Dark Fires Shall Burn Read Free

beaky head and waggled it at Frances. ‘Those Eye-talians would eat this. Wog food. Me? I wouldn’t feed it to me dog.’
    Uncle Stanley was proud to have been one of the mob that smashed the windows of the Cellini fruit shop on King Street back in ’41. He told everyone. He had even pissed in the till drawer, he had bragged to Frances once after a couple of beers.
    Something about the sick feeling that gives her also makes her remember that day she had opened the front door and stepped into the living room to find the crib next to the fireplace empty and her mother’s basket of piecework sitting on the rocking chair. A shuffle and a bump heard as if someone were in the bedroom. Seeing Mr Langby, sitting on the rumpled quilt with his trousers around his ankles, she didn’t know what to do, whether or not to run, whether she would get in trouble.
    â€˜Hey Frannie. Where’s your pa?’ His hand pulled away, quick tugs in his lap. ‘You’re just like your mother. Aren’t you?’ His top lip had peeled back dryly, exposing his teeth. ‘Come here.’ He had beckoned to her that one afternoon, in the still quiet.
    Silly! Frances chides herself. What is she, a baby? The memory of his sweating moustache makes her throat clench, but she is not supposed to think of it. She smoothes her cardigan and fixes the bow of the ribbon in her plait and clambers further up the tree. Six or eight feet off the ground, she looks about her. The streetlamps of Lennox Street throw a glimmer into the park, but may as well be far-off lighthouses. The other trees cramp in like old wives whispering, keeping secrets from her. Dryads, she thinks with a shiver. Witches. The boys in her neighbourhood tell stories of a crowd of Banksia Men who gather in the graveyard to see the Devil. That there’s a crack in the side of a tomb beneath a tree, and within it a staircase that descends to the land of the dead.
    â€˜Nancy!’ she shouts, peering from between branches. ‘Nancy? Come on now, come out. Hurry up, it’s almost dark.’
    Bad things happen in the graveyard after dark, everyone knows: Yankee soldiers fooling around with girls, tramps in punch-ups where men wager on which one can hammer the other near to death bare-fisted. Some man even died: she’d heard they’d found him the next morning, face beaten in, covered in his own sick. Sometime, early on in the war, she’d heard the boys’ talk about a dog’s head found near the gate, stuck on a post. People said it was a warning, but against what and directed at whom no one seemed to know. They never found the rest of the dog.
    If Nancy doesn’t show up soon, she’ll have to go home alone.
    â€˜Nancy! I give up!’ she gives a final shout.
    And finally she hears a rustle, and then her name called exultantly, and sees her friend’s ginger head emerge, vulpine, from the scrub.
    â€˜I won! You lost, ha ha. I won!’ Nancy calls, and Frances shimmies down the trunk, light-headed with relief.

TWO
    Under an old Moreton Bay, Templeton tilts his chin and lets the smoke leak from his mouth. Rain outfoxes the canopy of the tree and rolls down the back of his neck to pool in the deep clavicular basins of the tree roots. He breathes in the smell of it with the last drag of his cigarette.
    He takes another from his pack; grubby fingernails flick a spent match. He tears out half a dozen from the book before a damned one lights. Sheets of rain glance off the vitreous harbour, and men scramble to tie the lines on their fishing boats. Cursing, they grab at tarred ropes thick as their arms.
    His body raked diagonal against the gale, Templeton hunches against the tree and sucks on the limp cigarette. At least he isn’t out there copping a full face of spray. The rain has dug in, and the city will be sopping as the day grinds out. Soon the men will take to the pubs, quickly spending their shillings before six