He grinned and cocked his head to one side like an alert little dog. “Sit down,” he said, disappearing behind his screen to make the coffee.

I sat and talked to him through the crisply ironed cotton folds of the screen, and when he came out with the coffee in two white mugs, we just kept on talking. He was a bush boy, he said, grew up around the enormous cattle stations of western Queensland and the Northern Territory. His father had been a barracks cook, but first and foremost a boozer, so it was Toby who did most of the cooking, kept his father in a job. He didn’t seem to hold that against the old boy, who eventually died of the booze. Back then, Toby’s paints were children’s watercolours and his drawing blocks cheap butcher’s paper, his pencils HB pilfered from the station office. After his dad’s death, he headed for the Big Smoke to learn how to paint properly, and in oils.

“But it’s grim, Sydney, when you don’t know a soul and the hay sticks out from behind your ears,” he said, pouring three-star hospital brandy into his second coffee. “I tried working in the cook trade—hotels, boarding houses, soup kitchens, Concord Repat Hospital. Awful, between the voices that didn’t speak English and the cockroaches everywhere except Concord. I’ll give hospitals this, they’re clean. But the food is worse than station food. Then I moved to Kings Cross. I was living in a six-by-eight shed in the backyard of a house on Kellett Street when I met Pappy. She brought me home to meet Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, who told me I could have her attic for three quid a week and I could pay her when I had the money. You know, you see those statues of the Virgin Mary and Saint Teresa and the rest, and they’re all beautiful women. But I thought Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, the ugly old bugger, was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. One day, when I’m more confident, I’m going to paint her with Flo on her knee.”

“Do you still cook?” I asked.

He looked scornful. “No! Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz told me to get a job tightening nuts in a factory—‘Youse’ll earn big bikkies and suffer not a bit, ace,’ was how she put it. I took her advice, I tighten nuts in a factory in Alexandria when I’m not up here painting.”

“How long have you been in The House?” I asked.

“Four years. I turn thirty in March,” he said.

When I offered to wash the coffee mugs, he looked horrified—I daresay he thought I wouldn’t do it properly. So I took myself off down to my own flat in a very thoughtful mood. What a day! What a weekend, for that matter. Toby Evans. It has a nice ring to it. But when he’d mentioned Pappy, I caught the shadow of a new emotion in his eyes. Sadness, pain. Light dawned—he’s in love with Pappy! Whom I haven’t seen since I moved in.

Oh, I’m tired. Time to put the light out and enjoy my second-ever sleep in a double bed. One thing I know—I am never going to sleep in a single bed again. What luxury!

Wednesday,

February 3rd, 1960

All I’ve been doing when I’m not doing routine chests is slapping pink paint on everything in my flat that stays still long enough. Though I’ve been around the Cross in daylight enough now to have my bearings. It’s fabulous. The shops are like nothing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve eaten more strange things in a week than in the whole of the rest of my life put together. There’s a French bakery produces long thin sticks of bread that are a dream, and a cake shop called a patisserie with these fantastic cakes of many layers thin as wafers instead of jam rolls and cream sponges and lamingtons like an ordinary cake shop. Nectar and ambrosia whichever way I look. I bought something called potato salad—oh, the taste! And a cabbage salad called coleslaw—I gobbled a whole little plastic bin of it and farted all night, but I don’t care. There’s a brick of mince with a hard-boiled egg in the middle of it called Hungarian meatloaf. Salami instead of Devon, Tilsiter cheese instead of the sweating soapy stuff Mum buys from the grocer—I feel as if I’ve died and gone to heaven when it comes to food. It isn’t very expensive either, which amazed me so much I remarked on it to the New Australian chap in my favourite delicatessen. His answer solved my vexed question about Blue Laws and opening hours—he said that all the businesses were run by family members, though he put his finger against the side of his nose when he said it. No employees in the union sense! And it keeps the prices down.

There are a couple of underwear shops have me goggling. The windows are full of transparent black or scarlet bras and bikini bottoms, negligees that would make David keel over in a seizure. Underwear for tarts. Pappy tried to talk me into buying some as we walked home one evening, but I declined firmly.

“I’m just too dark,” I explained. “Black or scarlet make me look as if I’ve got terminal cirrhosis of the liver.”

I tried fishing for information about the situation between her and Toby, but she eluded every bait I put on my hook. That alone is highly suspect. Oh, if only I can work out a way to get them together! Neither with a family, each immersed in important activities—Pappy her studies, Toby his canvases. They were made for each other, and they’d have beautiful children.

Sister Agatha called me to her office today and informed me that from next Monday I’m coming off Chests and going to work in Casualty X-ray. Cas! I’m tickled pink. The best work of all, no end of variety, every case serious because the unserious stuff is shunted to main X-ray. And at Queens, Cas X-ray is Monday to Friday! That’s because Queens doesn’t have many emergencies at weekends. It’s surrounded by factories to north, south and west, and east of it for miles are parks and sporting grounds. Its residential districts it shares with St. George Hospital, though it does have its share of ancient dilapidated terraces. Of course the State Government keeps trying to close Queens down, put the money Queens eats like candy floss into St. George and the small hospitals out in the west, where Sydney’s population is mushrooming. However, I’ll back Matron against the Minister for Health any day. Queens is not about to close, my new job in Cas is safe.

“You are an excellent technician, Miss Purcell,” said Sister Agatha in her round-vowels accent, “and excellent with the patients too. These facts do not escape us.”

“Yes, Sister, thank you, Sister,” I said, backing out bowing.

Yippee, Cas!

Tonight’s wish: That Pappy and Toby get married.

Saturday,

February 6th, 1960

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.