by Rod Jones
Every morning, Mum walked with Molly as far as Ballarat Road to make sure she got safely across. Once she was on the other side, she waved to Mum and ran the rest of the way to her new school by herself.
Back at the orphanage, she had made friends easily, but now she often spent lunchtime alone in the schoolyard. If someone came up and spoke to her, she was friendly, and if some of the girls invited her into their skipping game, or to play jacks, she was happy enough to join in. She just seldom made the first move. On rainy days, girls had to stay in their own shelter shed, boys in another. Molly often thought of Bonnie, and missed the Brighton Beach State School. It was as though a part of herself had stayed there, and the other part couldn’t feel at home in this new school.
Her teacher, Mr Bates, was strict, but Molly liked him. The children sat at their wooden desks with their heads bent over their exercise books, hardly daring to look up unless Mr Bates was speaking. Molly liked the classroom smell of the wood fire, pencil shavings, orange peel, sandwiches. Sometimes the smell of tobacco came from the staff room. She also caught a whiff of the leather schoolbags that hung on hooks in the corridor outside, as well as the smell of the incinerator in the yard.
There was a lot about Mum that Molly didn’t know. She knew, of course, that Bill Williams was not their dad. And she knew that Mum was thirty-five years old and Bill was twenty-four, and that Mum didn’t like people to know. There were things Olive and Teddy knew that she didn’t know, because sometimes when Molly asked questions, they told her that some things are only for grown-ups.
She couldn’t remember their father. Sometimes Olive mentioned him, but she didn’t say much. Molly could often tell what Olive was thinking, because Olive had looked after her when she was small, and the sisters were close. Molly could never tell what Teddy was thinking.
Teddy was going out with Rosie and it was understood that soon they would be married. Rosie worked at Ball and Welch in Flinders Street and had sold umbrellas, gloves and handkerchiefs. Now she worked in the lace department along with twenty-seven other girls. The employees at Ball and Welch received a discount on purchases, and Rosie wore the latest fashions; she always seemed to have a new hat or new shoes.
Because Molly was shy and didn’t talk much, the grown-ups sometimes forgot she was in the room. ‘Did you see the way Teddy looked at her tonight?’ Mum asked Bill. ‘I think we can safely say that our Teddy’s on the hook.’
‘Rosie’s a looker, all right.’
‘As long as you’re not looking, Mr Williams,’ Mum said, but from her tone Molly knew she was joking. Mum often called Bill ‘Mr Williams’ and he called her ‘Mrs Williams’ even though they weren’t married.
Olive had been to the pictures with a man who worked at Standard Quarries, and who everyone called Hoppy because of his fondness for the Hopalong Cassidy stories, which had been appearing in magazines for some years. He was mad about cowboy pictures, too. Olive and Hoppy went to the Grand or the Trocadero on Saturday nights, depending on what was showing.
Hoppy seemed always to be tired and dragged his feet when he walked: wearing his heavy quarry boots, even when he wasn’t. Most evenings the two couples sat on the porch and talked. Teddy and Hoppy smoked. Sometimes Bill stuck his head in to say hello. Mum stayed peaceful in the kitchen, listening to the wireless, and helping Molly with her sewing or knitting.
‘You know, my life hasn’t been easy,’ Mum told her. ‘Well, that’s nothing special, I don’t suppose there’re many people who haven’t seen hard times. All my life I’ve spent jumping around from one place to the next, for one reason or another, and now at last I feel settled. I think this kitchen is my favourite place on earth.’
Molly liked to hide in the bushes and listen to the two couples on the porch. She could see their legs: their trousers, their stockings, their shoes. Sometimes they took the gramophone outside and practised the Black Bottom and the Charleston. If there was just one couple on the porch, and it was late, and they weren’t talking, Molly could raise her head above the bushes to see them kissing. It was usually about that time she heard Mum calling her to tell her it was bedtime.
On Saturday afternoons after work, Bill’s friends came and sat in the kitchen. Molly watched from the back door. Bill sat at the end of the scrubbed pine table with his hat on and a pencil in his hand, making marks on pieces of paper. The men counted out their two-shilling pieces, and sometimes Bill gave money back to them. They listened to the racing results on the wireless, and sometimes one of the men yelled in an excited way and Molly could not tell whether the man was very happy or very angry. She didn’t like the cigarette smoke and the noise. She played in the backyard or with the neighbouring kids down the lane along the cliff above the quarry. Some of the kids in her street went to her school, and she had been to play at Louise and Jenny Talbot’s house near the corner.
Late one Sunday afternoon, when Mum had gone out visiting and Teddy and Olive were out, too, Molly saw Bill in his gumboots and rubber apron, hosing out the killing shed.
As soon as she realised she had the house to herself, Molly went into Mum and Bill’s room. She liked the feeling that there were secrets to be discovered. Mum kept a tin in the drawer of her dressing table. The tin was purple with a picture of violets on it. It had once contained chocolates. Inside the tin was a picture of a big house that looked like a farmhouse, with wide verandahs and a horse and cart pulled up out the front. Molly had looked at this picture before. On the back of the photograph, someone had written in ink, Bellevue. Molly had made up a story that once upon a time Mum was rich and used to live in that house. And maybe it was true. Why else would Mum have kept a picture of the house? It was a mystery, but of course Molly couldn’t ask Mum about it without giving herself away.
There were no photographs of them as babies. Molly had been told that their dad had been killed in the Great War. But she had never seen a picture of their dad, not a soldier in uniform, or a wedding photograph of Mum and him, or his medals. She knew that soldiers who had been killed in the war got medals. In Louise and Jenny’s house there was a photograph of a man in uniform on their mantelpiece. She didn’t have the courage to ask who it was. There must have been pictures like that in many houses, Molly thought, photographs of faces, in lounge rooms where a father or a son or a brother should have been.
When Teddy came home from the Board of Works, he washed himself in the basin and changed out of his overalls. Teddy seemed like a giant to Molly. After he had changed into his trousers and flannel shirt, he sat at the kitchen table, smoking and reading the Herald, which he bought from the corner shop on his way home. If he found something interesting, he read it out to Molly. Late one afternoon when Mum was still at the shops, and Teddy had taken up his usual spot with the newspaper, he said to Molly, ‘Listen to this. A lady was murdered in her orchard over in Mitcham. It says that her injuries were caused by a blunt instrument, such as the blunt end of an axe.’
‘That’s terrible!’ Molly cried. She had never heard of such an appalling thing. ‘Why don’t the police put him in jail?’
‘They’re out looking for him right at this minute. But,’ said Teddy, winking, ‘if there’s a murderer on the loose, you’d better watch yourself. You never know when he might be tempted to strike again. You’d better be careful, Molly. You’re just the kind of little girl a murderer would be looking for.’
She knew Teddy was teasing her, but that night as she lay in bed,
she could not get the thought of the Murderer out of her mind.
When she came home from school, Molly followed Mum from room to room, helping with the chores, sweeping and dusting. She also had her scrapbook with the pictures she had cut out of Mum’s magazines, the Australian Woman’s Mirror and the New Idea. There was her drawing book and crayons, her needlework and the collection of clothes she had made for her doll. Her favourite time was the late afternoon when the family was all home together, the smell of food cooking, and she knew that Mum was happy with Bill. Molly was happy too, even when Teddy tweaked her ear and told her stories about the Murderer.
Apart from the killing shed, there was another shed with an old car inside, covered in cobwebs and dust, with no wheels, resting on wooden blocks. Bill had bought it from a man, intending to fix it up one day. Molly was not allowed to go in there because Mum said that the bloody great thing was in danger of falling on somebody.
There was dirty glass in the windows of the shed and a hard, greasy dirt floor. From one of the roof beams a heavy rope hung from a pulley, two metal wheels bolted to the roof beam, the rope hanging from a hook. Teddy and Olive called it the ‘hangman’s noose’, although there was just a loop of chain at the end of the rope, not a noose at all. Teddy told Molly that a murderer had once been hanged in there: ‘That’s what happens to murderers. Murderers get hung.’
When the girls in Eldridge Street visited each other’s houses, they usually played indoors. Sometimes Louise and Jenny came to the front door and asked Mum if Molly was allowed to play. Mum almost always said yes, and Molly dutifully took them into the bedroom and showed them her dolls, her patterns and needlework, the pictures she had clipped from magazines. It was the groups of boys who ran wild out of doors. Molly was careful of the boys who came to play in the lane. They threw stones at you, and played complicated games where they took you prisoner and locked you in a crate in next door’s shed. Even so, Molly liked to go off by herself down the lane. There were blackberry bushes, daisies in springtime, and holes in the wire fence where she could crawl through and sit on the very edge of the cliff and look down into the quarry.
Sometimes in the night—it must have been past midnight—the back gate creaked open and she heard the night man taking the can from the back of the outhouse, his quiet curses as he slammed it against the side of his cart and emptied it. The draught horse tramped on along the lane. Then she heard the sounds repeated as the night soil was removed from next door.
She remembered how scared she had been those first nights at the orphanage. But then she thought of how quickly those frightening, unfamiliar rooms, and the sounds from the other buildings in the night, had come to feel normal. She thought about Bonnie, and wondered if she was still at the orphanage, or whether some relative had come to claim her and she was living her life somewhere else. She decided to write to Bonnie again. If she had left the orphanage, Mr Butler would forward her letter to Bonnie at her new address.
After hearing the night man it was hard to get back to sleep and, lying awake in the dark, other thoughts came to her. She imagined the night man had a dirty face, like a picture of coalminers she had once seen in the Argus, their cheeks streaked, their eyes unnaturally big and clear. She wondered if the night man might have even been the Murderer himself.
One night Molly summoned up her courage, slipped out of bed and went outside. A breeze carried the stink of the night cart. She pulled her nightdress close around her and crept past the poplar trees, which Bill had planted like a row of soldiers, past the killing shed with its gutters that let out the blood, past the shed with the wheel-less car, and opened the gate beside the chook yard. It was too dark to make out much. She could see the bulk of the cart down the lane. She knew the draught horse was there by the sounds of its stamping hoof, and its snorting.
She dared go no further than her own gate. She was afraid she would fall down the cliff into the quarry. In the dark, that fear came close and she felt her stomach lurch as if she was already falling.
Back in bed, Molly closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep, but as soon as her eyes were closed there was something moving in the dark. She didn’t dare look. ‘It’s only the draught horse in the lane, silly,’ she told herself. But her terrified mind took her back to the lane. She heard a noise in the outhouse. Was the night man hiding in there? No, she reasoned, he had just needed to go in there to relieve himself. She smelled tobacco; he was sitting in there having a peaceful smoke while his horse waited in the lane and the rest of Footscray slept.
Suddenly the door opened and a man appeared, shockingly close, just a few steps away. He was still doing up his trousers. He went to the back of the outhouse, slid out the pan and hoisted it on his shoulder. His chest was rising and falling, as if from the exertion. He was wearing a khaki greatcoat and it looked wet from where he might have spilled a pan.
In that instant of her dream, he saw her. He looked at her with an air of indignation, as if accusing her of spying on him. He spoke in a low, hoarse whisper. ‘Hullo, what have we got here?’
Teddy had told her once that the night man came with his horse and cart and collected little boys and girls and took them off somewhere. He did to them whatever murderers do. Chopped them up into little pieces, she supposed.
Now the man took a cloth from his pocket with his free hand and wiped the slime from his face. He was the night man, but he was also Teddy, having his wash after work, as he did every afternoon. Teddy came home from work in the sewers they were building under Melbourne, his clothes smeared just like that. It must be awfully dangerous work that Teddy did, Molly thought. The worst thing, Teddy had told her, were the wild animals that lived in the sewers. Down there he had seen lions and tigers that had escaped from the zoo.
‘Real lions and tigers?’ Molly had asked her brother.
‘Oh, yes. They are very hungry. They’ll eat little girls who go to the outhouse in the middle of the night,’ Teddy had told her.
Then she remembered seeing the night man’s face through the open door of a public bar once, when she and Mum had been walking past. He was standing with a gang of men, loud with their mates and their beer, their faces stretched into leering smiles. Molly remembered that afternoon because, pasted to the brick wall outside the pub, there was an advertisement for the Holden Brothers’ Circus, and she had begged Mum to take her.
The night man must be so very tired, she thought. He went to work at sunset and came home at dawn. Molly could not imagine how weary he got, always more lanes to do, more pans to empty.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, grabbing her by the back of the neck.
‘Look here. My father is Mr Bill Williams and this is his house.’
‘Your father isn’t Bill Williams,’ the man laughed. ‘Your father is someone else.’ The Murderer seemed to know everything about her. ‘Look, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll take you into town. Have you ever been to Luna Park?’
She supposed that the night man really was the Murderer, wanting to take her away with him on the night cart to where he lived, in Mitcham, she remembered. First he would have to tell her how he was going to kill her, wouldn’t he? But where did he keep his axe? Molly was horrified by the fact that little girls’ bodies could be hacked up like that.
She couldn’t tell Mum, otherwise she would tell the policeman and the Murderer would be taken to the shed with the old car with no wheels and hanged. It must be like th
at in jail when a murderer is made to stand on top of a ladder and his head placed in the noose. She felt sorry for the man with the rope around his neck, who would be so frightened, knowing he was about to die.
Molly felt that she was always running away from someone in her dreams, ever since she had been sent to live at the orphanage. She had better not tell Mum about the night man. If Mum told the policeman, and the Murderer was caught and hanged, then wouldn’t that be her fault?
Molly had never been to Luna Park, or to the circus. Once, she had seen the coloured tents, the carts and wagons in the paddocks near the Royal Agricultural Showgrounds in Ascot Vale. When she had seen the poster and asked to go to the Holden Brothers’ Circus, Mum had said no.
Then, somehow, she was perched beside the man on the seat of his night cart, on their way to Luna Park.
He took her by the hand and led her through the open mouth of the face at the entrance of Luna Park. Then they were inside a room. A curved quarter moon hung against a background of stars and blue night. Molly and the Murderer were sitting together on the moon, having their photo taken.
A FEW MONTHS after she moved to Eldridge Street, not long after her tenth birthday, Molly sometimes got the feeling she was being followed home from school. When she turned and looked behind her, she saw nothing suspicious. She thought she must have been imagining it.
