by Pip Smith
But so far, so good. I’m not crying, or shaking. I’m telling the big detective everything: how I came to be here, where I’ve worked. I tell him my wife is the only personal friend I’ve had, male or female, since arriving in Australia.
The big man cracks a smirk. Great story, he says. I might tell you that I’ve interviewed a young man named Harry Birkett, also his uncle and aunt, and I feel certain that you married Birkett’s mother a few years back—
TO ALL OUTSIDE APPEARANCES, AT LEAST
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
WAHROONGA/BALMAIN
Annie Birkett: Housekeeper at Dr Clarke’s residence, also known as Daisy
Harry Birkett: Son of Annie Birkett
Harry Crawford: Scotsman, formerly of Wellington, New Zealand; Dr Clarke’s general useful
Lily Nugent: Sister of Annie Birkett, resident of Kogarah
DRUMMOYNE
Clara Bone: Grocer on the corner of The Avenue; married to Ernest Bone
Lydia Parnell: Wife of Harry Crawford’s colleague at Perdriau & Co. Rubber Works; friend and counsellor to Crawford
Emma Belbin: Resident of Rozelle; friend of Lydia Parnell
Jane Wigg: Resident at 7 The Avenue; neighbour to the Crawfords
WOOLLOOMOOLOO
Jack: Boarder at 103 Cathedral Street
Henrietta Schieblich: Landlady at 103 Cathedral Street
Eduard Schieblich: Violin teacher and husband of Henrietta Schieblich
Marcelina Bombelli: Resident at 156 Cathedral St; mother of Frank Bombelli and short-term carer for Harry Birkett
LANE COVE
Emily Hewitt: Office worker at the Cumberland Paper Board Mills
Ernest Clifford Howard: Apprentice at the Cumberland Paper Board Mills.
Constable Walsh: Constable at Lane Cove Police Station
Eliel Irene Carroll: Resident of Tambourine Bay and witness
DOUBLE BAY
Mrs (Granny) DeAngelis: Owner of the Italian laundry
Mr DeAngelis: Husband of Mrs DeAngelis
Josephine DeAngelis: Adopted granddaughter of Mrs DeAngelis
Nina: Mother of Josephine, employee at the Italian laundry
SYDNEY CITY
Sergeant Lillian Armfield: ‘Matron’ at Central Police Station, Sydney
Detective Sergeant Stewart Robson: Detective in charge of ‘the man-woman case’ at Central Police Station
Detective Bill Watkins: Detective working on ‘the man-woman case’ at Central Police Station
Maddocks Cohen: Solicitor for the defence at the hearing and the trial
Mr Gale: Magistrate presiding over the hearing
Roderick Kidston: Crown Prosecutor at the hearing
William Coyle, KC: Barrister for the Crown at the trial
William Cullen, KC: Judge presiding over the trial
Archibald McDonell: Barrister for the defence at the trial
LONG BAY
Dr Moran: Surgeon, Italophile, friend of William Coyle, KC, and author of the memoir Viewless Winds
CRAWFORD, THE FAMILY MAN
WAHROONGA, 1910–1913
HARRY BIRKETT
Wahroonga Public School was full of the sons of doctors and lawyers who grew up in dark houses under the enormous trees of Sydney’s Upper North Shore. Harry Bell Birkett was only the son of a doctor’s widowed housekeeper, did not own a boat or a chemistry set, and so was only interesting to the boys with allergies who liked to take him on as a charitable project. But Harry knew that when he got home he’d have the whole doctor’s house to play in as if it were his very own house, and the doctor would show him how to bowl a fast ball straight into the wicket as if he were his very own son.
Somewhere out in the world real men were fighting real pirates or driving wild horses across mountains honeycombed with gold mines. In Wahroonga you were lucky if you ever heard the dog from next door bark. There were lots of trees to climb, and strange insects to watch battle their way through a wilderness of lawn, and yellow and black spiders the size of your hand to dismember in a torture ceremony for an audience of stink beetles, but Harry sometimes wished that the spiders were pirates and the gum trees were the masts of ships and the grass was an ocean filled with sea monsters. The world could have burned down to the ground and you would never know it in Wahroonga. You mightn’t even smell it. You would only notice that the sky at sunset was a bit more red and matched the curtains in a nice way.
Harry slept in the same room as his mother on a trundle bed at the foot of her own, but sometimes he would crawl up into her bed because she was very long and thin and he was only small then, and warm—just like a hot water bottle, she said—and those were his favourite nights.
Then they would lie awake talking. She would stroke back his hair and pull the thumb out of his mouth every time it found its way there, but she wouldn’t reprimand him for it. She would tell him about all the possible futures they could have together once she’d saved enough money and they could leave.
‘And what do you say about us owning a lolly shop?!’ she would ask him and he would say, ‘Oh wow, Mum, really?’
‘Well, why not?’ she would say, and then go on to describe all the different lollies they would have: chocolates with caramel centres and caramels with chocolate centres and liquorice in the shape of fish. Harry wanted to tell her they never needed to have this shop, that he would be happy to spend the rest of his life lying in his mother’s bed imagining it, but he didn’t, in case actually believing the lolly shop was going to happen was the only thing that made the dreaming of it possible.
One day in spring, when Harry and his mother were sitting on the kitchen steps sharing a packet of humbugs, Harry saw that a man on horseback was watching them from further up the path near the stables. He tugged his mother’s skirt and pointed at the man but his mother didn’t seem to care.
‘Yes, Harry, that’s the new useful. Shall we go and say hello?’
Harry didn’t feel like sharing his mother with anyone that morning but did not have a good enough reason to say no, so he said yes.
The man was small with dark hair and a smooth face and the horse he was on top of let him sit on its back as if he were an important extension of the horse.
‘What’s your name?’ Harry asked the man.
‘Harry,’ the man said.
Harry thought the man was playing a joke but no one laughed.
‘But that’s my name,’ Harry said.
‘Can I share it with you, squirt?’ the man said with a wink.
Over the weeks that followed Harry couldn’t work out what exactly made Harry the New Useful useful, but sometimes they called him a gardener and sometimes they called him a coachman, and sometimes he would take Harry the Squirt and his mother out for a ride on the doctor’s dray, maybe to see the circus or to have a picnic down by the Lane Cove River on their day off.
Having two Harrys at the doctor’s house was confusing, so sometimes Harry the younger was called ‘squirt’ or ‘kid’ or ‘boy’, and sometimes Harry’s mother was called Daisy even though her name was Annie, and Harry the New Useful was called Harry Leo Crawford, but mostly just Crawford, because it was hard to imagine him being called anything else. Except ‘father’, which Harry the Squirt called him once by accident, and then blushed.
He blushed because Crawford was short and skinny, almost like a boy himself. He was not father material—he didn’t even have a beard—and what if his mother heard him say ‘father’ and got the wrong idea? Crawford had probably crawled inside his head and made him say it. He was fishy like that. He had a New Zealand accent with a bit of something else thrown in. He was from Scotland, but he could only remember that place when he had haggis for breakfast because he’d left when he was very small. Just like how Harry Birkett couldn’t remember his real father except for when he held his fork in his fist the way his strong, bearded father used to, but then that was only because his mother pointed it out.
On
ce Crawford arrived at the doctor’s house, he seemed to always be where the things people missed or wanted should have been. Harry’s old father was never around because he was dead, but Crawford was always around. He was there to help Harry and his trunk onto the cart when they finally left the doctor’s house for good. He helped Harry’s mother put her boxes next to Harry’s trunk and he waved as they moved off down the driveway. And after the long ride down the highway to Balmain, there was Crawford again: holding the keys to the lolly shop Harry’s mother had always wanted.
From the fingers of Crawford’s other hand hung something limp and dirty. A single key, dangling on a ratty piece of string. It could have been a key for a diary or a box, or a single shoebox room in a boarding house.
‘Hello, neighbour,’ Crawford said. ‘I quit the doctor’s too, and took a room just down the road.’
LILY NUGENT
The gravel driveway of Dr Clarke’s house was as long as a country road. Daffodils sprang up out of the lawns on either side in a semblance of carefree clusters. Grey trunks of blue gums disappeared into cloud above the house like the columns of an ancient Greek acropolis. Why did one man and his wife need to live in a house the size of a small ancient city? Didn’t the huge halls (not rooms) make them feel tiny in comparison? Didn’t God feel further away? Everything about the place made Lily feel crass. The salmon pink of her dress felt tinned, not fresh.
As she walked down the driveway, she could smell horses, then hear voices, then see the roof of a wooden shack peeping over the top of a hedge. This must be the coachman’s quarters, Lily thought, and turned around to find another path. But she could hear the shrill laugh of a small boy, then her sister’s laugh, followed by a gruff leathery voice calling out: ‘Daisy, come back!’ She heard Annie’s voice again, shouting: ‘No, Crawford, I can’t, Lily will be here any second!’
Lily stopped in the driveway, saw a bare patch in the hedge and bent down to look. Through the tangle of twigs she saw her sister running with her skirts hiked up above her knees, and her nephew with a fistful of leaves in his hand sneaking up behind a short man with unusual spade-like hands. The man was pretending not to see the boy, then turned around and walked towards the boy with the exaggerated strides of a monster. The boy was delightedly terrified, threw the leaves in the man’s face with a scream and ran back towards the house, chasing his mother. The small man swiped at the leaves in his face with his spade hands and moaned after them: ‘Daisy! Daisy!’ He followed them, and Lily couldn’t tell if he was exaggerating his steps or if he actually walked like that: like a man twice the size of himself.
‘Who is Daisy?’ Lily asked her sister, standing on the service door steps.
‘Well hello to you too, dear sister!’ Annie said, cheeks still flushed with rushing, a voice full of bubbles. She had grass on her shoulder, grass sticking out of her hair at all angles. She looked like an escapee from a pagan festival that had got a little too silly.
The short man came striding up the hill towards them with steps too big for his legs.
‘Daisy,’ he said to Annie in that leathery voice, ‘you forgot your hat!’
He handed her a hat with five fresh daisies woven around the band. Annie saw them, and tried not to smile.
‘I said, Who is this Daisy?’ Lily asked again.
She did not like secrets, did not like thinking this man knew her sister better than she did herself, and she certainly did not like that such a place made her worry about the colour of her dress while Annie was rolling around in the hay.
‘It’s me, silly,’ Annie said. ‘I am Daisy. It’s just a friendly name Mr Crawford has for me.’ She looked sideways at the small man and flushed again, until she looked dangerously sunburned.
Standing there, watching Mr Crawford ruffle the hair on her nephew’s head, Lily realised that he must have been the Don Juan of her sister’s letters. This was the man taking Annie and her son out in the doctor’s dray on their days off; this was the poor man who couldn’t read; the man who was a miracle with horses.
Lily felt suddenly ill. She wanted the doctor to walk in now and sweep her sister off her feet. It had been known to happen. One in every hundred or so posh North Shore doctors had actually left their wives for their housekeepers or secretaries. She wished she had written that in her letters now. Hold on, dear sister, the doctor might marry you one day!
What a father young Harry would have had then! What a school he would have gone to! What a waste.
BALMAIN, 1913–1915
HARRY BIRKETT
The lolly shop looked exactly the way a lolly shop should look, except it was coated in a thick film of dust, as if it were buried in the memory of a dying old man. When the door blew shut the dust jumped off the jars as if the old man had coughed, and the jubes sang their colours out into the light before the dust settled over them once more.
The shop had been sold after two boys robbed its previous owner on the stickiest day of summer. A police officer (with a real revolver) had chased the boys for half a mile only to be stopped in the street by heart palpitations and the sight of the fugitives inching across the harbour in a dinghy.
Harry and his mother were determined to revitalise the mood of the place. They ordered new blue balls of chewing gum, butterscotch, toffees in the shape of cushions, bullseyes, American fudge, peanut brittle, real ice-cream cones, soft drinks with bubbles, rocky road chunks, and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate all the way from England. Their lolly shop was going to be the lolly shop the whole of Balmain had as their favourite.
But one morning the joy Harry had in their project suddenly evaporated. As Harry’s mother was pulling the boiled lollies apart with her fingers so they looked a bit fresher, she paused for a moment and said, ‘Harry, how would you like it if Crawford came to live with us?’
She said it as if she were saying, ‘How’d you like an ice-cream cone for breakfast?’ But Harry wasn’t fooled. There was something about Crawford that reminded Harry of the seaweed shadows that flickered beneath the waves at the beach; the ones you had to look at twice to make sure they weren’t the shadows of sharks.
‘He basically already does live with us.’
‘Yes, but if we got married—’
‘Married?!’
‘—he could live here on a more permanent basis. What if he stayed the night, every night?’
‘He already stays the night!’
Harry had seen Crawford step under the streetlight across the street with a bunch of flowers, or a brooch wrapped in tissue paper, or part of a pig carcass from his new job at the meatworks wrapped in a bloody white cloth. He had seen his mother look over each shoulder, checking for neighbours, then let Crawford in the shop, even after business hours.
‘No, Harry, he stays until you’ve gone to bed and then comes back very early in the morning so it looks as if he stays the night, but he doesn’t stay the night properly—only married people can stay the night properly.’
There was no spit in Harry’s mouth anymore. His body had gone into a state of shock and had to conserve its energy in case he needed to run away very fast or punch his mother in the arm. His mother was lying to him about Crawford staying over. Maybe his mother lied about everything. Maybe she wasn’t his mother at all.
For a whole week Harry couldn’t talk to her. He would grab his breakfast from her, then eat it while hiding in the storage cupboard. In the dark, the jars of rainbow balls looked like eyeballs. Maybe his mother collected men’s eyeballs. Maybe his real father’s eyeballs were staring at him, warning him to leave. Maybe that’s why she liked it when men looked at her, because she was imagining what their eyes would look like in a glass jar hidden in the cupboard.
When they walked to school together Harry walked on the opposite side of the road. When she came to pick him up he would walk straight past her as if she wasn’t there. She was dead to Harry now. She looked like a ghost anyway, with her fair, almost see-through skin and blonde hair turning grey in places and long
white skirts and white lace blouses that went right up to her chin. The worst thing was that Harry wouldn’t be allowed to crawl into her bed anymore because the other Harry would be there, smelling of blood and meat from the meatworks and turning his mother into a slut.
After a few days of Harry’s silent treatment there was a sadness that ran through his mother’s voice so that it sounded like velvet rubbed the wrong way. And after a week of being ignored and not speaking herself, all the words she could have said spilled out of her at such a rate her face became red from lack of oxygen.
‘Now listen, Harry, it’s very hard running a shop on your own, especially as a woman, and Mr Crawford has promised to help around the place, he might not be the same as your father but he can always get a good leg of mutton and sometimes even lamb and I am going to marry him whether you like it or not.’ Then she jabbed her new greenstone pin into the high lace collar of her blouse so hard that she gave a little gasp and looked at Harry as if it was his fault, as if everything was his fault, and cried.
Harry’s mother did not often cry. The only other time he saw her cry was when she got the letter that said his father who no longer lived with them was dead, and even then Harry couldn’t be sure that the tear running down her cheek wasn’t sweat because it had been a hot day and she was wearing an awful lot of skirts.
Harry begrudgingly let his mother and Crawford marry on a hot February day in the Methodist church. He wore a sailor suit for the occasion, and felt as slimy inside it as a piece of corned beef left in the pot overnight. Aunt Lily was there with his two cousins who were not old enough to be fun or interesting, and so they spent the day hiding their faces in Aunt Lily’s skirts whenever he got too close, or staring at Crawford in his borrowed suit and high starched collar as if he were a monster that had walked right out of a picture show to gobble them up.