Form Ic

Form IC

Whenever Dad finds a dead friend in the paper he coughs twice to let me know he’s going to read aloud.
‘Theresa Maria Quisp. Died after a short illness. Burial at Brookfield Cemetery. No flowers.’
‘Tess, Tess, the murderess?’
I said that to make him laugh and he gave one of those high-pitched yelps that get me going too. He laughed so hard I thought he’d choke on his toast.
‘You girls,’ he said. ‘What an eye opener when a bloke has a daughter.’
He says that stuff because Mum died and he raised me by himself.
‘Do you reckon it’s her?’
‘Looks like it’s your ill-famed chemistry teacher,’ he said, scrutinising the fine print like the detective he once was.
‘Why?’
‘Well she lived around that way … Kenmore … Brookfield. And the age is about right..’
That was a surprise. He always knows things you don’t expect.
‘A woman not unknown to yours truly,’ he said, touching his heart with his bendy old fingers.

Every morning after breakfast Dad sits at his table with the Courier Mail spread out. He’s an old-fashioned kind of man, claims he never exceeded the speed limit, packed me off to an expensive girls’ school in Toowoomba. I always thought Mum was the love of his life but some time after l’affaire Quisp other information came to light. Turns out Dad had a colourful past.
‘I think I’ll go to the service,’ he said. ‘Tess was a good catholic you know. Odd when you think about her life-style, as people like to say these days.’
‘Should I come with you?’
I didn’t ask how he knew about the ‘good catholic’ thing. Or the ‘lifestyle’.
‘Only if you want to,’ he said.

As a kid I detested chemistry and Miss Quisp equally. But everything about her and St Hildegarde’s still fascinated me, even thirty years later. This may have been because of the death of Miss Quisp’s lover—our boarding-mistress, Miss Kurtz. And this, I wrongly thought, was the reason Dad wanted to go to the funeral. I had my own reasons to be interested, in particular the part I played in her downfall. When Miss Kurtz died I was thirteen and a boarder in her House. Dad lived in Brisbane. But he was Deputy Commissioner of Police so I wasn’t exactly keen to tell him what I knew.

Miss Kurtz was a chunky woman with sturdy brown arms and hooded eyes like a snake. She was our boarding-mistress. Her rooms were slightly above our dormitory and from this elevation she seemed omniscient, like God. Like God Miss Kurtz could appear soundlessly amongst us and make alarming predictions, and as she decided on and enforced the House rules, most of her predictions came true. She ran her House on a cocktail of forced confessions, favours and fear and this hotbed of shifting alliances and intrigues was my world for years. Dad wasn’t exactly a hands-on father in those days.

When Miss Quisp took up her position, she was a welcome change. Miss Quisp was young where most of the other mistresses were old. And she was tall, with a handsome face and long hands. She coached and played netball with the school team, and held reading evenings in the old music room. Many girls transferred their worn out crushes from a whey-faced sixth-former called ‘Bertie’ to the vibrant Miss Quisp.
But even at thirteen I liked to think I had my father’s cool eye and assessing mind. There were elements of Miss Quisp’s appearance I found disturbing—her red pointed nails for one, and the clanging laugh which displayed her over-large mouth for another. And there was that stilettoed walk which seemed to detonate along the upper verandah.

Rather than having a crush on Miss Quisp I thought her boring, although that could have been to do with her voice droning interminably on the Periodic Table: H, He, Li, Be. Hydrogen -1,1. Helium. Lithium 1. Beryllium 2; then orbitals, isotopes, allotropes, crystals. But I did like her experiments. These took place in the school lab, a place with a heat source (Bunsen burners) and cooking containers (beakers). Miss Quisp encouraged us to create soda volcanoes and stalactites and other glories of the chemical kitchen. It didn’t take much for us to transfer our skills to the creation of toffees and caramels from the butter and sugar we stole from the kitchens. For someone like me without a mother, late afternoons at St Hildegarde’s had a special melancholy. But once I had wriggled through the back window of the lab and begun a batch of honey kisses, happiness descended.

The funeral service at Our Lady of the Rosary was at 10:30 sharp. I took the morning off work to drive Dad to Kenmore. You can forget public transport in Brisbane if you’re old. Too much chance you’ll break a hip as the bus swipes a corner at break-neck speed. When I called to pick him up, he was standing in the street, under the poinciana. He wore his navy suit with a striped red shirt and his hair brylcreamed into place.
‘You look sexy,’ I said, once he was buckled in. He brushed the back of his knuckles against his newly shaven chin.
‘Well ….’ He looked slyly at me. ‘Tessa was an old girl-friend of mine. Gotta look my best to say goodbye.’
I was surprised at the anger I felt.
‘You kept that bloody dark,’ I said, speeding through a roundabout and slamming on the brakes outside the church. That was to let him know.
‘So why tell me now?’
‘Because she’s dead.’

At the wake Dad found himself at the productive end of a few chats. I did my best to eavesdrop, especially when I heard the words ‘formic acid’. This had to mean some discussion of Miss Kurtz. In Brisbane, a man like Dad knows everyone who matters: politicians, judges, journos, writers, actors. And they all want the inside dirt, the stuff they think only he knows. But Dad doesn’t disclose too much. I’m a cop too, these days. I get the way he thinks.
‘OK. So why did you tell me today?’ I said, once we were going home again.
‘Because I thought you’d do what you just did,’ he said.
‘Eavesdrop?’
‘Get interested again. It’s time I heard the rest of it.’
I did a bit of fast lane-changing to get him off the scent but he probably expected that. He knew I’d talk, but not when it was sprung on me by a wily oldster. Old people have a particular type of attention span. They focus deep. But they’re easy to distract. Soon I’d got him grizzling about the way the traffic banked up at an annoying turning lane.
‘All these hostile corners,’ he growled. ‘Every road in Brisbane is a glorified goat track.’
I knew Dad was puzzled by my indifference to Miss Kurtz’s death. But I was equally puzzled by his desire to know more. I wrongly put that down to his urge to understand me better. Of course, he also had the usual male fascination with ‘V on V’ sex. Whenever I mention my old school to anyone I get the same two questions: ‘Were they lovers?’ and ‘Who killed Miss Kurtz?’

In my first years at boarding-school, Miss Kurtz treated me neutrally. Looking back, I see this was to do with my father’s position in the world, his connections extending everywhere, even to having a cousin on the school administering board. Once Miss Quisp arrived however, she lost her cool.
From the beginning, it was clear Miss Kurtz was enraptured by Miss Quisp. Whenever her beloved appeared, Miss Kurtz was like a bush turkey watching itself in a glass door. We spied on her as she adorned herself with pearl ear-rings and bracelets. Later the plunging black numbers arrived to show off her décolletage. Miss Kurtz’s bras were the subject of many jokes whenever we saw them in the washing.

One night over a tub in the boarding-mistress’s bathroom, we heard Miss Quisp helping Miss Kurtz dye her hair. We shamelessly enjoyed what followed that night, which we declared was their first … um … kiss. But during the day there were still the hated chemistry classes. My father had been tough about my subject choice that year: chemistry was non-negotiable. My plan was to fail so badly I’d be allowed to drop it.

In the meantime, there were Miss Quisp’s instructive poison classes to enjoy. The poisons classes began with a declaration.
‘Every one of you,’ she said looking at each of us in turn, ‘is capable of murder.’
This really got us in.
‘But what we all admire,’ she dropped her voice, ‘is the perfect murder. And it’s surprising just how many household objects can be put to good use.’
Holding up a green almond and a red apple, she roamed the room.
‘The seeds of each of these,’ she said, ‘contain cyanides.’
Even the word sounded thrilling. She paused theatrically.
‘Given in sufficient quantities they can cause cardiac arrest. Then death.’
“How many would you need?’ one kid asked.
Miss Kurtz stood on the dais and laughed, opening her mouth so wide her uvula went on the record.
‘Too many to be a useful method,’ she said, setting aside her weapons.
Without much pressing she recommended formic acid, a poison even the humble ant possesses. Of course, ants needed distillation to produce adequate toxicity, and she wasn’t about to explain that to us. But she did point to a jar of the stuff locked behind the glass door of the poisons cupboard.
‘Next term we’ll be killing a frog with formic acid,’ she said smiling at the thought. ‘You can watch the death throes.’
I hoped I’d be gone long before that horror.

My father began weekending in Toowoomba that year. Every Sunday he took me and my friends to Weis’ restaurant for lunch. This was a glorious time for us, free of Miss Kurtz for the afternoon and stuffed weekly with third and fourth helpings of Rum Ball Custard. In our collective Form IC life this satisfied our twin aims.
It was also around this time that Miss Kurtz fired her first salvo in my direction. It began humbly enough when she brought her slippers into our dormitory, holding them so close to my nose I could smell her feet.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Cut with a razor.’
‘So what?’
I had the default attitudes of any self-respecting thirteen year old.
She ran a stubby finger along the blue seams. ‘Cut,’ she said. ‘Here. And here.’
‘Yeah?’
I knew it wasn’t me. But in our world that was no defence. Miss Kurtz picked up the blunted razor I used on my hair. Shreds of blue cloth were caught amongst the strands of chopped off peroxide. She fixed her snake’s eyes on mine.
‘Guilty as charged,’ she said.
‘I’ve been framed Miss Kurtz,’ I said, but it was useless.
There were times when her eyes became so hooded they disappeared, and this was one of them.
I wanted to say that she’d probably cut the slippers herself, it was the kind of thing she did. But my counter-attack must be concealed. We’d learned that from her.

There was something Miss Kurtz didn’t know and that was just how much we could hear through the walls of her bathroom. And there was another thing we knew too, —the madness of her love for Miss Quisp. For weeks we listened at the bathroom wall. Then finally we heard words which made sense to me thirty years later, after I learned of my father’s affair with Tess Quisp.
Public humiliation was a special weapon Miss Kurtz used in the house with her commanding voice. Now she unwittingly turned it on herself. Everything she said came booming through the thin bathroom walls.
‘He won’t stick with you Tess,’ she pleaded. ‘I will.’
We couldn’t hear Miss Quisp’s reply but the slamming door and howl of her lover were eloquent. It was disturbing to find that Miss Kurtz had feelings.

Dad can’t live alone any more, he’s too old. So he lives with me. Our Sunday arrangement goes like this: he gets the roast ready with an excellent stuffing of his invention and I make the pudding. Then I clean up while he has an afternoon snooze under the Sunday Mail. We usually put away a good bottle of merlot in the process. And we talk.
I opened the bidding.
‘Did you ever wish things had worked out with Tessa?’
It was hard to read his face. He looked wistful.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I wanted to marry her.’
I was glad he hadn’t.
‘You didn’t mind that she played for the other side?’
‘I didn’t know,’ he said. We were sitting with our elbows on the table, picking grapes turn by turn from a dish in the centre.
‘Turns out my thirteen year old daughter knew more than I did.’
‘We knew everything about Miss Quisp and Miss Kurtz,’ I bragged. ‘We got into their rooms and looked at their photos.’
Suddenly I remembered a letter we’d found half written in Miss Kurtz’s room. One of us had read it aloud in imitation of Miss Kurtz’s clipped accent. It began ‘Dear Robert’ and contained information about her beloved, Tess Quisp. On the chest of drawers stood a flattering photograph of Tess, but in the letter were accusations and disclosures. My father’s name was Robert. I made a leap of judgment.
‘Did you ever get a nasty letter about Miss Quisp,’ I asked.
He looked surprised.
‘I did,’ he said.
I told him about the letter we’d discovered Miss Kurtz was writing to ‘Robert’.
‘That must have been you,’ I said, trying to read his face. ‘Did you tell Tess?’
He nodded. I wondered whether he was thinking about the autopsy report and the chemicals found in Miss Kurtz’ body. He’d started to look downcast. I did my best to cheer him up by telling him about our revenge.

After my conviction for GBH of her slippers Miss Kurtz gated me. Looking down the perspective of thirty years, I can admire her deftness. Being gated meant I had to stay inside the school grounds, which also meant my father had no reason to visit Toowoomba. But she overlooked something important. My friends were affected as well. No more Rum Ball Custard for them, or me. With this one gesture, Miss Kurtz unleashed an army of ill-will against herself, especially as we all knew her to be the true slipper slasher.
Guidance came in the form of a séance, one of the dark arts we practised to defend ourselves.
‘How can we stop Kurtz?’ we asked. The glass tumbled over itself to produce an answer: ‘D-I-X-O-N'.
‘The Dixon spoon?’

This spoon, the orphaned remnant of an earlier cutlery set, was shaped like a tiny silver shovel. School tradition dictated its power, that whoever got the Dixon spoon at mealtimes also got a wish. The glass continued its instruction: ‘D-I-E-K-U-R-T-Z-D-I-E’. This was what we should wish when we got the spoon? Even to us it sounded extreme.
‘Let me get this right,’ Dad said. ‘If you got the Dixon spoon, you had to wish Miss Kurtz would die?’
He looked relieved. So it was all just schoolgirl hocus-pocus after all.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why couldn’t you just wish her to go somewhere else?’ he asked, reasonably enough.
The answer was obvious. Miss Kurtz would never leave St Hildegarde’s while Miss Quisp was there. Even the Dixon lacked such power. I could see Dad was ready for his afternoon nap, and vulnerable.
‘So how did you and Tess come to meet in Toowoomba?’ I asked.
He looked a little shame-faced at this.
‘Actually I knew her before she went to St Hildegarde’s,’ he said. ‘Met her at a trial actually. The year before she turned up at your place.’
He’d kept that bloody dark too.
‘What trial?’
‘A minor matter,’ he said. ‘She was questioned about the death of a cat. Magistrate’s court matter. Nothing serious.’
I pressed on. ‘How did she get a job with us then?’
‘Erm …,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember.’
He yawned extravagantly. Then he flexed his shoulders and rotated his head a bit like: I’m tired. It’s long ago. Get over it.
‘Come on Dad.’ I wasn’t going to give up now, we were so close. ‘Come clean.’
He sighed.
‘OK. I helped her.’
I told him about Miss Quisp’s comment that all of us harboured a perfect murder in our hearts. He drew his mouth down. It was not something he wanted to hear.
‘You weren’t nervous of her?’ I asked.
‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘that aspect of Tess added a certain piquancy to her other attractions.’
‘Eeeoouu,’ I said.
So he’d got her the job in Toowoomba. How that changed everything.
‘You sent her to spy on me?’
‘Actually, it was the other way round,’ he said. ‘I was getting on and Tess was young and sexy. She wasn’t built for monogamy. By then I was.’
Perhaps that was why I had disliked Miss Quisp all those years ago, but without knowing it; her vampiric hold on my dear old Dad.
There’s a snell I always associate with that time, and that is the stench of crushed ants. Of course we made what we could of the Dixon spoon command, getting the whole school behind us so that every meal was one more nail in Miss Kurtz’s coffin. But she stepped up the pressure too. My mail was censored and my conversations reported. In fact, she did to us what we did to her.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, as the saying is. We were in the lab one afternoon, cooking an opportunistic batch of fudge when someone noticed the locked doors of the poisons cabinet standing ajar. The skull and crossbones labels shrieked from their bottles within.
It could have been me who said ‘What about formic acid?’
That was when we began collecting ants. Maybe we couldn’t distil them but we knew how to get Miss Kurtz to eat them.

In the dining-room, Miss Kurtz kept a jar of Vegemite which she spread on her toast for breakfast. Each morning the jar was brought to her, loaded with our latest harvest of crushed ants. As vegemite smells of anchovies and tastes like mangroves the addition of dead ants wasn’t that noticeable. We brooded over our prety with the tenderness of clucky hens but apart from some obvious signs of thwarted passion – her panda bear eyes, and loss of weight - there were no changes to observe. But we all agreed—the Dixon spoon and Vegemite jar would do their work. Miss Kurtz was a goner. Even so, after the holidays and back in the Assembly Hall for the first time, we were surprised at the Head’s announcement. Miss Kurtz had died unexpectedly, and her funeral had been held in the school chapel. The head apologised that we couldn’t be there, but there was police interest in the case. She didn’t say it but the school wanted it all hushed up. It was strangely anti-climactic. I was pleased to learn however, that Miss Quisp had left the school.

The following Sunday after our garlic pork, I asked my father a little more, after all, I never wanted to learn what Miss Kurtz died of exactly. I hoped that I could trick him into a few more divulgences.
‘She died of a cardiac arrest,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘And she had formic acid in her gut.’
‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘Wonder how she got that?’
‘We thought it was probably from a commercial formula.’
There was the poisons cupboard with its unlocked doors, accessible to us all, even Miss Kurtz.
‘A suspicious death do you think?’
He nodded then jumped in an unexpected direction.
‘Tessa had something on you all,’ he said. ‘I was backing off by then. She thought she could get me to marry her, with a little pressure.’
‘But you didn’t cave.’
He looked a little embarrassed.
‘I did,’ he said. ‘But not in the way she expected.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked. I was a little nervous. Dad had been a very good detective in his day.

Some of my friends are now judges and doctors. With all the spying going on Miss Quisp could well have learned a few things none of us would want in the public arena. And I was learning a bit too. One thing I hadn’t known was my father’s desire to marry Miss Quisp.
‘I lost a couple of things that could have been telling,’ he said. ‘She had me over a barrel.’
‘But you didn’t marry her?’
‘There was evidence on a number of fronts,’ he said. ‘I pointed that out to her.’
His words hung in the air like the smell of roasting pork.

Ridding myself of Miss Quisp had been a lucky break.
‘She did fit the wicked step-mother image rather well,’ I joked, ‘with that huge mouth.’
‘A man-eater,’ Dad agreed.
‘Do you think she really wanted to marry you?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Dad said. ‘She wanted to be a Commissioner’s wife. That was for sure.’
I came and stood behind him so I could lean down and put my arms around his skinny shoulders.
‘Miss Quisp wouldn’t have suited us at all,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said wistfully. ‘I don’t suppose she would have.’