by Pip Smith
Oddly enough, the boy nodded. Perhaps he had been in on it after all.
‘Do you know?’
‘Yep.’ He spoke out the side of his mouth the way Crawford had done. The boy had been shaped into a man by that freak of nature. The scenario did her head in. ‘That’s why I’m here, Aunt Lily. You always knew what to do.’
HARRY BIRKETT
They’d been saying the rains were about to come for days now, but tonight, by the look of the bruised, swollen thunderclouds rolling in from the west, Harry would believe it. He had been standing by the lamppost for an hour now. It had taken him three years to find out where Crawford worked, and even after his flatmate Frank had seen him at Richardson’s Hotel it took him a week to pay a visit. Now it was taking him an hour just to cross the street. Yes, the rains were definitely on their way, but Harry stayed where he was, looked at the sky, looked in the window of the warm pub over the road, and talked himself into moving.
Soon, he told himself. Soon.
The horses trotting down George Street were tetchy in the premature dark. Drivers were cracking their whips more than usual. Or maybe it was Harry who was on edge. Either way, he couldn’t stand out here on the street forever. He would wait for that tram to pass. And the next. And then he would cross.
Two trams passed. Then a third. A drop of rain hit the middle of the road and Harry crossed.
The roar inside the pub and the boozy sweat coming off what had to be at least fifty men made Harry calmer.
‘Yeah?’ one of the bar staff said to Harry.
Harry blinked. ‘Sorry?’
Four of them, the bar staff, were staring at him like gargoyles. ‘Get you something or what?’
‘Johnnie Walker,’ Harry said. ‘Two.’ He didn’t really drink the stuff, but tonight would be different.
Over in the corner of the room was a table, recently vacated, and leaning over it a man—short, wiry, forty-five maybe, and still in his jacket despite the humidity. He was collecting glasses, stacking them into a tower nestled into the crook of his elbow. The glasses wavered above his head, first to the right, then to the left, and Harry rushed towards them, but they did not fall.
‘Crawford,’ Harry said, gripping the glass at the top of the stack. Harry was a lot taller, or Crawford had shrunk. Crawford looked bad, anyway. Like the air had been let out of him.
‘You look good, mate,’ Harry said. ‘You been well?’
Crawford laughed, thank God, and Harry laughed too. He was tall now. He was a man. But he felt as if he was still playing at being a man; as if his bones were two sizes bigger than he was used to.
He lifted the scotches. ‘Johnnie Walker. Got one for you, too.’
Crawford eyed the drinks. ‘Well, I’m working, so I can’t, but thank you.’
‘It’s alright,’ Harry said, placing a hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘See if you can get a ciggie break? Meet you out the front?’
‘Sure,’ Crawford said. He laughed again, and shook his head. ‘Jesus Christ, Harry, it’s been such a long time.’
Outside, the rain was feathering down onto the street. Taking its time, like it had a long time to take.
Crawford lit Harry a cigarette. Lit one for himself, too, and sucked the end of his fag as if it was filling him with life. Glinting on the ring finger of his smoking hand—four-fingered now—was a gold wedding band.
‘You got a new missus, Crawford?’ Harry asked as casually as he could.
Crawford pulled the hand away, covered the ring up with his thumb, but he was smiling. ‘Lizzie,’ he said. ‘My Lizzie. She’s a good egg.’
They both smoked and stared into the rain and were glad their cigarettes gave them something to do with their hands. Harry could see where he had been standing just a few minutes before, on the other side of the street. Now he was standing right inside the moment he had been both yearning for and dreading for three years.
‘Hey, Crawford,’ Harry said. ‘I was wondering if you’d heard anything more about Mum?’
Crawford took a drag of his cigarette, and shut his eyes, as if he was trying his hardest to hold something inside him down.
‘I’m sorry for asking,’ Harry said. ‘I know you took it pretty hard when she left.’
‘Nah, it’s fine.’ Crawford said. But it wasn’t. Crawford still had his eyes shut, and he was breathing slow. Even and slow.
Harry didn’t ask anything more; he simply stood and smoked, and when Crawford opened his eyes, Harry saw that his face was wet—with rain or tears, he couldn’t be sure.
‘Why don’t you come back tomorrow, Harry, when it isn’t so busy? I’d like to talk. I’d like that very much.’
But when Harry came back the next day, Crawford had already quit.
LIZZIE CRAWFORD
For weeks, water poured out of the sky. A bridge near Newcastle had broken under the pressure. Farms out west were sliding clean off the sides of hills, taking roads and train tracks with them. In country towns, umbrellas could not stay up for longer than a minute, and men were left to wade across the wide streets with their coats up over their heads, looking like nervous, waterlogged geese. Although the weather had been bleak in Sydney, it had not been quite so destructive as it was out in the sticks. Here, the rain simply made the trams late, their brakes squeak, and was used as an excuse—by those who sought one—to stay in bed.
On the morning of Monday the fifth of July, however, the deluge above the little house at 47 Durham Street, Stanmore, paused, and a chink of blue was visible through the Crawfords’ lace curtains. The sun tugged at Mrs Lizzie Crawford—Go outdoors! Go outdoors!—and she felt buoyant, full of life in a way she never had in all her fifty years of living.
Her husband was asleep. The parrots outside the bedroom window were tipsy and shrill with sun, and he slept through their shrieks so peacefully she could not bring herself to do anything other than sit on the bed and watch the miracle of his nose, his mouth, his rising chest breathe.
He was curled on his side, his right, four-fingered hand under his left cheek. They’d been married for eight months now, and Lizzie was still stunned by him and his unearthly effect on her. He’d been a prickly little man when they’d first met at the Coogee Bay Hotel—wounded by a cold-hearted woman who’d left him, a woman she’d never dared ask about. But, like an artichoke, underneath his prickles hid a tender heart and she believed she was the only woman who knew how to find it.
And find it she did. Eight months into her marriage, there it was: a decent, caring, tender heart that flourished in the light of their radiant love.
At her request, he stopped drinking. And when he made love to her, he focused his attentions not on his own pleasure, but on the magical conversion of her body into many unpredictable things. Sometimes it was the city at night seen from above—some streets flickering out, some surging with white light. Sometimes it was as if all her pores were wincing at the taste of sherbet. Sometimes she felt nothing but a spark on the roof of her mouth. Sometimes she wanted to swear loudly and kick, as if she were possessed. But she never told him any of this, because he was so painfully modest. Lovemaking was an otherworldly experience to be had in the dark, under the covers, and never spoken of in the light of day.
Because of this crippling shyness, Lizzie was not sure how to tell her husband that their love had sparked new life in her old but not-yet-withered womb. As she watched him wake, she wondered if she should tell him at all.
She held on to her news as she made him breakfast, as she ironed his shirt. She let the news tickle her on the lips until she leaned in to kiss him goodbye at their front gate and she couldn’t hold it back any longer.
‘We’re having a baby, love. Isn’t that wonderful? Did you ever think we would?’
He did not throw his arms around her neck as she hoped he would. Instead, he stiffened. Lizzie stepped back, held his face in her hands so that she might read it. He had a confused look, as if he did not understand how it worked—people growing inside of ot
her people, coming out of them somehow.
‘Are you alright?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, pecking her on the cheek. ‘Just late for work.’
He adjusted his hat, then turned and walked to work for the last time in their short married life.
JOSEPHINE DEANGELIS
If there was one thing Josephine DeAngelis knew, it was how to catch a sailor. She didn’t know how to hold on to one, but she absolutely knew how to catch one, and that was the first step. The Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League’s events at the Palais de Danse on George Street were always the best bet for catching sailors. But in terms of holding on to them, the problem was either you didn’t sleep with them and they lost interest, or you did and then they wouldn’t foot the bill when it came time to get rid of what they’d left up inside you.
As she grew older, Josephine became a better judge of who might stay catched once he was caught. She just had to avoid freefalling into a man’s eyes within the first five seconds of meeting him. That was always the worst, when you fell in love too hard and too fast. Then there was no getting up off your back until they left.
She’d thought things would be different with Arthur Whitby because he was The One. Josephine could tell. The sound of her name and his together sounded so nice, repeated over and over in her head (Jo-se-phine Whit-by, Jo-se-phine Whit-by, Jo-se-phine Whit-by), and had spiralled her across the floor of the Palais de Danse with the help of a positively electrified band. Those horns. Just, wow. They’d turned her blood into gold glitter the minute their notes hit her ears.
After only a few weeks he moved into the boarding house she was staying in, but now he was prone to going out and staying out all night. She wasn’t about to sit around worrying about his hand cupping some other girl’s breasts. No, she was going to go out and get her own kicks. So here she was, back at the Palais de Danse, and a man with four stripes on his lapels was asking her to dance. Arthur was only a seaman, just a boy it seemed to her now that a real captain was slipping his arm around her waist.
She hadn’t even needed a pick-me-up before hitting the floor. He was a captain in the Royal Australian Navy, that was pick-me-up enough. After three songs Josephine and the captain spun to the side of the hall, panting. He was a little soft around the middle. About twenty years older than Arthur, too. Probably more experienced, though, when it came time for the uptown shopping of a kiss to lead to the downtown business of fingers in the knickers.
‘Do you know my father?’ she shouted to him over the drum solo. ‘What?’ he shouted back, cupping his ear so he could hear her. ‘He’s a famous sea captain,’ she said, ‘Captain Martello.’ The captain threw back a drink. ‘No, I don’t know the tarantella, sorry, love,’ he said, and spun her back out onto the floor again, with Josephine thinking, Love, love, oh my God, he called me love.
Josephine’s steps became longer and looser as the night spiralled on, but if she ever lost the rhythm of the band, she simply closed her eyes and let the music play her from the inside, as if her skeleton and all her internal organs were an instrument only the horn section knew how to play. And Arthur, of course. He knew how to play her exceptionally well, but then perhaps that was the problem, perhaps she had become boring and predictable and far too easy for his lithe hands.
The captain led and she followed without one misstep, and it felt as if the whole world was watching, as if all the women in the room were whispering jealously behind their hands, because she had undoubtedly done it. She had nabbed the most important-looking navy man in the place, and he was going to take her out for ice-cream afterwards.
But once the dancing had finished it was too cold for ice-cream. It was bitter, in fact, and George Street had turned into a river of mud, so Josephine thought, Why not, just this once (though it had happened before with other, less important men) let him escort me home in a cab, and walk me up to my front door? Arthur would probably still be out anyway, and even if he wasn’t, maybe it would do him some good to see how fired up Josephine could make another, more important man than him. So, with a wave of her hand, Josephine hailed a hansom cab for the two of them.
By the time they’d reached her door his kisses had proved more delicious than she’d first thought. His hands inside the placket of her skirt gave her the feeling of stepping into a hot bath after a long day at the factory and every part of her let go, saying, Yes, more of that, oh please more of that.
She tried to be quiet with the front door of the boarding house, but it was hard getting the key in the lock when all the cells of her body were still doing the foxtrot, and the captain was kissing her right up the back of her neck.
‘Josephine!’ rasped a woman on the other side of the door, when she had finally thumped it open. It was the landlady, her hair in a mussed-up plait for sleeping. Josephine kicked the captain backwards out of the door and straightened up, but the woman did not give two hoots about the drunk old man who was feeling up her tenant. There were more pressing issues at hand.
‘A detective was here again, Josephine. He wants to talk to you about your mother. Urgently.’
Josephine’s blood lost all traces of glitter and booze. She ripped the captain’s hand off the back of her skirt. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but I need you to help me.’ She could see in his eyes the flash of fear she’d so often seen in Arthur’s when she asked him for a favour. This time, though, she was asking a captain, a man used to responsibility, so she did not feel so terrible asking him for it.
‘I need you to help me move,’ she said. ‘Tonight.’
EDUARD SCHIEBLICH
Standing to attention in front of the camp hospital in dungarees that have never been washed, with no undergarments on, and a rash on his left testicle he desperately wants to scratch, Herr Schieblich is about to burst. He can sleep on a mattress thrown over some rough-hewn logs he had to fell himself; he can sleep in a room with fifty other snoring Germans, Austrians, and Australians of socialist persuasion; he is prepared to share one lantern between ten men, and defecate in a group latrine with no partitions separating him from a man with diarrhoea. He has already planned to forget how Otto, whom he first met on the ship to Australia, died within his first twenty-four hours in Liverpool Internment Camp after being shot in the knee by one of the guards for no apparent reason. But the Great War is over. The Great War has been over for almost two years now and he is still locked up in Liverpool. He cannot stand not knowing when he can return to his wife. He cannot even write her a candid letter. He is only allowed to send two letters a week—each no longer than one hundred and fifty words in length—which will be opened, read and guffawed at by the guards. He is only allowed to see his wife in person once every two weeks between the hours of two and four on Sunday, and even then the guard present steers the conversation away from his concerns like a cautious cab driver steering a horse around a turd. And how Henrietta must miss the strength of his opinion! He saw how timid she could be as she stepped out into the streets of Woolloomooloo to take the boarders’ whites to the laundry. Each day she stood in the doorway, looked up the street and back, and sometimes would not step out onto the footpath for three whole minutes. She moved so slowly through their house, it was as if they lived six leagues under the sea—but instead of water, the sea was made out of all the possible decisions Henrietta could make, floating around her, tangling in her hair and making the cotton of her skirts cling to her legs. At the end of the day, Herr Schieblich would sit next to her in front of the fuel stove as her slow hand passed a needle and thread through their residents’ frayed clothes. Frau Schieblich would sew, look up, think, and sew, while Herr Schieblich read between the lines of a collection of papers, tied the loose ends of his deduced facts together and wove them into a flawless verisimilitude of the current state of the world. Or he would practise his violin, stop, turn to her and share his latest theory, before digging the bow back into a stormy Beethoven sonata. He kept talking, even when he knew that the connections he made between the ide
as he shared were tenuously held together. But what Henrietta didn’t know was that his assurance in his knowledge of the world was a performance he put on to give her strength. He should have known that it was not wise to act too certain about sensitive political topics when their boarding house was full of spies. He should never have got drunk with Jack that night, especially not to the point where he felt loose enough to say Germany was in every respect at least equal, if not superior to, England. Or that in spite of the German strength and power, we bowed our head for twenty-five years before England, and kept quiet when Russia and England divided up Persia and the whole north coast of Africa. Or that Egypt and Morocco had been divided up between England and France, with a little strip for Italy, while all we got, as compensation, was a slight enlargement of Cameroon. And he most definitely should not have said, after the sixth or seventh scotch, that a second war would follow because if anything could breed revenge, it was this.
Now the phrase haunts him.
When the guard takes and drinks the pint of black-market Kölsch beer that Henrietta had brought to the camp from Woolloomooloo, when Henrietta turns away at the sight of the guard drinking what cost her a week’s worth of groceries, as if blaming herself for making the wrong set of decisions that day, Herr Schieblich thinks: if anything could breed revenge, it is this.
But now the guard is busy skolling the beer, and his wife is whispering to him—‘Eduard, Jack Crawford has been arrested, and I have been asked to appear in court.’
Herr Schieblich sighs. Perhaps that is revenge enough, for now.
JANE WIGG
Mrs Wigg of 7 The Avenue, Drummoyne, opened the door to the crown of a rakishly angled fedora and a slate-blue, broad-shouldered suit, and thought, Oh, hello! Won’t this make an interesting story for the Eisteddfod committee meeting this evening? The hat tilted back to reveal the serious face of a man who required serious information—this was no ordinary door-to-door salesman.