Dark Fires Shall Burn by Anna Westbrook Page A

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.
    â€˜Oh goodness me, how you look like John,’ she says faintly, reaching for and gripping Nancy’s shirt collar. ‘While you’re alive your father will never be dead. You have his eyes, his jaw.’
    Nancy tries to disengage her mother’s stubborn fingers from her face. Talk like this makes her itch. She thinks about him too; he was her father, not that her mother seems to remember she might miss him. Anything will set her off sometimes: a particular teacup in the cabinet, a song on the wireless, the kookaburra that sometimes comes down into the yard because her father once gave it some chicken giblets. Such seemingly small things make her mother rage or cry or, worst of all, turn mute for hours. The kookaburra sometimes perches, calling for food, and her mother runs out, hysterical: ‘Shoo it away, shoo it away, Nancy. I can’t bear it!’
    â€˜I might have another. Get me one, would you, darling?’
    Nancy, with resigned obedience, picks up the tumbler and takes it to the kitchen. She stares at the perfect lipstick print on the rim of the glass for several long minutes. She wonders why her mother bothered wearing it today when there is no one to see.
    When Nancy returns, her mother is snoring quietly. She puts the glass down.
    Back in the kitchen, Nancy retches a little as she unwraps the chop. She can’t even feed it to Pinky. Still, there are powdered eggs in the cupboard, and she spreads what is left of the margarine onto some stale bread. She turns the stove and gas sputters to life. Lighting a match, she holds it to the ring, which catches aflame with a potent whoof. There is some Bovril that she heats, mixing it gingerly with her finger — hot, hot — and when it’s ready, she drinks it sitting down on the floor. All the cutlery in the house lies in a fetid tub of water, cold beneath a film of soap.
    The kitchen light is dim, so she sits in the semi-darkness and forces the miserable meal down her throat. She can hear the mice scratching in the walls, and what may be Pinky’s claws clacking on the floorboards upstairs, and she imagines herself deep in the hull of a ship, its timbers sighing in the wind, and thinks of Jonah 2:3: You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me.

SIX
    Frances does not notice Thomas’ cries, so consumed is she by thoughts of Kate Durand’s little talk yesterday and Nancy’s bloody scanties, and if that makes Nancy a woman then where does that leave her , until she is right at the front gate. Nancy wasn’t in school today, and Frances bet she got to stay home because of her ‘women troubles’.
    The garden fence is bashed in from two years ago when a Yank snub-nosed Chevrolet had taken the bend too hard and plowed it to the ground. She steps gingerly over the recumbent palings and the thriving clump of dandelions that has grown between them.
    â€˜Mum?’ she calls as she pushes open the unlatched door.
    She drops her bag in her bedroom, by