Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  By the Eight-Hour Day weekend of 1917, everyone knew someone who had been killed in a place few knew how to pronounce, but we were alright really, all things considered. Bodies were being found in our dreams, on the banks of rivers, but we were still attending the picture houses, the rowing regattas, the football. Strange men walked amongst us, but we were still milling on street corners on a Friday night to drink and gossip. Nothing was stopping us from betting a week’s wages away at the Spring Derby, or from taking our beloveds out for a picnic, though we might have been quicker to snap if we were ever double-crossed.

  EMILY HEWITT

  MONDAY, 1 OCTOBER 1917

  ‘Looks like you might never have to go back to work again, Em.’

  Emily’s mother raised her glass in the direction of the paper mills, where a twist of smoke was winding its way towards the sky.

  Emily, her mother and the new girl from the mills were sitting on Emily’s verandah enjoying a glass of holiday ale. Emily sat up straight and squinted at the smoke. It was definitely coming from a spot very near the paper mills. She hiccupped and held her fingers to her lips. If the mills really had caught alight, they wouldn’t stay mills any longer than you could point and shout, Look! The storage sheds were crammed with stacks of odd papers and boxes gone wrong. The vats of woodchips were lined up ready to burn one by one. She thought of the gum trees rubbing themselves against the mills’ roof like friendly, combustible cows, then sat back in her chair and poured her guests another round of ale.

  As the women watched the smoke their thoughts dawdled towards help. What, should they notify the police? Take wet blankets and buckets full of water over there themselves? If Emily had a telephone, then maybe—but who would they call? Their husbands were lost to the chaos of the Eight-Hour Day parade, no one would be in the mills’ office, or at the cornflour mills upriver, and the police were probably at the pub. On public holidays misfortune had to be taken with a shrug of the shoulders, and dealt with when those who could help were getting paid enough to care.

  The three women continued to sit, mesmerised by the lilting dance of the smoke rising and falling and kicking out to rise again from a new, surprising angle. It was too late to do anything about it. An enthusiastic picnicker had over-kindled his bonfire, that was all. The women leaned back in their chairs and watched the waterbirds rise from the river, turn black against the sinking sun, and dissolve in a lick of smoke.

  ‘To the Eight-Hour Day!’ Emily said, and lifted her glass to a vision she fleetingly had in which she had set fire to the mills herself.

  ERNEST CLIFFORD HOWARD

  TUESDAY, 2 OCTOBER 1917

  When Ernest signed up as apprentice at the Cumberland Paper Board Mills he did not think he’d be spending most of his days running messages between the manager and his wife. But he liked the walk to the manager’s house. Crossing the canal, you could get a good look at the cranes moving like slow steel giraffes reaching for their greens, and up alongside the river, if you were lucky, you might get a look at that mad woman who’d been hanging around the place for the last week or so, chasing invisible monsters through the scrub.

  But the walk was never as exciting as it was on Tuesday, October the second, when—about four hundred yards from the mill—Ernest saw traces of a fire. From the track, he could hear what sounded like ten thousand frenzied flies; he could see that the whole side of a gum tree was blackened with soot, its leaves shrivelled up or burned right off. He let the scene draw him closer until he found himself standing inside a circle of charred earth.

  Once inside the circle, Ernest stopped short. There, at the centre, lay a woman. She was cooked, contorted. She was lying on her back, with her legs slightly drawn up. Her arms were above the chest, as if protecting her heart, and her hands were tightly clenched. Ernest saw that her left hand was nearly broken off at the wrist, it was that severely burned. Her clothes were completely burned off her body, with the exception of the shoes and the bottom of her stockings. He could see her whole body, or what was left of it. He could see where her vagina would have been, and her breasts. Something white was moving in her mouth and between her legs. Maggots. Hundreds of them.

  He ran all the way back to the mills. He was flushed in the face, excited. He ran straight to the telephone in the office and when Emily the office girl asked him what was the matter, he laughed. Afterwards, he would be ashamed for laughing—they’ll believe I did it, he’d think, and maybe, if enough of them believe it, maybe it means that I did—but at the time all he could do was laugh as if he had just been kissed.

  THE POLICE

  WEDNESDAY, 3 OCTOBER 1917

  At first the police thought it was accidental. That she had accidentally set herself on fire. Standing on the perimeter of the black circle surrounding the burned body—between a large rock and a fallen tree—all they could see were objects and strange details glinting through the charred remains.

  First, they made note of details they could be relatively certain about. They determined the direction of north and estimated that the rock was nine feet high. They paced the distance from the body to the paper mills and wrote in a notepad that the body was found forty yards from the mills.

  The closer they looked, the more they could attribute causes to the damaged details that jumped out from the scene. For instance, there was a tall tree. The police could see that the fire had leaped right up to the top branch of that tree, where a single white cockatoo now sat. The fire had reached the rock, but on the right side of the body, the fire only extended six inches. Piecing these details together, they conjectured that the wind would have been coming, say, from the south, following the rise of the land.

  Next, they turned their attention to the stiffened female found in the charred circle. Staring at the body, everything they didn’t know swam out of the darkness into the foreground, but they stayed calm, professional, and pushed these unknowns back, remembering to pay attention only to what they could see.

  The female lay on her back, facing the east. Her charred hands were fixed in the position they’d held at the moment of her death: grasping at the chest. Her right leg was slightly drawn up. All that remained on the body was a pair of stockings and a pair of shoes. Her head was in something resembling a peaceful position, although the forward part of the head—the forehead and the face—were burned beyond recognition.

  They found things—incidental details, useless in themselves—and tried to divine a story from them, but couldn’t. They found a piece of gabardine under the body. They found a full set of upper teeth, and some loose teeth representing the lower plate. They found a broken quart flagon with the name Robert blown into the glass. They found a glass, and an enamel mug. They found the locks and corner-pieces of what appeared to be a carry-all, or small suitcase. They could see where the corners had fallen as it had burned. There was no steel frame, which they thought odd at first, but then they remembered that some of those Japanese cases had cane frames, and there were others with a sort of fibre, with no frame at all. They found locks and a knife. A hat pin. Some hat wires, or remains of a medium-sized hat. They found a kidney-shaped greenstone that appeared to have been a trinket. But they could not find any trace of kerosene or blood, or any signs of struggle.

  The site was ripe for burning. Eleven years later, the mills themselves would burn down, and four years after that the building’s remains would be laced with nitrate film, doused with petrol and re-ignited for a major motion picture directed by Frank Hurley. But at the time, if the police were honest with themselves, they really had no idea at all about the fire, let alone whose body was burned in it. That was the trouble. They could not get a start and they could not find out who it was.

  THE MASQUERADER

  SYDNEY, SUMMER 1917

  LYDIA PARNELL

  Couples were everywhere at the shops, walking arm in arm, padlocked to each other’s elbows. Lydia preferred to shop alone. Too many times had she taken her husband to the shops only to watch him spiral i
nto a pit of despair at the sight of how expensive butter had become or snap at a shopkeeper for asking how he was. ‘DO YOU ACTUALLY CARE, OR ARE YOU TRYING TO SELL ME SOMETHING?’ he would shout in their blank, professional faces. After a trip to the shops, he would go for long walks and come back wild in the eye, as if he had stalked up to the mountains, killed a shopkeeper with his teeth, and returned when the animal in him had been satiated. Yes, it was better for everyone if she shopped outside Drummoyne, and alone.

  Lydia knew that when people were at the shops, they were simply playing the role of people at the shops. They held themselves upright and said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ or, ‘Very well, thank you,’ when what they really meant to say was, ‘Give me your money,’ or, ‘Get away from me.’ When they reached into their bags and fetched their wallets it was as if they were reaching into their soft bellies to pull out secret body organs they were ashamed of. Lydia preferred what people became at night in her backyard, after a few drinks. Then their raw, bared hearts insulated her against the cold and she became a kind of woman priest, listening to people’s moral conundrums.

  But when Lydia went to the shops in Rozelle for a change, and saw Harry Crawford in the butcher’s laughing with her friend Emma Belbin, without a single wrinkle on his usually worried brow, her world flipped in on itself, like a sock getting turned out of its pair. This man had spent many late nights and early-morning breakfasts pouring the tale of his unloving wife into Lydia’s spongy heart. There was a plumber she had gone off with. He had wept. He kept coming back to Drummoyne, to see if she had returned. Lydia had been humbled by the sincerity of his feeling. But seeing Crawford with Emma, content and about to buy chops, Lydia was hit in the chest with the realisation that perhaps the loose ease people arrived at after a few beers was a whole other world invented by, and for, drunks—a realm that felt more authentic when you were sobbing at its depths, but when remembered the next day was as ridiculous and invented as a description of hell.

  EMMA BELBIN

  For Emma Belbin, the summer of 1917 was a summer of beer parties, learning the foxtrot, and momentarily forgetting how bored she was at home. It was a summer that raced forward, but not from underneath her as other summers had—it carried her along, so that she was fully alive and inside every second as it heeled-and-toed into the next. It was the summer she became close with Lydia Parnell’s friend Harry Crawford and—energised by loud, loose songs sung around strangers’ pianos—managed to charm him out of the funk his wife had left him in.

  Harry Crawford had left the area very suddenly that spring, after his wife had left him for a plumber, but he was always over at Lydia’s house for breakfast or beers or to see if his wife had shown her face around Drummoyne since their house had been broken up. Emma had got poor old Harry Crawford drunk on more than one occasion (only sometimes by filling his glass when he wasn’t looking), and they had often found themselves sitting in the corner of a stranger’s kitchen in the early hours of the morning, plumbing their souls for sad stories worth sharing.

  Sometimes Emma’s husband came to these beer parties, and sometimes he didn’t. Emma preferred it when he didn’t. He would only stand awkwardly in the corner, holding his beer glass too high up against his chest, looking as if his trousers were constricting his testicles. He would watch her as she talked to Crawford, and worry about how the two of them came across. Then she would have to spend the whole walk home explaining that they were only close friends, that Mr Crawford was still very much in love with his wife, that she, Emma, was nothing more than a shoulder to cry on.

  When her husband wasn’t there, Emma let her shoulder be a little more available for tears. And when Harry Crawford told her he could not take his wife back, even if she begged him, Emma did notice something flutter up inside her, like a racing pigeon released from its box. But she quickly trapped and smothered it, in case its feathers should fall from her eyes and he should see. No, theirs was not a friendship like that. And besides, there was another woman, a neighbour she shared a wall with in fact, that he mentioned once or twice—only a good friend, he assured her—and Emma tried her best to be happy for him.

  They sat in the corner, knees facing in towards each other, a bowl of peanuts balancing between. They nibbled and talked and reached for the nuts without even looking; they were so absorbed by the picture show of each other’s lives. They had arrived at a kind of deep, sedimentary truth together, accessible only by the brutally honest conversation of best friends.

  She told him how, after six months of marriage, when Mr Belbin was grunting away on top of her, she realised with a shock that the oceans of his eyes were mere puddles, and the caves of his soul that she had thought so mysterious were no deeper than potholes in a poorly maintained road. They were not filled with mystery, but with images of her husband: sitting in an armchair, reading the results of the boxing in the paper, smoking a pipe. Is this it? she had thought. Is this the rest of my life?

  She could say these things to Crawford. She could be crass and horrible and he would understand. His eyes as they listened changed their colour—from hazel, to blue, to grey—as if they were windows into an underwater cave lined with shells.

  When she finished speaking, he would tell her about his wife, how much she drank, how he was never good enough for her. Emma was always slightly disappointed he never went into the same level of detail as she did for him, but she had to remember he was a man. It was a wonder he was talking about his feelings at all.

  After their deepest conversations, Emma would need the walk home, to turn over the secret feelings that had been dug out of her guts and decide which she would ignore, and which she would return to later in her daydreams. She would arrive home to find her neighbour watching her through her lace curtains, and her husband asleep in his favourite armchair. She would fold up his newspaper, pick up his dropped pipe from the floor, and try not to catch herself thinking: What if he fell asleep when his pipe was still lit? Perhaps he would burn to death.

  LYDIA PARNELL

  He had seen her, he said when he was barely inside Lydia’s front gate. He had seen her. Flush-faced—maybe even a little drunk—outside the Palais de Danse on George Street. She’d had her arm around the shoulders of another man, but when she saw him, she quickly took her arm away, adjusted her hair and walked towards him, swinging her strumpety hips. From five yards away he could smell the gin on her breath. And—as if the sight of her wasn’t enough of a shock—she had the hide to ask him for money. Clearly things had not worked out in North Sydney with that plumber of hers and now she was reduced to this: earning her living doing the lame duck or the turkey trot to some honky-tonk band, charming pennies out of men with every flick of the head. He told her he did not want any conversation with her and she asked him for money and he said he had not any to give her and he jumped on a tram and left her standing there. Of course, the sight of her shrinking into the distance had pained him, especially after the two worried months he’d spent imagining all the things that might have happened to her. But it was not as bad as it could have been, didn’t she think?

  ‘Yes,’ Lydia said. She supposed so. Though she found it hard to imagine Mrs Crawford doing the lame duck. She found it hard to imagine that gangly woman dancing at all.

  Lydia and Crawford stood on the front path, blinking at each other. Now that the mystery of his missing wife was so easily resolved, there was nothing much else to say. Everything seemed less urgent, less real.

  Work had been good.

  George was good.

  Lydia coughed.

  He didn’t have time to stay long, he said, but he’d just wanted to tell her how overjoyed he was.

  Well, overjoyed was the wrong word. How relieved he was.

  He laughed like a man at the end of a film. The dark made a circle around his face, and closed in.

  SYDNEY, WINTER 1920

  LILY NUGENT

  Lily had been meaning to contact her nephew for three years, but things had got in the
way, and now it was somehow 1920 and he was here of his own volition: a grown man sitting on the edge of her day couch, making it look too small.

  Harry held his teacup as if it might crumble to dust at any moment, and spoke softly, careful not to blow it away with his breath. Since 1917, his mother had vanished without a trace; his stepfather had tried to push him off a cliff and bury him alive.

  Lily looked at her limp hands resting in her lap. Why had these hands not sought her nephew’s address? Written him a letter? Seeing him now—sitting in the seat his mother had once sat in, drinking from a cup she had drunk from—Lily flushed with shame. She had been angry at her sister, not this boy. It was her sister who had always been so impressionable; it was her sister who had stayed with that monster.

  ‘If you will not shake Crawford off, goodbye and good luck,’ was what Lily said to her the last time she had visited, in 1917.

  Now, three years later, her nephew’s face had Annie’s refined angles. The poor thing must have been reminded of his mother every time he looked in the mirror. How could it possibly have taken him three years to start searching for her? Never mind, he was here now, and that was what mattered. They must put guilt and blame aside, roll up their sleeves, and take a practical approach.

  First, she had to see if he knew about his mother. About the way she was.

  ‘Harry, there’s something you need to know,’ she said, putting her hands to use by straightening out the kinks in her skirt. ‘Something about your mother.’

  Harry looked up from his cup.

  ‘Some time in 1917, your mother wrote me a letter saying she had something to tell me. About your stepfather, how he was not …’