Angel

“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!”