Angel

Angel Colleen McCullough The bestselling author of THE THORN BIRDS returns with a novel of laughter, passion and more than a little magic …1960, Sydney's Kings Cross. Harriet Purcell leaves her conventional, respectable home and respectable, passionless boyfriend and moves into a rooming house owned by Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz.There, Harriet finds a life she relishes – excitement, adventure and passion. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz makes a living from telling fortunes, and is mother to 4-year-old Flo. Beautiful little Flo is mute, and Harriet comes to love her as if Flo were her own – and must protect her at all costs when tragedy strikes…Angel is Colleen McCullough at her vintage best, drawing on her own experiences of living in the Cross in the 1960s and writing of a world that has long gone. Most of all, it is a tale of a woman's love for a child, and what she is prepared to endure to ensure her survival. Angel Colleen McCullough Copyright (#ulink_e3d5c4e8-66af-5bc7-a1b4-88471d2efa72) HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) Copyright © Colleen McCullough 2004 Colleen McCullough asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780007199754 Ebook Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 9780007405664 Version: 2017-08-14 For Max Lambert Much loved friend Contents Cover Page (#u37f758a5-99a5-5242-b496-628cad110b70) Title Page (#uef98f2a5-9fc1-529f-b65f-a1cc54f28b0f) Copyright (#u9e0edce4-fbe7-5491-bbdf-d9cf6d91001e) Friday, January 1st, 1960 (New Year’s Day) (#u76371d72-a9a0-5c39-9737-0ca9e6d00578) Saturday, January 2nd, 1960 (#u620dbb6e-89c8-5429-a9af-791ddb8e4276) Monday, January 4th, 1960 (#u8734ad62-0f48-5e3c-a09e-0d264c275f1e) Wednesday, January 6th, 1960 (#u289a3a45-c3fe-58cc-aa85-b746819384c2) Thursday, January 7th, 1960 (#u80d98328-ba57-5d0e-b8cb-c694d46b1603) Friday, January 8th, 1960 (#u0d4aba2a-4ce8-5408-b01d-4e659836acdd) Saturday, January 9th, 1960 (#u4e69f296-f6f8-5ebe-bbb7-abd9d397dc5e) Sunday, January 10th, 1960 (#u58e42f77-2247-57b8-a54c-6f53e660a7f1) Friday, January 15th, 1960 (#u720f0d61-0505-5929-a452-6323d094bbeb) Saturday, January 16th, 1960 (#u01b1742a-4cc6-5862-a79b-da5734b2643c) Wednesday, January 20th, 1960 (#uf94088c2-d10c-5957-a4a7-55e4566116ff) Saturday, January 23rd, 1960 (#u45f4e730-5ce0-536a-985e-bc2c6d789b8c) Sunday, January 24th, 1960 (#u6525624a-c521-5a4d-bf12-98faab9b260c) Wednesday, February 3rd, 1960 (#u7093f935-de8b-52c0-99d5-5ceb02bf5828) Saturday, February 6th, 1960 (#u3e1449df-fcbf-5eda-9805-da493b46eb04) Monday, February 8th, 1960 (#uf43ec4b2-e76a-5190-ba00-2d604d64b19f) Tuesday, February 16th, 1960 (#uc01d1d72-b042-58d0-b2eb-298dbc5dcb71) Wednesday, February 17th, 1960 (#ucd047262-5cc5-5203-aba7-a945992dd27d) Saturday, February 20th, 1960 (#ud05e1a2f-03a4-59fa-a752-4982391f086c) Sunday, February 28th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, March 2nd, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Friday, March 11th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, March 28th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Friday, April 1st, 1960 (April Fool’s Day) (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, April 4th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Thursday, April 7th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, April 11th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Tuesday, April 12th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, April 25th, 1960 (Anzac Day) (#litres_trial_promo) Tuesday, April 26th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Friday, April 29th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Sunday, May 1st, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, May 11th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Thursday, May 12th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Saturday, May 14th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Saturday, May 28th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Sunday, May 29th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, May 30th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, June 6th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Thursday, June 23rd, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Tuesday, July 5th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Friday, July 22nd, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, August 24th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Sunday, September 11th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, September 12th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Tuesday, September 13th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, September 14th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Saturday, September 17th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Saturday, September 24th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Sunday, September 25th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, September 26th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, October 19th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, November 7th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Friday, November 11th, 1960 (My Birthday) (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, November 23rd, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Thursday, December 1st, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Saturday, December 10th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Sunday, December 25th, 1960 (Christmas Day) (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, December 28th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Friday, December 30th, 1960 (#litres_trial_promo) Sunday, January 1st, 1961 (New Year’s Day) (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, January 2nd, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Tuesday, January 3rd, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Thursday, January 5th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Saturday, January 7th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, January 9th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, January 11th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Friday, January 13th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Saturday, January 14th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Thursday, February 2nd, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, February 20th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Tuesday, February 21st, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, March 15th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Friday, March 24th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Tuesday, April 4th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, April 5th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Monday, April 10th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Friday, April 21st, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Wednesday, May 17th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Thursday, May 25th, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Saturday, June 3rd, 1961 (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Colleen McCullough (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Friday,January 1st, 1960 (New Year’s Day) (#ulink_e917787d-7a31-5dd5-a033-64b94f3a24b5) How on earth can I get rid of David? Don’t think that I haven’t contemplated murder, but I wouldn’t get away with murder any more than I got away with the bikini I bought myself with the five quid Granny gave me for Christmas. “Take it back, my girl, and bring home something one-piece with a modesty panel across the business area,” Mum said. Truth to tell, I was a bit horrified when the mirror showed me how much of me that bikini put on display, including sideburns of black pubic hair I’d never noticed when they lurked behind a modesty panel. The very thought of plucking out a million pubic hairs sent me back to exchange the bikini for an Esther Williams model in the latest colour, American Beauty. Sort of a rich, reddish pink. The shop assistant said I looked ravishing in it, but who is going to ravish me, with David Bloody Murchison hovering over my carcass like a dog guarding a bone? Certainly not David Bloody Murchison! It was up over the hundred today, so I went down to the beach to christen the new costume. The surf was running high, pretty unusual for Bronte, but the waves looked like green satin sausages—dumpers, no good for body surfing. I spread my towel on the sand, slathered zinc cream all over my nose, pulled on my matching American Beauty swim cap, and ran towards the water. “It’s too rough to go in, you’ll get dumped,” said a voice. David. David Bloody Murchison. If he suggests the safety of the kids’ bogey hole, I thought, girding my modesty-panelled loins, there is going to be a fight. “Let’s go round to the bogey hole, it’s safe,” he said. “And get flattened by kids bombing us? No!” I snarled, and launched into the fight. Though “fight” is not the correct word. I yell and carry on, David just looks superior and refuses to bite. But today’s fight produced a new rocket—I finally got up the gumption to inform him that I was tired of being a virgin. “Let’s have an affair,” I said. “Don’t be silly,” he said, unruffled. “I am not being silly! Everybody I know has had an affair—except me! Dammit, David, I’m twenty-one, and here I am engaged to a bloke who won’t even kiss me with his mouth open!” He patted me gently on one shoulder and sat down on his towel. “Harriet,” he announced in that toffee-nosed, super-genteel Catholic boys’ college voice of his, “it’s time we set a wedding date. I have my doctorate, the C.S.I.R.O. has offered me my own lab and a research grant, we’ve been going out together for four years, and engaged for one. Affairs are a sin. Marriage isn’t.” Grr! “Mum, I want to break off my engagement to David!” I said to her when I got home from the beach, my new costume unbaptised. “Then tell him so, dear,” she said. “Have you ever tried telling David Murchison that you don’t want to marry him any more?” I demanded. Mum giggled. “Well, no. I’m already married.” Oh, I hate it when Mum is funny at my expense! But I battled on. “The trouble is that I was only sixteen when I met him, seventeen when he started taking me out, and in those days it was terrific to have a boyfriend I didn’t need to fight off. But Mum, he’s so—so hidebound! Here I am of an age to consent, but he doesn’t treat me any differently than he did when I was a mere seventeen! I feel like a fly stuck in amber.” Mum’s a good stick, so she didn’t start moralising, though she did look a bit concerned. “If you don’t want to marry him, Harriet, then don’t. But he is a very good catch, dear. Handsome, well-built—and such a bright future ahead of him! Look at what’s happened to all your friends, especially Merle. They take up with chaps who just aren’t mature and sensible like David, so they keep getting hurt. Nothing comes of it. David’s stuck to you like glue, he always will.” “I know,” I said through my teeth. “Merle still nags me on the subject of David—he’s divine, I don’t know how lucky I am. But honestly, he’s a pain in the bum! I’ve been with him for so long that every other bloke I know thinks I’m already taken—I never have an opportunity to find out what the rest of the male world is like, dammit!” But she didn’t really listen. Mum and Dad approve of David, always have. Maybe if I’d had a sister, or been closer in age to my brothers—it’s hard being an accident of the wrong sex! I mean, there are Gavin and Peter in their middle thirties, still living at home, shagging hordes of women in the back of their van on top of a waterproof mattress, partnering Dad in our sporting goods shop and playing cricket in their spare time—the life of Riley! But I have to share a room with Granny, who pees in a potty which she empties on the grass at the bottom of the backyard. Pongs a treat. “Think yourself lucky, Roger, that I don’t chuck it on next-door’s washing” is all she says when Dad tries to remonstrate. What a good idea this diary is! I’ve encountered enough weird and wonderful psychiatrists to realise that I now have a “medium through which to vent frustrations and repressions”. It was Merle suggested I keep a diary—I suspect she’d like to peek in it whenever she visits, but no chance of that. I intend to store it propped against the skirting board underneath Granny’s bed right in line with Potty. Tonight’s wishes: No David Murchison in my life. No Potty in my life. No curried sausages in my life. A room all to myself. An engagement ring so that I could chuck it in David’s face. He said he wasn’t giving me one because it’s a waste of money. What a miser! Saturday,January 2nd, 1960 (#ulink_86ce7373-1759-59c4-8a56-1cb1f3148dde) I landed the job! After I sat my finals at the Sydney Tech last year, I applied to the Royal Queens Hospital X-ray Department for a position as a trained technician, and today the postie brought a letter of acceptance! I am to start this Monday as a senior X-ray technician at the biggest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere—more than a thousand beds! Makes Ryde Hospital, my old alma mater, look like a dinghy alongside the Queen Elizabeth. From where I am now, I should never have done my training at Ryde Hospital, but at the time I thought it was a brilliant idea when David suggested it. His elder brother, Ned, was a registrar there—a friend at court. Hah! He acted as my watchdog. Every time someone male gave me a come-hither look, Ned Bloody Murchison warned him off—I was his brother’s girl, so no poaching on taken preserves! In the early days I didn’t mind, but it became a colossal bog as I grew out of my teenage uncertainty and humility, started thinking occasionally that X or Y looked like he’d be fun to go out with. Training at Ryde did have one advantage, though. It takes two hours on public transport to get there from Bronte, and studying on public transport beats trying to study in the Purcell residence, between Granny and Mum watching television and the men usurping the whole evening to wash the dishes while they yarn cricket, cricket, cricket. Clint Walker and Efrem Zimbalist Junior in the lounge room, Keith Miller and Don Bradman in the kitchen, and no doors between all this and the only spot to study, the dining room table. Give me a bus or a train any day. Guess what? I topped everything! Highest marks possible. That’s why I got the job at Royal Queens. When the results came out, Mum and Dad nagged a bit because when I’d finished at Randwick High, I refused to go to Uni and do a degree in science or medicine. Topping X-ray rubbed my lack of ambition in, I suppose. But who wants to go to Uni and suffer the slings and arrows of all those males who don’t want women in men’s professions? Not me! Monday,January 4th, 1960 (#ulink_77f6af8e-972b-5360-93b6-e0b1f66c7a36) I started work this morning. Nine o’clock. Royal Queens is so much closer to Bronte than Ryde! If I walk the last mile-and-a-bit, I only have a twenty-minute bus ride. Because I applied at Tech, I’d never been to the place before, only gone past it on a few occasions when we went south to visit someone or have a picnic. What a place! It’s got its own shops, banks, post office, power plant, a laundry big enough to contract out to hotels, workshops, warehouses—you name it, Royal Queens has got it. Talk about a maze! It took me fifteen minutes at a fast clip to walk from the main gates to X-ray through just about every sort of architecture Sydney has produced for the last hundred or so years. Quadrangles, ramps, verandahs lined with pillars, sandstone buildings, red brick buildings, lots of those ghastly new buildings with glass on their outsides—stinking hot to work in! Judging by the number of people I passed, there must be ten thousand employees. The nurses are wrapped up in so many layers of starch that they look like green-and-white parcels. The poor things have to wear thick brown cotton stockings and flat-heeled brown lace-up shoes! Even Marilyn Monroe would have trouble looking seductive in opaque stockings and lace-up flatties. Their caps look like two white doves entwined, and they have celluloid cuffs and collars, hems mid-calf. The registered nursing sisters look the same, except that they don’t have aprons, flaunt Egyptian headdress veils instead of caps, and wear nylons—their lace-up shoes have two-inch block heels. Well, I’ve always known that I don’t have the temperament to take all that regimented, mindless discipline, any more than I have to put up with being maltreated by male Uni students protecting masculine turf. Us technicians just have to wear a white button-down-the-front uniform (hems below the knee), with nylons and moccasin flatties. There must be a hundred physios—I hate physios! I mean, what are physios except glorified masseuses? But boy, are they up themselves! They even starch their uniforms voluntarily! And they all have that gung-ho, jolly-hockey-stick-brigade air of superiority as they nip around smartly like army officers, baring their horsey teeth as they say things like “Jolly D!” and “Oh, supah!” It’s lucky I left home early enough to make that fifteen-minute walk yet still arrive at Sister Toppingham’s office on time. What a tartar! Pappy says that everyone calls her Sister Agatha, so I will too—behind her back. She’s about a thousand years old and was once a nursing sister—still wears the starched Egyptian headdress veil of a trained nurse. She’s the same shape as a pear, right down to the pear-shaped accent. Fraightfulleh-fraightfulleh. Her eyes are pale blue, cold as a frosty morning, and they looked through me as if I was a smear on the window. “You will commence, Miss Purcell, in Chests. Nice, easy lungs at first, don’t you know? I prefer that all new staff serve an orientation period doing something simple. Later on we shall see what you can really do, yes? Jolly good, jolly good!” Wacko, what a challenge! Chests. Shove ‘em against the upright bucky and get ‘em to hold their breath. When Sister Agatha said Chests, she meant OPD chests—the walking wounded, not the serious stuff. There are three of us doing routine chests, me and two junior trainees. But the darkrooms are in furious demand—we have to hustle our cassettes through at maximum speed, which means anyone who takes longer than nine minutes gets yelled at. This is a department of women, which amazes me. Very rare! X-ray technicians are paid the male award, so men flock to X-ray as a profession—at Ryde, almost all of us were men. I imagine the difference at Queens is Sister Agatha, therefore she can’t be all bad. I met the nurses’ aide in the dreary area where our lockers and the toilets live. I liked her at first glance, a lot more than any of the technicians I met today. My two trainees are nice kids, but both first-years, so a bit boring. Whereas Nurse-aide Papele Sutama is interesting. The name is outlandish—but then, so is its owner. Her eyes do have upper lids, but there’s definitely a lot of Chinese there, I thought when I saw her. Not Japanese, her legs are too shapely and straight. She confirmed the Chinese later on. Oh, just the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen! A mouth like a rosebud, cheekbones to die for, feathery eyebrows. She’s known as Pappy, and it suits her. A tiny little thing, about five feet tall, and very thin without looking as if she’s out of Belsen like those anorexia nervosa cases Psych sends me for routine chests—why on earth do teenage girls starve themselves? Back to Pappy, whose skin is like ivory silk. Pappy liked me too, so when she found out that I’d brought a cut lunch from home, she invited me to eat it with her on the grass outside the mortuary, which isn’t very far from X-ray, but Sister Agatha can’t see you from X-ray as she patrols. Sister Agatha doesn’t eat lunch, she’s too busy policing her empire. Of course we don’t get the full hour, especially on Mondays, when all the routine stuff from the weekend has to be squeezed in as well as the normal intake. However, Pappy and I managed to find out a great deal about each other in just thirty minutes. The first thing she told me was that she lives at Kings Cross. Phew! It’s the one part of Sydney that Dad put out of bounds—a den of iniquity, Granny calls it. Riddled with vice. I’m not sure exactly what vice is, apart from alcoholism and prostitution. There are a lot of both at Kings Cross, judging by what the Reverend Alan Walker has to say. Still, he’s a Metho—very righteous. Kings Cross is where Rosaleen Norton the witch lives—she’s always in the news for painting obscene pictures. What is an obscene picture—people copulating? I asked Pappy, but all she said was that obscenity is in the eye of the beholder. Pappy’s very deep, reads Schopenhauer, Jung, Bertrand Russell and people like that, but she told me that she doesn’t have a high opinion of Freud. I asked her why she wasn’t up at Sydney Uni, and she said she’d never had much formal schooling. Her mother was an Australian, her father Chinese from Singapore, and they got caught up in World War Two. Her father died, her mother went mad after four years in Changi prison camp—what tragic lives some people have! And here am I with nothing to complain about except David and Potty. Bronte born and bred. Pappy says that David is a mass of repressions, which she blames on his Catholic upbringing—she even has a name for the Davids of this world—”constipated Catholic schoolboys”. But I didn’t want to talk about him, I wanted to know what living at Kings Cross is like. Like any other place, she says. But I don’t believe that, it’s too notorious. I’m dying of curiosity! Wednesday,January 6th, 1960 (#ulink_4113a642-bb7d-51d6-8737-ea4072afd12b) It’s David again. Why can’t he get it through his head that someone who works in a hospital does not want to see some turgid monstrosity of a Continental film? It’s all very well for him, up there in his sterile, autoclaved little world where the most exciting thing that ever happens is a bloody mouse growing a bloody lump, but I work in one of those places where people suffer pain and sometimes even die! I am surrounded by gruesome reality—I cry enough, I’m depressed enough! So when I go to the pictures I want to laugh, or at least have a good old sniffle when Deborah Kerr gives up the love of her life because she’s in a wheelchair. Whereas the sort of films David likes are so depressing. Not sad, just depressing. I tried to tell him the above when he said he was taking me to see the new film at the Savoy Theatre. The word I used wasn’t depressing, it was sordid. “Great literature and great films are not sordid,” he said. I offered to let him harrow his soul in peace at the Savoy while I went to the Prince Edward to see a Western, but he gets this look on his face which long experience has taught me precedes a lecture that’s sort of a cross between a sermon and a harangue, so I gave in and went with him to the Savoy to see Gervaise—Zola, David explained as we came out. I felt like a wrung-out dishrag, which isn’t a bad comparison, actually. It all took place in a Victorian version of a giant laundry. The heroine was so young and pretty, but there wasn’t a man worth looking at within cooee—they were fat and bald. I think David might end up bald, his hair isn’t as thick as it was when I met him. David insisted on taking a taxi home, though I would far rather have walked briskly down to the Quay and grabbed the bus. He always lets the taxi go outside our place, then escorts me in up the side passage, where, in the dark, he puts a hand on either side of my waist and squishes my lip with three kisses so chaste that the Pope wouldn’t think it sinful to bestow them. After which he watches to see I’m safely in the back door, then walks the four blocks to his own house. He lives with his widowed mother, though he’s bought a roomy bungalow at Coogee Beach which he rents out to a family of New Australians from Holland—very clean, the Dutch, he told me. Oh, is there any blood in David’s veins? Never once has he put a finger, let alone a hand, on my breasts. What do I have them for? My big Bros were inside, making a cup of tea and killing themselves laughing at what had gone on in the side passage. Tonight’s wish: That I manage to save fifteen quid a week at this new job and save enough by the beginning of 1961 to take that two-year working holiday to England. Then I’ll lose David, who can’t possibly leave his bloody mice in case one grows a bloody lump. Thursday,January 7th, 1960 (#ulink_bd4423f9-e666-530f-ad97-4502c1a894e6) My curiosity about Kings Cross is going to be gratified on Saturday, when I am to have dinner at Pappy’s place. However, I shan’t tell Mum and Dad exactly whereabouts Pappy lives. I’ll just say it’s on the fringe of Paddington. Tonight’s wish: That Kings Cross isn’t a let-down. Friday,January 8th, 1960 (#ulink_92f7c867-65cf-52a7-a6f3-f1ca6c7f9876) Last night we had a bit of a crisis with Willie. It’s typical of Mum that she insisted on rescuing this baby cockatoo off the Mudgee road and rearing it. Willie was so scrawny and miserable that Mum started him off on a dropper of warm milk laced with the three-star hospital brandy we keep for Granny’s funny little turns. Then, because his beak wasn’t hard enough yet to crack seed, she switched to porridge laced with three-star hospital brandy. So Willie grew up into this gorgeous, fat white bird with a yellow comb and a daggy breast caked with dried porridge. Mum has always given him his porridge-and-brandy in the last of the Bunnyware saucers I had when I was a toddler. But yesterday she broke the Bunnyware saucer, so she put his dinner in a bilious green saucer instead. Willie took one look, flipped his uneaten dinner upside down and went bonkers—screeched high C without letting up until every dog in Bronte was howling and Dad had a visit from the Boys in Blue, who arrived in a paddy wagon. I daresay it’s all those years of reading whodunits sharpened my deductive powers, because, after a hideous night of a screeching parrot and a thousand howling dogs, I realised two facts. One, that parrots are intelligent enough to discern a saucer with cute little bunnies running around its rim from a saucer of bilious green. Two, that Willie is an alcoholic. When he saw the wrong saucer, he concluded that his porridge-and-brandy had been withdrawn, and went into withdrawal himself—hence the racket. Peace was finally restored to Bronte when I got home from work this afternoon. I’d grabbed a taxi at lunchtime and dashed into the city to buy a new Bunnyware saucer. Had to buy the cup as well—two pounds ten! But Gavin and Peter are good scouts, even if they are my big brothers. They each donated a third of the two-and-a-half quid, so I’m not much out of pocket. Silly, isn’t it? But Mum so loves that dippy bird. Saturday,January 9th, 1960 (#ulink_54e9957f-1f73-57cf-a213-9899cd397b67) Kings Cross is certainly not a let-down. I got off the bus at the stop before Taylor Square and walked the rest of the way with Pappy’s directions memorised. Apparently they don’t eat very early at Kings Cross, because I didn’t have to be there until eight, so by the time I got off the bus it was quite dark. Then as I passed Vinnie’s Hospital it began to rain—just a drizzle, nothing that my frilly pink brolly couldn’t handle. When I reached that huge intersection I believe is the actual Kings Cross, seeing it on foot with the streets wet and the dazzle of all those neons and car lights rippling across the water was completely different from whizzing through it in a taxi. It’s beautiful. I don’t know how the shopkeepers avoid the Sydney Blue Laws, because they were still open on a Saturday evening! Though it was a bit disappointing when I realised that my route didn’t lie along the Darlinghurst Road shops—I had to walk down Victoria Street, in which The House is situated. That’s what Pappy calls it, “The House”, and I know she says it with capital letters. As if it is an institution. So I admit that I hiked past the terraced houses of Victoria Street eagerly. I love the rows upon rows of old Victorian terraced houses inner Sydney has—not kept up these days, alas. All the lovely cast-iron lace has been ripped off and replaced by sheets of fibro to turn the balconies into extra rooms, and the plastered walls are dingy. Even so, they’re very mysterious. The windows are blanked out by Manchester lace curtains and brown-paper blinds, like closed eyes. They’ve seen so much. Our house at Bronte is only twenty-two years old; Dad built it after the worst of the Depression, when his shop started making money. So nothing’s happened in it except us, and we are boring. Our biggest crisis is Willie’s saucer—at least, that’s the only time the police have called on us. The House was a long way down Victoria Street, and as I walked I noticed that at this far end some of the terraced houses still had their cast-iron lace, were painted and well kept-up. Right at the end beyond Challis Avenue the street widened into a semicircular dead end. Apparently the Council had run out of tar, because the road was cobbled with little wooden blocks, and I noticed that within the semicircle no cars were parked. This gave the crescent of five terraced houses which filled it an air of not belonging to the present. They were all numbered 17—17a, b, c, d and e. The one in the middle, 17c, was The House. It had a fabulous front door of ruby glass etched in a pattern of lilies down to the clear glass underneath, the bevels glittering amber and purple from the light inside. It wasn’t locked, so I pushed it open. But the fairytale door led into a desert waste. A dingy hall painted dirty cream, a red cedar staircase leading upward, a couple of fly-dirt-speckled naked lightbulbs on long, twisted brown cords, awful old brown linoleum pitted from stiletto heels. From the skirting boards to a height of about four feet, every single bit of wall I could see was smothered in scribbles, aimless loops and whorls of many colours with the waxy look of crayon. “Hello!” I yelled. Pappy appeared from beyond the staircase, smiling a welcome. I think I stared quite rudely, she looked so different. Instead of that unflattering bright mauve uniform and hair-hiding cap, she wore a skin-tight tube of peacock blue satin embroidered in dragons, and it was split so far up her left leg that I could see the top of her stocking and a frilly lace suspender. Her hair cascaded down her back in a thick, straight, shining mass—why can’t I have hair like that? Mine is just as black, but it’s so curly that if I grew it long it’d stick out like a broom in an epileptic fit. So I hack mine really short with a pair of scissors. She led me through a door at the end of the passage beside the stairs and we emerged into another, much shorter hall which went sideways and seemed to end in the open air. It held only the one door, which Pappy opened. Inside was Dreamland. The room was so chocka with books that the walls were invisible, just books, books, books, floor up to ceiling, and there were stacks of books lying around that I suspect she’d cleared off her chairs and table in order to entertain me. During the course of the evening I tried to count them, but there were too many. Her collection of lamps knocked me sideways, they were so gorgeous. Two dragonfly stained-glass ones, an illuminated globe of the world on a stand, kerosene lamps from Indonesia converted to electricity, one that looked like a white chimney six feet tall, overlaid with slashed purple swellings. The ceiling bulb was inside a Chinese paper lantern dripping silk tassels. Then she proceeded to cook food that bore no relationship to the chow-meow from Hoo Flung’s up Bronte Road. My tongue smarting gently from ginger and garlic, I shovelled in three helpings. There is nothing wrong with my appetite, though I never manage to keep enough weight on to graduate from a B to a C cup bra. Darn. Jane Russell is a full D cup, but I’ve always thought that Jayne Mansfield is only a B cup on top of a huge rib cage. When we’d finished and drunk a pot of fragrant green tea, Pappy announced that it was time to go upstairs and meet Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. The landlady. When I remarked that it was a peculiar name, Pappy grinned. She led me back to the front hall and the red cedar staircase. As I followed her up, consumed with curiosity, I noticed that the crayon scribbles didn’t stop. Rather, they increased. The stairs continued upward to a higher floor, but we went forward to a huge room at the front of the house, and Pappy pushed me inside. If you want to find a room that is the exact opposite of Pappy’s, this one is it. Bare. Except for the scribbles, which were so thick that there wasn’t a scrap of space for more. Maybe because of that, one section had been roughly painted over, apparently to provide the artist with a fresh canvas, as a few scribbles already adorned it. The place could have held six lounge suites and a dining table to seat twelve, but it was mostly empty. There was a rusty chrome kitchen table with a red laminex top, four rusty chairs with the padding of their red plastic seats oozing out like pus from a carbuncle, a velvet couch suffering from a bad attack of alopecia, and an up-to-the-minute refrigerator/freezer. A pair of glass-panelled doors led out onto the balcony. “Out here, Pappy!” someone called. We emerged onto the balcony to find two women standing there. The one I saw first was clearly from the Harbourside Eastern Suburbs or the upper North Shore—blue-rinsed hair, a dress that came from Paris, matching shoes, bag and gloves in burgundy kid, and a weeny hat much smarter than the ones Queen Elizabeth wears. Then Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz stepped forward, and I forgot all about the middle-aged fashion plate. Phew! What a mountain of a woman! Not that she was fat, more that she was gigantic. A good six foot four in those dirty old slippers with their backs trodden down, and massively muscled. No stockings. A faded, unironed old button-down-the-front house dress with a pocket on either hip. Her face was round, lined, snub-nosed and absolutely dominated by her eyes, which looked straight into my soul, pale blue with dark rings around the irises, little pupils as sharp as twin needles. She had thin grey hair cut as short as a man’s, and eyebrows that hardly showed against her skin. Age? On the wrong side of fifty by several years, I reckon. As soon as she let my eyes go, my medical training clicked in. Acromegaly? Cushing’s Syndrome? But she didn’t have the huge lower jaw or the jutting forehead of the acromegalic, nor did she have the physique or hairiness of a Cushing’s. Something pituitary or midbrain or hypothalamic, for sure, but what, I didn’t know. The fashion plate nodded politely to Pappy and me, brushed past us and departed with Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz in her wake. Because I was standing in the doorway, I saw the visitor reach into her bag, withdraw a thick wad of brick-coloured notes—tenners!—and hand them over a few at a time. Pappy’s landlady just stood there with her hand out until she was satisfied with the number of notes. Then she folded them and slipped them into one pocket while the fashion plate from Sydney’s most expensive suburbs left the room. Back came Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz to throw herself onto a mate of the four chairs inside, bidding us sit on two more with a sweep of a hand the size of a leg of lamb. “Siddown, princess, siddown!” she roared. “How the hell are youse, Miss Harriet Purcell? Good name, that—two sets of seven letters—strong magic! Spiritual awareness and good fortune, happiness through perfected labour—and I don’t mean them lefty politicians, hur-hur-hur.” The “hur-hur-hur” is a kind of wicked chuckle that speaks volumes; as if there is nothing in the world could surprise her, though everything in the world amuses her greatly. It reminded me of Sid James’s chuckle in the Carry On films. I was so nervous that I picked up her comments about my name and regaled her with the history of the Harriet Purcells, told her the name went back many generations, but that, until my advent, its owners had all been quite cuckoo. One Harriet Purcell, I said, had been jailed for castrating a would-be lover, and another for assaulting the Premier of New South Wales during a suffragette rally. She listened with interest, sighed in disappointment when I finished my tale by saying that my father’s generation had been so afraid of the name that it didn’t contain a Harriet Purcell. “Yet your dad christened you Harriet,” she said. “Good man! Sounds like he might be fun to know, hur-hur-hur.” Oooooo-aa! Hands off my dad, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz! “He said he liked the name Harriet, and he wasn’t impressed by family claptrap,” I said. “I was a bit of an afterthought, you see, and everybody thought I’d be another boy.” “But you wasn’t,” she said, grinning. “Oh, I like it!” During all of this, she drank undiluted, uniced three-star hospital brandy out of a Kraft cheese spread glass. Pappy and I were each given a glass of it, but one sip of Willie’s downfall made me abandon mine—dreadful stuff, raw and biting. I noticed that Pappy seemed to enjoy the taste, though she didn’t glug it nearly as fast as Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz did. I’ve been sitting here debating whether I might save a lot of writer’s cramp by shortening that name to Mrs. D-S, but somehow I don’t have the courage. I don’t lack courage, but Mrs. D-S? No. Then I became aware that someone else was on the balcony with us, had been there all along but stayed absolutely invisible. My skin began to prickle, I felt a delicious chill, like the first puff of a Southerly Buster after days and days of a century-mark heatwave. A face appeared above the table, peering from around Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s hip. The most bewitching little face, chin pointed, cheekbones high beneath the orbits, flawless beige skin, drifts of palest brown hair, black brows, black lashes so long they looked tangled—oh, I wish I was a poet, to describe that divine child! My chest caved in, I just looked at her and loved her. Her eyes were enormous, wide apart and amber-brown, the saddest eyes I have ever seen. Her little pink rosebud mouth parted, and she smiled at me. I smiled back. “Oh, decided to join the party, have youse?” The next moment the little thing was on Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s knee, still with her face turned to smile at me, but plucking at Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s dress with one tiny hand. “This is me daughter, Flo,” said the landlady. “Thought I had the Change four years ago, then got a pain in the belly and went to the dunny thinkin’ I had a dose of the shits. And—bang! There was Flo, squirmin’ on the floor all covered with slime. Never even knew I was up the duff until she popped out—lucky I didn’t drown youse in the dunny, ain’t that right, angel?” This last was said to Flo, who was fiddling with a button. “How old is she?” I asked. “Just turned four. A Capricorn who ain’t a Capricorn,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, casually unbuttoning her dress. Out flopped a breast which looked like an old stocking with its toe stuffed with beans, and she stuck its huge, horny nipple in Flo’s mouth. Flo shut her eyes ecstatically, leaned back into her mother’s arm and began to suck away with long, horribly audible slurps. I sat there with my mouth catching flies, unable to think of a thing to say. The X-ray vision lifted to focus on me. “Loves her mother’s milk, does Flo,” she said chattily. “I know she’s four, yeah, but what’s age got to do with it, princess? Best tucker of all, mother’s milk. Only thing is, her teeth are all in, so she hurts like hell.” I went on sitting there with my mouth catching flies until Pappy said, quite suddenly, “Well, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, what do you think?” “I think The House needs Miss Harriet Purcell,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz with a nod and a wink. Then she looked at me and asked, “Ever think of movin’ outta home, princess? Like into a nice little flat of your own?” My mouth shut with a snap, I shook my head. “I can’t afford it,” I answered. “I’m saving to go to England on a two-year working holiday, you see.” “Do youse pay board at home?” she asked. I said I paid five pounds a week. “Well, I got a real nice little flat out in the backyard, two big rooms, four quid a week, electricity included. There’s a bath and dunny inside the laundry that only you and Pappy’d use. Janice Harvey, me tenant, is movin’ out. It’s got a double bed,” she added with a leer. “Hate them piddly-arse little single beds.” Four pounds! Two rooms for four pounds? A Sydney miracle! “You stand a better chance of getting rid of David living here than at home,” said Pappy persuasively. She shrugged. “After all, you’re on a male award, you could still save for your trip.” I remember swallowing, hunting desperately for a polite way to say no, but suddenly I was saying yes! I don’t know where that yes came from—I certainly wasn’t thinking yes. “Ripper-ace, princess!” boomed Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, flipped the nipple out of Flo’s mouth and lumbered to her feet. As my eyes met Flo’s, I knew why I’d said yes. Flo put the word into my mind. Flo wanted me here, and I was putty. She came over to me and hugged my legs, smiling up at me with milky lips. “Will youse look at that?” Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz exclaimed, grinning at Pappy. “Be honoured, Harriet. Flo don’t usually take to people, do you, angel?” So here I am, trying to write it all down before the edges blur, wondering how on earth I’m going to break it to my family that, very shortly, I am moving into two big rooms at Kings Cross, home to alcoholics, prostitutes, homosexuals, satanic artists, glue-sniffers, hashish-smokers and God knows what else. Except that what I saw of it in the rainy dark I liked, and that Flo wants me in The House. I’d said to Pappy that perhaps I could say that The House was in Potts Point, not Kings Cross, but Pappy only laughed. “Potts Point is a euphemism, Harriet,” she said. “The Royal Australian Navy owns Potts Point whole and entire.” Tonight’s wish: That the parents don’t have a stroke. Sunday,January 10th, 1960 (#ulink_99f12e44-e337-5f0f-a71a-7bb5f090786e) I haven’t told them yet. Still getting up the courage. When I went to bed last night—Granny was snoring a treat—I was sure that when I woke up this morning, I would change my mind. But I haven’t. The first thing I saw was Granny squatting over Potty, and the iron entered my soul. That’s such a good phrase! I never realised until I started writing this that I seem to have picked up all sorts of good phrases from reading. They don’t surface in conversation, but they certainly do on paper. And though this is only a few days old, I’m already well into a fat exercise book, and I’m quite addicted. Maybe that’s because I can never sit still and think, I always have to be doing something, so now I’m killing two birds with the same stone. I get to think about what’s happening to me, yet I’m doing something at the same time. There’s a discipline about writing the stuff down, I see it better. Just like my work. I give it all my attention because I enjoy it. I haven’t quite made up my mind about Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, though I do like her very much. She reminds me of some of my more memorable patients, those who manage to stay with me for as long as I’ve been doing X-rays, maybe are going to stay with me for the rest of my life. Like the dear old bloke from Lidcombe State Hospital who kept neatly pleating his blanket. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was folding sail, and then, when I settled to talk to him, he told me he’d been bosun on a windjammer, one of the wheat clippers used to scud home to England loaded to the gunwales with grain. His words, not mine. I learned a lot, then realised that very shortly he was going to die, and all those experiences would die with him because he’d never written them down. Well, Kings Cross is not a windjammer, and I’m no sailor, but if I write it all down, someone sometime in remote posterity might read it, and they’d know what sort of life I lived. Because I have a funny feeling that it isn’t going to be the boring old suburban life I was facing last New Year’s Day. I feel like a snake shedding its skin. Tonight’s wish: That the parents don’t have a stroke. Friday,January 15th, 1960 (#ulink_4e51df4e-9a82-5641-90f6-da5776d64cc9) I still haven’t told them, but it’s going to happen tomorrow night. When I asked Mum if David could eat steak-and-chips with us, she said of course; best, I think, to wallop the whole lot of them at the same time. That way, maybe David will get used to the idea before he has enough time alone with me to nag and hector me out of it. How I dread his lectures! But Pappy is right, it is going to be easier to get rid of David if I don’t live at home. That thought alone has kept my course steering for the Cross, as the natives call it. Up at the Cross, to be exact. I saw a man today at work, on the ramp leading from X-ray to Chichester House, which is the posh red brick building housing the Private Patients in the lap of luxury. A room and a bathroom each, no less, instead of a bed in a row of about twenty down either side of a whacking great ward. Must be awfully nice not to have to lie listening to half the patients vomiting, spitting, hacking or raving. Though there’s no doubt that listening to half the patients vomiting, spitting, hacking or raving is a terrific incentive to get better and get out, or else get the dying over and done with. The man. Sister Agatha grabbed me as I finished hanging some films in the drying cabinet—so far I haven’t had one ponk film, which awes my two juniors into abject submission. “Miss Purcell, kindly run these to Chichester Three for Mr. Naseby-Morton,” she said, waving an X-ray envelope at me. Sensing her displeasure, I took it and hared off. Pappy would have been first on her invitation list, which meant Sister Agatha hadn’t been able to find her. Or else she was holding a vomit bowl or dealing with a bedpan, of course. Mine not to reason why—I hared off like the juniorest junior to the Private Hospital. Very swanky, Chichester House! The rubber floors have such a shine on them that I could see Sister Chichester Three’s pink bloomers reflected there, and you could open a florist shop on the amount of flowers dotted around the corridors on expensive pedestals. It was so quiet that when I bounded off the top step at Chichester Three level, six different people glared at me and put fingers to lips. Ssssssh! Oooooo-aa! So I looked contrite, handed the films over and tiptoed away like Margot Fonteyn. Halfway down the ramp I saw a group of doctors approaching—an Honorary Medical Officer and his court of underlings. You don’t spend a day working in any hospital without becoming aware that the H.M.O. is God, but God at Royal Queens is a much superior God to God at Ryde Hospital. Here, they wear navy pinstriped or grey flannel suits, Old School ties, French-cuffed shirts with discreet but solid gold links, brown suede or black kid thin-soled shoes. This specimen wore grey flannel and brown suede shoes. With him were two registrars (long white coats), his senior and junior residents (white suits and white shoes), and six medical students (short white coats) with stethoscopes ostentatiously displayed and nail-bitten hands full of slide cases or test tube racks. Yes, a very senior version of God, to have so many dancing attendance on him. That was what caught my attention. Doing routine chests doesn’t bring one into contact with God, senior or junior, so I was curious. He was talking with great animation to one registrar, fine head thrown back, and I think I had to slow down and shut my mouth, which does have a tendency to catch flies these days. Oh, what a lovely man! Very tall, a good pair of shoulders, a flat tummy. A lot of dark red hair with a kink in it and two snow-white wings, very slightly freckled skin, chiselled features—yes, he was a lovely man. They were talking about osteomalacia, so I catalogued him as an orthopod. Then as I slid by them—they did rather take up all the ramp—I found myself being searchingly regarded by a pair of greenish eyes. Phew! My chest caved in for the second time in a week, though this wasn’t a surge of love like Flo’s. This was a sort of breathless attraction. My knees sagged. At lunch I quizzed Pappy about him, armed with my theory that he was an orthopod. “Duncan Forsythe,” she said without hesitation. “He’s the senior Honorary Medical Officer on Orthopaedics. Why do you ask?” “He gave me an old-fashioned look,” I said. Pappy stared. “Did he? That’s odd coming from him, he’s not one of the Queens Lotharios. He’s very much married and known as the nicest H.M.O. in the whole place—a thorough gentleman, never chucks instruments at Sister Theatre or tells filthy jokes or picks on his junior resident, no matter how ham-fisted or tactless.” I dropped the subject, though I’m sure I didn’t imagine it. He hadn’t stripped the clothes off me with his eyes or anything silly like that, but the look he gave me was definitely man-woman. And as far as I’m concerned, he’s the most attractive man I’ve ever seen. The senior H.M.O.! Young for that post, he couldn’t be more than forty. Tonight’s wish: That I see more of Mr. Duncan Forsythe. Saturday,January 16th, 1960 (#ulink_f1a04dc6-18c1-5911-8afb-fbea6c4e2e8d) Well, I did it at the dinner table tonight, with David present. Steak-and-chips is everybody’s favourite meal, though it’s hard on Mum, who has to keep frying T-bones in a huge pan and keep an eye on the deep fryer at the same time. Gavin and Peter get through three each, and even David eats two. The pudding was Spotted Dick and custard, very popular, so the whole table was in a contented mood when Mum and Granny put the teapot down. Time for me to strike. “Guess what?” I asked. No one bothered to answer. “I’ve rented a flat at Kings Cross and I’m moving out.” No one answered that either, but all the sounds stopped. The tinkling of spoons in cups, Granny’s slurps, Dad’s cigarette cough. Then Dad pulled out his packet of Ardaths, offered it to Gavin and Peter, then lit all three of their smokes off the same match—oooooo-aa, that was trouble! “Kings Cross,” said Dad finally, staring at me very steely. “My girl, you’re a fool. At least I hope you’re a fool. Only fools, Bohemians and tarts live at Kings Cross.” “I am not a fool, Dad,” I said valiantly, “and I am not a tart or a Bohemian either. Though these days they call Bohemians Beatniks. I’ve found myself a most respectable flat in a most respectable house which just happens to be at the Cross—the better end of the Cross, near Challis Avenue. Potts Point, really.” “The Royal Australian Navy owns Potts Point,” Dad said. Mum looked as if she was going to cry. “Why, Harriet?” “Because I’m twenty-one and I need space of my own, Mum. Now I’m through training, I’m earning good money, and flats at Kings Cross are cheap enough for me to live yet still save to go to England next year. If I moved out to some other place, I’d have to share with two or three other girls, and I can’t see that that’s any better than living at home.” David didn’t say a thing, just sat on Dad’s right looking at me as if I’d grown another head. “Well, come on, bright boy,” Gavin growled at him, “what have you got to say?” “I disapprove,” David answered with ice in his voice, “but I would rather talk to Harriet on her own.” “Well, I reckon it’s bonza,” said Peter, and leaned over to give me a cuff on the arm. “You need more space, Harry.” That seemed to decide Dad, who sighed. “Well, there isn’t a lot I can do to stop you, is there? At least it’s closer than old Mother England. If you get into trouble, I can always yank you out of Kings Cross.” Gavin burst into a bellow of laughter, leaned across the table with his tie in the butter and kissed my cheek. “Bully for you, Harry!” he said. “End of the first innings, and you’re still at the crease. Keep your bat ready to deal with the googlies!” “When did you decide all this?” Mum asked, blinking hard. “When Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz offered me the flat.” The name sounded very peculiar said in our house. Dad frowned. “Missus who?” asked Granny, who had sat looking rather smug throughout. “Delvecchio Schwartz. She’s the landlady.” I remembered a fact I hadn’t mentioned. “Pappy lives there, that’s how I got to meet Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz.” “I knew that Chinky girl was going to be a bad influence,” Mum said. “Since you’ve met her, you haven’t bothered with Merle.” I put my chin up. “Merle hasn’t bothered with me, Mum. She’s got a new boyfriend, and she can’t see any farther. I’ll only come back into favour with her when he dumps her.” “Is it a proper flat?” Dad asked. “Two rooms. I share a bathroom with Pappy.” “It isn’t hygienic to share a bathroom,” said David. I lifted my lip at him. “I share a bathroom here, don’t I?” That shut him up. Mum decided to bite the bullet. “Well,” she said, “I daresay you’ll need china and cutlery and cooking utensils. Linen. You can have your own bed sheets from here.” I never thought, the answer just popped out. “No, I can’t, Mum. I’ve got a whole double bed to myself! Isn’t that terrific?” They sat gaping at me as if they envisioned the double bed with a bus conductor’s bag on the end of it to collect the fees. “A double bed?” asked David, paling. “That’s right, a double bed.” “Single girls sleep in single beds, Harriet.” “Well, that is as may be, David,” I snapped, “but this single girl is going to sleep in a double bed!” Mum leaped to her feet. “Boys, the dishes don’t wash themselves!” she chirped. “Granny, it’s time for 77 Sunset Strip.” “Kooky, Kooky, lend me your comb!” carolled Granny, skipping up lightly. “Well, well, did you ever? Harriet’s moving out and I’ve got a room to myself! I think I’ll have a double bed, hee-hee!” Dad and the Bros cleared the table in double-quick time, and left me alone with David. “What brought this on?” he asked, tight-lipped. “Lack of privacy.” “You have something better than mere privacy, Harriet. You have a home and a family.” I pounded my fist on the table. “Why are you such a myopic git, David? I share a room with Granny and Potty, and I have nowhere to spread my things without picking them up the minute I’ve finished with them! Whatever space I have here is also occupied by others. So now I’m going to luxuriate in my own space.” “At Kings Cross.” “Yes, at Kings bloody Cross! Where the rents are affordable.” “In a lodging house run by a foreigner. A New Australian.” That killed me, I laughed in his face. “Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, a foreigner? She’s an Aussie, with an Aussie accent you could cut with a knife!” “That is an even greater indictment,” he said. “An Australian with a name that’s half Italian and half Jewish? At the very least, she married beneath her.” “You bloody snob!” I gasped. “You bigoted git! What’s so posh about Australians? We all came out as bloody convicts! At least our New Australians have come out as free settlers!” “With SS numbers tattooed in their armpits or tuberculosis or stinking of garlic!” he snarled. “And ‘free settlers’ is right—they all came out here for a mere ten-pound subsidised passage!” That did it. I jumped up and started whacking him on both sides of his head right over his ears. Wham, wham, wham! “Piss off, David, just bloody piss off!” I yelled. He pissed off, with a look in his eyes that said I was having one of Those Days, and he’d be back to try again. So there you have it. I do like my family—they’re good scouts. But David is exactly what Pappy called him—a constipated Catholic schoolboy. Thank heavens I’m Church of England. Wednesday,January 20th, 1960 (#ulink_4e3da814-e895-5335-afe6-68c6e65a25ad) I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to sit and write this, but things are looking all right. I managed to talk Dad and the Bros out of inspecting my new premises (I went last Sunday to have a look, and they’re not fit yet for inspection), and I’m working like stink to get my things together for next Saturday’s move. Mum has been colossal. I’ve got heaps of china, cutlery, linen and cooking utensils, and Dad shoved a hundred pounds at me with a gruff explanation that he didn’t want me touching my savings for England to buy what by rights belonged in my Hope Chest anyway. Gavin presented me with a tool kit and a multimeter and Peter donated his “old” hi-fi, explaining that he needed a better one. Granny gave me a bottle of 4711 eau de Cologne and a set of doilies she’d crocheted for my Hope Chest. There’s a sort of an archway between my bedroom and my living room in my new flat—no door—so I’m going to use some of Dad’s hundred quid to buy glass beads and make my own bead curtain. The ones you can buy are plastic, look awful and sound worse. I want something that chimes. Pink. I’m going to have a pink flat because it’s the one colour no one at Bronte will permit anywhere. And I like pink. It’s warm and feminine, and it cheers me up. Besides, I look good against it, which is more than I can say for yellow, blue, green and crimson. I’m too dark. My flat is in the open air passage that goes down alongside Pappy’s room and leads to the laundry and the backyard. The rooms are big and have very high ceilings, but the fixings are pretty basic. There’s a kitchen area with a sink, an ancient gas stove and a fridge, and it’s impossible to make it look nice, so I rang Ginge the head porter at Ryde and asked him if he could find me an old hospital screen—no trouble, he said, then started moaning about how dull the place is since I left. What rubbish! One X-ray technician? The Ryde District Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital isn’t that small. Ginge was always one to exaggerate. Matron came to visit X-ray yesterday. What a tartar she is! If the H.M.O. is God, Matron has equal rank with the Virgin Mary, and I think virginity is a prerequisite for the job, so it isn’t an invalid comparison. No man would ever get up the courage, it would take a dove flying in the window to quicken any matron. They’re always battleships in full sail, but I must say that the Queens Matron is a very trim craft. Only about thirty-five, tall, good figure, red-gold hair, aquamarine eyes, beautiful face. You can’t see much of the hair for the Egyptian headdress veil, of course, but the colour’s definitely not out of a dye bottle. Her eyes would freeze a tropical lagoon, though. Glacial. Arctic. Oooooo-aa! I felt rather sorry for her, actually. She’s the Queen of Queens, so she can’t possibly be a woman too. If you want to slap a coat of paint on a wall or you stick up a poster to amuse the patients, Matron decides what colour the paint will be or if the poster can stay there. She wears a pair of white cotton gloves, and while she can’t do it in X-ray (strictly speaking, she’s the guest of Sister Agatha in X-ray), on all ground where nurses work or play she runs the tip of one finger along skirting boards, window ledges, you name it, and God help a ward sister whose premises produce the faintest tinge of grey on that white glove! She heads the domestic as well as the nursing staff, she ranks equally with the General Medical Superintendent, and she’s a member of the Hospital Board, which I have found out is chaired by Sir William Edgerton-Smythe, who just happens to be my dishy Mr. Duncan Forsythe’s uncle. The reason why he’s senior H.M.O. of Orthopaedics at his age becomes clearer. Unk must have been a great help. What a pity. I rather thought, looking at Mr. Forsythe, that he was the sort of man who doesn’t stoop to string-pulling Upstairs. Why do idols always turn out to have feet of clay? Anyway, I was introduced to Matron, who shook my hand for the precise number of milliseconds courtesy and rank demand. Whereas when I met Sister Agatha, she stared straight through me, Matron held my eyes ? la Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. It seems Matron came to discuss the purchase of one of those new rotating set-ups for X-ray theatres, but a tour of the whole place was obligatory. Tonight’s wish: That I stop thinking of Forsythe the Crawler. Saturday,January 23rd, 1960 (#ulink_45caeb35-fd55-515b-8ae1-5620d30c0f5d) I’m here! I’m in! I hired a taxi truck this morning and hied myself and my cardboard cartons full of loot to 17c Victoria Street. The driver was a great bloke, never passed any sort of remark, just helped me inside with my loot, took the tip graciously, and pissed off to his next job. One of the cartons was chocka with tins of pink paint—ta much for the hundred quid, Dad—and another held about ten million assorted pink glass beads. I started in without any further ado. Got out the drum of ether soap (handy to work in a hospital and know the value of ether soap), my rags and scrubbing brush and steel wool, and set about cleaning. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz had said she’d clean it up when she showed me the place, and she hasn’t done a bad job, really, but there are cockroach droppings everywhere. I’ll have to ring Ginge at Ryde again and ask him for some of his cockroach poison. I hate the things, they’re loaded with germs—well, they live in sewers, drains and muck. I scrubbed and scoured until Nature called, then went out to look for the toilet, which I remembered was in the laundry shed. Pretty awful, the laundry shed. No wonder Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz didn’t include it in the tour. It has a gas-fired copper on a meter that eats pennies and two walloping big concrete tubs with an ancient mangle bolted to the floor. The bathroom is behind it to one side. There’s an old tub with half its enamel missing, and when I put my hand on it, it tipped down with a thump—one of its ball-and-claw feet has been knocked off. A wooden block will help that, but nothing short of several coats of bicycle enamel will help the bath itself. A gas geyser on the wall provides hot water—another meter, more pennies. The wooden latticed mat I put straight into a laundry tub for a soak in ether soap. The toilet was in its own wee (good pun!) room, and it’s a work of art—English china from the last century, its bowl adorned inside and out with cobalt blue birds and creepers. The cistern, very high on the wall and connected to the bowl by a squashed lead pipe, is also blue birds. I sat down pretty gingerly on the old wooden seat, though it is actually very clean—the thing is so high off the floor that even I can’t pee without sitting down. The chain is equipped with a matching china knob, and when I pulled on it, Niagara Falls cascaded into the bowl. I’ve worked all day and never seen a soul. Not that I had expected to see anybody, but I’d thought that I’d hear Flo in the distance—little kids are always laughing and squealing when they’re not bawling. But the whole place was as silent as the grave. Where Pappy was, I had no idea. Mum had provided a hamper of edibles, so I had plenty of fuel for all the hard labour. But I wasn’t used to being so absolutely alone. Very strange. The living room and the bedroom each had only one power point, but as I’m very knacky at stringing my own power, I got out Gavin’s tool kit and multimeter and popped in a few extra outlets. Then I had to go to the front verandah to examine the fuse box. Yep, there was me! One of those ceramic plug-ins with a piece of three-amp wire between its poles. I took it out, shoved a fifteen-amp wire in it, and was just closing the box when this crew-cut young bloke in a rumpled suit with tie askew came through the gate. “Hullo,” I said, thinking he was a tenant. “New here, eh?” was his answer. I said I was, then waited to see what happened next. “Whereabouts are you?” he asked. “Out the back near the laundry.” “Not in the front ground floor flat?” I produced a scowl, which, when you’re as dark as I am, can be very fierce. “What business is it of yours?” I demanded. “Oh, it’s my business all right.” He reached inside his coat and produced a scuffed leather wallet, flipped it open. “Vice Squad,” he said. “What’s your name, Miss?” “Harriet. What’s yours?” “Norm. What do you do for a living?” I finished closing the fuse box door and put my hand under his elbow with a sultry look modelled on Jane Russell. At least I think it was sultry. “A cup of tea?” I asked. “Ta,” he said with alacrity, and let me escort him inside. “If you’re on the game, you’re awful clean about it,” he said, looking around my living room while I put the kettle on. Pennies! I’ll have to buy bags of the ruddy things, there are so many gas meters to feed. “I’m not on the game, Norm, I’m a senior X-ray technician at Royal Queens Hospital,” I said, pottering about. “Oh! Pappy brought you here.” “You know Pappy?” “Who doesn’t? But she doesn’t charge, so she’s apples.” I gave him a cuppa, poured one for myself, and found some sweet bikkies Mum had put in the hamper. We dunked them in our tea in silence for a minute, then I started to pump him about Vice. What a beaut learning experience! Norm was not only a mine of information, he was what Pappy would call a “complete pragmatist”. You couldn’t keep prostitution out of the social equation, no matter what all the wowsers like archbishops and cardinals and Metho ministers said, he explained, so the thing was to keep it quiet and orderly. Every girl on the street had her territory, and the trouble started when a new girl tried to poach on an established beat. All hell would break loose. “Teeth and nails, teeth and nails,” he said, taking another crunchy bikky. “Then the pimps get out their knives and razors.” “Um, so you don’t arrest known prostitutes?” I asked. “Only when the wowsers start making it impossible not to—stir up the Mothers’ Leagues and the Legions of Decency from the pulpit—flamin’ pains in the arse, wowsers. Jeez, I hate them! But,” he went on, suppressing his emotions, “your front ground floor flat is always a problem because 17c isn’t in the trade. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz tries, but they come in all sorts, and then the feathers get ruffled in 17b and 17d.” Front ground floor flats at the Cross, I discovered, are just ideal for a girl on the game. You can bring the customers in via the French doors onto the verandah and shove them out the same way fifteen minutes later. And no matter who Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz puts in our front ground floor flat, that woman or women always turn out to be on the game. I did a bit more probing, and learned that the two houses on either side of The House were brothels. What would Dad say about that? Not that I am going to tell him. “Do you raid the brothels next door?” I asked. Norm—a nice-looking bloke, by the by—looked utterly horrified. “I should bloody think not! They’re the two poshest brothels in Sydney, cater to the very best clients. Sydney City Councilmen, politicians, judges, industrialists. If we raided them, we’d get strung up by the balls.” “Ooooooo-aa!” I said. So we finished our tea and I chucked him out, but not before he’d invited me up to the Piccadilly pub ladies’ lounge for a beer next Saturday afternoon. I accepted. Norm didn’t even know there was a David Murchison on my horizon—oh, thank you, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz! Here less than twelve hours, and I already have a date. I don’t think that Norm is going to be my first affair, but he’s definitely presentable enough to have a beer with. And a kiss? Tonight’s wish: That my life overflows with interesting men. Sunday,January 24th, 1960 (#ulink_d9a2795b-9fc4-55d7-866b-76a069b62718) I met several of The House’s tenants today. The first two happened after I’d had a bath (there’s no shower) and decided to visit the backyard. One of the things about Victoria Street that had intrigued me was that it had no streets or lanes leading off its left side, that our little cul-de-sac was a dead end, that there aren’t any houses lower than number 17. The brick paving of my side passage continued in the backyard proper, which was crisscrossed with washing lines, a good few of them festooned in sheets, towels, and clothes which seemed to belong to a man and a woman. Cute little lace-trimmed Gorgeous Gussie panties, boxer shorts, men’s shirts, girls’ bras and blouses. I pushed through them—they were dry—and discovered why there were no side streets off the left side, and why we were a dead end. Victoria Street was perched on top of a sixty-foot sandstone cliff! Below me the slate roofs of Woolloomooloo’s rows of terraced houses marched off toward the Domain—for this time of year, its grass is lovely and green. I like the way it divides Woolloomooloo from the City, though I never realised it did until I stood at the back fence to look. All those new buildings in the City! So many storeys. But I can still see the AWA tower. To the right of Woolloomooloo is the Harbour, flaked with white because it’s Sunday and the whole world has gone sailing. What a view! Though I’m very happy with my flat, I felt a twinge of envy for the inhabitants of 17c who are upstairs and whose flats look this way. Heaven, for a very few quid a week. When I parted the sheets to go back to my painting, a young man carrying an empty basket was striding down the passage. “Hullo, you must be the famous Harriet Purcell,” he said as he reached me and stuck out a long, thin, elegant hand. I was too busy staring to take it as quickly as I ought have. “I’m Jim Cartwright,” “he” said. Oooooo-aa! A Lesbian! Close up it was obvious that Jim was not a man, even one with a limp wrist, but she was dressed in men’s trousers—fly up the front instead of side placket—and a cream men’s shirt with the cuffs folded up one turn. Fashionable men’s haircut, not a trace of make-up, big nose, very fine grey eyes. I shook her hand and said I was delighted, whereupon she left off laughing silently at me, took a tobacco pouch and papers out of her shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette with one hand only, as deftly as Gary Cooper did. “Bob and I live on the second floor, up above Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz—beaut-oh! We look this way and to the front.” From Jim I obtained more information about The House—who lives where. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz has the whole first floor except for the end room, right above my living room; it’s rented by an elderly teacher named Harold Warner, though when Jim spoke of him, she screwed up her face in what looked like detestation. Directly above Harold is a New Australian from Bavaria named Klaus Muller, who engraves jewellery for a crust, and cooks and plays the violin for amusement. He goes away every weekend to friends near Bowral who hold apocalyptic barbecues with whole lambs, porkers and vealers on spits. Jim and Bob have the bulk of that floor, while the attic belongs to Toby Evans. Jim started to grin when she said his name. “He’s an artist—boy, will he like you!” The cigarette disposed of in a garbage tin, Jim began taking the washing down, so I helped her fold the sheets and get the lot neatly tucked into the basket. Then Bob appeared, scurrying and frowning, tiny feet in blue kid flatties skittling like mouse paws. A little blonde Kewpie doll of a girl, much younger than Jim, and dressed in the height of female fashion four years ago—pastel blue dress with a great big full skirt held out by six starched petticoats, nipped-in waist, breasts squeezed into sharp points that my Bros always say mean “Hands off!”. She was late for her train, Bob explained in a fluster, and there were no taxis. Jim leaned to kiss her—now that was a kiss! Open mouths, tongues, purred mmmmms of pleasure. It did the trick; Bob calmed down. Washing basket on one inadequate hip, Jim guided Bob down the passage, turned the corner and vanished. Eyes on the ground, I wandered toward my flat, busy thinking. I knew that Lesbians existed, but I had never met one before—officially, anyway. There have to be plenty of them among the heaps of spinster sisters in any hospital, but they give nothing of it away, it’s just too dangerous. Get a reputation for that, and your career is on the garbage dump. Yet here were Jim and Bob making no secret of it! That means that while Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz might object to girls on the game in her front ground floor flat, she isn’t averse to housing a pair of very public Lesbians. Good for her! “G’day, love!” someone screamed. I jumped and looked toward the voice, which was feminine and issued from one of 17d’s mauve lace windows. 17d’s windows intrigued me greatly, between their mauve lace curtains and the boxes of puce-pink geraniums under each of them—the effect was actually quite pretty, and made 17d look like a seedy private hotel. A young, naked woman with masses of hennaed hair was leaning out of one window, lustily brushing the hair. Her breasts, very full and oh so slightly pendulous, swung merrily in time with the brush, and the top of her black bush peeked among the geraniums. “G’day!” I called. “Movin’ in, eh?” “Yes.” “Nice to see ya, hooroo!” And she shut the window. My first Lesbians and my first professional whore! Painting was a bit of a let-down after that, but paint I did until my arms ached and every wall and ceiling had a first coat. Some of me was missing my Sunday game of tennis with Merle, Jan and Denise, but swinging a paintbrush has much the same effect as swinging a tennis racquet, so at least I was getting my exercise. I wonder if there are any tennis courts near the Cross? Probably, but I don’t think too many Crossites play tennis. The games here are a lot more serious. Around sunset, someone knocked on my door. Pappy! I thought, then realised that it wasn’t her knock. This one was authoritatively brisk. When I opened the door and saw David, my heart sank into my boots. I just hadn’t expected him, the bastard. He came in before I issued an invitation and stared around with this look of fastidious distaste, how a cat might look if it found itself standing in a puddle of beery pee. My four dining chairs were good, stout wooden ones I hadn’t started to sand down yet, so I poked one forward with my foot for David and perched myself on the edge of the table so I could look down on him. But he didn’t fall for that—he stood so he could look me in the eye. “Someone,” he said, “is smoking hashish. I could smell it in the hall.” “That’s Pappy’s joss sticks—incense, David, incense! A good Catholic boy like you should recognise the whiff, surely,” I said. “I certainly recognise licentiousness and dissipation.” I could feel my mouth go straight. “A den of iniquity, you mean.” “If you like that phrase, yes,” he said stiffly. I made my tone conversational, tossed the words off like mere nothings. “As a matter of fact, I am living in a den of iniquity. Yesterday a Vice Squad constable checked up on me to make sure I’m not on the game, and this morning I said hello to one of the top-flight professionals next door when she leaned stark naked out of a window. This morning I also met Jim and Bob, the Lesbians who live two floors up, and watched them kiss each other with a great deal more passion than you’ve ever shown me! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!” He changed tack, decided to back down and beseech me to come to my senses. At the end of his dissertation about how nice girls belong at home until marriage, he said, “Harriet, I love you!” I blew a raspberry of thunderclap fart proportions, and I swear that as I did, a lightbulb flashed on above my head. Suddenly I saw everything! “You, David,” I said, “are the sort of man who deliberately picks a very young girl so that you can mould her to suit your own needs. But it hasn’t worked, mate. Instead of moulding me, you’ve broken your precious bloody mould!” Oh, I felt as if I’d been let out of a cage! David had always cowed me with his lectures and sermons, but now I didn’t give a hoot about his pontifications. He’d lost his power over me. And how cunning, never giving me an opportunity to judge him as a man by kissing or fondling or—perish the thought!—producing his dingus for my inspection, let alone use. Because he’s so handsome and well-built and such an enviable catch, I’d stuck to him, convinced that the end result would be worth waiting for. Now, I realised that he’d always been his own end result. I wasn’t ever to know his faults as a man, and the only way he could ensure that was to keep me from sampling other merchandise. I had had it all wrong—it wasn’t David I had to get rid of, it was my old self. And I did get rid of my old self, right in that moment when I blew my raspberry. So I let him prose on for a while about how I was going through a phase, and he’d be patient and wait until I came to my senses, yattata, yattata, yattata. I’d found a packet of Du Mauriers in the laundry and slipped it into my pocket. When he got to the bit about feeling my oats, I fished the cigs out of my pocket, stuck one in my mouth and lit it with a match from the gas stove. His eyes popped out on stalks. “Put that thing out! It’s a disgusting habit!” I blew a cloud of smoke in his face. “The next thing it will be hashish, and after that you’ll start sniffing glue—” “You’re a narrow-minded bigot,” I said. “I am a scientist in medical research, and I have an excellent brain. You’ve fallen into bad company, Harriet, it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize winner to work that out,” he said. I stubbed the cigarette in a saucer—it tasted vile, but I wasn’t going to let him know that—and escorted him outside. Then I marched him to the front door. “Goodbye forever, David,” I said. Tears came into his eyes, he put his hand on my arm. “This is utterly wrong!” he said in a wobbly voice. “So many years! Let’s kiss and make up, please.” That did it. I doubled my right hand into a fist and whacked him a beauty on the left eye. As he staggered—I do pack a punch, the Bros made sure of that—I saw a newcomer over his shoulder, and gave David a shove off the step down onto the path. I looked, I hoped for the benefit of the newcomer, like a particularly dangerous Amazon. Caught in a ridiculous situation by a stranger, David scuttled out the front gate and bolted down Victoria Street as if the Hound of the Baskervilles was after him. Which left the newcomer and I to look each other over. Even given the fact that I was on the step and he on the path below it, I picked him as barely five foot six. Nuggety, though, standing lightly balanced on his toes like a boxer, his reddish-brown eyes gleaming at me wickedly. Nice straight nose, good cheekbones, a mop of auburn curls trimmed into discipline, straight black brows and thick black lashes. Very attractive! “Are you coming in, or are you just going to stand there and decorate the path?” I asked coldly. “I’m coming in,” he said, but made no move to do so. He was too busy looking at me. A peculiar look, now that the wickedness was dying out of his eyes—detached, fascinated in an unemotional way. For all the world like a physician assessing a patient, though if he was a physician, I’d eat David’s Akubra town hat. “Are you double-jointed?” he asked. I said no. “That’s a pity. I could have put you in some grouse poses. There’s not much meat on you and what there is looks sporty, but you’ve got very seductive breasts. They belong to your body rather than a bra manufacturer.” He hopped up the step as he said this, then waited for me to precede him inside. “You have to be the artist in the garret,” I said. “Dead on the knocker. Toby Evans. And you must be the new girl in the back ground floor flat.” “Dead on the knocker. Harriet Purcell.” “Come upstairs and have a coffee, you must need one after the wallop you gave that poor silly coot outside. He’s going to have a shiner for a month,” he said. I followed him up two flights of stairs to a landing which had a huge female symbol on one of its doors (Jim and Bob, undoubtedly) and an alpine view on the other (Klaus Muller, undoubtedly). Access to the garret was up a sturdy ladder. Toby went first, and as soon as I’d climbed onto firm ground he pulled a rope which plucked the ladder off the floor below, folded it against the ceiling. “Oh, that’s terrific,” I said, staring about in amazement. “You can pull up the drawbridge and withstand a siege.” I was in an enormous dormered room with two alcoved windows at its back and two more at its front, where the ceiling sloped. The whole place was painted stark white and looked as sterile as an operating theatre. Not a pin out of place, not a smear or a stain, not a speck of dust or even the outline of a dried-up raindrop on the window panes. Because it was an attic, the windows had seats with white corduroy cushions on them. The paintings were turned with their faces to the wall in a white-painted rack and there was a big professional easel (painted white), a dais with a white chair on it and a little white chest of drawers beside the easel. That was the business area. For leisure he had two easy chairs covered in white corduroy, white bookshelves with every book rigidly straight, a white hospital screen around his kitchen nook, a square white table and two white wooden chairs. Even the floor had been painted white! Not a mark on it either. His lights were white fluorescent. The only touch of colour was a grey army blanket on his double bed. Since he’d got personal first with that bit about my breasts—the cheek!—I said exactly what I was thinking. “My God, you must be obsessional! I’ll bet when you squeeze the paint out of a tube, you do it from the bottom, then carefully bend the empty bit over and make sure it’s perfectly squared.” He grinned and cocked his head to one side like an alert little dog. “Sit down,” he said, disappearing behind his screen to make the coffee. I sat and talked to him through the crisply ironed cotton folds of the screen, and when he came out with the coffee in two white mugs, we just kept on talking. He was a bush boy, he said, grew up around the enormous cattle stations of western Queensland and the Northern Territory. His father had been a barracks cook, but first and foremost a boozer, so it was Toby who did most of the cooking, kept his father in a job. He didn’t seem to hold that against the old boy, who eventually died of the booze. Back then, Toby’s paints were children’s watercolours and his drawing blocks cheap butcher’s paper, his pencils HB pilfered from the station office. After his dad’s death, he headed for the Big Smoke to learn how to paint properly, and in oils. “But it’s grim, Sydney, when you don’t know a soul and the hay sticks out from behind your ears,” he said, pouring three-star hospital brandy into his second coffee. “I tried working in the cook trade—hotels, boarding houses, soup kitchens, Concord Repat Hospital. Awful, between the voices that didn’t speak English and the cockroaches everywhere except Concord. I’ll give hospitals this, they’re clean. But the food is worse than station food. Then I moved to Kings Cross. I was living in a six-by-eight shed in the backyard of a house on Kellett Street when I met Pappy. She brought me home to meet Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, who told me I could have her attic for three quid a week and I could pay her when I had the money. You know, you see those statues of the Virgin Mary and Saint Teresa and the rest, and they’re all beautiful women. But I thought Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, the ugly old bugger, was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. One day, when I’m more confident, I’m going to paint her with Flo on her knee.” “Do you still cook?” I asked. He looked scornful. “No! Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz told me to get a job tightening nuts in a factory—‘Youse’ll earn big bikkies and suffer not a bit, ace,’ was how she put it. I took her advice, I tighten nuts in a factory in Alexandria when I’m not up here painting.” “How long have you been in The House?” I asked. “Four years. I turn thirty in March,” he said. When I offered to wash the coffee mugs, he looked horrified—I daresay he thought I wouldn’t do it properly. So I took myself off down to my own flat in a very thoughtful mood. What a day! What a weekend, for that matter. Toby Evans. It has a nice ring to it. But when he’d mentioned Pappy, I caught the shadow of a new emotion in his eyes. Sadness, pain. Light dawned—he’s in love with Pappy! Whom I haven’t seen since I moved in. Oh, I’m tired. Time to put the light out and enjoy my second-ever sleep in a double bed. One thing I know—I am never going to sleep in a single bed again. What luxury! Wednesday,February 3rd, 1960 (#ulink_21aa262a-c76b-5920-b2d5-0a3bf62c7970) All I’ve been doing when I’m not doing routine chests is slapping pink paint on everything in my flat that stays still long enough. Though I’ve been around the Cross in daylight enough now to have my bearings. It’s fabulous. The shops are like nothing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve eaten more strange things in a week than in the whole of the rest of my life put together. There’s a French bakery produces long thin sticks of bread that are a dream, and a cake shop called a patisserie with these fantastic cakes of many layers thin as wafers instead of jam rolls and cream sponges and lamingtons like an ordinary cake shop. Nectar and ambrosia whichever way I look. I bought something called potato salad—oh, the taste! And a cabbage salad called coleslaw—I gobbled a whole little plastic bin of it and farted all night, but I don’t care. There’s a brick of mince with a hard-boiled egg in the middle of it called Hungarian meatloaf. Salami instead of Devon, Tilsiter cheese instead of the sweating soapy stuff Mum buys from the grocer—I feel as if I’ve died and gone to heaven when it comes to food. It isn’t very expensive either, which amazed me so much I remarked on it to the New Australian chap in my favourite delicatessen. His answer solved my vexed question about Blue Laws and opening hours—he said that all the businesses were run by family members, though he put his finger against the side of his nose when he said it. No employees in the union sense! And it keeps the prices down. There are a couple of underwear shops have me goggling. The windows are full of transparent black or scarlet bras and bikini bottoms, negligees that would make David keel over in a seizure. Underwear for tarts. Pappy tried to talk me into buying some as we walked home one evening, but I declined firmly. “I’m just too dark,” I explained. “Black or scarlet make me look as if I’ve got terminal cirrhosis of the liver.” I tried fishing for information about the situation between her and Toby, but she eluded every bait I put on my hook. That alone is highly suspect. Oh, if only I can work out a way to get them together! Neither with a family, each immersed in important activities—Pappy her studies, Toby his canvases. They were made for each other, and they’d have beautiful children. Sister Agatha called me to her office today and informed me that from next Monday I’m coming off Chests and going to work in Casualty X-ray. Cas! I’m tickled pink. The best work of all, no end of variety, every case serious because the unserious stuff is shunted to main X-ray. And at Queens, Cas X-ray is Monday to Friday! That’s because Queens doesn’t have many emergencies at weekends. It’s surrounded by factories to north, south and west, and east of it for miles are parks and sporting grounds. Its residential districts it shares with St. George Hospital, though it does have its share of ancient dilapidated terraces. Of course the State Government keeps trying to close Queens down, put the money Queens eats like candy floss into St. George and the small hospitals out in the west, where Sydney’s population is mushrooming. However, I’ll back Matron against the Minister for Health any day. Queens is not about to close, my new job in Cas is safe. “You are an excellent technician, Miss Purcell,” said Sister Agatha in her round-vowels accent, “and excellent with the patients too. These facts do not escape us.” “Yes, Sister, thank you, Sister,” I said, backing out bowing. Yippee, Cas! Tonight’s wish: That Pappy and Toby get married. Saturday,February 6th, 1960 (#ulink_ab199013-8513-57e3-86b6-deaf92500e6f) Bash your head against a brick wall, Harriet Purcell, until the brain inside it thinks. What a fool you are! What a drongo! Pappy and I went shopping this morning, armed with our string bags and our purses. On a Saturday morning, you can hardly move for people along Darlinghurst Road, but nobody’s ordinary up at the Cross. This stunningly beautiful woman came stalking past with a poodle dyed apricot-pink on a rhinestone lead, dressed from head to foot in apricot silk and apricot kid. Her hair was the exact-same colour as the poodle’s. “Phew!” I breathed, staring after her. “A knockout, isn’t he?” asked Pappy, grinning. “He?” “Commonly known as Lady Richard. A transvestite.” “Camp as a row of tents, you mean,” I said, flabbergasted. “No, he’s so into clothes that he’s asexual, but a lot of transvestites are heterosexual. They just like women’s clothes.” And that was how the conversation started. Though I haven’t seen Pappy at The House, we see a lot of each other during the week, so by this time I thought I knew her. But I don’t know her at all. She told me that it was high time I had an affair, and I fully agreed. But Norm the Vice Squad constable turned out to be a lousy kisser—drowned me in spit. We parted after our beer on the best of terms, but each of us knew there wasn’t going to be anything in it. And, though I couldn’t very well mention that to Pappy, Toby Evans is taken. A pity. I’m very attracted to him, and he looks as if he knows his way around a bed. Which was what Pappy was going on about as we walked, that My First Time couldn’t possibly be with anyone insensitive, ignorant, dopey or up himself. “He has to be experienced, considerate and tender,” she said. I started to laugh. “Listen to the expert!” I chortled. Turns out she is an expert. “Harriet,” she said, sounding a bit exasperated, “haven’t you wondered why you don’t see much of me at the weekend?” I said I had wondered, but presumed she was deep in a book. “Oh, Harriet, you’re dense!” she exclaimed. “I spend the weekends having sex with men.” “Men?” I asked, winded. “Yes, men.” “In the plural?” “In the plural.” Where does one go from there? I was still looking for what to say next when we turned into Victoria Street. “Why?” “Because I’m looking for something.” “The perfect lover?” She rocked her head from side to side as if she’d like to shake me rather than it. “No, no, no! It’s not about sex, it’s about the spirit. I’m looking for a soul mate, I suppose.” I nearly suggested that he was sloshing paint on a canvas in the attic, but I bit my tongue and didn’t. There was a young chap sitting on the stairs when we came in. Pappy flicked me a small smile of apology as he rose to his feet, and I scuttled ahead of them to my pink flat, where I sat down rather suddenly to get my wind back. So that was what Norm the Vice Squad constable had meant when he said Pappy didn’t charge! No doubt she’d had sex with him too. Time to sort out your priorities, Harriet Purcell. Everything you’ve been brought up to believe in is hanging in the balance. Pappy can’t qualify as a “nice girl”, yet she’s the nicest girl I’ve ever met. But nice girls do not distribute sexual favours freely to any amount of men. It’s only trollops do that. Pappy a trollop? No, that I won’t admit! I am the sole member of my Bronte-Bondi-Waverley group hasn’t had at least one affair, but Merle, for instance, doesn’t think of herself as a trollop any more than she really is. Oh, the emotional gyrations I’ve witnessed as Merle plunged into love! The rhapsodies, the furies, the doubts, the eventual disillusionment. And those awful days once, while she waited for her overdue period to appear. It did, and the relief was something I’d felt as keenly as she, putting myself in her place. If anything keeps us on the straight and narrow, it’s the fear of pregnancy. The only people who do abortions use knitting needles, but the alternative is a ruined reputation. Usually what happens is a sudden four-month disappearance, or a very hasty wedding and a “premature” baby. But whether a girl chooses to go into a home for four months and then adopt her baby out, or whether she marries the bloke, the talk follows her for the rest of her days. “She had to get married!” or “Well, we all know, don’t we? She walks round with a face as long as a wet week, the fellow isn’t to be seen, she looks fat in the waist, and then suddenly she visits her granny in Western Australia for a few months—who does she think she’s fooling, eh?” I don’t believe I’ve ever subscribed to that sort of malice, but it is a fact of every girl’s life. Yet here is Pappy, whom I love, playing with fire in all directions from pregnancy to V.D. to the possibility of being bashed up. Using sex to look for a soul mate! But how can sex find the soul in a man? The trouble is, I don’t know any answers. What I do know is that I can’t think any the worse of Pappy. Oh, poor Toby! How must he feel? Has she had sex with him? Or is he the one she doesn’t fancy? Yes, I don’t know why I think that, but I do. I couldn’t settle, so I decided to go for a walk, lose myself in those crowds of fascinating people up at the Cross. But as I went through the front hall, there was Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz sweeping it. To little effect. She used the broom so hard and fast that the dust just rose in clouds and then crusted on the floor behind her. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if she’d ever thought of sprinkling wet tea leaves before she swept, but I wasn’t game. “Ripper-ace!” she said, beaming. “Come upstairs and have a wee snort of brandy.” “I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you since I moved in,” I said as I followed her up the stairs. “Never intrude on people when they’re busy, princess,” she said, flopping down on her chair on the balcony and glugging brandy into two Kraft cheese spread glasses. Flo had been clinging to her skirts throughout, but now she scrambled onto my lap and lay looking up at me with those tragic amber eyes, yet smiling. I sipped at the revolting stuff, but I couldn’t like it. “I never hear Flo,” I said. “Does she talk?” “All the time, princess,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. She was handling a pack of over-sized cards, then she fixed her X-ray eyes on me and put the cards down. “What’s bothering you?” she asked. “Pappy says she sleeps with a lot of men.” “Yep, that she does.” “What do you think about it? I always thought that landladies evicted girls who have men in their flats, and I know you do when it’s the front ground floor flat.” “It ain’t right to make real good women think they’re wicked just because they like a bit of nooky,” she said, drinking deeply. “Nooky’s as normal and natural as pissin’ and shittin’. As for Pappy, what’s there to think about? Sex is her way of voyaging.” Another X-ray glare at me. “It ain’t your way, but, is it?” I felt inadequate and squirmed. “Not so far, anyway,” I said, and sipped again. Willie’s tipple was beginning to taste better. “You and Pappy are the opposite ends of women’s life,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. “To Pappy, no touch means no love. She’s a Libran Queen of Swords, and that ain’t strong. Her Mars, mostly. Very poorly aspected. So’s her Jupiter. Moon in Gemini squared to Saturn.” I think I’ve remembered that correctly. “What am I?” I asked. “Dunno ‘til you tell me when you was born, princess.” “November the eleventh, nineteen thirty-eight,” I said. “Ah! Knew it! Scorpio woman! Very strong! Where?” “Vinnie’s Hospital.” “Right next door to the Cross! What time?” I racked my brains. “A minute past eleven in the morning.” “Eleven, eleven, eleven. Oh, bonza! Ripper-ace!” She huffed and creaked her chair, leaned back in it and closed her eyes. “Um, lessee…You rise in Aquarius—well, well!” The next minute she was on her hands and knees at a little cupboard to bring out a book so well worn it was falling to pieces, a few sheets of paper, and a cheap little plastic protractor. One of the sheets of paper, blank, was thrown to me together with a pencil. “Write it all down as I tell youse,” she said, and looked at Flo. “Angel, gimme some of your crayons.” Flo slid off my lap and trotted into the living room, returned bearing a handful in blue, green, red, purple and brown. “I do it all in me head—oughta be able to, after all these years,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, consulting her ratty book and making mysterious marks on a sheet already drawn up like a pie separated into twelve equal slices. “Yep, yep, real interesting. Write, Harriet, write! Three oppositions, all potent—Sun to Uranus, Mars to Saturn, Uranus to Midheaven. Most of the tension is removed by squares—lucky, eh?” As she spoke at normal pace, I had to do a Flo and scribble to get all this down. “Jupiter in the first house in Aquarius, your rising sign—very powerful! You’re gunna have a fortunate life, Harriet Purcell. Sun’s in the tenth house, means you’re gunna make your career your whole life.” That made me sit up straight! I scowled at her. “No, I am not!” I snapped. “I’m darned if I’ll keep on taking X-rays until I’m old enough to retire! Carry a lead apron on my shoulders for forty years and have blood tests once a month? Bugger that!” “There are careers and careers,” she smirked. “Venus is in the tenth house too, and your Moon’s in Cancer. Saturn’s on the cusp of the second and third houses, means you’ll always look after them what can’t look after themselves.” She sighed. “Oh, there’s lotsa stuff, but none of it’s worth a tuppenny bumper compared to your perfect quincunx between the Moon and Mercury!” “Quincunx?” It sounded absolutely obscene. “That’s the aspect will do for me,” she said, brushing her hands together in huge satisfaction. “You gotta look at everything in a chart before the quincunx makes sense, but the way your stars have progressed since you was born says the quincunx is it.” The X-ray vision eyed me again, then she got to her feet, went inside and opened the fridge. Back she came with a plate holding chunks of what looked like horizontal sections through a snake. “Here, have some, princess. Smoked eel. Very high brain food. Klaus’s mate Lerner Chusovich catches ‘em and smokes ‘em himself.” The smoked eel was delicious, so I tucked in. “You know a lot about astrology,” I said, chewing away. “I should bloody hope so! I’m a soothsayer,” she said. Suddenly I remembered the blue-rinsed lady from the upper North Shore, the several others I had encountered in the front hall, and a lot of things fell into place. “Those prosperous-looking women are clients?” I asked. “Bullseye, ace!” She speared me on those icy searchlights yet again. “D’you believe in the hereafter?” I thought about that before I answered. “Only maybe. It’s a bit hard to believe in the reason and justice behind God’s immutable purpose when you work in a hospital.” “This ain’t about God, it’s about the hereafter.” I said I wasn’t sure about that either. “Well, I deal in the hereafter,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. “I cast horoscopes, deal out the cards, scry into me Glass”—she said it with a capital letter—“communicate with the dead.” “How?” “Haven’t got a clue, princess!” she said cheerfully. “Didn’t even know I could until I was past thirty.” Flo climbed onto her lap for some mother’s milk, and was put down gently but firmly. “Not now, angel, Harriet and I are talking.” She went to the little cupboard and brought out a very heavy object covered with dirty pink silk, put it on the table. Then she handed me the deck of cards. I turned them over expecting to see the usual hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades, but these were pictures. The one on the bottom showed a naked woman surrounded by a wreath, all of it brightly coloured. “That’s the World,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. Underneath was a card showing a hand holding a chalice which poured out thin streams of liquid. A dove with a small circular object in its beak hovered upside down over the chalice, on which was written what looked like a W. “The Ace of Cups,” she said. I put the deck down very gingerly. “What are they?” “A tarot pack, princess. I can do all sorts of things with it. I can read your fortune if you like. Ask me a question about your future, and I’ll answer it. I can sit down all by meself and deal out a gypsy spread to get the feel of what’s happening in The House, to the people in my care. The cards have mouths. They speak.” “Rather you to hear them than me,” I said, shivering. She went on as if I hadn’t interrupted. “This is the Glass,” she said, whipping the dirty pink silk off the object she’d taken from the cupboard. Then she reached across the table to take my hand, and put it on the cool surface of that beautiful thing. Flo, standing watching, suddenly gasped and fled to hide behind her mother, then peered at me from around that bulk with wide eyes. “Is it glass?” I asked, fascinated at how it held everything inside it—the balcony, its owner, a plane tree—but upside down. “Nope, it’s the real thing—crystal. A thousand years old. Seen everything, has the Glass. I don’t use it much, it’s like a fit of the dry horrors.” “Dry horrors?” How many questions were there to ask? “The gin jitters, the whisky wackos—delirium tremens. With the Glass, youse never knows what’s gunna come screamin’ up to push its face against the inside of the outside. Nope, I use the cards most. And for me ladies, Flo.” The moment she uttered Flo’s name, I knew why I was being made privy to all this. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, for what reason I had no idea, had decided that I must be told about this secret life. So I asked the ultimate question. “Flo?” “Yep, Flo. She’s me medium. She just knows the answers to the questions me ladies ask. I wasn’t born with the gift meself—it just sorta snuck up on me when I was—oh, Harriet, desperate for money! I started the fortune telling as a racket, and that’s honest. Then I discovered I did have the gift. But Flo’s a natural. Scares the bejeezus outta me sometimes, does Flo.” Yes, and she scares the bejeezus out of me too, though not with revulsion. I could believe it all. Flo doesn’t look as if she belongs to this world, so it isn’t much of a surprise to find that she has access to another world. Maybe it is her natural one. Or maybe she’s an hysteric. They come in all ages, hysterics. But knowing, I simply loved Flo more. It answered the riddle of the sorrow in her eyes. What she must see and feel! A natural. After drinking a full glass of brandy, I got down the stairs rather clumsily, but I didn’t flop on my bed to sleep it off, I wanted to get all this down before I forgot it. And I’m sitting here with my Biro in my hand wondering why I’m not outraged, why I’m not of a mind to give Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz the sharp edge of my tongue for exploiting her weeny daughter. I do have a sharp edge to my tongue. But this is so far from anything I know or understand, and even in the short time I’ve lived here, I’ve grown a lot. At least that’s how I feel. Sort of new and changed. I like that monstrosity named Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, but I love her child. What stills the sharp edge of my tongue, Horatio, is the realisation that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than Bronte’s philosophy ever dreamed of. And I can’t go back to Bronte any more. I can never go back to Bronte. Flo the medium. Her mother had implied that she herself communicated with the dead through the Glass, but she hadn’t really described Flo’s mediumistic activities as concerned with the dead. Flo knows the answers to the questions “me ladies” ask. I conjured up visions of “me ladies” and had to admit that they didn’t look like women chasing beloved phantoms. All different, but none with that air of unassuaged grief. Whatever drove them to seek help from Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz was, I somehow knew, connected to this world, not the next. Though Flo was not of this world. Perhaps in the beginning, when it was a racket to earn the money she was desperate for, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz valued money. I imagine it bought her The House. But these days? In that bare, bleak, awful surrounding? Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz doesn’t give tuppence for comfort, and nor does Flo. Wherever they dwell, it isn’t among pretty dresses and comfy couches. I can even understand why Flo is still feeding off the breast. It’s a link with her mother she needs. Oh, Flo! Angel. Your mother is the whole of your world, its beginning and its end. She’s your anchor and your refuge. And I am honoured that you’ve welcomed me into your affections, angel. I feel blessed. Monday,February 8th, 1960 (#ulink_133619d6-0662-5bd4-ae38-4d1929eecd32) I started in Casualty X-ray this morning, I must confess not quite such an eager beaver as I used to be. My life is getting a weeny bit complicated, between nymphomania and soothsaying. Though I’m not sure that confining one’s sexual activity to the weekend qualifies as nymphomania. However, within ten minutes of starting, I forgot that there was any other world than Cas X-ray. There are three of us—a senior, a middleman (me), and a junior. I’m not sure that I like Christine Leigh Hamilton, as my boss introduced herself. She’s in her middle thirties, and, from overhearing the occasional conversation between her and Sister Cas, she’s just starting to suffer what I call the “Old Maid Syndrome”. If I’m still single when I hit my middle thirties, I will cut my own throat rather than go through the Old Maid Syndrome. It arises out of spinsterhood and contemplation of an old age spent living with another female in relative penury unless there’s money in the family, which there usually isn’t. And the chief symptom is an overwhelming determination to catch a man. Get married. Have some babies. Be vindicated as a woman. I sympathise, even if I’m determined not to contract the malady myself. I’m never sure which drive is uppermost in the O.M.S.—the drive to find someone to love and be loved back, or the drive to achieve financial security. Of course Chris is an X-ray technician, so she’s paid a man’s wage, but if she went to a bank and asked for a mortgage so she could buy a house, she’d be turned down. Banks don’t give mortgages to women, no matter what they’re paid. And most women are paid poorly, so they never manage to save much for their old age. I was talking to Jim about it—she’s a master printer, but she doesn’t get equal pay for equal work. No wonder some women go funny and abrogate men altogether. Bob is a secretary to some tycoon, isn’t exactly overpaid either. And if you work for the Government, you have to leave when you get married. That’s why all the sisters and female department heads are old maids. Though a very few are widows. “If it wasn’t for Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, we’d lead a dog’s life,” Jim told me. “Running scared of being found out and evicted, not able to afford to buy a place. The House is our lifeline.” Anyway, back to Chris Hamilton. The trouble is that she’s not a man-trap. Blocky sort of figure, hair she can’t do a thing with, glasses, the wrong make-up, grand piano legs. Which could be overcome if she had any sense, but she doesn’t. Man sense, I mean. So whenever a man, especially one in white, enters our little domain, she simpers and rushes around and turns cartwheels trying to impress him. Oh, not the New Australian porters (they’re beneath her notice), but even the ambulancemen get cups of tea and coy chats over the bikkies. If we’re not busy, that is, give her her due. Her best friend is Marie O’Callaghan, who happens to be Sister Cas. They share a flat together in Coogee, are both middle-thirties. And they both have the Old Maid Syndrome! Why is it that women aren’t deemed real women unless they’ve got a husband and kids? Of course if Chris could read this, she’d sneer and say it’s all very well for me, I’m a man-trap. But why are we categorised like that? The junior is very shy and, as usually happens in a busy unit, spends most of her day in the darkroom. Looking back on my own training, there were times when I thought I was better qualified to work for Kodak than in X-ray. But somehow it all evens out in the end, we do get enough experience with the patients to pass our exams and turn into people who send the junior to the darkroom. The trouble is that it’s a question of priorities, especially in Cas, where you can’t make mistakes or have ponk films. Five minutes hadn’t gone by before I realised that I wasn’t going to have it all my own way in Cas X-ray. The Cas surgical registrar came in accompanied by his senior resident, took one look at me and started laying on the charm with a trowel. I don’t know why I have that effect on some doctors (some, not all!), because I honestly am not after anything in a white coat. I’d rather be an old maid than married to someone who’s always rushing off on a call. And all they can talk about is medicine, medicine, medicine. Pappy says I’m sexy, though I haven’t got a clue what that term means if Brigitte Bardot is sexy. I do not wiggle my bottom, I do not pout, I do not give men languishing glances, I do not look as if I haven’t got a brain in my head. Except for Mr. Duncan Crawler Forsythe on the ramp, I look straight through the bastards. So I didn’t do a thing to encourage that pair of doctors, but they still dawdled and got in my way. In the end I told them to piss off, which horrified Chris (and the junior). Luckily a suspected fracture of the cervical spine came in through our double doors at that moment. I got down to business, determined that Chris Hamilton wasn’t going to be able to lodge any complaints about my work with Sister Agatha. I soon discovered that I wouldn’t have time to eat lunch with Pappy—we eat on the run. By the time I’d been in the place four hours, we’d had three suspected spinal fractures, a Potts fracture of tibia, fibula and ankle bones, several comminuted fractures of the long bones, a fractured rib cage, a dozen other oddments and a critical head injury who came in comatose and fitting and went straight on up to neurosurgery theatre. Once she got over her miff at the way that couple of eligible doctors had behaved, Chris was smart enough to see that I wasn’t going to be a handicap when it came to the patients, and we soon had a system going. The unit was officially open between six in the morning and six in the evening. Chris worked the early shift and knocked off at two, I was to start at ten and knock off at six. “It’s a pleasant fiction that we ever knock off on time,” Chris said as she buttoned her coat over her uniform about half-past three, “but that’s what we aim for. I don’t approve of keeping the junior any longer than necessary, so make sure you send her off at four unless there’s a huge flap on.” Yes, ma’am. I finally got off a bit after seven, and I was tired enough to think of hailing a taxi. But in the end I plodded home on foot, though people are always saying that Sydney isn’t a safe city for women to walk in after dark. I took my chances anyway, and nothing happened. In fact, until I reached Vinnie’s Hospital, I hardly saw a soul. And so to bed. I’m buggered. Tuesday,February 16th, 1960 (#ulink_37f31647-2652-5ee5-9e33-cf21f6f0ae90) I finally saw Pappy tonight. When I pushed the front door open I nearly knocked her over, but it can’t have been an important appointment, because she turned and walked to my flat with me, came in and waited while I made coffee. Settled in my own easy chair, I looked at her properly and realised that she didn’t look well. Her skin had a yellow tinge and her eyes looked more Oriental than usual, with black rings of fatigue under them. Her mouth was all swollen, and below each ear was an ugly bruise. Though it was a humid evening, she kept her cardigan on—bruises on the arms too? Though I’m a terrible cook, I offered to fry some sausages to go with the coleslaw and potato salad I can’t get enough of. She shook her head, smiled. “Get Klaus to teach you to cook,” she said. “He’s a genius at it, and you’ve got the right temperament to cook well.” “What sort of temperament cooks well?” I asked. “You’re efficient and organised,” she said, letting her head flop back against the chair. Of course I knew what was wrong. One of the weekend visitors had been rough with her. Not that she would admit it, even to me. My tongue itched to tell her that she was running a terrible risk going to bed with men she hardly knew, but something stopped me, I let it lie. Though Pappy and I were better friends in many ways than Merle and I had been—oooooo-aa, that’s an interesting tense!—I had a funny feeling that there were fences I’d be wise not to try to peek over. Merle and I were sort of equals, even if she had had a couple of affairs and I hadn’t had any. Whereas Pappy is ten years older than me and immensely more experienced. I can’t summon up the courage even to pretend that I’m her equal. She mourned that we weren’t seeing much of each other these days—no lunches, no walks to and from Queens. But she knows Chris Hamilton, and agrees that she’s a bitch. “Watch your step” was how she put it. “If you mean, don’t look at the men, I’ve already taken that point,” I answered. “Luckily we’re awfully busy, so while she bustles around making a cuppa for some twit in white pants, I get on with the work.” I cleared my throat. “Are you all right?” “So-so,” she said with a sigh, then changed the subject. “Um, have you met Harold yet?” she asked very casually. The question surprised me. “The schoolteacher above me? No.” But she didn’t lead the conversation down that alley either, so I gave up. After she left I fried myself a couple of snags, wolfed down potato salad and coleslaw, then went upstairs looking for company. Starting at ten means not getting up early, and I had enough sense to know that if I went to bed too early I’d wake with the birds. Jim and Bob were having a meeting, I could hear the buzz of voices through their door, a loudly neighing laugh which didn’t belong to either of them. But Toby’s ladder was down, so I jingled the bell he’s rigged up for visitors, and got an invitation to come on up. There he was at the easel, three brushes clenched between his teeth, four in his right hand, the one in his left hand engaged in scrubbing the tiniest smidgin of paint on a dry surface. It looked like a wisp of vapour. “You’re a southpaw,” I said, sitting on white corduroy. “You finally noticed,” he grunted. I supposed that the thing he was working on was an excellent piece of work, but I’m not equipped to judge. To me, it looked like a slag heap giving off steam in a thunderstorm, but it caught the eye—very dramatic, wonderful colours. “What is it?” I asked. “A slag heap in a thunderstorm,” he said. I was tickled! Harriet Purcell the art connoisseur strikes again! “Do slag heaps smoke?” I asked. “This one does.” He finished his wisp, carried his brushes to the old white enamel sink and washed them thoroughly in eucalyptus soap, then dried them and polished the sink with Bon Ami. “At a loose end?” he asked, putting the kettle on. “Yes, as a matter of fact.” “Can’t you read a book?” “I often do,” I said a little tartly—oh, he could rub one up the wrong way!—”but I’m working in Casualty now, so when I get off duty I’m in no fit condition to read a book. What a rude bastard you are!” He turned to grin at me, eyebrows wriggling—so attractive! “You talk as if you read books,” he said, folding a laboratory filter paper, inserting it into a glass laboratory funnel, and spooning powdery coffee into it. I was fascinated, not having seen him making coffee before. The screen was shoved out of the way for a change—it must have got a mark on it. The coffee was brilliant, but I thought I’d stick to my new electric percolator. Easier, and I’m not all that fussy. Naturally he’d be fussy, it’s in his soul. “What do you read?” he asked, sitting down and throwing one leg over the arm of his chair. I told him everything from Gone With The Wind to Lord Jim to Crime and Punishment, after which he said that he confined his own reading to tabloid newspapers and books on how to paint in oils. He suffered, I discovered, a huge inferiority complex about his lack of formal education, but he was too prickly about it for me to attempt any repair measures. Artists traditionally dressed like hobos, I had thought, but he dresses very well. The slag heap in a thunderstorm had received his attentions in clothes the Kingston Trio wouldn’t have been ashamed to perform in—crew-neck mohair sweater, the beautifully ironed collar of his shirt folded down over it, a pair of trousers creased sharp as a knife, and highly polished black leather shoes. Not a skerrick of paint on himself, and when he’d leaned over me to put my mug down I couldn’t smell a trace of anything except some expensive piney-herby soap. Obviously tightening nuts in a factory paid extremely well. Knowing him a little bit by now, I thought that his nuts would be perfect, neither too loose nor too tight. When I said that to him, he laughed until the tears ran down his face, but he wouldn’t share the joke with me. “Have you met Harold yet?” he asked later. “You’re the second person tonight to put that question to me,” I said. “No, and I haven’t met Klaus either, but no one asks if I’ve met him. What’s so important about Harold?” He shrugged, didn’t bother to answer. “Pappy, eh?” “She looks terrible.” “I know. Some bastard got a bit too enthusiastic.” “Does that happen often?” He said no, apparently oblivious to the hard stare I was giving him. His face and eyes looked concerned but not anguished. What a good actor he was! And how much it must hurt him to have to endure that kind of rejection. I wanted to offer him comfort, but that tongue of mine has developed a habit lately of getting too tied up to speak, so I said nothing. Then we talked about his life in the bush following his dad around, of this station and that station out where the Mitchell grass stretches to infinity “like a silver-gold ocean”, he said. I could see it, though I never have. Why don’t we Aussies know our own country? Why do we all have this urge to go to England instead? Here I am in this house stuffed with extraordinary people, and I feel like a gnat, a worm. I don’t know anything! How can I ever grow tall enough to look any of them in the eye as equals? Wednesday,February 17th, 1960 (#ulink_c449e8aa-32b9-5a2d-a14c-84ac8e3d96be) My goodness, I was in a self-abnegatory frame of mind last night when I wrote the above! It’s Toby, he has that effect on me. I would really like to go to bed with him! What’s the matter with Pappy, that she can’t see what’s right under her nose? Saturday,February 20th, 1960 (#ulink_5e75064a-f976-5134-99a7-3c4b127ded39) Well, I did it at last. I’ve had the family to dinner in my new flat. I invited Merle too, but she didn’t come. She rang me in January while I was still in Chests, and I had to have a junior tell her that I couldn’t come to the phone, that staff are not allowed to receive private calls. Apparently Merle took it as a personal rebuff, because whenever I’ve phoned her at home since then, her mother says she’s out. The trouble is that she’s a hairdresser, and they seem to spend half their lives on the phone making personal calls. At Ryde the policy wasn’t so strict, but Queens isn’t the same kind of institution. Anyway. I’d wanted to have Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz and Flo to dinner as well, but that lady just grinned and said she’d come down later to say hello. It wasn’t a huge success, though on the surface it was smooth enough. We had to wedge up at the table, but I’d grabbed extra chairs from the front ground floor flat, which is vacant again. Two women and a man who said they were siblings had rented it, but I tell you, men are not fussy when it comes to getting rid of their dirty water. The prettier of the two “sisters” made Chris Hamilton look like Ava Gardner, and both of them stank of stale, horribly cheap scent over the top of their B.O. The “brother” just had B.O. They were doing a roaring trade until Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz rang the Vice Squad and the paddy wagon arrived. There’s an American aircraft carrier in port, and when I pushed the front door open on Thursday night, I saw sailors from arsehole to breakfast—sitting on the stairs, leaning against Flo’s scribbles in the hall, spilling into Pappy’s hall and trooping by the dozen to the upstairs toilet, which was flushed so often that it took to groaning and gurgling. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz was not amused. The “brother” and his “sisters” were hauled off to the pokey in the paddy wagon, and the sailors scattered far and wide at the sight of the Boys in Blue behind Norm and his sergeant, a hugely beefy bloke named Merv. Good old Norm and Merv, stars of the Kings Cross Vice Squad! It really hurt that I didn’t dare tell this story to the family. As I haven’t met Klaus yet, let alone started to learn to cook, I cheated and imported all these delicious foods from my favourite delicatessen. But they didn’t like any of it, from the macaroni salad to the dolmades and the shaved ham. I’d bought this divine orange liquer gateau for pudding, skinny layers of cake separated by thick layers of aromatic butter cream. They just picked at it. Oh, well. I daresay steak-and-chips followed by Spotted Dick and custard or ice-cream with choccy syrup are what they dream of when their tummies rumble in the middle of the night. They walked around like cats in a strange place they’ve made up their mind not to like. The Bros pushed through the bead curtain to inspect my bedroom a bit bashfully, but Mum and Dad ignored it, and Granny was too obsessed with the fact that she needed to pee every thirty minutes. Poor Mum had to keep taking her outside and down to the laundry because my blue-birded toilet is too high for Granny to get up on by herself. I apologised for the state of the toilet and bathroom, explained that when I had the time I was going to do everything out in bicycle enamel so it would look absolutely spiffy. Cobalt blue, white and a scarlet bathtub, I rattled feverishly. Most of the conversation fell to me. When I asked if anyone had seen Merle, Mum told me that she was convinced I didn’t want to have anything to do with her now I had moved. She wouldn’t believe that Queens refused to let its staff take personal phone calls. Mum spoke in the gentle tones mothers use when they think their children are going to be bitterly disappointed, but I just shrugged. Goodbye, Merle. They had more news about David than about Merle, though he hadn’t visited them—didn’t dare, was my guess, until that wacko shiner I’d given him faded. “He’s got a new girl,” Mum remarked casually. “I hope she’s a Catholic,” I remarked casually. “Yes, she is. And she’s all of seventeen.” “That fits,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. No more David Murchison! He’s found a new bit of female clay to mould. After I’d cleared the uneaten gateau away and made a pot of tea, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz and Flo materialised. Oh, dear. The family didn’t know what to make of them! One didn’t talk, the other’s grammar wasn’t the best, and the most that could be said for their unironed dresses was that they were clean. Flo, barefoot as always, was clad in the usual snuff-brown pinny, while her mother sported orange daisies on a bright mauve background. 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