Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  After the wedding there was no big party with tiers of cakes and sandwiches. The adults went back to the shop to drink too much alcohol and then walked Aunt Lily and her kids back to the railway because the trams were too full and the fresh air was supposed to do everyone good.

  That night, Harry heard creaks and pants and giggles and, ‘Oh fuck, Harry,’ through the thin walls. Hearing his mother call out his own name like that felt strange, even though he knew it wasn’t meant for him. He wondered for a moment if he did wish she would scream like that for him, then shook the thought from his head and frowned himself to sleep.

  LILY NUGENT

  Balmain in February was so humid the flies moved through the air like paddle steamers slowly sinking—rising and sinking—in a stagnant river. Outside, the gardens were limp and inside the Methodist church the minister’s red face looked as if it were freshly basted in fat. Flies buzzed in and out of his mouth as he opened and shut it: dying, before being born again.

  ‘DO NOT FORGET,’ the minister said, releasing three flies as he did, ‘IN THE WORDS OF JESUS CHRIST: VERY TRULY I TELL YOU, NO ONE CAN SEE THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHOUT BEING BORN AGAIN.’

  The words resounded in the eaves of the empty church, shifting damp clumps of dust and lifting dozy pigeons out of their nests. The newly released flies flew up into the kingdom of God, which was now all around them, repeated, and repeated, and repeated.

  Lily’s little sister stood at the pulpit in a smart cream dress, but all Lily could see was how she flinched every now and then after being spat on by the minister’s explosions of words.

  ‘Why didn’t you get married at the Anglican church?’ Lily asked her sister after the service.

  ‘There was too long a wait,’ Annie said. ‘And besides, Harry is a Scot, and you know how the Scots feel about anything from England.’

  Another set of eyes might have seen how Annie had grown taller under the minister’s shower of spit. Those same eyes might have seen Annie and Harry as two strains of apple trees, flourishing together under the Holy irrigation spraying from the presiding minister’s mouth; the greenstone pinned to Annie’s left breast a new green shoot; the heart-shaped pendant hanging on a chain around Annie’s neck a precious metal replica of her own full heart.

  On a chain around her neck, Lily thought. How appropriate for a woman’s heart to be chained around her neck on her wedding day.

  Lily suspected the wedding meant more to her new brother-in-law than it did to her sister. He had never been married before. Lily knew her sister was no great beauty, but standing at the pulpit, her new husband looked like a donkey that had woken to find himself in the arms of a fairy queen. He was blinking uncontrollably. His voice was gruffer than usual. He kept wiping his hands on his trousers and staring into her face as if it were a rare rainforest flower in the process of opening, yielding its midnight scent just for him.

  HARRY BIRKETT

  Harry’s voice broke the same morning the lolly shop coughed its last cough, rolled over, and died. When Aunt Lily turned up with the removalist and dray, his mother leaned against the doorway of the dead shop like something wilted, and watched Crawford carry out the things worth keeping.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum—’ Harry started to say, but when he said ‘Mum’ his voice jumped as if he were about to hiccup or cry. He wasn’t about to cry, though. The adult in him was simply forcing itself through his boy body like Houdini bursting out of chains in a cage under the sea.

  Aunt Lily was supervising the move and doing her best impersonation of a sugar bowl, with two hands on her hips, saying, ‘Good boy, Harry,’ every time he picked up a box. He wanted to say, ‘I’m not a boy anymore, Lily, I’m a man now,’ but he didn’t in case she laughed at his voice seesawing between boyhood and manhood and pinched him on the cheek.

  Tomorrow he would wake up in Aunt Lily’s house and he would be a man with a man’s voice. He would open his mouth to speak and deep tones would rumble through the house, shaking its foundations, demanding respect, and Crawford would not be there to stop him from finally being the man of the house he was supposed to be.

  ‘I have no problem with you coming to stay until you find somewhere else, Annie, but I do have a problem with that gruff husband of yours and his girl, always lurking in corners like funnel-web spiders,’ Aunt Lily’s voice had said to Harry’s mother down the post office telephone, loud enough for Harry to hear it through the telephone booth wall.

  ‘His girl’ was a dark fifteen-year-old who called herself Crawford’s daughter. Her mother had died of consumption, she said, but this was the first any of them had heard about another woman. Crawford’s girl was never really talked to or explained, and ever since she surprised them on the doorstep one night with the knowledge of her existence and a large, pregnant belly, Harry’s mother looked permanently wan; her corsets were always too tight. The girl came to live with them whenever it suited her, then moved on once she’d eaten all their food and left a pile of dirty washing on the laundry floor. When it was time to sell up and move, Crawford’s girl was, of course, nowhere to be seen.

  Even though Crawford was short for a man, he turned out to be strong. Harry carted as many of the boxes to the dray as he could, but Crawford always carried more. Aunt Lily was the shortest and the smallest of them all but she was also the scariest, like a terrier in a family of labradors. She had a way of raising her eyebrows that could make a person say sorry without knowing why, and she especially liked to do this to Crawford, because she knew that if he and his trail of illegitimate children hadn’t been lurking around, the shop would have been fine, just fine.

  ‘How can it be,’ Aunt Lily asked Crawford as she scrubbed the walls of the shop so hard the paint came off on the sponge, ‘how can it be that there are hundreds of children in Balmain and yet this fine lolly shop—a children’s paradise—is a deserted wasteland? How can that be? Someone must have scared them off, Crawford; someone must have scared them off.’

  ‘Sorry, Lily,’ Crawford said, because she had raised her eyebrows.

  After all the furniture had been tied down to the dray, Harry sat with his mother on the kerb, holding her around the shoulders, and she looked up at the sky, waiting for it to fall. Crawford leaned on the dray with a cigarette hanging out one side of his mouth, while Aunt Lily walked through the shop to do a final check. There, on the empty counter, she found a kidney-shaped greenstone glinting like a sugared mint leaf. She picked it up between two gloved fingers, walked it outside and dropped it in Harry’s mother’s open palm.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Oh, Crawford gave me that,’ Harry’s mother said, as if he wasn’t there to hear it. ‘He was given it by a Maori when he rode horses up and down the West Coast of New Zealand.’

  Who would have thought that the man skulking under the brim of his hat had driven horses up and down the wild West Coast of New Zealand?! He was a real man, then. The kind of man Harry always wished his own father had been.

  In that moment, Crawford grew an inch, right before Harry’s eyes.

  DRUMMOYNE, 1915–1917

  CLARA ANNIE BONE

  Clara Bone the grocer’s wife sat by the upstairs window studying Lyons Road below. Her cat, Prudence, prowled around her ankles. Ordinarily she would kick Prudence aside for being such a nuisance, but this Sunday she welcomed the feeling of an animal between her legs. It kept the wildness of her grief company, so she could sit back from it for once, and watch.

  During the week customers had flicked their eyes between the prices on the blocks of butter and her composed face, as if she had personally been responsible for the war and the inflated cost of shipping. Of course, none of it was her fault, and she had to get by like everybody else. She had already made the supreme sacrifice by allowing her son to fight, and every day she regretted it, so she wasn’t about to feel guilty about her profit margins or her new holiday cottage by the sea. The sea was a mindless thing, but it was a grand thing, too: deeper and more agile than t
he mind and the war and the thought of her son’s body getting blown apart. Mr Bone had his garden. Well, she would have her trips to the sea.

  The street, stark under its electric lights, was quieter on Sunday nights, and ran out in the direction of a sea she could only visit sometimes. She was tied to Drummoyne, but she supposed there were worse things to be tied to. Parachutes, for instance, falling out of planes.

  From her window she could see a couple, new to the area, walk down the brightly lit road and turn into The Avenue. They walked arm in arm, a perfect specimen of young lovers—but closer inspection revealed irregularities. The woman was a great deal taller than the man, and thin to the point of being skinny. She looked as if she had fallen out of the world of ladies and lace and somehow found herself here, in this suburb of dressed-up workers’ cottages. The man walked with a swing in his arm, a stride that over-shot the distance of a step and seemed to be holding something back behind the lips. Following the couple was a boy, slightly younger than her son would be now. And—was that a shadow, or a dark girl? A maid, perhaps? Mrs Bone pressed her nose up against the glass, but the scene flickered to black.

  Another fuse blown in the streetlamps. Mrs Bone shook her head. Electric lights. She knew they would never last.

  HARRY BIRKETT

  When they stepped into their new brick house in Drummoyne, Crawford turned to Harry’s mother and said, ‘Look, Daisy, a separate dining room,’ and she smiled as if he had said, ‘Look, Daisy, a Persian elephant just for you.’

  It seemed to Harry that the more well off you were, the more rooms you had for the different things you did. You could eat breakfast in the kitchen, but if you were well off you ate dinner in a dining room. Now that Crawford had a job at Perdriau’s rubber factory and they were no longer living on a woman’s wage they could afford to eat their dinner in a dining room.

  At first it was fun pretending to be middle class. After school, Harry would walk down to Five Dock Bay at the end of their street. He passed through the empty sports field, where bicycles had been thrown against the brown grass as if bicycles were not things a person had to save money to buy. He passed a neat couple in new hats pushing a pram, the woman saying, ‘There’s no point farting about. You need to know what you want,’ and the husband staring at the mangrove roots that reached up out of the water like the fingers of a drowning man. Under the surface of the water the oysters looked like exploded wedding dresses, singed and pickled in brine.

  Drummoyne was a suburb of couples walking arm in arm along the edge of the bay as if they only ever spent their days walking—never screaming or dancing or fighting. On a single salary from the rubber factory, Harry’s family could not afford to walk. They could hardly afford to live in their brick house with its separate dining room, and although Crawford and Harry’s mother didn’t exactly fight, they did have long conversations in raspy voices late into the night when they thought Harry was sleeping. They may have had more rooms to fill but they also had less room in their heads for any thoughts other than how they would next afford their groceries or rent.

  Harry decided he did not want to be middle class if those were the things middle-class people thought about. We can just eat brown bread, instead of white, he could hear Crawford say on the other side of the bedroom wall. And if my daughter comes back again, she’ll pay her way, you watch. We’ll eat corned beef instead of beef. I don’t mind. Come here, let me kiss you. Please.

  At Perdriau’s bits of machinery sporadically exploded, separating ears from heads and flinging the young women who worked there against the walls. Crawford only mended tyres there but still he’d come back stinking of rubber as if his limbs were slowly being replaced with the stuff. He would come back swearing, too, at the enamel mug he took to work when he dropped it in the sink, at his jacket if he got his elbow caught in the sleeve when he was trying to shake it off, at Harry if he ever tried to open the bathroom door when Crawford was soaking in the bath.

  After a year of pretending, they had no choice but to downgrade to the weatherboard house at number five next door. If Crawford’s girl ever showed up, she had to hand things over to pay for her time there: a brooch, or a scarf—who knew where she got them from. Harry had to get a job running messages for the grocer at the top of their street, and on Wednesdays Harry’s mother would go out in her gabardine overcoat to do a bit of washing, or something like that.

  Or something like that.

  The phrase haunted the rooms of the house. Harry supposed the ‘something like that’ was mending, but he could never be sure. He just knew that when it was Wednesday, his mother returned home flushed in the cheeks and distracted, her head cluttered with things seen in the outside world collected on her day’s adventure. He knew that on Wednesday, the evening meal was pork fritz and bread if anything at all, and when they ate Crawford would watch her face intently from the other side of the dining room table, trying to see if she was still what she said she was: his wife.

  CLARA ANNIE BONE

  The Crawfords’ boy was intelligent, Clara could see that much. He knew exactly how to tessellate his mother’s groceries so that they fitted perfectly in the wooden crate. She was so impressed with the boy’s natural gift for packing, she could not help putting her hand on his shoulder and calling him ‘Rabbit’, as she used to call her own son.

  ‘You better be careful, Rabbit, or I might give you a job and not let you leave,’ she said, then gave him a gumball on the house. The idea of a job made the boy stand up straight as a soldier. ‘Hear that? A job, Harry!’ his mother said, patting him on the head.

  He pulled away, and ruffled his hair so that he stood apart from her: a grown-up, motherless man.

  ‘That would be excellent,’ his mother said to Clara, even though Clara was not talking to her, she was not doing this for her.

  Clara could not help but have ham sandwiches ready when the boy came to help the following afternoon. And a little raspberry cordial. And a freckle, for after the sandwiches. She gave the boy so many treats he found it difficult to leave, and so when she opened the front door of the shop the next morning to find Mrs Crawford twisting the wicker handle of her basket in her hands, Clara was sure she was about to be reprimanded for keeping the boy for such long hours.

  ‘I thought I could come and do a bit of work, or something like that, while your maid is away, as a favour,’ she said. When the tall woman spoke, her teeth moved around in her mouth. Clara tried not to laugh.

  She had kept doctors’ houses before, Mrs Crawford said, ten times the size of her own, and missed the work, how it kept her mind off things. What things? Clara wanted to ask her. Your son did not die in Ypres, what could your mind possibly need to be kept away from?

  But Clara didn’t mind having Mrs Crawford around. It gave her a chance to observe the woman: how every day she’d almost drink them dry of tea, and how she rubbed the Brasso on the door handles so hard she nearly rubbed them clean off the doors. She always worked harder when she thought Clara was watching. But Clara was not watching her work; she was looking at the woman’s skinny hips and small bust, and wondering how an intelligent boy like Harry was ever born from such a scrawny old hen.

  ‘You aren’t happy, are you, Mrs Crawford?’ Clara said out loud to her one day while watching the woman scrub the steps so hard that her dentures fell out of her mouth.

  Mrs Crawford grabbed her teeth and gobbled them up with her bare gums before Clara could see. But Clara did see.

  ‘Moff wewwy, mo,’ she said, and moved her tongue around in her mouth like a giraffe, then said again, ‘Not very, no.’

  Clara tried not to smile. ‘Why is that, dear?’

  ‘It is my husband. He—’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Clara said. ‘That must be hard for you.’

  It is funny, Clara thought, as she stepped over Mrs Crawford on her way up the stairs, how normal and happy people look at night, under the electric lights, from a distance.

  HARRY BIRKETT

  Harry’
s almost constant presence at the Bones’ was misunderstood by his mother as an enthusiasm for work—which was not entirely wrong. Lifting sacks of flour was never more exhilarating than when Mrs Bone pointed to where they should go with her long white fingers. But in truth, Harry didn’t want to stay at home only to find Crawford’s girl in the kitchen, still drunk from the night before and using up the butter on the last of the bread. He didn’t want to wake up in the morning to his mother kneeling beside his bed again, begging him in a whisper to try to keep Crawford at home when she next pays Aunt Lily a visit. Whatever schemes she was plotting, he wanted no part in them.

  He preferred the harmless chaos at the Bones’ shop. They kept seven different kinds of flour, and each sack had little moths that leaped out like soldiers jumping from planes shouting Geronimooo! Big cockroaches flew in the Bones’ open window on hot nights and small cockroaches scurried across their counter when the store was locked up and no one was looking.

  By mid-summer, they declared war. Mr Bone stalked through the shop like a German soldier spraying surfaces, gassing the small creatures to death, and Harry stayed upstairs in the Bones’ apartment, setting mousetraps in Mrs Bone’s wardrobe and looking out the windows Mrs Bone had polished after breathing on them with her ripe red mouth.

  From the upstairs window Harry could see into his neighbours’ yards. He could see Mrs Wigg at number seven leaving for her Eisteddfod committee meeting. He could see his own house through the red and green bristles of a bottlebrush tree—it seemed a prickly, empty place. It had no cockroaches, mice or moths, but it also didn’t have their tiny, fluttering heartbeats, or give him the feeling of togetherness he had now with the Bones, armed to the teeth against their scuttling enemy forces. He watched as his mother rushed out the door with Crawford close behind her. He was supposed to be there, keeping Crawford distracted while she paid Aunt Lily a visit in Kogarah—Harry had forgotten—but it was too late to go home now. It would look far too suspicious.