The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  Alice held the baby to her breast. It was her sister’s baby. She felt her sister’s blood pulse through the baby’s tiny veins, she saw the blood purplish-blue beneath the transparent skin of its eyelids. She thought of her sister locked up this cold June night and every night for three years in a cell in Darlinghurst Gaol.

  And then she closed that door and did not open it again because she could not endure it.

  The clouds had rolled in from the west to obscure the moon and Alice turned away from the window and looked about at her room beneath the eaves, a sloping room cut from a space in the roof that was usually reserved for bats and birds. A narrow bed pushed close up against the sloping wall filled most of the space, crowded beside it a chest of drawers and a small, roughly hewn table on which a water jug stood. The window jutted out into the night and the doorway opened onto the little landing and the narrow staircase down which you crept at night without a candle at your peril.

  Might she ask Father McCreadie for help? The old priest had come to her aid once before when she had found herself alone and unprotected, but five years had passed. She had not returned to the church, had not once attended mass. Did not know if Father McCreadie remained still at the church. Was even alive. He had been an old man then, stooped and unshaved and smelling already of the decay and the dust of the dead. I will take the child into the orphanage, Alice. I will hand it over to the Sisters of Mercy, he would say. It is for the best. It is God’s will. And that would be the last she would see of it, Milli’s child.

  At her breast the baby shuddered and let out a wail. It began to cry. It went on crying. It did not stop. It was hungry or thirsty or dying, Alice did not know which. She patted its head, and stroked its downy cheek, she jiggled it on her knee, propping up the head, which seemed impossibly large for its body and in imminent danger of wobbling right off. She lay the baby down, she picked it up. The baby cried.

  Panic-stricken, she put it down and ran from her tiny room down the narrow staircase to the floor below then downwards to the hallway and the closed doors of the dining room and the drawing room. She opened each door to reveal the empty unlit fireplaces and the polished unlaid tables and the silverware in the cabinets and the paintings on the walls and the rows of untouched books on the shelves. She threw back the curtains. There was no one here. She did not know what it was she searched for. Silence, perhaps, peace—for, distantly, she heard the crying of the baby. It did not stop. The Dunlevys would be home this hour or the next, the empty house would not remain empty for long. And then what?

  She did not know what to do. Everything sped up inside her, the beat of her heart, the blood in her arteries, the breath in her throat, the thoughts in her head. She ran back up the two flights of stairs and flung back the door to her room to scoop up the crying thing—

  But someone was there before her. Someone was in her room holding the baby.

  ‘Why do you not feed it, Alice? The baby will perish if you do not tend to it.’

  Mrs Flynn. Her sleeves rolled up and her coat and hat on as though she had thought to leave for the night but had changed her mind. Spots of animal blood on her arms. Her lips set firm around her toothless gums. The baby in her arms.

  ‘I do not know how to,’ said Alice, and her shoulders sagged and the breath went out of her at her own failure, at this blessed and unhoped-for relief.

  ‘It needs mother’s milk,’ said the elderly and toothless cook. She did not say, And who is the mother and why is she not here? She had lived too long in the world to bother with such questions.

  ‘But where?’ said Alice helplessly. ‘Where do I get such a thing?’ Her own failure, her lack of knowledge, hung heavily about her.

  ‘From a nursing woman,’ was the simple reply.

  The baby did not stop its crying but Mrs Flynn did not flinch. She held the little shrivelled thing to her shoulder and nursed it as best as a wizened and dried-up old woman could.

  ‘You must find a nursing mother if the real mother cannot nurse it,’ she said again.

  Alice nodded. She knew where she must go—it was as preordained as Christ’s death on the cross—and she readied herself to go out into the night. The clouds had rolled in to obscure the moon and it seemed likely the rain would come again. But not yet, and under Mrs Flynn’s silent gaze she hurried down to the scullery and gathered such items as she might need and tied them in a cloth. She wrapped a shawl about her shoulders and over her head and took the baby, which Mrs Flynn held out to her, enclosing it inside the warmth of her arms, and set off.

  Alice returned to Frog Hollow and to Mrs Renfrew, a woman who had four or five children already and a sixth at her breast, whose husband had lost his job because of his drinking and who would never get another and whose bitterness at his own failure was displayed daily on the swollen faces and bruised and bloodied bodies of his wife and offspring. ‘This is where you come when you cannot sink lower,’ Milli had said once, meaning herself, but it applied equally to the Renfrews and to all the others too, for the Hollow was large enough to swallow up countless unfortunates and many families found their way there eventually.

  But at least Mrs Renfrew had her freedom, at least she was not locked in a cell at Darlinghurst Gaol. And so Alice hurried to her, through the lengthening night, carrying her valuable prize.

  She negotiated the descent down the flight of stone steps and picked her way as carefully as she could. A child, ten years at most and pale as a corpse, darted past her and slipped behind a square of sackcloth pinned across the doorway of the shack that four nights ago had been Milli’s. This place, the Hollow, and the souls that inhabited it, did not remain stagnant for a moment. A space had become vacant and had been filled almost before it was cold.

  Someone at some point had fashioned a rudimentary ladder up to the Renfrews’ shack and Alice grimly attacked this ladder, hauling herself up one-handed, clutching her precious bundle. As she neared the top she called, ‘Hello? Anyone inside?’

  A head appeared, dark against the dark sky.

  ‘Who’s there? What d’you want?’

  ‘It is Alice Nimrod, Milli’s sister. I have come to see Mrs Renfrew. It is terrible important I speak with her.’ For the head, the voice, was not a woman’s but a man’s.

  ‘Terrible important, is it? Then you had best come up.’

  Scorn—but also an invitation.

  Alice pulled herself up, stood unsteadily for a moment atop the little ladder, swayed and might have fallen had not a hand shot out and grabbed her sleeve, hauled her inside.

  And Alice baulked. For here, in a space no bigger than Milli’s little shack below, Mrs Renfrew and her brood lived. A quantity of this brood were here now, sprawled or huddled, every space taken, the smallest ones perched like doves in a coop on shelves that had been hammered into the timber walls and the furniture stacked one thing atop another so that you wanted to step right outside again to draw breath. The little ones watched her, rows of eyes in the gloom staring, unblinking, as though she was a ghost or a phantom. The watching eyes and the chaos and the roof-high piles of clutter on the brink of toppling was oppressive, a great weight pressing on the chest. How did they stand it? Alice wondered. The smell of too many bodies, of rotting food scraps, of night-time slops in such a confined space almost made her gag.

  ‘It is the Nimrod girl’s sister,’ said the man who had pulled her up. A tallow candle burned and the light it gave out was feeble and flickered madly on the walls and danced about in the breeze, distorting all that it touched. A sea of staring faces, a mass of shifting bodies was all she could discern.

  ‘Alice, is it?’ said a woman’s voice, and she recognised Mrs Renfrew emerging out of the dark, creeping, as though the roof were low or as though she expected it to fall in on her at any moment. Mrs Renfrew straightened herself up and peered closely through yellow eyes that blinked in the candlelight. Her lips were split and covered in scabs.

  ‘You are brave, coming here,’ she said in wonder, as though
‘brave’ was not a word she had much cause to use very often. ‘Or you are foolish.’ And she sighed. ‘You know they are after your sister for she owes them money?’

  ‘Quiet, woman!’ said the man, Mr Renfrew, emerging out of the gloom and striking his wife a blow about the face. She tottered and almost fell over but otherwise seemed barely to notice.

  ‘Please, I have come to ask for your help,’ said Alice, and at her breast the baby stirred and let out a wail.

  ‘Zat Milli’s baby?’ said the man, moving into the candlelight so that Alice saw the whites of his eyes in a blackened face, saw the sluggish shuffle of a body broken by drink and poverty but still with a strong right arm on him. He reached out with long callused fingers that twitched as though they longed to feel the newborn’s flesh and Alice shuddered.

  ‘The child is born then,’ said Mrs Renfrew, as though a prophecy had come true.

  ‘I cannot nurse it,’ said Alice. ‘But you can.’

  She looked at the woman, at her yellow eyes, at her split and bloodied lips.

  ‘And why would she do such a thing?’ said the man, testing her, searching for the profit that might be had.

  ‘I have food and a little money. It would only be for a few days. While I decide what must be done.’

  ‘Is Milli not returning then?’ said Mrs Renfrew simply, as though a mother disappearing after her child is born was a common enough matter—and perhaps it was, here. Perhaps it was everywhere.

  ‘No,’ said Alice.

  ‘How much money?’ said the man.

  It was a simple enough transaction. Alice gave them what money she had brought with her, which was little enough but more than nothing so it was greedily accepted. And then she brought out the small bundle wrapped in a cloth and tied with a knot so that she could lay it upon a table and untie the knot and let the contents fall out and dazzle them: bread and cheese and the drumsticks from lunch and leftover game pie and a little wine in a bottle sealed with a stopper. And they fell on the food, like dogs, until the man swatted the children away and curses were thrown and a little blood spilled.

  ‘It is just for a few days,’ said Alice, holding the baby, still wrapped in its shawl.

  Mrs Renfrew reached over and plucked the baby from her and put it under her left arm as her own baby was under the right. Alice would have asked, Do you have enough milk for two? Will the baby live? But she did not ask for she did not trust that the replies she got would be the truth. The man, she saw, wolfed down the food when she had brought it for the mother, but she said nothing. ‘We have no room for an extra mouth beyond these three days, mind,’ said Mrs Renfrew.

  And what she meant was: We cannot say what will happen to it after that time, if you do not come for it.

  The man would sell it, Alice presumed. Or worse.

  ‘God bless you,’ said Alice, reaching out to touch the woman, to touch the stunned baby, which had not uttered a cry since she had handed it over. The woman said nothing and it seemed unlikely that God did bless her, or indeed any of them, and Alice made ready to leave, taking one final look at the child.

  ‘It is a boy,’ she said, from the top of the ladder.

  She had saved the baby, for now. And Alice almost tripped and fell in her scrambling haste to descend the ladder and at once her feet sunk into the mud at the bottom. Her dress dragged in it and her boots were sucked into the quagmire up to her ankles. All about her the tumble of shacks and huts crowded any which way and no one but herself was abroad, though every pair of eyes in every dark corner watched her.

  She was leaving the child in this fearful place. But Alice Nimrod could not afford second thoughts. Second thoughts were for rich people.

  A dark figure now sprang from the shadows to block her way. A second figure came at her from behind and grabbed a handful of her hair, jerking her head back.

  ‘YOU. OWE. US.’

  The light was such that Alice saw only the whites of a man’s eyes and the moonlight flash dully on a rusted razor blade held an inch before her eyes. But she felt their combined bulk, holding her in a grip from which she could not even struggle; she felt hot breath on the back of her neck, the arm fast around her middle, and now the blade of the razor softly nuzzling the delicate skin on her cheek, moving down and scraping against her throat. Fingers, too, closed around her neck and Alice stood perfectly still.

  ‘I do not owe you nothing!’ she said calmly and steadily, though fear clogged her throat and her bladder had emptied, sending a trickle of warm liquid down her leg. The razor pricked at her skin. The man standing behind her let out a snarl and pulled tighter at her hair, jerking her head back further, exposing the whiteness of her throat.

  ‘Your sister,’ whispered the first voice, ‘she borrowed money from us and now we have come to collect. If she is gone then you shall do just as well.’

  ‘I have nothing. Look—’ Alice held out her hands, though they shook, she lifted up her arms, showed the pockets of her coat.

  ‘Then we shall take this as down payment.’ They stripped the coat from her shoulders, laughing as she fought them, twisting this way and that to stop them from taking it, laughing when she slipped and fell.

  ‘Next time we will not be so gentle.’ And they ground her face down into the mud and left her.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE RESPECTABLE ESTABLISHMENT

  The journey from Charles Booker-Reid’s house at Woollahra to Elizabeth Bay was a long one if judged not in miles travelled but in words spoken and silences accumulated. For the latter part of the journey the flickering lights of ships on the harbour were distantly visible to the north, and across the night air could be heard the tinkling of rigging on the yachts moored at Rushcutters Bay. The fine weather held. The clouds that had rolled in earlier in the evening had moved offshore and the sky above was clear, if crisp. One needed gloves, one needed a muffler. But there was no danger of a frost. There was never any danger of a frost. This was Sydney, after all.

  Alasdair Dunlevy turned his face away from the lights on the harbour, he blocked his ears to the tinkling of the rigging. It was intolerable, this cab journey. Why must he be forever in one cab or another, going from one desolate place to another?

  ‘Cecily Pyke is rather a silly woman,’ observed his wife, seated beside him and evidently having given the matter some thought, for she had sat silently since they had left Booker-Reid’s house.

  Alasdair stirred restlessly but did not turn his head towards her. ‘Because she does not tend to your point of view?’

  Eleanor laughed at this, though he had not intended it as a joke. ‘I merely meant she is rather naive, always jumping to the defence of the poorer classes as though she has a better understanding than others of what such lives are like.’

  ‘Her husband is a Methodist preacher when he is not a parliamentarian and their congregation are tenant farmers and drovers and their wives. Perhaps she feels this gives her some insight.’

  ‘No doubt she does think that, though I am equally sure it is misplaced. Can she really believe she has a superior understanding of such things than Judge Thistledon? Than men who sit in parliament?’

  ‘I really cannot say.’

  This was intended to close the conversation, but it had the opposite effect. Eleanor sat up, turned a little towards him, seemed about to confide in him, though what she might confide he could not for the life of him imagine.

  ‘Alasdair, what did Charles Booker-Reid mean when he alluded to your father benefitting greatly, when we talked about the railways?’

  ‘How can I possibly say what any man has on his mind? Why do you not ask him?’

  ‘I am asking you, as my husband. He implied there was some irregularity. I merely wish to know why he would suggest such a thing—it is not unreasonable.’

  ‘Not unreasonable?’ And now he turned to face her. ‘My father bought and sold land and became moderately wealthy, as many men did at that time—is that what you wish to know? My father came from hum
ble origins but he made his way by sheer hard work and some good fortune. He did not spend his time sitting on a roof gazing at ships in the harbour through a telescope—’

  His wife gave a tiny gasp at this allusion to her father but he went on:

  ‘—and if you wish to cast aspersions on my dead father’s name, you would do well to remember that it is his money that set me on my political career and paid for the house in which we live.’

  ‘My dear, I merely—’

  ‘And, furthermore, if the wife of a dear friend happens to express her sympathy for the plight of a poor unfortunate wretch who has been forsaken by society, then I, for one, do not find it naive; I find it admirable evidence of Christian charity.’

  It was curious how the words now tumbled out of him. Words he had no wish to utter yet here they were.

  ‘No doubt you already knew Drummond-Smith was to accompany Reid on the tour to Newcastle—’

  ‘I? How could I possibly—’

  ‘—and no doubt it pleased you immensely.’

  ‘Why should you think such a thing?’

  But he would not answer her question. Would not humiliate himself further.

  The cab had by now reached Elizabeth Bay. Through the fronds of the palms on the esplanade the moonlight shimmered on the water.

  Alasdair rapped on the roof of the cab. ‘Stop here!’ he called, his voice carrying across the still night air all the way to Beare Park and beyond.

  Eleanor started, and when the driver jumped down and flung open the door she stood up, stumbling a little and dropping a glove. She climbed down the step, but when the driver stood aside to let Alasdair out he dismissed the man with a hand. ‘I am remaining, you will take me onwards,’ he commanded, and he saw Eleanor turn back in surprise.

  The cab lurched forward and Alasdair leaned back in his seat and did not observe as his wife stood in the road and watched him go.