Read Online Dark Fires Shall Burn by Anna Westbrook - Free Book Online

night?’
    â€˜What’s happened to you? What’s the matter with your mum?’ Ada stands firm and suspicious in the doorway.
    Frances holds Thomas under his chubby arms, offering him like an over-stuffed parcel. ‘She’s sick. Please!’
    Ada looks her up and down and sighs. ‘God Almighty. Well, come in then, and have some toast at least. Have you had your tea? You look scrawny as a stray. Hasn’t your mother been feeding you?’ Ada takes hold of Thomas and shushes him. The children push past her, jabbering and grasping at Frances, but she picks them off like burrs. Two have noses streaming snot, and one of the twins — she can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl, Trudie or Graham — has a nasty-looking purple lump on its head.
    â€˜No. No, thank you. I’m alright.’ Frances says this last from over her shoulder. She is already heading off down the street, breaking into a run as soon as she is around the corner and out of sight. Ada is not worth the toast. She reaches King Street at the corner of Missenden Road and stops. She has nowhere to go. Sucking at her lower lip, she almost starts to cry again.
    â€˜Where you going, little miss?’ One of two men in zoot suits shouts from across the street in a bunged-on Yank accent. ‘What’s wrong? You lost? We’ll take you home. Come on over here, sugar.’
    Their accents are rubbish — they are about as American as she is. Frances keeps her eyes bolted to her feet and begins to walk fast. If a girl fell for that, she was dumb as a bag of hair. One of the men hoots like a cartoon coyote. She swallows. Stop being a sissy, Frances Margaret.
    She can hear the men’s laughter fading as she hurries down her side of the street. She yearns to get off the road, but she daren’t go home or to Nancy’s, even though Mrs Durand had been so kind, despite her heavy-lidded eyes and liquor-dipped breath, despite — to Frances’ acute embarrassment — wearing the kimono that gaped a touch and allowed a lunar sliver of bosom to escape.
    The men are in the distance now; they’re not following her. She shuffles along the road more slowly.
    Frances had watched as Mrs Durand, Kate, had given Nancy the belt made of a kind of elastic pyjama cord tied to a towel like a baby’s nappy, the belt that catches her most secret blood. Frances had watched in disbelief as Kate held it between thumb and forefinger. Did women really have to wear this once a month, every month? Why hadn’t her mother ever told her? ‘Fasten it into your scanties and wash it out when it gets soiled,’ Kate told Nancy matter-of-factly.
    Frances wonders if men can smell it. Like dogs. It should be she, Frances, who got her women’s trouble first, not Nancy. Nancy is still a child, with her silly games and even sillier invisible friend: that ridiculous Lily. If it wasn’t so babyish there would be something queer about it. Nancy really should know better. Frances remembers Corinthians, her mother’s voice snaking through her head: ‘ When I was a child, I spake as a child , I understood as a child, I thought as a child …’
    She thinks of gorgeous, laughing girls — the girls with black lines drawn straight down the tan flesh of their legs, which fool nobody that they’re stockings but still reek of glamour, even on melting summer nights when they warp and smear. She covets their Yank Catcher heels and their heady, swoony clouds of Evening In Paris . Nancy doesn’t understand. ‘I don’t see why you’re so keen on all those pictures of boring ladies’ dresses,’ Nancy had complained only last Tuesday when Frances had produced the new-season fashion catalogue from London, light-fingered from the handbag of a woman at church.
    â€˜You wouldn’t understand, Nan,’ she had told her airily. She had a real, grown-up vision of herself in one of these