Razorhurst (31 page)

“It doesn’t sit right. Waiting like this,” Dymphna said. “We should go back to Glory. Me and Kelpie should. You can go home, Neal. I’ll make sure it’s all right for you.”

“How’s she going to do that exactly?” Palmer asked. “Glory’ll want somebody’s blood.”

“Not leaving,” Darcy said. He smiled. “It’s the most excitement I’ve had since I was out bush.”

“Excitement—” Dymphna broke off because her voice was too loud. She quieted. “You going to write a story about all of this? Being attacked by a razor man? Hiding from criminals with a fallen woman?”

“You’re not a—”

“I am.”

“How old are you?” Kelpie interrupted in a whisper, looking at Darcy. She didn’t want them fighting. They’d get loud. She didn’t know why she was asking. Just that she had to.

“Nineteen,” Darcy said.

“Tell her you dunno,” Dymphna said at the same time.

Kelpie sighed and dropped into a cross-legged position, not caring
about the pigeon shit or that they should be on the run like Palmer said. She felt as if someone had let the air out of her. Nineteen wasn’t much older than sixteen.

Darcy and Dymphna seemed old to her. They were grown up and she wasn’t. They weren’t part of the same kind of people as she was. She was little. They were big. Welfare would never pull them aside for walking down the street when school was on. They would never be asked where their parents were.

Kelpie had never thought about people’s ages before. People were either grown-ups or they weren’t. She only thought about it if they said, like Tommy and Maisie had. Ghosts who died young always told you their age. They were the ones who found it hardest to be dead. Always moaning about how young they were,
Only eleven! Only fifteen! Only seventeen! Only twenty-one!
And how much they were missing out on.
No one ever kissed me! I never got rid of me virginity! I was about to get married! I wanted to have bubs!

But she had no idea how old Miss Lee had been. Or Old Ma. Or her ma and pa. She didn’t know how old Snowy was, except that he had to be older than Darcy. That doctor said he was thirty-five, and he looked much older than Snowy. Did that make Snowy twenty-four? Twenty-eight?

“How old are you?” she asked, looking straight at Palmer.

“Thirty-six. Though I started to lie about me age. Doesn’t matter anymore, does it? I could be your dad. Dymphna’s too. Not to mention that Darcy fella there.” He looked sad.

“I told you,” Darcy said. “Nineteen.”

Kelpie started.

She had asked a ghost a question in front of the living. Something she had not done since she really had been little, back when Old Ma was still alive.

She hadn’t forgotten Dymphna and Darcy were right there, standing over her. She wasn’t being careless. Not exactly. It was more like there were worse things. Gloriana Nelson worse. Mr. Davidson worse. Blood everywhere worse.

Still, slipping up like that worried her.

She breathed like Old Ma taught her. But it didn’t help.

Jimmy Palmer was older than the doctor even though he looked younger. Kelpie didn’t know what to do with that information. She didn’t know what to do with any of this information.

She felt more upended by the news that she really and truly was
the same age as Dymphna Campbell than she had been by Palmer’s dead body, or the copper’s, or by running from the police. Meeting Glory. Having Bluey for a guardian. Seeing a man get shot. None of it made her feel this way.

She felt like … She didn’t know how she felt. Her world wasn’t the way it had been. She wasn’t who she thought she was.

If Kelpie was sixteen, that meant she was almost a grown-up. If she’d lived a life like Darcy had, with a family, she would have finished school by now. She’d be finding a job in one of the factories, making clothes, shoes. Or working in a shop selling them. Or she’d be working for someone like Glory or Mr. Davidson.

Though probably not. If you had a family, they protected you from having to do work like that, and even if they couldn’t, she wasn’t pretty like Dymphna. She wasn’t even as pretty as Lettie or Dazzle.

Or she’d be trying to find work. Half the grown-ups in the Hills were looking for work. But most of them didn’t find any.

What else did girls do?

They got married. But then their husbands beat them, or ran away, or the wives did. Like the lodger at the Darcys’. Or the husbands drank all the money they made so there wasn’t enough for food.

Kelpie did not want any of that.

Kelpie never thought about the future. Why would she? She didn’t have a home. She didn’t have people. She didn’t have a future.

Except as a ghost. Kelpie thought about
that
future often. She knew what could happen when she was dead. She didn’t know what could happen to her alive and fully grown. She was sixteen. Could be that she wouldn’t grow another inch.

What did it mean not being a kid anymore? Even if she still looked like one? How long would that last? She crossed her arms to cover her—what had the doctor called them?—mammary glands. They were tender. The doctor was right.

Dymphna sat down next to her. “Are you all right, kiddo?”

Kelpie said yes, though it wasn’t true. Darcy sat down. The sun shone in through the broken roof. She could smell dung and urine. Probably possums up there too. They’d be asleep. Possums slept during the day and screamed like banshees at night.

“We’re the same age,” Kelpie said to Dymphna.

Darcy gasped. “You’re sixteen?” he said, looking at Dymphna.

“I am,” Dymphna said.

“But that’s imposs—”

Dymphna cut him off with a look. The way Glory had cut Dymphna off earlier. For a moment, Kelpie could imagine Dymphna turning into Gloriana, ruling Razorhurst.

“Kelpie, you wanted to say more?” Dymphna said.

Kelpie didn’t know what to say, or how to say it. She had spoken more today than she had since Miss Lee faded. Even then she’d never spoken
this
much in one day. She’d asked a ghost a question in front of the living. She was breaking all the rules. It felt like a bad omen. She held her hands wide in front of her. “There’s so much I don’t know.”

Palmer sat in front of them, angled for the best view of Dymphna. He hadn’t said anything since he told Kelpie his age. Him being quiet unnerved her.

“I can read. But I don’t know my numbers. Not like they teach them at school.” Kelpie could count and do a little bit of adding and minusing, but she’d had a squiz in the windows of every school in the Hills and seen how much she didn’t know. Blackboards covered in big numbers mixed with letters and symbols she didn’t recognise.

Back then it hadn’t bothered her. She hadn’t known the point of letters until Miss Lee taught her. But once she’d learned her letters, she could tell that numbers were important too.

Miss Lee was the beginning of learning how small her world was. She had told Kelpie to keep reading, but Kelpie was increasingly sure she needed to know more than she could glean from discarded newspapers and chance encounters with books. She hadn’t dared the library since Miss Lee faded.

Most of what Kelpie didn’t know wasn’t in books. She didn’t even know enough about living people to tell how old they were. She hadn’t even known how old
she
was. She still didn’t know. Not for sure. Snowy could be wrong.

She didn’t know how to buy a ticket on a tram. She didn’t know how to dress. Even if she’d had the money, she had no idea how to go about buying clothes. How did you take pieces of fabric and turn them into something you could wear? How did you know what would fit you? She didn’t know how to turn raw food into something more wonderful, like a pie or fish and chips. She didn’t even know how to make porridge.

“I don’t know how …” She was going to say
how the living live
. But
she couldn’t say that because then she’d have to explain about ghosts. Funny how the things she
did
know were all things the living didn’t. “What’s going to happen to me?”

“I’ll look after you, love.” Dymphna put her arm around Kelpie. Kelpie leaned into her, appalled to realise that her eyes were stinging the way they did when tears were trying to slip out. “Glory always forgives me, no matter what happens. She likes you. I could tell. It will be all right.”

“We’ll both look after you,” Darcy said, sitting on her other side. For a moment, Kelpie felt like they were her parents. “Ma likes you too. She’d already decided to keep an eye out for you.”

“She was going to send me to the sisters. Put me in an orphanage. Make me go to school.”

“She would never,” Darcy said.

Kelpie wasn’t sure of it. Maybe Darcy believed what he said, but she was not at all convinced about his ma.

“Well, school, yes,” Darcy continued. “But not an orphanage.”

Kelpie wished that was true. “Will you let me read your stories?”

“’Course.”

She wanted to tell him how much she liked them. How much she wanted to read them all through from beginning to end.

“Teach me how to use your typewriter?”

“If you want.”

“I want to write stories. Like you.”

Darcy smiled at her. “I bet you’ve got plenty.”

Her stories would be about ghosts. If she wrote ’em down everyone would think she’d made them up for a story, not that she was touched in the head. Miss Lee had always marvelled at the things Darcy made up, and everything he wrote was normal everyday living-people things. She could work the same trick.

Kelpie closed her eyes and went to sleep. Not all the way down. She had long since learned to sleep when she could, as lightly as she could. It was something else she knew that most people didn’t.

The kind of talent that you learned when you grew up among ghosts.

Neal Darcy’s Typewriter

Neal Darcy saw the typewriter on display at Gold’s, the smallest pawnbroker on Oxford Street. It was as if she was calling to him. Rays of sunlight through the grimy window made the glass keys of the typewriter glow. Golden dust motes danced in the air around it as if to say,
Here she is, your typewriter, the essential tool in your journey to becoming the famous writer that you know you must be
.

Neal had to have it.

But it cost almost a brick—eight pounds.

Eight pounds was more money than Neal Darcy’d ever had, more than three weeks’ wages. Those eight pounds that Neal did not have weighed him down for the rest of the week as he went to work each day and then home the long way via Gold’s on Oxford Street because he couldn’t not make sure that the typewriter was still there.

The typewriter never glowed again as it had that first day. But Neal didn’t care. It was the most glorious thing he had ever seen.

He thought about stealing it. But smashing a window and taking a typewriter was many steps up from a little shoplifting. Where would it lead? His family couldn’t afford to have him in gaol, and even if he wasn’t caught, his ma would want to know where it came from. She almost always knew when he was lying.

There was no space in Neal’s life for mistakes. He couldn’t afford to sleep in or get sick, let alone serve gaol time. Not being able to work meant no money, which meant his family would be one step closer to living on the streets. He still wanted that typewriter. He
needed
that typewriter. With it he could type his stories so they looked classy enough for publication. He was still smarting from the neatly typed letter that deemed his handwritten story unprofessional and illegible.

That Sunday, Neal went to church. He rarely did. Sundays were Neal’s writing days. Church was hours of wasted writing time and far too much temptation. There were too many flirtatious, curvy, laughing girls in church. Especially Lettie Ryan, who glowed almost as much as his typewriter had. Wasn’t right for her to be that pretty, and prettier every time he saw her, and smiling at him that way. Neal
couldn’t afford to get into trouble and wind up married with five kids of his own and no way of ever affording a typewriter.

Neal listened to the father’s sermon, kept his eyes steadfastly away from Lettie Ryan’s, took communion, confessed, and then did something he’d never done before: asked Father O’Brian to lend him money.