Chapter Text
The October heat lay over Port Melbourne like a damp wool blanket. It was the kind of heat that smelled of tar, salt, and the distant, metallic hint of the abattoirs. Bea Smith navigated the dusty footpath of Bay Street, her sensible black shoes clicking a steady, weary rhythm. Her dress, a faded navy serge, was too heavy for the season, but it was the best she had for job hunting. The world outside, after eight years inside, was a symphony of overwhelming noise: the clatter of a passing Model T Ford, its engine backfiring like a gunshot; the electric whirr of a tram on its new lines; the raucous cries of newspaper boys hawking The Argus, shouting about some new political scandal in Canberra.
She’d taken a room in a boarding house on Nott Street – a narrow, grey place that smelled of boiled cabbage and loneliness. The money Harry had left her was nearly gone, eaten by rent and the sheer, staggering cost of ordinary things. A loaf of bread was threepence, a pound of butter a shilling. Her world had shrunk to calculations.
Her destination today was the ‘Ocean’s Grace’ Laundry & Steam Press. It was a vast, soot-blackened brick building, its windows perpetually misted. Inside, the air was a visible, choking fog of steam and lye soap, the thunder of the mangles a constant, physical pressure. Women, faces flushed and damp, moved like ghosts through the haze, their arms corded with muscle from wrestling wet sheets.
Bea presented herself to the foreman, a man with a waxed moustache and a clipboard.
“Smith. Beatrice Smith. I saw your notice.”
He looked her up and down, his gaze lingering not with lechery, but with a cold assessment of her capacity for labour. “Experience?”
“Laundry. Eight years.” She didn’t elaborate. The prison laundry at Wentworth was a circle of hell, but it had taught her efficiency and endurance.
He grunted, scribbling. “Start Monday. Six a.m. Seven shillings a week. Don’t be late.”
It was something. As she turned to leave, the main doors swung open, blinding the steamy gloom with a shaft of white, dusty sunlight. A figure stood silhouetted in the doorway.
She was a vision entirely out of place. A woman in a dress of cream-colored georgette, a dropped waistline swinging with beads that caught the light. A cloche hat was pulled low over a stylishly bobbed dark wave of hair. She carried a portfolio case and wore an expression of determined curiosity that bordered on offence.
“Excuse me,” her voice cut through the industrial din, clear and posh, flavoured with a private-school education. “I’m looking for the manager? I’m from Femina magazine. We’re doing a feature on modern industry and the… the feminine workforce.”
The foreman looked as if she’d announced she was from Mars. “This ain’t a picture show, love. It’s a laundry.”
“Precisely,” the woman said, stepping fully inside, her leather T-strap shoes utterly unsuited for the damp concrete floor. Her eyes, a startling, intelligent blue, scanned the room, missing nothing. They passed over the exhausted faces, the raw red hands, and then they stopped on Bea.
Bea felt seen, not as a worker-bee, but as a person. It was unnerving. She dropped her gaze and made to move past.
“It’s brutal, isn’t it?” the woman said softly, not to the foreman, but to Bea, as she passed.
Bea paused. “It’s a job.”
“Allie Novak,” the woman said, offering a gloved hand, then thinking better of it, given the environment. “And you are?”
“Leaving,” Bea replied, but a ghost of a smile touched her lips. There was an audacity to this Allie that was both absurd and fascinating.
*****
They met again two days later, by accident, at the Victorian Arts Centre gallery in the city. Bea had gone not for art, but for the cool, quiet silence. She stood before a Frederick McCubbin painting, The Pioneers, losing herself in its bush gloom, a world away from steam and brick.
“Prefer the cityscapes myself. More life.”
Bea started. Allie Novak stood beside her, today in a neat skirt-suit of heather-grey, her hatless hair gleaming under the electric gallery lights. She smelled of cigarettes and Chypre perfume.
“What are you doing here?” Bea asked, suspicion a hard-learned reflex.
“Same as you, I expect. Escaping.” Allie’s smile was quick, bright, but didn’t quite reach her eyes, which held a watchful, haunted quality Bea recognised. “I didn’t get my story. Foreman threw me out. Said I was unsettling the girls.” She lit a Capstan cigarette with a silver lighter. “Fancy a coffee? There’s a new place on Swanston Street. They have a proper La Victoria Arduino machine, imported from Italy.”
Bea had never had coffee from a machine. Her life had been tea, stew, and prison gruel. “I shouldn’t.”
“Why not? The 20th century is here. We have wireless radio, aeroplanes, and apparently,” she gestured with her cigarette, “art that looks like a child did it.” She nodded at a modest, controversial modernist piece. “Live a little.”
The coffee shop was a temple to modernity: chrome, polished wood, and the hiss of steam. They sat at a small round table. Allie ordered two ‘espressos’. The bitter, strong liquid in the tiny cup was a shock to Bea’s system.
“You’re not from a magazine, are you?” Bea said quietly, holding the warm cup between her palms.
Allie’s confident facade faltered for a second. “I am. Sometimes. I’m a lot of things. A writer. A nuisance. A black sheep.” She took a drag of her cigarette. “My family has money. Pastoralists. Wool. They’d prefer I marry a suitable idiot and host garden parties. I’d prefer to… understand things. People. Like you.”
“There’s nothing to understand.”
“I saw it in your eyes at the laundry. You weren’t just tired. You were… contained. Like you’d lived a whole other life.”
The truth sat on Bea’s tongue, heavy and dangerous. In this world, a prison record was a stain that never lifted. But Allie’s gaze was not judgmental; it was keen, searching for a truth of its own.
“I was inside,” Bea said finally, the words leaving her in a rush, like air from a punctured tyre. “Wentworth. Eight years.”
She waited for the recoil, the polite withdrawal. It didn’t come.
Allie simply nodded, as if she’d been told the weather. “What for?”
“Murder.” Bea met her eyes, daring her to flinch.
A long silence, filled only with the jazzy crackle from the wireless speaker—a tune called Sweet Georgia Brown. “My father,” Allie said finally, her voice low, “is a different kind of criminal. The kind who ruins lives from behind a mahogany desk and gets a knighthood for it. I think I prefer your honesty.”
The bitter espresso seemed to echo the bitterness of her confession. Bea braced for the inevitable: the gasp, the muttered excuse, the chair scraping back as Allie fled from the dangerous, soiled ex-convict.
Allie simply lifted her cigarette to her lips, her gaze not wavering from Bea's face. The silence stretched, filled with the jazz from the wireless and the clatter of cups. "Eight years is a long time," she said finally, her voice contemplative. "I imagine they stop using your proper name in a place like that. What did they call you?"
Bea blinked, thrown by the question's direction. "Smith. Or 'three-two-seven'. Mostly just Smith."
"Smith." Allie tested the word, then shook her head, a small, decisive motion. "No. That's a name for a ledger." She leaned forward, her blue eyes intent, piercing the defensive walls Bea had spent a lifetime building. "The name you were given. The one that belongs to you. I want to know that one."
The request felt more intimate than any touch. To be known, truly known, was a risk greater than any she'd taken inside. She looked down at her work-roughened hands, clenched tight around the tiny cup. "Beatrice," she whispered to the dark liquid.
"Beatrice," Allie repeated, and the way she said it—softly, with a kind of reverence—made it sound like a beautiful, forgotten thing. A smile touched her lips, not of pity, but of quiet triumph. "Thank you, Beatrice." She stubbed out her cigarette, the gesture final. "Now. Tell me what you think of this dreadful modern art. And don't say 'leaving'."
*****
A fragile, unlikely friendship unfurled over the following weeks. It was conducted in the stolen hours—the ‘unlikely hours,’ as Allie called them. They walked through the Royal Botanic Gardens, amongst the newly planted war memorial roses. They took a ferry across the Yarra to Williamstown, the salty wind whipping their hair, Allie laughing as she held onto her hat. They saw a silent picture show at the Majestic Theatre, a Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler, with Allie providing a hilarious, whispered commentary.
Allie showed Bea a world she’d never known: speakeasy-style cocktail bars hidden behind unmarked doors in the city, where women smoked and danced together, a hidden, pulsating world of forbidden looks. Bea showed Allie resilience: how to stretch a shilling, how to mend a seam so it never showed, the quiet dignity of survival.
The shift happened one rain-lashed evening in Bea’s tiny boarding house room. The kerosene lamp cast a warm, shaky glow. Allie was reading aloud from D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, a banned book she’d procured from God-knows-where. Her voice was soft, lyrical.
Bea watched her, the way the light caught the curve of her cheek, the delicate shell of her ear, the passionate curve of her mouth around the scandalous words. A feeling, vast and terrifying, welled up inside her chest, a tidal wave after years of drought.
Allie felt the silence and looked up. The reading faltered. The book slipped to the worn rug.
No one moved. The rain drummed its urgent rhythm on the corrugated iron roof.
“Bea…” Allie whispered, and it was a question, a plea, a confession all at once.
Bea crossed the space between them. It felt like crossing a canyon. She cupped Allie’s face, her thumbs tracing the astonishing softness of her skin. The world outside—the tram bells, the shouts of sailors on the wharves, the whole stiff, judgmental era—faded into a distant hum.
When their lips met, it was not gentle. It was a collision of two starved souls, a desperate, thirsty kiss that tasted of espresso, cigarette smoke, and the salt of unshed tears. It was the silent, screaming truth they had both been circling.
They broke apart, foreheads touching, breathing ragged in the lamplight.
“This is madness,” Bea breathed, her voice trembling.
Allie’s blue eyes were blazing, fierce with certainty. “I know. But it’s 1925, Bea. The world’s changing. The Great War blew the old one apart. They’re putting hemlines up and hair down. Why not this?” Her fingers intertwined with Bea’s, a bold, defiant gesture. “Why not us?”
Outside, a newsboy cried about the late edition. A gramophone in a distant flat played a melancholy jazz tune. The modern world, with all its noise and promise and peril, spun on.
And in a small, quiet room on Nott Street, with the rain painting silver tracks down the windowpane, Bea Smith allowed herself, for the first time in a life defined by walls, to believe in a freedom that had nothing to do with parole boards, and everything to do with the woman whose heart was beating, wild and sure, against her own.