Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  ‘Good afternoon,’ the man said, taking off his hat. ‘My name is Detective Watkins. Might you be a Mrs Jane Wigg?’

  A chill crept over her skin then, from the base of her neck—a chill born of genuine concern. What on earth did one offer a detective for afternoon tea? Poundcake? Honey jumbles?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Detective Watkins said, squatting slightly to lift up her troubled gaze with his own. ‘I haven’t caught you at a bad time, have I?’

  ‘Oh no!’ She stepped backwards into the house. ‘Please! Come in.’ At the moment of retreat it came to her: a selection of fish-paste sandwiches, teacake and arrowroot biscuits would be the wisest selection for a detective—not too showy, nutritionally comprehensive.

  ‘Please make yourself comfortable in our parlour,’ she announced, indicating the kitchen.

  After placing the afternoon tea in front of the detective, she turned the plate around as brazenly as one might spin a roulette wheel, so that the teacake (her signature cake) was facing him. Mrs Wigg perched on the edge of her chair, with her knees twisted away from the detective as she had been taught, and asked delicately, ‘Detective, how may I help you?’ (Ten points! cheered the Eisteddfod committee. What a talented hostess!)

  The detective pulled up his trousers at the knees, leaned forward, and selected a fish-paste sandwich. He chewed quickly at first, then paused as if his tongue had discovered something illegal hidden between the slices of bread. A tooth? Or a limb? He swallowed hard.

  ‘Is it stale, Detective?’

  ‘No! Fish paste!’ He coughed, and tried to smile. ‘I thought it was chocolate butter, silly me.’

  Mrs Wigg was horrified. Fish paste! What was she thinking! ‘I’m sorry, Detective, it must have been quite the shock.’ At that moment she felt for him the way she had felt backstage after last year’s Eisteddfod, seeing the minstrel performers wipe the black off their skin—how inferior their talent for singing suddenly seemed.

  Detective Watkins placed the rest of the sandwich on the coffee table for them both to keep an eye on in case it leaped off its plate and swam around the room.

  ‘Mrs Wigg, I am here to talk to you about the man-woman.’

  Mrs Wigg laughed. ‘Pardon, the what?’

  ‘The man-woman. Have you not heard of her? She is in all the papers.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. So he was a salesman. What a foolish woman she had been, to endow his slate-blue suit with such inflated importance. ‘You are a gentleman from the circus, aren’t you, come to sell me a ticket?’

  ‘No, Mrs Wigg, I promise you I am a detective of the police.’

  Mrs Wigg did not want to hear it. She had already been shamed by her husband after purchasing radium pills and blood tonic from a man who looked the spitting image of a doctor. Her work on the Eisteddfod committee was making her believe in first impressions, talent, magic tricks. It was exciting to believe in these things. To live a cynical life was to live like Mr Wigg, always grumbling sensible facts at a newspaper effervescent with sensation. But she was not going to be played for a fool so easily by this charlatan detective. The detective was reaching into his pocket, no doubt taking out a ticket book for a quack travelling freak show of trickery and fat women with beards. She stood up, ready to send him on his way, when he pulled from his pocket not a ticket book, but a police badge. It was police-grey—the colour of gaol terms and bullets. Too dull to be a prop, too ordinary. Mrs Wigg sat back down.

  ‘Do you remember Mr Crawford, your neighbour at number five?’ the Detective asked her.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And did you notice anything odd about him, Mrs Wigg?’

  Mrs Wigg wanted to answer yes, so that she would not seem unobservant. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘What did you notice?’

  ‘Well,’ she said slowly, ‘his wife seemed tall, so I suppose that would mean he was short.’

  ‘Right,’ Detective Watkins said, shaking the cuff of his sleeve back from his wrist in preparation to write. ‘What else?’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘Did you overhear anything at all?’

  ‘Overhear anything?’

  ‘Yes—any rows, or anything like that?’

  ‘I heard a few groans coming from the house in the night.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And once I heard a little scream, and then a door slam.’

  ‘But did you notice anything in particular about Mr Crawford?’

  ‘About his … ?’ She leaned forward, hoping he would finish her question so that she might better know how to answer it, but the detective was not playing. He sat back in his chair.

  ‘This is not a school exam, Mrs Wigg. It’s alright to admit you noticed nothing at all.’ He spoke in the same weary tone of her high school maths teacher when he insisted that a hypotenuse was not, as Jane then believed, an African animal that lived in a swamp.

  Yes, now that she put her mind to it, she could remember the rumours that circulated in 1917, about Mrs Crawford going about with other men. About her penchant for plumbers. She remembered the last time she saw Mrs Crawford, too. She was carrying nothing but a small suitcase, and walking arm in arm with Mr Crawford in the direction of the tram. Funny behaviour for a woman planning to run away with a tradesman, now that she thought about it.

  ‘Can you describe the suitcase for me, Mrs Wigg?’

  ‘Well, it was a small square case.’

  ‘Did it look oriental at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Perhaps a little.’

  ‘Almost Japanese?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps it was a little bit Japanese.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Wigg.’ And the detective wrote down some more notes.

  As the detective walked towards the door, she felt relaxed enough to ask him, ‘Detective, what does this have to do with the man-woman?’

  ‘You do know that Mr Crawford is not Mr Crawford at all, don’t you, Mrs Wigg?’ the detective asked.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Mr Crawford is an Italian woman called Eugenia Falleni.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you seriously telling me you never suspected?’

  ‘My Lord,’ Mrs Wigg said, and leaned very quickly against the wall. For a full nine months she had lived next door to a pair of sapphists and hadn’t even known. Mrs Wigg remembered the groaning house, and the little scream, and flushed. Now that she thought about it, Mr Crawford never wore a five o’clock shadow at five o’clock, nor any other time either. And he walked as if he had something to prove. And he had a funny swing to his arm, like he was a child playing the role of a sailor in a play. My God, she thought, am I so easily fooled?

  Yes, my girl. Yes, you are.

  NINA, THE WRONG DAUGHTER

  SYDNEY, 1898–1917

  GRANNY DEANGELIS

  It was late in the night when the girl came to Granny’s door. It was a cold night—there was a wind whipping right off the bay. She was standing on the front steps in a big coat, and her belly was out here like this, like she had swallowed the moon. The girl was pregnant and the baby had hands and hair and fingernails already. She had been pregnant for seven months and Granny thought to herself: No, this is not the daughter I was promised.

  Granny knew the girl’s mother back in Wellington. Isola had sent the girl here because the Lord did not give Granny any children. He gave Isola so many, but he did not give Granny even one. The girl, Nina, she was five daughters for the price of one. She was too much daughter for Isola and so she sent her to Sydney to help out in the DeAngelis’s laundry.

  Granny foolishly thought, How kind of Isola, giving away her oldest girl like this. But when Nina turned up, pregnant and with short hair, short as a boy’s, she saw that she was not her girl either. She would never be anyone’s girl.

  ‘Mrs DeAngelis?’ she said. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Granny said, but Nina did not come inside, she only stood there and burst into tears. She had s
aved up every tear from her life for this night, it seemed like to Granny, and now they were fighting each other, trying to come out first.

  ‘I have to get rid of the baby,’ Nina said through her tears. ‘I cannot look after a baby.’

  Granny folded the girl up into a blanket and when she did she could feel the baby move. This is the daughter God promised me, Granny thought. She is still growing hair and eyelashes and toenails. She is the girl inside the girl.

  Sitting by the stove, sipping coffee, Nina did not say anything for some time. She only sat on the stool, with the blanket wrapped around her, and stared at the glass of the window. Her eyes did not look out the window; it was like they were two birds thumping against the glass.

  ‘Who is the father?’ Granny asked. ‘Maybe he can help pay?’

  The girl sipped the coffee and looked at Granny, but did not say anything. Granny thought: She must be heartbroken, with him so far away.

  When the coffee was all gone and the stove was out, Granny took the girl to her bed. She told Mr DeAngelis, ‘Get up, you’re sleeping on the floor,’ and he said, ‘What? Sleep on the what? In my own house?’ And Granny said, ‘You have not paid a penny for any of this, it is my house and if I say the girl is sleeping in the bed she is sleeping in the bed.’ So Mr DeAngelis went and slept on the floor like a dog.

  Nina barely even touched the bed before she fell asleep; she must have walked such a long way to bring Granny her new daughter.

  When the girl and the baby were all tucked in, Granny took her coat and clothes to the laundry and looked in the pockets for the money Isola had promised her, but there was nothing there.

  Even though Granny gave Nina her own bed, Nina was up every night having hot baths and doing handstands against the wall, and one night Granny found her vomiting into the chamber pot after drinking half a bottle of whisky, but she put up with it because she knew her daughter was coming in the end. She had held fast for so long, there was nothing Nina could do to shake her out now.

  Another night Granny found her with her head bent down between her legs. She had a knitting needle bent into a hook, and she was using it to poke up inside herself.

  ‘Stop!’ Granny shouted at her. ‘Do not hurt my baby!’

  Granny took the knitting needle away from her. There was no blood, but even so she crossed herself, crossed the baby in Nina’s stomach, and left Nina for Our Lady to judge.

  ‘Just send me to the home!’ Nina said. ‘I can’t keep the child and neither can you!’

  Mr DeAngelis stood behind Granny in the hall and shouted along with the girl, ‘I don’t want another mouth to feed!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Granny said to him. ‘It’s my laundry, I run the business—what do you do but scratch your scrotum and spit into the cabbages?’

  ‘I don’t want another man’s baby here!’ he said. ‘Send the girl to St Margaret’s!’ But Granny did no such thing. She knew what would happen. Those frigid women, they’d take the baby and sell her to make money.

  When the baby was born it was a beautiful night. The full moon popped out from behind a cloud just as the baby came screaming out of the girl. There was no wind. The whole night was holding its breath at the sight of the most beautiful of babies being born.

  ‘A girl!’ Granny said to the midwife. ‘She will be called Maria, after Our Lady.’

  ‘No,’ Nina said. ‘She needs an Australian name.’

  ‘Maria can be an Australian name.’

  ‘No,’ Nina said. ‘Call her Josephine.’

  She was red in the face and tired, so Granny let her name the baby. She gave her that.

  When the midwife handed over the baby, Nina turned her head and looked away. She was crying and didn’t want the baby to see. Her breasts were weeping, too. They were weeping milk at the sound of the baby’s voice. Nina pressed them down with her hands to make them stop, but they would not.

  ‘You have to feed her,’ Granny said. ‘She will not stop crying until she is fed.’

  Nina took the baby to her chest, and the baby was so thirsty, she drank her dry. Nina’s breasts were not weeping anymore, but she was still crying, because there, in her arms, was her baby, and she couldn’t do anything about it now.

  All the next day Nina lay in bed, as grey as the sheets. She said she wanted to die, but Granny did not let her die, because she needed to feed the baby milk until Granny could feed the baby porridge herself.

  The baby cried every time the girl did not touch it, which was all the time, so the baby was crying all the time. It sent Mr DeAngelis crazy.

  ‘I have to sleep on the floor of my own house and listen to another man’s baby cry?’ he said. ‘Get rid of the baby or I will leave you and go back to Italy!’

  Granny looked at his fat belly, his lazy hands too stiff to work, his penis which could not make babies. She looked at his forehead, all wrinkles from frowning at the things he did not understand, and she looked at the baby: small and pink as a piglet, wailing so loud it was almost an aria, and she said, ‘Certamente, Mr DeAngelis, see you in Italy,’ knowing she would not.

  Mr DeAngelis looked at her like a fish that had been hooked through the throat; he did not believe that his threat would work, and then it had.

  Even with him banished from the bedroom, the baby kept crying through the night, and kept crying when the dogs started howling and the roosters started crowing and lights came on in neighbours’ houses. During the day, the whole of Pelham Street walked about as if they were asleep, and at night, they would stay up and fight.

  One night, the baby stopped crying very suddenly. Granny could see that Nina was not in her bed. She thought: Ah, maybe now she has finally gone to her baby. Granny saw Nina leaning over the crib. Maybe she is about to pick the baby up, Granny thought. But no, she was not moving. Her arms were strong, her elbows locked. She was holding a pillow down on the child.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Granny beat the girl’s arms but she did not stop. Granny pinched her, pushed her. Nina was strong, but she stopped when Granny yanked back her hair. Nina stepped back and shook her head at herself. She was crying again, but the baby was crying louder than she ever had before. Granny picked the baby up and sang along with the dogs and the roosters and the screaming neighbours until the sun came up.

  When Granny woke, she was sitting on the stool next to the stove with the blanket wrapped around her. The baby was in her arms and Nina was gone. She had taken everything she’d brought into the house. Everything, except Eenie.

  JOSEPHINE DEANGELIS

  Helping Granny in the laundry was as exciting (and ultimately disappointing) as a smoke and mirrors show at a carnival. Ghosts flickered in the shadows the steam cast against the walls, and sometimes those ghosts would become the spectacular figure of a man standing between fluttering sheets and drums of boiling chemicals—one of his hands resting on the handle of a sheathed sword, the brass buttons on his captain’s jacket glinting as dangerously as stolen doubloons.

  Every time the man appeared, Eenie was sure it was her sea-captain father come to take her with him on his next voyage across the Pacific.

  ‘Come on, Eenie,’ the man would say. ‘Come and help me deliver the laundry for Granny.’

  Eenie would stare at the figure, wishing from the bottom of her toes that it was him this time, that they were going to deliver laundry to an exotic island in the middle of the sea, but when she stepped towards him he would turn into Nina, in trousers again, his hand on his sheathed sword nothing more than Nina’s hand holding the end of a wooden pole used to poke boiling rags.

  Even though the laundry cart was not a barque and Nina was not a famous sea captain, Eenie helped her mother deliver crisp piles of sheets and shirts to the houses all around Double Bay. If they rode through Queen’s Cross, Nina would ignore the hoots and hollers of sailors unused to cart-driving, trouser-wearing women, and Eenie would eye each one of them, wondering if that man was a captain, or that man, or that. She would tug on Nina�
��s sleeve and ask, ‘Is that him?’ And Nina would act as if she was only capable of fixing her eyes on the road ahead.

  As suddenly as Nina could appear before Eenie’s eyes, Nina could vanish, too, and be gone for months. Then Eenie would sit in the laundry shop window and watch the rabbit-oh skin his rabbits in the street, and the bloody rabbits twitch even in death. She watched for Nina, who came back sometimes to fight with Granny and try to take her away. She watched for the fruit-and-vegetable man, played by one of four different Chinamen whose name was always John. But she watched, mainly, for her father, who never came.

  When Josephine turned twelve she left school to work in Granny’s laundry full time. A gloominess seeped into the space her father should have filled. It seeped stealthily, under the cracks of doors at midnight. It pooled in the hollows under Josephine’s eyes and weighed them down; it stuck to her thoughts and made them drag. Josephine thought the darkness might not stick if she kept moving, and so she spent her nights walking through the streets of Double Bay towards the Cross. She walked dangerously close to gaudy, feathered girls and men in high-heeled boots, but they let her pass silently. She wanted to be frightened so that she could leap out of her skin and feel lighter for a moment, but no one mugged her. No one even snarled.

  She tried the walk on other nights, wearing Granny’s lipstick, Granny’s rouge. She piled her hair up on top of her head and practised sauntering. She burned messages into the hearts of the men she passed with her eyes. Look at me, her messages said. I exist. I exist.

  After a few years of practice, Josephine’s message finally landed in the heart of a waiter at Woodward’s Oyster Saloon on King Street. Her message released itself as stealthily as a gas, so that all he could pay attention to was the miracle of Josephine’s existence fogging up his field of vision.

  She sat on a stool at the oyster bar, swivelling from left to right, left to right, holding his gaze fixed. He was tall, dark and handsome, just like the men she read about in books. Except he was very dark. Italian maybe. He would whisk her off to Livorno in an old fishing boat he made himself. He would place fresh mullets at her feet as an offering to her beauty. But before all this, he slipped her a glass of lemonade with complimentary bubbles.