by Pip Smith
Jack Coroneo had no idea where Josephine was—she knew this—but still she hoped—assumed, even—that he would find out anyway, and walk in just as the crown of their baby’s head was beginning to show between her legs. He would take up her hand in his own, kiss it, and only then would their baby slip out as easily as a word. He would say it: Sorry. And she would forgive him.
She had rehearsed the scene so many times it had the detailed clarity of a premonition, and so she was surprised when—as she breathed in for a final push—Nina walked through the door with her hat in her hands.
‘Where’s Jack?’ Josephine panted. ‘What have you done with him?’
‘Now, now,’ the nurse said. ‘It’s not your father’s fault you got into this mess.’
‘Yes it is!’ Josephine screamed. ‘Yes it is!’
‘I put an ad in the police gazette for the bloke that did that to you,’ Nina said, nervous, ‘but nothing came of it.’
‘I don’t believe you!’
Josephine grunted. She moaned. Nina looked fraught and slipped out into the corridor where she’d only be met with more wails and forty eyes from twenty bassinets staring up at her.
Josephine did not get to see her baby after it was born. It—or she, Josephine would later find out—was taken, big-eyed and squirming, to an empty bassinet in the corridor. ‘It will be easier,’ the nurse said. ‘This way you won’t form a bond.’
But what about the blood that flowed through both of them? The placenta she had made that it had been feeding off for the past nine months? ‘I’m keeping it,’ Josephine said, staring down the nurse. She wanted to call her a bitch, a fucking bitch, but she knew it wouldn’t help.
‘No, Josephine, the papers have been signed.’ The nurse was turning back Josephine’s sheets, tucking them in, strapping her arms down.
‘I never signed anything.’
‘Your father did, and with your best interests in mind. Now calm down.’
Her best interests? The hospital would probably sell her baby—for ‘a donation’—to a barren, uptight family and she would not see a penny of it. The injustice made Josephine dumb. Couldn’t they see how unfair this was? To have the most important decision of your life made by an ex-nun and a distant—possibly lunatic—parent who never wanted you in the first place? She kicked the sheets off her bed and crept out into the corridor to steal her baby back.
She was the only girl in the place on the darker end of European, and she realised that for the first time this could work in her favour. She would know which baby was hers by its dark lashes, black hair, melted chocolate eyes.
Josephine waited until the night-duty nurses were nodding off in their seats and snuck down the hallway, testing the handles on doors. At the end of the hall she opened a door onto a room full of pink-and-white babies in eggshell bassinets. The babies were bald, or with tufts of gold, blond or pale brown hair. Some were sleeping, some were wailing; their sausage fingers wriggled at the end of fat, edible hands. None of the babies were hers but they wailed anyway, because the cold air was nothing like the red warmth of a womb, and the scent of milk leaking from Josephine’s breasts was driving them wild.
The night nurse came rushing after the wails and found her. Josephine’s cheeks felt old and heavy. She could not turn and run. ‘Where’s my baby?’ she whispered. ‘None of these are mine.’
The nurse took her by the hand. ‘I’m sorry, Josie,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘She is no longer with us.’
‘She’s still in the hospital though, yes? She’s just in a different ward?’
‘No, dear. I’m sorry.’
When the nurse pressed her gently in the small of her back, Josephine did not fight. She shuffled back to her bed, curled up to face the window and watched the bats fly home from their evening hunt.
Childless, with aching breasts, Josephine growled and sulked. Daisy let her stay in the flat above the shop with the rest of them, but her moods were not tolerated for long. ‘You can live here,’ thin-lipped Daisy had said, ‘but you have to do a few chores until you feel well enough to go out and get a job.’
Ah, so she would be a slave here, too.
The shop was failing—anyone could see that. Josephine could have told Daisy she’d have to be a few degrees warmer than an ice chest if she wanted any child other than her dopey son to dare to set foot in the place, but Josephine did not care to give her insights as well as her labour away for free. And so she watched Daisy’s shop fail from on her knees, where she scrubbed the hardwood floor, and smiled into the suds.
There is only so much scrubbing and genuflecting a charismatic girl of sixteen can handle before her claws flick out of their own volition and start scratching the plaster off the walls. To spare the walls and lives of others, Josephine dressed up like a movie star and caught the tram to the Cross, where boys flashed through the streets like flocks of gaudy parrots. She would buy a pie, sit on a bench, and try to catch the eyes of the dark-haired ones as they passed.
The navy men were her favourite. They were steeped in delicious man-smells, and were as bold and loud as trumpets. They strode across the road as if no one would ever dare run them down. They were lovely, and even lovelier when they were drunk. Then they would tell her how beautiful she was and, when she blushed, tell her again with one arm around her waist. They would ask to buy her drinks. They would breathe their whisky breaths into her neck and she would feel alive again, even something close to loved.
The next day, stories would have to be concocted, apologies dished out for stumbling up the stairs too loudly at three in the morning. By the incredulous look on her stepmother’s face, she could have sworn Daisy had never had a womb at all—it was like trying to explain the cancan to a cornhusk.
When the shop finally failed, it was everybody’s fault but Daisy’s. They would fight about it in bed at night. ‘It’s because your daughter comes home too late at night,’ Daisy said to Nina. ‘Don’t you worry for her? Anything could happen.’
Josephine called through the bedroom door: ‘Ah, you frigid old bitch. Anything already has!’
It wasn’t until they moved to Drummoyne that Josephine wondered if Daisy was not quite so frigid as she appeared. Returning home from work one afternoon, wondering where to go that night, she realised she might not have to go anywhere at all, for there, waving around in the air, were the firm buttocks of a young plumber. His arms and trunk were stuck halfway under the kitchen sink.
Josephine took off her hat. ‘Hello,’ she said, shaking out her hair.
The plumber did not look impressed. He was now all the way out from under the sink, and rubbing his hands down his grease-streaked trousers. He was handsome, but uninterested. This was not how it usually went.
‘Thought you was Annie,’ the plumber said.
He wasn’t smiling. He seemed immune to her eyelashes, immune to the molten brown of her eyes.
At that moment, Daisy came in through the back door, hugging a basket of sun-warmed washing against her hip. The redness was gone from her cheeks—was she wearing powder? And her hair was done up—not in the harried way it usually was, but in a neat bun with a well-selected curl spiralling down from her temple. Now the man smiled, and Daisy did too. Their smiles were connected—it seemed for a moment—by a fine gold thread. The man looked away, looked at Josephine, rubbed his hands down his pants again, and started talking.
‘Mrs Crawford, it appears I might need to come back tomorrow, to fix the, ah, balancing valve.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Daisy said. The saucy hypocrite.
‘I suppose I should let Dad know,’ Josephine said, her voice as strong as a wrench. ‘So he knows how much money to leave?’
Daisy’s smile hardened. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
So then, Josephine would have to go out to get her kicks after all.
She didn’t come home until the weekend had worn down to dust, her clothes reeked of cigarettes, and the smell of semen wafted up
from her underpants. The light in the kitchen was watery—it must have been four or five in the morning—but there, sitting in a meek shaft of moonlight, was Nina, head bowed down to a bottle of beer.
‘More rows over you,’ she said. ‘I can’t get any sleep at night.’ Josephine fetched a glass and sat opposite her. ‘Should have finished me off all those years ago, like you wanted.’
Nina’s head lifted, could not hold itself up. ‘What a lovely daughter I’ve got.’
‘What can you expect?’ Josephine took the beer, poured herself a glass. ‘A lovely mother I’ve got.’ She leaned over the bottle and whispered: ‘She had a plumber over. And I don’t think it was the kitchen pipes he was fixing.’
She should not have said that. Nina sat up straight in her chair, every part of her paying attention.
‘From Balmain? What was his name?’
‘I don’t know. It was probably nothing,’ Josephine said, although she knew it wasn’t nothing anymore.
Josephine thought it might be wisest to stay home in the evenings, only for a week or two, to make sure she hadn’t lit any fires that couldn’t be easily put out. But then actually standing in the middle of the room while her so-called parents glared at each other was another thing entirely. And actually staying put in Drummoyne was about as dull as living could get. The neighbours lapped up any sensational detail glimpsed in the lives of others. Did you hear that Crawford lost his job at Perdriau’s? Yes! As a result of that nasty strike! Lord, I thought it would never end! Eventually, one brazen neighbour found herself on the Crawfords’ doorstep holding out a plate of homemade ginger snap biscuits.
‘Hello, dear,’ the woman said, looking over Josephine’s shoulder. ‘Is your father home?’
‘No,’ Josephine said, trying to close the door.
The woman pushed it back with her plate. ‘Well, I made these for you, too.’
Now, after all this time, a neighbour was prepared to acknowledge—to her face—Josephine’s existence. She opened the door wide and let the woman in.
The woman sat at the kitchen table and waffled on about the repercussions of the strike, and the horrible ways she’d heard Germans treated their pets, and the price of butter, and the unpredictable spring weather, and only after she had exhausted every mundane topic did she ask the question the whole street wanted to know the answer to: ‘Dear,’ she asked, ‘where is your mother? Why aren’t you living with her?’
The woman’s eyes were bright with hunger for the attention she’d receive once she’d grown full and interesting with this particular piece of news. Josephine was sick of it. Why should her family live caged in by the opinions of bored women too frightened to be interesting themselves?
Nina was walking up the front path with her usual quick, overreaching strides. Her head was down; she was clutching a bottle in a brown paper bag.
‘There is my mother over there,’ Josephine said, ‘dressed up as a man.’
The neighbour laughed but Josephine did not join in. The neighbour glanced over at Nina, who was standing in the kitchen now, quiet and alert. One look at Nina’s cadaver-pale face had the woman stop laughing at once—‘The potatoes,’ the neighbour said, ‘I have left the potatoes’—and she was careful to give Nina a wide berth as she made her way out into the street.
Nina did not rage or shout. She breathed in, and slowly sat in a chair at the kitchen table as if her joints were made of paper and easily crushed.
‘I’m sorry,’ Josephine said.
Nina said nothing.
‘I should leave,’ Josephine said.
Perhaps her mother would protest? Ask her to stay? There was a small part of Josephine that was afraid to live alone. She did not know how she would orientate herself without someone to live against.
‘Maybe a place close to your work would be good,’ Nina said.
‘Yes.’ Her lip began to tremble. No, she thought, don’t cry, not now, she will think it is a trick.
But it wasn’t a trick. A dam wall had ruptured and violent, ugly sobs were forcing their way out.
Hold me, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t even breathe.
MARCELINA BOMBELLI
One night Nina brought a sneezing, shivering boy to her place. They had been staying at a German woman’s house up the road, and the over-boiled cabbage had him wasting away. The boy’s father was dead and his mother was sick in hospital with consumption, Nina thought—could Marcelina take him in? ‘Alright, if you pay me,’ Marcelina had said, and sometimes, when Nina had money, she paid.
It is hard to explain the joy that is felt when you meet someone who speaks the same as the family you have left behind on the other side of the world. This person, when you meet her, becomes a substitute for the family you have lost. There might be other things this person brings. A hand gesture, a certain way of frowning—and maybe it was a combination of these things that meant Marcelina did not ask too many questions, and did exactly what Nina said.
‘The boy calls me Crawford,’ Nina said. ‘It’d be better for everyone if you could too.’
So Marcelina did.
She knew it was her son Frank she had to watch. Little ones born in a new country, they feel an allegiance to the new place and the people in it, so that when you say, ‘Now listen, Frank,’ as Marcelina said to her son the day he left for Sans Souci with the boy Harry Birkett, she knew he would not listen.
Frank was a real good boy, but the two women could not trust what he might say when he’d thrown back a beer or two. Nina would stare at him long and hard and that would shut Frank up. He would look away; he never could stand her stares for long.
The boy Harry thought Frank was the best thing who ever stood on two legs. Frank was a motor mechanic then, and had a healthy appetite, and the hair on his arms and chest was good and strong and dark. After the boy moved in, he hardly noticed Nina when she came around to talk with Marcelina. He was too busy following Frank around like a baby bird, squawking: could Frank show him this, could Frank show him that, could Frank teach him a thing or two about girls? ‘What, like how to tell them apart from a bloke?’ Frank would say, and Nina would stare until Frank changed the subject.
Frank enjoyed having the boy Harry follow him around, and the two became as thick as motor grease, always tinkering with rusted engines or brewing beer in the bathtub, until eventually they moved to Sans Souci.
‘Why must you go?’ Marcelina said. ‘My house is so much closer to your work.’
‘I can’t stand having Nina breathe down my neck,’ Frank said.
God knows what he told the boy down by the beach. Whatever it was, it was not good.
‘Where is the boy?’ Marcelina asked, when she went to give Frank’s place a clean.
‘In town with the detectives,’ Frank said. ‘Learning how to tell the difference.’
JOSEPHINE DEANGELIS
After dancing for two hours straight at the Palaise de Danse, Josephine went outside to breathe. Arthur had become a little too friendly with a woman who lived on her street, and nothing could take her mind off it. Not the music or the booze, and the cocaine only made the cool air feel like shards of glass in the nose. And was that a man staring at her from the other side of the street? She blinked. A gentle rain took the edge off the electric dance hall sign, and—yes—a man was there, watching her. She leaned her head against the wall in a way that made her hair cascade over her shoulder.
Now the man was stepping forward. Perhaps he would offer her some snow? She waited until he was at smelling distance before she turned to look him in the face.
He smelled like Nina. Josephine turned and, yes, there was Nina: damp and on edge. Josephine would have slapped her across the face if so many people hadn’t been nearby to see.
‘Where have you been?’ Josephine asked. She had not realised how angry she was until she opened her mouth and the words splintered out. She was speaking quickly, more quickly than she thought it possible to speak. ‘I went back to
The Avenue, and you weren’t there, and Mrs Bone had no idea where you had gone. Do you know what that’s like, to come looking for your mother and to be met by the dark rooms of an empty house and no note and no message, no nothing?’
Nina looked horrible. Her cheeks dragged down, her mouth was a limp line drooping towards the dirt of the street. ‘Everything’s unsettled and upside down,’ she said. ‘Daisy has found out I’m a woman. I’m going my way and Daisy’s going her way, and if you ever go near her again, she’ll go for you.’
Josephine thought of the costume brooch she had turned over to Daisy in lieu of board, the necklace that was hers that she had seen Daisy wearing about the house. ‘Who has the jewellery?’ she asked.
‘Oh, she’s got all that.’
That bitch had milked them of their precious things, then took it all and ran.
The rain was picking up, but Nina made no move to leave or step under the awning. She was standing in the mud, lingering in the rain. Why? Did she have nowhere else to go? Josephine remembered what Nina had once said to her, about doing away with herself before the police found anything out.
‘Come and stay with me and Arthur in Darlington,’ Josephine said. ‘We’re having a party tomorrow night. Will you come?’ Nina thought for a moment, before drifting back out into the street.
Daisy had killed herself. That’s what Josephine thought when she saw the picture of her shoes in the paper. She had doused herself in kerosene and thrown herself into a fire. It was a brazen way to go. Romantic, even. And Josephine thought: Perhaps we were not so different after all. Both of us wanted to burn the place down.
GENE, THE FATHER-IN-LAW
DARLINGTON, NOVEMBER 1917
GENE
What’s that Arthur Whitby you think you can make me small by looking at me like that sitting me in the shadows of your rank beer party so no one will see me I know what you get up to with that woman over there that slut from down the street don’t think I don’t know even her little girl she can’t be more than four she’s in on it too right in front of my daughter I’ll kill you if you hurt her you low down bugger don’t think I haven’t done worse
