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.
I met several of The House’s tenants today. The first two happened
