Fishing in the Styx Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  FISHING IN THE STYX

  Born in New Zealand, Ruth Park came to Australia to continue her work as a journalist. Here she married D’Arcy Niland and travelled with him through outback Australia, working in a variety of jobs from shearer’s cook to fruit packer – all of which provided a rich source of material for her later writing.

  She has written over fifty books, including ten novels and twenty-seven children’s books and several travel and educational works. Her many prizes include the prestigious Miles Franklin Award for her novel Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977) and the Australian Children’s Book of the Year Award and the Boston Globe Award (1984) for Playing Beatie Bow.

  A Fence Around the Cuckoo, the first volume of her autobiography, won the Age Book of the Year Award for non-fiction (1992) and the Colin Roderick Award presented with the H. T. Priestley Medal.

  Ruth Park received the 1993 Lloyd O’Neil Magpie Award for services to the Australian book industry.

  After making her home on Norfolk Island for many years, Ruth Park now lives in Sydney, and the southern highlands of New South Wales.

  Other books

  A Fence Around the Cuckoo

  Novels

  The Harp in the South

  Poor Man’s Orange

  Missus

  The Witch’s Thorn

  A Power of Roses

  Dear Hearts and Gentle People

  The Frost and the Fire

  Serpent’s Delight

  Swords and Crowns and Rings

  Children’s Books

  The Muddle-Headed Wombat Series

  Callie’s Castle

  When the Wind Changed

  Playing Beatie Bow

  Things in Corners

  James

  My Sister Sif

  Roger Bandy

  FISHING IN THE STYX

  RUTH PARK

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd

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  Ringwood, Victoria 3134, Australia

  Penguin Books Ltd

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Canada Limited

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  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd

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  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd

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  First published in Viking by Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1993

  Published in Penguin, 1994

  Copyright © Kemalde Pty Ltd, 1993

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.pcnguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74-253380-3

  Contents

  PART ONE

  • 1 •

  • 2 •

  • 3 •

  • 4 •

  • 5 •

  • 6 •

  PART TWO

  • 1 •

  • 2 •

  • 3 •

  • 4 •

  • 5 •

  • 6 •

  PART THREE

  • 1 •

  • 2 •

  • 3 •

  For our children

  The Styx is only rumoured to be a dark and terrifying river. Who has explored it? If you threw in a line, mightn’t you pull out a golden fish?

  PART ONE

  • 1 •

  One boiling day I was writing in my garret when the murderer knocked at the door below. I knew it was the murderer because I looked from the bedroom window of our landlady, Mrs Cardy. Her window surveyed Devonshire Street and the rowdy world, whereas mine was slapbang up against the sweating wall of the Chinese grocery next door.

  As Mrs Cardy was at church, I went downstairs to see what he wanted. But it was merely to inquire if my landlady could put a few stitches in the torn lining of his coat pocket. His demeanour was as circumspect as his knock had been modest.

  ‘Leave the coat with me, Mr Green,’ I said, and we parted civilly. As he turned I observed on the back of his head the rubbly dent where some friend had once cracked him with a hatchet.

  In Devonshire Street, Surry Hills, we were not short of murderers, no. We had Sweetpea, a child strangler, a musty old rapist who had inexplicably slid by on a manslaughter charge, served his time and been freed, but still had bottles and hard words thrown at him. We had rabbity women who had done in their newborns but got off on a plea of insanity. In those days of the second World War it was still widely believed that women who had just delivered could reasonably be expected to be off their heads.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ these meek women said, with a certain mournful importance. ‘I was outa me mind. Terrible, really. All me milk went to the brain. I suppose it curdles, like.’

  Being in a delicate condition at the time, though extraordinarily ignorant of the entire process, I plied my mother in New Zealand with nervous questions about these ladies with heads full of junket.

  ‘Have I reared a looney?’ she asked testily.

  There were plenty of things about Devonshire Street that I did not mention to my mother, and I did not tell her about famous Frankie Green, either. He was the murderer, exalted above all others, a man of renown. He attracted obsequious attention from the drunks who yammered and fought outside the Shakespeare Hotel on Saturday afternoons, yet he wasn’t even one of us in Surry Hills. He lived in foreign parts, Darlinghurst or Paddington, where he ran a few girls. His main business was frightening people. A standover man, what is currently called an enforcer, he made a living threatening illegal bookmakers, drug peddlers and shopkeepers with gun, razor, or anything else handy, such as tailor’s shears, or half a brick. When he knocked so gently on Mrs Cardy’s door he was still the most feared underworld figure in Sydney.

  ‘Fancy knowing a man like that!’ I marvelled when Mrs Cardy returned.

  ‘Know him me foot!’ she retorted. ‘My Ownie wouldn’t let me know a man like that! Murdering no-good! I just do a bit of stitching and darning for him like I do for a dozen others. It stretches my pension, you see. No, ’course I don’t know him. He comes over to visit his old mates here, like that Sally Bux, the Afghan with his face all minced up like a cat’s dinner, you know the one. And he brings his mending for me to do,’ she added with a little preen.

  In the razor-gang days, in the 1920s and 1930s, Frankie began his career as a minder for the Palmer Street brothels of the gaudy old girl, Tilly Devine. Known as the Little Gunman, he was afraid of no one, and quickly became a notorious and dreaded figure.

  ‘The fights there were over that Nellie!’ recalled Mrs Cardy. ‘Him and that Italian Calletti.’

  Guido Calletti, in fact Australian born, was capo of the Darlinghurst push, and a formidable man with any weapon, as well as fists, boots and teeth. He was a celebrated biter. For years he and Frankie Green battled over the ownership of the fascinating prostitute, Helen Cameron. How much one would like to read a biography of this wayward charmer! A well-educated girl from a good family, she ran away from home at fifteen, leaving her own world behind forever in favour of the hazardous, dirty, vagabond life of gangsterism. A pretty redhead with a dancin
g step, she was bold enough for any adventure. There are many traditions of her courage; she joined wholeheartedly in gang warfare, was three times shot, and was often thrashed by her brutal lovers. But there are no records of Nellie being mean or cruel.

  ‘She was right off the lid of a chocolate-box,’ said Mrs Cardy, referring to her youth when hand-tinted photographs of actresses and admired beauties were so to be found. ‘Classy, like.’

  Nellie left this world at forty-one years of age when she put her head in a gas oven.

  Now and then I saw Frankie Green in Devonshire Street, looking older and glummer each time. He was a thickset man with strong regular features and wintry eyes. He never spoke to or looked at anyone, and the story was that if you bade him good morning he was likely to knock your block off. Mr Green was glum not only because he was a waning force, and knew that any day now some drunk outside the Shakespeare Hotel would be dared by his mates to stick out a foot and trip up the ex-king of the pushes, but because he was always in pain from four untended bullet wounds. One had created a large unhealed lesion at the bottom of his spine, and another was in his stomach wall, where it formed vile recurrent cysts. These made his belly swell like a pumpkin, and the Surry Hills residents would murmur, ‘Poor bugger, eight months gone again.’

  Until 1956 he was still pimping around King’s Cross, still engaging in vicious fights, although by then he was well past middle age. He died in Paddington, stabbed through the chest with a breadknife by one of his women, a haggard creature whom he had beaten atrociously and twice cut with the same breadknife.

  At her trial she pleaded self-defence and was acquitted. Those were not days when people thought of the criminal as a sick or misunderstood person and the victim as one who must have invited the crime.

  No one knows how many people Green actually murdered; he had a remarkable facility for keeping out of the courtroom and gaol.

  ‘At least eight,’ said Mrs Cardy. ‘Not counting the poor girls he kicked so bad they died later. Oh, yes, we know. But of course we aren’t talking.’

  How fortunate we were that Mrs Cardy of Devonshire Street had had a room to let! She lived behind and above an unoccupied barber’s shop; the room we rented was twice the size of a single bed, with five walls and a fireplace four handspans across and decorated with Biblical tiles depicting the near-sacrifice of Isaac. There was one disturbing tile of the trussed boy kneeling meekly on a tidy pile of kindling, awaiting his papa’s carving knife. I often cried over it, until my husband, exasperated, stuck a picture of a bulldog across it.

  D’Arcy and his brother, Beres, knew Mrs Cardy quite well; she had come from the same New England town as their mother. Grace was her name, but never in a hundred years would we have thought of addressing her except by her proper style. She was a strong-built woman in her sixties, her handsome face unlined, her hair still brown, and her fine eyes speckled with green and yellow like a bird’s egg.

  I liked her the moment I met her. She had a grand gift of irony and a generous view of life.

  ‘It’ll be good to have a baby in the house again,’ she said. After all the gruesome women we had interviewed in our search for a roof in overpopulated and houseless Sydney – drunks, psychotics, and ladies demanding fantastically large ‘key money’ – it was a wonderful relief to meet Mrs Cardy. Blunt-spoken, decent in her very bones, she was similar to the countrywomen I had known during my travels in the bush. She was also to be my only defender against the Niland family’s incomprehensible hostility to the stranger who had joined the clan.

  ‘And what about the boy?’

  She knew my brother-in-law Beres was also without a roof.

  ‘You could sleep in the shop,’ she said. ‘But I haven’t another bed.’

  ‘Oh, the barber’s chair will do me,’ he said, and he hopped into the chair, let his head fall to one side, blasted out a snore, and looked so exactly as if he had been hanged that Mrs Cardy fell into a hooting fit, banging her chest and gasping, ‘You’ll kill me!’

  Mrs Cardy had a heart condition of some kind, but had so organised things that her life was serene and orderly. Her sister, a retired nurse, wanted Grace to live with her in a more pleasant environment, but she was content where she was.

  ‘I don’t need much from life,’ she said. ‘Here I’m near the church, and the picture show, and I have two or three good friends, and besides, there’s Ownie, you see. He died in this house and I see signs of him everywhere.’

  I have always been saddened that an unlikely and melodramatic fate decreed that because of me Mrs Cardy should lose her home and its comforting memories. But she was a strongminded woman, and survived the demolition of much of Devonshire Street that followed the publication of my first adult book. She lived, anyway, until she was in her nineties.

  Mrs Cardy had a sorrow that followed her every step, ate away at her heart. How was I to know then, at my age, that some griefs never heal; they glaze over with the thinnest integument, so easily cracked by a chance odour, a word, a waifish memory from God knows where. But I was to learn.

  She had lost her husband Owen, her cherished Ownie, and whenever she had a drink or two grief caught up with her and she wept for days. The boys had little concept of her pain. Puzzled, they said to each other, ‘But he died two years ago. Two years! She ought to be over it.’

  To them two years was a largish part of a lifetime. I, too, had little idea of what to say to her during these periods of inconsolable pain. Once I shyly put my arm around her, and she choked out, ‘You’ve been brought up well. Not like some I could lay me tongue to.’

  But in a kind of way I understood the boys as well. At their ages they were psychologically years younger than I, still self-absorbed in the manner of masculine youth, not yet come to the place where empathy with other people would mature them.

  In the Depression years in New Zealand, my family had been forced to retreat to shabby neighbourhoods, forlorn and in decline. We had never lived in city slums such as those which, in my persona as Wendy, children’s editor of the Auckland Star, I had seen whilst accompanying the City Missioner on his rounds. And no matter where we had lived, my parents had made the place livable, mended leaks, painted the kitchen, hung curtains, put in a few vegetables. Surry Hills was not like that. No one repaired anything. If the kids playing in the street broke a window with a ball, someone scrounged a bit of cardboard and kept the rain out with that. Thirty years later the cardboard was still there.

  Surry Hills was on the fringe of the criminal quarter, and in its own way notorious for minor crime and farouche social behaviour. Nowadays it has changed its character, but when I first saw it, it was a queer, disreputable little village, half hidden under the hem of a prosperous city. A port, rather, for Sydney was strongly maritime until the 1960s or 1970s of this century. Somehow Surry Hills, growing up higgledy-piggledy amongst the prehistoric sandhills that once made Sydney much smaller than it is now, had divided itself into the posh and the poor. There were some fine broad streets, carriage ways, lined with stately three-storey town houses once owned by rich merchants such as the original David Jones. But also there was a scramble of lanes and working-class streets – places of scrawny terraces; ruinous cottages far older than the terraces, sagging roofs; snaggletoothed fences and warped green shutters that always dangled idly from one rusty bolt. Such neglect, such disrepair! No one had cared for Surry Hills since Victoria was on the throne.

  And as in a Victorian rookery, life was lived on the street, rowdily and often outrageously. It was what sociologists call a close community, but in truth the people were not as much close as closer together, mostly in each other’s pockets and not wanting to be there. Overcrowding; dwellings dark and meagre as hutches; narrow streets and spindleshanked lanes were the major determinants of the manner of their lives. In later decades, in other countries, the anomalies of tower blocks and islanded council estates that related to humanity and its needs only on paper would similarly create misery, violence, and the
extraordinary phenomenon of feral children.

  Violence there was, in nearly all cases associated with the misuse of alcohol. Mrs Cardy’s sister visited every Saturday to watch; she said it was as good as a show. As a nurse she probably recognised that much of it was a show - a version of the braying and ground-pawing indulged in by many animals. Some things were bizarrely amusing. One Saturday I saw a respectably dressed elderly lady take off her knickers, finickily fold them into a pillow, put it down on the footpath and lie down and go to sleep, her hands folded over her bosom. Another man liked to make his dog drunk; this was his party piece. The small creature, a Sydney silkie, lapped obediently, and in a moment its legs, all four, shot out at right angles. This caused great hilarity. The only disappointment, as far as I could see, was that the dog became drunk so quickly.

  It was the street fights, the ferocious wife-beatings and the egregious female displays that raged up and down the street that devastated me. If I had not been so ill myself – I was one of those unfortunates who, like Charlotte Brontë, are intermittently nauseated for twenty-four hours in the day, and for six or seven months - I might have been able to adapt more tolerantly to people who scarcely knew any other way to behave. Later, of course, I realised that they had demonstrated convincingly that violence is indeed the theatre of the disenfranchised.

  Many times I was ready to run away. Almost the first day I lived there, as I walked home with my shopping, I saw children throwing a litter of kittens, one at a time, from an upper-storey window. Their mother was below, heaving a stained mattress over her front railing.

  ‘Ere!’ was what she said, angrily. ‘You bloody well nearly hit me with that one!’

  As the kittens were dead as well as broken, I walked home, trying not to scream.

  ‘What should I have done?’ I asked my husband.

  ‘If you’d said anything she’d have likely given you one over the chops.’