Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  Wheatfields smeared across the train window. Watkins was on his way to Hay in search of the dead woman’s dentist. How any dentist could recognise a singed and melted upper plate he’d made ten years ago beat Watkins, but then the dentist would see very different things in those dentures depending on what questions he was asked—Robson had at least taught him that.

  Yes, the dentist would be easy to sort out, but what about the man-woman’s daughter? They still couldn’t find her, and Watkins wondered what she looked like. Going off her friends who’d been calling the station with gossip, he didn’t figure her being as butch as her mother. He imagined her giggling about her eccentric mother’s antics while she and her friends shelled peas into their aprons on their front steps. It was common knowledge—these girls had said down the telephone—that Josephine’s mother got about in trousers, that Josephine and her mother had worked together at the Riverstone Meatworks, and that when her mother got her finger caught in one of the machines, she’d bandaged the stub of her amputated finger herself. Watkins could never imagine his wife being as tough as that.

  To pass time on the train, Watkins played a game with himself. One by one, he imagined all the women he knew, in trousers. He started with Miss Armfield—she was a plain-looking woman anyway, and if it weren’t for her hatred of sex perverts he could imagine her becoming something of a man-woman herself. He imagined his mother in plumber’s overalls. Now that was a terrifying thought—his mother, with her fist up someone’s pipe. He imagined his sisters dressed as butchers. He looked around at the women in his carriage and imagined them in police boots, carrying pistols, swinging batons above their heads, and began to feel afraid—not of being hurt, but of ever so gradually becoming obsolete.

  SYDNEY

  In waiting rooms and parlours, in pubs and tea houses and milk bars, the story was changing. Every day we had to wind the pictures back in our minds and start again. She did not grow up in Italy, she went to New Zealand as a child, and it was there that she met Martello, the captain of an Italian ship. She became so attached to him, she left her parents to become his wife. They sailed in a vessel with their only child, Josephine, and eventually the mother and daughter were landed in Newcastle.

  But what of the burned woman found in the bush? How did we know she was the man-woman’s wife?

  CONSTABLE WALSH

  Constable Walsh was the first officer to see the burned woman in the scrub by the mills back in 1917. He could still remember how the red of her heart and lungs could be seen through the crumbled charcoal of her ribs. And her hands: he would never forget those two stiff talons clutching at that roasted heart. It had moved him then, almost to tears. At the Coroner’s Court they’d said she’d probably been a mad woman escaped from Gladesville Hospital that the manager from the Chicago Mills had seen loitering about the place. Walsh had been told not to worry any more about it. But when, three years later, he found out the size of the lie this woman had been told, and the type of monster that told it, it fired him up so that he couldn’t sleep at night. The picture of the man-woman he had seen in the Sun was seared into the back of his eyelids, he had stared at it that many times.

  The case had been passed up the ladder to the boys in the city, and yet after weeks they still had nothing to prove the burned woman was this monster’s wife, beyond the coincidence that one woman had vanished when the other had appeared. Surely someone at the mills had seen the picture, too; surely they’d remembered seeing him—her—stalking through the scrub, wringing her hands.

  He decided to go to the paper mills again. He’d been a number of times, standing in the shadows of the city detectives, but they never let him speak. All they wanted to do was walk through the patch of scrub where the body had been found and look around. Parts of the gum that had been singed were still black, but new branches had begun to grow out of proportion to the rest of the tree, so that it looked like a tyrannosaurus rex—strong and ancient, with feeble child arms. Let’s go to the mill, he’d wanted to say. Let’s talk to them, one by one. But he never did say anything. He stood behind them, and nodded, and did what he was told.

  ‘Not to be a cunt,’ Detective Sergeant Robson would say, ‘but do you think you could stand a bit further away?’

  He started to become a little looser with the regulations. Or, another way of looking at it: he started to take initiative. He took a copy of the Sun, with the picture facing out, and went to the mills alone.

  He spoke to the office girl, Emily Hewitt, about the fire she had seen. He spoke to the watchman on duty over that October long weekend, and another man, Hicks, who had seen a strange man look up towards the incinerators at the crack of dawn. He was amazed by what people would tell you, if you ever dared to ask.

  When he got wind of a woman who had been telling everyone in the area she’d been stalked through the scrub around the mills by a suicidal-looking man that very weekend, he hightailed it over to her house.

  Mrs Carroll’s place was a newish bungalow, built of brick the colour of oily liver. She seemed to know that Walsh was coming, and seemed pleased about it, too, in a macabre sort of way. She was sitting by the only window that let in any light, and had herself turned at such an angle that her cheekbones glowed skeleton-white out of the shadows of the room.

  Walsh lowered himself into a velvet club armchair and was nearly swallowed by it, so that his knees were like the knees of a huntsman: two sharp angles reaching up.

  ‘Mrs Carroll,’ he said, adjusting himself in the chair, ‘I hear you’ve remembered seeing a man about the vicinity of the Cumberland Paper Mills in 1917?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘A very strange man.’

  He pointed at the paper. ‘Is this the man you saw?’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s him.’

  ‘And when did you see him?’

  ‘Good Friday.’

  ‘What? In April?’

  ‘Yes, the twenty-eighth of September.’

  ‘So not in April?’

  ‘Yes.’

  From where he sat he practically had to throw the Sun, picture out, onto the table in front of her. ‘Can you remember the colour of this man’s eyes?’

  ‘He had eyes of a grey hazel colour.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘That is, they were neither brown nor grey.’

  He tried not to look disappointed.

  ‘They were a peculiar colour, Constable.’

  ‘It appears so.’

  He thought for a moment. Perhaps he was complicating things. Perhaps he should just let the woman talk.

  ‘Mrs Carroll, would you mind simply telling me the story of when you saw the man, and I’ll try and write it all down as quickly as I can?’

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ she said. She cleared her throat and, as she did, a breeze thrust a shrub up against the windowpane. The light that filtered through the leaves was a sickly green, and made the hollows of the woman’s cheeks almost look burned out. She was thrilled, he could tell, by the thought that the burned woman could have been her.

  THE ACCUSED

  SYDNEY, AUGUST–OCTOBER 1920

  THE PROFESSIONAL MEN

  When dawn seeped meekly over the Tasman’s edge on Monday, 16 August, the weather was cloudy and unsettled, as if all our evaporated sweat from the weekend’s effort had curdled what should have been a crisp blue winter sky. On Saturday, the Roman Catholics of the city—some sixteen thousand—had filled the Domain to protest the British government’s poor treatment of Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne, while His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales had walked the golf links at Rose Bay and Louisa Lawson, mother of the New South Wales suffrage movement (and drunkard poet Henry), was laid to rest in the next best thing to a pauper’s grave at Rookwood. Sunday saw solicitor Rod Kidston of the Crown Prosecutor’s Office skip church to run through the proceedings of Monday’s hotly anticipated man-woman case, while Maddocks Cohen, solicitor for the defence, aired his navy blue suit, knowing that by then the most he could do for his
haggard client was look his dapper best.

  And so, on Sunday night, the two solicitors put their nerves to bed, and woke on Monday energised, as if they had spent the night in an electrical substation and come out with surplus free electrons. They felt the way young directors do before the dress run of a play, for after over a month of remands they were finally about to attend the first morning of the man-woman’s committal hearing.

  The hearing afforded both men the opportunity to run their witnesses through the emotions they had set down for them, to see if that speech needed shortening, or that veil needed lifting and at what time, without the accused’s life being wholly in the balance. Could the Crown prove that the burned-to-a-crisp five-foot-seven-inch body found by the Lane Cove River was tall Annie Birkett? Would Lily Nugent admit her sister had a weakness for drink? Would the accused’s ‘wife’ be in attendance, and show support for her distressed spouse? These were elements neither lawyer could now control.

  As both men shaved in the mirror before breakfast, their minds were as clear and indestructible as bulletproof glass. When they arrived at their respective offices, they greeted their secretaries with the same charismatic smiles they would soon try on the magistrate, Mr Gale. They lived for these Monday morning committal hearings, when the week ahead glimmered with the possibility of their success. Of course, both men could not succeed, and Maddocks Cohen, though calm, confident and dashing as always in his navy blue suit, suspected the forty subpoenaed witnesses were stacked ominously against him. So many infringements had been made by the prosecution—with the police parading the accused through the local court seeking remand after remand, sometimes without even telling him, her advocate, that she would be making an appearance. To make matters worse, they walked her from the cells to the court via the courtyard, instead of through the private indoor passageway as was convention. He could only presume they were trying to give the press ample photo opportunities, but he could not dwell on these details, or else he would likely lose his cool.

  It was hard to imagine the ground where the police court stood as ever having sustained trees or grass or snakes burrowing under rocks. The imposing stone building rose from the earth like an uninhabitable slab of granite. But if the courthouse on Liverpool Street was imposing on the outside, its insides revealed that this impression of natural grandeur was exactly that—an impression—and one invented by lofty English imaginations before being built by calloused Irish hands. The furnishings were the colour of English parlours: maroons and dark, deciduous greens. The patterns on the carpet did not quite line up with the patterns the moving sunlight made as it shone past the beams in the ceiling and the joins in the skylights and refracted off the right-angles of the doorframes, so that it seemed to be a courthouse made from turning pieces always trying to connect, but never quite managing it.

  Kidston did not notice these irregularities. When he bowed upon entering the court, he was bowing to the solid profession he had given his life to; a profession that had been worthy of his uncle’s passions and mental energies and had done well for him, affording him a house in Mosman and two holidays a year. But Cohen—a former bankrupt who had stood on both sides of the dock’s wooden barricade—knew that the law was not a divine decree received, Moses-style, from the clouds, but a tangled thing of sticky tape and string that had survived years of add-ons and subtractions and the twisting of language to the point at which it almost—but never quite—breaks.

  At various positions along the front row of the gallery, journalists filled notebooks with furious scratching. They occasionally looked up, cocked their heads this way and that, and then scratched on, their hawkish eyes seeing more quickly, and in more detail, than those of the regular human onlooker.

  They saw when, just after ten o’clock, Falleni, in man’s attire, was ushered into the dock. She wore a grey suit, a blue tie, white collar, black boots, and her hair was plastered down in the ordinary masculine fashion. To their eyes, her face was pale and rather haggard, and while the charge was being read over to her her hands picked nervously at the dock rail. In answering she said ‘Not guilty’ in a low voice, and then sat down on the dock bench.1

  Falleni, looking more effeminate than on any previous occasion, sat with legs crossed … and listened with drawn countenance and steady attention to the story told against her. Each time her advocate, Mr Maddocks Cohen, walked across to the railings of the dock to consult her those in the front positions of the galleries almost fell into the court itself in their endeavours to catch a glimpse of the man-woman.2

  Constable Walsh was called to tell of how he found the remains of a body near the Cumberland Paper Mills at Lane Cove. He told the court that a mills worker named Hicks had identified Falleni as having loitered near the murder site around the time the body was found, and Mr Cohen did not waste the opportunity to point out that Hicks only identified Falleni after her picture had appeared in the paper and ‘the whole world knew about the man-woman!’3

  Dentists—with the help of ledgers—remembered making the very teeth that were found by the dead woman’s body for a Mrs Birkett almost ten years prior. And Mrs Lily Nugent would recognise the dead woman’s pendant and chain as having belonged to her sister, the very same Mrs Birkett for whom the teeth had been made.

  Mr Cohen began his cross-examination with questions about Mrs Nugent’s sister’s drinking. If the burned woman was indeed Annie Birkett, mightn’t she have been drinking metho by herself on the banks of the river, and mightn’t she have spilled some on herself, and mightn’t she accidentally have caught on fire?

  Mr Cohen: Was she not under the influence of drink at the wedding ceremony?

  Mrs Nugent: No.

  Mr Cohen: Are you not aware that on the night of the marriage she had to be put to bed by a woman?4

  The newspaper men, though impartial, could not resist a snigger. Of course Mrs Birkett had been put to bed by a woman. Hadn’t she married one? Didn’t she get naked and rub up against one in the marriage chamber?

  Mr Kidston: Did ever the question of Crawford’s sex come up?

  Mrs Nugent: No.

  Mr Cohen: He was always a nice man?

  Witness made no reply.5

  HARRY BELL BIRKETT, the deceased woman’s son, was the next witness.6

  Mr Kidston: What fluids did your mother drink?

  Mr Birkett: She was a great tea drinker.

  Mr Kidston: Did she drink ale?

  Mr Birkett: She might have drunk ale at Drummoyne brought in by accused.

  Mr Kidston: Did she drink spirits?

  Mr Birkett: Not to my knowledge.

  Mr Kidston: Did you ever see her under the influence of liquor?

  Mr Birkett: No.7

  [ … ]

  Leaving Balmain, Birkett went on, he went with his mother to his aunt’s place at Kogarah. They were there about 18 months, and Crawford, though his mother did not wish it, often went there. Then they went to Austral-street, Kogarah, and the accused lived with them there, but there were always the same rows. There was one big row.

  Mr Kidston: What was that?

  Mr Birkett: I don’t know what it arose out of, but Crawford was wild, and smashed many a thing up.8

  Cross-examined by Cohen, Birkett had to turn his head at a sharper angle to meet the lawyer’s gaze, so that the late morning light fell harshly across his face, making his nose appear sharper, his eyebrows set at a more resentful arch.

  Mr Birkett: I have heard my mother say that Falleni pestered her so much that she was practically forced to marry him. They did not live happily for long after the marriage. It was a matter of weeks. They would quarrel no matter who was there. They would row in the shop.

  [ … ]

  Mr Cohen: Has the accused been cruel to you, or chastised you?

  Mr Birkett: He never had much to do with me, and he treated me with contempt. He has never been cruel to me.9

  The light moved across the room, pulling Birkett from the stand, setting Mrs Bone, a grocer fro
m Drummoyne, in his place.

  Mr Cohen: Have you seen Falleni and Mrs Birkett out together?

  Mrs Bone: Yes, I have seen them out on Sunday nights.

  Mr Cohen: Walking arm-in-arm and going to church?

  Mrs Bone: Yes, arm-in-arm, but I do not know where they were going.10

  Mrs JANE WIGG, who lived at Drummoyne in 1917, deposed to seeing accused and his wife leave their residence together one morning late in September or early in October, 1917, and that she never saw Mrs Birkett alive again.11

  After further corroborative evidence, and as the day’s proceedings were nearing an end a young married woman entered the box. The lights had not been turned on. She told her story, which contained some startling evidence, in a dramatic tone. The court became hushed. Falleni shifted nervously in her seat. The witness was shaken by attacks of shivering.

  This witness was Mrs Eliel Irene Carroll, living at Longueville, and she said that on the Friday preceding Eight-Hour Day, 1917, about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, she saw a man sitting on a rock with his head buried in his hands looking across the moat near the paper mills.

  [ … ]

  To Mr Kidston: I did not speak to the police after the body was found because it was the body of a woman. Had it been that of a man I would have spoken up.12

  Falleni was told to stand up, and Mrs Carroll said she was the ‘man’.13

  The further hearing was adjourned until Wednesday morning14 and Maddocks Cohen came up for air. He buttoned his jacket, smoothed down his moustache and packed his briefcase as was his ritual at the end of a day in court. Although he moved with deft ease, he felt queasy, as if he had spent the day spinning in circles with his eyes shut, and not coolly cross-examining the Crown’s witnesses in court.