Half Wild
Page 27
That was Mavis, number-one warder. She seemed nervous that we might start enjoying ourselves—or, worse, that she might crack a smile, and the smile would lead to God knows what carefree emotions cartwheeling up to her tear ducts. What if she cried in front of us? Her eyes moved from face to face, looking for a whisper to catch.
Pretty Tilly had it worked so we got the most handsome couple currently treading the Tivoli boards. No nightclub tarts for us. They were decked out in diamonds and furs and really gave the first-timers something to daydream about. You could dress like this too if you worked for me, those furs said.
The man at the piano began with such gusto that the warder who played hymns winced with every clang, but the young girls up the front jiggled their shoulders in time to the sounds and looked at each other and clapped their hands.
Oh, this one! I love this one!
The look on Pretty Tilly’s face was that of a shark who’d just cruised past a school of bream.
The singer’s first notes quivered over our heads like bubbles frightened of popping and I was taken off to the Coogee Palace Aquarium with Lizzie, my hands small on her generous arse. She showed me how to dance and laughed at the stiffness of my shuffle across the floor. She’d wanted to be out amongst young things jostling across the dance floor, each woman the star of her own penny romance, and so Lizzie moved me through clusters of sideways glances, her own eyes stubbornly looking straight into mine. What could she see there? Only what she needed, because she smiled, her teeth all angles, her cheeks as round as puddings, in love with her Harry.
Her Harry. No one else’s, not even mine.
Around us drifted schools of tropical fish dozing in water murky with their own shit. There must have been a thousand bright humans in that aquarium-walled room, the notes of the band floating up, up, up.
By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea,
You and me, you and me, oh how happy we’ll be!
When each wave comes a-rolling in,
We will duck or swim,
And we’ll float and fool around the water.
Over and under, and then up for air,
Pa is rich, Ma is rich, so now what do we care?
I love to be beside your side, beside the sea,
Beside the seaside, by the beautiful sea.
And afterwards, outside, eating ices with our toes in the sand, she said, I’ll look after you like a wife, but if they ever find you out I’ll say I never knew.
I should’ve told her that she was not the first, that Daisy had tried and not lasted the distance, but I only said, Of course.
A wave licked the sand along the shoreline and I thought of her toes, how they’d taste. My skin tingled like algae lighting up at night. It will be different this time, I told myself, because by then it was impossible to tell myself anything else.
That conversation eventually weathered away and it got to a point where I—then Harry—couldn’t be sure it had happened.
I played to our story. Took care to strap on my member with the door locked, in case she stumbled in to see how alien the thing was that gave her pleasure. But she knew. Of course she knew. How could she not have known? She must have unlearned the knowledge, so she didn’t have to feel so strange.
One year was all it took for her dream husband to turn real.
I’m pregnant! she said one morning, her teeth in an akimbo grin.
She went red because pregnant made her think of what we’d done in bed for her to end up that way.
She was almost telling the truth. We had both given each other a feeling as new and fragile as an egg. We spoke to each other tenderly, in case it should break.
Where was Lizzie now? I imagined her walking to the edge of that rickety pier at Coogee, the pylons collapsing under the heaviness left in her when they took me away.
I heard her howling in the foyer of the CIB from my corner of the overnight cell, two storeys below sea level.
Christ, an old drunk said. Sounds like a whale giving birth up there.
A girl pissing in the corner laughed.
I could’ve smacked their criminal heads together, but I was heavy myself and could not move.
Like Daisy before her, Lizzie was older than me. She knew more than me, but she didn’t know how to swim. Maybe drowning for her would be like dancing for me: spinning delirious past the blank stares of fish.
By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea / You and me, you and me, oh! How happy we’ll be, the couple sang last. The skin beneath my eyes began to twitch. A warder was watching. Don’t cry. Don’t cry now.
Talentless tarts, Lady Reay said on our way out of the hall. All the same it took me two days to recover. Sentimental songs are unnatural spells. They make your blood flow backwards, your memories start speaking in tongues. I was not strong enough for Pretty Tilly’s concerts.
What’s the worst that could happen? I’d asked.
Two wives dead, over and over. That’s all.
When I next made it to the library, Reay pulled me behind the library shelves to say she had news. They wanted to take a piece of her brain away, she said.
You’re not going to let them, are you? I was worried by the look of wonderment on her face.
Of course I am, she said, if it means they’ll let me out.
But will it turn you into a vegetable?
Perhaps, she said, but I don’t have much to lose anymore.
They discussed Reay’s operation in the press, and a woman recently released thought she’d contribute by gabbing about Mrs Mort’s special treatment in gaol. After that they were even more eager for bits of her brain, but not so keen on the idea of letting her loose. When they told her she wouldn’t be released—not even to gain strength before her operation or to recover afterwards—she flat out refused to let them take any of her brain, not a single grey worm of it.
She found me tugging at weeds in the fernery and shouted at me as I did, but the fierceness of her conviction was too strong for her delicate frame and she looked about to break.
They shan’t do it. What’s the benefit to me? she said. That I might not become so drearily bored staring at the walls of the prison hospital, day in day out? I would rather be an hysteric in this place; at least it gives me plenty to think about.
I sprayed a fern with pesticide, and Reay enjoyed the nervous release of a sneeze.
Lovely, she said, suddenly calm. Thank you, Jean, I needed that.
A psychiatrist came, and Mr Mort, her husband, and an old family doctor who had stitched up the heads of her brother and mother after her father had attacked them with the blunt end of an axe. She decided to have a cold when they came to talk her into the operation. She wanted them to find her in bed, because it gave her an opportunity to wear her navy kimono with the pink irises. The men fluffed her pillow and asked the warders how she was. After they left she was right as rain, not a sniffle in sight.
You see, there is a taint, Reay whispered to me in the exercise yard.
We were doing our stretches. All of us in grey cotton, Reay in silk. Occasionally she joined in.
I never was mad until my father woke up that night, and hacked into Mother’s head with the axe, she said, arms up straight as a pole. It was the fear of madness that finally pushed me over the edge. When you stare straight into the eyes of whatever it is you are most afraid of becoming, you start emulating it, despite yourself. The warder leading us through our routine had one leg forward. She lunged and we did too, as far as our stiff hips let us go. They always said I had my father’s eyebrows, Reay said. That’s all I could think of when they told me what he’d done. I should have been grieving, or crying, but I was thinking of his eyebrows.
Above us, the blue sky stretched up into forever. From where we lunged in the exercise yard, it looked like that was all there was beyond the prison walls. I wondered if her father thought he was doing his family a favour, slicing off the tops of their heads so they could find release.
But then, in the
library, she told me she’d changed her mind again. She’d been reading plays, she said, and had an epiphany. It was all an act, she said. My fainting at my trial, my muttering about world trips and babies. And yet the strangest thing began to happen. I couldn’t tell the difference anymore between acting and its opposite. Or, rather, I realised I didn’t know what its opposite was. Truly, the only time one is not acting is when one is out cold, and that is only because one has no memory of it. Even whilst lightly sleeping one plays picture shows behind the eyelids. She took me by the hands. Jean, don’t you see? If everything is acting, then nothing is genuine. Or, rather, everything acted is all that is genuine. So perhaps I am as mad as I have affected to be. And by that logic, yes, they should take a piece of my brain.
They eventually did operate on Reay. They came at night and took her to the Coast Hospital in a slick black motorcar. She was gone for two weeks, and when she came back she did nothing but sleep for months. I missed her ibis-beak nose, her pendulum breasts, her knees like the knees on a giraffe. I missed her coolly watching on as I worked like every other prisoner in the place, but I had my own ghosts to worry about. No one was allowed to distract her, the library was closed, and even the other prisoners stopped slagging her off behind her back. Most of us resented the special attention she received, that was true, but the special attention of psychiatrists was something no one envied.
In the fernery, I squashed the bright green caterpillars between finger and thumb, and let the slaters roam free. To be brown or grey, I thought, is not such a terrible fate.
Ever since the concert I hadn’t been sleeping right. And the problem with not sleeping right in a place where every day is the same is that days take on the feel of dreams, and dreams become as dull as days. One moment no longer leads to another; it threads back into itself, from the future into the past, like the backstitch on Lady Reay’s curtains.
I was in the prison fernery, with a frond curled around my finger. A currawong descended from the sky. He’d found something in the tree fern—a matted feathery thing. Walking closer, I could see that it was the nest of a small bird; walking closer still, I could see how the feathers came to a smooth red point, as if they’d been dipped in blood. The currawong cocked his head, and I knew what he was about to do before he did it. He took the nest in his beak and tore at it. He shook the pieces away, gripped the nest and, eyeing me, tore at it again. I couldn’t see any reason for the bird to do this. Unless, of course, it had been his own nest.
To start again, Rita, I’ll start with you.
I’d known you were about to be born because your mother wrote, asking if I was on a prison pension and if so could I help her out the way a mother should when her daughter’s up the duff. Well I wasn’t, and I couldn’t, but I would’ve liked to see her nonetheless.
I planted a sapling in the fernery the day you were born and spoiled the fragile thing nearly to death with all the chicken shit it could absorb into the threads of its roots.
If it sprouted a new leaf, I imagined you had likewise grown a tooth.
You wouldn’t be that little now.
By now you can probably walk and talk, can probably read and write. My God, I’ve never stopped to think, but you’d be, what, fifteen? Sixteen? Maybe you are married! Don’t get married, Rita. You’ll only end up having visions of your spouse lying dead in every room of the house. I tried to say as much to your mother, but she never did listen.
Josephine, my changeable daughter. I can’t shake the sweet smell of pigs’ innards from the memory of her. She looked like a page two girl from the magazines, even in a blood-smeared apron with her hair shoved up under a net. There was a rage in her that crackled under the skin, like a wireless being tuned. She hadn’t found a frequency that made her sing, but the crackle kept her sharp for men and girlfriends eager to have adventures they could blame on a bad influence. One week she’d be living in Marrickville, another in Pyrmont, another in Darlington, always chasing that pig Arthur. He was a gunner in the navy, she said. He got his charm from the same sea she thought her father vanished into—it was too late to tell her anything different.
Who was my dad? she asked when she was little. We delivered laundry to the houses around Double Bay and the driving was long, the questions inevitable.
I told her about the steamer that went the wrong way to Sydney—from Wellington via London. I told her I saw the Queen at her silver jubilee, and that she looked like an old toad dressed up in lace and a hoop skirt big enough to hide a family of twelve.
Tell me who he was, she said, and I said I thought England would’ve been everything New Zealand only dreamed it could be, because anyone who was from there looked at you all smug if you said you were from anywhere else. They shared a secret, those people, a special mark in their blood. But when I got there it turned out to be a vague, grey country where the rain didn’t fall so much as hover above the ground. Children worked in factories and everyone got by on bread and dripping if anything at all, unless you were the Queen. In that case, you got by on children basted in bacon fat. It was no wonder half of England came to live on the far side of the world, where the sky was big and bold and there was space enough to be whoever you damn well wanted to be.
That’s not true, she said. You never visited the Queen.
You bet I did, I said.
She sulked, so I told her about the island traders I met in the Pacific on the way back; I told her about how they dived for pearls when pearls were still plentiful and offered themselves up in clams the size of dinner plates.
Just tell me his name, then, she said, exhausted, because by then we had arrived at a house and she knew I’d use the unloading of sheets as an excuse to change the subject.
Martello, I said. Captain Martello. It was a grand-sounding name, just like she would’ve wanted.
A name was never enough.
Even after she fell in love with Arthur, the idea of him at least, she had to know the sight of her could wind every man in the street. If not, something needed fixing. Her hem was too low. Her feet too flat. The sheen of her eyes too dull.
Nina, she announced when we worked side by side in the meatworks, I’m gonna take up a typing career.
Yeah? I said. Her hands were gloved in pig grease. I couldn’t imagine them any other way.
Yes, she said, throwing a scrap of skin on the floor. Why don’t you ever believe me?
There was no use responding. I wanted to believe her, which was almost as good, but it was never good enough.
Those were our closest years. She couldn’t leave in a huff; we could only look at the frozen meat as we passed it under the saw.
She never did come to visit me in gaol. Our love, if you could call it that, was a mess of finger-pointing, fierce loyalty and silence.
I wished we could start again.
The beginning is a hard place to start. And now my toes are freezing and, try as I might, I can’t warm them, can’t even wiggle them. I can feel the cold skin of them, but can’t see it, can’t shift it. My toes must have turned blue by now, they must be smoking like dry ice. You’d think a nurse would notice the smoke, notice the serious reduction in temperature my toes have caused in the ward. I can feel all this, but I can’t move a muscle.
A muscle. A twitch of that tiny blue muscle under her flat foot. She hadn’t been able to move then, either, I was holding the pillow down that hard, but then that twitch of her muscle. It was so particular. She wasn’t a baby anymore, she was a person, my daughter—a very particular person—and when I let the pillow go, her chest flooded with life.
Now it aches, my chest. There is phlegm building up behind my sternum, but I can’t cough, can’t shift it. I’m drowning in battlefield mud. Suck it out of me, I want to say, but I can’t, and even if I could they wouldn’t listen.
Listen, I’d say to her now, instead of holding the pillow down. Listen, we can work it out together. I can be the father you always wanted. Listen, stop crying, let me paint him for you:
In return, he’ll show you how to fend for yourself in a world that wants you to cower.
I remember the day I found out your mother had died. It was hot at Long Bay, and for all her airs and graces, Lady Reay smelled ripe. In the library, the newspapers crackled to the touch. It was too hot to talk, so I didn’t think much of Reay’s silence when she set down a newspaper open at the obituaries. A strange choice for a reading lesson I thought, until I saw her name:
Whitby, Josephine Rita.
Beloved wife of Arthur. 26.
Tuberculosis, they said. She suffocated to death.
In the fernery, your leaves curled up, clutching at nothing but air.
Over the months that followed, I found it was best to stay out of the way of other people, in case they reminded me of someone or something or stirred the silt that had gathered at the pit of my stomach. Journalists asked after me at the front desk and the warders met their questions with blank stares the way I’d suggested. Scare the vultures off with silence, I’d said. I don’t know what to tell them, and they’ll only write the story the way they want anyway.
Lady Reay played a very different game. She had her friends write to the papers and anyone else important enough to be effective. They gave details—of her illness, prison life, how she was struggling—and gradually the accumulation of words turned like a flock of gulls on the wind. She was no longer a middle-class murderess, she was a fragile woman wrongly incarcerated, and lo and behold she was released.
I began to wet myself. Little drops that only came out when I coughed, but I was coughing a great deal at the time.
Poor dear, the warders said as I bundled up my damp bedding in the morning, she’s lost another queer chook and now she’s falling apart.
They gave me Reay’s library job to cheer me up. What they didn’t know is I wasn’t pining for Reay. I was furious. She’d killed her lover just as I’d supposedly done. The difference was, there was no doubt at all she had done it. The pieces of her story lined up, there were no jarring contradictions. She was a spoiled brat who couldn’t have the man she wanted, and so she shot him twice in the brain and through the heart as well. Nine years later she was released. Prison is a great leveller, the warders used to say, marvelling at my friendship with Reay. At first I believed them, but after seeing how easily she was released, I wasn’t so sure. A safety net followed her wherever she went. She could mess up, even murder a man, and she’d still wind up relaxing in her Mosman garden afterwards, surrounded by lavender and bees.