Angel

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.