Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  She can hear Jack rousing on him in the front room. ‘What did I say about keeping out of everyone’s hair?’ and ‘You’re not to go in there without me, you understand?’

  So he’s the stepson, then.

  Henrietta stands still, listening for a squeak of a floorboard or the click of a door latch. When she’s certain no one is about to discover her, she slips the letter out of her pocket and holds it up once more against the light. She will read every word Andrew wrote to her from that horrible place. Again and again. Especially the words that have been blacked out.

  JACK

  The bats have begun their evening hunt. The sky is alive with them, flying—as if magnetised—towards the east. Sitting on my green box, looking out the window, I’m the only one who sees them.

  The boy is here now, sitting on the edge of his bed and staring fiercely into the floorboards. I watch him closely, as if he might, at any second, sprout claws and wings and fly away.

  ‘Any word from Mum?’

  ‘No, kiddo.’

  ‘Did you even go to the police?’

  ‘No need for that.’

  The boy misses his mother. He pretends not to need her, but the boy is like a sick animal, dragged away from water. I don’t know what to do.

  Out of the pub on the opposite corner, women stumble with their hair half undone and falling over their faces, and men stumble with their arms half lost in the women’s blouses. They move in a slow dance, as if their bones have melted away, and I am melting into them, too. How is it possible to feel this seasick a mile away from sea?

  The boy speaks.

  ‘Crawford?’

  ‘Yes, son?’

  ‘Do you think, once I’ve saved some money and can buy us a house, Mum might come back?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  The boy is curled up on his side, his blanket folded over his hands under his chin. His eyes are bright—the light from the streetlamp outside has lit two fires in them. He is staring at me, as if every answer I give is something he can peg into the ground to keep himself from drifting away.

  I sit in the crook the boy’s body makes, and stroke the hair out of his eyes. He has his mother’s wild hair, his mother’s grey eyes, but some other man’s jaw—a man who’d died years before and left the kid with nothing but a name and a jaw. How proudly the boy holds on to that name. It was the first word the boy learned how to spell, his mother said, and once he’d learned it he wrote it on every surface he could find to write on in the house. Everything was labelled Birkett. The underside of plates: Birkett. The address book: Birkett. The edge of the dishrags: Birkett. When I moved in, I was living a borrowed existence.

  Daisy said the benefit to having her son grow up without a father was that all the boring, violent, less-than-perfect aspects of the man were not around. His empty name could be filled with the strongest, most honourable hero a boy could imagine. She never told him about the day his father moved to Newcastle so she couldn’t nag him anymore, because she could see that there was something in the myth of the man that filled up the boy from within.

  Sitting here, nursing another man’s child to sleep, I can see how this boy might be my unravelling. This boy, who I have absolutely no claim to, who tries so hard to prove himself as a man that he lets his childhood slip through his fingers like sand.

  The boy is asleep now, and I go back to my green box, watching the street below. Above the chimneys and spires of the city, the sky is a bruise, healing. Morning will come soon, but before it does my mind will wander in and out of sleep and memory, mistaking one for the other. Nothing will be left as it was found.

  HENRIETTA

  She is up to her elbows in blood and fat. She has so much to do today and there is Jack standing in the doorway, moaning, ‘Are we having sausages for breakfast?’ as if everything she does is for him. He is in the same rumpled suit he arrived in yesterday. He has not bathed, he has not changed; she wishes she had never let him into her house.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘These are for my son.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Where is your wife?’

  A silence makes the morning light lemon-sharp in the eye and is not broken until her husband, sitting at the kitchen table, turns the page of his newspaper. His contribution, as it is most mornings, will be to read out the headlines from the paper, offering commentary when he deems it necessary.

  ‘The Baltic Islands! Russians Hit Back!’

  ‘Nothing to do with the war, please,’ she asks.

  ‘Grocer’s Profits! Prices Raised Without Authority!—does that count, Hettie?’

  ‘No—but so dull, Eduard.’

  ‘Chatswood Mystery,’ he reads next. ‘Woman Not Yet Identified.’

  ‘Alright, read that,’ Henrietta says, because he will keep going on and on unless she lets him read something.

  ‘The detectives engaged in clearing up the mystery surrounding the death of a woman …’

  Jack drops his cup in the kitchen sink. ‘Oh, Mother! Mother!’ she thinks he says. Is he sobbing—or laughing?

  ‘Jack, what is wrong with you?’

  He is pale. ‘I don’t know,’ he says, and shakes his head. ‘I don’t know.’ But when he looks up to see the boy standing in the doorway he acts as if he does know and he takes the paper from her husband, the boy by the shoulder and says, ‘Come and read for me in the room.’

  JACK

  The boy is sitting on the green box, glaring right at me.

  ‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ he says.

  I look at the picture of the shoes in the paper. ‘Now, calm down, we don’t know …’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  I say nothing.

  ‘I suppose it doesn’t help anyone,’ he says.

  ‘What doesn’t?’

  ‘Telling the cops that Mum’s a slut and went off with another bloke—’

  I take the boy’s hand in my own. ‘It’s not your fault,’ I say. He tries to pull away, but I’m holding on so tight my fingers have turned white. ‘She left. That’s all we know.’

  But really, she hasn’t left. I can see her in everything. She’s right there in the boy’s face.

  HENRIETTA

  Her husband is in the upstairs music room, galloping through the Paganini concerto he and his mother had played for the Russian tsar when he was only nine years old. He plays it when he wants to be back in old Europe, back at the beginning of his glittering future that never eventuated, and now the whole house is unsettled. Even the suds in the sink are collapsing with disappointment.

  Henrietta looks up from her wrinkly hands to see Jack pass down the hall. Her husband’s plaintive violin is drawing the bottle of Johnnie Walker that Jack clutches in his hand up the stairs.

  The concerto lands on a low G and stops so suddenly Henrietta puts down her dishcloth and listens. She hears silence, footsteps, her husband’s bold, generous laugh. The sounds of two lost men, finding something of themselves in each other.

  An hour later the sound of the men has become raucous. They are probably halfway through that bottle of whisky, telling dirty jokes. The last thing she needs is for her loud husband to get on the bad side of the neighbours, or the boarders, or her own nerves, so she brews a pot of coffee and takes it upstairs.

  ‘And so you see, the way we’ve been treated, I am starting to side with the German position in the war,’ she can hear her husband saying as she makes her way upstairs. ‘My family fled Germany over forty years ago for the exact same reason Britain is now at war with her, but here we are not allowed to own businesses. I have lost half my students. My wife’s son—’

  ‘Eduard!’ she says so fiercely he puts the cap on the now half-empty scotch bottle and hands it to Jack without her needing to say another word.

  She leaves the door open when she goes. I am listening, the open door says. I am always listening for you to break your promises, Eduard.

  Descending the stairs, she hears the chink of spoons in coffee cu
ps, the mutterings of goodnight, Jack’s voice in the open doorway: ‘Oh, and Edward—if two detectives come, remember: the boy and myself, we are not here.’

  JACK

  From my position on the green box I can see a figure walking down the footpath on the opposite side of the road. I can’t quite make it out. I’m sure I can see a police helmet, but the figure crosses the road and the helmet becomes a mass of woman’s hair, piled up on her head.

  It is safer to sit here and watch than to try to sleep.

  HENRIETTA

  Returning home one afternoon, she can hear the sound of an axe splitting wood. Her paranoid heart speeds up, convinced that an intruder is at that moment smashing his way through her back door. She turns the key quietly and creeps into the house. She will not let that intruder get his hands on her husband’s violin. He will have to cut her to pieces first.

  In the back courtyard, Jack is hunched over the smashed remains of a green wooden box. Bits of lace and shreds of linen are strewn around his feet, making him look like a werewolf just turned back into a man. She sees him raise the axe over his head again—his shoulders broadening—and throw it down, scattering splintered wood across the yard. She’s horrified—such good boxes, all broken up! They could be sold. And Jack, he owes her money. He has been paying her in lace and pretty pieces of wearing apparel that will never fit her even if she starves herself for a year.

  ‘Jack!’ she says, stepping out to take her husband’s axe from his hands. ‘Your wife will come back to you.’

  He lets her take the axe and slumps, as if the feel of the axe in his hands was the only thing giving him strength.

  A low animal moan comes from him then. It has its own heartbeat. It is almost a song. ‘Oh no, no, no, I want her no more, no more, no more, she is no good, no good, no good, drinking too much.’

  She puts a hand on his back—it is more bone than muscle when his arms have nothing to wield—and walks him into the kitchen to make him coffee.

  She puts the kettle on the hob and feels safer, moving through the ritual she knows so well. She feels so safe she dares say, ‘That is a funny thing that she leaves you without anything. Surely you had a row or something with her—she would not run away for nothing.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jack says, ‘I had a jolly good row with her and I gave her a jolly good crack to go on with.’

  Henrietta does not believe that this man, on the verge of tears, could be the sort of overbearing husband one reads about in the penny press. He is surely only violent the way a toddler gets violent, confused over how to hug a playmate without asphyxiating him to death.

  ‘You should not hit a woman so hard,’ she says with a pat on his hand. ‘It is not nice.’

  Jack puts his head in his hands, as if he is sorry.

  JACK

  Breaking up the box hasn’t helped. Lying awake I can hear a noise coming from the corridor—a scratching made by flimsy nails. Closing my eyes only makes the noise louder, as if it’s coming from the gas pipe, the window, the ceiling and the corridor at once.

  I check the sleeping boy. He’s out cold. Good. Sleep, boy, sleep sound enough for the two of us.

  The hallway is so dark it’s dimensionless. I have to pull back to stop myself from falling. After my eyes have adjusted, I run a hand down the hallway wall towards the sound. The sound is coming from behind a door. I open the door and in the middle of a small room I can just make out the metal horn of a gramophone. In the dark it looks like the bell of a giant, carnivorous lily growing out of the dust on the floor.

  The gramophone is spinning a record. Its needle slips, comes back, slips, comes back to the last second of the record.

  Beside the gramophone is a candle and a box of matches. I light the candle, and see that the room I’m in is bare, except for the gramophone. The room is too small to be a bedroom, too big to be a cupboard. It has no windows, no shelves. I move the needle back to the beginning of the record, and hear what sounds like my own voice. The record is playing at a very slow speed. I turn the handle of the gramophone, and a woman’s voice comes to life.

  ‘Take off your shirt,’ she says.

  ‘No,’ my voice says.

  ‘How is it we’ve been married for this long, and we’ve never slept flesh to flesh?’

  ‘We aren’t that sort of people.’

  ‘And why not? Take off your shirt.’

  ‘No. What’s wrong with you? It’s the middle of the day.’

  ‘Are you worried I’ll laugh at your breasts?’ she says.

  The record slows; the voices through the trumpet become deeper, until they are the voices of two men at the bottom of the sea. I look to see that I have spilled candle wax onto the spinning record. It has spread along the grooves and congealed around the needle.

  A gust blows the door of the room shut behind me. I turn, and there I am, reflected in a mirror on the back of the door.

  The shadows under my eyes look like dark pools of water corroding the soft rock of my face. How could she have loved this face? How could anyone have loved this face, steadily weathering into powdered bone?

  The figure in the mirror moves his mouth.

  ‘Jack,’ the figure says.

  ‘Nina,’ I reply.

  ‘What’s troubling you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I can’t seem to remember.’

  ‘Surely you can, if you can only be still for long enough.’

  Shutting my eyes, I can see a woman with her mouth frozen open. A girl in a too-small nightshirt standing in the cool light of the kitchen late at night. Cold bodies hanging from hooks. Me, or someone like me, waltzing with them. A giant fish with a hundred broken jaws suffocating in the open air. A boy growing, bursting out of his shoes. The boy has a woman’s face. Her eyes are spinning like planets, her hair is as wild as weeds in a summer field.

  I open my eyes.

  ‘It’s the boy,’ I say. ‘Sometimes I see him out the corner of my eye, and it’s her.’

  HENRIETTA

  When she arrives at Central Police Station, the officer at the front desk does not get out of his seat.

  ‘Sheep Lick,’ he says, as he says every Wednesday just before lunch. Her presence is a punctuation mark in the digestive calendar of his week, nothing more.

  ‘Yes, Henrietta Schieblich,’ she says in reply.

  There is a woman officer there too, who looks up at Henrietta with a fleeting smile. She’s often at the front desk, helping the secretary with the typing. But once Henrietta saw her walk a fortune-teller through the station in handcuffs, and sometimes she overhears the policewoman giving a strumpety-looking girl a talking-to about how to turn her life around.

  Henrietta walks past the policewoman, the bored officer, into the back room.

  ‘Can you smell cabbage, Sergeant? I can smell cabbage!’ the officer there says to his colleague, the same as he does every week. ‘Been building any trenches down Cathedral Street, Sheep Lick? Manufacturing any mustard gas in your lavatory?’

  She lets him have his fun. It does not bother her. Her mind evacuates the room to monitor the weather, to think about the mending or what she will buy for dinner that can stretch to feed six. But when the officer says, ‘Sign here, Sheep Lick. And here,’ as he inevitably does, her mind is brought back into the room.

  This week, however, the officer has something to add.

  ‘Going to be sending you over to the barracks, Frau.’

  ‘To the camp?’ she asks. She is terrified of the camp, but also drawn to it, obsessed by it. She could be with her son again. She could trade one set of anxieties for another; one set of comforts for others greatly missed. (Her son’s face, when he tells her a joke; the way it lights up.)

  ‘No. Listen. To the barracks. On Oxford Street. The army are handling you lot now. Krauts are apparently too dangerous for us.’ The police officer looks disappointed and Henrietta smiles. The police station is a lion’s den of men trying to climb on each other’s backs. And his back—hunched over in the t
iny office he had been allocated—supports much bigger backs than his.

  When she returns home she forgets to tell her husband about the barracks, because there he is, meeting her at the door, pulling her in close, walking her up to the music room. He has not been this forthright with his affections since the Toowoomba Eisteddfod in 1908, when they first met: the miracle meeting in a Queensland backwater of two Germans who loved Schubert.

  But this afternoon her husband is not about to kiss her behind the music stands. He shuts the door.

  ‘There was a fire,’ he says.

  ‘What? Where?’ She sniffs the air, looks around the room. Before the war the two of them were laughed out of Queensland after trying to claim insurance for their incinerated home. Now, especially now, they would never have their claims met.

  ‘Under the boiler,’ he says. ‘It had been lit. And it was still burning with papers and lace. And there was a pair of scissors there, too, when I came home.’

  He fetches the scissors from where they hold a Haydn concerto down on his desk. The scissors are black with soot.

  A storm lands over the city like a blanket thrown over a birdcage. The darkness is suffocating, and Jack is in the kitchen, pacing back and forth. He is like an ant, unsettled by the promise of rain, desperate to scurry. She can see he needs to get something off his chest to someone—anyone—but tonight she would rather hear her knife slice potatoes than listen to him complain.

  ‘I can’t stand it anymore,’ he says, without any prompt from her. ‘The bloody bastard’s no good, no good.’

  ‘There is nothing wrong with the boy; the boy is real good,’ she says, decimating a potato with five whacks of the knife.

  ‘I must get rid of him,’ he says. ‘I must take him to his aunty up the line.’

  ‘Tell me the address,’ she says. She is getting sucked in. ‘I can take him in the morning.’

  But he will not tell her. He sits at the table wringing his hands like a hammed-up Lady Macbeth. Maybe he is a genuine lunatic. But what can she do? Get the doctor? Fetch the police? Not in this weather, and never to this house.