Angel. Colleen McCullough

her back. She’s about a thousand years old and was once a nursing sister—still wears the starched Egyptian headdress veil of a trained nurse. She’s the same shape as a pear, right down to the pear-shaped accent. Fraightfulleh-fraightfulleh. Her eyes are pale blue, cold as a frosty morning, and they looked through me as if I was a smear on the window.

      “You will commence, Miss Purcell, in Chests. Nice, easy lungs at first, don’t you know? I prefer that all new staff serve an orientation period doing something simple. Later on we shall see what you can really do, yes? Jolly good, jolly good!”

      Wacko, what a challenge! Chests. Shove ‘em against the upright bucky and get ‘em to hold their breath. When Sister Agatha said Chests, she meant OPD chests—the walking wounded, not the serious stuff. There are three of us doing routine chests, me and two junior trainees. But the darkrooms are in furious demand—we have to hustle our cassettes through at maximum speed, which means anyone who takes longer than nine minutes gets yelled at.

      This is a department of women, which amazes me. Very rare! X-ray technicians are paid the male award, so men flock to X-ray as a profession—at Ryde, almost all of us were men. I imagine the difference at Queens is Sister Agatha, therefore she can’t be all bad.

      I met the nurses’ aide in the dreary area where our lockers and the toilets live. I liked her at first glance, a lot more than any of the technicians I met today. My two trainees are nice kids, but both first-years, so a bit boring. Whereas Nurse-aide Papele Sutama is interesting. The name is outlandish—but then, so is its owner. Her eyes do have upper lids, but there’s definitely a lot of Chinese there, I thought when I saw her. Not Japanese, her legs are too shapely and straight. She confirmed the Chinese later on. Oh, just the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen! A mouth like a rosebud, cheekbones to die for, feathery eyebrows. She’s known as Pappy, and it suits her. A tiny little thing, about five feet tall, and very thin without looking as if she’s out of Belsen like those anorexia nervosa cases Psych sends me for routine chests—why on earth do teenage girls starve themselves? Back to Pappy, whose skin is like ivory silk.

      Pappy liked me too, so when she found out that I’d brought a cut lunch from home, she invited me to eat it with her on the grass outside the mortuary, which isn’t very far from X-ray, but Sister Agatha can’t see you from X-ray as she patrols. Sister Agatha doesn’t eat lunch, she’s too busy policing her empire. Of course we don’t get the full hour, especially on Mondays, when all the routine stuff from the weekend has to be squeezed in as well as the normal intake. However, Pappy and I managed to find out a great deal about each other in just thirty minutes.

      The first thing she told me was that she lives at Kings Cross. Phew! It’s the one part of Sydney that Dad put out of bounds—a den of iniquity, Granny calls it. Riddled with vice. I’m not sure exactly what vice is, apart from alcoholism and prostitution. There are a lot of both at Kings Cross, judging by what the Reverend Alan Walker has to say. Still, he’s a Metho—very righteous. Kings Cross is where Rosaleen Norton the witch lives—she’s always in the news for painting obscene pictures. What is an obscene picture—people copulating? I asked Pappy, but all she said was that obscenity is in the eye of the beholder. Pappy’s very deep, reads Schopenhauer, Jung, Bertrand Russell and people like that, but she told me that she doesn’t have a high opinion of Freud. I asked her why she wasn’t up at Sydney Uni, and she said she’d never had much formal schooling. Her mother was an Australian, her father Chinese from Singapore, and they got caught up in World War Two. Her father died, her mother went mad after four years in Changi prison camp—what tragic lives some people have! And here am I with nothing to complain about except David and Potty. Bronte born and bred.

      Pappy says that David is a mass of repressions, which she blames on his Catholic upbringing—she even has a name for the Davids of this world—”constipated Catholic schoolboys”. But I didn’t want to talk about him, I wanted to know what living at Kings Cross is like. Like any other place, she says. But I don’t believe that, it’s too notorious. I’m dying of curiosity!

       Wednesday,January 6th, 1960

      It’s David again. Why can’t he get it through his head that someone who works in a hospital does not want to see some turgid monstrosity of a Continental film? It’s all very well for him, up there in his sterile, autoclaved little world where the most exciting thing that ever happens is a bloody mouse growing a bloody lump, but I work in one of those places where people suffer pain and sometimes even die! I am surrounded by gruesome reality—I cry enough, I’m depressed enough! So when I go to the pictures I want to laugh, or at least have a good old sniffle when Deborah Kerr gives up the love of her life because she’s in a wheelchair. Whereas the sort of films David likes are so depressing. Not sad, just depressing.

      I tried to tell him the above when he said he was taking me to see the new film at the Savoy Theatre. The word I used wasn’t depressing, it was sordid.

      “Great literature and great films are not sordid,” he said.

      I offered to let him harrow his soul in peace at the Savoy while I went to the Prince Edward to see a Western, but he gets this look on his face which long experience has taught me precedes a lecture that’s sort of a cross between a sermon and a harangue, so I gave in and went with him to the Savoy to see Gervaise—Zola, David explained as we came out. I felt like a wrung-out dishrag, which isn’t a bad comparison, actually. It all took place in a Victorian version of a giant laundry. The heroine was so young and pretty, but there wasn’t a man worth looking at within cooee—they were fat and bald. I think David might end up bald, his hair isn’t as thick as it was when I met him.

      David insisted on taking a taxi home, though I would far rather have walked briskly down to the Quay and grabbed the bus. He always lets the taxi go outside our place, then escorts me in up the side passage, where, in the dark, he puts a hand on either side of my waist and squishes my lip with three kisses so chaste that the Pope wouldn’t think it sinful to bestow them. After which he watches to see I’m safely in the back door, then walks the four blocks to his own house. He lives with his widowed mother, though he’s bought a roomy bungalow at Coogee Beach which he rents out to a family of New Australians from Holland—very clean, the Dutch, he told me. Oh, is there any blood in David’s veins? Never once has he put a finger, let alone a hand, on my breasts. What do I have them for?

      My big Bros were inside, making a cup of tea and killing themselves laughing at what had gone on in the side passage.

      Tonight’s wish: That I manage to save fifteen quid a week at this new job and save enough by the beginning of 1961 to take that two-year working holiday to England. Then I’ll lose David, who can’t possibly leave his bloody mice in case one grows a bloody lump.

       Thursday,January 7th, 1960

      My curiosity about Kings Cross is going to be gratified on Saturday, when I am to have dinner at Pappy’s place. However, I shan’t tell Mum and Dad exactly whereabouts Pappy lives. I’ll just say it’s on the fringe of Paddington.

      Tonight’s wish: That Kings Cross isn’t a let-down.

       Friday,January 8th, 1960

      Last night we had a bit of a crisis with Willie. It’s typical of Mum that she insisted on rescuing this baby cockatoo off the Mudgee road and rearing it. Willie was so scrawny and miserable that Mum started him off on a dropper of warm milk laced with the three-star hospital brandy we keep for Granny’s funny little turns. Then, because his beak wasn’t hard enough yet to crack seed, she switched to porridge laced with three-star hospital brandy. So Willie grew up