The Sparrows of Edward Street

by Elizabeth Stead

  ‘Yes, Rosy, homeless. Poor as mice! Nothing! The beggaring is up to you.’

  ‘Won’t our father’s family help?’

  ‘No. We’ve been chucked out by everyone and everything.’

  ‘You have no heart, Aria.’

  ‘Everyone has a heart, Rosy. It’s just a red, squishy pump with no feelings at all. Feelings are not the job of a heart, so for goodness sakess pull yourself together and see what’s real and fix it!’ Strange, coming from the empress of pretence, I thought.

  A Curious Family

  I expect I should explain the reason for that day, how it began, and what happened next.

  After father Sparrow’s death by cat there had been next to nothing to live on. Father Sparrow had left nothing – no, that’s not entirely true: he’d left us the red and yellow deck chair he’d used when he sold icecreams on the Sunday beach. Hanora treasured it because it had been in use on the beach the day she had met our father. But there was very little of anything else. And sadly, very little time for grieving, Hanora had told us.

  ‘I circulated as much as I could, loves. I simply had to think of the future. I had two little ones to care for.’

  But Hanora Sparrow did not peck at the first crumb offered to her. She’d struggled with her widow’s pension for as long as she could, until a more substantial offering was made.

  At the time we lived in one room in a gloomy building with a gas meter and a gas ring in what was known as a kitchenette, and when a man Hanora had met, a man she called ‘Our Friend’, offered to subsidise a flat on a hill where the eucalypts grew, she jumped at it.

  ‘He was mad about me, loves. What could I do? He had loads of money.’

  And also a wife, but never mind: a starving sparrow can’t be too fussy.

  When we lived in the flat, Hanora had often been behind with the rent because she loved lipsticks and scent, and if she saw an old book or a record in a market stall she would buy it. Her orphans, she called them. She adopted old books and recordings of music. But in the flat our lives had been comparatively comfortable for a very long time, and the eviction had been a terrible shock.

  Our Friend’s financial help came to a sudden and grubby end in the divorce court, and we found ourselves back on the pension alone. Although father Sparrow died during the war years he had not died as a member of any of the fighting forces, and the civilian widow’s pension was more of a struggle than that of a war widow. In addition to the late rent, the landlord, Mr Kellog, took exception to Hanora’s habit of sunbaking in her pink two-piece costume in full view of the other tenants. He objected to her sunbaking on the deck chair on the septic tank cover under the peppercorn tree, and he objected to the scandal associated with the ‘affair’.

  Mr Kellog was a sour-faced old health fanatic who lived on barley water and bran. Guts of grain. His intestines would have looked like a road winding through fields of threshed fibre, I thought. He had a crag of a face, eyes as hard as a rock’s bottom, and the teeth of a milkman’s horse. He was as acidic as any bran and barley man could have been. I used to hate the creepy way he had of sneaking up behind Hanora with his hard eyes and his silo mouth spewing branny breath. And when she sunbaked I knew it was Mr Kellog’s eyes among all the others stuck all over the window curtains and blinds. Curtains and blinds going up and down like yo-yos, with eyes stuck all over them. I knew that Mr Kellog was one of the disapproving viewers from the way his own eyes bulged when he’d watched her from his hide.

  I had long noticed that human eyes, given the opportunity, operate very much like snail eyes. Snails never blink. Apparently dogs don’t blink when they sneeze, but that’s neither here nor there. Of course I could have been wrong, but I don’t think so.

  Our Friend’s wife had invaded the happy arrangement at our flat by shaking a rolled, black umbrella like someone telling off a policeman. She was as strong as a fence paling. She’d worn black to church twice on Sundays, and despite the fact that Hanora never intended to interfere with the marriage, the very strong woman took ‘Our Friend’ to the divorce court, and named Hanora (among many other things) the despicable Jezebel, the scarlet woman and the gold digger. Our mother told us that the skinny wife with her mean eyes and beak of a nose could have stood in for any of Macbeth’s witches. Hanora thought ‘Our Friend’ was afraid of her. Come to think of it, ‘Our Friend’ wore black too, and I remember not liking him very much at all. He was very large, and could have been in disorganised crime or the police force. He wore huge black shoes that Hanora said were made by prisoners. She said you could always tell.

  He had a big black American car. The running board was wide enough for a dozen gangsters to ride shotgun. I used to be terribly car sick in the big black car, and made a terrible mess from the window all the way down to the wheels, but I’m not sorry. I once came upon him kissing Hanora and I kicked him in the shins.

  The divorce scandal made the front pages of a notorious newspaper, and I remember fiercely protecting Rosy at school. She was not a baby, but I carried her through lunch and playtime – can you imagine it? I don’t think her feet touched the ground for weeks! All our lives were changed. Hanora was in a terrible state – she was alone and desperate again. I remember her opening a pill bottle, taking two and shoving a whole cigarette into her black holder. I think it was the beginning of the pills.

  ‘I am suffering so much, loves, I might as well have stayed a Jew!’

  And so it was that almost the minute after ‘Our Friend’ sped off in the big black car, Mr Kellog ordered us to leave. We had nowhere to go and hardly any money. If there’d been snow outside the door he would have thrown us into it. Charles Dickens had destitute women thrown into the snow, but they usually wore shawls and had a baby clutched to their breasts. Hanora did not have either, but at the time the whole thing was as darkly miserable as a Dickensian scene.

  Whenever I picture Mr Kellog I see only his starved, canyon face and a long bony finger pointing out! I decided to write a play about him one day. It would be a highly dramatic and violent act of revenge.

  ‘I’ll store your stuff in the garage!’ he growled with his sharp bony tongue. ‘That’s all I’ll do for you. Sort it out as soon as you can.’

  Hanora was crying, and Rosy, and I think I might have been crying too. I must say I hardly ever cry for myself, but I think I cried for Hanora then.

  I was sorry for all the drama – it was truly a tragedy that would have had a theatre full of people sniffing into their hankies and hoping the lights didn’t come on too soon – but for other reasons I was not sorry to be leaving the flat.

  The flat had been one of six, within a big old pile of a house divided into mean sections, with not an inch of wasted space. There were shared bathrooms for the ‘up’ and ‘down’. Mr Kellog was forever peeping around its corners, licking away white spittle at the edges of his mouth. I caught him peeping through the bathroom window once, after Rosy had gone to the toilet. He once tried to touch me, but he took one look into my eyes and thought better of it. A creeping slither of a man, he was.

  Still, it was the saddest of sad days for Hanora when she packed her belongings and left the flat for good. I imagined ‘Our Friend’ had gone to ground like a kicked cur, to beg forgiveness and lie on the iceberg of his bed next to the woman in black. Hanora was utterly bewildered. She had no one to turn to, and I saw Mr Kellog’s eye slits peeping as he walked backwards and forwards past the garage while our goods and not so goods and our odds and peculiars were bundled onto the bed of a very rickety truck. Mr Kellog had drain rats’ eyes, shaped for peeping and they could swivel every which way. I stuck my tongue out at him and spat on the ground at his feet. It must have looked childish and disgusting, but I was not sorry. I would have done worse in a minute! I could have done worse! I should have done worse!

  *

  Hanora told us that on the advice of one of the tenants she had been in touch with the Housing Commission, and had begged for help, and it seemed that they coul
d shelter us in a ‘Camp’ until something more permanent could be found.

  ‘Isn’t that kind of them?’ Hanora said.

  ‘I think it’s all bloody terrible!’ I said. ‘But better than nothing, I suppose.’

  ‘There’s a very, very long waiting list for permanent accommodation. I had to accept, love. We must explain gently to Rosy.’

  ‘Oh, damn Rosy.’

  ‘Aria, please, not now. We have to go there immediately or we’ll have nothing tonight, love. I have a key.’ Anxiety and weariness had traced fine lines around her eyes like a faded map of rivers. ‘Try to smile, Aria. I do depend so much upon your strength.’

  Now, those were familiar words, along the line of . . . and don’t forget to change the globe I’m no good on a chair and the clock’s stopped and so is the drawer runner and Rosy’s shoes need mending . . . etcetera etcetera. The portrait of the child as a woman. Poor little Cinders all over again.

  I tried to smile. Something sour lifted the corners of my mouth, but for that moment I felt as inhuman as a mop in a bucket of slops.

  Rosy, listening to the tail ends and somehow beginning to understand our predicament, was silent as death and as white as a sheet.

  The Cells of 19B Edward

  Iron hut 19B Edward, humid and warm to hot to cool to cold conditions plus light breezes to strong winds to gale force whipping through the gaps between the walls and the roof with the possibilities of ice storms, monsoonal rains and floods, mosquitos, dust storms and rapists after dark . . .

  End of predicted conditions according to Margaret Rose Sparrow.

  I watched Hanora struggling to stay calm, and I did what I could, but with Rosy wailing like something lost in a maze I thought it better to keep my feelings to myself.

  ‘I’m going to christen the toilet, loves. I’m bursting.’

  We heard her urinating in the peculiar tin bathroom, and we clearly heard the chain being pulled and the flush. When she emerged, shaking water from her hands, I said: ‘Well, at least the acoustics are good.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Rosy.

  I’d been astonished that our hut bore the number 19, a sacred number to me, and I thought it should not have been used in this way. No one else noticed that, of course. At first I saw it as an omen, but then, no, I saw it as a challenge. It was clearly a challenge! To arms, to arms! I cried in the privacy of my mind. As we moved from cell to cell in 19B there was Rimsky-Korsakov bringing up the rear in footy jersey number 19 and brandishing the score of Scheherazade like a weapon. Go, R-K! We need you!

  Hanora had begun to unpack our small suitcases full of what she considered essentials for the first night in our hot iron cells. The iron crackled with the slightest temperature change. We’d never need a barometer, I thought; the walls had a language of their own. Hanora had not packed very well, but that was understandable under the circumstances. I glanced at the rough timber struts, stained in parts. The corrugated iron was grubby and oily to the touch.

  ‘The walls could do with a scrub, Rosy. A flagon of metho and steel wool should do it.’

  ‘You don’t seriously expect me to scrub iron walls, Aria?’

  ‘It’ll take your mind off your miseries. I’ll get some metho tomorrow, in a brown paper bag, of course.’

  ‘Metho?’

  ‘Yes, that and elbow grease. We can drink what’s left over.’

  ‘You’re a terrible person, Aria. Why are you talking like that? You sound rough, as though you’ve been living here for years.’

  ‘How do you know the people here are rough?’

  ‘Of course they will be.’

  ‘They’re in exactly the same boat as us, Rosy! Are you suggesting that we are rough?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘What a pain in the backside you are!’

  ‘Aria!’

  ‘I’m not sorry.’

  Once upon a desolate time in the flat I had tried to make my sister understand the reality of a moment: ‘Rosy – Rosy! Open your bloody eyes. That bread and dripping is for you. There’s nothing else!’

  But she turned a blank expression and began to spin in front of the wardrobe mirror like a dancer inside a music box. She even asked the clothes prop man what it was like to be poor.

  ‘You tell me, missy!’ he barked at her.

  ‘What did he mean, Aria?’

  At the time I’d felt like punching her. I cannot say to this day why I didn’t.

  *

  Somehow Hanora had managed to find shelf space of a sort along the rough narrow timbers holding the iron walls together. She’d also found power points and a few studs that had been carelessly hammered but were suitable for hanging a print or two.

  ‘Open the windows, loves; there’s a bit of sunshine somewhere out there. There’s a day trying to get inside. I wish I’d brought the kettle and the pot. I’d love a cup of tea.’

  ‘I expect you were too upset to think of everything,’ Rosy said. Her eyes were ringed red from weeping, but I thought it was kind of her to say that.

  ‘At least they’ve left wood in the stove. There was a list of things.’ I poked about and found kindling and a few split logs. ‘They probably leave the wood as a starter.’

  ‘But I’m not sure what to do with it, love.’ Hanora cut a cigarette in half and stuffed it into her black holder. ‘I’ve never used a stove like this before.’

  Hanora might truthfully have said that she was not entirely familiar with the workings of any stove at all, but I did not say so. She’d never been a good cook – she could very well have been the worst cook in the world, and that significant fact proved to me that the choice she’d made so early in her life to renounce Judaism and embrace atheism was the right one. She couldn’t have made chicken soup to save a life. I had started to experiment with cooking when I was ten, after Hanora served another tasteless, grey dish of sloppy cabbage and haricot beans that had us farting for a week. I thought that there must be something better, and there was – it was like discovering a food bowl at the end of a rainbow. But I didn’t say what was in my mind.

  ‘Well, if there’s no kettle we’ll have to wait until our things arrive tomorrow morning,’ I said.

  ‘But what about tonight, Mother? What are we supposed to do tonight?’ Rosy whined.

  ‘I brought sandwiches. Sausage and pickle and cheese and plum jam. They’ll probably be a bit curled.’

  ‘Oh, God, how awful.’

  ‘And we have three cups, but I forgot the rest. Sorry, loves. We’ll just have to manage with our bed rolls and water tonight. We can tell stories.’

  ‘Heavens, this is terrible!’

  ‘Shut up, Rose,’ I said. ‘You’re being painful.’ Poor Colonial Rosy – the dear little Princess Margaret Rose look-alike all teary-eyed and probably wondering where the servants were. I have always thought that the attention her Royal resemblance attracted did Rosy more harm than good. ‘There’re bound to be shops somewhere, but in the meantime I’ll go next door, shall I? I’ll go next door and maybe someone will make us a cup of tea.’

  I pushed a window open and looked outside. I had in my mind that Camp-hut and iron-cell dwellers helped each other, like refugees in any other refugee camp. I imagined a defiant flag flying proud for a movement of some kind at the beginning of every slum’s street. I had not yet designed the flags or their colours: I would consult with R-Korsakov. No one does flags better than the Russians – of course, they’d have to be red in part. I could clearly imagine painted flutes of corrugated iron inside our hut, pictures, fabric scraps, old sarongs draped, a crucified kimono behind Hanora’s bed, and a hook with a couple of Rosy’s ‘mistakes’ hanging from it.

  ‘I wonder if we’re allowed to paint the walls?’ I said.

  ‘I think we’d have to have permission, love. But paint is so expensive, Aria. What colours did you have in mind?’

  ‘Purple and yellow, I suppose, knowing her,’ said Rosy.

  ‘Excellent choice!’


  ‘Heavens, Aria, you are so creative!’ said Hanora.

  ‘She’s a pain in the neck, Mother. Why don’t you just say so?’

  ‘Oh, my poor Rosy.’

  Never mind, Rosy . . . If I can, I’ll paint your side of our cell devil-red and nightmare-black. There! That should cheer you up, Rosy! Can’t you see colour at all? Can’t you imagine a butterfly? Can’t you see dragonflies with rainbows in their wings? Oh, Rosy, please try to think rainbows . . .

  *

  As sparrows go, I thought of Rosy as the nestling with its beak open, squeaking and squawking and waiting for someone to feed it. A little like father Sparrow, in a way. She might take after him.

  ‘Why don’t you go and ask the neighbours for tea, Rosy?’

  ‘I don’t want to meet the neighbours, Aria! For goodness sakes. I couldn’t possibly.’

  ‘Then I expect I’d better go on the hunt,’ said Little Red Hen me. ‘There’ll be other humans along this fork in the road, and I expect we’re all from the same planet. I’d like to get to know them, anyway.’

  ‘But shouldn’t you be on your way to the city, Aria? Shouldn’t you be on your way to work? Aren’t you “loving” something this afternoon?’

  ‘I asked if I could go tomorrow, after the furniture arrives. I explained. They understood. Leon said he’d tell the others.’

  I expect I should explain.

  I had risen from filing clerk in government offices to the dizzying heights of a bottom-of-the-ladder model for an advertising agency. As a photographic model I’d been asked to ‘love’ everything from stove scrubbers to shampoo. My breasts were my greatest assets. Breasts were very popular, I’d discovered. I had no end of invitations to take my top off behind filing cabinets in the government offices, and in broom cupboards everywhere else, but I was a very quick sparrow with a very mean beak when it was necessary to be sharp. Having developed so early, my breasts were quite mature by the time I was sixteen. I called them my ‘currencies’ and even considered having them insured.