Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  ‘Leave the boy here, and you can go elsewhere,’ she suggests. ‘Find a job somewhere. I’ll look after the boy for a while.’

  But this suggestion makes Jack worse. He stands up, sits down and stands up again, like a cuckoo clock out of touch with time, and when the boy comes in, already changed into comfortable clothes after his first day at a new job in the city, Jack shoos him out. ‘Hurry up and dress yourself, and I’ll take you to your aunty.’

  The boy whines.

  ‘Now!’ Jack roars.

  She doesn’t understand why the boy doesn’t stand up to Jack. He is taller than Jack. Stronger, too, probably. And yet he always skulks around like a reprimanded puppy. Jumping when Jack says jump. Going out whenever Jack says. But never smiling. Not once.

  The two leave the kitchen and she hopes that’s an end to the drama for the night. Jack will calm down. He will take pity on the boy, and calm down. But a quarter of an hour later they are back again. The storm is worse. Jack is worse. He is out in the hall, raging in a raincoat, but the boy, he is only in a thin summer coat. It’s outrageous to take the boy out on a night like this. Why can’t he take the boy tomorrow?

  ‘Yeah?’ the boy says. ‘Why can’t I go tomorrow?’

  ‘Ah, get out,’ Jack says, and pushes the boy out the front door.

  The wind throws the door open, and the rain comes into the hall in horizontal streaks.

  ‘Wait a minute, Harry,’ Jack calls to the boy, and she thinks: yes, good man for changing your mind. Good man for taking pity on the boy. She is about to say as much but he goes into their room to fetch a brand-new shovel and is on his way again.

  ‘What on earth are you going to do with that?!’ she calls out to him.

  ‘I’m going to kill the bloody bastard!’ he screams. The door slams, and she almost collapses on the floor.

  JACK

  Out in the rain, things I was sure of now seem hazy. The boy’s being good, the boy’s doing what he’s told. The boy’s still asking questions, but they’re thinning out now he knows I won’t reply.

  There are only a few people on the William Street tram. Young men going to the Cross—loud and calling to each other across the tram aisle; couples on their way home from the theatre. One woman, drunk, is abusing her husband for ogling one of the girls at the Tivoli.

  The rain is streaking down the windows of the tram in floods. Two horses at the intersection wobble with rain. One shivers, melts, comes back together again.

  We get out at Edgecliff and walk past trees backlit by lightning. The boy is silent. He’s shaking, too; the clatter of his teeth sounds like distant hooves.

  No one will find us on a night like this, and our footsteps will wash away. But despite the sticky blackness, the houses on Ocean Street are bright. They’re fitted out with electric lights and it seems like every one is trained, like a searchlight, on me and the boy, throwing hundreds of our shadows down at our feet.

  We come to a flight of stone steps and go up. On the left-hand side there’s a thick scrub. I enter, and the boy follows. He always walks behind; he’s somehow afraid to walk near me.

  When we come to a space amongst the bushes, I begin to dig a hole some three or four feet wide and longer, and three or four feet deep. The rain helps. The earth is soft and turning into mud.

  I stop digging a couple of times to drink spirits from a bottle, and after I have the hole about four feet deep I say to the boy, ‘Now you get down and have a go.’

  The boy digs the hole a foot or so deeper, but he’s started asking questions again. He asks what I want the hole for. I won’t answer. He keeps an eye on me all the time until he gets tired and drops the shovel in the bottom of the hole. He climbs out, so I jump down and have another go at it, but it’s no good, the earth’s too rocky, so I climb out and search for sandier ground. I walk in and out of the bushes, branches flinging back into my face, my arms and hands are scratched but it feels good, it feels right. The boy is behind me, though. Watching, always watching.

  After a while, the rain still streaming, I find a good spot and dig again. I dig about the same in width and length, but not nearly as deep as the first place, and ask the boy to help. He digs for a while but doesn’t do much because by then he’s soaking wet and shivering violently. All I can hear is his skeleton rattling in his skin so I give in.

  ‘That’s enough,’ I say, and take the shovel from the shaking boy.

  HENRIETTA

  The rain blends the hours together. People are passing through the rain outside and as they pass their shadows stretch across the wall. The shadows’ umbrellas dig and dig at the sky, and once they have dug all the rain out, she sees a shape that makes her sit up. Perhaps it is a police helmet? The helmet crosses the road towards her house, and once it has reached her front step it turns into a shovel resting on the shoulder of Jack. Beside him, the boy, looking half drowned, is covered all over in sand.

  When Jack comes in he says, ‘Oh, Harry’s a coward. He started crying and wouldn’t go to his aunty.’

  The boy is silent.

  JACK

  The memory of her will not be buried, and the boy has gone to Italian people up the road. On my first night alone I am kept awake by an image of my wife unbuttoning her blouse—perhaps reluctantly, but at least she’s finally doing it.

  HENRIETTA

  Jack makes a point of standing before her while she’s doing the mending to declare in her boarders’ presence that everything is fine. The boy’s mother has written, she is working in a hotel over in North Sydney. She needs time apart to get her head straight and try to get off the drink, that’s all.

  As he speaks, he seems to be waiting for Henrietta to breathe out, or nod, or give some other sign of approval. But she doesn’t. She’s sick of coming home to find perfectly good things smashed to smithereens, or burned, or drenched. The man is disruptive on a biblical scale. She doesn’t need his money so badly that she has to put up with Jack and his ghosts chasing each other through her house. She simply says, ‘Oh,’ and prays that peace will soon be restored.

  But peace is not soon restored. Her trips to the barracks are unsettling her nerves. The soldiers all look the same. They could have been put together in a factory, those lizard-green killing machines. She can’t stop thinking about what they are doing to her son right now at the camp. And then there’s her husband, spending his nights drinking with Jack. And the price of butter. And the ghosts stalking her mad tenant through the house, shuddering up the pipes when she sleeps. She can hear Jack muttering to them in his room, sometimes so loudly she wakes up.

  On one occasion she runs into Jack in the hall as he flees from his room. He is quivering with terror, his hair tousled, his eyes red.

  ‘Madam, madam, I think the room is haunted. I am haunted,’ he says.

  A part of her wants to calm him down. Another part of her—the weary, sleep-deprived part—has become as ruthless as those lizard-soldiers up in Paddington. This is your chance, that side of her thinks, to exorcise your house.

  She looks him in the eye. ‘I think your wife is haunting you,’ she says. ‘I think you killed her.’

  JACK

  At my new job, bodies swing off hooks, smooth and almost elegant. They have no heads.

  The floor is littered with cigarette butts, swelling with blood like gorged leeches. Smoking helps mask the smell. But after the second or third day, the smell of blood and fat becomes sweet and almost metallic. A smell I could get used to.

  The carcasses come out of the cool room on hooks. Headless, armless, they are the colour of candlewax, mostly, and glow a bluish pink.

  It’s late November, and even the high ceilings of the meatworks don’t release the heat. Flies stick to our mouths. We shake our heads, but the flies turn a few circles in the air and come back.

  The hooks hold the carcasses by the ankle joint, between the two long bones of the leg. Sometimes a hook gets caught up in tendon or membrane. The hook doesn’t pierce all the way through,
and the membrane stretches over the rusty metal. When that happens, I shove the heel of my hand against the joint, so the membrane splits. It’s a satisfying feeling.

  We hug every third or fourth carcass. Our ears press against the pig’s thighs, our arms wrap around the haunch, the nook between our necks and shoulders lock against the meat. Braced like this, we walk the carcasses out of the cool room, and into the butchery.

  The first time I walk in the procession of carcasses, I have the feeling I’ve been here before. It’s the coldness of the skin. The touch of a woman who doesn’t know how to love.

  HENRIETTA

  After being woken up again by Jack’s mutterings, she stares steadily at the ceiling and tells her husband she can’t stand it anymore.

  Her husband rolls to face her. ‘The detectives,’ he whispers.

  ‘What? Did they come?’

  ‘They could have. Looking for him.’

  ‘Ah!’ She kisses her husband on the forehead, the cheek, both curls of his moustache. ‘You are a genius, Herr Schieblich. This is why I married you.’

  JACK

  She is everywhere. She is sitting three rows ahead of me on the ferry. She is buying a pound of sugar at the grocer’s in a suburb I never thought she’d visit. Wisps of women’s hair fly up under the brims of their hats, the way hers used to. I see the flash of a green coat tailored sharply into a waist as small as hers. These things make me realise how often I think of her.

  I see her standing outside Mark Foys with the boy. I walk towards her with my hat in my hands. She’s standing in front of a window display of new dining room furniture, arranged around a fibreglass roast. A mannequin mother stands in the corner of the window display, watching me with a jug in hand, threatening to hurl boiling gravy in my face if I get too close.

  Daisy sees me and grips the boy’s arm. The boy’s bigger than me now. Amazing how fast they grow.

  ‘Hello,’ she says. Her mouth has new lines around it; her neck is as shiny as plastic, as red as scalded skin.

  HENRIETTA

  Telling Jack about the detectives is easier than she thought. All she has to do is pull the same straight face she pulled for the insurance men when they came to inspect the ashes of their house in Toowoomba.

  She waits until after Jack has paid his week’s rent, then knocks on his door.

  ‘Jack,’ she whispers through the door.

  ‘Mmm?’ he says. He sounds drunk.

  ‘The men you said about—the broad-shouldered men. They came looking for you.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he says; then, snapping out of it, ‘Which men?’

  ‘The detectives. They came just this morning, asking about a man who had come to stay with his stepson.’

  Jack opens the door. Now she has to lie while looking him directly in the eye. The calm this gives her—a thrilling calm, the way one feels after climbing to the peak of a mountain—is surprising to her. She will soon be free. He is not her problem. When he slams the door in her face, and begins to rip the linen off the bed and hurl his belongings into boxes, his distress is nothing for her to worry about. And when, the next day, her other boarders begin to pack, when they nervously make apologies on their way out her front door, she is still calm, although colder now, and a little confused. They must have been told something, and the only clue is what Miss Johnson says, as she hastily pins her hat into place at the front door: ‘I know you are different to the rest of them. I’m sorry.’

  When two detectives eventually come to 103 Cathedral Street, asking if the collaborationist Herr Schieblich is in the house, she steps back and lets them take him. She has not been sleeping. She has been walking through the days as if she is asleep. She has been having visions, premonitions, strange fancies. They seep into her consciousness, are whispered through the creaks and groans of the house. She does not ask who reported her husband; she already knows. She does not protest—as she would have only a few months before—that he only said the things he said to feel alive and dangerous, the way his music used to make him feel. She steps back and watches them take him. Hadn’t she invented these men herself? Hadn’t she almost wanted them to come?

  JACK

  I leave the German woman’s house for a small cottage in North Sydney. Here, I have Daisy all to myself. I run circles around her. Get up before her. Get the breakfast things out before the sun comes in through the window. And when I come home, I bring offcuts from the meatworks and cook her chops in extra fat. I don’t want her to lift a finger, so she doesn’t. She stops going to work. She sleeps in. She is tired all the time.

  When I come home from work my hair is hard with blood and my cheeks are sticky with fat. She won’t kiss me like that. We go through five boxes of soap that summer, and I have to spend at least an hour after work each day soaking in water so hot it turns my skin red.

  The first night Daisy lets me touch her again she says she’ll have to be drunk. I take two tin mugs down from their hooks and fill them up to the brim with straight whisky. We sit on the edge of the bed in silence, sipping and wincing at the sharpness of the booze. When she’s sipped her way through a quarter of the mug, I put my hand on her knee. She flinches slightly, but leaves it there. I pull the mug away from her mouth, and hold her hands in my own. She’s forgotten the feeling of my hands touching hers. The gentle electricity of it.

  I stand up to turn out the light.

  ‘No, leave it on,’ she says.

  I pull her by the ankles so that she falls flat on her back in the bed, her whisky spilling, filling the room with the smell of smoke. We are heady with it.

  I draw patterns up and down her inner thigh, coil her pubic hair around my little finger, bring the juices of her cunt up to my nose. God, I’ve missed this. Her hips carve figure-eights in the mattress as I trace smaller ones with my tongue between her legs. She begins to shudder. I pull my head out from under her skirts. She’s unbuttoning her blouse, unhooking her corset. Then—

  I stop moving. There, in the centre of her chest, is a pit. I’d never noticed this when we made love before. I touch it. It’s cold, and feels as if the walls of the cavity were made of bone. At the bottom of the cavity the skin is blue. The colour moves like a gas flame. I look up at her face. She smiles. Toothless. The way her tongue moves between the ridges of her gums looks like the head of a snake, blindly testing the air for warmth.

  ‘Yeth, thomeome burmp my hearp oup. Burmp i’ righ’ oup of my chesp.’

  She throws her head back and laughs.

  Afterwards, I watch her sleep. It’s the only time I can look at her without making her flinch. Through the water and the curve of the glass jar beside the bed, her teeth look huge, but also kind of crooked. Each tooth is traced with a fine black line. Her gums are turning black, too. All that sugar and brandy she hides in her tea is rotting her from within.

  Even in her sleep she’s gripping her jaw, and the skin around her eyes is tight. The scar on her temple is purple, like a mark on a rind of pork, and rises up off her face.

  I can keep her with me, run circles around her, but I can never make her love me. When she speaks to me, if she’s ever up before I leave for work, she sounds distant, as if her spirit wants to be somewhere she can only ever visit in her sleep.

  I’ve killed her. I really have. I’ve killed what it was in her that loved me in the first place.

  WOMAN NOT YET IDENTIFIED

  LANE COVE RIVER, OCTOBER 1917

  SYDNEY

  Spring in Sydney is a confusion of winter and summer days jarring against each other. It is the beginning of the southerly buster season, with its window-shuddering winds and sudden thunderstorms. The air is hot with pollen from the London plane trees, reddening our eyes and throats; and on the streets horses are more irritable, their drivers quicker to take risks or tell those in motorcars to go to hell.

  During the spring of 1917 we were still fuelling the Great War of the northern hemisphere with a steady supply of men, munitions and hand-knitted socks. Meanwhile, ano
ther war raged right under our noses. A new American-style card system designed to monitor labour efficiency was introduced by the Department of Tramways and Railways, and the workers at the Eveleigh train yards responded by walking off the job. Over six long weeks, union leaders lost their voices preaching like religious zealots in the Domain on Sundays—‘Work slow, show the masters it is we who control them. They will all burn in the end.’ The strike spread to the coalfields and the waterfront, until eventually every industry was affected, even those whose workers did not strike. Crates of rubber resin piled up on wharves. No one dared ferry them to Perdriau’s upriver in Drummoyne, and the workers there were laid off one by one. ‘I’m sorry, lads,’ the foreman said. ‘There’s nothing for you to do.’ A man named Harry Crawford returned home to his wife, hat in hand, hoping she’d understand. ‘Well,’ she might have said, ‘that’s it. We won’t survive like this.’

  Only a year before, twelve leaders from an anti-war socialist group, the Industrial Workers of the World, were arrested for treason and two were hanged for ‘imagining the death of the King’. In spring 1917, some members were still interred in enemy alien camps without ever having seen a warrant for their arrest.

  These were strange times. Strange measures had to be invoked. It was hard to know who was with us or against us, or who ‘we’ even were in the first place. If we were Irish Catholics, should we have been fighting on the side of an Empire that killed our cousins in Dublin the previous year? If we were workers, should we have been fighting a capitalists war? If we were Australian, should we have been fighting a European diplomats war over Belgium, a country half the size of Tasmania, whose citizens we doubted would ever return the favour? Those of us with sons, fathers and brothers brave enough to risk their lives for the Empire found it hard not to be personally insulted by those speaking out against the men who had signed up. Even if, deep down, we were not absolutely sure why we were fighting, too many people had died for us not to believe in the war.