Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  LILY NUGENT

  Lily sat opposite her sister and uninvited brother-in-law as if she were interrogating them for war secrets. She did not intend to make them feel this way, but they sat so stiffly that Lily felt she’d been cast in the role of inquisitor without even knowing she had auditioned. They sweated as they sat, and the room burned with a mustard-yellow light that made the shadows of the objects in it larger and darker than the objects themselves.

  Lily could see new etches radiating out from Annie’s lips. She looked strained and tired—it was crippling her, all this withheld information.

  ‘Annie, dear, you wrote saying you had something to tell me,’ Lily suggested, holding her smile in place so that she did not look threatening.

  Annie widened her eyes at her sister, sending messages Lily could not decipher, then looked at Crawford to see if he had noticed.

  He had. Annie nibbled at her slab of teacake. Lily was sure Annie was chewing in code: It’s Crawford. Stop. Look at Crawford. Stop. Tell me what you see.

  Crawford was not much to look at. His eyebrows drooped down either side of his face, giving him the appearance of a worried cat: drenched and miserable. He did not touch his cake. He did not sip his tea. He sat and worried; looked from one sister to the other and worried some more.

  Lily, who had spent a pleasant morning filling the house with teacake smells and guessing at the ‘news’ her sister’s letter had promised (she was hoping for news of a baby, but was not about to hold her breath), now found that this unspoken ‘news’ had swollen to fill every corner of her house, giving the place the caustic air of a German trench. She wondered why Crawford had followed her sister here. She would have to get her alone if she were ever to find out.

  ‘Annie, will you come and help me prepare the root vegetables? You always knew what to do with them.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Annie replied, and stood up so quickly her chair was thrown into the sideboard behind it, shattering a porcelain horse.

  ‘Oh! I’m so sorry!’ Annie said, looking as if she were about to cry.

  Lily was not irritated, not really. She chose to see the accident more as an opportunity. ‘Crawford, you’ll find a dustpan out in the shed at the very back of the garden.’

  Crawford looked at his wife. Annie seemed to be genuinely frazzled by the broken horse, and was now turning the pieces over in her hand as if they were the bloodied ears and legs of a real horse she had accidentally killed.

  ‘Don’t, Daisy, you’ll cut yourself,’ he said.

  She snapped a look at him that suggested she would have happily smashed him to pieces, too, if Lily’s nice things had not been at risk of getting damaged in the process.

  ‘In the shed, you said?’ Crawford asked Lily, and left without waiting for a response.

  Once he was in the garden, Annie could not hold anything back any longer, and let out a low, rasping moan.

  ‘Is it his daughter?’ Lily asked, with a hand on her sister’s back. ‘Is she making a nuisance of herself again?’

  Annie nodded, shook her head, nodded. She looked thin and frail and light, like the cockatoo carcass Lily had once seen washed up on the mudflats at Kogarah Bay and never forgotten. What had he done? What had that man done to her? Lily stood helpless before the awkward throes of her sister’s body, saying simply: ‘Shhhh. Shhhhh. It can’t possibly be that bad.’

  As she would soon find out, it was that bad.

  Lily thanked God Mr Nugent had never given her cause to fall apart quite like this.

  HARRY BIRKETT

  After Harry’s mother and Crawford came back from Aunt Lily’s place, things seemed to settle down for a while. His mother was quieter, and doing her best to make a show of kindness. On a hot January afternoon, when Harry was let off work early to listen to what was left of the cricket on the wireless, he’d found his mother sitting on Crawford’s lap on the front porch, sharing a bottle of ale. They already had the cricket on, and Australia had just hit a six, so Crawford poured six fingers of ale in a glass Harry’s mother held in front of him, and he took six gulps straight from the bottle. Crawford was loving their new game, but Harry’s mother’s laugh had a shiver to it.

  Crawford patted the milk crate next to them.

  ‘Come join us, sport. We’re killing it out on the green.’

  Crawford looked part crushed underneath Harry’s mother, but they seemed to take a liking to stretching out the summer afternoons with a bottle of ale on the front porch, nodding to whoever walked past. Harry took this as proof: women were complicated. One day they’d be jangling with you, the next they’d be sitting on your knee, sharing your beer, like nothing had ever been wrong.

  When the dark came on before Harry had finished work, they seemed to use the cold as an excuse not to sit out the front like that, for everyone to see. And by the time spring came around, making everyone sneeze and go outdoors wearing too much or not enough and always the wrong thing, people started grumbling when they came into the shop. There was trouble with the unions, or there was trouble with the industrialists—it depended on who was doing the grumbling. One by one the unions went on strike. First it was the railways and tramways, then it was the miners, the wharfies. People started buying the older, cheaper flour in the store if they bought any flour at all.

  Sure enough, Crawford lost his job at Perdriau’s. It was because of the strike, he said to Harry’s mother. There was no one left to send the rubber up the line. He stood before her in the kitchen like a scolded child, his hat clutched behind his back, like it was the hat’s fault things had taken a turn for the worse.

  Harry’s mother did not snap him up like she might have done a few months before. Strangely enough, she almost seemed relieved. She turned to Harry and said, ‘Well, my boy, now you’re really the man of the house.’

  Harry could have killed his mother for the shame that brought Crawford. He tried to catch his stepfather’s eye, to show him he was sorry, but Crawford would not let his eye be caught.

  If they fought, Harry was not there to hear it. The Bones were letting him stay for dinner now, to take the pressure off the pantry at home, and on the Eight-Hour Day weekend Mrs Bone was going to take him up to Collaroy, where the ocean was loud enough to drown everything out.

  On the Friday morning before Eight-Hour Day, 1917, everyone in the Crawford house was distracted. Harry’s mother was getting ready to go on a picnic with Crawford—picnics were supposed to keep the mood between couples pleasant—and Harry only had one more shift until he left for Collaroy. He was restless and didn’t have a newspaper to read because Crawford was staring at it, pretending to look for a job. Harry shovelled his breakfast into his mouth and read the name blown into the glass bottle in front of him over and over.

  Robert Robert Robert Robert Robert.

  ‘Mum, who’s Robert?’ Harry asked when she took away the bottle to pack in the picnic basket, and he had nothing left to read.

  ‘Oh, an old flame,’ she said, smiling a warm milk smile.

  Crawford shook the paper straight, but said nothing. Since he had lost his job they were living off Harry’s wage, and Harry’s mother seemed lighter, more distant, maybe even happier in her distant place than the real world made her. She hummed to herself as she put the dish scourer in the picnic basket, the sandwiches under the sink.

  The ticking of the roof as it warmed in the morning sun made Crawford flinch. Maybe he was on edge because the mention of his name no longer made Harry’s mother smile a warm milk smile. It made the little muscles on the side of her eyes contract, as if she was struggling to read a sign on the far side of a room.

  DRUMMOYNE, OCTOBER LONG WEEKEND, 1917

  HARRY BIRKETT

  When Harry arrived home from Collaroy all he wanted to do was go to sleep and dream the long orange beach stretching out on either side of him again—its stealthy rips, the tough plants clinging to the dunes, Mrs Bone’s wet swimming dress shaped around her clutchable thighs.

  But when Harry
walked up the front path he forgot all about the beach and Mrs Bone’s hams. He forgot because the front door of his house was as open as a throat and a lantern in the kitchen was moving yellow light around in the hallway.

  When Harry stepped into the room Crawford did not look up. He sat, staring into the wood grain eyes of the kitchen table as if trying to hypnotise it into life. One of his hands rested next to a bottle of whisky, the other beside an empty glass. About a quarter of the whisky was gone. Something was wrong; Crawford never drank whisky.

  Harry stood and Crawford sat in the still house like this for some time. There were no night-birds calling to each other from the neighbours’ trees and it was too cold for crickets. There was maybe the rustle and thump of a possum crashing through a tree onto the neighbour’s roof but it could have been the sound of Harry’s heart falling through his chest and thudding like a fish onto the floor.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Harry asked.

  Crawford said nothing.

  ‘Where’s my mother?’ Harry asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Crawford said, but the bottom had fallen out of his voice and Harry did not believe him.

  ‘Where is she?’ Harry asked again.

  Crawford turned to Harry and for a moment Harry saw himself as Crawford might: standing there, pathetic in the twitching light, red and cringing in his adolescent limbs.

  ‘She’s gone to North Sydney with a Mrs Murray and her daughter,’ Crawford said.

  The boy and the man looked at each other for a long time. One of them was a jungle cat, the other its prey, and for the first time in his life Harry felt something fierce rise up in him. If the world champion boxer was standing before him at that moment, he would have automatically known how to pummel his jaw into a paste of teeth and tongue. He was the cat. He would not be the one to look away.

  ‘Would you have a drop of whisky?’ Crawford finally asked the boy.

  ‘No,’ Harry said, shook the visions from his head, and went to bed.

  In the morning barely anything had changed. Crawford was still sitting at the kitchen table, his back towards the doorway, his right hand resting next to an empty glass, but the shadows had crawled back under the furniture and the whisky had practically disappeared from the bottle. It was sweating out of Crawford’s skin instead.

  This time, when Harry entered the room Crawford stood and swayed as if he were on a ship and clutched the chair to balance. He looked at the catastrophe of fences, sunlight and clotheslines out the window and went to the stove to make tea.

  Harry saw that Crawford’s hand was shaking as he struck a match against the side of the matchbox. And when the flame took on the gas burner Crawford flinched and turned his face as if half expecting the flames to leap up towards the ceiling.

  ‘Let me do that,’ Harry said, ‘you’re too drunk.’

  ‘Oh no. No, no.’ Crawford shook his head hard.

  ‘Did you fight with her?’ Harry asked, hoping Crawford was so drunk he would forget to lie.

  Crawford nodded.

  ‘Did she say when she’d come home?’ Harry asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Crawford said, dropping the tea canister on the floor. ‘No.’

  ‘No, or you don’t know?’

  Crawford nodded, shrugged, wavered. He slowly lifted the kettle off the stove with a tea towel wrapped around both hands, as if the kettle held Harry’s mother inside it, shrunk to the size of a pea. He lifted off the lid and looked inside.

  ‘Here, let me do that,’ Harry said again.

  ‘No! Please. It’s the least I can do for her now.’

  At the shop, Harry wasn’t noticing the rise and fall of Mrs Bone’s full breasts when she breathed as much as usual. He was too busy talking himself out of the idea that his mother had left because of him. Maybe she had gone to see Robert. There was nothing holding her here anymore. Not her unemployed husband who had become a drunk, and definitely not her son, who’d drifted away into filthy, late-night dreams of Mrs Bone.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ Harry said to the new bottles of kerosene he was stacking on the storeroom shelves. ‘I didn’t think you’d notice.’

  ‘What didn’t you think I’d notice, Harry?’

  It was a woman’s voice, but it was not Harry’s mother. It was Mrs Bone. He had replaced his mother with this white-necked, red-faced woman who looked—Harry now realised—more like a raw leg of mutton than the pin-up girl he’d thought she was.

  ‘Your father came to say he wants you home at once,’ her red mouth said. Harry had spent so much time imagining that mouth down where it could make him feel alive, and all the while his mother had retreated further and further away.

  At home the scene was the same. Crawford was sitting in the same position with his back to the door, but now there was a green tablecloth on the kitchen table tingeing Crawford’s smooth skin green, and there was a little pork fritz and bread and butter where the whisky bottle had been.

  ‘Why did you want me to come home?’ Harry asked. ‘Is she back?’

  But Crawford would not answer him. Instead, they ate, letting their knives and forks scrape against their plates and teeth to fill the empty room with sound.

  After eating they cleared the table together, and washed up at the sink side by side. Crawford was sober now, but Harry could see the booze had opened up new rooms inside him. Rooms, or dark, musty dungeons at the bottom of spiral staircases. He wanted to hug the man, but knew he wouldn’t. He would go to bed early and lie staring at the ceiling with his arms held stiffly by his sides. He was angry, because Crawford would not answer any of his questions, or even hold him, and he didn’t know where to put his arms, they were so long and thin.

  SYDNEY, WEDNESDAY, 3 OCTOBER 1917

  HARRY BIRKETT

  When the light in the sky was pallid and groggy, Harry was dragged up from the depths of sleep by Crawford shaking his shoulders saying, ‘Get up as quick as you can.’ Harry rolled over, but when he looked up to ask what was happening Crawford was gone. He could hear footsteps in the hall. Two sets. Then there was the sound of cans being slid off shelves in the kitchen and clattering into a bag. There was Crawford’s voice and the voice of a boy. Once Harry had one side of his shirt tucked into his pants he walked down the hall, toes first. The house felt as fragile as blown glass. To walk suddenly or violently or even normally would have caused the house to crumble to bits.

  From the dining room doorway he could see Crawford and the Parnell boy from a few blocks away clearing out the kitchen cupboards at a manic rate. Had the Germans come? There were no sounds of planes. Was there a flood? No, it was not raining, though the air felt hot and heavy, the clouds about to drip sweat.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Harry asked, but Crawford turned to the Parnell boy and said, ‘The ice chest; don’t forget to empty the ice chest.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Harry asked again, stepping into the kitchen.

  Now Crawford looked caught out. First he’d wanted Harry awake, now he wanted Harry gone—or did he even know what he wanted? He was acting like a panicked animal, urged forward by fear, not led by anything so thoughtful as a plan.

  ‘Go back into the dining room,’ Crawford snapped. ‘I’ll explain soon.’

  From the dining room window, Harry watched the Parnell boy leave the house weighed down by a sack full of the groceries Harry had ordered and brought back from work only that week.

  ‘Where’s he taking our food?’ Harry asked. He was fourteen now and as strong as Crawford, but in a nervous way, unused to his own strength.

  ‘I’ve sold the furniture and there’s a man coming for it and I want you to come to town with me,’ Crawford said.

  ‘What for?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Never mind, put your shoes on,’ was the only answer he got.

  Harry and Crawford followed the boy with the sack full of their food through the streets of Drummoyne. The light was more robust now and the men who worked some distance away were already moving towards the
tram with their heads bent to the ground, watching their feet walk them there.

  When they were in the Parnells’ kitchen, Harry was told to sit at a table and wait for breakfast while Crawford and Mr Parnell went to another room to talk in hushed and hurried voices.

  Breakfast, when it came, was bread and butter and beans stolen from their house. Mrs Parnell watched Harry eat, standing by with a pot of beans in her hand and spoon at the ready in case Harry needed more. The woman was looking at Harry as if she was about to cry on his behalf.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Harry asked her.

  ‘That’s sad news about your mother,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she loves you, she’s just not thinking straight.’

  ‘What news about my mother?’ Harry asked. All he knew was that when Crawford lost his job his mother sulked and had probably yelled and now she’d taken off without a trace, without even a note. But then Crawford was in the doorway with a newspaper in one hand and the woman was looking at Crawford with her hand covering her mouth, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.’

  ‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ Crawford said, throwing the paper on the table in front of Harry so that the knife and fork jumped on his empty plate.

  ‘What was that about my mother?’ Harry asked the woman, but again she said, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything,’ then turned her back on him and wiped down the bench once more.

  For a full hour Mrs Parnell fussed around Harry, clearing his plate, wiping down the table in front of him, sweeping the floor under his chair, leaning against the kitchen bench, watching him turn the pages of the paper. And for an hour Harry tried to read. He read every advertisement for false teeth and blood pills. He read about the revolution brewing in Russia, he read about how many Australian prisoners were held captive in Germany, he read about the price of eggs, but none of it was sinking in, because none of it had anything to do with his mother.