Beneath the Southern Cross

by Judy Nunn

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Ben, not in the street.’ But she smiled as they went inside.

  The door from the street led directly into the sitting room which was small and crammed with an assortment of second-hand furniture. To the left was a narrow staircase leading to the two upstairs bedrooms, and the wall to the right was given over to a large grey-pink sofa, the back of which was covered with several lace-worked antimacassars which hid the moth holes. The sofa was far too big for the room but it doubled as a bed for Benjamin’s young brother Billy.

  The fireplace beneath the wooden mantel in the corner was framed by green tiles with, here and there, a flower motif. Several of the tiles were cracked and chipped, but they were attractive nonetheless. The tiles were kept glossy and shining, and always there was a small vase of flowers on the mantelpiece, violets or pansies or even sweetpeas, whatever was available from the street vendor on the corner. The fire in the little iron grate gave off a good strong heat too, and the family was cosy in the colder months, unlike many of their neighbours who lived in damp and rotting dwellings.

  Benjamin and Norah walked through to the kitchen where they found Beth and Timothy seated at the table, admiring the set of marbles. The kitchen was where the family invariably gathered, and most of the space was taken up by the old, scarred wooden table which Samuel had made. Pots and pans hung from hooks screwed into the yellowing plaster walls, and utensils dangled from nails driven into the big wooden beam above the stove.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Beth said, rising to admire the hat closely, ‘now that’s what I call posh.’ She felt the texture of the blue satin bow. A seamstress by trade, employed as an outworker by the Goulburn Street tailor, J Cohen, Beth certainly knew her fabrics. ‘Very, very posh.’

  Norah fumbled with the hatpin. ‘Try it on, Beth. Do. You can borrow it whenever you wish. It can be ours to share if you like.’

  Knowing how hard Beth slaved away in her little sewing room, the second-hand machine Samuel had bought her whirring away till well past midnight, young Timmy all the while sleeping soundly in the upper bunk, Norah once more felt a wave of guilt that she had not insisted upon buying a present for her mother-in-law.

  ‘Put it on,’ she urged. ‘Please.’

  Benjamin watched, puzzled as he often was by the genuine affection between them. He remembered a time when Beth had been highly critical of Norah. ‘Above herself,’ he could remember his mother saying to Samuel. ‘She’s just a Surry Hills lass like the rest of them, who does she think she is?’ But somewhere along the line, she had changed her tack. ‘Shy she is,’ Beth would say in defence of her daughter-in-law. ‘Shy that’s all,’ when the neighbours insinuated that Norah was a bit stuck up. Benjamin was grateful that the two had become friends, but it only confirmed his confusion about the female sex. Much as he loved and admired the look and the smell and the touch of them, their minds remained a mystery to him.

  ‘Fine piece of craftsmanship, I must say.’ Beth turned the hat in her hands, examining it from every angle. ‘Very nicely worked.’

  ‘Here, let me help you.’ Norah sat Beth down and tucked the stray wisps of grey hair back up into the untidy chignon. She placed the hat on Beth’s head and secured the pin. ‘There. Now come and look in the mirror.’

  Benjamin and Timothy followed as Norah dragged her mother-in-law into the sitting room, and together they all looked in the mirror over the mantelpiece.

  The hat was totally at odds with the colourless face which peered from beneath its brim. It mocked the once blue eyes, now a faded grey, and emphasised the sunken cheeks which had once been rosy. Beth was fifty-five years of age, but in that hat she could have been seventy.

  ‘Now, there’s a sight for sore eyes,’ she said, her weary face cracking into a smile. ‘It’s a younger woman should wear this hat, and that’s a fact.’ She laughed out loud as she took it off.

  The flash of humour revealed a strength which belied the aged face beneath the hat. There was plenty of life left in Beth Kendall. The fight for survival might have drained the colour from her, but survive she had. She would never admit defeat, although the death of her husband had brought her close to it. In the thirty-three years of their marriage she had weathered two miscarriages, given birth to a stillborn baby, and lost two, one to scarlet fever at ten months, and a three-year-old to measles. None of which had prepared her for the death of her husband.

  For the first week or so they had persuaded themselves that he had caught a chill. His high temperature, his headaches, his dry cough. ‘Just a chill,’ Samuel had said, and she’d believed him. Then, overnight, the plague had struck with a passion and within three days he was dead. Mercifully quick some might say, but it was a hideous death to behold. Daily Beth had watched her Samuel wasting before her eyes, coughing up blood-stained sputum, his skin turning blue. Delirious. Vomiting. And when the end finally came, withered to a husk, skin ulcerated, abscesses covering his body.

  She had nurtured him throughout, washing him, caressing him, lying beside him and whispering her support. She’d held his decaying body close, the once strong body she had known and loved, and often she’d wished that the plague would take her too. But it hadn’t. And she supposed she should be grateful, it was a death no-one should have to suffer. And there was more living to be done after all, she still served a useful purpose.

  ‘You keep the hat for yourself, Norah,’ she said, handing it back. ‘I’ll play with Tim’s marbles, they suit me better.’

  ‘Fancy a drink out the back?’ Benjamin asked. ‘Nellie said she’d join us.’

  Beth caught the hopeful plea in her grandson’s eye. ‘You two go on,’ she said, giving Tim a nod, ‘we’ll be out when we’ve had a game of marbles.’

  The boy raced off into the kitchen and Beth smiled at her daughter-in-law. ‘It’s a lovely hat, Norah, it suits you well.’

  Norah smiled back happily. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Strange how transforming that smile was, Beth thought. For a relatively plain young woman, Norah looked very pretty when she smiled.

  Norah’s plainness had been included in Beth’s litany of criticism during the early days. ‘She’s not even pretty,’ she’d grumbled to Samuel. ‘She’s stuck up and she’s not even pretty. Why, she’s nowhere near as good-looking as the other girls Ben’s courted.’

  ‘Ben’s never “courted” a girl in his life,’ Samuel had replied with more than a touch of cynicism, ‘and well you know it.’

  Beth had known it. Only too well. Devilishly handsome with charm to boot, Benjamin was a magnet to women. And at his age, if girls wished to surrender themselves to him, who could blame him for enjoying his conquests? But it had been only a matter of time, despite his father’s regular warnings. ‘You be careful, boy,’ Samuel had said time and again. ‘Many a young ram’s had to pay for his pleasure.’ Only a matter of time. And then there she was. Norah Davis. Twenty-one years old. A full five months pregnant. And plain.

  In Beth’s eyes it had all added up to one thing. A trap. How come all the pretty girls Benjamin had bedded over the past five years had managed to keep themselves out of trouble? Well, two of them hadn’t, she knew that for a fact, but they’d found the solution to their problem.

  ‘There are ways, you know. Ways to get rid of it.’ Beth had been cruelly direct with the girl. Didn’t she know they were in the depths of a depression? The lad was too young and the times were too hard to be saddled with a wife and a baby. ‘There are ways,’ she said. Then she told the girl about hot baths and gin, about smashing her stomach against a chair or a railing. ‘Did you try anything?’ she demanded.

  The girl shook her head, about to cry. ‘I prayed,’ she said, ‘I prayed that I’d lose the baby.’

  Prayer! Beth had little time for prayer, it had certainly never worked for her. ‘Oh well, it’s too late now. Five months. Nothing you can do about it now.’

  The tears started then. Silently. Coursing down the girl’s cheeks. Beth refused to be move
d. The distress was genuine, she could see that. But her son was trapped. Why should she waste her sympathy?

  ‘There’s no need for that. Ben will do the right thing, you’ll be married before the baby’s born.’ She rose from her chair. ‘Now pull yourself together, I’ll put the kettle on for some tea.’

  After the marriage and the birth of the baby, Beth’s attitude towards Norah softened a little. The girl loved her son, and was a good wife and mother, for that she should be grateful. And gradually she realised that Norah’s reserve was not due to any snobbishness on her part, that she was indeed shy, and painfully self-conscious.

  The death of Norah’s second child, the little girl she had so longed for, finally sealed their relationship. Without Beth’s strength and support, and above all understanding, Norah would never have survived her loss, Beth knew it. And from that moment on, she became protective of her daughter-in-law.

  Following the game of marbles, which she let Tim win—the first game with his new set, it seemed only right—Beth and her grandson joined the others in the communal backyard shared by the Kendalls and the Putmans.

  There had once been a dividing fence, but in the lean times Samuel Kendall and Jack Putman had pulled it down and used it for firewood. No-one had told the landlord, but then he was unlikely to find out. Most landlords in the poorer areas of Surry Hills were disinterested in the living conditions of their tenants and, so long as the rent was paid, were rarely seen. Neither of the families had ever mentioned rebuilding the fence, although Norah always wished they would. The Kendalls and the Putmans preferred it that way. A communal backyard was neighbourly, they said.

  ‘A grand age for a man, thirty.’ Nellie toasted Ben yet again with her bottle of beer, then took another swig—she always drank from the bottle. ‘A man’s not a man till he’s thirty, that’s what I say.’

  Nellie was flirting with Ben. She always did. Nellie flirted with every man she met and particularly with Ben because she liked him the best. She meant no harm, she was just as saucy with men in the presence of her own husband. More so at times, Jack Putman enjoying his wife’s vulgar good humour, safe in the knowledge of her loyalty. But Jack Putman was not present at the moment, he was halfway through a six-month stint in Darlinghurst Gaol for petty pilfering. Nellie had been furious at the time. How could he have been so thoughtless, she’d roared, just before the baby was born, and all for the sake of a bloke’s wallet in a pub.

  ‘I tell you, Ben, when my Jack was thirty,’ Nellie grinned and gave a growl of sexual innuendo, ‘oh, a bull of a man he was! A bull of a man!’

  There were times when Norah found Nellie Putman repulsive. And this was one of them. She looked away, pretending to be deep in thought, so that she didn’t have to watch Nellie, seated at the rickety table outside her back door, intermittently sucking on her bottle of beer whilst her child sucked on her breast, every now and then throwing her head back to laugh her raucous laugh, her big frame heaving, the baby grabbing at the nipple which had escaped it.

  ‘It takes a hell of a woman to bring the bull out in a man, Nell,’ Benjamin deliberately flirted back, angered by his wife’s disapproval. ‘And you’re one hell of a woman.’

  Seated beside Ben on the bench outside their own back door, Norah felt his body stiffen and she knew she’d annoyed him, but she couldn’t help it. It was disgraceful that Nellie Putman, at forty-two, should have had yet another child. The woman had two married daughters and three grown sons, and there was an eighteen-year age gap between the baby at her breast and her youngest boy. It was disgraceful that Nellie Putman openly displayed her great, sagging breast and suckled the child in the company of others. But more than anything it was disgraceful that Nellie, a middle-aged woman, fat and blowsy, should flirt with her husband. And that he should flirt back. Time and again Norah told herself the flirtation meant nothing. It was Surry Hills backyard banter. Boisterous, bawdy and utterly harmless. But she couldn’t help it. The more she listened to them, the more she shrank into herself, convinced that Ben didn’t love her, that he never had.

  Norah had always been threatened by women’s reactions to her husband. She could see the way pretty women looked at Ben. And she could see the way they looked at her. ‘What a handsome man,’ she could hear them thinking, ‘why is he married to her?’ Well if they’d asked, she could have told them. ‘He married me out of a sense of duty,’ she could have said, ‘a sense of duty, that’s all. He never loved me.’ Oh, and she could just see their faces if she told them that. ‘So you trapped him,’ they’d think. ‘You clever girl, you trapped the pick of the bunch.’

  Well that’s what Beth had believed, hadn’t she? And in a way, Beth had been right. Norah had been so desperately in love with Benjamin that she had let him have his way. How else could she have held his interest? What else had she to offer? She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even pretty. But she had never intended to become pregnant. She had been a virgin, with no idea how to guard against conception. And when she had discovered her pregnancy, she had genuinely prayed for a miscarriage, not wishing to force an unwanted marriage upon the man she loved. And in due time she had paid shockingly for such wicked prayer. The memory of her dead baby weighed perpetually upon Norah’s conscience.

  The banter between Benjamin and Nellie continued, but just as Norah was about to make her excuses and go inside, the back door slammed open and in walked nineteen-year-old Billy with his comrade-in-arms Mick Putman beside him, both dressed in their trademark bell-bottom trousers, bright bandanas and black slouch hats.

  ‘Billy!’ Tim yelled, his Uncle Billy was his hero. ‘Wait till you see my new marbles,’ and the boy dashed into the kitchen.

  Nellie beckoned her youngest son to her. ‘Fetch us some more beer from the ice chest, Mick, there’s a good lad, it’s Ben’s birthday.’

  ‘No, Nell, no, it’s our shout. Fetch the beer, Billy, let’s have a party.’ As his young brother dived inside, Ben called after him, ‘And bring out the kitchen chairs.’

  Nellie was delighted. ‘Go get your mouth organ, Mick,’ she said, ‘we’ll have a singalong.’

  The evening turned into a boisterous success, like many a backyard party at number 22. They ate outside around the Putmans’ table, sharing Nellie’s rabbit-pie—she’d bought a pair from the rabbit oh’s cart for sixpence that very afternoon—and Beth’s mutton stew, mopping up the rich, fatty gravy with home-made damper. There was tapioca pudding to finish up with, after which they dragged the chairs back inside and sat around the table in the Kendalls’ kitchen, singing along to Mick’s harmonica. When they ran out of beer, Nellie got into the gin, and by midnight, she was maudlin drunk and bemoaning the fact that her Jack wasn’t there.

  ‘Time for bed now, Timmy,’ Norah insisted, ‘and I’m going myself.’ Beth had retired an hour previously and Norah had only stayed up to keep an eye on her son.

  ‘Oh Mum,’ Tim whinged as he followed Norah out of the kitchen, but it was a token protest only. He’d been fighting to stay awake for over an hour, trying desperately to hide his exhaustion. The sips of beer Billy had been surreptitiously feeding him must have amounted to two full glasses by now and he was feeling the effects.

  Tim had had a wonderful night. He’d beaten his Uncle Billy twice at marbles. Unheard of! But then Billy had been pretty drunk. Tim wondered if that counted.

  ‘I beat Billy twice, Mum,’ he said on the way upstairs, ‘and he’s really good.’

  ‘Shh, don’t wake your grandmother.’

  Norah waited whilst he undressed and climbed into the top bunk and, in a matter of seconds, he was asleep.

  As Beth snored lightly in the bunk below, Norah studied her son. She worried about Billy’s influence over the boy. Not that Billy Kendall was bad, but he and Mick Putman together were a wild pair of lads.

  ‘Billy and Mick are little more than boys themselves, Norah,’ Ben had protested when she’d raised her fears with him. ‘They’re not yet twenty, stands to reason they’re high
-spirited.’

  ‘But Timmy spends so much time with them.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that, every boy needs a hero.’

  Benjamin had known full well that Billy and Mick Putman were members of the Gipps Street Gang, but he’d said nothing about that to Norah. Anyway, half the young men in Surry Hills belonged to one or another of the local larrikin pushes, it was necessary for their reputation. They lounged around outside the headquarters of their favourite pub or billiards hall, baiting police, conducting slanging matches with passers-by and generally making nuisances of themselves. Occasionally the more criminal element in a gang waylaid a toff who should have known better than to walk the Surry Hills backstreets alone at night. A quick smack to the skull with a sock filled with sand and the toff was relieved of his wallet to wake an hour later with an aching head.

  In the prearranged venues of local paddocks and alleys, neighbourhood gangs staged occasional battles, resulting in black eyes and scratches and bruises, but rarely anything more. There was cause for concern, however, when a push moved outside its own territory. When the Darlinghurst push invaded Surry Hills, or the Woolloomooloo push took on the Rocks, then it was war, and sand-filled socks were exchanged for flick-knives and daggers.

  Billy and young Mick were good enough lads though. They both had legitimate jobs. Mick was employed in a blacksmith’s shop and Billy had regular shift work at the Toohey’s Standard Brewery in Elizabeth Street.

  Ben said as much to Norah. ‘They’re good lads, love, they go to work, they’re not like Nellie’s other two.’

  Spotty and Geoff Putman were professionals. Burglars by trade. More ambitious and more proficient than their petty-thief father, they had never seen the inside of Darlinghurst Gaol, and quite possibly never would. Their downfall was more likely to come via the underworld, they had trodden on some toes in their time.