Swords and Crowns and Rings (30 page)

The warmth and squalor of the unknown town appealed to her strangely; she felt almost happy sometimes. Perhaps this was because she often managed to have a small drink before she left. In the older women's absence she searched the house—the kitchen cupboards, under Claudie's bed, amongst the garments in the wardrobe. As she did so she was amazed at herself, her lack of shame.

She was very crafty at taking the smallest amount from the bottle when she found it, and putting things back exactly as they had been, so that Claudie or Iris could never be sure whether the bottle had been touched. And it seemed that, with care, in spite of what Iris had said, an intelligent person could manage to keep a thin veil of alcohol between herself and the sharp corners of life. It was probably what Iris and Claudie themselves did, in spite of Iris's preaching.

The boom after the War that had raised gorgeous cinemas and cast up huge skeletons of electric posters everywhere, that had put plate-glass windows on shops, and tramlines where none had been before, had not changed the Victorian character of the city. A flood of new cement-rendered cottages, gaunt as bones, had washed up to the feet of tall old schools with bell-towers and pillared porticoes; terra-cotta Town Halls decorative as jelly moulds; churches with crocheted spires filled with silent, rusted bells. Along beaches white as sugar, jerry-built follies had sprouted.

The city was rich, bursting, coarse as old sacking, a sandstone city that seemed to have cast up stalagmites of its own substance, coloured with the sun. Its traffic clanged like beaten bronze, and its heart, lying athwart an entire block like some vast beached vessel, was Jackaman's Emporium.

Once or twice Cushie had gone there, almost timorously. The place was like a city in itself, full of clatter and light, the pneumatic change-carriers whizzing above the customers' heads on a network of electric wires centred above the cashiers' ornate brass cages. It was hard for the girl to realise that her great-grandfather had created this incredible monster, and that her own aunt Australia Jackaman had built it into a store larger and more modern than anything in the southern hemisphere.

One boiling January day, during the autumn sales, she did indeed see Australia, in a costume of grey linen and a brimless hat with a veil pinned with a diamond, hasten across the ground floor, glancing sharply at this and that, and throwing an occasional comment to a man secretary who made notes on a pad.

Cushie, fearful of being seen, shrank back into a rack of house-dresses, turning her face away. And a woman beside her said excitedly, ‘Did you see that? That was Miss Jackaman, who owns the shop. They say she's worth millions. Skinny thing!'

The sight of her Aunt Australia reminded Cushie of her grandmother, her sagging face, her fat, liver-spotted hands. Grandmother lived in Balmain, near the water, in a house she would not leave, though the district was running down and becoming industrial. Often Cushie longed to see that loving, commonplace old Grandmother Jackaman; the very thought of her was comforting, healing. But how could she put her burdens on that old woman?

Some deprivation or distress must have shown on her face, for the woman who had spoken to her of Australia Jackaman looked at her suspiciously and then moved away quickly, an extraordinary expression on her face.

When Cushie caught sight of herself in a mirror she saw that her top blouse button was undone, and her hat was crooked. She tried to pull herself together, but her fingers felt numb. She had drunk too much of the bottle of port wine she had found hidden in Aunt Claudie's wash-jug, and now she was going to disgrace herself in public. Cold sweat ran down her back. That woman must have smelt the wine on her breath.

Who could have guessed that wine was so intoxicating? Her father had a small glass of it every night after dinner, for medical reasons, and it had seemed to have no effect on him. The sheer horror of her situation rushed upon her. Her fingers would not do up the button; she could not even feel the button. Could she get to the ladies' retiring-room, hide herself in a cubicle until she felt better? She took a few steps towards the lift, and the sight of it whizzing up and down in its enclosure of whorled and twisted gilt wire made her head rock. For a frightful moment she thought she was going to be sick right there on the parquet floor.

Somehow she got to the doors; they swung in and out at her, mahogany inlaid with bright brass, waving in blasts of noise, gusts of heat, people. A voice a mile away said, ‘Do you feel faint, miss?' Cushie pulled away with a feeble anger; she was terrified that someone else would smell the wine, say, ‘That young lady's drunk. Did you ever!'

Her one idea was to get home to Claudie's house, hide herself. Deep inside her brain there was a small sober centre that knew just what to do to be unobtrusive, ladylike, decorous. But her body no longer took orders. She felt her hair fall down, her skirt placket split. One shoe seemed loose, as if the lace had broken. Inanimate things had turned against her. It was like black magic, or a bad dream.

Fifty yards from the shop, the late afternoon sun hammering down from a steely sky, she knew she could not do it. She could never climb on a tram, and she could never walk such a distance without collapsing. The small sober centre was screaming with fright.

Some time elapsed, full of noise, faces, people who appeared and disappeared. She became aware that six inches in front of her nose were three sweating bricks in a herringbone pattern. They were part of a wall. Roaring in her head drowned out most of what a voice was saying in her ear. With difficulty she slid her eyes sideways and saw a strange face hovering near by. It wore an expression of sentimental concern that did its best with features so curiously marked with dirt and a harsh life that it resembled a piece of crocodile skin. Cushie looked blankly at it, but it did not move away. She felt a certain remote relief that it was female. At last she thought that it might be the courteous thing to say something, so she muttered, ‘I'm not at all well.'

‘Course you're not, love,' said the face.

‘I want to go home,' said Cushie. She thought she had better give the woman the address, but it would not come out.

‘And so you shall,' said the woman. ‘But first you'd better come with me and have a nice lie down. Oh, you don't look at all clever.'

‘It's the heat,' said Cushie, docilely stumbling along the lane with the strange woman, who was small and decrepit, and kept glancing back over her shoulder as though the girl were a prize that someone might dart out and grab. She fell into a narrow dark passage, smelling of gas and food, and realised that she must be in the woman's house.

She said, woebegone, ‘I have to go home.'

Panic rose in her; she saw a yellow old man, half-naked on a tossed bed in a room as big as a cupboard, and a young boy appeared from nowhere, picking his nose. But the panic did not last; she was not able to keep her attention on anything. It whirled away vertiginously, and so did she, with rushing watery sounds. She heard herself moaning, like a cat crying, far, far away.

At some stage she felt someone touching her breasts. She whispered, ‘Jackie!' but it was not Jackie. A strange face with topaz teeth and bulging eyes leant over her, grinning. There was the sound of a blow, laughter, a yell of, ‘Can't trust you a minute, you ratbag!' And then someone, the woman perhaps, was hoisting her to her feet.

When she awakened she was paralysed with cold, the sky was full of diamonds, and a policeman was shining a torch in her face.

‘Come on out of that, you poor little devil. My God, what a mess you're in!'

She was wearing only a bodice and waist petticoat, her feet were bare, her hair fell over her face, tacky with vomit and dirt. Everything had gone, her handbag, her hat and dress, her silver chain and the watch that it suspended, her silver link belt, the white gloves and kid shoes, even the tortoiseshell clasp from her hair.

‘Sleeping it off, were you? Well, a lane's no place to do it in.'

She was bundled into a vehicle of some kind. There were lights, other people; and then she was wrapped, with what appeared to be rough kindness, in a blanket. Thankfully she turned her face against a clammy stone wall and slept.

They kept the lights on all night in that place, glaring bulbs set into a concrete ceiling. Cushie woke up, lay for a while, the thin harsh blanket up to her chin, not sure whether the nightmare was continuing. She thought, dumbfounded, ‘I think I'm in jail.' The following thought was, ‘No, it's not possible—I'm dreaming or I'm mad.'

She kept her eyes shut, pretended to be still asleep. Meanwhile her hands travelled stealthily over her body. She wore no dress, and her chemise front was wet and smelly. Oh, God, then she had been sick, in public! She could remember nothing, except Australia Jackaman's grey hat, a lavender veil caught with a small diamond brooch. She began to sob, pulling the blanket over her head.

After a little while a hand twitched away the blanket.

‘Feeling crook, dear?' inquired a hoarse voice.

A hand smoothed the matted hair from her face. ‘That funny old cow Thompson is on duty: she's not too bad. You just try to stick it out till she comes around.'

Cushie did not answer, cringing in the blanket, afraid to look out. The room was filled with a confusion of sound, faintly reverberant as though in a dream. Cushie listened, trembling. The noise divided itself into strata. At the top was a muted blare of drunken singing, shouting, snoring. Then came a layer of belching, moaning, subdued intermittent chatter, punctuated ever so often by an obbligato of thin cursing, like someone dribbling. At the bottom was a faint, wretched whimper, and Cushie discovered that she herself was producing it.

The girl felt ill and wambly; her head hammered. But otherwise she seemed physically normal. If indeed she was in jail, then she had hit bottom. The daughter of Bede Moy, of the Bank, picked up half-naked, filthy, in an alley. And what had happened before that?

‘I must have gone mad. Perhaps I have, perhaps this is a mental hospital.'

This freezing thought made her pluck the blanket away, sit upright, her mouth open to scream. The room was full of women, none of them taking any notice of her. It was a huge concrete chamber, like the inside of a tank, painted green, with dazzling peepholes of light in the high ceiling. It smelt of phenyl, urine, and old wet flannel. A low platform ran around the wall; women snored there, wept, lay as if dead. Near Cushie two women sat, both wearing similar bashed-in hats, chatting away, it seemed, in a mild, social manner. But after a moment or two the girl realised that each was talking to herself, droning drunkenly.

‘I never missed first prize for me melon and lemon,' said one.

The other took out her dental plate, looked at it fastidiously and said, ‘I got it at Paddy's Market, but it don't fit. There's knobs, lumpy bits.'

In the middle of the room a tall, fat woman, architecturally large, wearing a green tennis eyeshade and a man's khaki shirt, was sweeping the floor. She was aggressive about it, beating the broom around the limbs of lolling bodies, occasionally giving some sleeping hump a brisk crack with the handle.

The melon and lemon woman got her eyes focused momentarily said, ‘That Virgie Goldsmith, real house proud, ain't she? Ever since she moved over to this side of town she's been at it. I s'pose we ain't as posh as Darlinghurst. Regular as Epsom salts she is. Jugged every Friday, got the place spring-cleaned by Monday morning. I even seen her yell for a bucket and brush so she could do the double-you.'

‘Me son could bail me out, he's nicely fixed, but he won't,' said the other one, and a tear ran down her nose. She had a sick, oleaginous face with a huge dent in the middle of her forehead. A finger could have been laid in it. Cushie wondered how it had been done. It looked like the result of a hatchet blow in infancy. But the woman seemed all right. She turned puffed eyes on Cushie saying, ‘Feeling better, love?'

‘Yes, thank you,' whispered Cushie.

‘Pretty little thing. New to the game, are you?'

Cushie, not knowing how to answer, withdrew into her blanket. She watched the woman sweeping, sweeping, a redoubtable figure with pink arms like legs of pork. She was a mammoth, exemplifying the nightmare unfamiliarity of this place. The inhabitants were all freaks, and so was Cushie Moy, or she wouldn't be there.

The melon and lemon woman said thickly, ‘That Virgie Goldsmith, I wouldn't cross her. Not for JC himself. She's got a temper like a tiger. Six years she spent in boob for manslaughter. And look at her, going on like Mother Hubbard. You'd never guess it, would yer?'

‘I got a heart, you know,' she added vaguely. ‘Quack at St Vincent's said I gotta take care, and I do.'

She suddenly folded up into a heap of old clothes and began to snore.

Cushie shrank away, relieved to see a stocky woman in a dark uniform enter the room through a barred door, which she locked after herself. She seemed on familiar terms with most of the inmates, chiacking this one, shaking another to consciousness, exchanging a few remarks here and there.

‘You here again, Virgie? Why don't you make it permanent?'

‘Aw, it makes a nice change, Tommo,' answered the large woman. ‘So I'll stick to me own routine, thanks.'

‘Matron,' called the scarred woman in a placatory tone, ‘the new girl's come to, poor thing.'

The police matron came over to Cushie, and the large woman came too, leaning on the broom and regarding Cushie from under her eyeshade.

‘What's your name, lass?'

Cushie was silent, panic-stricken.

‘Don't you give matron a made-up one, now,' cautioned Virgie Goldsmith. ‘Only make it worse for you. They're bound to find out, noses like ferrets, ain't that right, Tommo?'

‘Butt out, will you, Virgie?' replied the woman. ‘Come on, love.'

‘Dorothy Moy,' whispered Cushie.