Copyright © Carmel Bird 1996.
All rights reserved.
Short Story translated into Czech
TIES OF BLOOD
I wish, in a way, I could tell you that Henrietta Robinson’s uncle Charles raped and murdered Henrietta, but I can’t, because he didn’t. I mean, he might have, but nothing can be proved. He wanted to. He used to say he wanted to put some sense into her, and he also said he could murder her, but these things were taken as jokes, and the expression of irritation in a respectable bachelor bank manager. Irritation with a very silly niece such as Henrietta. But somebody murdered Henrietta. Somebody raped her on the gravel of the car park at the back of her shop. The shop was Crystal Clear in Camberwell, Victoria,and there Henrietta sold oils and incense and crystals and Tarot cards and jewellery. One night at about ten o’clock somebody grabbed her in the dark and then they raped her and cut her throat and left her there, taking with them her brief case that was supposed to contain money, makeup and papers. Leaving the remains of Henrietta and a Tarot card with a picture of an angel with a trumpet at the Last Judgment. The briefcase was found on the golf course, empty; the contents were never found. Henrietta’s injuries were consistent with the use of a meat cleaver, but it went missing too. The newspapers played down the presence of the Last Judgment card, and I know the card was just the sort of thing Charles would be capable of thinking up. As far as I’m concerned, Charles is written all over this. Henrietta was born in 1960, the daughter of Henry Robinson, manufacturer of footwear (Put Your Best Foot Forward in Robinson Shoes) and his wife Anita. Henrietta was the only child and her arrival was greeted with flowers and champagne and cigars and photographs. They were the surface things. Actually Anita opened up like a large sea-creature, say a giant mussel, and Henrietta was pushed and pulled and squeezed and choked until finally she was squirted into the light with splashes of blood. So you say that Anita gave birth to Henrietta, and that Henrietta was born. She was attached to Anita by a telephone cord of blood vessels, but this was soon severed and Henrietta, who was covered in slime, a kind of green and purple and white cream cheese,was washed. Her nose and throat were cleared of gunk with a little vacuum cleaner. She was wrapped in a pink blanket and put in a plastic box and deposited in line with all the other babies in their boxes. They lay in the nursery like a row of larvae in the nest of a large insect. Charles visited his sister Anita in the hospital. He brought flowers for Anita and a white teddy bear for Henrietta. There was the christening and then there were the birthday parties and for many years Charles was a doting uncle. Then it became clear that Henrietta was a bit eccentric, a bit alternative, a bit environmental, even a bit feminist or whatever. Vegetarian. Animal rights. Then it was crystals and Tarot. And then she opened Crystal Clear across the road from the bank where Charles was manager, and she was no longer a joke as far as Charles was concerned. She was embarrassing and deeply disappointing. He actually voiced those words to Anita one afternoon in the garden. I heard the words. My garden is divided from Anita’s by a high brick wall, but the tinkle of the wind chimes and the sound of certain words float up over the wall and land in my place. ‘Deeply disappointing’ he said. ‘An embarrassment to me, a shop full of ground unicorn tusk and superstitious clap trap’. Anita said it was a thriving business and then she said it was harmless and then she said there might be something in it anyway, and Charles snorted and said he would discuss it with the vicar. Then Anita laughed and told him he was a fuddy duddy out of the Ark. He said that in any case telling fortunes was against the law. Henrietta made money out of telling people’s fortunes. She believed in the stars. And so on. She resembled a lovely pantomime fairy - covered in strange silver jewellery, a ring on every finger. Henrietta could look into your eyes and remark on the state of your liver. Across the road her uncle Charles trotted richly around the bank in a dark Gucci suit and a silk Dior tie and he resembled a figure in a painting by Rene Magritte. Charles might have appeared from behind a tree in a park at twilight in a long dark overcoat and a bowler hat, with a furled umbrella and a mad glint in his eye. You can see I have an imagination, and I have admitted I have no real evidence that it was Charles who killed Henrietta, but deep down I know. He hated her for the apparent freedom of her spirit, and I have always believed him to be capable of violence. That type usually is. They spend their lives collecting stamps and butterflies - beautiful things but dead - and then one day they turn up at the railway station with an old service rifle and shoot the station master, a perfect stranger, and half a dozen innocent travellers. But a even a man like that would hardly go and murder a niece like that in real life, everyday life, would he? Splatter her blood on the gravel of the Crystal Clear car park and run off with his meat cleaver into the night. The photograph of Henrietta in the newspaper resembled, if you could see past the jewellery and the layers of white chiffon, the image of her own great-grandmother Eliza in a photograph taken in Hobart over a hundred years ago. An irony is that it was this old picture of the ancestor that gave Henrietta the idea that, according to my theory, led to her tragic death. Henrietta Robinson Born: 1960 Saw Picture of Great-Grandmother: 1989 Died: 1992 One night in the summer of 1992 a man grabbed Henreitta from behind and tore off her white satin knickers and raped her on the gravel and then he severed her neck with a meat cleaver and her blood went spurting and splattering all over her white chiffon shirt and all over the yellow gravel, onto the blooms of the angels’ trumpets that dangled over the fence. Then this man, covered in blood, must have got in his car which was parked in the street, taking with him the brief case and the weapon and tossing the Tarot card onto the blood-stained gravel beside the body. He wiped the brief case carefully and chucked it onto the golf course. The police called for witnesses to come forward. Nobody had heard a sound. Nobody had seen a thing. Blind, deaf and dumb the people in the apartments behind the car park slumbered on while the man with the meat cleaver chopped into the throat of the woman from Crystal Clear. In 1989 when Henrietta saw the photograph of her ancestor, and noticed the resemblance between herself and the other woman, she had her fatal (so I say) idea. Henrietta began to investigate the Robinson family tree. There were Scots who came to Tasmania in 1850. Then there were Irish. There were French, German, Dutch, English, Welsh, Russian. The woman who looked like Henrietta was Irish, from County Galway. Anita and Henry and even Charles took a mild interest in Henrietta’s strange sudden passion for the past. It was probably like many of her other passions - a passing phase - like ballet and the violin and making satin handbags. But Henrietta became obsessed. She went to Tasmania and then to France and England - Ireland,Scotland, Wales. She wrote letters filled with strange accounts of visits to graveyards and to peculiar old ladies in foreign nursing homes. The long-lost cousin in Cambridge took her out to tea. It went on and on, and in her imagination Henrietta saw always blood, blood trickling and gushing and rushing and flowing across the seven seas, blood surging over centuries; she saw it like the ribbons of red light you see at night when cars stream along the highway. And these ribbons of blood end up in Henrietta; she is the vessel at the end of the rope of blood. Henrietta’s imagination was a closed book to her family. What they knew was the filing cabinet, the notes, the letters, the documents, the photographs. And then one day she said that she was ready to present the results of her research. You know what’s coming, don’t you. There must be enough clues. Henrietta unrolled a big complicated scroll on the dining room table, and Henry and Anita and Charles bent over it in amazement and fascination. Actually, Henry and Anita were thrilled and very interested. They were proud of Henrietta, and had become quite keen to know the details. Then Charles saw… the thing. He stared for a long time and then he looked up at Henrietta with a cold hard glare. He said: ‘This bit about Eliza and the man called Lenney is quite wrong.If you are trying to suggest, Henrietta, that there is aboriginal blood in the family, you are going to be very disappointed. There is no such thing.’ Henrietta argued and the whole day was spoilt. ‘You will need,’Charles said,’to do some real research. Or, better still, I suggest you drop the whole idea and take up another hobby altogether. This fabrication only makes you look a fool, and it is, furthermore, very, very destructive to the good name of this family. Next you will be saying your mother is some kind of prostitute and your father is a member of the Mafia. You’ll have me running some giant drug ring, I suppose.’ Henrietta simply said quietly that he wouldn’t know how. But Henrietta was obsessed. Her fascination with the aboriginal blood in the family tree had become a compulsion. She started to campaign for Land Rights for Tasmanian Aborigines and she identified herself as Aboriginal. I’m not really up in these things, and I never know where to put the capital letters. I wish I had been able to talk to Henrietta, but she was gone before I had a chance. I have talked to Anita - we have always been on good terms - but of course I haven’t said anything about my suspicions. I think she knows anyway. That’s it really. That’s all I know. I wish I could tell you it was all true, that Charles did those things to Henrietta. In my heart I know he did, but because I can’t prove anything, I just have to bite my tongue. Bite my tongue and bide my time and let things run their course. I tell the story to my little white cat - she’s deaf and wouldn’t breathe it to a soul in any case. I walk past Crystal Clear when I go to the bank. Charles, of course, is never visible, lurks behind locked doors. I put my money in and take my money out and discuss the weather with the tellers and imagine the blood that seeped into the gravel flowing in an underground stream and welling up in Charles’ office, a gorgeous crimson fountain. What would he do? Call a plumber I suppose. Complain to the Camberwell Council. Donate it to the Blood Bank. I bide my time and bite my tongue and wait for things to run their course. 1947 words
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