Half Wild

by Pip Smith

You’re the one who goes round dressed as a bloke, aren’t ya? Now Martha was standing beside her bed with her clothes off. It was brave of her, I supposed, but I couldn’t look. I could never be that brave.

  That night, in my dream, I was suddenly cold. Someone had made a cut on my head along the hairline, gripped the flap of skin and ripped down, peeling my face right off. Electrical cables were attached to my nipples, and someone was standing beside a giant machine, about to flick a switch. I woke to find my covers had been pulled off, and one of the girls, the one with the blonde hair, was climbing into my bed. I tried to speak, but she put her hand on my mouth.

  Shhh. This is what you like, isn’t it, love? she said, rubbing her thumb over my nipple.

  Where’d you get that idea? I mumbled through her hand, but it felt good, like gold dust glimmering in ripples out across my chest.

  No fucking in the dorm! one of the girls shouted out.

  Ah shuddup Sandra, ya whiny bugger.

  You woke me up, you bitch!

  The girl in my bed started suckling then, as if she were a child. Her face looked as calm as a child’s. She’d become a baby, and I was the Virgin Mary—and no more a virgin than Mary was, either.

  I felt sick. These women are disturbed, I thought, and replaced my nipple with her own thumb, rolled her out of bed and carried her back to her own.

  I’m not a mother, I whispered to her. I can’t be a mother. To you or anyone else.

  After a breakfast of watery porridge, Sergeant Deirdre walked me to the sewing room. I wondered if it was worth it, to spend my days bowed down to the ravenous sewing machines, feeding them cloth in exchange for a bed and watery porridge, but where else could I go? The drainpipe men would’ve told everyone what a joke I was by now.

  Outside, the tuba was still cutting squares in the air, and a drum joined in, to keep its corners straight.

  Who’s playing that? I asked Sergeant Deirdre.

  Our girls in the band. They practise tirelessly, they practise so hard they have no time to enjoy their sewing with the other girls, she said, shaking her head.

  And what would I have to do to join the band?

  Well, you’d need to be able to play a musical instrument for a start, she said. Can you play?

  I stopped in the middle of the hallway. Yes. Yes, I can.

  She seemed surprised. What can you play, dear?

  Anything you put in front of me.

  She looked doubtful, then guilty for doubting. Well, I’ll speak to Captain Gunnion and see what she has to say.

  I stood at ease in the music room. Standing at ease, however, did not put a person at ease. It meant standing with your feet hip width apart, staring at the wall, while Captain Gunnion paced backwards and forwards in front of you. She’d have been happier as the captain of a ship, or in the army leading a charge of horses to kill everyone in sight, but she was stuck as the captain of a spiritual army, which was more wafty than she was built for, but better than being a nun.

  Are you prepared to be a soldier of God and recruit the stray sinners on the streets to our cause? Captain Gunnion asked. The way she asked, there was only one answer.

  Yes, Captain. I am prepared.

  Well, show me what you can do.

  I made my way around the music room, trying my luck with the different instruments. The tuba looked easy enough. All you were meant to do was put your lips to it and blow, but when I tried all that came out was the sound of an elephant getting its trunk stuck in a washing wringer.

  STOP! she called out. What are you doing? I thought you could play. Are you wasting my time?

  No, Captain. I used to play in the Catholic church, but since they turned me out on the streets with nowhere to go …

  My hand was shaking. I was afraid she’d march me over to a sewing machine so ravenous it would stitch me into a cocoon and I’d only break out once I’d become a fully formed soldier of God. A sob caught in my throat. How had it come to this? How could I crawl out of this place? A tear rolled down my cheek and crashed onto the tiny metal cymbal of the tambourine at my feet.

  Stop crying and pick it up, the captain said. I’ll show you how to play.

  Out in the streets on Friday nights we sang, Why Are You Doubting and Fearing? Children bought ice-creams and came to watch, mostly to see who was at the girls’ home now and who was prettier back when they were drunk and a whore.

  We played on the street corners, we played outside the pubs. We sang, There’s a Sea for Weary Souls to the sailors as they walked from the quay to Courtenay Place. Through a pub window I could see the drainpipe men laughing and pushing each other into bar stools. One squinted at me as if I was a ghost come to haunt him. I looked away, and tapped my tambourine harder.

  We passed the bear on Garrett Street. It was drunk and stumbling. We played There Is a Better World, They Say to give him hope that he might make it back to a Russian pine forest. He roared at the noise we made and was poked with a stick by his master as punishment.

  We played at the cricket pitches on the weekend and we played at the shops. We played to an old drunk in slippers who wore a Red Indian headdress and the hide of a sheep strapped to his back. We sang, Sinner, See Yon Light!

  What light? he yelled back. What bloody light? It’s the middle of the night, you fools!

  We sang, We Have Each a Cross to Bear.

  Bear? I’m no bear! I’m a fucking sheep! Baa! Baa!

  So we sang, The Lord’s My Shepherd and he passed out in a horse trough.

  No one had the guts to shut God’s soldiers up, so we played through nearly every suburb of Wellington, until there was only one left: Newtown.

  On the day we were due to play in Newtown I tried to be ill, but Captain Gunnion did not believe me.

  I held my breath and tried to faint, but it didn’t work. They shook their heads and said, O will you not yield to God tonight?

  No! I coughed. I can’t!

  O lamb of God, thou wonderful sin bearer, the trumpet player said.

  What are you saying? What are you talking about?

  They were circling now, their instruments pointed at me like guns.

  Come to the Saviour, come to the Saviour!

  Dark is the way, sinner!

  For our salvation, Jesus paid a wonderful price!

  Alright! I said. I’ll go! I’ll go!

  The captain chose a spot on the corner of Coromandel Street for us to play on, possibly because of the twelve brats standing on the opposite side of the road in the shadows. I could feel them staring at me as one many-armed creature waiting to pounce. But it didn’t pounce. We sang about shepherds and we sang about sinners and I played the tambourine on every two and every four. The monster sat there in the dark, and breathed, and licked its twelve ice-creams, and listened.

  Though we are sinners every one,

  Jesus died!

  And though our crown of peace is gone,

  Jesus died!

  We may be cleansed from every stain,

  We may be crowned with peace again,

  And in that land of bliss may reign,

  Jesus died! Amen.

  After we finished killing Jesus I told the rest of the band I’d meet them back at the Home. Captain Gunnion looked at me down the length of her nose.

  Are you sure? she asked.

  Yes, Captain, God is with me. I’ll be fine.

  I walked along Coromandel Street until I found myself outside Amelia’s house. Two lights flickered inside, turning the windows gold. I looked at my grey skirt and blouse and felt as drab as river stones with the gold blasted out. I couldn’t go to her door like this.

  I heard my house from four doors away—the shrieks and giggles of brats being chased around the living room, the call that it was time for bed, Ida’s voice, a woman’s voice now.

  The garden was dark. The tomato vines in the front yard breathed out their spiciness into the night air, making my nose itch. There was no moon spying on me, no million eyes of stars, but I kne
w this garden well. I’d be as invisible as one of Captain Gunnion’s angels. So invisible I wouldn’t even exist. I tiptoed around the side of the house and, as I did, stopped for a moment to look through the kitchen window. A woman was bent over a tub, washing dishes. She paused for a moment, and I slunk back into a shadow, but she’d only paused to push the hair out of her eyes with her wrist. She was fair, with red cheeks. Children clambered up onto the kitchen table behind her, leaped off, and clambered up again to throw spoons at other children on the floor. They were blonde, some of them. One of them had red hair. They were what my family would’ve been if they were Scottish or Irish or dropped in a vat of bleach. I’d never seen them before in my life.

  Behind the lemon tree, under a rotting crayfish net, Joe’s trousers had become a slimy city for slaters and worms. When I pulled them on, a hundred cold feet tickled my legs. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, my life as a boy would rise from the grave. If my family could leave Eugenia for dead, then I could, too. For good this time, and with no regrets.

  THE SHIP GAME

  The first rule is, you have to be tough.

  The second, you have to get to the top of the mast without stopping. The top of the mast is called the button. Everyone has to touch the button, or else they die.

  Don’t look down. If you look down, you’ll think about falling, and if you think it, you might accidentally make it happen. Then you’ll die.

  Climb to the top looking only at your hands. It helps if you sing under your breath to prove just how easy it is to climb. Don’t notice that the top of the mast sways like a spindly pine tree in the wind.

  As soon as you touch the button, go straight back down. Maintain three points of contact while descending the rat bars. Talk to yourself under your breath. That’s it. Right foot there. Good. Hands down a rung. Well done! Could your foot go there? No. There? Yes! Good work!

  Afterwards, down below, your eyes will try to hold on to the fixtures in the ship and pin them down; your eyes will try to tell your brain that the fixtures aren’t swaying, you’re the one who’s swaying; that you must be drunk; that you’ve been drunk for days. Don’t pay any attention to your eyes, or you will vomit.

  You will probably vomit anyway. You will probably spend the first three rounds of this game sitting under the main mast, gripping onto the railing that runs around the deckhouse, vomiting into a bucket. The bosun will step around you, sighing because of the extra work he has to do now that you’re sick. The second mate will ignore you. The cook will tell you it’s all in your head.

  Someone might bring you a glass of water and a biscuit. Maybe a lick of molasses. They will watch you eat the biscuit, then watch as you vomit it back into the bucket.

  Look up. Smear the vomit off your face and into your hair. Say sorry. Watch them shrug and walk off.

  Another deckhand might lift you up, walk you to the bridge and say: Take the helm, it will make you feel better. Discover that helming really does make you feel better. You are no longer a piece of flint being blown around a ship, being blown around the ocean, being pulled around the world, being thrown around the sun. These circles hula hoop around you. You are at the centre of all these circles, because you are behind the wheel. Watch the sea just beneath the horizon in the direction you are heading. Wait for it to tell you grand things about existence.

  Keep waiting.

  Give up.

  The sea won’t tell you anything. It will just move. Always. Sometimes the waves will mimic the shape of the mountains shrinking behind the stern. As the mountains get smaller the waves will get bigger, sucking all the power from the mountains. Waves are more powerful than mountains, because they can loom up on your right, then shrink underneath you and reappear on your left as three smaller mountains. Waves are nightmare mountains.

  When a bell rings, let the nightmare dissolve. It’s time for dinner.

  Eat in the lower mess. Discover the meaning of the word ‘mess’ when your plate slides across the table and flings mashed potato across the walls.

  After dinner you try to sleep. You lie in your bunk stiffly, your hands and feet pressed against the ship and the leeboard, trying not to roll out of bed. Every two seconds there’s a thud against the hull. Both your eyes are all pupil. Cannon fire? Icebergs? A twelve-foot shark trying to smash open the fo’c’sle and suck out the tender humans inside? Quite possibly. After each thud the ship quivers like a dog in a thunderstorm. You think: we are all going to die. There is no doubt. How can you swim through swells as high as this? Be honest: you can’t. You are definitely going to die. You begin coming to terms with death. You think: it will be like sleeping through a dreamless sleep—unmemorable. You think, maybe this has been a dream anyway, and you will wake up to find that the thuds were made by your little sister kicking the bed.

  At a quarter to four in the morning, someone who is not your little sister, dressed in oilskins, touches you on the shoulder. Get up, he says, it’s your watch. Grip his arm. He is slippery with ocean spray. Is it terrifying? you ask. Is this the end? He throws your oilskins onto the bunk. Get up, he says. You’ll be fine.

  On the bridge, the wind blows the spume from the waves horizontally, right into your face. You think it’s horizontal, but you have no idea what horizontal is anymore. Horizontal could be any number of directions that don’t point straight down to the bottom of the sea. But right now, horizontal could include that direction too. On the bridge you can’t feel the ship quiver. It gets doused by a wave and then bobs back up like an empty bottle of rum. Think: DO THEY KNOW EVERYONE IN THE FO’C’SLE THINKS THEY ARE GOING TO DIE?

  You are travelling at 10 knots. 10.2 knots. 10.6 knots. At one point you are travelling at 11.2 knots. Having never been on a ship before you have no idea what a ‘knot’ is, but now you know that 11.2 knots is bloody ridiculously fast.

  We’re going too fast, you think. We’re out of control. This is like those stories when the driver gets shot by Indians and the horses keep running across the hills, any which way, and the cart and the horses end up smashed to bits at the bottom of an abandoned quarry. Except instead of a quarry you’ll end up smashed to bits at the bottom of the sea, and the horse would be a giant squid, sucking the meat off your bones.

  The ship dives nose first into a gully made by two waves and you think no thoughts anymore; you just sit on the bench with your back against the controls and look at the mast. The mast looks high. Too high. It doesn’t seem in proportion to the rest of the ship. Or the barque, that’s what it should be called. You wonder if they checked this when they built it in somewhere exotic like Denmark or Norway. The mast looks heavy, too. And with all those sails up, and the yardarms, it must be even heavier. The ship dips to the right side, rolling over a wave. The ship dips to starboard, you think. That means right. You are becoming a sailor after all.

  The next day the captain is quiet. You wonder if he is nervous about not knowing what he is doing. When you asked where you were headed he pointed to the map and said, Here. No wait, here. Oh, I’ve lost it. No—here it is, and pointed to Australia. Now you notice that there is a network of glances all around you. The captain is watching you quite closely, and everyone else watches the captain watch you.

  The captain does nice things for you. When dolphins swim alongside the ship, he tells you stories about them. That the males have corkscrew penises and rape the females in a gang. He knows all sorts of facts about the animals you can see, the animals you can’t. Even the animal you are.

  AS FAR AS HE CAN REMEMBER

  SYDNEY, 5 JULY 1920

  HARRY CRAWFORD

  My name is Harry Leo Crawford and I was born in Scotland in 1875 to my father Harry Crawford and my mother Lizzie Crawford—

  Wait a tick, they’ll say. Isn’t your wife Lizzie Crawford?

  And I’ll say, Yes, as it happens that’s the same name as my wife now. She’s Scottish too. Lizzie’s a very common name there.

  Or perhaps I’ll start with how it was when I was a boy and we l
eft Edinburgh for the one other corner of the world that looks the most like Edinburgh. Green and rough and windy and cold—but wilder, with Maori wars and glaciers and gold getting coughed up out of the ground. New Zealand’s full of Scotsmen and women. When it’s day in New Zealand it’s night in Scotland and, yes, I’ve wondered before if New Zealand only exists when all of Scotland sleeps.

  A boy who can’t sit still can’t be expected to live his life trapped in someone else’s sleep. I ran races for the butchers, which was great fun of course, but when a boy like that grows into a man he gets to a point where he feels his muscles strain under his skin, as if he’s actually a lion that somehow got born into the wrong body.

  Wellington’s too small for restless boys. What usually happens is they learn to dull their twitchiness right down by throwing back a few beers at the pub so the twitchiness can release itself as a loud story, a slap on another bloke’s back, or a punch in someone else’s face, until the pub closes or they black out—whatever comes first.

  If New Zealand is the spirit of adventure squeezed into two small islands, then Australia is that same spirit stretched out as far as it can go.

  When I was a child I thought the ground under Australia must’ve been nothing but snake tunnels and the surface was a dry wasteland where you’d see the occasional rusted-up water tank, skinny dog licking its balls, or hard man shooting a rabbit. If you wanted to be a hard man, Australia was the place to be one. New Zealand had mountains to climb and cattle to muster but Australia was tough, and it wasn’t going to say sorry for anything. It was just there, and you could take it or leave it.

  I wanted to take it alive. I couldn’t keep living in a house that was trying to be a house in Scotland, with a mother who lived with her head drifting around in dreams of Scotland and a father who couldn’t understand why the market hadn’t made him rich yet. Besides, I’d got into a nasty altercation with a pissed bloke I’d once thought of as a friend, so I felt it was time to pack my things and tell the oldies I was leaving.