Half Wild Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  HALF WILD

  ‘Half Wild is a triumph of novelistic paradox—a quixotic portrayal of a subject whose life is a lesson in “becoming”. At the hybrid heart of this work is an impassioned address to the Nietzschean enigma: “how one becomes what one is”. This debut signifies the taming of an immense and soaring imagination in the figure of Pip Smith, who—with cool command of form—is here both the falcon and the falconer.’

  LUKE CARMAN, author of An Elegant Young Man

  ‘Pip Smith is a writer full to the brim with brio and vim. Her fiction leaves nothing behind: every sentence wrings language for its emotional and aesthetic possibilities. Half Wild is a remarkable work of empathy: Smith has committed herself entirely to the imaginative act, plonking us right down into the shoes, skin and mind of a person who shed these same things time and again. We live in an era where the reinvention of self is common, and even encouraged; Half Wild reveals to us in dynamic prose that these concerns are timeless and universal, that one of history’s most exceptional chameleons could have been you, me or anyone we know.’

  SAM COONEY, editor of The Lifted Brow

  ‘Smith’s writing is lucid and lovely; it’s fearless—resonant with the verve of another century and steadily surprising.’

  STEVEN AMSTERDAM, author of The Easy Way Out

  ‘A richly imagined and voiced novel that floats across time, and through the shifting sands of identity. A buoyant, beautiful debut!’

  DOMINIC SMITH, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Pip is a writer of songs, poems and stories. Her first poetry collection, Too Close for Comfort (SUP), won the Helen Ann Bell Award in 2013. She ran the monthly writing event Penguin Plays Rough, for which she published and edited the multimedia anthology, The Penguin Plays Rough Book of Short Stories. She was a Faber Academy Writing a Novel scholarship recipient, has been a co-director of the National Young Writers’ Festival, and holds a doctorate in creative arts from Western Sydney University. She is one quarter of garage band Imperial Broads and works in a bookshop.

  The lyrics from the song ‘By the Beautiful Sea’ on page 353 were written by Harold R. Atteridge and published in 1914.

  All attempts have been made to locate the owners of copyright material. If you have any information in that regard, please contact the publisher at the address below.

  First published in 2017

  Copyright © Pip Smith 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760294649

  eISBN 9781760638641

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Cover design: Romina Panetta

  Cover photograph: Mohamad Itani / Trevillion Images

  CONTENTS

  SYDNEY HOSPITAL, 9 JUNE 1938

  JEAN FORD

  WHO SHE’D LIKE TO BE WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND, 1885–1896

  AS FAR AS HE CAN REMEMBER SYDNEY, 5 JULY 1920

  TO ALL OUTSIDE APPEARANCES, AT LEAST SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  CRAWFORD, THE FAMILY MAN WAHROONGA, 1910–1913

  JACK, THE BOARDER WOOLLOOMOOLOO, OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1917

  WOMAN NOT YET IDENTIFIED LANE COVE RIVER, OCTOBER 1917

  THE MASQUERADER SYDNEY, SUMMER 1917

  NINA, THE WRONG DAUGHTER SYDNEY, 1898–1917

  GENE, THE FATHER-IN-LAW DARLINGTON, NOVEMBER 1917

  THE MAN-WOMAN SYDNEY, WINTER 1920

  THE ACCUSED SYDNEY, AUGUST–OCTOBER 1920

  SOME LOWER ANIMAL SYDNEY HOSPITAL, 9 JUNE 1938

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  She was just a half-wild creature who felt herself apart and different.

  —Dr Herbert M. Moran, 1939

  I was what other people made me.

  —Eugenia Falleni, 1930

  SYDNEY HOSPITAL, 9 JUNE 1938

  —Who is she?

  —Not sure. Female. Sixty, seventy maybe. Hit by a car up on Oxford Street.

  —No purse?

  —No. A wad of cash, though. A hundred pounds.

  —Stolen?

  —Probably.

  —What’s your name, Mrs … ? I don’t think she can hear me.

  —No, her eyelid twitched. Did you see that? Her eyelid twitched.

  —Mrs? Can you hear me? What is your name?

  JEAN FORD

  My name, my name. What should we say my name is today, little Rita?

  Today it’s Jean I think, but tomorrow, when I find you, we’ll christen me something new—something you can decide because my new life will be lived for you and no one else.

  A name is a lie, Rita, remember that. If none of us had names, how would we remember who each other was? How would we call to each other from across the street? How would we attach a face to a name, a name to a bank account? I tell you, we couldn’t. We couldn’t even tell our own stories, because stories need heroes, and heroes would not hold together without a name, they would fall to jelly on the floor most likely, and wouldn’t that be delicious?

  Who I am, you cannot know,

  for Jean Ford is my name.

  Like Fords they make in factories,

  my selves all look the same.

  The doctors will think: a sensible name for a sensible woman, and let me out.

  So call me Jean.

  Can you hear me? I’m Jean—Jean Ford.

  They can’t hear me.

  And there’s a loud white pain flaring out from my hip and the back of my head that makes it hard to speak. Don’t. No, stop. Morphine will only make me slip further away. I want to be inside this pain, because it’s mine, because it proves this broken body’s still got fight.

  They are pressing into my wrist with their cold fingers. They are feeling for a pulse. They are saying numbers and writing on paper. Ha. Do monsters have pulses? I can hear someone fingering my banknotes. Don’t you dare, don’t you bloody dare, that’s everything I’ve got.

  What was it—almost twenty years ago now?—I was sent to die under a different name. I travelled to Long Bay Penitentiary like a celebrity, on a tram with tinted windows. Instead of a destination, the tram said SPECIAL. The woman next to me couldn’t stop giggling. Never thought I’d get called special, that’s for sure.

  Inside the tram we didn’t feel special. We got shoved ten at a time into compartments with seats for four and clung to the chicken-wire gates that fenced us in. A woman moaned the whole way there, like a cow torn away from her calf.

  —Ah shuddup Sandra, ya whiny bugger—

  Long Bay had never kept a woman about to hang and they weren’t sure where to put me. They settled on a concrete cell, thirteen feet by seven. I got a mug and spoon, a shelf, and a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. I could’ve wrapped the light cord around my neck and jumped off the shelf I suppose, but what if the cord brok
e and left me lying on my back, more alive than dead, legs twitching like a poisoned cockroach?

  I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. The cell was like a roomy coffin, and I was half convinced I was already dead when I heard a warder whisper outside my door: Maybe they’ll send her to Hall B in the men’s.

  I could tell by the break in her voice what happened in Hall B. They lowered their voices whenever they passed my cell, as if I was a ghost likely to haunt any poor sucker who pricked my ears. I probably would’ve, too, I was that hungry and sore about it.

  They say you eat whatever you want when you’re about to hang, but turns out this is a lie. They’d fed me Ration One for supper, the next best thing to dry bread and water. I suspect they didn’t want to clean up my shit after I dropped. A constipated corpse is a tidy corpse, and doesn’t leave a trace.

  But everything leaves a trace. You mightn’t be able to see those traces, but you can feel them, you can smell them. There are traces of me in you, and mark my words there are traces of me in the acid that burns the Crown Prosecutor’s gullet at night, keeping him awake.

  Wake up, Mrs; Mrs, wake up, a nurse is saying.

  Ah, darling girl, I would if I could.

  Now she is giving up, too. Her soft shoes pad across the floor.

  The warders bit their nails when I looked them in the face. They barked occasionally, to remind me where I was, but it was hard for them to keep up the gruffness when I gave them no reason to complain. Mavis slipped a ball of tobacco into my pocket. May gave me an extra scoop of hominy on Sundays, and in early December a young warder slid back the hatch on my cell door.

  Good news, love, she said. There was a cabinet meeting. Your death sentence just got commuted to life.

  What? I didn’t understand. What about the jury’s decision? The lawyers’ two-hour speeches? The months of preparation for the trial, and all along they could change their minds, just like that?

  No premier wants a hanged woman on his hands, not now we can vote.

  So it was life, then. Sentenced to life. It was worse in a way, but the women in the cells began to clap. The sound was water smacking stone; the drops accumulated and became rain. They clapped harder, they whooped and hollered—the cheers of women wild or poor enough to break the law are as close to rapture as a person can get now that churches don’t mean much.

  My cheeks were wet, my throat choked up; I hadn’t cried like that in years.

  Sister, the old woman is crying, I think.

  The nurses are coming from all directions, needles out.

  No, no more morphine.

  Too bad. Jab.

  And off I float. I’ve been trapped like this before, long ago now, but it’s all coming back—

  WHO SHE’D LIKE TO BE

  WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND, 1885–1896

  TALLY HO

  Mamma was always having babies. Sometimes I imagined they grew out her fingertips when she stood for too long in the sun, but they didn’t. They crawled into her vagina when she sat on the toilet seat after Papà used it. That was why you always had to stand on the toilet seat and squat. Never sit.

  And Mamma was a tailoress and a very hard worker. She worked every day of the week, and also cooked for us and cleaned the house and fixed our clothes except for when I did that, which was as often as she could make me. I tried not to be home too much in case she made me stitch flowers onto one of Ida’s bonnets. Mamma said Ida couldn’t stitch flowers onto her own bonnet because she was three and if you tried to make her she would put the needle in her eye or in your eye or try to eat it. I didn’t know why bonnets needed flowers. If I had to stitch a horse costume, I would’ve done it. Or if I had to stitch something useful like trousers. But I didn’t know why bonnets needed flowers, so I wouldn’t do it.

  When I came home after being outside for too long, Mamma would look at me as if she was experiencing great sorrow. When she stood up she held her back and sucked in through her teeth, as if the sorrow might leak out her back and pour all over the floor. Mamma always wore black, to accentuate the sorrow. She said she was in mourning for her lost babies, but she had more alive than she had dead, so you’d think that would make her want to wear more colour.

  So far she had:

  Me who was ten

  Lisa who was nine but in Italy and didn’t want to come and live with us

  Federigo who would be five but was dead

  Ida who was three

  Rosie who was one

  and Emily who was not anything yet.

  Then there were others who died before they came out. There was no saying how many she’d have before she stopped.

  I saw my last three sisters come out of Mamma and she was screaming and sweating and throwing her head around each time. Those three times were the only times I saw her hair out and all over the pillow, and she was yelling at me, Ho troppo caldo! Tagliani i capelli, cazzo! but Papà yelled, Non brontolare! from the other room. Each time Papà rushed in, asking, È un maschio? And each time Mamma said, No, Luigi, hai una figlia.

  One of the times she gripped my arm so hard it bled where her nails went into the skin. I still have scars from it. They look like four empty cribs in a row.

  Right, you. It’s morning. Up.

  It was still dark outside but Papà said it was morning, so it was morning.

  Why aren’t you fishing? I asked.

  The sea is too high. Why aren’t you helping your mother?

  When there were high seas out on the harbour there were high seas inside Papà, too. He’d walk through the house with heavy feet, sometimes carrying buckets of water and a mop, which he’d drop in front of me without saying a word. Then his eyes would be a dark blue and you didn’t say anything or else you got smacked. He never cared if I was out playing when he was fishing, but when there was no fishing he watched me closely, as if I was an insect he’d caught under a jar, and the jar made everything the insect did really big, but also kind of crooked.

  If you’re going to live under this roof you have to help around the house, said Papà, and he left the room but made sure the door was open so he could keep track of my getting-up progress with his ears.

  Sometimes helping Mamma wasn’t so bad. When we had to bottle passata at the end of summer my job was to put the teaspoon of salt into each bottle, but sometimes I got to fill the bottles with the red sauce. That was the best job, especially if you imagined you were a monster and the red was actually human blood that you planned to drink over the winter, when humans were harder to come by.

  It was winter now and there was no passata to bottle, or bottles of blood to drink. There was only sewing in the dark, then school—long hours of chalk screech and out-of-bounds daylight. When I was fully dressed I lay in bed with all my clothes on and tried to be invisible. Maybe today I won’t have to go to school, I thought. Maybe today I’ll fix fishing nets with Papà instead.

  It was hard to tell how long it was before I could hear Papà’s feet in the hallway. The steps were slow and even but loud, too, which meant he was trying to be terrifying.

  Cosa. Ti. Ho. Detto?

  The walls shook with his voice. Mice turned around in their nests, and in somewhere like Christchurch an earthquake shook the leaves off all the trees. I threw back the covers to show him I was fully dressed.

  I did it all under the covers!

  He wasn’t impressed.

  When I eventually came out to help the sun had already crawled into the sky and surprise surprise Mamma said she wanted me to stitch flowers onto one of Ida’s bonnets. I opened my mouth to complain, but then Mamma rushed towards a chamber pot and filled it with vomit.

  Fine, I said. I’ll do it.

  No, Nina, it’s the new baby, Mamma said.

  She looked pale and strained, and so, so tired.

  I don’t want to have babies when I grow up, I said.

  Her face went still like the refrigerated pigs I once saw in the bond store at Queen’s Wharf.

  Well, what are y
ou going to do? Mamma said. Be a nun?

  No, I said. I’m going to be a sailor, or a driver down the West Coast called Tally Ho, or a butcher boy like Harry Crawford.

  She ruffled my hair. She said I was a funny little joker. Then she said I’d better get my tally ho to school or she’d butcher me herself.

  My teacher at the Sacred Heart school was a nun. Her name was Sister Katherine. She always had her head in a book about distant lands, so when she walked through the school she was really walking across the plains of Africa, or moving through a fish market in the Orient. You always had to say her name twice. First to bring her back to earth, and then to bring her over to you. It went like this:

  Sister Katherine?

  Hmmm?

  Sister Katherine?

  Oh! And she would jump and clutch her chest. Yes, dear, what is it?

  Then she’d look at you with her eyes all misted over, as if someone was having a hot bath inside her head.

  Sometimes she read to us from one of her books, but only when Father Kelly wasn’t around. On this particular morning, she read out the first bit of Frankenstein, but just as it was getting good she stopped and made different people read different bits. I was scared she might ask me to read so I sat close behind a fat girl’s back, but Sister Katherine saw and asked me to read next.

  I was sweating and my eyes were doing that thing where they jump between lines. Sister Katherine was staring at me, saying, Go on. Go. On, between long pauses while everyone waited for me to start. Even the trees outside were waiting. The cicadas started chanting read read read faster and faster until someone threw a piece of chalk at my head and shouted, You can’t read! Everyone laughed and the cicadas whirred and the trees bent down and brushed against the window, ho ho ho. Sister Katherine wasn’t laughing, though. She had her finger pointing at me like a gun. Out! she shrieked. Outside until I work out what to do with you!

  While I waited for Sister Katherine to calm down I did some experiments in the playground. I found a lizard and I also found a cicada that was the same thickness as the lizard. I pulled the head off the lizard and pulled the head off the cicada and then swapped them around, mainly so the lizard could see what it would be like to fly. I held the head in place with some pins I’d stolen from Mamma’s sewing box and left the cicard and lizada behind a bush.