Disreputable People

by Penelope Rowe

  They put Walter Sims on the stand. He was impeccably dressed, dark, pinstripe suit, subdued silk tie, grooming immaculate, the epitome of prosperous respectability. Then they let loose with all his achievements. They impressed the jury with his legal qualifications (fudging his actual professional status), his work for Third World countries, his cultural pursuits, his work with deaf and dumb children, and, critically, his wife, a social worker. She was a convincing, calm witness who swore that on the afternoon in question they had been together, correcting the proofs of his latest manuscript.

  The Crown had problems. DNA results were dismissed because the samples had apparently been disturbed at the crime scene and inadequately stored in the lab. There had been too many embarrassments regarding DNA and forensic evidence in recent cases. It was not going to happen here. A sole witness who placed Walter vaguely near the crime scene was shaky on the stand, admitting that her identification was hazy, based insubstantially on her observation that the man she had seen had very hairy ears. There had been laughter in the court at this.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re off to that awful prostitute murder thing again this morning,’ scolded Kath, bringing the otto bins off the street.

  ‘She wasn’t a prostitute,’ said Aurelia sharply.

  ‘Wasn’t she? That’s what the papers said. Anyway, it seems to me,’ Kath wrestled the bins into a precise line, ‘it seems to me, some of these young girls, practically naked, late at night, you have to admit, they …’

  ‘There’s my bus,’ interrupted Aurelia.

  ‘Drop in for a drink tonight,’ called Kath after her, shaking her head. When would Aurelia realise the time had come to slow down?

  Aurelia alighted from the bus at Taylor Square. For the first time in twenty years she had broken her self-imposed smoking rules. She entered a shabby twenty-four-hour cafe, ordered black coffee and smoked. The same old thoughts that swirled through her head in the long nights beset her still. Innocent until proven guilty, justice must be seen to be done, the greatest good for the greatest number, means must justify the end … or was it end must justify the means? How did that one go, one of the great Catholic infallibles from schooldays? Was it the end could not be used to justify the means? She felt her pulse rising in distress. She dragged on the cigarette, ordered another, stronger coffee. She found herself quite incapable of untangling the semantics. The greatest evil is when good men do nothing. It is better to do the wrong thing for the right reason than the right thing for the wrong reason. Martin Luther King, Socrates, Graham Greene, Pastor Niemoller, Mandela, Cardinal Newman, Voltaire, Koestler, C.S. Lewis, de Chardin, Kath. What would they say? Do? Right? Wrong?

  She stubbed out her cigarette purposefully. Gail Sheehy’s mantra from Passages came back to her: ‘There is no-one who won’t ever leave me alone’. This is my dilemma. My decision. She strode out, bolstered by caffeine, down Oxford Street to the Downing Centre. She checked her watch. She was still early. As she had done every day of this trial, she walked the perimeter of the court block. She went past the public entrance and all the doorways that she knew from her working days—the entrances for prison vans, protected witnesses, judges, the loading bays behind which the jurors filed in and out. She knew them all so well. She stopped when she was in front of the public doors again. She saw the media contingent, the parents of the murdered girl, she saw Walter Sims’s wife, she saw learned counsel entering. She checked her watch again. Right on time. She set off around the perimeter for the final, critical circuit.

  Everyone in the court knew that the Crown simply did not have a case that would stand up against Walter Sims. Aurelia stared at the composed man in the dock. You are a murderer, she whispered to him in her mind. You lured that girl, just like you lured those other little ones years ago. I know you did and I don’t need to see the pictures that the jury have seen. I know what she would have looked like because I’ve seen the pictures of what you did to those others. You terrorised and tortured her in that waterlogged paddock until the blood and mud coated her body and face and hair, every orifice stuffed with filth, suffocating her slowly. I know how you thrust a filleting blade up through her living body, and when you were satiated and there was no more satisfaction to be had you despatched her by cutting her throat, severing it to the spine. You are evil incarnate. The Crown may not have succeeded. But neither have you.

  She looked over at the jury box. She willed them.

  miss pewsey gets a hard-on

  In the piano lessons department, Miss Estelle Pewsey almost had the eastern suburbs sewn up.

  ‘Miss Pewsey has the odour of a nun,’ said Derek Fulcher, father of a pupil and a pompous idiot, who fancied himself an intellectual. ‘The odour of virginity, milk and the chador.’ His wife, Vivienne, moisturising and toning with Clinique before bed, ignored him as best she could while accepting that intercourse would take place. Derek had a thing about nuns, made him sexy. It confirmed Vivienne and her friends’ opinion, that men were extraordinary and often very silly.

  Miss Pewsey would have given Derek Fulcher full marks for perspicacity except that it was no secret. She had actually been a nun for twenty years, before the winds of Vatican Two came howling through the bleak old Canowindra convent and bowled Sister Agnes—habit flapping, wimple askew, rosary beads clattering—into the sordid modern world. Being a nun somehow lost its relevance for her and she had left the order. Being a music teacher, she did rather better than some of her co-religious who left around the same time. Hers was a skill more readily adaptable to the secular life than novice mistress, choir mistress, portress or perpetual adoration devotee.

  Her name reverted to Pewsey, Miss Estelle Pewsey. She packed her modest valise and came to Sydney. Brave, modest, and resourceful, she rented a small flat in Bellevue Hill and took up her old ways as a music teacher. Her love of God was replaced, to a certain extent, by her love of children.

  She was in her seventies now and everybody had been taught their major and minor scales and contrary motion, ‘Für Elise’ and the ‘Chopin Prelude in E Flat Major’ by Miss Pewsey. At eastern suburbs dinner parties, in nostalgic moods, people reminisced about her, sentimental that their children were learning from their old teacher.

  ‘She’s a legend in her own lifetime,’ said Derek Fulcher authoritatively, unoriginally.

  Myths grew up around her. No-one knew for sure where she had come from and eastern suburbs habituees like to know where people come from. There was a theory that she was the illegitimate, badly-treated daughter of a deceased Prime Minister, who had exiled her to a nunnery; that she had been born to an inmate of the asylum for the criminally insane and made a state ward; that she might be Jewish; that she was the product of a virgin birth (this from Derek Fulcher). It was the men who made these outrageous suggestions. Vivienne Fulcher opined that this was because Miss Pewsey was a virgin and they couldn’t get a handle on that! It made them uncomfortable. One or two husbands had actually said aloud, not unkindly, after the sticky wine, that all that was wrong with Miss Pewsey was that she needed a good fuck. A good-natured jest; naturally, they thought the world of her.

  Miss Pewsey would have been surprised that she evinced any interest whatsoever, outside her occupation as a music teacher. She considered herself quite dull really. Admittedly, in earlier, post-convent years, Miss Pewsey had actually asked herself whether or not her sense of her own dullness might not be assuaged by a good fuck. (Not in those exact words though.) However, the years went by and the need was minimal anyway and Miss Pewsey accepted with equanimity that her life would be without sexual adventure. Her children were the pivots of her life.

  Streams of six-year-old girls (and the occasional little boy, but not enough to comment on) had been greeted by Miss Pewsey for their first piano lessons with her welcome little hug about their shoulders, the smell of methylated spirits on the yellowing ivories of her old upright piano, a Monte Carlo biscuit after the scales and before List A, and a butterscotch lolly to suck on the journe
y home. Streams of little girls had had their pudgy fingers gently curved, their wrists gently lifted, their backs gently prodded, their pose and confidence enhanced by Miss Pewsey’s ‘Lovely, darling,’ as they slipped from the cushioned piano stool at the end of the lesson. Cross-overs, duets and use of the pedal came later and Miss Pewsey made it all seem like the most tremendous achievement.

  The little ones adored her. They quickly formed the habit of telling her things, for she was that rare being, a natural and utterly trustworthy confidante. She knew the names of their pets and cut pictures out of magazines for them of cocker spaniels and kittens and white mice. Later on she knew the school projects they were labouring with and kept an eye out for magazine materials for these, too. She knew astonishing and intimate things about what Mummy said to Daddy and what Daddy said to Mummy and what Mummy said then and she kept it close.

  Her little girls grew older and inevitably, like a timer suddenly shrilling on a slow-baking oven, they were telling her about … boys. Then love. LOVE.

  Miss Pewsey sorrowed for them momentarily, before commonsense reasserted itself. It was only natural after all. But she knew, from the confidences of the little girls who had come before and grown to adulthood and wifehood and motherhood, that the discovery of love was the beginning of a lifetime of, if not pain, then frustration, disappointment, loss, with, if lucky, little bursts of ecstasy in between. Listening, it puzzled Miss Pewsey how these small, ecstatic moments made it worthwhile. But apparently they did. That was love.

  Year after year the adolescents kept coming, keeping Miss Pewsey up-to-date with the latest in singers, movie stars, fashions, boyfriends and sexual mores. She listened without judgement and never seemed shocked (although sometimes that was not easy). And all the while she urged those well-curved, less pudgy fingers through the arpeggios, Czerny studies, Lists A, B, C and D for the high grade exams. Around this time some of the older ones would drop out, too pressed by their school and/or social curriculum to give the time necessary to their music studies. Miss Pewsey could always guess which ones she was about to lose. They were the ones who grew their fingernails and painted them ox-blood red and went clackety-clackety on the keyboard, discarding forever that nice curved technique she had spent so many years instilling. Miss Pewsey was not saying goodbye to them, however, for history had shown that they would be back in a few years, bringing their own young ones. Everybody went back to Miss Pewsey.

  Just recently she had cut down her teaching hours but her life was as occupied as ever. Every morning someone arrived for morning tea, a quick cup and a gossip after tennis or the gym, and rarely was she without a companion for her evening sherry. So quiet, unassuming, so good at listening was she, that the young mothers found it restful and comforting to trust their pains and sadnesses (mostly sex-related) to Miss Pewsey over the traditional Monte Carlos. (Anything more modern in the biscuit line would have disappointed them terribly.) In her presence they could re-experience, for a short while, what they were sure they remembered as the uncomplicated, innocent peace of childhood.

  The older Miss Pewsey grew and the more she heard about sex (and she heard a lot—the eastern suburbs was apparently seething with illicit, illegal, incestuous, adulterous, despair-creating sex) the more certain she became that she was lucky to have escaped its fatal thrall. All that remained was the tiniest smidgin of curiosity.

  Then, quite unexpectedly, Estelle Pewsey had her curiosity satisfied.

  As a child she had had a fine lush head of hair. (And elsewhere too. Once, at fourteen, her mother had come upon her as she stood naked, feeding chips into the old bath heater and quite involuntarily exclaimed, ‘Oh, Estelle, it’s like a great wild bush.’ Estelle never knew whether to be ashamed or proud.) However, by the time she removed her wimple and veil, the hair on her head was no longer lush, though still respectable. Now it had become truly sparse. Backlit by the standard lamp, her scalp gleamed smoothly, the colour of honey toffee, under the grey-white wisps that she teased and sprayed every morning and mid-afternoon when she repaired her lippy. Every few weeks she took out her sewing scissors and gave it a good all-over, tidy-up snip. She was not vain and this method of dealing with her hair would have remained quite satisfactory if she had not been given, by well-meaning parents, a birthday gift of a visit to Sanctum Hair Artistry in the city.

  ‘A little bit of indulgence, treat yourself,’ said Vivienne Fulcher, presenting the voucher, hoping her dear old teacher would not be insulted.

  ‘You shouldn’t have,’ said Miss Pewsey. ‘At my age. Fancy.’

  Sanctum Hair Artistry was situated high up under the glass roof of a splendid old arcade that gleamed with the dignity of old wood, brass and leadlights. The lift appeared to be out of order and Miss Pewsey was quite puffed after the five flights climb to the Sanctum, and rather disorientated by her greeting. A person of indefinite sex welcomed her from a chaise longue with a languid wave of a pallid hand from whose fingers startling red talons scooped at the air. Not for the first time Miss Pewsey wondered how matters of personal hygiene were attended to by those with such nails, but only briefly, as she was working hard to establish what type of person was addressing her. The person wore a suit the cut of which was male, that was true, but it was a scarlet satin suit over a lamé brassiere that accentuated a deep and splendid cleavage. This person also had a pronounced beard shadow, gothically black against chalky white skin.

  ‘You’re here to be cut, are you, darl?’ said the person. ‘Cut? Cut?’ The red talons caressed the scarlet tulips that reared erotically from a slim vase. ‘Two-lips. Two-lips. Get it? Get it?’ Miss Pewsey handed over her voucher, speechless. ‘Oh, yes,’ said the person. ‘Stephan’s going to do you. Take a pew … see.’ And laughed maniacally.

  Miss Pewsey sat gingerly down on a large pouffon, arranged her handbag and submitted to the person disdainfully lifting locks of her wispy hair for inspection. The feel of the fingernails on her scalp reminded her of Nightmare on Elm Street and she spoke sharply to herself. Pull yourself together, Estelle, she said. This is supposed to be a treat and an outing. The fingers explored in a desultory way for a minute or two then were withdrawn with a sigh.

  ‘Special treatment for you, darl. Relax. Smoke?’ Miss Pewsey shook her head but her nostrils twitched as smoke drifted across her wrinkled face. She might be old but she was no fool. That was no ordinary cigarette. Perhaps this would have been the moment for her to forget cut, start run. That moment, not taken, is never regained. Once in shock it is practically impossible to regain the initiative. Miss Pewsey was for it.

  Stephan, louche, appeared through the arch of the Sanctum interior. Miss Pewsey was relieved to see that his sex was unequivocal although his pony tail and brief singlet did not strike her as being very professional. Further, illogically, but there you are, she was nervous of hairy men. Stephan was exceedingly, though artistically, selectively, hairy. ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit,’ she thought, blasphemously to herself, just slightly hysterical. In for a shilling, in for a pound, try and enjoy it, Estelle.

  She found Stephan’s absorbed initial inspection of her thinning pate somewhat intrusive but grew more relaxed at the basins where a young lass shampooed her, shouting across the sound of the hoses to her friend doing a shampoo at the next basin. Miss Pewsey closed her eyes and let the water and the words splash about her. Amazing, really, how often sex was the topic of conversation. As she could have foretold, the story ended unhappily, in disillusionment.

  She was taken back to the mirrors and left to sit staring at her wizened, damp self for about half an hour. All about her were sounds of merriment and familiarity. She saw that most of the clients were sipping white wine. She would have quite liked a glass herself, to aid her relaxation in this unusual setting, but no-one offered her one and she presumed there was some protocol, extra price perhaps, that she was not party to. Patiently she waited, playing a little Bach fugue gently across her knees under the cape which had ‘You Got What I Want�
� printed large across the front.

  Presently Stephan returned. He took another critical look at her damp hair, sighed and swivelled to take a glass of wine from a passing tray. For a moment, hopefully, Miss Pewsey thought this might be for her, but Stephan downed it in one gulp.

  ‘Style and blow job today, was it?’ he asked. Miss Pewsey nodded. That was what Vivienne Fulcher had told her, was it not? Something of the sort, anyway. Stephan wielded his scissors with admirable artistry, she had to admit, although the black hairs on his fingers gave her the willies. For someone with very little hair, an alarming amount seemed to be falling across the shoulders of her cape. Still, she supposed he knew what he was doing. She closed her eyes.

  ‘Tired?’ asked Stephan. She opened her eyes reluctantly.

  ‘A little,’ she said. ‘I’m not as young as I used to be.’

  Stephan discarded the scissors and took her head firmly between his hairy hands. For a moment she thought he was going to lift her scalp off, so resolute was his grip. She even rose slightly out of the chair so that his suddenly letting go made her rather plop back into her seat.

  ‘Better,’ he stated, rather than asked and plugged in the dryer. Now he proceeded to style the short fuzz that remained, with little crimping motions of his hands. It took almost no time at all and she supposed he was finished when he returned the dryer to its hook. She closed her old eyes again preferring not to have to stare into the mirror.

  ‘I’ve worn you out,’ he said. ‘Fancy a head massage? Nice and relaxing. All part of the service.’

  ‘How nice,’ said Miss Pewsey politely, wishing it was all over.

  Once more he took her head firmly in his hands, moving close in, the better to grip.

  ‘Like it nice and hard?’ he asked.