by Pip Smith
Perhaps it’s time to tell them how it happened, Mavis said.
And how was that?
You know, she said. Whatever it needs to have been to get you out before you die.
I shrugged.
Think of your granddaughter, she said. Wouldn’t you like to see her?
Right then. What it needs to have been.
When the police showed me where the burned woman was found, I was supposed to remember the long walk through the scrub. Why this spot for the picnic? Had I convinced myself the smell wouldn’t be streaming from the chimneys of the cornflour mills upriver because it was a long weekend? Did I choose that spot because I thought I could lift her into one of the furnaces at the paper mills nearby?
Who planned it all: the picnic, the fire, the direction of the wind?
Wouldn’t I like to know.
Wouldn’t they just kill to know.
I told the warders: Alright, I’ll try to talk. For Rita, you understand.
The first man who came was a doctor I’d never met before. He sat awkwardly in the reception room, beside a warder who was trying not to smile at his awkwardness.
I told him the parts of my story I could remember—mainly things I’d read about in the papers. I assumed they were the things people wanted to hear, but he seemed unimpressed, like he’d heard it all before.
Why are you here, then? I might have asked him.
He blundered through some sentences. Something about sending me back home.
And where is that?
He spoke slowly, in a clipped Italian learned from books. Italia, avrei pensato … ?
My Italian is very rusty, I said. Seeing as I left the place when I was two.
He lowered his notebook. Mr Coyle arranged the visit, he said.
I said nothing.
You know, the prosecuting lawyer in your trial?
How could I forget.
I hope that hasn’t put you off speaking to me?
My cell’s stone walls were warmer company.
Coyle meant for no harm to come to you, he said. He feels sorry. He was only doing his job.
Oh really? What a relief.
Hours later, the doctor returned in my sleep.
Would your faces like the chance to be killed? he asked.
The offer seemed sensible enough.
We’re all going to die sooner or later. Probably when we least expect it. Would they prefer to control the timing of their deaths? To take the element of uncertainty away from the fear of their inevitable end?
To my surprise, all my faces said yes. I sensed relief in their voices, maybe guilt for letting the care between us lapse. I felt responsible then, for the nature of their deaths, and suddenly anxious that I had not quizzed the doctor enough. How would our lives end? Would we be in pain?
When the doctor proposed the plan to me—the anatomy department was struggling to get its hands on bodies these days—it seemed like a brave experiment. I didn’t understand the practical reality until I saw Tally Ho, Crawford, Jack, Gene, Nina, all behind soundproofed glass, having our heads spliced open and the skin stripped from our scalps and necks while we were still alive. Their skin was elastic, unreal, it stretched for ages before it finally snapped. What was real was the horror in our faces.
In the morning, all I could see were bodies twisting in the fern fronds, vertebrae in the yellowed books stacked on the library shelves.
Try again, Mavis said.
The next man’s card read: Harry Cox, Journalist. What a name. Like Harry Crawford but with multiple cocks. I imagined them squirming in his pants like Medusa’s head as he sat opposite, holding his smile just out of reach.
It was a charming smile, full of teeth that were brighter than teeth, the way fishing lures are brighter than fish.
Why did you do it? he asked.
I had no choice.
He couldn’t scribble in his notebook fast enough.
Wait a tick, I said. Why did I do what? Dress as a man?
Hmm? he said, half listening, still writing. So, you came to Australia on a Norwegian barque …
Did I? This was news to me.
Tell me a little about your time at sea …
My time at sea? I tried a smile. Haven’t I lived most of my life at sea?
In his notebook he wrote: At sea—six years.
What I’d wanted to tell Harry Cox and his multiple cocks is this:
I was once a partner in a laundry business with a woman my family knew. Mrs D’Angelis ran the shop while I carted starched linen around Double Bay with my daughter by my side. Because we worked separately, the old woman didn’t see how I slogged. She thought she was a tortoise, carrying the weight of the business on her back. Her limbs swelled in the steam until they looked like loose-skinned sausages that jiggled when she walked. This was evidence, she moaned, that she was doing all the work. She didn’t count the work of the black girls from Parramatta. She only noticed them when something went missing, or when they themselves disappeared.
Everything was in her name: the house, the laundry, my daughter’s future. Sit down and write a will, I urged her, and she did, but the old hag never signed it. When she eventually kicked the bucket, she did so instantly, pulling a string of starched sheets down as she went. They sat around her, as stiff as sugared egg whites, and sweated in the heat.
As a mother with no husband, no work and nothing to any of my names, what else could I do but try on the suits her dead husband left in their wardrobe? They were moth-nibbled and old, but they fit like skin. Wouldn’t you have done that, Rita? If I’d stayed a woman I’d have earned half the wages of a man. I had two mouths to feed. It was simple maths.
But Mr Cox didn’t ask the right questions, so he never heard any of that.
The next journalist met me in a room empty of furniture or decoration, save for a big table, two chairs, and a long form against the wall. I entered the room and waited for instruction. Asked by a distant warder’s voice to take a chair, I chose the form. I wanted to lean against the wall, did not want my back exposed to the unpredictable hands of others.
The journalist noted my choice, and when I pulled a pink handkerchief from my pocket, it was not wasted on him.
J.D. Corbett was clean-shaven, his cheeks and chin still red from the razor. He smelled of soap and his eyes were a soft gravy brown—a comfortable brown, though he couldn’t have been more uncomfortable in his scratchy suit. I wondered for a moment if he’d rather be wearing a dress.
What do you miss most? he asked. George Street? The shops? The lights scrawling across the harbour?
He asked me these questions and I forgot who was supposed to be wringing whose heart.
Please help me, I said. I have no friends, no money, no influence.
He was trying to believe me. He nodded a concerned nod.
I was convicted on circumstantial evidence, I said. I was what other people made me.
But sitting on either side of that large table we were making each other up as we danced around what we thought the other wanted us to say.
I told J.D. Corbett that soon after I lost my job, I found Daisy drinking at home. Maybe she hadn’t drunk as much as I thought, but I knew we wouldn’t make rent and she was at the table with her feet up, swishing a nip of gin as if she were the landed gentry. I didn’t hold back and said she should go off with that plumber I heard she was so keen on if she was going to drink like that and I tried to remember the rest of our conversation but my memory wouldn’t give it over. I know I went for a walk to Five Dock Bay and watched the prawns get frisky in the moonlight and when I came back half her clothes and she herself were gone.
After three days of waiting, I sold up the furniture and took her boy and together we went to lodgings. I know I should have gone to the police, but I hoped she’d come back after that plumber had had it up to here with her drinking too. Also, I worried (and I was right) that if the police got one whiff of the breasts under my suit they’d make up hidden murderous a
gendas to go with them.
It was hard living with her boy because he looked so much like her, and asked questions about her, none of which I could answer. He began to be like a flea, biting at the one sore over and over, so we went our separate ways after a time.
Have you noticed that when you assume people think you are guilty, you answer their questions in the manner of someone who is guilty? When I was a kid someone stole the scissors from Sister Katherine’s desk, and even though I didn’t steal them I thought, They will think I did, so I said in a loud voice, I WONDER WHO DID THAT? GOSH I’M GLAD IT WASN’T ME, after which everyone, of course, decided it was.
This is what it was like after Daisy went away. Neighbours asked after her, so did old friends. I could see that if I said, I don’t know where she is, they’d think I was lying, so I tried to sound as though I knew where she went. To one woman I mentioned she’d gone to North Sydney, to another I said she’d left with the plumber from Balmain. I couldn’t admit I knew nothing about my wife—where she’d want to go, and who with.
Three years later the police dragged me out of the cellar at the Empire Hotel to tell me I had murdered her, then locked me up and asked again and again: What happened? When I didn’t say anything, they worked out a past for me, and my God it was convincing. I began to wonder if it was more convincing than the truth.
They took me to a hallway in a building without signs and held me against the closed door of a room. I could hear hammering and sawing inside. Eventually they opened the door and lead me to a long box on a high table. The air was thick with dust and the dank smell of underground animals. Inside the box I caught glimpses of bone through traces of dirt and I was surprised by the whiteness of her skeleton despite the worms and clumps of clay and smell of rot. It was as white as the coats of the doctors who leaned with metal instruments clanking at the end of their hands.
The detectives held my face up to the hollow eye sockets and toothless grin of a skull. This is the woman you murdered, they said. They had me by the neck so I couldn’t look away. I closed my eyes but that grin burned red through my eyelids. Its toothless bone mouth was open wide in an expression of delirious joy. I’ve got you now! it seemed to say. They’ll never let a freak like you off the hook!
The story made Smith’s Weekly, page one. Mavis brought it to the library and in her best out-loud voice she read: To-day Eugene Fallini, pink handkerchief in her gnarled hand, makes a humble, feminine gesture of entreaty. She beseeches her freedom. She does not want to die in gaol …
I had them read me the article again and again. I committed the words to memory. All week I fluttered the handkerchief for show, using it to wipe the corners of my mouth to great imaginary applause, but one week revealed that the article had a very different effect to the one I’d hoped for.
Young Birkett and the detectives had spent the past ten years sitting in a circle, stewing on their rage, until I emerged between their blazing lines of sight, more animal than a salivating werewolf of the steppes. Eugene Falleni, that murderous human monster … the Truth wrote on their behalf. This harsh-voiced, obscene-tongued, evil-featured person … they went on to say, before declaring that it was in the interests of justice that I have no right whatever to be allowed loose amongst society again.
As I read, I felt something harden behind my sternum. Like a tree, I was growing a layer of brittle wood around my green core. I coughed up whatever was left. It came out thick and yellow, and eventually I could no longer walk.
When the air was drier they wheeled me out into the fernery. Sitting beneath the tree fern was a short, stocky man with a landslide chin and thick glasses. He was Italian, and you could see that, like me, he was haunted by some aspect of himself he wanted to cut out and burn. He asked me questions I would’ve answered, but the coughing had changed my voice into the echo of a voice, heard at the end of a drain.
One week later, Joe Lamaro, son of Italian fruit vendors and Attorney-General, took pity and announced my release.
I should have been overjoyed, but I couldn’t eat my hominy the morning of my release.
Don’t be nervous, Jean, Mavis said, watching me move my spoon through the glop. What’s the worst that could happen?
Outside the prison gates, the journalists who followed me from court would be crouching behind their flashbulbs. Their beards long, their hair grey, they’d be waiting to solve the riddles in the story of their careers, drafted ten years back and set aside until this very moment. Why did you kill her? Who is your daughter’s father? Were you raped, is that why you are the way you are? The worst that could happen was that they’d begin to swarm, reaching for bits they could keep in formaldehyde. A tooth, an eyeball. Is the iris grey or hazel? They’d ask their colleagues. Some would say hazel and some would say grey. An argument would ensue. The story of the eyeball’s host would be told—She was a man and a woman at the same time!—until news would be received of a man, this time, in a dress. They’d rush to find him, leaving the rest of me to feed the currawongs and feral cats. That was the worst that could happen.
But when I walked through the prison gates it was already dark. I passed an old, veiled woman. Her hands gripped a plate of homemade biscuits. I smiled as she passed, but she didn’t notice. I checked my hand—I was not invisible—and looked up to see my face reflected in the window of a brand-new automobile parked half up on the kerb. I’d seen my face in the prison mirror and hadn’t paid much attention. But here, in the stark electric streetlight, I looked like a woman I did not recognise.
From the forehead down my reflected face peeled away, revealing the face of another woman behind the glass. It was the woman they called the Silver Lining, rolling down her window. A nervous smile flashed across her face.
Hello, Jean, said another woman, leaning across from the front seat. As she waved, her white-gloved fingers looked like tentacles feeling around for a meal. It was Lady Reay, gloved and hatted and ready to collect me for ‘rehabilitation’ at her friend the Silver Lining’s house. I would have hosted you myself, Reay said, but Mr Mort tries to ensure we lead an unexciting life.
They gave me the front passenger seat so I could sit next to Reay—or Dorri, as her friends called her. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, but she was not making eye contact with me. I wanted to touch her hand resting on the gearstick, but she tugged it and the clutch rasped as if gasping for breath. It was a miracle anyone let her drive, considering what they’d done to her. But she was still Reay, just better-dressed and duller in the eyes.
She instructed us to stay quiet and slump down in the seats to be out of view of the prying eyes of journalists. The plan is, Reay said, pulling off the kerb, to throw them off our scent. She was convinced the road was lined with journalists hiding in the shadows behind trees. She assured us it was best to drive along the road closest to the sea, where the fierce onshore wind meant no trees could ever grow, and thus no journalists could hide behind the trunks of said trees in order to take down the coordinates of her car at every turn.
Are you sure you’ve driven one of these before? the Silver Lining asked, gripping her seat with two hands.
Reay’s headlights set the pupils of a possum alight and for a moment we glimpsed the hell that burned inside the furry shell of its body.
Thump.
The Silver Lining screamed. Oh, Dorri, was that a cat?
No dear, just a possum.
Oh.
We were all rattled after that, and when white light could be seen, an anaemic dawn rising above the curve of the road, Reay switched off the headlights and turned into the nearest laneway too sharply. She mounted the kerb and winded a postbox. Headlights swung past, and I could feel the Silver Lining analysing the moving angles of my profile as they did. I tensed my jaw to give it a more masculine edge and made that sound men make when they clear their throats to help her see how I could have been the man-woman after all, and she had not been jilted.
Yes, Reay said, starting up the motorcar again, hard to i
magine how anyone ever took her for a man, isn’t it?
The Silver Lining quickly turned to look at the lights out of the window.
The lights. My God, the lights. Since I’d been inside Long Bay the city had been electrified. The whole place was trying to dazzle us. What was it trying to hide?
The curtains in the Silver Lining’s house were embroidered with flowers of a dangerous size—the kind you might find in a rainforest, baring teeth. The fabric of the curtains was so heavy that even if you’d been standing in the room in the middle of the day, you’d never have known. At night, the electric lamps were left on and the hours hummed along in a dim haze. In that house, time evaporated into the high ceilings. The carpet looked as if it had never been stepped on, the lounge never sat on, and the moment a person moved, a half-caste girl materialised from the shadows to erase any trace of the movement.
The madness of the rich was more sinister and ordinary than I’d first suspected. When I saw that my shoelace was undone, the Silver Lining nudged the girl until she said, Here, Mrs Ford, let me do that.
It’s fine, I said. I can tie my own shoelaces. And with that the girl melted back into the shadows.
There were black girls at Long Bay—more than I’d ever met in the outside world. Most of them had been locked up for no reason at all. The Silver Lining collected them when they were released, though they often vanished in the night, never to return, not even for their pay. It’s a common problem, she said. Those girls are like cats; you can make up a warm bed for them, but they are determined to wander off wailing in the night to sleep wherever they want.
