1001 Nights Cast

She saw the mound of blue and white flesh as she clumped down the front steps to look for Daddy’s paper. Every morning Julia brought the Sydney Morning Herald to her father because while he was reading, no shouting troubled the family breakfast.

Today there was a body sprawled in the hedge, unmoving, with some tufts of hair on its chest and a dangly thing hanging like a plump pink grub on its leg. Julia didn’t like the blubbery thing being in their hedge, the special place where she and her younger brother played ‘spot the floppy-top car’ at weekends while their father pushed a mower over the grass.

Julia reported her find to her parents, then calmly went out the back to pick flowers for her posy—fuschia, lavender, violets. Today they were going to the flower show. On her way back in she heard her father say ‘Apparently there was some kind of a fight last night over near the new milk bar—they’d all had a few, probably been at the trots at Canterbury or Rosehill.’

Suddenly he noticed her posy, ‘What’ve you got those for! You can’t go to the flower show now, don’t be ridiculous. Your mother has to stay here to help the police with their enquiries, and I have to take your brother to football on my way to golf. Go to your room.’

She was still in her room when her father returned and accosted her brother, ‘Well, did you win?’

‘No, but Bruce scored two tries,’ said Dan.

‘And you didn’t score any—hopeless, you’re hopeless!’ Father stormed at son, while Julia hatched her desires for escape.

At lunch the next day, father filled them in on the hedge man, ‘The police have identified him as that jockey Pete Skinner. Don’t know why he’d get mixed up with Jack Thornton’s mob, but I’ll bet this has something to do with the SP bookies.’

Julia was concerned with more pressing matters. ‘I want a red cardigan like Tracey’s.’ Julia wanted a red plastic bangle like Tracey’s too, or perhaps a pink felt hat from the hat-shop on the corner. Julia was sure that in a red cardigan or a red plastic bangle or a pink satin skirt, she would not be followed by that man as she was today, but her mother had already begun her reply,

‘Don’t be silly darling, you look much nicer in your brown cardigan. Girls who are going to a private school don’t wear red cardigans.’

‘But I’m not going to a private school.’

‘Yes you are darling, next year. It will be lovely. Now, can you be a big girl and walk back to school by yourself?’

So Julia set off, down the hill, past old Mrs Swan’s house, past the Baby Health Centre, through the park. And there he was again, waiting for her. She gripped her little brown suitcase very tightly and dashed out, across the road. The man followed her, but he wasn’t as quick as she was, and he didn’t see the car coming.

She heard screeching and shouting but she didn’t look back. She ran to the brick arched doorway and into the cool safety of school. She headed straight for the musty-smelling library. Julia sat there quietly, thinking of pink satin, feathers and felt.

Julia was usually comforted by the train journey between her private school and home. She folded herself wearily into the train seat. Immediately she felt his presence across the aisle, lifting and replacing pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. Ker-lunk, ker-lunk, cold and dark, ker-lunk ker-lunk, no friends here, ker-lunk ker-lunk, Friday nights, six stops till home. Pages of paper rustled over his lap when people passed by. But when no-one else was around, he lifted the paper to reveal a swimming sea of white and blue blubbery flesh, a windmill of hairy arms and hands busy beneath the fleshy folds. Julia could see it all in the double-glazed reflection. Her heart klunked with the rail tracks, as she counted down the stops to home. He was looking at her. She should get up, walk away, but her legs had turned to jelly, to lead.

The next morning, collecting it from the front lawn as always, Julia brought the paper to her father. She ate her cornflakes and listened to the big brown bakelite radio on the shelf, with one eye on her father. He exclaimed, ‘Well, the Americans have elected a Catholic as President—you see, tolerance is growing.’ Julia supressed an ironic smile as she thought of her brother.

And then he added, ‘A man was found dead on the tracks between Ashfield and Summer Hill stations last night. Oh, hey, it was Jack Thornton, you remember, the king of the SP mob. He was the one who’d probably had that jockey bumped off.’

‘I wish they wouldn’t put these things in the paper,’ her mother murmured, ‘it isn’t nice.’

‘He was pushed, apparently,’ said her father, engrossed in the details.

Her mother inhaled sharply, ‘good God, Julia, that was about the same time you were coming home from school, wasn’t it, you’re always late on Fridays?’.

Julia seemed lost in the past or maybe the future. She shuddered a little and finally responded, ‘Yes, well, if all crims and bullies fell off the train, or went under the wheels of a Holden, I wouldn’t care! I want to be rid of all that low life. When I win that scholarship to University…that’s my path to peace.’

‘Oh don’t be silly darling. You’ve always found peace here, in your room or under the hedge. You can’t still be thinking of that murder? It was years ago now.’

Julia spun round, raced through the hall, slamming the front door behind her. From the porch she looked over the city skyline while a quiet suburban thrum settled with the morning haze over Sydney.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Marion White.