The White Body of Evening

by A L McCann

  The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities pushes into territory that will be unfamiliar to Melburnians, because it presents the dark places of the imagination rather than any directly recognisable reality. It shows us what the cult of realism in our national culture has hitherto disallowed and dismissed – the psychological. To wed morality and art in the name of public respectability, as is so often our want, is to travesty both.

  Hamish McDermott was in the Eastern Arcade a few weeks after the play was banned by the Melbourne City Court in a special sitting convened to expedite a decision and conclude the whole affair before Christmas. Paul was fined fifty pounds and all copies of the play were confiscated under the Obscene Publications Act. Robert Walters, anxious that his paper’s defence of the play might lead to the discovery that the Melburnian’s chief editor was in fact the uncle of the defendant in a public obscenity hearing, had decided to reassign Hamish before the debate over The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities got any more vitriolic. Disapproving of his nephew’s efforts, which offended his own sense of social hygiene, but at the same time unwilling to undermine Paul’s interests, Robert had allowed Hamish considerable latitude in the play’s defence. But by the time legal proceedings were launched, things were becoming overly heated and he decided to redirect Hamish’s fervour towards a cause that was closer to his heart.

  So at the end of 1921, December 30 in fact, it happened that Hamish was in the Eastern Arcade, thinking about a series of articles on the decline of “marvellous Melbourne”. He had just come from a screening of a travel documentary, Sir Ross Smith’s Flight from England to Australia, and was struggling to reconcile the aerial camera work – its abstract, joyously dislocated omniscience – with the tangible sense of location he was confronted with now. Once people got used to seeing things from the sky, he thought, the tiny details that distinguish one place from another would be lost to them.

  He was supposed to be exploring the moral and physical degradation of what had once been a splendid Victorian city, writing sketches of locations like the arcade, the Eastern Market, and Little Lonsdale Street. Robert held up his own article “Eastern Arcade, or Passage of Crime?” as an indication of the general tone he wanted to convey, but the moralising of the piece was alien enough to Hamish to make him doubt his ability to manufacture it. He went to the arcade hoping to find the “miscreants” of a declining city, and seemed to be loitering himself, watching the odd person slip into one of the brothels or emerge from the stationer’s clutching a brown paper bag or a parcel squirrelled away under a folded jacket. He felt quite purposeless, as if he were waiting for something to hold his attention, and the slow meanderings of the arcade seemed to be lulling him further into this blankness when a large, loutish man with conspicuous gold teeth glistening like nuggets half-buried in his red gums brushed past him, waking him from his daydreaming.

  That was when he saw the girl. At least he thought he saw her. When he thought about it afterwards, he really couldn’t be sure. In the following weeks the newspapers were full of such detailed descriptions of her that practically anybody could have accurately visualised Alma Tirtschke gazing longingly through the plate-glass window of a fancy dress shop as she paused on her way through the arcade. She would have looked like any other schoolgirl had not her fate transformed her white cambric blouse, pleated navy-blue tunic and panama hat into symbols of an innocence devoured by the jaws of the city. If he had seen her, Hamish thought, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the exact details of her dress until the newspapers jogged his memory. But in the days and weeks that followed there she was just the same, standing before him in the arcade, the twelve-year-old schoolgirl with pale, freckled skin and auburn hair, clutching the package of butcher’s meat she had just picked up for her aunt.

  By the next morning the girl was dead. It was just after dawn when a rag-picker, a veteran down on his luck, stumbled into Gun Alley, a cobbled cul-de-sac running off Little Collins Street opposite the entrance to the arcade. The man scanned the cobblestones for bottles until the bend of the alley led him to the body. In the days that followed, the details of this discovery were not left to anyone’s imagination:

  GIRL OF TWELVE BRUTALLY MURDERED. BODY FOUND IN CITY LANE. STRANGLING CORD AND CLOTHES REMOVED FROM BODY

  One of the most horrible murders that has ever been committed in Melbourne was discovered early last Saturday morning when the nude body of a child of twelve – Alma Tirtschke – was found in an alleyway off Little Collins Street. She had been outraged, strangled with a thin cord, stripped of all her clothing, borne from the death chamber, and dumped onto the street, where the body was found.

  The spot is a narrow alleyway at the rear of shops in Little Collins Street near Exhibition Street. This lane runs east and west off Gun Alley, alongside Lane’s motor garage. Few people use the lane, and probably nobody would be in it after midnight, as an ordinary rule, though during the daytime it is always under observation by men employed in the neighbourhood.

  While walking along Gun Alley, shortly after six o’clock on Saturday morning, Henry David Errington, a bottle gatherer, saw the corpse of the murdered girl. She was lying on her back, with her legs doubled beneath her. Errington immediately ran to the butcher’s shop of Watkins and Co. in Bourke Street and telephoned the news of his gruesome discovery to the police, and Senior Constable Salts went to the scene. The girl’s auburn hair was spread out on the ground, and the position of the body suggested that she had been carefully laid down on the granite pitchers.

  People who previously had not bothered much with the news of the day certainly read the papers now. As the investigation into the murder gathered pace the pages of the city’s dailies came alive with the grim details of the crime and still grimmer speculation about it. Not since the Crimea Street murder thirty years earlier had a crime aroused such public concern. The papers introduced the phrase “lust murder” into the popular vocabulary, recounting a history that ran from Jack the Ripper to Gun Alley. “What sort of fiendish person could perpetrate this sort of crime?”The question was the subject of endless speculation. The papers were almost unanimous in their conviction that the killer would strike again and could even be hiding behind the veneer of public respectability. Sex maniacs, one prominent alienist claimed, are often “respectable” citizens or even saintly, churchgoing types with a reputation for piety. Still, it didn’t take long for public fear to turn to the arcade itself, and the maze of little alleyways associated with it.

  As Hamish read the papers, the girl’s naked body was constantly before him – hair spread out on the stones, legs folded beneath her, bruised skin around the slender, white neck. At night, when he masturbated, he couldn’t help but imagine her posing in the arcade and the killer’s hands trembling around her neck. Afterwards he felt sickened. This fleeting identification with the killer, the merest possibility of it, left him feeling polluted by his own touch. He looked at his hands – obscene lumps of flesh they were. Sometimes he imagined they’d been dug up and sewn on. The smell of them – sweat, semen and the grime of the city – repulsed him.

  But when he tried to moralise about the arcade and the murder for the paper, he found his own increasingly florid prose ill-adapted to the task. The daily papers had descended into the most mundane form of journalese. Semiliterate stuff, he thought. But next to their simple clarity his writing seemed tainted. Twice Robert withdrew Hamish’s articles and finally referred him, chidingly, to the Herald’s damning evocations of the market area. Hamish ran his eyes over the articles which pitted the menace of the evil-smelling arcade against the longing for clean, modern structures, where the sweet smell of fruit and flowers was not strangled by the reek of old, dirt-begrimed buildings. Hamish understood the metaphor perfectly. Fruit and flowers, dirt and grime. He again looked at his hands and wondered, shamefully, what they were capable of.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  On the day Alma Tirtschke was buried, crowds of weeping women laid wreaths of flowers in Gun Alle
y, and then besieged the arcade with such fervour that a police barricade had to be thrown up around the Little Collins Street entrance. The demonstration quickly died down, but a large crowd remained outside as flower-bearers continued to pay homage to the corpse of the city’s innocence.

  Paul Walters made his way down Little Collins Street, sardonically pleased at the sight of the mob his banned play had envisioned with such accuracy. He’d heard rumours that the police were close to an arrest and that the suspect was in the arcade itself, so, like hundreds of other Melburnians since the murder, he thought he’d have a look at a genuine crime scene.

  He was in need of distraction. The banning of the play had left him at a loose end, and his sister and wife had subsequently formed a conspiracy of the just against him. Under Ondine’s influence Laura had become stubborn and assertive. By the time the court case concluded she seemed glad that the play had been stopped. He suspected his sister of coaching her resentment.

  “Why do women only appear as corpses and whores?” Laura asked him.

  “It’s not supposed to be realism,” he replied.

  “Still, I think I’ve almost had enough, as if I’ve overeaten and am now feeling a bit sick.”

  He looked at her suspiciously. “My sister has got to you,” he said.

  “Rubbish.”

  Paul was already tired of the two of them. He could see they were intent on establishing their own enclave and was happy to get out of the house. He quickly forgot himself in the comforting bustle of the streets and the commotion as he approached Gun Alley.

  “Makes me think of Little Nell,” a voice said at his shoulder as he walked towards the arcade entrance. “Who wouldn’t be moved to tears?”

  The voice belonged to an impish old man whose eyes were firmly fixed on the crowd of women. He had raised his walking stick slightly in readiness, as if he expected to have to fight his way through.

  “How’s a fellow supposed to conduct a business with such a kafuffle going on?”

  Paul looked at the man intently. He was older, more wrinkled and a bit smaller, as if he’d shrunk with age. But the same bulbous eyes and round bald head were there under the brim of the flat straw hat.

  “Max? Max Wedelkind?” Paul said, astonished.

  “Good God, boy. Nobody has called me that for years.”

  “It’s Paul Walters. You remember.”

  Wedelkind paused on the pavement, put on his glasses and pushed his face closer to Paul’s.

  “Paul Walters. So it is,” he said. “I suppose you’ll be coming to me for a bit of help now that your play is bust? I thought you would have been smarter than to try it on back here.”

  “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Oh, I just turn up where I’m needed.”

  The police outside the arcade shepherded Paul and Wedelkind through the crowd.

  “You see that bloke behind the bar in the wine saloon?” Wedelkind said, pointing to a large fellow with gold teeth. “He’s the one who’ll hang for that girl’s death.”

  “How the hell do you know that?” asked Paul.

  “It’s my job to know these things.” He stopped outside a shopfront. “Oscar Kismet – Phrenologist” was painted in red letters on the door.

  Wedelkind dangled some keys, fiddled with the lock, and led Paul into an office where he slung himself into an old chair and lit a cigarette. There were astrological charts on the wall, weird symbols from Eastern mysticism and some ornately illustrated tarot cards, one of which depicted the grim reaper as a skeleton concealed behind the mask of a smiling young woman.

  Wedelkind noticed Paul’s eyes resting on the card.

  “You show them death, let them think you can see death, and they’ll believe anything. It’s the oldest trick in the book. That’s how I know about poor Ross down there in the wine saloon. He’s a bit simple, really. He watched his mates mangled in the trenches. Now he sleeps in the same room as his brother and screams at night. Maybe even pisses himself and could have a touch of the syph as well. All those country brothels in France, you know. I told him he might do someone in if he couldn’t control his urges and sure enough the bloke has been true to my word. There are half-a-dozen whores here who’ll see him hang sure as the sun will rise.”

  Paul stared in amazement at the aged impostor in front of him. For a moment it was all too fantastic to be real.

  “And now you’re a phrenologist? What on earth is that?”

  “It’s nothing really. An ambiguous kind of calling I’ll admit, a hangover from last century, though I’ve always had a bit of a talent with other people’s heads.” Wedelkind smiled mischievously. “Now, I suppose you’d like me to tell you your future, wouldn’t you?”

  “No, not at all,” Paul said, aghast.

  “Well, what else are you doing here?”

  Paul looked stunned. Had the man really forgotten that he had almost single-handedly moulded Paul’s fate?

  “Who are you?” Paul said.

  “Who am I? Didn’t you read the door?”

  “Kismet. Fate. What nonsense. I must be dreaming.”

  “Dreaming? Oh, I like that.” Wedelkind looked thoughtful for a moment. “You know,” he said, pointing his smouldering cigarette at Paul, “I bet you could do a good job with poor old Ross down in the wine saloon. Was there ever a better subject for one of your horrible little plays? And think of the controversy. You’ll probably burn in hell for it, to use a dated metaphor, but your name will burn much brighter than that in the inflamed imagination of posterity.”

  Paul was on the verge of wringing his neck or dragging him out into the arcade and unmasking him, but felt sufficiently light-headed that he let the moment pass and simply sat there breathing in the pungent, scented smoke of Wedelkind’s cigarette.

  “You know,” Wedelkind continued, “these are the last days of the Eastern Arcade. We can all read the writing on the wall. Soon they’ll raze the place and turn it into some sterile department store or office block. A shame really. The last little bit of devilry will be gone. That will be a sad day, my friend. You, who have been such a part of it all, should appreciate that. There’ll be nothing left for the likes of you or me when places like this are gone. There’ll be horror, to be sure. But of a blander, less appealing variety. So make the most of it, that’s what I say. Make the most of it, Paul Walters. You come from a famous literary family, after all.”

  He leant back in his chair, cigarette in hand, and pulled a book down from the shelf behind him. It was the English version of Romanze zur Nacht. Wedelkind opened a marked page and read, “‘In the Eastern Arcade I met a man who said that I would sell myself, or reap profit from the dead.’You see,” he added, “this is such a wonderful book because everything is in it. Everything is written. What ever did become of my young friend Klessmann? Never mind.” He closed the book and gestured to the door. “Good day then, Mr Walters. May Kismet smile on you.”

  Paul stood up, stunned. When he re-entered the arcade the light had turned a murky green. The crowd was still gathered at the Little Collins Street end, but was thinning. Amongst the women emerging from Gun Alley, where the floral tribute to the dead girl now covered the ground, he noticed his own mother, looking pale and tired in the steady movement of pedestrians up and down the narrow street. He turned away from her, confident she hadn’t seen him, and walked the other way.

  Wedelkind’s voice echoed in his ears. It was as if the old charlatan were still speaking to him, insinuating himself into his consciousness until Paul couldn’t quite distinguish his own thoughts from the words that drifted about him on clouds of clove-scented smoke. As the fumes overwhelmed him, he felt himself go dizzy and then a bit blank. The nauseating fog rushed to his brain. He had to grip the wall beside him.

  “Who wouldn’t be moved to tears?” a voice whispered.

  He looked around, but there was no one there. He regained his composure and it occurred to him then and there that he would write a play about the murd
er, and shock the city to its very foundations. Why not? What did he have to lose? The audacity of it. It was brilliant.

  He had visions of a madman with gold teeth, a shell–shocked veteran shaking with fear as he stalked the child, watching her innocent movements as she looked with wonder at the sights of the arcade and the subterranean figures emerging from its depths. He saw the old rag-picker stumbling over her body, falling in love with the corpse as the whole city had done, and the vengeful mob prowling the arcade for the killer. The play would slice through the consciousness of the city like a burning knife, etching his own bleeding initials indelibly in its memory.

  When he got back to St Vincent Place Laura and Ondine were seated opposite each other in the sitting room, each nursing a different volume of Balzac’s Human Comedy. It was hot outside, and when Paul entered he was sweating. He flew to Laura and dropped himself down beside her. “I’ve had a wonderful idea,” he said. He was already clutching his wife’s hands. “We can perform the Alma Tirtschke murder. Call it ‘The Gun Alley Atrocity’. It will send the place into convulsions.”

  Ondine stood up, book in hand, glanced at Laura and left the room. Paul, in his fervour, barely noticed her exit. Laura looked down into the folds of her dress.

  “You don’t think it’s a good idea?’ he asked. “It will make us here. It will put us on the map and show up those prudes for the idiots they are.”