Dark Fires Shall Burn by Anna Westbrook Page B

the front door, and shuffles up the corridor towards the kitchen. Out through the kitchen is the back door, from which a paved passageway leads to the dunny and laundry in the yard. The floor they occupy has only three rooms, and they share the bog with a Greek family upstairs, a fact her mother hates. Everyone only found out they were Greeks because during the war the family told anyone who’d listen that they weren’t Italian, even putting up a sign in their shop window: We’re Greek .
    â€˜I don’t care if they’re from Timbuktu! Greeks, Italians: wogs all the same. To think that those heathens will never get to meet God in heaven,’ her mother said. Frances had tried to tell her that she had seen crucifixes on their walls, beautiful ones made of silver, when she’d peeked in one day. ‘Not the rightkind,’ her mother had replied. ‘They believe more in hocus pocus than they do in the Lord.’
    â€˜Mum?’ she calls again, deeper into the house. No answer. Thomas is flushed as a beet and furious in his crib. She picks him up and shushes him, planting him on her hip. A strange sound emanates from her mother’s room.
    â€˜Oh, Peggy.’ She can hear a man’s voice now, low and queer.
    â€˜Mum?’ She tries again, softer. She nudges the door open.
    There on the stripped, sheetless mattress is her mother with her skirt and petticoat up around her waist, drawers pulled down. On top of her is Mr Langby, making little grunts of pleasure, snuffling at her mother’s neck like a hog at a trough. Frances gasps in surprise, smacking her hand over her mouth, nearly dropping the baby.
    â€˜Christ!’ Mr Langby roars upon turning to see her, hurtling backwards, his trousers hobbling his ankles. He gropes for them, tottering, as if in some silent movie farce, except it is not funny and the look on her mother’s face is murderous.
    â€˜Get out!’ Mrs Reed yells.
    Frances moves on pure instinct: she catapults out of the house and up the road, and runs on, hot-cheeked, barely noticing that she still carries Thomas, who is howling so much he looks near to asphyxiation.
    Far up along the railway line, Frances pauses to catch her breath. She sets her brother on the ground. He clenches his fists into tiny white cauliflowers. She slumps down by him on the side of the road, wiping her leaking nose along her forearm. She had not realised she was crying, and the breeze stings against her tears. The spire of St Joseph’s is visible from where she sits: she wonders if she should dump Thomas on the step and bang on the shuttered door, wailing for sanctuary, like in a romance. But they probably wouldn’t open up for a dirt-smeared schoolgirl and a baby.
    She looks over at Thomas, whose eyes are still half-moons of tears. Oh, did he howl for his country! Just for an instant she imagines putting her hands over his little mouth: she thinks of the swift, stiff silence seizing the tiny body. But a lady in Chippendale had killed a baby doing that only last year. The papers had called the woman a fiend and said she should hang. Frances’ mum would kill her if anything happened to Thomas.
    Her eyes shear the street for revelation. Suddenly she thinks of Ada, her mother’s cousin, barely ten minutes’ walk away. Frances scoops up Thomas, shushing him helplessly as he continues to bawl in her face. She shifts him onto her hip and cuts down the alley towards Ada’s.
    When she arrives she is wilted and exhausted, her hair loose from Thomas pulling on her braid.
    â€˜What do you want?’ Ada serves up a face that could curdle milk. Grubby-mouthed little ones strain at Ada’s legs to spill out onto the street. Frances never could remember their names; sometimes she doubts that even Ada can.
    â€˜I’m sorry, Ada,’ she says, thinking quickly. She hasn’t considered this part of the plan. ‘But Mum asks can you take Thomas for the