Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  The beer was a song and we sang it loud and proud in the streets of Wellington. It made us brave enough to show the world how much we loved it. We wanted everyone to love the world as much as us. We wanted the spinster Mrs Cockrain in her bonnet and black cape to come out in the streets and dance. We wanted her to see how funny her name was, and laugh with us. We threw stones at her house trying to get the walls to fall flat on the ground, bam bam bam, and leave her standing there in her cape. But she never did come out, because she was a bitter old spinster and our song was racing towards the chorus, so we left. We went to find the dancing bear on Garrett Street and we danced with the bear. It was on a chain and it was tired but it still eyed our delicious hands and jugulars, so two of us held the bear’s head back and one of us held its jaws open by the teeth and another poured three pints straight down its wide red throat. It danced again, a slow syrupy dance, and made the chain around its ankle sound like a tambourine played at the bottom of the sea. We walked down Haining Street breathing in the opium smoke that leaked from the boarded-up windows and let visions hover in front of us like an empty suit of clothes held up by fairies. We said, Oh thank you, fairies, thank you very much, and stepped into those visions. We couldn’t tell the difference anymore between a punch in the face and a hug that went wrong. We became a pack of puppies jumping over each other in the middle of the street because they were our streets, we owned them and we were afraid of nothing. Eventually we found ourselves in beds at night or on floors that belonged to one or another of us and in the morning someone’s wife or sister or mother gave us porridge or bread and kicked us out the door when we needed to be on the road to the drainpipe manufactory again. Apart from the fear of getting too drunk, of dropping my guard, of taking a piss somewhere someone might see, it was the best week of my life.

  Friday arrived. It must have been a Friday because the lads were outside with their hands clutched tightly around envelopes full of money. They were clustered around one man reading from a newspaper.

  … in a drunken row which occurred in a house off Cuba Street, about one o’clock this morning, a man named Harry Crawford, a stevedore, lost his life.

  What? I pushed myself to the front of the crowd. What?!

  He read on: Some persons walking down Cuba Street, about that hour, state that they heard a woman crying, ‘Murder.’ They followed her to the house of William George Raines, a stevedore, where on a verandah at the back they found Crawford lying dead, with a large bruise on his forehead … Detective Campbell, after making investigations, arrested Raines shortly before ten o’clock on a charge of wilful murder which will in all probability be resolved into a charge of manslaughter. Raines, who did not appear to have completely recovered from his drinking bout, was brought up at the Police Court this morning, and formally remanded … Crawford had been in ill-health for some time past, and was brought up on a charge of lunacy a short time ago …

  The men stared at their shuffling feet. No one knew what to say. Sound and the air itself was suddenly extracted from the world, and with that all the possible conversations I hadn’t yet had with Harry Crawford collapsed into one dead soundless nothing. It was the first time I realised we wouldn’t last forever; that everything wouldn’t work out in the end unless someone made sure that it did.

  You know what I think? the man with the sad eyes said. I think we should go to the opera house, what do you boys reckon?

  We shrugged, shifted our weight from foot to foot. Opera had to be the last thing we felt like watching.

  Boys, he said, Lena’s tits will make you feel better, I promise. Going to the opera house meant standing in a queue for tickets then standing in a queue for whisky then standing in a queue for ice-cream. I tried not to think about Harry Crawford sprawled across Raines’s floor, with a bruise blooming on his temple. He’d never have died like that; I refused to believe he was even dead at all. Raines must have been playing a prank. He must have given the cops a different name for the dead man in his house.

  Once we were armed with our whiskies and ice-creams we took the stairs by threes up into the gods. The gods was a place near the ceiling filled with people like us, offering food and drink at the altars of their stomachs. We elbowed our way to the front, so close to the stage we could almost reach out and rip the blue velvet curtain off its castors. We tried this of course, but it didn’t work.

  When a man’s voice announced that a Miss Lena Salette would sing us a song the men around me stood up and called out, Kiss me, darlin’! before she’d even walked out on stage; they were that sure she’d be beautiful. It turned out she was a woman like any other and sang a song that any other woman could have sung, but the crowd cheered. Ladies in feathers shuffled across the stage. One of them tripped, but no one seemed to mind. A fat man and a thin man poked each other and joked. Behind their stiff smiles their brains worked hard at remembering their lines.

  Two whiskies in and I began to understand. The thrill of the opera house was not what was happening on stage; it was being in the house itself. It was us, here, watching. Three whiskies in and it was announced that none other than Harry Crawford of New York, Ethiopian song-and-dance artist and legmania champion of the world, would now perform.

  I turned to the man next to me. Did he say Harry Crawford? I asked, but the man could not hear me over the roar of the crowd.

  The man they called Harry Crawford walked out on stage with his shoulders back and his face turned out to the audience. His face was covered in black greasepaint and his legs did things I’d never seen legs do. They could wrap around each other as if they were made of rubber. They could fly up and kick the man they belonged to in the face. Harry Crawford hadn’t died—he’d changed into this all-singing, all-dancing octopus masquerading as a white man masquerading as a black man. He’d left this dull place for the world of other people’s dreams. I looked around me and saw men laugh. Their drinks spilled and their ice-cream dribbled down their fronts but they didn’t care. All that mattered was that someone had let the God in them loose to laugh in another man’s face.

  Outside the opera house I was shaking with my new discovery. The seagulls were shaking with it, even the drunk men on the streets were shaking and it was with fear. They knew that God was not up there, far away. Broken pieces of Him were inside their hearts, and inside the hearts of everyone else, too. When those pieces came close together God was released as one resounding chant, usually at the cricket. It was a depressing thought, that cricket chants were the best the God in us could come up with, and so men drank, to forget that God was not as wonderful as they had hoped.

  Outside the opera house bits of God called out to other bits of God. The bits had different names, but they were all the same underneath.

  Jack. Hey, Jack.

  Harry. Oi, Harry!

  Nina! Nina!

  I turned around.

  A swan lady was standing in front of me with her white hat tilted slightly over her eyes. When she looked up the smell of Wellington cakes rushed towards me—coconut and chocolate and cream.

  Nina? Nina! It’s me, she said.

  I tried to look across the street as if I hadn’t seen her.

  Don’t you remember me?

  The men around us stopped talking. I was growing breasts and hips and eyelashes right in front of their eyes.

  Sorry, who? I asked.

  Amelia—Amelia Grey! We played on your grandfather’s hobby horse together when we were girls, remember? What was its name? Jerry-Moe?

  Oh, yes, my mouth said. Geronimo. How could I forget?

  I knew it was you under those boy’s clothes. What a laugh! Were you performing tonight?

  The drainpipe men didn’t know what to say. Their eyes lingered around my chest trying to see through my shirt. One boy leaned in and asked what the others didn’t have the guts to say.

  Hey, Nina, can I have a feel of your tits?

  What woke me up was a knock on the door. Then footsteps. The cluck cluck of concerned women talk
ing in hushed voices. Gasping, then agreeing, then clucking. I was on a floor that could’ve been any of the drainpipe men’s floors. My shirt was open and my right breast had slipped free of its binding for anyone to see. I tried to remember all the seconds that had passed between my third whisky and waking up here, but my memory of the night was one nauseous wave surging towards the acid-bright morning.

  I was buttoning up my shirt quick as my fingers would go when a woman bent over me with the sun radiating out from behind her head. She looked straight into my eye as if I was a puppy with a brick around its neck, and she’d come to drop me in a horse trough.

  Excuse me, mister, er … miss … She didn’t know what to call a man who’d suddenly turned into a woman, and quite frankly neither did I. There is someone here from the army to see you.

  The army? I could see this woman was as worried as I was, so I let her walk me to the door, watching me the whole way there in case I turned into something else. A rabbit, perhaps. Or a dog.

  In the doorway stood a steamship of a woman in a uniform. It wasn’t a police uniform and it wasn’t a hospital uniform—it was something that was trying to be all these things and more. She was bigger than most men, and could probably king-hit one with her thumb.

  What’s your name, dear? the woman asked.

  I don’t know, I said. Does it matter?

  The woman raised her eyebrows and shook her head at the sight of such a poor unknowing wretch.

  You’re a woman, though, are you not?

  Sometimes, I said.

  Behind her eyes thoughts were turning over, clunk clunk clunk: Clearly her time on the streets has put her under great distress; she doesn’t know her own name and she can’t even tell me if she’s a woman or a man.

  Come here, child, she said, pulling me into a hug that was all elbows and epaulets in the eye. Come with me. You cannot be forced to live like this anymore.

  She was right. My men, the drainpipe men, would never drink with me again.

  Captain Gunnion led me to a fortress on Cuba Street. She called it a house, or the Pauline Home, but it was a fortress.

  Let’s have a cup of tea, she said, unlocking the six locks on the front gate. And you can get everything off your chest.

  Behind the gate was a garden, if you could call it that. It consisted of plants growing in the shape of cubes. Women in uniforms walked past the cube plants with young girls who looked like they’d had their brains extracted. A nervous sound came from their mouths, and even the house at the end of the path made a shrill noise, as if its walls were lined with cicadas. In a distant room someone was practising a tuba. The notes drew a square in the sky, bom, bom, bom, bom, over and over until a piece of sky nearly fell out and shattered at my feet.

  Captain Gunnion did not smell like onions. She smelled like soap—and not the flowery kind; the kind that made a person clean without going in for any fancy business. She sat at one end of a large table, next to another woman with wide, jittery eyes. She was younger and her hands moved restlessly, never sure where God wanted them to be.

  Please, tell us your story from the beginning, the restless woman said. She looked worried my story might make her sad, but a little excited by that, too. What this woman needs is to have a good cry, I thought, really let everything out, so I didn’t skimp on the melancholy, I went straight for it.

  Do you know the story of Cinderella? I asked.

  Yes, of course, she said.

  Well, that’s not far from the truth.

  ROMANCE IN REAL LIFE. A BIGAMOUS MARRIAGE. A WOMAN DISGUISES HERSELF AS A BOY.

  A representative of the New Zealand Times unearthed on Saturday a most extraordinary case, involving a bigamous marriage, the desertion of the victim, her plucky determination to obtain her own livelihood in a brickyard as a labourer, and her rescue from her uncongenial occupation by the Salvation Army. It appears that the girl, who is 21 years of age, is a native of Wellington, and resided up till nine months since with her parents in Wellington. According to her statement to the Salvation people, she led an unhappy life with her father and mother, and was relegated to the position of the family Cinderella. About nine months ago she met a specious scoundrel in Wellington, who took advantage of her innocence, and with him she went through a form of marriage. The newlywedded couple immediately after the ceremony took their departure for Auckland, where, shortly afterwards, the unhappy bride ascertained that the man whom she believed was her husband was already married to another woman, and had by her a family. The poor girl at once, on ascertaining her lamentable position, left the fellow, and as speedily as she could returned to Wellington, where she vainly endeavoured to obtain employment, but, as she states, without acquainting her parents of her forlorn condition. In despair, the poor girl says she obtained a suit of boy’s clothes, and got her hair cropped, and after several attempts, obtained work in a drainpipe manufactory. The girl entered upon her duties and gave the greatest satisfaction. She was attentive, worked hard, and took her first week’s wages, and on the same evening accompanied several of her yard mates to the opera house. There she was seen by a friend of her family, who, being aware of her identity and her antecedents, acquainted the Salvation Army of the facts in connection with her sad case.

  The captain in charge of the Pauline Home called at the girl’s lodgings, and had little trouble in inducing her to enter the Home, pending her obtaining a situation more suitable and congenial to her sex than the one she was recently rescued from.

  The Salvation Army people give the young woman an excellent character. They state she is modest in her demeanour and is in every sense of the term a good woman. The Salvation officer who supplied the particulars of this extraordinary case says the girl’s appearance when she entered the Pauline Home would lead anyone to believe she was a goodlooking lad of about 17 or 18 years of age.

  Wanganui Chronicle, 24 July 1895

  Well, I’m glad we found you before it was too late, Captain Gunnion said.

  What would happen when it was too late? I wondered, but did not ask.

  Deirdre! Captain Gunnion said to the restless woman. Show the girl her bed, and where she will be working.

  Working? I asked.

  Yes, working. This is not a hotel, young lady.

  Sergeant Deirdre led me up the stairs to a hall with walls that looked as if they’d been painted with splatters of leftover pea soup. Branching off the hallway were rooms the size of drill halls with high, barred windows at one end, and inside each room were rows of beds with sheets tucked so tightly into the bedframes you could see the stitching on the mattresses underneath. Deirdre pointed to a bed far out in the distance, a bed that looked like every other bed, and told me, proudly, that it would be mine.

  I think you’ll be very happy here, she said, and patted me on the hand. I was glad one of us thought so.

  Sergeant Deirdre let me put my things on the end of my bed, so that I’d be able to find it again in the sea of identical beds, and walked me down the hall towards the whirring sound I’d heard from outside. As we moved towards the door at the end of the hall I realised it was not the noise of cicadas, but metal machines with teeth. Deirdre opened the door to thirty sewing machines and behind them women and children bent down, carefully feeding the ravenous metal monsters.

  IT’S QUITE ENJOYABLE ONCE YOU GET THE HANG OF IT, Deirdre shouted over the noise. ALMOST LIKE YOU’RE FEEDING A VERY HUNGRY PET, she said.

  The women looked like husks of women. As they fed their hungry pets I could not shake the idea that they were unspooling from the inside and feeding them their own unravelled souls.

  WHAT ARE THEY MAKING? I asked.

  WHATEVER NEEDS MAKING. OUR UNIFORMS, OR SHEETS FOR THE HOSPITAL, OR THINGS TO SELL.

  SELL?

  HOW ELSE DO YOU THINK WE CAN AFFORD TO LIVE IN THIS BEAUTIFUL HOUSE! she yelled over the violent vibrations of floor and walls trying to shake the room free of this infestation of machines. SOMETIMES WE EVEN MAKE ENOUGH TO BUY A NEW SEWI
NG MACHINE!

  A fine dusting of plaster fell from the ceiling, sprinkling Deirdre’s hair, but she didn’t notice.

  IT’S GOOD TO KEEP THE GIRLS BUSY—YOU KNOW, GIVES THEM PURPOSE, KEEPS THEIR MIND OFF THINGS.

  Keeps their mind off what? I wondered. How much happier they were before they’d been rescued?

  That night I lay on my bed wondering what Mamma’s life would’ve been like if she’d had a sewing machine. She would’ve had more time, but for what? To take in more sewing? To make more babies? Now that there were more machines in the world, the people in it galloped ahead with renewed purpose, but they were moving so fast they were likely to gallop off the edge of the earth. Where was our efficiency supposed to take us? To an early retirement sitting in an armchair, watching the seconds peel away from more seconds underneath?

  As I lay there, the women from the sewing room filed in. Their pale heads at the top of their dark dresses looked like moons floating around in search of a planet. Some of them had shaved heads. Some had peroxide blonde hair that was growing out. Some of them were scratching their arms and the back of their necks. Once they were in the room, they sat, as one, on the edge of their beds.

  I hate this place, one woman moaned.

  Shut up, another said. This is what God wants for us, remember?

  She laughed. She kept laughing. The laugh turned into a sob.

  Learn how to play a tuba and you’re saved from this, a third woman said. But you don’t have a musical bone in your body, Martha, so tough luck for you, eh.

  If you can play the tuba, you’re saved from what? I asked and forty eyes turned on me.

  Who are you? Martha asked.

  I’m—