Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  ‘Can’t let a beautiful girl like you go thirsty,’ he said with a wink.

  Like fleas, the bubbles leaped from her drink and into her skin and tickled the roots of her hair.

  She covered her mouth and giggled to mask a little burp. ‘No,’ she said, and swivelled to face him front on. ‘No, you shouldn’t. The only problem is, I’m thirsty for something stiffer.’

  Driving straight into the full-bodied attention of an unknown man without the brakes on gave her a thrill she did not think she’d be able to live without now she’d had a taste.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Twenty-one,’ she said, and outlined her lips with her straw in case he’d missed how full they were. What did it matter if she was seven years shy of twenty-one? She felt twenty-one. And so many twenty-one-year-old girls sat at home doing needlework, wasting the freedoms their age gave them. He looked as if he didn’t care to know her real age anyway, in case it stood in the way.

  ‘You got a feller?’ he asked.

  ‘Only you,’ she said, and he clutched his heart and dropped his head as if he had been shot straight through.

  ‘Coroneo!’ his manager called to him from the back of the room. ‘Are them tables going to clear themselves, you slack Greek, or what?’

  So he was a Greek. That was very almost Italian. Josephine imagined the white house they would have on a hill rising out of a turquoise sea writhing with octopuses. He would come home in a toga, tasting of salt. She would turn olives into oil with her own hands. The ways of their ancestors would come back.

  ‘I knock off at ten,’ he said. ‘Meet me out the back. I’ll take you somewhere real nice.’

  By eleven o’clock she was two drinks in and as syrupy as toffee on the hob. Jack Coroneo could have poured her into any shape he liked and she would have stayed and let him lick her all over, starting at the toes. He took her by the waist after the third drink and walked her through the streets, stopping to kiss at every intersection.

  After they had walked for what felt like hours he smuggled her up the back steps of his parents’ house, so that his mother would not wake. ‘Shhh,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to be quiet.’

  It hurt, what he did to her down there under the sheets, but in a way that reminded her she was alive. All the same, she had heard stories of girls having to go away to the country after they’d let men keep their penises inside them for too long. She didn’t ever want to go to the country, it sounded like the most boring place in the world.

  ‘You can’t stay in there,’ she whispered, trying not to sound too frigid.

  ‘It’ll hurt me,’ he said, not letting her pull away. ‘If you make me this excited and don’t let me get off it’ll turn my balls purple and then they’ll fall off.’

  He was so frightened of losing his balls, he was beginning to shake. She did not want to make his balls turn purple because then he might not like her and above everything else that was the most important thing—that he should like her, that he should think she was maybe even worth loving. She moved a little, so that she could look him in the eye.

  ‘Oh! Oh, Josephine!’ he said, shaking more violently. The way he said her name, she didn’t care anymore about his seed or going to the country. The way he said her name he may as well have said, Let’s go to the country together, you and me.

  The jolting of his body subsided until he was so still she thought for a moment she had killed him.

  ‘Jack! Jack!’ She shook him by the shoulders. ‘Jack, I’m sorry! You don’t have to come to the country!’

  ‘What? Who’s going to the country?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I thought you—nothing.’

  He sat up and she leaned in for a kiss but he was reaching for an old singlet to wipe her blood off his penis. ‘Can you be careful not to let the screen door bang when you leave?’

  He pulled her hat from under his back where it had been crushed by the weight of them and threw it to her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, still hopeful, always hopeful, and stinging a little between the legs.

  The next time they met out the back of the oyster saloon. He loved her quickly, bent over the staff dunny. This time, he did not ask her to leave. After they dressed he placed his hand on the small of her back. Her nerves burned there, in the shape of his hand.

  What followed was a week of saying, ‘Alright, why not?’ Not yes—a word of conviction—but alright, a gusty word that lifted her off her feet and carried her to places she had no real intention of visiting. The middle of Rushcutters Bay Park in the rain on Wednesday evening, for instance, or standing naked in the washroom of his friend’s boarding house on Friday, watching him wash his penis in the low sink, saying, ‘It’s probably too soon for this.’

  When Josephine saw Granny’s grey face, it seemed to her that the week had run out ahead like a wave and was now drawing itself up to crash over her head from above.

  ‘Where have you been going at night?’ Granny said in a frail voice. ‘You are too much. You are just like your mother.’ Granny coughed. Granny rubbed her swollen knees and groaned. She looked at Josephine as a stranger might.

  I’m still here, Josephine wanted to say, I’m still Eenie, but it was too late to undo what she had done, and the shame of it only kept her out longer—made her drink four drinks, instead of three.

  No one came to the house when Granny died, not even Jack Coroneo. There had been no notice in the paper, so no one had known to come. Customers rapped on the door, frustrated their laundry had not been delivered, but when they saw Josephine pregnant, in mourning, and wearing far too much make-up for a girl her age, they pressed their hands into their chests, muttered condolences, and quietly took their business elsewhere.

  Josephine hung on. This was her house now, her cave. She was a mama bear going into hibernation, and if anyone tried to take her away, she would be fierce, too, just like a mama bear. She collected pretty things from the pockets of coats that had never been picked up from the laundry, and made a nest out of them. A silk scarf, a bright brooch made out of real diamonds, a playbill from a show. She was sick some mornings, but she hoped that meant she’d be thinner once the baby was out. They could live like this, together. She and the baby protected from the rest of the world.

  And maybe a man would see her from across the street. Maybe he would be touched by her fierce instincts. Maybe he would save them from the withering gaze of neighbours. The daydream was a light, flickering at the mouth of her cave. It threw its shadows large against the shutters at night until it was hard to tell the difference between what could only be a dream, and what could ever possibly be real.

  MARCELINA BOMBELLI

  The first thing Nina asked Marcelina was could she write a letter.

  It was 1910 maybe, and it was rare to meet new Italians in those days, seeing as the country wasn’t letting any more in. They had been coming for years to the goldfields, and then suddenly: no. You have too many babies, you use too much garlic in your cooking—but that is another story, not for here.

  Marcelina met Nina at the Italian laundry in Double Bay. Nina would come and go from that place: come to take her daughter away from the woman who brought her up, and when the woman chased Nina out the door with an open bottle of bleach she would go—no one knew where, but she would put on a man’s clothes and go away for months. It was strange the way Nina went about in trousers, but she could do a man’s work and got paid more for it, too, so what did it matter if she was a woman underneath her clothes? Marcelina couldn’t think of any good reason.

  Marcelina did write a letter for Nina, and after that Nina was a frequent visitor to her house. The two women would talk in Italian well into the night. Marcelina talked of the country and the family she left behind. They would re-create Italy right there on Cathedral Street, and it got so they could almost smell the place. Even though Nina had left Livorno when she was two, after Marcelina started on about the holiday villas studded into the mountainside, and the wine merchan
ts brawling in the streets, and the fishermen always coming back with more fish than they could sell, Nina would get wet in the eyes. She remembered the place well, even if it was only Marcelina’s memory dropped into her head.

  Nina spoke of Wellington. Her Nonno and his horses, her Nonna always telling stories, pretty Ida, Emily and Rosie always wanting to be saints, and little spoiled William. They’d had their fights as all families did, but the life she was living here could not last. She had to run from job to job in case anyone caught her out for the man’s pay she was getting. She was sick of looking over her shoulder every second. She was worn out. Maybe her family were right, Nina said, maybe she should have married a rich man when she had the chance, and put on a smile to show everyone she could take it. Her mother had sent her here to help Mrs DeAngelis, but now that Mrs DeAngelis had stolen her daughter she wanted to go back and start again.

  ‘Will you write another letter for me?’ she would say when she got like that, and Marcelina would smile and hope another memory would carry them away, but then Nina would say ‘Per favore?’ and Marcelina would have no choice.

  She began to dread writing Nina’s letters, because they were always the same. I want to come home, her letters would say. Per favore fatemi tornare a casa. They had tried writing this to her sisters, her brothers, her Mamma, her Papà, her Nonna and Nonno Buti, and none of them ever wrote back. Anyone would have thought New Zealand had drowned itself under the ocean.

  Nina must have started feeling as though Marcelina’s house was a deep, dark well with no echo. You could shout all sorts of things into it, and no one would shout back.

  Late one night, after they had talked their way to the bottom of a bottle of wine, Marcelina could see that Nina was on the verge of asking her to write another letter. ‘You know what I think?’ Marcelina said, before Nina could say another word. ‘I think you need to take a lover.’

  JOSEPHINE DEANGELIS

  Soon after Granny’s death, Josephine was shaken awake by a man she did not at first recognise. He smelled familiar—of salt, horses and sweat. It was dark, but she could just make out a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the cabbage-tree hat of a bum. He was opening and closing her drawers, throwing her clothes into a bag.

  ‘Who are you supposed to be now?’ Josephine asked.

  ‘Your father,’ Nina replied.

  ‘What’s become of Nina?’

  ‘She’s dead. Consumption.’

  ‘Alright. So where are we going?’

  ‘Balmain,’ she said. ‘A lolly shop in Balmain.’

  ‘What, now? Can’t we go in the morning?’

  ‘No.’ Nina pointed at her belly. ‘Who did that to you?’

  ‘No one,’ Josephine said.

  ‘Alright, Virgin Mary, who’s going to pay for it?’

  Josephine said nothing. And then, to make sure Nina said nothing else: ‘I’m going to keep it.’

  They rode in silence, through streets piled high on either side with boxes and bits of wood nailed together in a semblance of houses. They passed a pregnant cat lying on its back in the gutter, panting.

  ‘So who is she?’ Josephine asked Nina.

  She was silent for a moment. She whipped the horse. ‘A Mrs Birkett. She has a bit of money.’

  ‘And does she know?’

  ‘No.’

  Josephine rolled her eyes. ‘You know she’ll find you out one of these days.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll watch it. I’d rather do away with myself than let the police find out anything about me.’

  After midnight they arrived on a doorstep somewhere. A crisp voice called through the door, ‘Who on earth is that?’

  Josephine was looked up and down by a woman, pinched in the face and alarmed, like a crow that had just found a vulture in its nest. The woman lingered over the bulge beneath Josephine’s dress.

  ‘This is my daughter,’ Nina said. The woman could not take her eyes away from the bulge. ‘Can you let us in now, Daisy? We’ve been driving for almost an hour.’

  Daisy smiled, though only her mouth moved. Her eyes were lead doors, sealed shut.

  ‘Excuse us, dear,’ Daisy said to Josephine, ‘while I have a word with your father.’ Daisy folded Nina into the house by the shoulders, careful not to open the door too wide in case Josephine made a dash inside and gave birth in the middle of the floor. The door closed in Josephine’s face with a thud and she was left to lean against the nearest streetlamp and listen to Nina get torn into strips.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me she’d been knocked up?’ the woman was saying. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I can’t understand it.’ As the woman got louder, her pitch rose. A glass canister smashed to the floor.

  ‘Calm down,’ she heard Nina say.

  ‘Send her to St Margaret’s!’

  ‘I can’t do that, Daisy—have you ever seen that place?’

  And so the argument went on. Josephine listened, shifting her weight from foot to foot to give her back a break. It was surely one o’clock by now, or maybe two. She turned her attention to the street and the wind whipping the dust up into miniature tornados. An old woman passed, clutching a wicker suitcase. Even in the dim streetlight, Josephine could see that the woman’s once-yellow skirt and blouse were filthy. She had a grand kind of hat on, though, with a big feather struck through the band. It flopped up and down as she lugged her suitcase up the hill, muffling and releasing the sounds of her mutters as it rose and fell. The woman was in her own world, but even so she saw Josephine’s belly and gave Josephine a look of pity. How pathetic, to be pitied by a lunatic. Josephine turned her head away. Come on, she willed Nina. Come on, let me in.

  The door opened a crack and Nina squeezed out. She had a gentle spattering of sweat across the brow. It had been a long and arduous fight.

  ‘You can stay tonight,’ she said, ‘but we have to get you gone before she wakes up.’

  Josephine pushed herself away from the streetlamp. ‘Great, thanks.’ Some man Nina was, she couldn’t even keep that scrawny bitch in line.

  ‘What can you expect, being up the duff?’

  How quickly you have forgotten, Josephine thought, but she was too tired to fight. Nina picked up her bag and helped her up the steps into the shop.

  Traces of the fight were scattered across the floor. Shards of boiled lollies and glass snatched at what moonlight made it through the windows. Josephine resolved to wake up and be dressed with all her things packed before that horrible witch cracked opened the slits of her eyes. Anywhere would be better than here. Even St Margaret’s.

  Josephine woke to the sight of two white shirts drifting from the sky towards the street. Upstairs, the banshee was holding Nina’s things to ransom.

  ‘Who are you?’ she shrieked. ‘Tell me!’

  A pair of trousers drifted past the window. ‘And who is that little madam’s mother?’

  Silence.

  ‘Tell me!’

  There was the sound of Nina’s feet descending the stairs three at a time. She rushed outside to catch the rest of her clothes before they fell into the horseshit in the street.

  ‘Well, good morning,’ Josephine whispered to the bump under her dress. It fidgeted and rolled, and Josephine rolled too, onto her back. She was lying on a blanket on the floor of the shop under shelves of boiled lollies lined up in gradations of colour. The early sun shone through the jars, casting a timid rainbow across the room. At its end stood the stockinged feet of the woman, Daisy.

  ‘I trust you slept alright,’ the woman said. Her gaze could not quite hold on to Josephine’s. Their eyes were two wrong ends of magnets forced to meet.

  ‘Fine,’ Josephine said. ‘Except for the shard of glass that was jutting into my back.’

  The woman let her smile drop. ‘Perhaps the sleeping arrangements at St Margaret’s will meet your standards,’ she said. Her look added, Though I doubt it.

  At St Margaret’s there were the things you were not allowed to do, and then there were the things
you did. These were often the same things. They were the things that happened at night, when Mrs Abbott was not stalking the hallways and the girls stretched their claws, ready for the hunt. Then Josephine snuck out the window and crab-walked across the roof to steal port wine and cigarettes from drunks asleep on the church steps, or stood watch in the hallway while boys were snuck into the bedrooms of other girls, and wondered when they would get to do the same for her.

  Josephine thought about Jack Coroneo as she cleaned the nice toilets used by the pregnant women with proper husbands in the hospital next door. She thought of him as she hung washed sanitary napkins up on strings threaded through the laundry rooms, scraped charred fat out of the ovens in the kitchen, and watched unmarried girls go suddenly into labour, slumped in a puddle on a half-mopped floor.

  On Saturday afternoons, Josephine sat in the garden out the back and stared deep into the earth, right down to where the skeletons of babies had been buried. They were supposed to have sprouted shoots and leaves and bloomed into less burdensome organisms, but instead they occasionally surfaced and were found scattered across the dirt after the dogs had got in through the hole in the fence.

  Nina visited once a week, though Josephine had no idea why. They would sit on the furthest ends of the settee in the foyer. Nina would ask her how she was, and she would say, ‘How do you think?’ then pretend to read a pamphlet taken from a box on the wall. Something about St Margaret’s protecting the country from white race suicide. There was nowhere else to look, there was nowhere else to sit. If Nina tried to bring up the subject of adoption, Josephine would say: ‘I told you: I’m keeping it,’ and Nina would shake her head and leave.

  ‘I know it’s hard for you to imagine!’ she’d shout out after her. ‘Wanting to keep a child!’

  Josephine did not waste time being sorry, because she knew Nina would be back again the following week to take her daughter’s moods like a cat-o’-nine-tails thwacked across her back. Nina was far more Catholic than she ever dared admit.