, before he realises.

‘Did you now?' Dolly looks at him. ‘Poor boy! Come here.' She lays down her pipe.

He walks over warily. ‘Only a little.'

‘Baby killers on the streets.' Dolly cups his chin in her hand, surprisingly gently, turning it to catch the incoming sunlight. ‘What happened to your hair?'

‘I … I got …' he stammers. ‘I got it cut.' He had ducked into a barber before he had come back to Palmer Street, paid for it with the last of his coin and told the old man to do his best. He had flinched something awful when the barber took out his razor and sharpened it. His face told the man not to inquire why his head was in the state it was.

‘No matter. Still handsome. Almost as pretty as your sister.' She strokes his collar maternally. ‘I was pretty once too. Did you know?'

‘Yes, ma'am.' He tries to stay still under her touch, but her thick rings drag sharply against his skin. He can see her handkerchief, sprinkled with a light mist of rose-coloured blood, stuffed down her cleavage.

‘I was adored once.'

He nods, helpless, wiping his sweaty palms on his trousers.

‘Best looker in East London, they used to call me.'

‘Do you think the coppers will catch who did it?' Templeton asks her, not knowing what else to say.

‘Ha!' Dolly says with a snort, a glimmer passing across her face. ‘Most of the Sydney police force couldn't catch the clap in a Shanghai whorehouse.'

‘I'm dreadful at this game. Let's play something else,' Sally huffs suddenly and throws her hand face-up on the table.

‘One dead girl.' Errol seizes the chance to command attention again. ‘And the whole world's fussin'. Not like it's some great loss.'

He is slurring, Templeton notices, which is a bit ahead of schedule. The hands of the mantelpiece clock are scarcely at four, next to the framed photograph of a much younger Snowy, in his uniform before he fought at Ypres.
Wipers
as he calls it, when he's in his cups and in the mood to talk, and the picture shows him standing with his arm around a decades-younger incarnation of Dolly, directing her smile past the camera lens, her eyes peering fixedly into some radiant future.

‘I mean,' Errol's boots shoot out and his heels grapple with the floor, ‘all me mates that got mown down in Africa, or their heads blown off in Guinea by Jap bastards? Who's makin' a fuss? Who's bangin' a drum about them?'

Snowy puts a hand on Errol's shoulder. Templeton feels flushed, conscious of his bare scalp. Dolly's attention has moved away from him, and he takes a seat further from the fire.

‘But
one
dead girl and suddenly everyone's up in arms!'

‘Come on, now,' says Snowy. ‘That's enough, mate.'

‘One dead girl, violated, outraged, whatever she was.
Fucked
— that's what those newsmen really mean.' Errol snicks a match off the book with a chuckle. He stabs at a passage in the newspaper with his thick, blunt finger. Templeton feels sick. ‘What about all the tens of thousands of men, eh?'

‘Shut up, Errol! It's different. She was just a child.' Dot throws her cigarette into the stove and glares at him.

Errol eyes the room, obviously itching for a fight. ‘No! No, I won't shut up. So what, just a child? I lost five brothers before they turned ten years old. They were children. Where's their article in
The Sydney Morning
bloody
Herald
?' Errol slams the dregs of his longneck down his throat.

‘That man is uglier than a hatful of arseholes,' Roberta says under her breath to Dot, pressing in close to her.

‘A mate of mine, just a young bloke, like a son to me — you listenin'? Just back from Changi. Well, he got into his car when he got home. Brand new car. Holden. Beautiful thing. And y'know what he did? Do you?'

Dolly is absorbed in a mantle of smoke, eyes closed and the small, round lenses of her reading glasses precariously low-set on her nose. The girls at the table exchange glances. Snowy paces, irritated that he can't nudge Errol off this well-worn track.

‘Well, I'll tell you. He put a hose in it from the tail pipe in through the front window and wadded up the gap with rags. Then he got in and sat down and started the engine. Bob's your uncle. Left his missus and his newborn son.' Errol burps and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

‘Right there in their driveway. Blue as an Auschwitz Jew he was, when they pulled him out.' His voice cracks. ‘Why would you starve and slave through that hell just to top yourself when you got home? Why the fuck would you do that? Weak shithead.'

They all sit in the excruciating hush. Dot looks at Templeton, and he can see the strain to keep quiet in the muscles of her face.

‘And another one, a bloke I knew from me old work. He was top brass, a lieutenant commander or something or other, and I heard, just the other day, that he hanged himself from a tree in the bush out near Epping.'

‘Alright mate, that's enough,' says Snowy. ‘The pubs are full enough of this talk. Don't need to bring it home.'

Errol is relentless. ‘And a pal of a pal, he just crawled on under his mother's house and cut his own throat. Twenty-three, twenty-four, just a young fella. And what is the government doing about it? Nothing. Bloody useless Labor and that Chifley. Son of a bitch.'

Dolly exhales and percusses her fingernails against the wooden arm of her chair. Roberta is crying without making a sound: Templeton only notices because her cheeks are wet. Dot slips an arm about her shoulder. Snowy, whose face is always red, is starting to look like he is actually choking.

‘I'd give ten of you rotters for an innocent girl-baby like that.' Dolly dumps the contents of her pipe bowl into a saucer and flicks the charred grime out with a hooked file. She stands abruptly, pushing the chair back noisily. Templeton suddenly sees the years folded into the corners of her eyes. He wonders if she'd had babies, and if they themselves had children. He'd never known his grandmother, on either side. And his father's father had been a German gold prospector, but the family did not speak of that after the Great War.

‘A dreamer of dreams,' his mother used to say to him when he was lost in a reverie. Sometimes he daydreams about a proper family, like in the war posters — a pretty blonde mother in an apron and a soldier father. In some of the posters a Japanese octopus stretched its tentacles towards Darwin and Cairns, reaching for the pretty blonde. Sally has a story about her friends in Queensland at the start of the war, saying they'd rather take cyanide than get ravished by the Japs when they invaded.

‘Take him upstairs and put him to bed,' Dolly orders Snowy.

‘Come on! Up we go, mate. Let's have a nap.' Snowy hefts Errol, half-carrying him. ‘A good little lie down, shall we?'

‘They'll never catch him,' Errol says. ‘Bastard that killed that girl will get off scot-free. No one saw a hair of him.'

‘That's what you think,' Dolly tells him.

‘One for the road.' Errol lurches out of Snowy's grip and grabs another bottle. He opens it, lifts it and nods at them all. ‘Cheers! Here's tae us! Wha's like us? Damn few and they're a' deid!' His words ring in the air and he takes a noisy drink and stumbles off up the stairs. Templeton wonders why the Scottish, flattened out by decades in Australia, seems to flare up like a rash when Errol is drunk.

Dolly opens a new pouch of American tobacco, a heady blend of hickory and tar, and Templeton strikes a match for her as she fumbles for one in her skirt pockets. Her eyes crinkle and pull her whole face into her smile. ‘Why, aren't you just the little gentleman?'

‘He's right, though. Whoever killed Frances Reed is long gone from here.' Annie sighs, leaning back in her chair. ‘Only a fool would stick around.'

Templeton hovers, his hands quivering as he lights a cigarette for himself, wondering why his sister would think this. Perhaps a cunning man would stick around, wagering he could melt into the background of fools.

‘Excuse me.' Roberta brushes her face against the sleeve of her dress and sniffs. ‘I'm sorry, I'm … feeling poorly.' She moves slowly and then quickly up the stairs as if she is going to be ill.

Dot gazes after her.

‘I suppose that's that, then,' Annie says, and holds the tip of her tongue between her fine white teeth while she sweeps up the abandoned game, pouring the cards back into a neat pack. Sally sits there sullenly.

Templeton lets the ash on his cigarette build up in a drooping turret. His hands are shaking and he doesn't know why. ‘Papers reckon it was a drifter, don't they? Or a foreigner. He couldn't be a local man, could he? Known to the community?' The words come out awkwardly. No one replies.

He realises Lorraine has stopped writing her letter and is looking at him. ‘Why would you think it was a local man?' She places her pencil down and smiles, showing her long gums and large, gappy teeth.

He thinks of Jackie's face, half-shadowed by the lamplight — his savage agitation and the scent of him — and he wants to be sick. ‘No reason.'

SEVENTEEN

Nancy waits until the conversation downstairs has ceased and the light in her mother's room has gone out. She slides out of bed and her bare feet scuttle along the frigid floor to the uppermost kitchen cupboard, where she knows her mother hides things in a biscuit tin. Standing on a chair, she reaches in and retrieves the folded newspaper, betting that her mother would not throw it away.

Frances Margaret Reed …
Nancy's hand shoots to her face and she chokes on the next words as she reads them, feeling them burn as they slide back down her clamped throat.
Frances Margaret Reed, aged eleven, ravished and strangled, was found in a disused cemetery at Newtown early Wednesday morning
.

Nancy feels dizzy. The room tips sideways and she gets down from the chair.

More than 50 men have been questioned
.
Police have no suspects as yet, although some men questioned have been charged for vagrancy. She had been struck savage blows on the mouth, strangled with strips torn from her singlet. And then outraged
.
Her body had been mutilated
. Nancy reads the last five solid-black words as if they're in a foreign language. She throws the paper down and curls into a tight, solid knot, where there is only darkness. Frances.

She lies on the kitchen floor for what could be minutes or hours, and some time later she sits upright with a jerk. Getting up and padding back towards her bedroom, she feels numb and yet on fire. Through her mother's partially open door she spies her dozing in a chair in the corner, still dressed in her funeral clothes. Wisps of hair have straggled from her previously neat waves, and the creases that bracket her mouth look somehow deeper in the dim light.

Nancy returns to her room, sits rigidly on the bed and wishes she were dead. She imagines that Frances was walking ahead of her through the graveyard, the memory-light sticky as glue. She tries calling her name, but Frances will not turn around; as fast as Nancy runs, she cannot catch up. Frances is dressed just as the papers describe, the same clothes she had worn in the cemetery the Sunday just past — pink rayon frock, lemon-coloured cardigan, blue-grey overcoat, black shoes, short blue socks — and she can hear her own voice calling out.
Frances!
The name flames out and dies.