Fire

by Deborah Challinor

  ‘Shall I feed you breakfast then, madam?’ Marion said to Susan. ‘Porridge and golden syrup?’

  Susan clapped her hands and charged outside, yelling ‘Podge and syrup, podge and syrup!’, and scaring the wits out of Eccles, who was hiding under the lemon tree.

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ Louise said. ‘I mean it.’

  Marion kissed her daughter. ‘I wouldn’t miss it, love. She keeps me young, she really does.’

  That night Allie lay in bed, doing her best to get to sleep because she had a busy day tomorrow, but failing miserably. She’d had a hot cup of cocoa and a long bath to relax. She’d tried counting sheep but had given up when she’d got to a thousand. She’d imagined herself lying on the beach at Mission Bay in her togs, the sun warm on her skin, the breeze so light she could barely feel it, and the small waves hissing in and out, in and out, in and out, lulling her closer and closer to sleep, but that hadn’t worked either. Then she’d read for half an hour, a book she’d pinched out of Donna’s satchel—Mickey Spillane’s latest, Kiss Me, Deadly, which had been banned by the school, so God only knew where she’d got it—but found the story quite unpleasantly violent and gave up on it.

  Now she was lying in the dark, her bedroom window open and the blind up a little to let in the smell of the sea, still thinking about Sonny Manaia and her date with him the following night. She was looking forward to it, and feeling nervous about it, in roughly equal measures. When she’d said to Irene that she hardly knew him, it had been the truth: she’d never even spoken to him before Monday. He’d come into the cafeteria one morning with a group of the lads from stores and you couldn’t help noticing him. He was nice-looking and had sort of a confident air about him and seemed to have plenty of mates.

  And of course he was Maori, and there weren’t many Maoris working at Dunbar & Jones. Allie tried to count them in her head. She thought there might be two blokes in stores, and there was Hori who drove one of the delivery vans. And one of the girls in the typing pool was part-Maori, she knew that. So those four, plus Sonny, made five—not many in a staff of nearly four hundred and fifty. There was the girl who had modelled in the dress department’s spring fashion show, a really beautiful young woman, but Allie didn’t count her because she wasn’t sure if she actually was Maori, or whether she was from some exotic faraway country. Somewhere foreign probably, with her stunning looks. And anyway she wasn’t a house model so she wasn’t on the Dunbar & Jones payroll.

  And who was Sonny Manaia, anyway? What had he been doing before he came to work at Dunbar & Jones? Where did he come from and where did he live? She didn’t even know what age he was, though she suspected he couldn’t be that much older than she was. And why did he want to take her out? She wasn’t the sort of girl who stood out in a crowd, though sometimes she did laugh a bit loudly in the cafeteria: she couldn’t help it once she got going. What if she didn’t turn out to be what he’d been expecting?

  She’d been out with boys before, of course, and had had a boyfriend, Derek, for six months, but it hadn’t lasted. What she’d initially taken for a reserved and cautious nature had turned out to be dullness and a distinct lack of initiative, and she’d grown tired of always being the one to decide what they were going to do on Friday and Saturday nights, so eventually she told him it wasn’t working out and that was that. So why was she so nervous about this date?

  She was also worried about what she was going to wear. She knew it shouldn’t be that important, but she kept turning it over and over in her head. She’d told Irene she had decided on her grey skirt and Irene’s bright blue top, but when she’d tried them on together that night the outfit had looked a bit, well, tarty, to be honest. Well, certainly much closer to racy than…not racy. Especially with her black platform heels that made her two and a half inches taller than she actually was. Oh God, how tall was Sonny? She couldn’t remember. What if she towered over him? Perhaps she should take another pair of shoes in her bag just in case. But would they go in? Only her flats would fit in her handbag, and they wouldn’t match the rest of her outfit.

  She threw her blankets off, sat up and exclaimed, ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

  Almost immediately there was a tap on her bedroom door. It was her mother.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ Colleen asked.

  She had on her slippers and her old chenille dressing gown, which had once been a deep apricot colour and was now so faded it was almost white, and her hair was pulled back in a plait that hung down past her shoulders. She wasn’t a particularly vain woman, but she was proud of her hair, which was still thick and lustrous and not yet showing any signs of grey. Sid, thinking he was being complimentary, had once said that grey would never show anyway in all that lovely deep gold, but Colleen had been out of sorts for days, insisting that if she did have grey hairs they would be visible, so obviously she didn’t have any. Sid had kept his mouth shut about her hair after that.

  ‘No,’ Allie said. ‘Can’t you either?’

  ‘Had to go to the lav.’ Colleen sat down on Allie’s bed. ‘Why can’t you sleep?’

  Allie shrugged. ‘Don’t know, really.’

  ‘It’s that boy you’re going out with tomorrow night, isn’t it?’

  After a moment, Allie said, ‘Yes.’

  Colleen waited for a minute. ‘Well, what about him?’

  Allie made a face. ‘I can’t decide what to wear.’

  ‘Is that all? Really?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I think so.’

  Colleen pulled at a loose thread on her dressing gown. ‘If it’s about what your father said last night, I wouldn’t be too worried about it. You know what he can be like.’

  When Allie had told her parents that she was going to the pictures with a Maori boy, Colleen had said ‘That’s nice, love’, and Sid had said ‘Well, make sure he pays, keep an eye on your purse and don’t stop off at the pub or you’ll never get him out’, then laughed his head off. Colleen had had a go at him and said that was a bit like the pot calling the kettle black, and Sid had said it was just a joke, and everyone knew the Maoris liked a drink and had a very communal view of money and property. Colleen had said she’d never heard anything so derogatory in her life and Sid had said what was ‘derogatory’ when it was at home and retreated behind his paper, not quite sure what he’d done wrong.

  ‘No, it wasn’t that,’ Allie replied. She was used to her father being tactless and saying the wrong thing. ‘It’s just that, well, I think I quite like him and I just want to get it right tomorrow night, that’s all.’

  ‘Look, love,’ Colleen said, ‘he’s asked you out, not your wardrobe. Go out and have a good time. It doesn’t matter what you wear and it doesn’t matter if he’s a Maori or from Mars, as long as you enjoy yourself. All right?’

  Her mother always had such a knack for putting things in perspective. Feeling a lot better, Allie went back to bed, and this time she fell asleep straight away.

  Chapter Four

  Wednesday, 16 December 1953

  Allie spent half the day with butterflies in her stomach at the thought of going out with Sonny, and the other half berating herself for feeling like a silly schoolgirl. Fortunately, she was kept extremely busy, getting garments ready for the fashion show Dunbar & Jones was presenting the next night, as well as attending to an apparently endless stream of customers.

  She did, however, see Sonny at lunchtime in the cafeteria. He stopped at her table and said ‘Still on for tonight?’, which made Allie go bright red and robbed her of the ability to say anything sensible, so she only nodded while Irene, Louise and Daisy looked on with gleeful interest.

  During afternoon tea she ducked down to the cosmetics department on the ground floor where Bev, the Helena Rubenstein girl, was arranging a pile of Apple Blossom perfume and talc gift packs on the counter.

  ‘Hi, Allie. What can I do you for?’

  ‘Hi, Bev. I’m after a new lipstick and some mascara.’

  Bev’s eyebrows went up. ‘Big date?’<
br />
  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Any particular colour?’ Bev asked as she carefully balanced the last pack on the top of her display.

  ‘I’ve been told it has to be a pink one.’

  ‘By who?’ Bev frowned. ‘Or is it “whom”?’

  ‘Irene. She did my face for me yesterday and reckons the tangerine I usually wear isn’t right for my skin tone.’

  ‘But darling, tangerine is your signature colour!’ Bev exclaimed.

  ‘Cut it out,’ Allie said. ‘So what have you got in pink?’

  Bev beckoned her along the counter to the display of Helena Rubenstein lipsticks. ‘Rose Mauve?’ she suggested, picking out a tester and winding the lipstick out of its case. ‘Give us your hand.’

  Allie held her hand out, palm down.

  ‘Other way,’ Bev said. ‘Your fingertips. They’re the closest to your natural lip colour.’

  Well, Allie thought, that was something she hadn’t known until today.

  Bev applied a dash of the lipstick to the tip of Allie’s forefinger and studied the effect critically. She looked at Allie’s face. ‘Too deep, I reckon. What about Tender Pink?’

  ‘Sounds nice,’ Allie agreed, and stuck out her middle finger this time.

  ‘That’s a better colour for you,’ Bev said. ‘Do you want to try some on your lips?’ She retrieved a tissue from beneath the counter, gave the tip of the lipstick a good wipe, then used a tiny brush to collect some of the colour. ‘Have a seat.’

  Allie climbed up onto the high wooden chair on the customer side of the counter and sat very still while Bev came around and applied the lipstick.

  ‘Actually, I don’t know about that one, either,’ Bev said when she’d finished. ‘It’s too red, makes you look more like Tender Loin. What colour did Irene put on you?’

  Allie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It was really pretty, though, a nice pearly pink.’

  Bev tapped her teeth thoughtfully with the handle of the lipstick brush. ‘I might ask Anita what she’s got.’

  She walked down to the other end of the counter and came back a moment later with Anita, who was the Elizabeth Arden girl.

  ‘Hi,’ Anita said, holding up a lipstick. ‘Have you tried this? It’s the new colour Elizabeth Arden put out for the coronation. It’s called Perfection Pink and there’s a rouge to go with it.’

  The colour looked good on Allie, so she put it on her staff account along with a cake of mascara that had its own little brush. She didn’t buy the matching rouge, though. It cost too much.

  But by the time the store closed at five o’clock she’d almost convinced herself she’d changed her mind about going out. Buying the lipstick had only made her feel even more nervous and all the way home she dithered yet again over what to wear, finally deciding at her front gate that she’d wear the grey skirt and blue top after all. She ran herself a long bath, eliciting protest from Donna and Pauline in case there wasn’t any hot water left for theirs, and sat in it for half an hour until the water had gone tepid. She washed her hair, shaved her legs with her father’s razor and pinched some of her mother’s good talc after she’d dried herself.

  Tea was put on the table just as she was ducking down the hall to her bedroom, a towel wrapped, turban style, around her wet hair.

  ‘I don’t want anything to eat, thanks, Mum,’ Allie called. ‘My hair will dry funny.’

  ‘You will have something to eat,’ Colleen replied. ‘You’re not going out on an empty stomach.’

  So Allie sat down at the kitchen table in her dressing gown with the towel still on her hair.

  Sid said, ‘Oh, look, it’s Lawrence of Arabia.’

  ‘Stop that, Sid,’ Colleen said as she set plates of chops, beans and potatoes on the table.

  Donna and Pauline were staring at Allie.

  ‘Your face is bright red from the bath,’ Donna taunted.

  ‘Yes, and there’s a huge pimple on your chin,’ Pauline added gleefully.

  ‘Is there?’ Allie’s hand flew to her face.

  ‘No, there isn’t,’ Colleen said as she sat down. ‘Don’t be mean, girls. Leave your sister alone.’

  Donna and Pauline smirked into their plates.

  ‘What’s he like then, this bloke?’ Pauline asked.

  ‘Fellow,’ Colleen corrected.

  Donna said, ‘Is he coming to pick you up?’

  ‘I’m meeting him in town,’ Allie replied.

  ‘Bugger,’ Donna swore. ‘We wanted to see him.’

  ‘I beg your pardon!’ Colleen said, glaring at Donna.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You just watch your mouth, young lady. Where you get language like that from I don’t know.’

  ‘Jesus bloody Christ,’ Sid said as he missed his mouth with his fork and spilt beans down his front.

  ‘Sid!’ Colleen was losing her temper now.

  Allie started laughing. And then Sid joined in, which Donna and Pauline took as a sign to giggle hysterically themselves.

  ‘Honestly, sometimes I wonder about you lot,’ Colleen remonstrated, but she got up and went to the fridge in search of the butter so no one could see she was smiling.

  Allie bolted a chop, a mouthful of potato and six beans, then said ‘Excuse me’ as she pushed her chair back from the table.

  Colleen looked up. ‘Is that all you’re going to eat?’

  ‘I’m not that hungry.’ In fact, Allie’s stomach felt as though there were a hundred angry sparrows in it, all fluttering madly to get out.

  ‘Oh, go on then.’ Colleen said, remembering what it was like to be young and getting ready to go out on a date.

  Allie went to her room, shut the door and sat down in front of her dressing table. She lit a cigarette and left it burning in the ashtray, took the towel off her hair and felt her heart sink. Hurrying into the bathroom, she ran hot water over her comb, rewet the renegade sections of her hair, then dashed back to her room and bunged in half a dozen rollers. While she waited for it to set she started on her make-up.

  Though she’d been impressed with what Irene had done yesterday, the result had made her feel sort of uncomfortable and self-conscious—it just wasn’t her. So tonight she left off the eyeshadow, though she did try some of her new mascara. She had to have several goes, however, because it wasn’t as easy to put on as Irene had made it look, and she couldn’t seem to stop her hand from shaking.

  When her hair had dried, she took out the rollers and brushed it until it shone, then lacquered it vigorously so it would stay in place. After she’d changed into her going-out clothes, which included a new pair of twelve-denier stockings that had cost her ten shillings and ninepence, even with her staff discount, she applied her new rose-coloured lipstick and sprayed her wrists and throat with White Magnolia perfume.

  ‘You’d better be worth it, Sonny Manaia,’ she said to her reflection in the mirror. This date had cost her a fortune.

  Sid whistled when she went out into the kitchen. ‘Look at our little girl, Col,’ he said. ‘All grown up.’

  Colleen frowned. ‘Yes, I can see that. You don’t think that skirt’s a little on the snug side?’

  ‘No,’ Allie replied, resisting the urge to tug it down because she knew it wouldn’t budge. She’d be in trouble if she had to run for the bus.

  ‘Hasn’t he got a car?’ Pauline demanded.

  ‘I don’t know, I didn’t ask.’ Which wasn’t strictly true; Allie had automatically assumed Sonny didn’t own one.

  ‘Fancy not having a car!’ Donna said.

  ‘Donna, what did I say to you before?’ Colleen warned.

  ‘I’m just saying—’

  ‘Well, don’t.’

  ‘I’ll be off, then,’ Allie said, edging towards the door.

  Colleen asked, ‘What time do you think you’ll be home?’

  ‘About half ten, I suppose. I’ll get the late bus.’

  ‘You be careful, love,’ Colleen added.

  Allie knew her mother wasn’t just referr
ing to going into town on her own. ‘I will, don’t worry.’

  By the time the bus slowed at the Wellesley Street stop Allie was convinced that Sonny wouldn’t be there. But he was, standing just outside the Civic Theatre. It was nearly dark now, but not so dark that she couldn’t see that Sonny was grinning broadly at her. It wasn’t even remotely cold but she caught herself shivering.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hello.’

  Sonny took his hands out of his pockets. ‘You look nice.’

  ‘Thank you. So do you.’

  Out of his work clothes, he looked very smart, if slightly ill at ease. He was wearing grey trousers, a blue shirt without a tie, a dark grey sports coat and highly polished black shoes. He was freshly shaven and close up he smelled of something that reminded Allie of wood smoke, but sweeter. Cedar?

  ‘We’re twins,’ he said, nodding at her own blue and grey outfit.

  ‘So we are,’ Allie said.

  And so they stood there, awkwardly saying nothing as people walked around them heading into the theatre.

  Sonny looked at his watch. ‘Film starts in ten minutes. You want to go in?’

  As Sonny paid for their tickets, Allie thought take that, Dad, you narrow-minded old bugger.

  She loved the Civic Theatre with its exotic Moorish-themed foyer and perpetual promise of fantasy and excitement. She was staring up at the domed, ornately decorated ceiling when she realized that Sonny was talking to her.

  ‘Pardon?’

  Sonny nodded towards the refreshments counter. ‘Do you fancy an ice cream or chocolates or anything?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Allie said. ‘We had a big tea.’ Untrue, but she was far too nervous to eat anything now.

  ‘We’ll find our seats, then, eh?’

  Allie waited while their tickets were torn in half, then followed Sonny up the carpeted stairs into the auditorium, marvelling as she always did at the lofty midnight-blue ceiling sprinkled with hundreds of glittering stars.

  Apologizing and squeezing their way past people, they found their seats and sat down, looking down at a stage that seemed to be miles below them.