by Carmel Bird
We’re moving—are we moving? He said this several times and Ida felt it prudent to give the evening primrose an imperceptible wave. The elevator slid gently into motion and they arrived at the ground floor. The security guard at the front desk woke up from a little dream he had been having, unaware that on his elevator monitor he had just missed something that resembled a scene from a silent movie—a man and a woman, both in evening dress, having a sort of picnic between floors.
Ida found that her imagination was gripped by Lawrence. Ida had fallen in love in that brief time between the ground floor and basement one. She was moved also by the thought of the obvious cruelty of his ex-wife, Georgina. Ida would comfort Lawrence; he would not have to weep again. She dashed down to a fire extinguisher and plugged in her morning glory. Nellie, Nellie, she said, all excitement. I’m bringing someone home to dinner. A simply lovely man. I met him in the elevator on his way to Lodge. Do we have cognac? I think he would like that.
It is a coincidence, Ida said to Lawrence in the elevator when he was going home after Lodge, that we should meet again. They both laughed and hoped the thing wouldn’t stick between the floors. You have your car? he said, and Ida said that actually she didn’t have a car—had something else to show him. Perhaps he didn’t realise, but the very latest thing to do was to travel round the city by underground waterway. He said he thought he had read about it somewhere. Perhaps it was in the colour supplement of the Saturday paper.
Lawrence Honey, as if in a trance, stepped into the rowing boat. He felt a drowsy humming feeling running through his blood. The beautiful woman, so reminiscent of a fairy from a ballet or a picture book, took the oars, and smiled. He smiled. The small black attaché case of the Invisible Lodge slipped silently from his hand into the water.
They found the attaché case caught in weeds some miles downstream. They never found a body. Vanished into thin air. The white silk scarf embroidered with Lawrence’s own secret symbol turned up at the State Library some years later. A baby boy who was manufactured in the hospital was named Lawrence Honey Hamilton in a gesture of reparation for the man who disappeared. And in certain lights you can imagine that you see a gorgeous fairy and a man in evening dress as they step into a little rowing boat on the water underneath the car park that is underneath the Day Procedure Centre.
Ties of Blood
I wish, in a way, I could tell you that Henrietta Robinson’s uncle, Charles, raped and murdered Henrietta, but I can’t, because he didn’t. I mean, he might have, but nothing can be proved. He wanted to. He used to say he wanted to put some sense into her, and he also said he could murder her, but these things were taken as jokes, and the expression of irritation in a respectable bachelor bank manager. Irritation with a very silly niece such as Henrietta.
But somebody murdered Henrietta. Somebody raped her on the gravel of the car park at the back of her shop. The shop was Crystal Clear in Camberwell, Victoria, and there Henrietta sold oils and incense and crystals and Tarot cards and jewellery. One night at about ten o’clock somebody grabbed her in the dark and then they raped her and cut her throat and left her there, taking with them her briefcase that was supposed to contain money, make-up and papers. Leaving the remains of Henrietta and a Tarot card showing a picture of an angel with a trumpet at the Last Judgment. The briefcase was found on the golf course, empty; the contents were never found. Henrietta’s injuries were consistent with the use of a meat cleaver, but it also was never found. The newspapers played down the presence of the Last Judgment card, and I know the card was just the sort of thing Charles would be capable of thinking up. As far as I’m concerned, Charles is written all over this.
Henrietta was born in 1960, the daughter of Henry Robinson, manufacturer of footwear (Put Your Best Foot Forward in Robinson Shoes) and his wife, Anita. Henrietta was the only child and her arrival was greeted with flowers and champagne and cigars and photographs. They were the surface things. Actually Anita opened up like a large sea-creature, say a giant mussel, and Henrietta was pushed and pulled and squeezed and choked until finally she was squirted into the light with splashes of blood. So you say that Anita gave birth to Henrietta, and that Henrietta was born. She was attached to Anita by a telephone cord of blood vessels, but this was soon severed and Henrietta, who was covered in slime, a kind of green and purple and white cream cheese, was washed. Her nose and throat were cleared of gunk with a little vacuum cleaner. She was wrapped in a pink blanket and put in a plastic box and deposited in line with all the other babies in their boxes. They lay in the nursery like a row of larvae in the nest of a large insect.
Charles visited his sister Anita in the hospital. He brought flowers for Anita and a white teddy bear for Henrietta. There was the christening and then there were the birthday parties and for many years Charles was a doting uncle. Then it became clear that Henrietta was a bit eccentric, a bit alternative, a bit environmental, even a bit feminist or whatever. Vegetarian. Animal rights. Then it was crystals and Tarot. And then she opened Crystal Clear across the road from the bank where Charles was manager, and she was no longer a joke as far as Charles was concerned. She was embarrassing and deeply disappointing. He actually voiced those words to Anita one afternoon in the garden. I heard the words. My garden is divided from Anita’s by a high brick wall, but the tinkle of the wind chimes and the sound of certain words float up over the wall and land in my place. ‘Deeply disappointing,’ he said. ‘An embarrassment to me, a shop full of ground unicorn tusk and superstitious claptrap.’ Anita said it was a thriving business and then she said it was harmless and then she said there might be something in it anyway, and Charles snorted and said he would discuss it with the vicar. Then Anita laughed and told him he was a fuddy-duddy out of the Ark. He said that in any case telling fortunes was against the law.
Henrietta made money out of telling people’s fortunes. She believed in the stars. And so on. She resembled a lovely pantomime fairy—covered in strange silver jewellery, a ring on every finger. Henrietta could look into your eyes and remark on the state of your liver. Across the road her Uncle Charles trotted richly around the bank in a dark Gucci suit and a silk Dior tie and he resembled a figure in a painting by René Magritte. Charles might have appeared from behind a tree in a park at twilight in a long dark overcoat and a bowler hat, with a furled umbrella and a mad glint in his eye. You can see I have an imagination, and I have admitted I have no real evidence that it was Charles who killed Henrietta, but deep down I know. He hated her for the apparent freedom of her spirit, and I have always believed him to be capable of violence. That type usually is. They spend their lives collecting stamps and butterflies—beautiful things but dead—and then one day they turn up at the railway station with an old service rifle and shoot the station master, a perfect stranger, and half-a-dozen innocent travellers.
But even a man like that would hardly go and murder a niece in real life, everyday life, would he? Splatter her blood on the gravel of the Crystal Clear car park and run off with his meat cleaver into the night.
The photograph of Henrietta in the newspaper resembled, if you could see past the jewellery and the layers of white chiffon, the image of her own great-grandmother Eliza in a photograph taken in Hobart over a hundred years ago. An irony is that it was this old picture of the ancestor that gave Henrietta the idea that, according to my theory, led to her tragic death.
Henrietta Robinson
Born: 1960
Saw Picture of Great-Grandmother: 1989
Died: 1992
One night in the summer of 1992 a man grabbed Henrietta from behind and tore off her white satin knickers and raped her on the gravel and then he severed her neck with a meat cleaver and her blood went spurting and splattering all over her white chiffon shirt and all over the yellow gravel, onto the blooms of the angels’ trumpets that dangled over the fence. Then this man, covered in blood, must have got in his car, which was parked in the street, taking with him the briefcase and the weapon and tossing the Tarot card onto
the blood-stained gravel beside the body. He wiped the briefcase carefully and chucked it onto the golf course. The police called for witnesses to come forward. Nobody had heard a sound. Nobody had seen a thing. Blind, deaf and dumb, the people in the apartments behind the car park slumbered on while the man with the meat cleaver chopped into the throat of the woman from Crystal Clear.
In 1989, when Henrietta saw the photograph of her ancestor and noticed the resemblance between herself and the other woman, she had her fatal (so I say) idea. Henrietta began to investigate the Robinson family tree.
There were Scots who came to Tasmania in 1850. Then there were Irish. There were French, German, Dutch, English, Welsh, Russian. The woman who looked like Henrietta was Irish, from County Galway. Anita and Henry and even Charles took a mild interest in Henrietta’s strange sudden passion for the past. It was probably like many of her other passions—a passing phase—like ballet and the violin and making satin handbags. But Henrietta became obsessed. She went to Tasmania and then to France and England—Ireland, Scotland, Wales. She wrote letters filled with strange accounts of visits to graveyards and to peculiar old ladies in foreign nursing homes. The long-lost cousin in Cambridge took her out to tea.
It went on and on, and in her imagination Henrietta saw always blood, blood trickling and gushing and rushing and flowing across the seven seas, blood surging over centuries; she saw it like the ribbons of red light you see at night when cars stream along the highway. And these ribbons of blood end up in Henrietta; she is the vessel at the end of the rope of blood.
Henrietta’s imagination was a closed book to her family. What they knew was the filing cabinet, the notes, the letters, the documents, the photographs. And then one day she said that she was ready to present the results of her research.
You know what’s coming, don’t you? There must be enough clues.
Henrietta unrolled a big complicated scroll on the dining-room table, and Henry and Anita and Charles bent over it in amazement and fascination. Actually, Henry and Anita were thrilled and very interested. They were proud of Henrietta and had become quite keen to know the details.
Then Charles saw…the thing. He stared for a long time and then he looked up at Henrietta with a cold hard glare. He said: ‘This bit about Eliza and the man called Lenney is quite wrong. If you are trying to suggest, Henrietta, that there is Aboriginal blood in the family, you are going to be very disappointed. There is no such thing.’
Henrietta argued and the whole day was spoilt. ‘You will need,’ Charles said, ‘to do some real research. Or, better still, I suggest you drop the whole idea and take up another hobby altogether. This fabrication only makes you look a fool, and it is, furthermore, very, very destructive to the good name of this family. Next you will be saying your mother is some kind of prostitute and your father is a member of the Mafia. You’ll have me running some giant drug ring, I suppose.’ Henrietta simply said quietly that he wouldn’t know how.
But Henrietta was obsessed. Her fascination with the Aboriginal blood in the family tree had become a compulsion. She started to campaign for Land Rights for Tasmanian Aborigines and she identified herself as Aboriginal. I’m not really up in these things, and I never know where to put the capital letters. I wish I had been able to talk to Henrietta, but she was gone before I had a chance. I have talked to Anita—we have always been on good terms—but of course I haven’t said anything about my suspicions. I think she knows anyway.
That’s it really. That’s all I know. I wish I could tell you it was all true, that Charles did those things to Henrietta. In my heart I know he did, but because I can’t prove anything, I just have to bite my tongue. Bite my tongue and bide my time and let things run their course. I tell the story to my little white cat—she’s deaf and wouldn’t breathe it to a soul in any case. I walk past Crystal Clear when I go to the bank. Charles, of course, is never visible, lurks behind locked doors. I put my money in and take my money out and discuss the weather with the tellers and imagine the blood that seeped into the gravel flowing in an underground stream and welling up in Charles’s office, a gorgeous crimson fountain. What would he do? Call a plumber, I suppose. Complain to the Camberwell Council. Donate it to the Blood Bank. I bide my time and bite my tongue and wait for things to run their course.
Affair at the Ritz
Speaking as a dying cockroach, I tell you it is nice to have spiders and insects like you to talk to. My voice is faint and muffled, but I know you can hear me, and I sense your sympathy and kindness. I know you would help if you could.
I am reasonably philosophical, but tonight has been almost too much for me. Tonight I have discovered that I am unable to face death calmly. I do not want to die.
I have lived in this bathroom all my life, raised a large family with hundreds of descendants all over the hotel. Two years ago I was Grandmother of the Year. We always have a huge reunion in the kitchen on Christmas Eve, and next time I won’t be there. I can’t bear to think of it—the sea of shiny backs and handsome feelers—and I will never know it again.
It’s because I’m getting old, slowing down, that I’m in my present state. Once upon a time I could anticipate a human visit to my bathroom, even before the human thought of it. But tonight she turned on the light and there I was—marooned on the tiles, halfway between the bath and the handbasin.
She hated me with a radiant hatred. She must have realised I knew all about her, and she hated me for that. She was, of course, frightened of me too. As far as she’s concerned, I am a creepy-crawly, whereas she wears satin lingerie and goes to the hairdresser twice a week. She’s in town for a brief holiday with her husband, but I have learnt to sum people up in no time. I’ve got her number, and she damn well knows it.
Her holiday consists of shopping and eating and drinking, going to the pool and the sauna and having massages. Once she had her horoscope done. Her husband tries every now and then to interest her in the theatre—they went to the ballet and the opera, but she drew the line at experimental plays. I adore that kind of thing myself. Once I went to the University in the pocket of a leather jacket and saw some students doing King Lear as flowers and vegetables. And another time I arrived at the Opera House in a velvet handbag. I heard Joan Sutherland.
Occasionally this woman goes out with her husband to humour him, but mostly her holiday consists of little trips to the boutiques and the antique shops, and then a drive to the beauty shop to have her nails done—then off to lunch.
Food is her main topic of conversation, actually, what she has and has not eaten. She says she eats the salad and not the strawberry shortcake. I wonder sometimes about that. Her figure is beyond repair, beyond belief, and must surely frighten other people in the sauna.
Oh, why was I so slow and stupid? I was having a lovely stroll along the green arabesques when on goes the light and in she comes to cleanse her face. Creams and lotions and moisturisers and all the rest of it. She is definitely not a good advertisement for Estée Lauder. Did I mention her boyfriend? He had just left, and she was moved to rush into the bathroom and remove her face.
What happens is: husband goes to the opera; boyfriend arrives with flowers and wine; lady and boyfriend laugh and drink and hop into bed; boyfriend leaves taking empty bottle; husband comes back. ‘Frank and Julia sent flowers,’ she says.
You see I do know all about this woman. And she has done for me.
We both stood still and looked at each other for quite a long time like beasts in the jungle. But I was defenceless.
She reached for her husband’s spraycan of shaving foam. She squirted a great white cloud of the stuff on me so I could see nothing and I could barely move. Then I think she put a glass over me, slid a piece of cardboard under the glass. Trapped. She wrapped the whole thing up in a plastic shower cap, took out the glass, sealed the little parcel with a rubber band.
And now I am in the little rubbish tin under the vanity unit. Waiting to die. It’s a comfort to have friends like you with whom to share
the final moments.
The Picture of Doreen Gray
Every Christmas Shadbolt Gray sent his sister Charmaine a letter.
‘Dear Char,’ he would write, ‘nothing much to report.’ And then he would go on about his work on the oil rig, the prawn trawler, the opal mine. Ever since his beloved Doreen shot through with a fireman, taking the kids and the four-wheel drive, Shad had been a real rover, never short of work, never short of mates, never short of women. Yet always in the Christmas letter there would be a wistful reference to Doreen and the kids. He never seemed to understand or accept that they were gone forever, and year after year made some allusion to the time when they would get back together, when he would have his own garage in some country town.
‘I can just about afford to buy the garage now, Char,’ he wrote. And he would allude to the fireman, not by name, or even by profession, but as ‘that shit-faced paramedic’.
Shad was well-built, suntanned and handsome, with bright green eyes and a real Kennedy-style grin. Charmaine wished he would get over Doreen’s defection and get on with his life. In fact she never understood what Shad saw in Doreen in the first place. Doreen was small and pale with wispy faded ginger hair and no eyelashes. She spoke with a whine. Shad could have had any girl he wanted—but he fell for Doreen.