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

dresses, sailing down the street like a swan, breaking every one of her mother’s mysterious rules: not to talk to the boys down at the brick pit, not to talk to soldiers, not to engage with the tram-men. The Americans sometimes hollered out to Frances from their Chevrolets and stretched their arms out, holding packets of chewing gum. A Negro in an ike jacket had once called her little lady . He’d given her a drag of his cigarette and told her about his Momma in Baltimore as she sat swinging her feet on the waist-high wall of the train station. The cigarette had made her feel queer: wobbly but stiff all at once, like a chicken in aspic.
    Frances had once overheard Mrs Roberts talking about a certain house on Myrtle Street that was known to entertain Negros. She had wondered if they all sat down and played Gin Rummy or Pontoon like her parents had before her mother found God again, when they used to entertain.
    One day, Frances was going to get her hair set in curls just like the woman with the red lips she had seen holding the Negro’s arm as they strolled down King Street. The woman flounced her hip out with each step, her shoulders back. Her lips were so red they looked like a beautiful wound. People stopped to watch them go by. Frances felt ashamed that the woman might have thought that her stare was like every other person’s, ugly and full of spleen, but it wasn’t. She wanted to be on her way to jitterbug at the Booker T. Washington too.
    What would it be like to kiss a coloured Yankee soldier, not just on the swarthy cheek but even on the lips, like Beatrice kissed Benedikt? The idea makes her quiver. She hopes the Yanks will still be here when she is a few years older so they can take herto the flicks every Friday night. What a sight she would be! She would startle all those old church biddies, yammering and licking their toad-mouths in the parish hall. Frances detested their inedible fruitcakes, their eggless recipes that always tasted like grease. She plotted her escape over margarine and corned-beef sandwiches, studying their liver spots and sun-ruined faces as they talked about the bride ships cramming the Quay, and the girls on them — some already with a baby — deserting ‘our boys’ for a glamorous life in Great Britain or the United States of America.
    And now Nancy was a woman before her, closer to adulthood than she was. It wasn’t fair. Is it a punishment for seeing what she saw Mr Langby doing last year? Or is it, darker and more secret still, because of that glistening new shame? She had discovered it a mere month ago when her mother instructed her to make sure her ‘down there’ was clean as a whistle. She’d blush to say it, but ever since then her ‘down there’ had been shinier than the windows in Mark Foy’s arcade.
    It is already sliding towards ten on the clock tower and she has been walking for hours up and down the almost-empty King Street. She sidesteps a pool of frothy vomit outside the Shakespeare Hotel. A man watches her as he leans against the hotel wall, eating a meat pie. She can see gravy and morsels of mince clinging to his lip. His gaze follows her for yards. Her hands quiver, and there is a nervous but excited tremble to her stride. She thinks of seeing Nancy’s blood, scarlet on her scanties, and wonders when her own will come. Surely it will be soon.
    She wipes at her cheeks, dry now from her earlier tears. It was silly and childish to bawl on like that. Instead she remembers with fascinated horror the empurpled Mr Langby and his little potbelly jiggling below his shirttails and above his pale legs, shoes and socks still on. An involuntary giggle slips out. Mr Langby is nothing at all like Neptune in her schoolbook. Neptune: pelagic and supple, sliding around those slippery, salty mermaids without their clothes on. Although her mother is a far cry from a mermaid.
    The textbook gives her an idea: the school is a safe