Tap-tap, tappity-tap-tap-tap, ping. As the dusk deepened into night, Joan lit yet another cigarette and kept working. T.S. continued to doze on the rug at her feet. In the night-time mirror of her window, Joan glanced now and then at her oval face, floating ghost-like with its broad forehead, thick eyebrows, refined Greek nose and shoulder-length black hair. It was a handsome face, classical in its proportions; more of a Diana than an Aphrodite, thought Joan.
She enjoyed the early evenings, listening to the boarding house coming to life all around her: the muffled slam of doors and twinging creak of floorboards, the thump and gurgle of the makeshift plumbing hastily installed when the decaying mansion Bomora had been divided into flats and bedsits with a sink in each room and a toilet on each floor. Plywood partitions split in two the old house’s ballroom, parlours, dining room, bedrooms and library. Mildewed wallpaper, chipped statuary, scuffed chequerboard marble floors, smoke-stained ceilings and oil paintings, cobwebbed chandeliers … these were the melancholy vestiges of grander days.
The plywood pretend walls were paper-thin but this did not bother Joan; the sounds of the boarding house were familiar and oddly comforting. To the left of Joan and Bernice’s flat, vaudeville performers Iris and Velma warbled melodically in the early evenings and fought like cats later when they got on the plonk. Two doors down, Archie, retired midweight boxer and now part-time nightclub heavy, sat in his sweaty singlet, eating beans out of a saucepan and listening to the wailing of Bessie Smith over and over on his Victrola. Eleanor and Jessie, two of Phil Jeffs’s harlots (or ‘painted houris’ as that salacious broadsheet, The Arrow, liked to call them), shared a room downstairs; they had convinced Mrs Moxham, the nosy landlady, that they worked in retail, but Bernice was certain that she would soon sniff out the truth.
Next door to them was Mary, a mousy country girl from Dubbo who had been in Sydney for only three months and was paid a pittance as secretary to a shyster solicitor; she made barely a peep, except for gentle sobbing late at night. On the other end of the rowdy scale, the two painters, Arturo and his ‘brother’ Vincent, threw boisterous Saturday night parties in their downstairs flat attended by writers, actors, artists and other hangers-on in the bohemian community of the Cross. Joan and Bernice had been lucky enough to be invited to some of these soirees and assumed the two gents were keeping Mrs Moxham sweet with money or crates of bootleg. Tonight, they had the Divine Melba singing La Bohème at full volume on their gramophone.
Joan glanced at her alarm clock again—quarter to nine. So it looked like Hugh was having another bad night. These gas neurosis attacks were so unpredictable. Joan never demanded explanations when he failed to turn up for a date. She suspected that she must truly love this angry, righteous man as it was so easy to forgive him just about anything.
Joan sniffed the air. The fumes of frying potatoes, lamb chops, mince and onions and the unmistakeable stink of boiled cabbage were now drifting under the door and through the open window. Her back ached. It was time for a break, maybe something to eat. She could fry up the two rissoles she had bought that morning from the ham-and-beef place opposite the tram stop.
Joan cranked the page out of the Corona and added it to the stack of paper on her desk. This precious first draft was anchored by a water-smoothed river stone, a souvenir from the creek opposite her parents’ house that had been Joan’s childhood playground in Willoughby. So very long ago. Before her brothers went off to war. Before her father got sick and gave up his dwindling medical practice. Before she moved away to discover a larger world.
For the first eight months of her course at the secretarial college in Elizabeth Street, Joan had taken a bus and then a ferry every day from her parents’ house to the city. She soon tired of the morning and evening stampede through the turnstiles at Cremorne Point and Circular Quay. When she got the five-day-a-week job at the Mirror she decided to find a flat nearer the city. Which was when she had met the wonderfully worldly Bernice Becker, journalist, novelist, playwright, poet, dancer, actress, divorcee, mother of two boys (left in the care of their grandmother) and a Bohemian with a capital B. Introductions were made through Joan’s old schoolfriend Dottie Francis, who had known Bernice in New York when she had pursued an unsuccessful career in the theatre there for a couple of years. You’ll love her, Joanie—she’s a firecracker! Dottie had written.
Bernice was an accomplished writer with no less than four novels to her credit, as well as many short stories, poems and plays. Her freelance journalism had been published in The Sydney Morning Herald, Truth and The Bulletin. She was five years older than Joan but with the vitality of a much younger woman. While she would admit she was no traditional beauty (she had a mannish jaw and a long equine face), it was generally agreed she possessed a quality that moviegoers liked to call ‘oomph’. At the scandalous 1923 artists’ ball (when police raided Sydney Town Hall with a tip-off about copious bootleg and drunken copulation), Bernice had become notorious overnight for her entrance in a body-clinging leopard skin tunic and dog-tooth necklace: a pagan hybrid of a tribal goddess and Diana the Huntress. With her thick black tresses, mesmerising dark eyes and unapologetic lust for adventure, Bernice was worshipped by a retinue of heartbroken lovers.
From their first meeting at a pub in Crown Street, Joan was drawn to Bernice, who declared her intention to take the younger woman under her wing. ‘I can tell you’re a serious writer, Miss Linderman, and I believe we’re going to get on like the proverbial house on fire!’ Bernice’s prediction proved pretty much on the money in the four years the two women had shared their little rundown flat in Bomora. In that time Joan had fallen in love with the village life of the Cross, thanks in large part to Bernice, who proved to be less of a flatmate and more of a mentor. As a member of the artistic circle I Felici, Letterati, Conoscenti e Lunatici—the Happy, Literary, Wise and Mad, shortened to the Noble Order of the Evil Itchy (a cheeky corruption of I Felici)—Bernice had introduced her protégée to a ragtag collection of poets, journalists and editors (including Reg Punch), who liked to meet on Saturdays for long, boozy, philosophical lunches.
Half-starved, penny-pinching bohemians were in plentiful supply in the dives of the Cross. As the surrounding suburbs had disappeared under a slum tide of terraces and hovels, the wealthy had made their escape, their antique villas demolished or reborn as melancholic boarding houses like Bomora. Bernice’s latest conquest, Laszlo, a Hungarian sculptor, lived in Elizabeth Bay House, once the grandest home in the district but now occupied by artists on peppercorn rents, a jaded colonial relic with its lovely rooms cut up into dingy studios.
But the rich had far from deserted the Cross. Some hung on, eking out a precarious existence on dwindling inheritances, falling share dividends and the rent they earned by letting out rooms in their crumbling villas. But there was another, more appealing choice. On the unmarked graves of the old villas, there arose, phoenix-like, a new species of building inspired by the high-rises of New York and London: blocks of flats.
Joan found it strange to think that only a few streets away from her own down-at-heel flat, her wealthy Aunt Olympia and Uncle Gordon lived in a penthouse apartment at the top of Kingsmere, one of the most elegant of the new brick fortresses that towered over the village of Kings Cross with panoramic views of the city and harbour. As Joan sat down to her modest meal of two gristle-and-sawdust-textured rissoles garnished with HP sauce, she could picture her aristocratic aunt in her Art Deco dining room at the top of Kingsmere, quaffing champagne and tucking into truffles and caviar, oysters Kilpatrick and cold fillets of sole in horseradish sauce.
Shortly after her aunt and uncle had moved into their apartment two years ago, Joan had been invited for the rare treat of a dinner party and given a tour of the spacious rooms with their dark wood panelling, vibrant coloured walls and polished parquet flooring. As well as a living room and study, four bedrooms and two balconies, the apartment boasted a ballroom, two modern Art Deco bathrooms, a kitchen and pantry and a ‘telephonette’ from which one could ‘ring down’ for the caretaker or the resident chef or the florist or the hairdresser or one of the uniformed chauffeurs. It was the last word in luxury and avant-garde design.
‘My clever niece is a writer for a women’s magazine!’ her aunt had announced to the gathered company with her glass raised for a champagne toast out on the east-facing balcony as an amethyst dusk settled over Bondi in the distance. Olympia seemed genuinely pleased to discover a member of her immediate family had ‘creative ambitions’.
While Joan appreciated her aunt’s enthusiasm for her new career (including a ‘small deposit on your future success’ in the form of twelve pounds in an envelope), she also felt wretchedly guilty and more than a little patronised. Joan knew that Olympia’s interest was only an opportunity to show her off to her high society friends as if Joan were some clever performing animal. What made Joan feel especially treacherous was that the invitation was also a calculated reproach to her own mother.
Gloria had never seen the inside of Olympia’s apartment and never would. The two sisters, both well-brought-up young women from a genteel, affluent family, now lived in separate worlds. Olympia had married ambitious lawyer and businessman Gordon Fielding-Jones from Point Piper, while Gloria, afflicted with a youthful outburst of social conscience, had married Horace, an idealistic doctor from Auburn who prioritised the pursuit of doing good ahead of making money.
As the years passed, the sisters’ paths continued to diverge. Hosting balls and cocktail parties in her Vaucluse mansion, Olympia helped her husband to cultivate powerful allies while his legal practice thrived on its reputation for a no-holds-barred defence of the rights of the rich in such troubling matters as the eviction of tenants, intimidation of workers, cutting of government red tape and destruction of business rivals. Happy clients had brought their own rewards. Thanks to an early tip-off from an amenable alderman, Gordon had made a handsome profit from the purchase of six slum properties marked for demolition when the City Council widened William Street in 1920. Joan heard these stories of her aunt and uncle’s ruthless dealings from her mother.
Meanwhile, Gloria and Horace lived in Willoughby on the modest proceeds of Horace’s medical practice. When the Depression bit harder and Horace’s income shrank even further as he cared for patients too broke to pay him, Olympia made it clear she had no time for such idiotic altruism and that Gloria and her saintly husband must never look to her for charity.
Joan was torn. Of course, she despised Olympia for her hypocrisy and cruel treatment of Gloria and her family. But as an aspiring writer and bohemian free spirit, Joan could not altogether throw off her fascination with her aunt. For all her undeniable faults, Olympia’s view of Gloria as a dull, conventional soul, shackled by duty to her husband and children and robbed of life’s jouissance, was disturbingly accurate and aroused Joan’s worst fears for her own future.
There was no denying that Olympia Fielding-Jones was a force to be reckoned with; a cultured and magnetic personality, she was an outspoken champion of female independence. At the dinner party Joan had attended, Olympia had discoursed at length on the rights of the modern woman. After the men had retired to Gordon’s study for cigars and brandy, Olympia had explained to her female guests that she had allies in the so-called sex reform movement, which advocated a woman’s entitlement to sexual pleasure.
Joan knew that Olympia’s interest in this subject went further than most. She had founded a covert women’s-only society inspired by the ancient cult of female worshippers of Bacchus, Greek god of grapes and wine, ritual madness and ecstasy. Its formal name was the Ladies’ Bacchus Club; Olympia was its high priestess and, with membership by invitation only, no more than a dozen or so women knew the details of its secret rituals except for the odd guest sworn to secrecy. High society gossips had come to call it the Ladies’ Goddess Club and speculated about the racy pagan parlour games indulged in by these shameless women. Olympia had told Joan she liked the nickname and rarely bothered to correct it. ‘Through the performance of our mysteries we become one with the god Bacchus. So, yes, we are transformed into goddesses.’ Aunt Olympia had also suggested that one day Joan might be willing to take part in their rituals and that she would be most welcome. ‘But only when you feel you’re ready. When the time is ripe.’ Joan did not know what to think about this invitation—should she be excited and curious about such a prospect, or intimidated and scandalised?
By a peculiar turn of events, Joan’s flatmate Bernice had only recently stood on the threshold of Olympia’s opulent corner of the universe alongside a new recruit for the Ladies’ Goddess Club. Olympia had met Bernice at one of the city’s infamous artists’ balls, where the curious rich came to mingle with the scandalous artistic poor. Here, amid the licentious gaiety of half-masked and semi-naked men and women in all manner of fancy dress, Joan’s aunt had explained she was looking for a young initiate to tutor her bacchantes in the arts of sensuality. ‘She will be remunerated, of course,’ Olympia hastened to add.
‘I know just the person,’ Bernice had replied, adding one proviso: that eventually she, Bernice, be allowed to join the secret society. Olympia hadn’t hesitated. ‘Of course! You would make a perfect bacchante.’ And so Bernice persuaded Eleanor, the pretty whore from downstairs, to attend the next meeting of Olympia’s secret society. ‘It sounds a bit monkey-brained, I know, but there’ll be a fair whack of dosh in it for you.’ Eleanor was game and so Bernice introduced her to Olympia one evening in the foyer of the flat in Kingsmere and left the ladies to their fun.
‘What did Eleanor tell you?’ Joan asked Bernice later with undisguised eagerness. To her disappointment, Ellie did not have much to report, having taken an oath of secrecy. She did observe that ‘crazy or not, the ladies are good sorts really and generous to boot’. The Bacchae women had made her an honorary member of their club and invited her to join them again at some time in the future.
Joan caught sight of her eccentric aunt in the Cross every now and then, out shopping or while Olympia waited in her limousine as her chauffeur queued at the delicatessen for a side of salmon or a jar of oysters while Joan ordered her humble can of sardines as a special treat. Such was the social kaleidoscope of Kings Cross, where barristers and gunmen, prostitutes and heiresses, office girls and socialites rubbed shoulders.
While Joan had fallen in love with the atmosphere of danger and excitement in the Cross, if she was to be honest with herself, she had never felt totally at home in this morally murky world. Bernice Becker, on the other hand, was utterly at ease. It seemed nothing fazed her. She had befriended the whores, Eleanor and Jessie, and often joined them for a late-night drink or early breakfast after work. When she invited her flatmate to come along, Joan had hesitated. ‘Go on, don’t be so daft. What are you afraid of? They don’t bite! They’re just women like us, trying to make a fist of things. Ellie’s even got a little girl, Greta, living out at Tempe with her mother, Ruby. She goes out to visit her every second Sunday or so.’
As it turned out, Joan had liked both prostitutes. Eleanor was thirty-one and still striking, copper-haired and angel-faced, even though the last two years of cocaine addiction had begun to take their toll. As one of Phil Jeffs’s most attractive whores, she had once earned good money; enough to keep a roof over Ruby and Greta’s heads while living it up with gambling, parties, liquor and drugs. Now that much of this money had been frittered away, and she was left with only one fur coat and a nice old radiogram, she and Jess made do in their seedy flat.
Bernice was also on first-name terms with Albert and Merv, a pair of itinerant spielers and magsmen who worked scams on the country trains, defrauding out-of-town mugs in card games and get-rich-quick schemes. She had even dated Shark Jaws, one of Jeffs’s standover men, but ended the liaison when she found out he could only be sexually aroused by throttling her. She was afraid of nothing, ashamed of nothing, willing to try anything once—as long as it didn’t kill her. Joan didn’t mind admitting she was envious of Bernie’s courage.
Joan returned to her desk and continued to work steadily until her eyes grew bleary and a glance at the clock told her it was past eleven. Rising, she stretched to ease the kinks in her back, then rinsed a tumbler and poured herself a finger of sherry. She had just replaced the bottle on the shelf when she was startled by a full-throated scream. It came not from the street outside but closer—inside the boarding house itself, she realised, her heart galloping in her chest. As the woman screamed again, Joan was struck by a shock of recognition. It was Bernice!
Flinging open the door of her flat, she raced to the top of the stairs that ran down the centre of the boarding house, connecting both floors. All around her, doors were flying open to reveal faces wide-eyed with fear. ‘Bernie! Bernie! What is it? Are you okay?’ Joan hurtled down the staircase. In the corridor below, she found her flatmate outside the bedsit of Eleanor and Jessie. She was bent over, one hand clutching her face, the other clutching the handrail of the staircase. ‘Oh, dear God,’ she moaned. Her hands were covered in blood, bright and sticky, and so was her blouse.
‘What is it, Bernie? What in God’s name has happened?’
Bernice pointed at the door opposite. It was wide open. Even from here, it was obvious there had been a struggle: a lamp had been knocked over, throwing a spooky ellipse of light onto the wallpaper; the bedsheets were torn back, exposing the blue-striped ticking of the cheap mattress; a cascade of objects had been swept from the dresser; two valises were kicked over and their contents, mostly clothing, spilled across the floor. Joan stepped through the doorway into what felt like the slow-motion flicker of a nightmare. Christ, it was like walking into one of Bill Jenkins’s crime scene photos, she thought. But this was real, this was solidly, sickeningly real, not sealed off in the black-and-white remoteness of a police file.
Joan recoiled as she drew closer to the bedroom. Between the dresser and the bed, she saw a body slumped on the floor. It was poor Eleanor, unrecognisable except for the bright copper of her marcel-waved hair. Her face had been slashed repeatedly so that it was now no more than a mask of clotted blood and butchered flesh. The deepest gash was across her throat. Blood had sprayed everywhere. Her rucked-up dress was soaked with it and on either side of her body was a thick dark pool. Joan staggered back and retched onto the carpet.
As she heard a siren in the distance, Joan’s thoughts ran in absurd directions: how Mrs Moxham would be mortified to have her boarding house invaded by police and its reputation destroyed in the tabloids by morning. Within minutes, a couple of patrol cops with filthy boots would tramp up the landlady’s lovingly polished and vacuumed stairs, followed shortly by a squad of plainclothes detectives, the official photographer, the fingerprints man and Bill Jenkins, crime reporter for Truth, who always managed to get an early tip-off when there’d been a murder.
Joan’s head throbbed violently. She felt disgusted with herself. All day she had sat at her typewriter, happily composing a murder scene for her novel. And now here she was, thrust without warning into the middle of a real one, the unspeakably gruesome death of someone she knew. Her clever words had not only failed utterly to capture the reality of this experience, they mocked her writerly arrogance to think she could even do so. Joan rose unsteadily to her feet, still dizzy from vomiting. Bill had been right after all. ‘Crime’s not a woman’s business, Joanie. It’s not a bloody game.’
And then her eyes fell on something on Ellie’s nightstand. It was a square of creased paper with a telephone number written in ink and four words printed across the top in the style of letterhead: THE LADIES’ BACCHUS CLUB. Fine drops of blood still glistened along the bottom edge. ‘Fucking hell!’ Joan swore out loud. She snatched the note from the stand, folded it and shoved it inside her blouse. What in God’s name was she doing? This was madness, this was plain wrong. This was tampering with evidence at a crime scene. But for some reason still unclear to herself, Joanie felt a compulsion she had no will to resist.