by Pip Smith
27Truth, Sunday, 22 August 1920.
28Evening News, Wednesday, 18 August 1920.
29Truth, Sunday, 22 August 1920.
30Daily Telegraph, Thursday, 19 August 1920.
31Evening News, Wednesday, 18 August 1920.
32Truth, Sunday, 22 August 1920.
33Daily Telegraph, Thursday, 19 August 1920.
34Evening News, Wednesday, 18 August 1920.
35Truth, Sunday, 22 August 1920.
36Sun, Thursday, 19 August 1920.
37Truth, Sunday, 22 August 1920.
38Evening News, Thursday, 19 August 1920.
39Truth, Sunday, 22 August 1920.
40Daily Telegraph, Friday, 20 August 1920.
41Evening News, Thursday, 19 August 1920.
42Daily Telegraph, Friday, 20 August 1920.
43Evening News, Thursday, 19 August 1920.
44Truth, Sunday, 22 August 1920.
45Evening News, Thursday, 19 August 1920.
46Truth, Sunday, 22 August 1920.
47Evening News, Thursday, 19 August 1920.
48Truth, Sunday, 22 August 1920.
49Evening News, Thursday, 19 August 1920.
50Daily Telegraph, Friday, 20 August 1920.
51Truth, Sunday, 22 August 1920.
SOME LOWER ANIMAL
SYDNEY HOSPITAL, 9 JUNE 1938
JEAN FORD
Bugger the morphine, I’m clinging now: onto the hollow coughs resounding in the bedpans, the groans of the crook woman next to me, the rattle of a metal bed wheeled down the hall. I’ve been in a hospital before, long ago now, but it’s all coming back—
Riding the tram to gaol the pain I felt was too big for moans. With Lizzie gone, and my daughter given up on me, I’d no one to live for—but I didn’t want to die at the hands of old men in white wigs, and what were they hiding under there anyway? If I was going to go, it’d be by my own hand, thanks all the same.
The concrete floors, the single-file lines, the mosquitos that rose in clouds from the drains—to execute a person at Long Bay Gaol is worse than killing your wife in a drunken rage at a picnic and is much worse than not killing your wife and getting told by all of Sydney that you did.
I hope you never believed those stories about your grandma, Rita; it’s important to me that you don’t. I almost began to believe them myself when Sydney’s million eyes twinkled in the electric courtroom light. Thinking of those eyes now, it’s hard not to imagine them attached to butchers’ aprons and bloodied arms clutching spears and stun guns. I was supposed to make a statement from the dock, but standing there in my meat and bones, all I could see were the jurymen’s smug faces grimacing at the sight of my member dangled before them—a poor cousin to what they had between their legs—and my mouth could not make a sound. Every word was suddenly right and wrong depending on how it came out, and I was stuck and drowning in the lost eyes of my barrister.
My gun and thing they found in the box made the jury sure I killed her. By the looks on their faces, you would have thought my member fired bullets out of its rubber shaft. Obsessed with secrets, people are. If I was a woman in man’s clothes, there must have been other bad things I was hiding, too; things I’d want to kill to protect. They didn’t think that my woman’s skin was hiding another true thing that the man’s clothes were bringing out. Did you want to be a man, then? the cops asked, confused, and what to say? Yes? No? I don’t know?
All I knew was I wasn’t good at being the way a woman was supposed to be, so I tried the only other option and it was better, for a time.
All I know is, if Harry Crawford had been on trial, the best they could have pinned on him was manslaughter; they’d never have sent him to hang.
That barrister they gave me was not so easily put off. He was waiting for me in the prison interview room the morning after I arrived.
Fight them, he said. I know you want to give up, but we have to fight them, not just for you, but for inverts everywhere.
So I was an invert now? He seemed so sure of the word, like it suddenly made sense of who I was. And others, too, apparently. We were part of a secret society of inverts who were everywhere, walking around with our penises sucked up inside ourselves, our breasts punched into our chests, our skins flipped around, so that the muscles and veins were flailing around in the wind.
Poor old Archie McDonell could smell my resistance. He couldn’t stop mopping his brow and dropped my case file on the floor so that the pages lost their order. His cheeks burned red, and he apologised to his shoes because he couldn’t look me in the face after we had lost.
We had lost. He didn’t want to feel he’d failed alone.
You were convicted on circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence!
His eyes were wet, and I wondered if he was about to cry.
I took his hand—something we weren’t supposed to do, in case forbidden things passed from palm to palm.
It’s alright, Mr McDonell, I said. You did everything you could. Which wasn’t saying very much at all.
He appealed—or we appealed—and lost.
One month later, in a snap cabinet meeting, the Premier and his men overruled the decision anyway. In a matter of hours, my death was turned back into life. All of Archie’s fretting and sweating, the months of being walked to and from the court in front of the flashing bulbs of photographers, the whole trial was suddenly revealed to be little more than a drawn-out freak show, an excuse to put journalists to work, a quick dose for readers addicted to their own outrage, so they could sit at their kitchen tables and point and comment and feel like they’d contributed to the running of things.
I spent the first few months of my new life sentence swallowing snail pellets in the prison fernery or sneaking sips of detergent in the kitchen. The old bod got the hint and ran with it. I was wheeled into the hospital wing. My insides were being scoured out, that’s how it felt, and the doctors thought they’d help the process along by forcing vials of bitter medicine down my throat. Soon only my skin would remain: a costume to wear on New Years Eve. Look, it’s the man-woman! a giddy kid might shout, but no one would believe him. By then my skin would be that of a shrivelled-up old lady—a spinster aunt or a librarian or a nun—as interesting as dregs of tepid tea left in the bottom of cups. Not a man, never a murderer, nothing as exciting as that.
A nurse pressed her fingers into my stomach to watch me wince, then whispered, Cancer.
A terminal illness. What a relief!
Turned out cancer was an alien creature, living off my stomach acid, knocking me out for days at a time. And as the weeks dragged on, I wished it could’ve been a bit more clear on when it was planning to terminate.
When I came to, I watched the walls move under their bugs. What never moved were two rows of steel cot beds, their starched sheets tucked stiffly in. Down my end was a curtained-off corner, the curtains embroidered with cross-stitched religious scenes. I saw Jesus wash Mary Magdalene’s feet before a gust blew the curtains back, revealing the drawn face of a woman sitting on the bed beside me. I wondered if she was an angel. Her face was long and thin, her nose beak-like; the curtains moved like wings. She sat, staring at the medicine cabinet on the far wall.
Mary, I said.
She didn’t flinch.
Mary, I said again.
I felt a rush of love for her, possibly because I’d rolled off my morphine drip, but at the time, with the light shifting from white to yellow in her wings, I thought this woman could save me. She rose and walked towards the locked cabinet on the far side of the room. Was she walking? She seemed to float. She scanned the room slowly, coolly, then picked the lock with a bobby pin drawn from her mass of dark, wavy hair. She took a vial from the cabinet, drank it, replaced it with something hidden in her blouse, locked the cabinet and floated back.
What did you put in there? I thought, or maybe asked.
Don’t worry, she said, only something I found in the cleaning cupboard. Nothing you people could distinguish fro
m the filth you drink at the pub.
When I next opened my eyes, she was unconscious. Her nose was an arrow aimed straight at God.
Later, I woke to hear the woman sobbing, to see the bones of her spine nudging up against the silk of her petticoat—silk, not the rough cotton of our nightshirts. The sharp blades of her shoulders rose and fell, almost cutting the silk from underneath. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, hooked over, facing the wall. She had a cathedral dome for a sinus, her sobs lifted towards the roof like miserable angels of their own.
Are you alright? I asked.
She couldn’t hear me.
Mrs, what’s your name?
She stopped sobbing for a moment. Di, she said. Lady Diana Reay.
And what’s the matter, Lady Reay?
They hate me, she said.
Who hates you?
All of them. They snigger behind their hands when they come to the library.
I’d heard of Lady Reay. She was an aspiring film actress from Sydney’s North Shore. She didn’t have to sew buttonholes on pillowcases or clean out the loos. When she was well, she got to be prison librarian. And she slept in the hospital wing whether she was ill or not, never in the cold stone cells below.
I guess you’re a novelty, I said. A lady from the north side of the harbour.
Yes, in this place I’m even more of a novelty than the wife-killing man-woman.
My cancer throbbed, releasing a wave of nausea as it did. Lady Reay turned, saw my pale face, and lifted her hand to her mouth.
Oh, she said. That’s you? But you’re just an old woman, you look nothing like a man.
Thank you, I said. I supposed she’d meant it as a compliment. You can call me Jean.
She turned her back on me again, hung her head low. I’m terrible at this.
What, talking to people?
Yes, she said. I suppose they are people.
The light behind her dimmed then flared. Her wings quavered. She lifted her head to the pale green light coming in from the high window.
Finally, a storm, she said. These are the wildest moments of my life, now.
The first drop hit the roof, dragging others down with it. They rattled in the gutters like pebbles thrown from the clammy fists of little boys. The sound filled the ward, and it was the closest thing to silence you could hope for in a place like that.
Thank you, she said over the roar. This has been a comfort to me, Jean. This little chat.
When I was well enough I was allowed to meet Lady Reay in the library between two and four, before I was locked up with my conscience and supper for the night. Yes, Rita, we had a library and even a fernery, but it was hardly a holiday camp.
The library was where the prison’s dust gathered to mate—under dustjackets, between pages—and if you opened a book it escaped into the air only to hang, unsure of where to go next. Lady Reay ordered me to sit at a table piled high with newspapers. On top: a photograph. Two men, one short and tense, one bulky as a rugby thug. I knew the angle of the small man’s cocked fedora, remembered the feel of that sweaty hatband against my forehead. It was a picture of Harry Crawford leaving court with Detective Robson. The picture was only months old, but the small man in it was so different to the woman looking at it now, in her grey cotton dress, with grey hair long enough to curl behind the ear.
The next paper also boasted Harry Crawford’s face. There were hundreds of newspapers open at pictures of Harry Crawford, and too many Crawfords, all of them slightly obscured. As Lady Reay proudly pointed out, some were from as far afield as Western Australia.
I closed my eyes to shut them out and felt Lady Reay watching for signs I might break down. Perhaps she was as mad as her lawyers had made out.
I think it’s time you took charge of all this, don’t you? she said.
I thought there was nothing more they could do to me now, but there was. They could take what life I’d lived and cut it to bits, then twist each bit into a sinister, mangled mess. These Crawfords lived their own lives, separate from mine. I looked at them from high up, outside of time and my own skin. I read syllable by syllable, each detail stretched out, stammered through, wrangled by the tongue. Lady Reay sat patiently by, her long breasts resting on the table, her neck craning over the paper in front of us.
The tree … al . . .
Trial, said Reay.
Trial off …
Of, said Reay.
The trial of Eugene Falleni, the …
Man-woman.
Man-woman … on … the k-ha … k-har …
Charge. C-h is ch.
Charge off …
Of—
It was exhausting, but I wanted to know what happened next. Would your mother testify against her own trouser-wearing mother? What would Lydia say, who had been Crawford’s closest friend? There was a chance they’d say something different in the world of paper and ink.
Two weeks of reading lessons was all it took for the cancer to return. The pain was easy to ignore while scrubbing pans in the kitchen, but in the library Harry Crawford twisted the wedding band around his finger as he waited for his hearing to start, and I was standing in the dock again, searching for Lizzie’s plump cheeks, her earnest Scottish brow, her gloved hands clutching the handle of her handbag propped on her lap as if it was holding her together. I never did see her for the parade of former friends taking it in turns to stand in my line of sight and speak as if Harry Crawford never minded their kids or shared a scotch; as if they’d never heard of loyalty. How eager they all were to be part of the show.
Soon I was down one end of the hospital wing again. The doctor was playing the role of a man at peace with the company of prisoners, but behind his composed face he was mentally checking that his wallet was safely out of reach of the grasping, grubby fingers of convict women.
Mrs … ? he checked his clipboard. Falleni?
Yes?
You will have to stop imbibing cleaning products if you want your condition to improve.
Doctor?
We’ve run tests, he said. I’ve no idea how you’ve managed to smuggle mouthfuls of the stuff, considering we’ve a warder watching you twenty-four hours a day.
A warder was, in fact, sitting in a hard-backed wooden chair where Reay’s bed had been.
I panicked. Please, no. Reay can’t be dead, too.
Where’s Lady Reay?
Who? the warder asked. No ladies here, love.
Lady Diana Reay. Where is she?
Oh, her. The warder laughed and nodded at the neatly made bed under the window behind me. I could have sworn the room had flipped. You mean Mrs Dorothy Mort? She’s at the Coast Hospital seeing the head-shrinkers. Don’t worry, she’ll be back soon enough.
The warder said Mrs Mort’s expensive lawyers got her off a murder charge by claiming she was mad. The warder said she called herself Lady Reay and shot her doctor lover in the parlour of her Lindfield home. The warder said she spent Sundays reading poetry in bed because she didn’t like the way the prison chaplain pronounced his vowels. The warder said she was highly educated. And look where it got her.
She said this as if I hadn’t heard it all before.
I wondered if, when a woman with a nose like Reay’s looked up, even just to make out the pattern of a stain on the ceiling, it’d be hard not to think she was giving herself airs. But was she giving them to herself, or did these airs swarm around her? She’d had advantages I’d never had. They said she was insane to excuse her for behaving like a member of the criminal class, but she was no more insane than me. If we were weighed in the justice scales, they’d be down on my side. I knew this, but right then I decided: me and Reay would be friends. There’s something about a proud woman that gets me on my knees. I want to build pedestals for them, so they never have to see how grotty the world really is.
That night I dreamed of Daisy, for the first time since she left.
That house of ours was a cold dark place full of cheap furniture, but the way Daisy cleaned,
it always looked brand new. My face looked back at me from every polished surface and I felt as if I couldn’t sit down anywhere, or play music on the wireless in case it made the curtains flutter out of their folds. After a few drinks, she’d loosen up, and maybe sit on my lap on the front porch for the whole street to see. But something died in her after I lost my job; it didn’t matter how many glasses of ale I poured, she sat stiff and cold as a frozen pig on the hook.
Hooked on songs my next wife was. After Daisy’s icy silence, Lizzie was my barrel organ wife. She hummed tunes under her breath and our curtains always danced.
After Lizzie disappeared, I decided to build a wall inside myself, with music on one side, where it could play without me having to hear it.
But then sometimes it would come at me from the outside.
My wall was still hardening when the gangster Pretty Tilly organised the first concert for us. She treated her Long Bay stints like well-deserved R&R and this time she was going to have the best singers you’d ever pay two pounds to see in the posh theatres of Sydney.
Are ya coming to the concert? was all she asked anyone. Are ya coming? Are ya coming? I got youse the next best thing to Dame Nellie, you’d be a fucken deadshit if ya didn’t go.
I shook my head. Too old for concerts.
Don’t give me that shit, Jeanie.
I smiled, or the muscles tightened on my face—I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.
Everyone had to go to the concert, even Lady Reay. If you didn’t go, Pretty Tilly would take it personal. There’d be a mix-up in the kitchen: concrete dust in the hominy, gravy in your underwear.
I pulled a lot of strings to get these girls to come out here and sing to you, so you—
She coughed up a fruity one. At twenty-five, her voice was already curdled with phlegm.
Alright, I said. What’s the worst that could happen?
Exactly.
She cocked her head, sweet as a puppy that just shat on the floor.
We sat on wooden benches straight as church pews and even the warders seemed uneasy. The skills of the theatre usherette were not part of their job descriptions.
Sit down and shut up, and if ya even think of heckling there’ll be no more concerts, you got it?