The Sparrows of Edward Street

by Elizabeth Stead

  The records were classical and a mixed lot. Eclectic, I thought, was the word. Not much Mozart, but there was Bach and Handel and Beethoven, a lot of Russians and a dozen others to choose from. I shared Hanora’s love for the classics, but Rosy also had her own collection of pop, jazz and crooners. She checked them all to see if they were unbroken.

  ‘It was kind of Madame to give you a day off, love.’

  ‘I couldn’t just leave you both to do this without me. I told her we were moving. I didn’t say where. I will never say where.’

  Although I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be much help, I thought it was kind of her to think of it. And I said so.

  From the bed of the truck came more old books, kitchen utensils and the basics of tableware, a two-bar radiator, an electric griller that could accommodate a small roast if necessary, an electric frypan and a kettle. Our old ’fridge had been part of the flat, so until we could afford another we had to make do with an ice-chest. Of course the precious sewing machine was moved to a safe corner. There were two small kitchen chairs and a stool. Beds, linens, towels and the old curtains from the flat were dumped onto the floor on top of the deck chair. There were a few framed prints that might have brightened the place, but practically nowhere to hang them. Hanora thought that the ironing board would do for a table and shelf when we were not ironing on it.

  ‘We’ll drape it with something exotic, love. Oriental.’

  Hanora had covered her most precious possession, a mirrored cocktail cabinet, with her own blankets. ‘Our Friend’ had given it to her when he moved her to the flat. Frankly, I’d been surprised when he’d left it behind.

  For some reason, one of the removalists stripped the covering off the cocktail cabinet.

  ‘What’s this, then?’

  ‘It is, as you can see, a cocktail cabinet.’

  It did look out of place, like a chandelier in a dunny.

  ‘Like a bit of a drink then, do you, Mrs?’ Wink, wink.

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ Hanora said, ignoring the question. She opened her purse and gave the man his fee plus five shillings, which we could not at all afford, but I understood the reason for it.

  When the men left, one with his face slightly more flushed than when he arrived, I called out to them: ‘If this ever happens to you lot, you’d better hope it’s not me who moves you!’ I saw one of them spit onto the dust before I slammed the door.

  ‘Aria!’

  ‘They were as rude as hell!’

  ‘They moved us for practically nothing.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’m not sorry. They broke things.’

  Rosy wandered all over the place, doing nothing as usual, shaken and pale. She has no guts. She has a liquorice stick for a spine – limp, like one left in the sun.

  ‘What will we eat tonight, for goodness sakes?’ was all she said.

  ‘Bread and music, love, and afterwards we’ll read stories.’

  ‘But I’m hungry! This is a terrible place. I know I’ll die here.’

  ‘Sooner the better!’

  ‘Aria!’

  ‘I’m not sorry, Hanora. If you don’t shut up, Rose,’ I said, ‘you’ll be made to eat the biscuits with the weevils.’

  ‘There aren’t any biscuits with weevils. You’re making it up as usual.’

  ‘That’s what you’d get if we were really poor. Now, help with the beds!’

  *

  I expect I should describe our beds and all the terrible rest of it.

  Hanora’s was a single divan bed with a wire base and a thin mattress, a pillow of ticking and two grey blankets bought from the Disposal Store. She had a cell to herself. Rosy and I had narrow beds with wire bases and ticking mattresses that were supposed to be stuffed with horsehair, but I imagined they were stuffed with something else. I have never wanted to know what. They didn’t smell too badly, and we had a pillow and two grey blankets each, and I have to say that I dreaded the winter, but I kept the thought to myself.

  In Rosy’s and my cell there was just enough room between the beds for a small table with two drawers, and just enough room for a narrow cupboard for our clothes. Hanora had managed to sell the big wardrobe, so we had no mirror. For a while we used the mirror in the cocktail cabinet, but it wasn’t a very good image. The cocktail cabinet’s mirror made us look like something in Luna Park’s Hall of Horrors.

  ‘Do I look awful?’ Rosy once asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You’re such a bitch, Aria.’

  ‘I’m not sorry. I can’t help it. My blood’s hotter than yours – straight from Hades!’

  ‘It’s Jewish blood, Aria, that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Don’t let Hanora hear you say that! I’ve been excused. I’m out of it. And if it’s all to be truly believed, you’re still Jewish, so don’t you forget that. As far as I know, Hanora hasn’t given you freedom.’

  ‘I don’t care any more – at least Jews are all rich. I could marry a rich Jew. I wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘You’d be perfect! And you can have the Jew in the rest of us, Rosy. I’ll give it all to you wrapped up in banknotes, and you can have money coming out of your toenails. But you’d better learn how to make chicken soup and livers.’

  ‘What are you two arguing about?’ Hanora called from her cell.

  ‘Chicken soup!’

  ‘Now, there’s an idea!’ she said, and I wished I hadn’t suggested it. She’d tried making it once, with necks and wings and gizzards. It was terrible.

  ‘Cheese on toast will do,’ I said and had a vision of burnt cheese slices on burnt toast scraped of its ash. ‘I’ll get it.’

  ‘Sorry if I treat you badly sometimes, Rosy. But you really are the end!’

  ‘Aria, we’re not truly poor, are we? We’re not really beggars, are we?’

  ‘We’re as poor as slops, Rosy, there! I’ve told you, the beggaring is up to you.’

  ‘Lovely!’ said Hanora, who hadn’t heard a word.

  Rosy and I gave as much of our wages to Hanora as we could, but we both needed to keep ourselves reasonably well dressed, and of course there were fares to be paid. And despite Rosy’s glorification of father Sparrow as a war hero, a very mean civilian pension meant that at times we barely scraped by. But there was food to eat and a roof of sorts over us, and perhaps when the shock of the Camp was not so great we might begin to see things in a sort of light instead of darkness. In the meantime, there were upper lips to be stiffened. I needed to persuade Rosy that the world was not exactly coming to an end.

  It’s true, I suppose, I did tend to rip a few too many pieces out of Rosy. I did let myself go off the rails a bit more than I should have. She was never as strong as me. While she played with a doll I was using a screwdriver. Sometimes my words seemed to tumble from nowhere, absolutely uncontrollably, as though there was another mind next to mine going off like a cracker when it felt like it. Perhaps I did dream and pretend a bit too much, but there was usually a good reason for it. It’s possible my dreams of a different world became more real than they should have. It’s possible that bits of my dreams lie scattered all over the place like pieces of a puzzle.

  There had been a box in the flat, a small Chinese box of polished camphor wood, ugly really, but it was where I kept my childish secrets. Hanora had sold that, too. It had been my hope chest of sorts, but not a ‘hope’ chest full of material stuff for a future house slave to ‘love’. It was full of all the richness and beauty in my mind – swirls of all the colour and sounds in the world, above and below it. For a long time I’d whispered into my hands and placed them in the box. The only material item I had added to the collection was when I’d seen a king parrot for the first time – I’d described that on a piece of paper and slipped it into the box. Pandora would have detested it.

  The person who bought the box would have had no idea what treasured images were inside. She’d had to pay no extra for them. But I liked to think her life was made happier for the purchase. She might
even have wondered why.

  I wished so much that Rosy could see the colour in darkness. I had so much I could share with her. It seemed such a waste.

  Mr Sparkle

  ‘Can I give you a hand, here?’ Mr Sparkle had rapped at the open door. ‘I’m the bloke who made the tea when you moved in. I’ve been keeping an eye out and I seen, saw the truck. I don’t mean to butt in here, but I’ve got a bit of time on my hands. I’ll do anything you want. Was there much damage? Usually is.’

  ‘A few tiny chips, but nothing serious, Mr Sparkle. Did you get your teapot back?’ Hanora, by the serene grace of chemistry, had retained the remnants of her smile. ‘It’s so kind of you to offer. I think the removalists have not taken a great deal of trouble with us, as Camp people.’

  ‘We’re only a grunt away from trash to them, I’d say. That’s what they’d be thinking. They’re just ordinary blokes, but here in the camp they feel they’ve got the edge. And yes, I did get the pot. I might have been having a bit of a kip when you brought it back. Did you knock?’

  ‘No,’ I lied.

  ‘It scares them to think it could be them here instead of us. There but for the grace of God, eh? No work, no money and not a decent roof over the head. They see people like us . . . well, me, anyway, and they think, Jesus! Excuse the language, but they think, That could be me, and they get scared and they get mean with it.’

  There was a minute’s silence for no particular reason. Mr Sparkle’s head was bowed as though at a memorial service. A fly had settled on his nose, but he seemed not to have noticed. ‘I can’t get a job, you see. For the life of me, I can’t crack a job,’ Mr Sparkle said suddenly, as though everything that had taken place since he arrived led to this point. ‘The wife’s gone back to the country ’til a house can be found. I have four little kids, did you know that?’

  ‘No, Mr Sparkle, I did not.’ Hanora untied the string around a cardboard box of books.

  ‘I haven’t seen them for weeks, maybe two months.’ Mr Sparkle seemed to become emotional. There were tears in his eyes. His eyes were red-rimmed as though he cried a lot, or had more grog than he should . . . Metho? Probably, Rosy, I’m pretty sure. ‘I get so lonely, you know. She won’t come down until I get a house – she won’t live here in the Camp. She’s got a job up country. Ten months I’ve been here trying to get us a place and trying to get work. I drop a letter to the Housing Commission every couple of weeks, but they don’t even send me an answer. Every few weeks the wife comes down in the train so the kids can see me and I go up there, but it’s getting harder to pay the fares. The Commission reckons it takes longer to find a house big enough for kids – it has to be a house, at least three bedrooms, and I don’t want it just anywhere. I don’t want it out in Woop-Woop somewhere. There’s no work at all in some of the places they build the cheap houses. It might make the Housing Commission look good, but if they put people in houses out in no-man’s-land where there’s no jobs, before you know it there’s no money coming in, the kids get into trouble and you’re right back where you started. I don’t know what they expect us to do. The Commission swears blind it looks after families first, but I think it’s a crook business. I know blokes not been here as long as me and they got what they wanted – makes you wonder, doesn’t it? But listen to me going on, and you just arrived . . . sorry about that.’

  ‘It’s perfectly all right, Mr Sparkle.’

  There had obviously been a buried word-glut of epic proportions that Mr Sparkle had no longer been able to contain, but I did wonder how many others he’d bailed up.

  Hanora glanced at him with the slightest frown from her book sorting, the way she might glance quickly at a damaged spine and then move on. Her brain, I imagined, was going through a sort of medicated muddle.

  ‘Perhaps you might help me straighten the floor rug, Mr Sparkle. I would be grateful.’

  Spot on. And I smiled at her.

  Here she was, barely five feet tall, bunged to the eyebrows with pills, poor as a church mouse, in an oven of corrugated iron like a badly designed farm shed, with the first of the season’s blowflies zooming in through the space between the wall and the roof like a squadron of bombers, and managing to give gentle orders to a servant like a lady to the manor born. ‘And if you would help move the chair to that corner?’ Mr Sparkle was naturally unaware of the nature of Hanora. If he’d been aware and had a forelock he would have lifted it.

  ‘Yes – right you are – always ready to lend a hand, Mrs Sparrow. Not bad, is it, this rug of yours – looks Gyppo, is it Gyppo? From around there anyway. If you don’t mind me saying so, you lot might stick out a bit in this place. You’ll notice that at first, I think. You three look a bit different, if you know what I mean, and you talk different. Not like most of the others, except maybe the Glasses up in Bradman, but they keep to themselves. Not like you, I think. You’ll probably be out of here sooner than most. You don’t need as much room, do you? Just a flat would do you, wouldn’t it?’ Mr Sparkle’s eyes started to water again. ‘Anything else you want done, I’ll do it.’ There was another silence, with bowed head. ‘I get so lonely, you know . . . I miss the kids . . . and what with one thing and another . . . well, it’s idle hands, isn’t it . . . I think the idle hands makes it worse.’ Loneliness had Mr Sparkle practically whitewater-rafting down his sad river of words. ‘I’m going on a bit, aren’t I? Hardly know you, and I’m sorry about that. It’s good to get things off the chest, I’ll tell you that. Tell me what else you want me to do, and I’ll do it and keep me, my mouth shut.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Sparkle, but I don’t think we’ll “stick out” here at all. We will fall into Camp life very nicely. We look forward to meeting the others.’

  ‘But not for a while, Mother,’ Rosy said quickly, and Hanora glanced at her with her finger to her lips.

  ‘After all, Mr Sparkle, we’re all here for the same reason, and I’m sure everyone is very nice and helpful.’

  ‘Some of them are buggers.’

  ‘Then we’ll jolly well be buggers too!’ I said. ‘Won’t we, Rosy?’

  ‘Aria!’

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Rosy.

  The first thing I’d noticed about Mr Sparkle was his nose, and not just because a fly had settled on it for a short time. He seemed to have been given the wrong one. His nose was too large and too fleshy and the skin was pocked and a different colour from the rest of his face, as though he’d spent a lot of his youth squeezing pimples.

  Mr Sparkle was not tall – about five feet seven inches – and I thought he looked like a man who’d possibly wanted to be a jockey but was turned down. His hair was self-hacked and looked like a very small stack of hay with an untidy ‘cowlick’ at the back, and he was, on the whole, an illustration of rejection, failure and hopelessness.

  ‘Why can’t you get a job, Mr Sparkle?’

  ‘Aria!’ said Rosy. ‘Don’t be so rude.’

  Hanora continued to unpack books and fidget in a disorganised way. I knew that she was unaware of nervous hearts fluttering outside her own, tears outside her own, only just held back . . . Or at least she gave that impression.

  ‘I don’t really know the answer to that question,’ Mr Sparkle answered me. ‘I’m a sort of Jack-of-all-trades. I’ve had enough interviews to sink a ship, but as soon as they know I’ve been out of work for so long and live here in the Camp, they get that look in their eyes. I know that look. It’s a sort of half-smile up one side of their dial, and they sigh and push papers away from them on the desk and sit back in their chairs and shake their heads, and I start moving to the door. Body language, it’s called. I got to know it well. I sort of gave up after a while. You can get into the habit of giving up, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know, Mr Sparkle. I have never, never given up and never will!’ I said.

  ‘Good for you, girlie!’

  ‘My name is Aria, Mr Sparkle. Maybe you seem a little too desperate when you apply for a job. Your haircut simply won’t do. Do you have a dece
nt suit?’

  ‘Aria!’

  ‘No, no . . . it’s okay, really. I don’t mind being given a bit of advice. I need all the help I can get. She’s right, of course, but it’s hard, you know.’ Mr Sparkle appeared to be perfectly happy to put himself into my hands – as of course he should, I thought. ‘Only the one suit. It’s a bit over the hill, I’ll admit that.’

  ‘Shirts?’

  ‘Pretty well worn out, Miss.’

  ‘Aria! I can’t believe this!’ said Rosy.

  ‘I’m sure Mr Sparkle wouldn’t mind if we helped him, Hanora. After all, I work with advertising people and I know a trick or two. It occurred to me that when you have a minute to spare you could perhaps turn the collars and cuffs of his shirts and we could find some way to clean and press his suit and find him a tie. What about shoes, Mr Sparkle?’

  ‘ARIA!’

  ‘Two, brown, with laces. Hole in right sole.’

  ‘Easily fixed, Mr Sparkle.’

  ‘You know, I feel better already!’ he said. ‘You move in here and I come around to help you, and bore you stiff with me, my troubles and suddenly I’ve got bloody angels of bloody mercy fixing things up, excuse the language.’ He forgot about his gapped and yellowed teeth and grinned all over his face. I imagined he could never have afforded to get his teeth fixed. He would, I decided, have to keep his mouth shut unless it was absolutely necessary to open it.

  ‘And where do you think you’re going to get a tie, Aria?’ asked Rosy. ‘There’s nothing left of Father’s stuff.’

  ‘I’m sure Madame must have fabric scraps spilling out of bins all over the place. What colour is your suit, Mr Sparkle?’

  ‘It’s a sort of browny grey, but pretty thin, faded.’

  ‘Then, Rosy, I think a red fabric might do well – silk would suit very well, don’t you think, Rosy? Red is a positive colour and will draw the eye away from any faults in Mr Sparkle’s suit. Madame will not miss such a small donation, and you’re so clever with your sewing.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sakes, Aria, you’re impossible!’