by Pip Smith
Don’t think I never shoved a crowbar right where it hurts you sailors swanning around in your white uniforms like baby lambs like you wouldn’t take what you could get away with if you knew you’d never get arrested
And if any of you come for me again I’ll lock myself up in the toilet and I’ll hold my back against the door and you can cut your way to what you want through my kidneys—go on try it I bet you can’t—I bet you scream at all the blood like a pack of pansies I’m no lay down and take it type of animal—
But it isn’t my snatch you want is it you’d probably think it was all shrivelled up and foul like an oyster in the sun ha
No you want to feel like you’ve swallowed something alive you want to feel that alive thing kicking and fighting for its life you want it to fill you up on the inside and make you more powerful than a god and you want me to shake like a leaf and beg you to stop please stop
You cunts wearing your gonads on the outside like you think they won’t get hurt I’ll twist them off with a wrench I’ll tie them off with a belt until they turn black and drop off like the rotten fruit they are
Yes I will have another scotch—you call that a scotch?—that’s it fill it up of course I can take it Josie you think I’m weak—
Whitby I will drink you under the table and then we’ll see who’s the bigger man when I’ve cut you down the arm—
yes it’s a knife you dumb fucker—
Ha what you can’t take a joke? Every man carries a knife
No Josie I won’t calm down and don’t you whisper anything into that slimy cunt’s ears like I’m the embarrassment he’s made of the same rotten stuff you sprang from course you’d end up with something as low down as Arthur bloody Whitby—
Yes I had a day off the sauce yesterday don’t you patronise me girl I am your father
What’s that Whitby what is it you want me to say? Yes I am her father yes that’s right and you know it—look at her she looks just like me
What have you told him Josephine what lies have you been filling his hollow head with now?
Ah girl I’m sorry thank you for putting me up love I know I am a good for nothing—come here please sit with me it’s cold over here in the corner and everyone at this party is looking at me like I’m a funnel web spider and I’ve been so lonely since that trouble with Daisy and I just can’t keep it together—
I’m sorry it’s just can’t you see the way he is looking at that woman who is she it’s your neighbour right? and her little girl look Eenie look that girl is looking at your feller like she is real familiar with him like he is over at their place every second night like he is her dad
This is all happening under your nose girl you’re being walked all over—don’t let them take your shoulders-back-tits-out way of being in the world Josie don’t just lay down and think of England it’s a horrible place it always rains
No I am NOT seeing things look at him reaching over and brushing beer off that slut’s top lip oh ha ha yes did he just say the moustache Gene could never grow? Very funny Whitby tell that bitch to get her own feller I will go him I’ll bloody go him and smash his smirking smug face I will pound him in the head until his brains dribble out his cauliflower ears that thick fucking cunt
What’s that Whitby yes I’m talking about you
No I won’t calm down
No I WON’T I have a RIGHT I know my—
SMACK you in the BLOODY HEAD
Ha! Not scared are you?
Here we go! Here we bloody GO—
THE MAN-WOMAN
SYDNEY, WINTER 1920
DETECTIVE SERGEANT STEWART ROBSON
Robson always thought Central Police Station looked as if it had been dropped from a great height onto the wrong street. It was a grand colonial building, but it’d been built on a laneway down the rough end of town, crammed between the boiler rooms of two buildings that fronted onto wider, more respectable streets. When he’d first walked through the carriage entryway of the station as a young cop, he’d soon realised the place had been built around a lot of hot air—literally, a bare stone courtyard. The building itself was only a few yards deep. The plaster was cracking—you could see the brick underneath—but a few chips in the paint only made the place look tough. You should see the other bloke, the building seemed to say. And the thing was, you could see the other bloke. More often than not, he was locked in a cell underground, bruised and licking his wounds.
By the winter of 1920, Robson felt as battle-scarred as the building crumbling around him. For weeks the press had been drumming up an impending state inquiry into a few slip-ups he’d made four years prior, and now people were talking about it at his kids’ footy games, the pub, the dogs, the place where his wife got her hair done. Now she was asking questions, too, and staring at him over her porridge spoon each morning as if she couldn’t quite size him up. Look, he wanted to say, we might have set a warehouse on fire and planted some fire dope in a socialist’s wastepaper basket, but the Superintendent had the Commissioner breathing down his neck, and the Commissioner had the Premier, and the Premier had the Prime Minister throwing tantrums over his failed conscription referendums, and the Wobblies were asking for it, waving pamphlets around in the Domain with SABOTAGE written in block letters across the front. He wanted to admit these things straight to his wife’s hard, honest face, but he knew he couldn’t. He would prefer to be a murderer of socialists than worse. A ball-less whinger. A snivelling excuse-maker. Mindless fingers at the command of a head office that now had a serious case of dementia. So when a young man and his uncle and aunt walked into the station that winter, mumbling something about a murder, Robson relaxed. Here, finally, was a chance to prove he could think for himself.
He was at the front desk trying to get Miss Armfield to make him a cup of tea when they swung back the door—the woman in her best pink dress, gripping her husband’s elbow as if he might lose his way; the young man doing his best impression of a coat-hanger, awkwardly filling out a stiff, cheap suit.
Robson steered them away from the bright eyes of ambitious juniors and into his office, and before they had even perched their backsides on the edge of their chairs, the woman started whimpering that her sister had gone missing three years ago, around the time a burned woman was found on the banks of the Lane Cove River.
‘Three years?’ he said. ‘Three years?’ He shook his head. There’d be little surviving evidence of any use. His fresh ambition was wilting faster than a cock in a rent girl who was drifting off to sleep. He was about to send the nervous woman and her family home with condolences, but then she lowered her voice and told him the reason they’d taken so long to come.
‘The thing is, Detective,’ she said, ‘my sister’s husband was not a man.’
Robson looked at her husband to see if they were having him on, but the man swallowed hard and looked up, as if he were afraid his wife might get struck down for sharing such a shameful thing.
‘He was a woman, Detective. A woman in disguise as a man.’
Robson imagined the headlines. His photograph in the paper. Happy birthday you old bastard, God whispered in his ear. Here’s that case you have been waiting for your whole life, Stewart—now don’t fuck it up.
Then it came to him. Perhaps it would be best for her sister’s reputation if the woman kept the bit about her brother-in-law being a woman under wraps, so to speak.
‘Let us make that discovery,’ he said. ‘Allow yourselves—and your sister—the innocence of never having known.’
SERGEANT LILLIAN ARMFIELD
The morning Robson went out to find the wife-killer Crawford, Lillian was rubbing cream into her hands under the front desk. Five years earlier she’d been one of the first two women police officers in the Commonwealth and still no one knew what to do with her. Get the boys a cup of tea, they’d say. Type out our reports. Dog a white slaver. Go undercover at a fortune-teller’s. Stay out of the way until a case comes along with a woman in it, then sit in the interview room w
ith your mouth shut to make sure no one puts their hands anywhere they shouldn’t. The only thing she was certain of was that she wasn’t there to replace the boys, she was there to complement them. If she wanted to keep her job, it was important to maintain some feminine habits. Hence the cream.
Detective Sergeant Robson had been flexing his muscles over this Crawford character for weeks now. All Lillian knew were the details of the ghastly remains of his wife. Lillian had seen the broken pieces of the dead woman’s dentures, had held the woman’s greenstone pendant in her own hands, had touched the square of fabric that remained of the woman’s incinerated skirt. There was something about touching these objects that transported her three years back, to the moment the woman screamed and dropped to the ground.
When Robson and Watkins dragged Crawford in by each scrawny arm, she was disappointed. He was not the thug she’d been expecting—he was small for a start, even smaller than her. He was itching himself with his cuffs the way a mangy dog squirms inside his collar, and asked Robson, ‘Are you going to lock me up?’ When Robson said, ‘We certainly are,’ Crawford whimpered, ‘What will happen to me when I’m put in jail?’
‘Usually they bathe you and put you in clean clothes, and then in a cell,’ Robson said.
‘I want to be put into the woman’s section,’ Crawford said, and Lillian laughed because she thought it was an impudent joke.
‘Don’t we all, mate!’ Truskett said, and they laughed harder then, everyone but Robson. He smiled and surveyed the room like a captain at footy training.
She liked Robson. He hadn’t quite got the hang of the fact that she was an officer of the police and not a tea lady, but there was an earnestness to his virility that comforted her, the way her family’s snarling dog had done.
An hour later she was called in to witness Crawford’s examination by the Government Medical Officer.
‘Strip,’ the GMO said. ‘We don’t have all day.’
Crawford’s hands were shaking as he reached for the buttons on his shirt.
‘Hurry up,’ the GMO said, giving Lillian a look of impatience, as if it was her fault Crawford was so useless.
‘Here,’ Lillian said. ‘Let me help you.’
She watched her hands as they pulled Crawford’s buttons from their holes. Don’t look at the wife-killer’s eyes, she told herself. Or his—
Breasts? Were they breasts? Why had Robson said nothing about breasts?
Crawford did not move.
‘Well, Miss Armfield,’ the GMO said, ‘you don’t need a medical degree to know what those are, do you?’
She laughed, nervous.
‘Trousers,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Would you please remove the man-woman’s trousers.’
She accidentally looked at the wife-killer’s face then—why? to seek permission?—and as she reached for Crawford’s belt she couldn’t shake the thought: Is this how your wife undressed you when you got ready for bed? She’d undressed all kinds of crazed, violent women when she worked over at Gladesville Hospital, but she’d never undressed one who had reached so far out of her sex that she had fallen from its clutches entirely.
She undid the belt in three deft moves—you learn to be swift, strapping women into straitjackets.
‘No need to take them all the way off,’ the GMO said. ‘Just around the ankles is fine.’
Lillian let the pants drop, hooked her thumbs around the elastic of Crawford’s long johns and pulled down.
There was no doubt about it: Harry Crawford was more woman than man. The GMO stuck his hand down amongst the hair to check that nothing had been tucked back between the thighs, but it came back empty.
Stripped naked in the room like that, the man-woman was grief-stricken, her wolf eyes shot red. ‘This is a terrible thing for me,’ she said softly, ‘and the worry of my life.’
Lillian knew she wasn’t talking about the murder. She wasn’t feeling bad for anyone other than herself.
LILLIAN ARMFIELD
Many years later, Lillian would tell her biographer what she thought of the lesbian cult. How it was a problem the authorities had to face, even though it was difficult. It required the cooperation of the wisest and best medical specialists, police, clergy and welfare workers, because it was on the increase. Those who practised it were furtive and subtle, and the leaders in the cult shrewd and persistent in their eagerness to corrupt others. Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, this menace would have to be faced head-on. It was a menace too serious to be ignored just because it was such an ugly and unpleasant issue to drag out into the open. This was why it was important she tell her biographer about the woman who pushed through the front doors of the station at six in the evening on 5 July 1920.
Lillian had no doubt at all who she was. At the sight of her, and the thought of what she would soon find out, Lillian wished she was still strapping mad women into straitjackets over in Gladesville. Or that she was anywhere, really, other than there.
‘Mrs Crawford, I’m afraid you are in for a terrible shock,’ she said. She tried to coax the woman into one of the interview rooms before saying any more, but when she took her by the elbow the woman snatched her arm away. She seemed to want to stay standing there, in the middle of the foyer, for everyone to see.
Lillian had no choice but to come right out and say what needed to be said.
‘The person you married can’t be your husband.’
The poor woman looked lost. ‘You mean he’s a bigamist?’
‘No,’ Lillian said. ‘The person we’ve locked up under the name of Harry Crawford is a woman.’
Mrs Crawford laughed. ‘That’s ridiculous.’ And Lillian laughed too. It was a release of nerves more than anything, but she had to agree, the whole scenario seemed like it had been stolen from a terrible play, something with cloaks and cardboard swords. After a moment the woman appeared deep in thought—perhaps piecing together memories of lights turned out, sheets pulled up to the chin, and she now seemed genuinely stunned.
‘The Government Medical Officer has checked,’ Lillian said, ‘and I’m afraid it’s true, Mrs Crawford.’
The woman shook her head. ‘Let me see him, please. Let me talk to him. I can’t believe what you’re saying.’
Lillian ordered one of the boys to get a glass of water for the woman and, without asking Robson or any of the others, went down to the cells to confront the man-woman herself.
Lillian found her curled up on the bunk in her cell.
‘Your wife’s here,’ Lillian said. ‘She wants to see you.’
The man-woman groaned and rolled over to face the wall.
‘You owe her an explanation, don’t you think?’
The man-woman was listening. Lillian could tell because her head was ever so slightly raised off the bunk, but when a howl came from her wife upstairs the man-woman played dead. Just as Lillian suspected, she was a coward through and through.
When she returned upstairs, she found Robson with the suitcase open in the middle of the foyer.
‘And see this?’ he was saying. ‘This is what she’s been using. So you see now, Mrs Crawford? You see what we’ve been trying to say?’
SYDNEY
On trains and ferries and trams, in kitchens over wheat bran or marmalade on toast, we opened our newspapers expecting to read about the inquiry into the police.
When we opened the paper, there was that crooked detective. But he was not standing in the dock—he was standing tall and proud with his chest out, walking a wiry little man towards the police court.
The headline read: IN MALE ATTIRE. WOMAN CHARGED WITH MURDER.
We blinked. We looked at the picture again. What? That is a woman? In male attire? We read on.
She was an Italian. Of course she was. She had married a man named Martello in her native country, and had a daughter with him. She sailed with him to New Zealand, where they lived for a few years, and then she came to Sydney with the daughter. Here, amongst us,
she lived as a man, she did a man’s work. She met and married a widow named Annie Birkett who never knew she was a woman and four years later the widow was dead, burned alive on the banks of the Lane Cove River.
We looked up at our husbands. We looked up at our wives. ‘But how could she not … ?’ we asked. ‘Didn’t they ever … ?’ we asked.
Apparently, no one knew.
DETECTIVE BILL WATKINS
He was on the train, Watkins was, a long way out of Sydney, and he was glad for it. With his thug boss Robson getting paranoid that Watkins was out to steal his job, and all the sideways talk around the Wobblies, and the station telephone ringing itself berserk with news from people desperate to be a witness on the man-woman case, it was impossible to get any perspective.
Nearly all the callers were women. Nearly all of them believed what they were saying, too, though not half of them were telling the truth. Or maybe they were all telling the truth—he’d heard that people actually bled from the hands in the parts of the world that believed in stigmata. It didn’t take him long in the job to work out that ‘the truth’ was a room with the blinds down and the lights out. You could only see it if you pulled the blinds up to let in a little light, but then it wouldn’t be a room with the blinds down and the lights out anymore, would it? It would become something else entirely.
In any event, the man-woman case file was littered with notes from mysterious female callers. After Walsh up at North Sydney had found the body (and no incriminating evidence), he’d received a telephone call from a woman who said if he looked again he might find a bottle of kerosene at the site and promptly hung up without giving her name. Another woman called Central Investigation Bureau to tell them a black girl had gone missing from a laundry in Double Bay around the time the man-woman had worked there. And a third woman called to say that both she and her neighbour had been screwing Harry Crawford while their husbands were out, until jealousy had her bore a hole in their shared wall to spy on the lovers in the act. She fainted when Watkins showed her the ‘device’, which had—presumably—been up her own snatch, and made them promise she would not be subpoenaed as a witness. Why call, then? Watkins wondered. Just for the thrill of being involved?