The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  It was not the kind of fear one feels at a sudden loud sound in the night and that stops the heart and freezes the senses. No, this was a fear that resided daily in her breast, that beat a dull rhythm in her head and in her ears from morning to night, and was the fear of the servant who has been plucked from the pit of poverty and hopelessness and, having once been saved, whose every waking hour was shaped and determined by the threat of sinking back into it. With her mistress gone, Alice had cast off the spotless white apron and cap and snatched up her coat, but beneath her coat she still wore the ugly black dress with its stiff white collars and cuffs that marked her as a servant. She had left the house of her employer without permission, and if her mistress found her gone she faced dismissal.

  She faced disaster.

  For a moment she faltered, raised her eyes to the darkened sky and considered turning back.

  But there was more to Alice Nimrod than her fear and her five years of service. She was not yet twenty and sometimes she stood at the shore and watched pods of dolphins playing in the bay, she observed the great ships that had crossed oceans to slip inside the heads and dock in her city, she gazed at the flocks of yellow-crested cockatoos that filled the sky at dusk.

  Tonight Alice Nimrod put her head down and ran through the rain.

  The road had begun to flood. A growing torrent surged along both gutters, carrying with it a detritus of mud and refuse, running off into the mean dwellings on either side of the street, dwellings that became meaner the further she travelled from Darlinghurst Road and the closer she came to Surry Hills. Something in the darkness fetched up against her foot and lodged there. She saw it was a dead rat and kicked it away; it swirled for a moment, caught in a whirlpool, and was gone. But she was on Riley Street now, and despite the rain her steps slowed.

  The road had been constructed on a high piece of ground but here, at the corner of Riley and Albion streets, the earth plunged in a sheer cliff face to a crater some thirty feet below as though it had been dynamited, or perhaps dug out of the rocks with their bare hands by men in chains as, not so many decades before, so much of the city had been dug. A creek that had once crossed Riley Street to feed this pool of swampy ground and the frogs that once dwelled here and had given the Hollow its name were long gone. Instead, mean tenements, loosely constructed of rotting timber and broken bricks, of rusted sheets of tin and sometimes just mud, sprouted from the stinking mire at the bottom of the Hollow, growing one on top of the other in a chaotic and confused fashion. Frog Hollow existed on the fringe of the city, a part of it but violently separated from it, the home of the poorest and the most desperate, a place of opium and blindness-inducing homemade grog, of brutality and disease, of unwashed barefoot urchins, of rabid dogs and rats and fleas and every sort of vermin, of narrow unlit passages a foot deep in mud upon whose environs the sun never shined.

  This was the place to which Alice Nimrod hastened.

  Three flights of stone steps, steep and crudely carved, provided the only access down—though why someone had thought to dig out such steps and what kind of person might use them to enter such a place, who knew? Certainly the constables of Surry Hills police station did not, and nor did the various members of the clergy from the many churches in the parish.

  But Alice Nimrod did. Though it was true she paused a moment to lift her skirts and perhaps, too, to steel herself. But only for a moment. She stepped down, picking her path carefully for the way was treacherous at the best of times and on this night it was a fast track to the city mortuary and a pauper’s grave. If you were lucky. If you were unlucky, your body was spirited away by the people lurking below—for who knew what nefarious purpose—and you were never heard of again.

  Alice made slow progress down the flights of steps until something blocked her path just a step or two from the bottom. What seemed to be a decaying pile of clothes or waste slowly took on a human form with two staring eyes. A woman, unmoving, and whether soaked by the rain or by the grog Alice felt no compunction to find out. When the figure did not stir and the staring eyes did not blink she understood that the woman had departed this earth, and her suffering, whatever form it may have taken, was ended.

  Alice stepped over her and thought no more of her. There was compassion in Alice but, like everything else in life, her compassion was not limitless, it must be parcelled up. It must be rationed.

  She reached the bottom of the Hollow and her boots sank in sludge and, at the same moment, a figure reared out of the darkness and lurched at her with a drunken roar. Alice let out a cry but she struck out because she was not helpless, far from it, and her own upbringing, though better than this by far, had still been filled with hardship. Her strike hit home, meeting something solid and rebounding off it so that she almost lost her footing. Her assailant staggered, reeling towards her, whether off balance or with actual intent it was impossible to tell, but Alice shoved him hard so that he fell and, before he could right himself, she fled.

  Her heart beat a little faster. This was not her first visit to Frog Hollow after dark and, though she was clearly no policeman or priest or bailiff nor any of the natural enemies of the Hollow, she well understood the horrors that might befall a woman in this place. She turned this way and that, negotiating the labyrinth of narrow byways, her flight more panicked than before, but no one save herself need know it. She pulled up only when she reached the low, uneven opening at the entrance of a timbered shack.

  It was a doorway, though if this was to imply that something as conventional as a door stood in this doorway that would be wrong, for all that stood there was a roughly hewn plank of rotting wood laid across the space and providing little by way of barrier or weatherproofing or privacy. It did at least keep out the stray dogs, but that was all that could be said for it.

  Alice pushed the piece of wood to one side and slipped inside. The shack within consisted of a single windowless room with a dirt floor that some previous occupant had covered with layers of newspapers and straw and remnants of old matting. The only furniture was a table fashioned from four kerosene drums with a square of flattened tin on top and two wooden chairs, mismatching, and looking as though they had washed up as flotsam from the harbour. A wooden pallet on the floor against one wall on which soiled bedding was piled and a bucket in the furthest corner covered by a cloth from which a foul smell exuded made up the rest. Above, the ceiling bulged and creaked ominously and strange noises could be heard—another shack, with another family, had been built directly atop this one. How long the two dwellings would remain separate was a cause for speculation—one great downpour (a bit like this one, in fact), one violent gale or flash flood, and the shack above, along with the family and all their belongings, such as they might be, would come crashing down into the shack below.

  There was no light inside other than the thin shaft that now crept in through the doorway and Alice reached out, feeling with her hands until her eyes adjusted—

  A hand shot out and grabbed her by the hair and the blade of a knife flashed at her throat and Alice cried out, ‘It is me, Milli! It is Alice!’

  There was a sharp intake of breath. The knife clattered to the floor.

  ‘As well that it is you, for I was ready to cut your throat! Hurry! Show me what you have brought me.’

  The shadowy, shapeless figure that spoke these words rustled as though it wore a great many clothes and moved sluggishly as though hampered by some great burden. The hands snatched and twitched and could not settle. The faint glow from the doorway now afforded a glimpse of a great mass of matted hair framing a skull on which the skin was stretched taut and where the ghost of a face Alice had once known better than her own appeared fleetingly. She saw eyes that could not rest any more than the hands could rest. Whether or not this longed-for figure, her sister, would have cut her throat Alice did not know; whether Milli being nine months heavy with a child was a condition which made murder more likely or less likely she could not say. A longing had filled her head all that day a
nd all the previous day and the day before that. It was a longing that had been dulled for the five years of Milli’s absence, but now that Milli was returned it struck her mute. It had sent her, a dozen times that day, to the door of her mistress’s room with a plea to be released early from her duties, with a plea—though she hardly dared formulate the words in her head—for help in whatever form it might be in her mistress’s power to give. But each time she had failed, had left without knocking.

  Yet here she was, and she had got away, if only for an hour or two.

  ‘Here, Milli, see what I have got!’ And with a flourish, Alice pulled from her coat pocket a linen cloth from which spilled a half-loaf of bread, two cooked potatoes and a lump of cheese. Her face burned hotly and she sat down, a little breathless. If she could not release the words of longing that filled her heart, if she could not hear those longed-for same words on her sister’s lips, she could at least bring her this feast.

  Two hands snatched up the food and crammed it into the almost-toothless mouth and Alice stole a glance at the sister returned to her after five years, at those restless and dimmed eyes that seemed to deny all that had once been their life together and at the same time demanded all that her younger sister could give. If there had been self-pity in those eyes at one time, or loathing, it was long gone. All that remained of Milli was those hands snatching at the scraps of leftover food.

  How had she sunk so low?

  Five years earlier Milli had leaned out of the window of the train at Sydney Terminal Station in their mother’s old coat, clutching a carpet bag and sporting a gay red hat with a feather in the crown, about to depart on the overnight to Melbourne. Milli leaving, this time for good, to join Seamus. She had been so happy, or so it had seemed to the fourteen-year-old Alice, standing on the platform, the smoke and steam swirling about her. Alice, sad already, and desperate to be leaving too, only dimly aware of the loneliness that was to come, waving goodbye to the only family she had left in the world. Wishing she had a white handkerchief to wave, watching until the train was out of sight.

  ‘Take me with you.’ The words she had not spoken.

  And now five years had passed and Milli was back. Two babies had come and been lost, both before their first birthdays, and Seamus had gone too, to Adelaide, for it turned out he had a wife already. So here was Milli, nine months heavy with a third child and so large her confinement could not be more than a few days away. The old coat that had once belonged to their mother was gone, so too the little red hat with the feather in the crown. And the bag of belongings—where was that? The happiness, the hope of a future, all of it gone. And what had returned from Melbourne was this shadowy collection of rags who dwelled in a cave and snatched at the scraps on the table and pressed a knife to your throat when you came through her door.

  Handsome Seamus with his Irish eyes and his Irish laughter and his solid and muscular wharfie arms and that flash of something that was thrilling and frightening all at once. Milli had said, There’s some Abo in him, Alice, somewhere back. Alice had been a little in love with Seamus herself.

  ‘Take me with you.’

  But Milli had not thought to take Alice with her—what would she want with a girl of fourteen in tow? She had left her behind, though their mother’s grave was still fresh in Devonshire Street Cemetery.

  The potato had slowed Milli down; it required some tearing, some chewing. You needed a few teeth and Milli, by the look of it, had none.

  Alice did not speak, though words crammed her mouth. Five years, such a very long time and such very different lives they had lived in that time, so that Alice found herself all at once filled to bursting with stories about the life she now led, the place she now lived, of the Dunlevys for whom she worked. But she said nothing. And it was because of her good fortune. Because God had seen fit to pluck Alice Nimrod from the life she had been born to and drop her into a better place, and He had not done the same for Milli.

  It hung between them, Alice’s good fortune.

  ‘You took this, dint you, from the people you work for?’ said Milli, indicating the scraps of leftover food. She spoke as someone afraid to be overheard. Or someone who did not wish to know the answers to her questions.

  Alice nodded. Yes, she had taken it. And why should she be ashamed? The food was there to be stolen and no one would notice if it was gone or not. (Perhaps Mrs Flynn did notice; certainly she gave Alice a shrewd look every now and then. But that was all she did, for what servant wanted to know another’s private business? In any case, Mrs Flynn took leftovers home to her own family.) But Alice had lately discovered that it was hard to help someone who had less than yourself, though you might think it would be an easy thing to do, and she did not understand why this was so.

  ‘I have some money too,’ she said now, and she scrabbled in her other pocket and laid a meagre pile of coins on the table.

  The shame of the little pile was great and Alice sat in misery.

  But Milli paused with the potato long enough to flick her fingers through the pile, to make a speedy reckoning, then sweep the lot off the table and into her pocket. Gone.

  ‘You always did have sharp fingers,’ said Milli, her voice softening and a memory flashing across her face. ‘Remember the baker’s on Crown Street? All them buns you nicked and that old baker never the wiser. You was like lightning.’

  ‘Mum used to say, “Never ask where a thing comes from for it is sure to disappear if you do”!’ said Alice, the brief light of remembrance shining in her own face, and for a moment they were sisters once more.

  But Milli heaved herself to her feet, shifting her bulk with a groan, repositioning herself on the rickety little chair into a more comfortable position, and the shadows rose up and consumed them. The baby would come any day and what then? Alice felt the hopelessness swell and surge about them. Perhaps the baby would die.

  She wondered again if she might ask Mrs Dunlevy for help—sometimes it seemed within her power to do so. At other times the utter impossibility of it struck her dumb.

  A great thud from above caused them both to look sharply upwards and a shower of dust and earth came tumbling down so that Alice wondered if the ceiling might choose this very moment to finally descend on them, or if God Himself might decide to bring the roof down, for He seemed set fair on this path of cruelty where Milli was concerned.

  But the ceiling did not come down. Not yet.

  How many of them lived up there? Alice wondered. The woman, whose name was Mrs Renfrew and who had four or five barefoot, clamouring offspring crowded about her legs and a newborn in her arms, had spoken a civil word to her once when no one else had.

  And all the time the hopelessness swelled and surged about them, but whereas Alice struggled to keep her head above the rising tide, Milli submitted to its inevitability, or this was how it seemed to Alice. She watched as her sister pushed at the matted clumps of hair that obscured her face. This was the same Milli who had once sat on a bed with a mirror in one hand and a hairbrush in the other, brushing and brushing her beautiful, soft and shining chestnut hair and arranging it and rearranging it, getting up and flouncing about the room because some lad had called out to her in the street and another had whistled at her from a tram. Milli, turning this way and that, trying to see herself full length in a mirror that showed you only your face and Alice watching her, perched on the bed and clapping her hands and laughing, and their mother seated in her chair with her withered and broken body, her eyes sunken and dulled, shaking her head and muttering dire warnings. For Mrs Nimrod had lived a life already and she had seen what happened to a girl’s dreams and hopes once some man came along, and when your own life had been spoiled you did not have it left inside you to let your own child have her life. Alice had not seen it at the time—a delighted observer of her sister’s exploits, a dreamer of her own future exploits—but she saw it now.

  She looked away.

  ‘What is to be done?’ she said at length. And then, remembering: ‘Milli
, the place at Pitt Street, the Benevolent Asylum, you must go there.’

  It was where the women went for their lying-in, or it had been when Alice had grown up in streets not so far away, where the sorts of women who needed such places sometimes lived.

  But Milli’s face was set hard. ‘I went there first day I got here,’ she said. ‘It was full.’

  ‘Full? But surely—’

  ‘I went before a board, they said show us proof you are married, show us proof your husband abandoned you, or you are at the back of the queue. There was a dozen other women trying to get in. Two dozen. It was no good, so I came here.’

  Alice was silenced. The asylum was the last place of sanctuary. It had not occurred to her a woman might be refused entry. If not the asylum, then what? Scraps of leftover food and a handful of coins, this was all the assistance she could render. She thought again of Mrs Dunlevy, who sat on committees and attended charitable lunches and raised funds for deserving causes. One of her committees, surely, was the Benevolent Asylum? It was what had made her think of it.

  She would ask Mrs Dunlevy for help, she would!

  But she said nothing to Milli, because each occasion that she had stood before Mrs Dunlevy’s door unable to knock filled her with shame. Instead, she said, ‘Milli, if ever there was something I might do to help, I would do it, oh, I would! And with a glad heart!’

  At this Milli’s arm shot out and grasped Alice’s wrist in a sudden and tight grip. Her eyes fixed on her sister in a way they had not done since she had arrived, as though Milli had just awoken and had been awaiting this moment.

  ‘You can help me, Alice,’ she said, and perhaps she saw more than Alice meant her to, for her next words seemed to reach inside Alice’s head and pluck the thoughts straight out of her. ‘You must take me back with you to that grand house where you work. I can shelter there. It would be a few days or a week at most.’