Shadowboxing

by Tony Birch

  I heard another screech of car brakes behind me. It was the press. A reporter and photographer jumped out of a car. A third police car carrying several policewomen and then a grey van with ‘Victorian Government Forensics’ written on its side arrived next. Two men got out of the van. They were each wearing dustcoats. The forensics and police went into the house with the exception of a uniformed officer who was left to guard the door and keep an eye on both the quickly gathering crowd and the news reporters.

  Shortly afterwards the forensic men came back out of the house. They were carrying a couch. As they moved towards the parked van everyone in the street could see a wide dark bloodied patch across the back of the couch. There were clots of congealed blood stuck to the cloth. A photographer tracked the couch, pointing and shooting, winding on his film as he did so.

  A detective followed the forensic team from the house. He was carrying a plastic bag. A bloodied claw hammer, inside the bag, was visible to everybody on the street. The same photographer ran towards the policeman and dropped to one knee to get a shot of the bag. The policeman stopped in the centre of the road, appearing more than happy to pose with the bag held aloft.

  A television news crew arrived and began to set up equipment on the footpath in front of our house. The camera’s eye was pointed directly at the open doorway of the butcher’s house. For the next few moments everything on the street appeared to stop. Nobody spoke and nothing moved. The street waited in the silence for the butcher’s wife to exit the house.

  When the butcher’s wife finally emerged into the street she was flanked by a policewoman on either side of her, ready to take her by the arm if it appeared that she might fall. But the butcher’s wife wasn’t about to fall. She walked into the street with her head held high as she glanced up and down the street and then across the road into the television camera. The welts and bruising from the beating she had received on the Saturday night were clearly visible on both her face and bare arms. She had found neither the time nor the will to camouflage her husband’s violence on this occasion.

  A photographer ran towards her, raising his camera as he did so. He was about to take a shot when Senior Detective MacInerney stood between the photographer and the butcher’s wife. As she was being eased into one of the police cars a third policewoman came out of the house, carrying the baby. The sirens and flashing lights of the police cars were switched on, which seemed so unnecessary now that it was over. The noise of the sirens was unbearable. As the cars took off up the hill the butcher’s wife rested her head against a policewoman’s shoulder.

  Next morning, the headlines again told the story: slaughterman butchered with own knife by wife — tearful scenes at fitzroy. Senior Detective MacInerney stated that the butcher’s wife, a Miss Ruth Goodall, had confessed to ‘bludgeoning her de facto husband to death with a hammer in the early hours of Sunday morning in their Fitzroy terrace. Miss Goodall informed the police that her husband had beaten her badly on the night of his death, and in a drunken state had subjected her to gross indecencies for some hours. Her recollection of what subsequently occurred was described by MacInerney as vague at best.’

  In the weeks after the murder people came from all over Melbourne to visit the murder scene, the allotment where Sab had found the torso, and the old stables behind the mattress factory. While there was a lot of talk amongst the women in the street about the forthcoming criminal case, the men remained quiet about the killing. My father appeared particularly shaken by it.

  After we had been and done the shopping one Saturday morning, mum walked around to Little Charles Street with Katie and me following behind her. She stood in the street, staring at the now heavily bolted doors of the stables. She looked down and studied her own hands and then at the two of us. None of us spoke a word while standing at the stables door nor as we walked back home.

  When the trial came to court it was followed with intensity, not just in our street or suburb, but throughout Melbourne. The court was told that the butcher had beaten his wife for many years. On the night of the alleged murder, it was believed that he had first beaten her in the street — we all knew that — and later, continued the assault in their house, where the still unnamed ‘indecencies’ had occurred.

  ‘Eventually he had fallen asleep on the couch, at which time Miss Goodall took a claw hammer from a cupboard under the kitchen sink and began to assault her de facto husband around the head with it. On realising that he was dead, Miss Goodall dissected his body in the bath with her husband’s slaughtering knife before disposing of the various sections of his body from her baby’s pram, at several locations throughout one of Melbourne’s most notorious districts.’

  On the final day of the trial the street anxiously waited for the court’s decision. I was sitting in the kitchen eating a salad sandwich for lunch when the news came through. Katie burst in the front door, yelling, ‘She got off, she got off.’

  She skipped down the hallway into the kitchen. Mum was at the sink. Katie could not contain her excitement.

  ‘There’s all these reporters in the street. One of them is making a news story with a camera, out the front of their house. He’s telling everyone in the street that she got off. The butcher’s wife is not guilty! Not guilty!’

  I looked across at mum. She turned around and wiped her hands on her apron. And then she smiled, briefly enough for Katie and me to see it. She looked down at her hands and then out of the window and into the yard.

  Senior Detective Jack MacInerney was wrong about the severed head. The butcher’s wife had not kept it to avoid identification of the body. She had dumped it somewhere along the no-man’s-land adjoining the old rail line that had once passed through North Fitzroy. The police had taken her down to the wasteland after she had been arrested, pursued closely by a press entourage. She became disoriented and could not remember exactly where she had disposed of the head.

  The butcher’s head has never been found. Although there were several reported sightings of it in following months, each of them proved to be a hoax. About a year after the trial had ended a brief and final news item appeared in the paper in reference to the case of the dismembered butcher. Senior Detective MacInerney released a statement saying that it was the opinion of the Homicide Squad of the Victoria Police that ‘the said severed head of the butcher Robert Arnold Cross ... had most likely been devoured by animals and therefore its recovery is no longer sought’.

  A Disposable Good

  She lived in the rear of the old ham-and-beef shop in the street behind ours. Although we shared the same laneway and passed each other regularly on the street, she didn’t so much as nod, and kept very much to herself. Barely a word passed between her and the other women of the street, although some of those same women would occasionally visit her at the shop, just the same.

  Various women and teenage girls arrived regularly on her doorstep. They came in taxis, or were driven by boyfriends, husbands, or other women. They also arrived from the city on the Smith Street tram and walked up the Webb Street hill, sometimes carrying a small brown case, while looking around warily for her door.

  If a group of women were sitting in the street and having a drink or playing cards, which they often did on a Saturday afternoon when the men were at the pub, a barrage of almost incomprehensible abuse would overtake the conversation whenever her name was mentioned.

  She was a mystery. And if there was a mystery to be solved on the street, Emu Bailey was the person to approach. He was a junk man, so far down the scale in his chosen trade that he did not have a truck of his own, and either could not afford to or was too mean to hire a horse and cart from Enright’s yard. So Emu pushed his homemade wooden trolley around the streets, more or less scavenging what the other junk dealers left behind.

  But Emu was not without value. He traded in information which some people, including the local police, would pay a small fee to acquire, while s
ome of the other stories he carried amounted to nothing more than worthless gossip, or an entertaining story at best. But everybody accepted that no one was better at shifting a story around the streets than Emu Bailey.

  Emu was struggling with his cart, pushing a load of beer bottles up the hill. I was standing on the corner of our street, sharing a streetlight with George Carter. He had not spoken to me for weeks after the fight I’d had with him in our backyard. But as soon as the football season came around again, George turned up outside my house on the morning of the first game of the season. We walked down Brunswick Street together, towards the ground, without either of us mentioning the fight.

  I was watching George as he repeatedly pitched a tennis ball against the gutter and tried catching it before it ricocheted away from him. Emu pulled up alongside us and rested his cart against the edge of the gutter. He took a dirty handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wiped his flushed and sweating face.

  Emu opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. He wiped his dry mouth with the handkerchief and took a drink of water from a lemonade bottle sitting in his cart. He gestured towards our side gate.

  ‘Michael, any beer bottles in the yard there, at your place?’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know. You can go take a look yourself. The gate’s unlocked. The old man keeps the empties in the laundry, under the trough. You can have them. He won’t mind. He stores them for you anyway, so you might as well go look.’

  George continued to slam the tennis ball into the gutter. The three of us watched as it shot across the road and disappeared down a drain on the opposite corner.

  ‘Shit.’ George kicked the edge of the bluestone with the toe of his frayed canvas runner.

  As I chatted to Emu, George looked down into the junk-man’s trolley, maybe in the hope that it might contain another tennis ball or something else of value that Emu might pass onto us, which, unfortunately, he rarely did, seeing as he rarely picked up anything of value. When Emu told people that he traded in ‘disposable goods’, he was being entirely accurate.

  While George searched the trolley, and Emu ran his dirty handkerchief across his forehead once more, I turned around in response to the sharp footsteps I heard coming up the hill towards us. It was a woman struggling slowly up the footpath. She was well dressed, as my mother would say, wearing a woollen suit and black high-heeled shoes. She was carrying a small case under her arm.

  She stopped when she got near the side door of the old ham-and-beef shop. We looked over at her. She opened the case and took out a slip of paper. She looked down at it, up at the number on the door, and then briefly over at us, before crumpling up the piece of paper into her hand. She knocked at the door.

  The woman must have been expected because no sooner had she knocked than the door opened. The woman on the street seemed startled. She took a step back onto the footpath before stepping forward again and disappearing into the house.

  I watched Emu as he watched the door. ‘Hey, Emu, why are there always so many women going into that place? That woman gets more visitors to her place than the corner shop. She selling something?’

  If Emu had heard what I had asked him, he ignored me. He was now looking up at our rooftop, closely examining the lead flashing.

  I had to shout at him several times before he answered me and he took his time in responding, scratching the end of his chin with his dirty nails and then knitting his brow.

  ‘Well, Michael, the woman lives there is Wilma Carson. They call her Kit in the pub. The women call her Kit. Well, she’s like a doctor, yeah? She does work, like a doctor, for all the girls that come knocking at her door. And she’s like the undertaker, too. She’s the doctor and undertaker, all in one. They don’t like to talk to her, and they don’t like visiting. But in the end, well, most of them, they knock at Kit’s door. One day or another, they all knock on Kit’s door.’

  Emu told his story with only passing interest. His attention remained firmly on our roof. And then, as if suddenly reminded by a chore buried somewhere in the back of his mind, he picked up his cart and wheeled it onto the road.

  ‘I have to be going now, to the sly grog, plenty of bottles for old Emu down there.’

  And with that Emu headed down the hill, barely able to maintain control over his cart. I watched him struggle on his way before turning to George.

  ‘He’s mad isn’t he, Emu? Like a doctor? How could she be like a doctor? Or an undertaker? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. A doctor? He’s mad.’

  George sat down and rested his back against the base of the streetlight.

  ‘He’s mad, for sure, fucken old Emu. But he’s right though, about what she does in there. She treats the women who come knocking at that door.’

  ‘Treats them? With what? You’re mad yourself, George. What do you mean? What does she treat them with? Who told you that?’

  ‘No one had to tell me. I just heard it. When Mrs Arnold — from the hardware — when her daughter, you know the one with the big tits and pigtails that goes to the nuns school on Nicholson Street, you know her?’

  I knew the girl from the hardware store on Smith Street with big tits and pigtails who went to convent school. But I had no idea what Wilma Carson would be treating her for.

  ‘Well, Mrs Arnold, she was up at our place one night picking up some finishing that mum had done for her, some aprons, tea-towels and stuff, and when she was about to leave the two of them stood on the verandah talking. I was in the front room, watching the telly, and I heard them, through the window.

  ‘She wanted to know where she could get her daughter “fixed up”. That’s what she called it, “fixed up”. And mum told her to go and see Wilma Carson. That’s what she does, Michael. When women don’t want to have a baby, when they get pregnant and have to get rid of the kid, she does a treatment on them. That’s what my mum called it, “a treatment”.’

  I hesitated before asking George my next question.

  ‘A treatment? What the fuck is that, George? What sort of treatment does she give them?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, Michael. I’m not a fucken doctor.’

  I laughed at him. ‘Yeah, and neither is she. What would she know about being a doctor, or treating anybody? Don’t believe it, George. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Well, I don’t give a fuck, Michael. I’m just telling you what I heard. But I’ll tell you something else. I saw Mrs Arnold’s girl coming out of that door,’ George pointed across the road in the direction of the ham-and-beef shop, ‘the week after her mum spoke to mine, and she didn’t look too good, either. Her mum drove that old Morris of hers around the corner just to pick her up. Around the corner, Michael. She couldn’t even walk the two hundred yards home.’

  We stayed out on the footpath talking while waiting for the woman to come out of the side door again. But we did not see her. She must have left by the back gate, walked along the laneway and cut through to Smith Street.

  I puzzled over what it was that George had told me for a few days before I summoned enough courage to raise the issue with mum.

  She was in her usual spot at the kitchen table, labelling and rearranging photographs in one of the many albums that she had filled over the years. I sat down next to her and watched her as she worked. My mother diligently recorded the date, the names of the people, the location, and any special occasion that a photograph might relate to on the back of each image before placing it in the album.

  She looked over at me as I followed her work.

  ‘I saw George today, mum.’

  She was holding a photo of a then-newborn Katie in her hand. My father is also in the photograph. He is awkwardly holding Katie away from his body, looking like he is about to drop her.

  My mother did not look up at me. ‘Well that’s not exactly news, is it, Michael? You see him ever
yday, don’t you? How is he? How’s his mum?’ she asked, while returning Katie to her place in the album.

  I shifted nervously from foot to foot. ‘He’s good, mum, real good. I don’t know about his mum though. He didn’t mention her. I s’pose she’s okay.’

  I hesitated for another moment and then let it out, in one long nervous rant.

  ‘Mum, today when I was with George, and old Emu, he was there too, in the street with us. Well Emu was telling me, I mean George was telling me … they both were, that Wilma Carson, there around the corner, that she does these sort of operations, “treatments”, they called them. Well, she does them for women at her place there. She helps them. Fixes them up, George said. If they uh, get uh … pregnant, George said. Emu said.’

  My mother did not say anything. She did not so much as look at me. She continued to concentrate on recording the documentation on the back of one of her photographs, ‘Show Day: 1966’.

  Then she rested the pen on the kitchen table. She did not appear at all angry, as I expected that she might be. She even smiled at me.

  ‘Listen, love, I like George. He’s a good kid. It’s a wonder that he is talking to you at all, after what happened between you two in the yard out there. But between him and that gossiping old woman Emu and all his bullshit, well, between the two of them they wouldn’t know what they’re talking about.’

  She picked another photograph from the pile on the table. It was one of herself. She is standing in the street with my grandmother. The photograph was taken in front of their old house in Carlton, when my own mother was just a girl. It was the day of her Holy Communion.

  Just as my mother had done with the other images, she checked the back of the photograph to make sure that all of the information had been accurately documented. It was obvious that through her silence my mother was letting me know that our conversation about Wilma Carson was over. But I was not satisfied.