Razorhurst (21 page)

It wasn’t true. Dymphna wasn’t entirely sure what kind of men she liked. Ones that smiled and laughed. Though she’d known few like that. She wondered if Neal Darcy laughed. Strong, tough men were a necessity that had nothing to do with liking.

“Rough men, yes, but not dirty, run-down places. You’re like me that way too. Mrs. Stone’s ain’t that far off being demolished.”

“I had to, Glory. Jimmy said it was urgent.” He was supposed to have killed Davidson that night. She was supposed to have given Glory the news.

“Must’ve been. He was meant to be doing a job for me over in the ’Loo last night. Never showed up.” Glory tossed the black stone from one hand to the other.

“That doesn’t sound like Jimmy, does it? He was steady.”

“For his kind. When he didn’t have a drink in him. He said it was urgent?”

“I never drank when I was working,” Jimmy said. “But she kept calling me in when she’d given me the day off. Can’t expect a man to be sober on his day off.”

“Yes,” Dymphna said. “Though things were often urgent with Jimmy.

“I was in a hurry! Can’t blame a man for that!” Jimmy spluttered.

“But not why it was so urgent?” Glory asked.

Dymphna shook her head. “And when I arrived …”

“And when you arrived?”

“His throat was slashed. No, not merely slashed. You could see his spine. His head was almost completely off. His face was cut up. Blood everywhere.” Dymphna blinked, letting her eyes water, though there were no tears in her.

“Well, that wasn’t necessary, was it?” Glory pursed her lips disapprovingly. As if Jimmy’s death would have been all right if it had been done more genteelly. “How’d you get in, then?”

“Get in?”

“Into Mrs. Stone’s. Be a bit tricky for Palmer to open the door with his head half off.”

“Door wasn’t locked.”

“The door to one of the most notorious boarding houses in the Hills—a place filled to the rafters with thieves, bastards, and rotters who’d kill you soon as look at you—and the front door wasn’t locked?”

“No.” Dymphna cursed herself. Why hadn’t she said that Jimmy gave her the key?

“Didn’t strike you as curious?”

“No. I was running late. I was tired. I didn’t notice, really. Besides, I knew Jimmy was there and he’d look after me. Everyone was scared of him. You know that.”

“Big boy, our Palmer. It’s why I kept him. Seen him scare folks without even lifting a finger. All he had to do was stand and glower. Makes me wonder how many it took to kill him. Was he alive when you got there?”

“With his head half off?”

“That is unlikely, isn’t it? Was he still warm?”

“Very,” Dymphna said, thinking about how warm the room had been despite it being the coldest time of the night. It was as if his body’s receding heat had filled it. Or his panic and fear and rage at being murdered.

“Couldn’t have been dead long then.”

“Could Glory really not know that Davidson had me butchered because I was going to kill him?” Jimmy asked. “Does she really not know what we planned?”

“That’s why I ran. I didn’t want anyone to find me.” Dymphna wished she could ask Jimmy why he thought Glory didn’t know anything. She wished she knew what Glory was thinking, what she knew.

“Of course you didn’t, love,” Glory said. “’Cause then they might start thinking that you had something to do with Jimmy Palmer winding up dead.”

Glory smiled at Dymphna like a snake before it ate you.

Words into Stories

Kelpie discovered that she loved words and sentences and stories. If she’d thought about them at all, she would have thought they had no place in her life. But there was the story Old Ma had told her over and over and over about her parents. The story that Kelpie had to badger Old Ma into telling right. Learning to read meant learning to write. It meant that she could write down the story of her parents so it could never be told wrong again.

The morning after Kelpie’s first reading lesson, Miss Lee was back in Kelpie’s ear again, talking faster than Kelpie had known anyone could talk.

She ungummed her eyes. She’d slept heavier than usual, exhausted by all the new: Letters! Words! Writing! Reading!

Miss Lee insisted that they had to go back to Neal Darcy at his typewriter. That they had to find a copy of
Great Expectations
, that they should start from the beginning because Kelpie would need to know the whole story.

Miss Lee had heard that the owner of the flower shop at Taylor Square was quite a reader. Maybe there’d be a copy there?

On and on went Miss Lee’s flood of words.

Kelpie gave in to them, gave in to Miss Lee leading her back to Darcy, ignored Tommy’s sarcastic comments about Darcy’s appearance and Irishness, and fell into the spell of Darcy’s stories.

“You see? You see? This is him making a book! Right in front of us. A miracle.”

Darcy’s story was not nonsense about Rapunzel, with her long, long hair that could be climbed by a full-grown man without any of it tearing out. None of the women in Darcy’s stories lacked fight. The men didn’t either. If anything there was too much fight. Exactly like the streets of the Hills and, it would seem, out bush too. Kelpie had always thought bush people would be different, but not according to Neal Darcy.

Sadly, though, Darcy didn’t write in a straight line. For some stories, they never found out what happened at the beginning or the end. Darcy would work on the one scene, the one paragraph, writing it over and over until he was satisfied. Only then would he move
on. Miss Lee read Kelpie the same description of rainwater pouring down Foveaux Street so many times she wanted to scream.

Kelpie loved watching Darcy at work and hearing his words. But she couldn’t help wanting to read complete stories too, like the ones they found at O’Reilly’s.

Before too long, Kelpie was reading almost everything. Any word she didn’t recognise Miss Lee would explain. Reading was okay, Kelpie decided.

Reading was better than okay.

Though not okay enough that she enjoyed sneaking into the public library.

They hadn’t found a copy of
Great Expectations
anywhere else. Not at the florist’s. Not in O’Reilly’s attic or his library or at any of the churches or schools they snuck into.

The library felt dangerous. Even when it was summer and school was closed until the autumn. Kelpie was still an unaccompanied child.

The librarians were too vigilant. Too ready to hand her over to Welfare.

Kelpie would only venture in on Tuesday mornings when the blindest librarian had her one shift. Getting past her did not require sneaking. It was slow going getting through
Great Expectations
. Sometimes they read only a chapter a week. Even so, Kelpie had been glad that Miss Lee started from the beginning.
Great Expectations
was a fine story. She liked Pip and Estella. She even liked that mad old woman Miss Havisham.

They’d started
Great Expectations
at the end of spring when Kelpie could barely recognise a handful of words. When they’d finished, the days were turning cold, and Kelpie could read about Pip all on her own.

Which was as well because when they finished
Great Expectations
, Miss Lee disappeared.

She had been getting fainter for that last week. Kelpie pretended to herself it wasn’t happening. But then Miss Lee was gone, and no amount of pretending had brought her back.

Kelpie stopped sneaking around after that. It wasn’t as much fun without Miss Lee, and the thought of the librarians or O’Reilly catching her was too terrifying.

But she missed the stories. She missed Pip and Estella. Even stupid long-haired Rapunzel in her tower.

Kelpie missed them that much she started to tell herself those stories to keep them from fading away the way Miss Lee had.

KELPIE

Gloriana Nelson had a red-and-gold shawl around her shoulders, though its red seemed muted compared to her hair, which was the brightest red Kelpie had ever seen. Her cheeks and lips too. She sat in a chair that was almost like a throne. It made her seem taller than everyone else. Scarier too.

The everyone else when they’d first entered the room was four ghosts paying no mind to each other or to the living and two women sitting side by side on stools, both of them younger than Glory, one with shiny yellow hair and the other with hair so black some of it had leaked out over her temples.

Even if Kelpie’d never seen Gloriana Nelson before, she’d’ve known that Glory was the boss. The other women’s heads weren’t held as high. They slouched and sat closer to each other than they sat to her. One was called Lettie and the other Dazzle. Kelpie wondered how you got a name like Dazzle.

She also wondered if Snowy had been helping or killing that Cait woman who’d tried to grab Dymphna. Kelpie didn’t think he’d been killing her, but she wasn’t certain. She had the growing feeling that she knew even less about Snowy than she had realised. It was an uncomfortable feeling.

There was a gap between knowing that Snowy had killed people and seeing someone that he might have maybe killed. It was more than an uncomfortable feeling.

Palmer kept saying he’d done it because Mr. Davidson told him to. That it was Snowy’s job. Like it had been Palmer’s job to kill for Gloriana Nelson.

But Palmer said he’d been planning to kill Glory. That
wasn’t
his job.

Did Dymphna know about that? Palmer had killed people before. Had Dymphna? Kelpie looked at her. There was no way of knowing. Snowy had always been kind to Kelpie. Even when he wanted to take her to the nuns, to the orphanage. He thought that was being kind. Now Dymphna was being kind. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t thought about killing. Or hadn’t actually killed.

People who killed weren’t good people. Kelpie knew that from
Old Ma, from Miss Lee, from all the stories they’d read together. From everything she’d seen in her short life. But she also knew that the world would be better if certain people weren’t in it. Like Bluey Denham.

Old Ma had said Snowy was good. But he killed people, so he couldn’t be, and he had lied to her to try to get her to go with him to the orphanage. Then there was Dymphna, who did many of the things Miss Lee and Old Ma did not hold with. Possibly killing too.