Angel (5 page)

Yep, there was me! One of those ceramic plug-ins with a piece of threeamp 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.

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 culde-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 themthey 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 44

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.

Ooooooaa! 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 Schwartzbeaut-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 agopastel 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 themthe 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, rd 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.