Angel (22 page)

It just ain’t in the cards. All that water and all that fire-sooner or later the pair of youse woulda gone up like a volcano meetin’ the sea.”

“You did his horoscope?” I asked, surprised.

“Yep. Solid Leo, Aries, Sagittarius. Looks and acts like a Virgo with a touch of Libra and Sagittarius, but underneath he’s on a permanent slow burn-there’s an afflicted square between Venus and Saturn, though he ain’t got the selfish streak of that-it hobbles him terrible, but. Pity I dunno what he rises in.”

“How did you find out his birth date? Even I don’t know!”

“Looked him up in Who’s Who in Australia,” she said smugly.

“You went out to a library?”

“Nah, princess! I got me own library.”

If she does, it isn’t kept in this room. Her attitude helped me a lot-this will pass, the sea is chocka with fish, my Queen of Swords is well placed, I am unbreakable. Though Flo helped me more. She never 215

budged from my lap until Harold arrived, when she bolted under the couch.

He looks frightful. Ill, unkempt. He’s crumbling, his self-esteem is eroding badly. He used to be so immaculately groomed-a prissy, fussy little man in ancient three-piece suits with a gold watch and fob across the waistcoat. Now he reminds me of a derelict. His shirt collar is frayed, his trousers are rumpled, his thin grey hair is flaked with dandruff. Oh, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, try to be kind to him!

But that isn’t in her. She resents him, she wants to be rid of him, yet the cards say he has a job to do for The House, and she will never go against the cards. So she picks away at him like a crow at a carcass, the softest ,,and most vulnerable bits first.

“You’re early,” she snarled.

Even his voice has lost its edge, its pernickety genteel vowels more nasal, flatter, Australian. “It is precisely four o’clock by my watch,” he said, his eyes on me. Hate, hate, hate.

“Bugger the time!” she roared. “You’re early, so piss off.”

Harold actually rounded on her! “Shut up!” he screamed shrilly. “Shut up, shut up!”

Oh, Flo, you shouldn’t be listening to this, but you are from under the couch! I shrank in my chair and prayed a silent babble that the cards released Flo’s mother from this hideous, self-inflicted bondage.

Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz simply laughed at him.

“Garn, Harold, you ain’t even a danger to all them little boys at school!” she said contemptuously. “You don’t impress me one little bit with your shut ups.

Or with your trouser snake, ace.” She winked broadly at me, but made sure that he could see her do it. “Truth of the matter is, princess, that if it was half an inch shorter, it’d be a hole.”

“Shut up, shut up!” he screamed again. Suddenly he turned on me, the hate flaring up in his eyes like a fire doused in petrol. “It’s your fault, Harriet Purcell! It’s all your fault! Things have changed around here since you arrived!”

If I could have answered, she would have cut me short. “Lay off Harriet!”

she thundered. “What’s Harriet ever done to you?”

“She’s changed things! She’s changed things!” “Bullshit!” she scoffed. “The House needs Harriet.” That set him off around the room, wringing his hands, screwing his head down into his shoulders, shaking and shuddering. Dear God, I thought, he’s genuinely demented! “The house, the house, the wretched house!” he cried. “Do you know what I think, Delvecchio? I think you have an unhealthy attachment to this-this female! Harriet wants, Harriet gets. There’s no difference between you and that filthy pair upstairs! Oh, why are you so cruel?”

“Bugger off, Harold,” she said with dangerous quietness. “Go bugger off.

The cards may say I gotta keep youse here, but you just done your dash in the 217

nooky department, ace. From now on you can masturbate. Fuck off!”

One more scorching look at me, and he went.

“Sorry about that, princess,” she said to me, then, to the couch, “Youse can come out, angel puss, Harold ain’t ever comin’ back into this room.”

“Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, there’s something seriously wrong with Harold’s mental processes,” I said with all the authority I could summon. “If you insist on keeping him in The House, please, I beg of you, treat him more kindly!

He’s deteriorating, surely you can see that! And he stalks me-or at least he did until Duncan came. Now that Duncan’s gone, he might go back to stalking.”

Oh, how can she be so intelligent and wise, yet so thick? Her response was to blow me a derisive raspberry. “Don’t youse worry none about Harold, princess,” she said. “The cards say you ain’t in any danger from a little wart like Harold.”

The cards, the cards, the bloody cards!

Still, I got Flo to myself for two hours, which delighted me. That scene between the two unlikely lovers had been awful to endure, but even in the midst of it, my heart had turned to lead at the thought that the breach between them would mean no more Flo on late Sunday afternoons. I think Flo was feeling the same as she huddled under the couch, because when her mother handed her to me, she lit up so vividly that I melted the way I used to when Duncan smiled at me. Used to. Past

tense, Harriet, past tense. Oh, I miss him! Thank God I don’t have to miss my angel puss too.

She loves the other angel puss, Marceline. If only Flo would put on weight the way Marceline has! My fivepound cat is now ten pounds, and still expanding. The pleasure in watching the pair of them roll around the floor! But I have made up my mind that Flo must start playing with the alphabet building blocks. I’ve tried sending my thoughts at her, but they don’t get through. So if I teach her to read and write, then we’ll be able to communicate.

She listened intently while I showed her A and B and C and T and a few others, seemed to comprehend completely when I built CAT and DOG. Yet when I give the bricks to her, what comes out is CTB or DAC. She can’t even hand me A or B. Meaningless to her. The reading centre in her brain must be damaged or nonexistent. Oh, Flo!

Pappy must have returned very late last night, while Marceline and I were asleep. Yet there must be some sort of supernatural force in The House, because I woke two hours early and I knew that she was home. When I came around the corner to her room with the coffee percolator in my hand, her door was wide open.

She was sitting at the table, looked up at me and smiled. Oh, so much better than she had looked when she went away! I hugged her and kissed her, poured both of us coffee, sat down. There were sheets of paper spread on the table, some blank, some with a few words written on them in purple ink.

“Ezra Pound-another Ezra!-had huge handwriting,” she said. “I wrote to him while he was in jail, and he answered me. Isn’t that amazing? I must show you his letter-written in pencil on a page torn out of an exercise book. His wonderful poetry! I’ve been trying to write a poem, but I can’t find the right words.”

“You will, later. How was it?”

She didn’t dodge the question. “Not too bad. I had a post-operative haemorrhage that kept me longer than usual. They treated me as if I had a fibroid tumour-that was the diagnosis on my chart. It’s a very well-run place. I had a private room, and they don’t let you see any of the other patients-very prudent. The food was good, and they were sympathetic to my going off meat.

A dietician came and explained to me that I’d have to balance my food very carefully to get all the necessary amino acids-eggs, cheeses, nuts. So in future you won’t be able to rouse on me, Harriet, I’ll be eating sensibly.”

All this was spoken in a gentle voice that utterly lacked any kind of vitality.

“Harriet,” she said suddenly, “do you ever feel as if you’re nailed to the same spot by one foot only, going round and round?”

“Of late, often,” I said wryly.

“I’m so tired of going round and round.”

I swallowed, tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t open up her wounds, yet might comfort her. In the end I just sat and looked at her, my eyes full of tears.

“Can you teach?” she asked. “Teach? Me? Teach

what?”

“I want to sit for the nurses’ entrance examination, but I lack even elementary schooling. Funny, I can read and write like a real author, yet I can’t analyse or parse a sentence, I can’t add or subtract or multiply or divide beyond kindergarten level. But I’m fed up with being an aide. I want to do nursing,” she said.

What a relief! Her words didn’t indicate a return to those hectic, men-by-thedozen weekends. Ezra may have almost killed her in one way, but in another he seemed to be freeing her.

I told her I’d try, suggested that she go and see Sister Tutor at Queens for an idea of what the examination was going to demand.

“Do you think Duncan would give me a reference?” she asked.

“I’m quite sure he’d leap at the chance, Pappy.”

She drew a breath, sighed. “Did you know that he offered to support me and my child? To give me enough money not to need to work, to educate it properly?”

Oh, Duncan! How good and kind you are, and how cruel I am! “No,” I said, “he didn’t tell me.”

“It upset him dreadfully when I refused. He didn’t understand.”

“I don’t either,” I said.

“It’s the father’s place to care for his child and its mother. If he isn’t willing to honour his moral and ethical obligations, no other man can take his place. If another man did, then in a court of law, lawyers could prove that that man was the father.”

“The Law is a ass,” I said, disgusted.

“I need to thank Duncan for everything he’s done. Ask him to visit me next time he’s here, please, Harriet?” “You’ll have to leave a note in his box at Queens. I broke it off with Duncan,” I said.

That seemed to upset her more than dealing with her fibroid had. Nor could she grasp why I’d sent him packing. To her, I’d betrayed him, the finest man in the world. I didn’t try to explain my side of it. Why upset her even more?

Wednesday, October 19th, 1960 I’m losing my enthusiasm for everything, including entering this book, though the finished ones seem to be safe in the ceiling.

Harold’s back at his old tricks, and maybe because I’m missing Duncan so much, the crazy old bastard has won at least the battle, if not the war. I don’t go upstairs for a

shower any more, I use the laundry bathroom. Oh, I just got to the point where my hair was standing on end and my flesh was crawling before I got to the top of the stairs. When I peered around the corner, the bulb would be out and the toilet door shut. Pitch darkness, and terrifying.

“Whore!” he’d whisper. “Whore!”

So I’m going to buy a shower head, some pipe and a couple of elbow joints and see if I can’t rig up a shower myself. I did ask Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz if she’d have one installed, but she has been in a peculiar mood lately too. I don’t think she even heard what I said. Malefic influences are at work, was all she would say, and that at a mutter. From which it’s obvious that lunches on Sunday are not happening. I still get Flo, which is the main thing. But Flo can’t seem to learn her alphabet.

Toby is never here at weekends, too busy building his shack up at Wentworth Falls, and during the week he has his work cut out tutoring Pappy, who is determined to sit the entrance examination this year, at the end of November. I did try to tutor her, but I’m so good at maths that I can’t understand anyone who has trouble doing simple arithmetic. Not a born teacher, unfortunately. Toby, on the other hand, is proving wonderfully patient and considerate. I am delighted. The pair of them are spending hours together from Monday to Friday. She still looks all right, just quenched.

Thanks to Klaus, I am now a very good cook of European food, and can make a few Indian and Chinese

dishes, thanks to Nal and Pappy. Isn’t it funny, though, that I can’t be bothered cooking for myself? I save my talents for dinner guests, of whom there are very few. Jim and Bob, really. They come down on Tuesday evenings, sometimes with Joe the Q.C. and her friend Bert. I’ve found out their real names. Jim is Jemima, which I don’t blame her for hating. Fancy parents being inconsiderate enough to do that to a baby! Bob and Bert are both Robertas, and Joe is Joanna. After that awful business with the Boys in Blue, Frankie (Frances) moved away from the Cross, lives somewhere in Drummoyne these days.

That’s because poor little Olivia was discharged from Rozelle into Callan Parkshe’s gone quite mad, poor soul, just drifts around in another world. But Frankie won’t abandon her, though her family has. Pathetic, isn’t it?

When I had Norm to dinner-roast chook, roast potatoes, good old Aussietype vegies for Norm-I found out that word of the Frankie-Olivia outrage has filtered through the system, and our own Kings Cross coppers are as livid as they are mortified. Well, coppers are like any other large group-some good, some bad, some indifferent. Our own blokes leave the Lezes alone, don’t think any the worse of a girl for being a Lez any more than they think the worse of a girl for being on the game. They just keep the wowsers at bay. Seems to me that the wowsers generate the worst of vice simply by stirring people up against what is inevitable, while the politicians serve their own interests by sucking up to the

wowsers. Beware of people who are addicted to power. In politicians, it’s ambition allied to no talent. They’re either failed lawyers or failed schoolteachers, with an occasional shop steward thrown in.

Off your soap box, Harriet Purcell!

I did mention Harold to Jim and Bob, who believe me. “You don’t think he’d take to haunting the laundry, do you?” I asked with a shiver.

Jim considered it, shook her head. “No, I don’t, Harry. He seems glued to Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s floor, that’s where the centre of his universe is located. He wants to separate you from the old girl, that’s all. If he was really going to do you in, I think he would have tried already.”

“He hates you too,” I said gloomily.

“Yes, but that’s the wowser in him. Oh, he’s jealous of us, but he knows we don’t matter to the old girl the way you do.”

What a splendid person Jim is! She sat there looking like whipcord and sprung steel, slim and muscular, that bony face very definitely more a man’s than a woman’s. No wonder the world sees her as a young man when she thunders through on her Harley Davidson with Bob perched on the pillion-a hell-for-leather chap out for a ride with his sweetheart. I can even understand why Bob’s parents, elderly and real bushies, have never woken up to the fact that Jim is a woman. So wise of them!