Razorhurst Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Justine Larbalestier

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Soho Teen

  an imprint of

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Larbalestier, Justine.

  Razorhurst / Justine Larbalestier.

  1. Criminals—Fiction. 2. Organized crime—Fiction. 3. Ghosts—Fiction. 4. Sydney (N.S.W.)—History—20th century—Fiction. 5. Australia—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PZ7.L32073Mah 2007

  [Fic]—dc23 2014030128

  HC ISBN 978-1-61695-544-1

  PB ISBN 978-1-61695-625-7

  eISBN 978-1-61695-545-8

  Map by Hannah Janzen

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  v3.1

  For Ruth Park and Kylie Tennant,

  who lived in and loved and wrote about Surry Hills

  decades before me,

  without whom this book would not exist.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Kelpie

  Razorhurst

  Kelpie

  Miss Lee

  Dymphna

  Stories of Kelpie’s Parents

  Kelpie

  Kelpie’s Theories of Ghosts

  Kelpie

  Neal Darcy

  Dymphna

  The Angel of Death

  Dymphna

  Old Ma

  Kelpie

  Snowy Fullerton

  Dymphna

  Miss Lee Teaches Kelpie to Read

  Kelpie

  Mr. Davidson

  Kelpie

  Standover Man

  Dymphna

  Gloriana Nelson

  Dymphna

  Language Acquisition

  Kelpie

  Society

  Kelpie

  Glory Days

  Dymphna

  Words into Stories

  Kelpie

  Bluey Denham

  Kelpie

  Gloriana Nelson’s Doctor

  Dymphna

  Boxing Ghost

  Dymphna

  On What Not to Read

  Kelpie

  Shearing Shed

  Dymphna

  Gaol Time

  Kelpie

  Snowy Fullerton and Old Ma

  Dymphna

  Cockatoos

  Kelpie

  Neal Darcy’s Typewriter

  Kelpie

  Sex

  Kelpie

  The Harbour Bridge

  Dymphna

  Kelpie’s First Ghost

  Dymphna

  Dymphna’s First Love

  Kelpie

  Betting Shops

  Dymphna

  Johnno Bailey

  Kelpie

  Newspapers

  Dymphna

  When They Died

  Kelpie

  Old Ma’s Death

  Dymphna

  Family

  Kelpie

  Unhappy Endings

  Dymphna

  Funerals

  Kelpie

  Razorhurst

  Kelpie

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments & Influences

  About the Author

  KELPIE

  Tommy was a talker and didn’t much like the other ghosts, so he was forever talking to Kelpie. That’s how she divided them up: talkers and silent ones. Most ghosts were silent. Most ignored the living. Kelpie thought that was just as well.

  She wished Tommy was a silent one. She wished she hadn’t listened.

  Most ghosts haunted a person or a place. Pimply Tommy had Belmore Lane. He didn’t like the word haunt because it implied he had a choice, but no matter how many times he tried, he could not leave. Tommy had been born in that lane, he had been killed in that lane, and that kept him there for eternity, looking at the backyards of houses and the rear entrances of warehouses and factories, unable to set foot in either.

  It made him cantankerous and tricksy.

  “Barefoot again, eh?” Tommy said, his voice cracking on the word barefoot. “And this the coldest winter in forever.”

  Tommy’s world was so constrained he noticed all the changes. Because he was a ghost, he could see in the dark, and though he could not leave that all-too-small lane, he could hear and smell farther than a human. All ghosts could. Tommy knew everyone’s business.

  “Where your shoes?”

  Kelpie’d taken them off once she was sure Miss Lee had faded. Miss Lee was a ghost too.

  Had been a ghost. She’d looked after Kelpie, which was why Kelpie’d worn shoes—to please her. They pinched Kelpie’s toes, and besides, the soles of her feet were tough as any shoe. Cold didn’t bother her as much as shoes did.

  “Here to see your boyfriend?” Tommy asked. “You do know every girl in the Hills is after that ugly mick, don’t you?”

  Neal Darcy was not ugly, and he was not her boyfriend. Though she was there to see him. She hadn’t once since Miss Lee had gone, and he’d promised he was going to show her how to use his typewriter. Her stomach growled.

  “Hungry, eh? Darcys’ ain’t got no food. Piles of apples in there, though.” Tommy pointed at Mrs. Stone’s boarding house.

  Mrs. Stone’s was not what Miss Lee would have called respectable. It was what Kelpie’s other living friend, Snowy, called dangerous. Hardly a one of the men who lived there didn’t have an L- or an X-shaped razor-etched scar on one side of his face. Hard men, Snowy called them. He’d know. You’d have to be mad to venture in uninvited.

  Or invited, for that matter.

  “I never seen such shiny apples. Reckon they’re for that Gloriana Nelson’s party. Lot of her boys live at Mrs. Stone’s.”

  Kelpie wished her stomach were quiet. She would not listen to Tommy. Miss Lee never had. No one has ever lied as much as that young man, she’d told Kelpie. Just because sometimes he leads you to a meat pie. Well, a stopped clock is right twice a day.

  Kelpie wished Tommy told the truth that often.

  “All you gotta do is climb in the back window. The one off that side.”

  Kelpie couldn’t help looking past Mrs. Stone’s fence, which sagged in the middle like an old horse. The window was open. A tattered curtain fluttering over the sill looked silver in the moonlight.

  “Back door’s always locked. Kitchen’s second door down past the room you’ll climb into. And there’s your apples. Dead shiny, they are.”

  Kelpie knew better than to go in. Apples or no apples.

  She wasn’t even sure she remembered their taste. A bit sharp, a lot sweet. Or was that plums? Hadn’t had one of them since Old Ma was alive. They were softer, juicier. Apples were the hard ones. Like cricket balls. She felt the water enter her mouth.

  “Never seen so many apples,” Tommy said.

  “Why do you want me to eat?” Kelpie asked instead of walking on like she would have if Miss Lee hadn’t faded. “They poison?”

  Tommy grinned.

  If Miss Lee was still here, Kelpie wouldn’t be talking to him. She wouldn’t be hungry either. Miss Lee found food for her and safe places to sleep.

  “She’s gone now, ain’t she? You talking to me again and no shoes. No one’s looking out for you.” He paused and then said, “’S not right.” Almost as if he cared.

  That should’ve been Kelpie’s warning. Tommy didn’t care about anything. If he wanted her to go into Mrs. Stone’s, it weren’t for any good reason.

  Ghosts couldn’t hurt you directly. They couldn’t push you off a
cliff, but they could lead you off one, if you were stupid enough to follow.

  But Kelpie was hungry. Hard to think when you’re hungry. She had to scrounge food where she could, because Miss Lee was gone, because Snowy was still in gaol and no one else living looked out for her, because she had no money to pay for food, and because she couldn’t beg. Kids who begged got swept up by Welfare.

  Tommy nodded at Mrs. Stone’s. “Ain’t none of them home. Too early for that lot. And you know Mrs. Stone’s deaf as a post.”

  The sun wasn’t up. For the razor men, the standover men—all of that mob—their working day ended at noon. Didn’t start till after the sun went down.

  “I used to love me some apples.”

  Tommy kept showing teeth. Happy as a pig in shit, Old Ma would have said, with no approval at all.

  “Go on then.” Tommy pointed at the gap in the collapsing grey fence, edged with splinters longer than Kelpie’s thigh. “You’ll fit through easy.” He leaned back, arms folded, all nonchalant like he owned the lane.

  Kelpie was hungry.

  She slipped through the gap, crept past the pile of bricks that was the dunny leaning against the fence. Smelled like the night-soil men had missed this one. She threaded her way past a broken curved-backed chair and a rusting bicycle without seat or handlebars or wheels. Weeds growing high between paving stones brushed the backs of her calves.

  Kelpie tried the back door, not putting it past Tommy to make her enter through a window when she didn’t have to.

  Locked.

  She stood on her toes to look through the window. The dirty curtain brushed across her nose. An empty bedroom. Narrow unmade bed in the corner. A pile of clothes on top of suitcases and a side table covered with old newspapers, an overfull ashtray, and empty bottles. One was filled with desiccated brown flowers. Kelpie wondered at a razor man having flowers, even dead ones, and then hauled herself over the sill.

  Outside she could hear the clip clop of horse and cart, the clatter of a truck down Foveaux Street, further away raised voices. The house creaked, settling in the wind. The place smelled damp and dank and dusty. She heard no movement inside the house.

  Kelpie peered out the open door. The carpet along the corridor was so worn the floorboards peeked through. Near the front door empty hooks protruded from the wall. On an afternoon, they’d hold hats and coats. Behind her the back door’s bolt was thick and heavy.

  As Kelpie crept along, a board groaned. She stilled. Listened hard.

  Nothing.

  Her skin tightened, as if her body heard something her ears didn’t. Kelpie could slip out the way she came. Go to Paddy’s Markets. There was sometimes fallen fruit and vegetables, provided she wasn’t run off before she could lay hands on any of it.

  These apples were closer.

  Kelpie went up on her toes, making herself lighter. She’d spent so long among ghosts she’d become almost as quiet.

  Something smelled worse than damp. The closer she moved to the kitchen, the worse the smell grew.

  The first door on her left was closed, but the second was open.

  It wasn’t a kitchen. Tommy’d lied.

  It was another bedroom.

  A lady in a fancy blue suit with matching hat was leaning over a dead man on the bed. Her hands were shaking. She held a card. She handed it to Kelpie.

  “Mr. Davidson did it,” she said. “See?”

  Razorhurst

  Nineteen twenty-eight had been a banner year for blood. Throughout the east of the city—Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Woolloomooloo, Kings Cross, Paddington—blood flowed. Razors cut up faces, sliced off ears, opened up chests and bowels; went in through the eye, the ribs, the throat. They maimed, crippled, and killed.

  Why razors?

  Because they banned handguns at the beginning of the twenties, didn’t they? To keep them out of the hands of the Commies. To stop the much-promised revolution. The one that never came.

  Not that banning guns made them go away, but it did mean if you was caught with one, they could arrest you without you even pulling the trigger. Catch you with a razor, and all you had to do was point to your none-too-smooth cheeks: Was gunna give meself a shave first thing, wasn’t I, constable? A very close shave. That’s why it’s so sharp, see?

  The razor men became artists of the blade. Where was the artistry in squeezing a trigger? In the rough outlines of a bullet wound? Nowhere. Not like the L you could carve on a man’s face.

  You didn’t have to kill your enemies. Just let them know you’d been there and weren’t never going away. That scar lived on a mug’s face for the rest of his life. He would always be marked, broken, less than.

  Or not.

  The hardest razor men had the biggest scars.

  Get cut up like that? And live? Now there was a man.

  Angry Carbone, Snowy Fullerton, Razor Tom, Jimmy Palmer, Bluey Denham. Real men with real scars and real razors.

  Proud inhabitants of Greater Razorhurst. Dubbed so by Truth, a newspaper that never lied, in the bloody year of 1928—when Frog Hollow had only just been torn down, Old Ma was barely dead, and Kelpie was being raised by ghosts. Dymphna Campbell was beginning her first year in her chosen profession, and those gang bosses, Gloriana Nelson and Mr. Davidson, were crawling to the top of the bloody remains of Razorhurst and brokering the peace that still held.

  And could well hold for a while longer on this cold winter morning in 1932.

  Or not …

  KELPIE

  Kelpie didn’t look at the card between her fingers. She could feel it there, but she was staring at the red splashes on the walls, on the mirror of the wardrobe, across the two paintings. At the blood sliding down in thin rivulets. Her nostrils flared at the smell from the dead man, and she wished she could close them.

  She did not see or smell apples.

  She had to run. This was trouble. This would bring police, Welfare.

  Her feet would not move.

  “That’s Mr. Davidson’s handwriting,” the woman said, as if handwriting mattered while a man lay dead. Newly dead.

  Kelpie knew who Mr. Davidson was: the boss of all the crime in the Hills and beyond, him and Gloriana Nelson. She ruled where he didn’t and vice versa. They did not like each other.

  The man’s face was all cut up, his throat slashed open. Kelpie saw something white in the midst of all the red. The bones of his neck?

  Kelpie couldn’t help touching her own throat.

  Blood had soaked into the top of his trousers, his jacket, his shirt, the pillows under his head, the sheets. There was blood across the ashtray and magazines and books and empty glass on the bedside table. On the coats hanging from the hooks on the wall. Blood dripped from the dead man’s shoes hanging over the edge of the not-big-enough bed.

  Kelpie wondered how his blood had hit the wall behind him. She tried not to imagine his body spinning.

  She’d seen dead bodies before. But not like this. She needed to get away. Fast.

  Why wasn’t she moving?

  “Davidson did this,” the woman said. Her voice caught on his name. “Do you understand? Look at the card.”

  His eyes were as open as his throat, staring up at the ceiling as if that’s where his killer was. Kelpie looked up.

  The ceiling sagged, the plaster rose in the centre mostly gone, damp brown stains spreading out from where the rose had been, but no killer. No blood either. The splashes didn’t reach that high.

  One of his hands lay palm up on the bed, scored with deep cuts. The other hung over the edge.

  “Can’t you read?” the woman asked. Her voice was as posh as her clothes.

  Kelpie blushed and looked at the card. There was blood on it, and neat handwriting:

  For you, Dymph

  That was when Kelpie knew who the woman was: Dymphna Campbell. She was famous in the Hills. Most beautiful woman any of them had ever seen.

  Kelpie had never seen her this close. She was prettier, shinier, cleaner than Kelpie ha
d imagined. The cold didn’t seem to affect her: Dymphna’s eyes weren’t red or running. Her blue suit was matched by her hat, by the small bag jutting out of her pocket, by the shoes on her feet. The silver watch on her wrist sparkled in the moonlight spilling through the window. Her hair was almost the same colour.

  Kelpie half disbelieved Dymphna Campbell was real.

  She didn’t have a drop of blood on her.

  There was blood everywhere.

  “The card was on top of Jimmy. A warning for me.”

  Kelpie could hear Dymphna breathing. Dymphna worked for Glory Nelson. But the card was from Mr. Davidson. This was worse than trouble.

  “I thought he’d last longer,” Dymphna said, her voice shaky, looking down at the body, one hand covering her nose. “Now what? Shit.” She glanced at the card in Kelpie’s hand, breathed in, and straightened, stepping away from the bed. “Kelpie, isn’t it?” Dymphna asked, as if they’d been introduced on the street, as if there wasn’t a dead man in the room.

  Kelpie nodded without meeting her eyes, surprised Dymphna knew her name. She lowered her head, saw drops of blood by her feet. Everyone in the Hills called Dymphna Campbell the Angel of Death. All her boyfriends died. Not one had been with her longer than a few months.

  “Snowy told me,” Dymphna said. “I saw him give you peanuts.”

  “My Snowy?” Kelpie asked. Why wasn’t she running?

  “Snowy Fullerton.”

  Snowy was one of Mr. Davidson’s men. Why would he be talking to Dymphna, Glory’s best girl? Their people were not friendly with one another.

  A jarring thud made them both look away from the dead man.

  “Shit,” Dymphna said, grabbing Kelpie’s hand and pulling her from the room. Kelpie’s feet finally cooperated.

  The thumping came from the front door.

  Dymphna dragged her along the corridor, dropping Kelpie’s hand to pull at the bolt on the back door. It didn’t budge. She pulled harder, her knuckles going white.

  The banging grew louder.

  “In here,” Kelpie whispered. She shut the bedroom door behind them as wood splintered at the front of the house. The room looked different from this angle. The dead flowers cast a shadow the shape of a twisted hand.

  The house shook.

  “Christ,” Dymphna breathed. “Sounds like they’ve ripped the door off. Not the cops. It can’t be the cops.”