In June 1980, Sandra strode through the grand complex of the Queen Victoria Hospital, her palms electric with excitement. In those days, the Queen Vic was on the north side of Lonsdale Street. It had been, since the late 1960s, Monash University’s teaching hospital for obstetrics, gynaecology and paediatrics.
The plastic surgery department initially comprised a senior plastic surgeon, Lena McEwan, and a young assistant plastic surgeon, Simon Ceber. At first, the clinic’s work consisted mainly of correcting cleft lips and other congenital abnormalities, including hand and genital abnormalities. In 1976, however, the surgeons were approached by Professor William Walters about a patient requiring a type of surgery not routinely performed in Australia. After corresponding with Professor Shan Ratnam in Singapore (who had, at that time, five years of experience in sex reassignment surgery) and reading the literature he suggested, the two surgeons ‘decided to go ahead and do one’. The surgery was successful.
‘So that’s how I got into it,’ explains Dr Ceber. ‘Having done one, Walters had another one within a few months. Word got around that we were providing this service.’
It wasn’t that this surgery had never been performed before in Australia—there had been ‘eight or nine cases’ in Melbourne. Rather, it had been performed extremely rarely and somewhat covertly. There was word that a small group in Sydney was performing operations, that a surgeon at St Vincent’s Hospital had been treating transsexual patients for a number of years, and rumour had it that over at the Royal Melbourne Hospital there was a surgeon who would operate on a Sunday morning in a locked theatre and transfer the patient to Mont Park mental hospital for clandestine post-operative care. In other words, these surgeons were as brave as their patients. By 1977, an interdisciplinary committee had been formally established at the Queen Vic to supervise the assessment and management of patients seeking sex reassignment surgery. By 1982, they had successfully treated about eighty-five patients.
Though she has no recollection of him, Dr Ceber—Sandra’s surgeon—is a meticulous and soft-spoken man whose grey-bearded face rests in a reserved smile. He carries within him almost the entire history of this branch of medicine: it barely existed when the weight of performing it for a significant portion of the Australian population was placed on his shoulders. ‘Initially I was just part of the team. It was exciting, challenging surgery because it was different. Later, there was no one else doing it. If I stopped, the whole clinic failed. So, that kept me going for thirty years.’
Was there anything that united the patients he treated over his career? ‘An obsessionalism about wanting to get their surgery,’ he says. ‘I think that’s what impressed me the most. The older ones, with professions and kids and wives, sacrificed a lot. Yet to them it was worthwhile. Transsexualism is not a choice.’
When I ask him how this work was perceived by the broader community of surgeons at the time, he hesitates for a beat before saying, ‘It was looked down on. They looked at you as if you were doing something terribly immoral.’
There were successes; but mostly Sandra remembers that they came back from Cairo like the walking dead: maimed, burnt, scarred, ‘drug fucked’. Even with the flights and the hotels, going overseas for the operation was cheaper: ‘You’d just whore it for a week or two and you could go to Cairo.’ And the process at the clinic there was shorter and simpler—no waiting period, unlike Melbourne, where the doctors wanted you to live full-time in your gender identity for two years before surgery. But she had seen women who expected to come home exalting in their new bodies returning instead with stories of being burnt by faulty lighting or cut open in outdoor sheds. Sandra worked and saved unrelentingly for the right to walk into—or, more accurately, out of—the elegant building on Lonsdale Street: to have her surgery and recover in safety.
When she first inquired about the procedure she was told unequivocally that even the most straightforward cases take a minimum of two years to complete. She wanted it done yesterday but she still played the game, showing up early to her first appointment with the psychiatrist, smiling and overdressed. She had already had the feminising rhinoplasty and an eye lift; was not in possession of any obviously male facial features that could cause ‘incongruencies’ after her surgery, making it more difficult to integrate socially as a woman. She had breasts and soft hips, and moved with casual grace in her own skin.
‘I know this operation is a new sorta thing,’ she had told the psychiatrist as she settled onto his couch, casually crossing her legs and placing her handbag by her ankle, ‘and not many have been done. I reckon that’s about right, when you think about it, ’cause it should be saved for those who are absolutely certain that they need it. Well, doctor, what would you like to know?’
Eleven months later she was on the operating table.
•
Though the sex work she does and the drugs she takes and her overriding need for constant company frequently mean that she is not in control of herself or her environment, she is excellent at acting otherwise to conceal any vulnerability. So she does not cry in public and, while she might comment in the same tone as one comments on traffic that she is experiencing pain or discomfort, and though of course, she feels pain deeply, she never actually shows it or makes any practical adjustments to accommodate it. She is supposed to stay in her hospital bed for a week following her surgery, but after a few days she gets restless.
‘Cuppa tea? Cuppa coffee? What would you like, darl?’ she asks, leaning down and smiling into the faces of the other patients. Seeing that the nurses are run off their feet, she figures she may as well help with breakfast. Later that morning, bored, she asks one of the nurses if she might be able to go for a little walk? Thinking that she means to stay on the ward, the woman gives Sandra a brief nod of approval. She does not see Sandra put on lipstick or hitch her catheter up underneath the belt of her good kaftan dress; no one is at the front desk when Sandra walks into the lift.
Crossing the road towards the religious shops selling rosaries and bibles, Sandra is feeling slightly woozy but grateful for the fresh air when she catches a glimpse of a woman, tall and slim and blonde, reflected in the mirrored wall between two shops. She automatically appraises the stranger for a moment, enviously thinking, ‘She looks lovely,’ before realising that she is looking at her own reflection. ‘It is fucking ME!’ she says to herself, marvelling, incredulous.
She will forget the details of her surgery, boiling it down to its vaguely constituent steps. ‘First they remove everything and then insert it all and they had bolts inside you to realign your stomach, which was pretty painful. Then you go back and have the bolts taken out.’ She will, within the next three years, forget the year of this surgery. She will forget the names of her doctors and where she recovered and how long it took. But this moment—when she knows, not simply that she has done the right thing, but that she has been righted—will live forever, undiminished. There is harmony, correction, congruency; physically and mentally everything is finally in its place. This is the first time she sees herself, truly, as a woman and she will forever describe it as the happiest time in her life. Exuberant, she goes shopping to celebrate.
She buys chocolates and flowers for the nurses, new clothes to wear home and new records to play when she gets there. Checking her watch, she decides to head back to the hospital so she retraces her steps through the city. She grows impatient waiting for the lift, takes the stairs instead and enters the ward with her shopping bags, singing out her return to the nurses at the front station. They immediately go ballistic. She is suddenly surrounded by people and doctors come running, as though it was the emergency room, to check whether she is bleeding, whether she’s ripped her stitches. She is ordered to stay in her bed and lectured about how she has recklessly risked everything that has just been done for her. But she feels fantastic. ‘It was me. It was fucking me!’ she thinks from her bed, replaying that moment in the mirror over and over and over.
It takes a while before it hits: a pain she is at first unwilling and then unable to describe. It gets worse and worse until eventually all she can manage is a whispered ‘Pain…pain…’ The nurse on duty gets a doctor. He’s heard about this one, and takes his time sauntering over. Due to her earlier robust display and the fact that she is a transgender sex worker, he thinks she is trying to scam extra drugs. And despite the fact that the pain is so intense that she cannot speak properly, her anger raises her momentarily aloft. ‘You think I’m here…for drugs? If I…want drugs, I can buy drugs on the fucking…street. How dare…you…think I’m going through this for…’ But the doctor only closes his notes and walks away.
Time stops under the weight of this stabbing pain radiating from her guts. There is only the endless dark beyond the high windows and the insectile buzz of the fluorescent lights boring into her temple. At some point in the night, she crawls out of bed and over to the nearest window where she claws at the pane. If she had the strength to lift it open she would throw herself out; hurl this body where the bad is devouring the good out onto a bed of air and nothingness. This is where a nurse finds her, sobbing, resting her burning cheek against the cool glass. The nurse has her carried back to bed, examines her chart and orders an enema that resolves the problem entirely.
When Sandra is discharged, finally, she says to this nurse, ‘I don’t know how I can ever thank you.’
‘Just don’t show up here in three months,’ the woman replies with a tight nod, referring to the high rate of suicide attempts among Sandra’s peers. Sandra dutifully keeps her two-month follow-up appointment with Dr Ceber. But she never returns after that, despite the need for at least a year of aftercare.
She lives on her small savings while she recovers, growing bored and increasingly nervous about her seeming stasis and financial insecurity. She rolls joints and drinks tea and re-reads the same magazines while the rain beats down on the roof. Unable to use her body, at least for a while, she obsesses about finding new ways of making income.
‘I just need the rent paid. It’s like a cooperative, really, but I hold the reins. I only take ten dollars from every job, no matter what it is. What you do is your concern,’ she tells the new girl briskly. Then she stands up from the couch with some trouble and slowly shows her through the small house on Buckley Street in Footscray, where she has just taken over the lease. ‘Clean towels from here, dirty towels go there. If you’re between clients, hanging out in the girls’ room, just give a knock after a half hour’s up. That’s how we let each other know.’ Through the front window, she sees the cops pull up outside and excuses herself for a moment to let them in. They stand in the front hall for a few minutes where she jokes with them, has them laughing, slips them their cash, sees them off. Everything has run smoothly here, apart from that night when she lost her cool with one of the girls who was carrying on like a fucking banshee about something or other. Sandra picked up a bottle and threw it at her. ‘Just missed the TV by a bee’s dick! Would’ve smashed the TV to fucking pieces,’ she explained to the heads that popped out of the rooms at the sound of glass shattering against the wall.
She opens a small bric-a-brac shop in North Melbourne with her friend Robyn. The rent is only twenty dollars a week and she loves scouring estate sales and garage sales, loves tweaking the displays in the window, loves the process of turning nothing into something. But as soon as her body feels ready, she grabs the chance to make some real money. By October 1980, four months after her surgery, she passes the brothel on to one of the girls, hands the shop over to Robyn and heads for Kalgoorlie.
Sandra does not remember how she heard about Hay Street and the money to be made out west. But Kalgoorlie, six hundred lonely kilometres inland of Perth—itself one of the most isolated cities in the world—has been a frontier gold-mining town since 1893. Its brothels have long been part of popular lore, and it is also likely that Sandra would have encountered women in the Melbourne brothels where she had worked, going to or returning from their ‘tour of duty’ in the goldfields.
In 1980, Kalgoorlie was still the Wild West. Still very much that frontier town of miners and prostitutes, people arriving for the gold, working long hours on short-term contracts and divided by gender, with the attendant drinking and fighting and fucking. Whether you drove or took the train or flew in direct from ‘the eastern states’ (a phrase which still carries an air of cultural divide if not outright suspicion) your overriding impression on arrival would have been one of dust and tin, of heat, impermanence and remoteness.
While prostitution itself was not illegal in Western Australia, most prostitution-related activities, such as soliciting or brothel-keeping, were. But for nearly one hundred years the Kalgoorlie police pursued an unwritten but immutable practice of selective policing known as the Containment Policy, which ‘grant[ed] criminal immunity to a limited number of brothels, in order to “contain” the activity and enforce unofficial restrictions on the businesses and the work force’.5
The tin brothels of Hay Street became a major tourist attraction for both paying customers and voyeuristic visitors. By concentrating prostitution in one place, Containment had made Hay Street—and Kalgoorlie—infamous. Sandra, when she arrived, was not aware of the policy, but she came to know its terms intimately. They structured her life for a year and a half.
When she first gets there, she goes straight to the police station to register. Name, address, age, marital status. Photograph. They tell her the rules: prostitutes must reside on brothel premises and submit to weekly medical examinations; they are prohibited from visiting the town’s pubs, cinemas and swimming pool. They warn her that if she breaks these rules, she will be out on the next plane or train. Then the madam of her new house, whom she spoke to before leaving Melbourne, takes her on a tour of the town. Sitting in the hot car, Sandra listens while the madam explains the hours, curfew, job prices, payment protocol and the requirement to keep her doctor’s book up to date; also the house rules, which culminate in the admonition that should she fuck a black man, she will be thrown out.
Sandra’s house, like all the brothels on Hay Street, is a low-slung corrugated-iron shed. There are individual bedrooms for the girls, all in a row, and a communal lounge room and dining area. Each bedroom has two doors: one opens back into the house and the other opens onto a long outdoor corridor running across the front of the house. Directly across the corridor from each of these front-facing doors is a second, open doorway which looks out onto Hay Street. She is expected to have her tea and be sitting in this doorway by 6 p.m. each day. There, under the lights, is where she will solicit clients while being gawked at by the tourists and townspeople who drive slowly past.
Taking her suitcase out of the car, Sandra asks the madam about the thick wire over the windows and light bulbs. The madam explains that the miners are paid fortnightly: every second week, there is no money in the town.
‘They want it but they can’t pay for it, so they get drunk and come up and raise a riot,’ she explains. ‘If something like that happens, you just lock the doors, love, and they can’t get in.’
She assigns Sandra to the first room. Number one. The room number corresponds to a number on the row of mailboxes lining the common area. In her mailbox Sandra will deposit, after a brief discussion with each client, the up-front payment. The madam will collect the night’s earnings from her mailbox each morning, tally it up, take half and return the remainder to Sandra. But sometimes Sandra will be groggily cleaning up her room and a hundred-dollar bill will unfurl from beneath an overflowing ashtray like a creature disturbed under a log. Another hundred might be shaken out from, say, the folds of her sheets as she strips her bed or plucked from between the empty bottles covering her bedside table like a stand of trees. These are the bills that maybe she doesn’t place in her mailbox.
The doctor, officially the obstetrician to the town’s married women, also visits Hay Street every week. In each brothel, the madams set aside a room for examinations. There he swabs for the common local sexually transmitted infections. Once a month, he takes blood to test for syphilis and hepatitis B and C. While many of the women are hepatitis B positive, and there is ‘a bit of chlamydia, a bit of gonorrhoea’, the overall rates are not high in the early 1980s, despite the fact that ‘practically no one used condoms’.
Many of the women get in to get out. These women work in Hay Street for four to six weeks straight before leaving Kalgoorlie with enough money to pay for their housing or education, or a trip or a car. Some madams make employees who stay longer take a week off every three months so they don’t burn out. Some women take a few days off when they are menstruating; others just insert a sea sponge and keep working. Like them, Sandra is there to make money. She becomes one of the top earners. She makes a lot of money. ‘A lot.’
She glistens in the doorway like something edible, narrows her eyes against the glare of late sun. She lives in the time before. When she has showered, long and hot despite the heat, while airing out her room. When she has washed her sheets, hung them to dry too fast in the stabbing sun and smoothed them back on her bed. When she has nested the pillows back in their places, given them one quick karate chop to make them sit just so. Cracked a joint. Chatted with the other girls. Regaled them in a whisper about how—despite the fact that her mailbox had been particularly full that morning, to the delight of the madam—she discovered yet another hundred dollars on the sink in her bathroom.
‘Huh!’ she marvels theatrically. ‘So I go to myself, “Fuck, what’d I do last night? If nothing else, I’m a good slut.”’ When they have chuckled and drunk from the bottles she buys for the house. When she has set her hair. Glued a nail. And finally, when she has angled a folding chair just so in the doorway, to enjoy the gentle warmth before it fades to a feeling barely remembered.
She shares with the other girls what she’s been taught. To put a towel down on the bed. To slide across the bed, melting into ‘the goddess look’. To say, ‘Put your arm around me and kiss me.’ To heat a glob of Vaseline in one hand while the customer is thus distracted, then to throw a leg up near your head and reach that hand around the outside of the thigh and underneath, placing the lubricated fist in front of your crotch. ‘I have this thing that I don’t actually have sex with them,’ she says. ‘If you get the position of your arm right, and warm up the Vaseline right, they’ll fuck your hand! I’ll say, “Just kiss me a bit more,” (not that I want to, but to distract them) and they’ll get off like a rocket. Bang bang bang. Straight onto a blanket, you do the actress bit and then off you go. So I never really have sex. It’s quite ingenious really. That’s how I make my money.’ To assist her in this, she pops a lot of pills. This she also shares with the girls: ‘Mandies make you randy, make you root like a fucking viper and be making a lot of money.’
But she also makes her money by looking like she has already made it. Each small room comes furnished with a double bed, a locking wardrobe, a dressing table with mirror, a bedside table and a washstand where the women wash the client while inspecting them for signs of infection before getting started. During her free time, Sandra cruises the secondhand shops in town and buys furniture. In her tiny room she sets up a wall unit and a free-standing bar stocked with liquor; she brings in a lamp, a rug, coordinated bedding, soft music. There, in that tin shack on the edge of a great desert, she transfigures an oasis into being.
She steps back to check that the wine-red curtain is hanging straight and one of the younger girls stops in the hallway to gaze in.
‘It looks like a luxury to come into my room,’ Sandra explains. ‘I always make out like I’m very wealthy and well to do because it creates an illusion around me.’ What she does not say, because she has not realised it yet, is that the more she makes, the more she spends because the more miserable she is, really. Furniture, gifts, clothes, accessories, booze, drugs. She came here with the specific intention to make money and she is unrelenting about it, but unlike some of the other women who get in to get out, she is one of the girls who parties. It drains her savings, but on the other hand she remembers those pilled-out nights as ‘fun times, to say the least’. It is not quite a house, this long, low shack with its tin walls radiating heat in the summer sun. But it is home for a time.
No one is sure how the rumour starts, but word gets around that there is a drag queen working on Hay Street. Drunk, laughing, enraged, the men have resolved to hunt him down—a preoccupation that survives when the alcohol wears off and renews itself in the pubs where they gather, reeking of cigarettes and beer and fried food and sweat. They are saying that the bloke is in the first room of the first house. The fearful vigilance Sandra carries just beneath her skin like shrapnel twists inside her now. She is tall, huge-breasted, she has large hands. But so does the Swedish girl in the room a few doors down who is taller, bustier, larger.
‘You know what we’ll do?’ She smiles, this beautiful woman Sandra will always be grateful to, but whose name she will forget. ‘We’ll swap rooms.’
From the girl’s sparsely furnished room nearby, Sandra strains to hear what’s being said as the men walk up the veranda and through the door of room number one.
‘Gentlemen?’ the woman greets them.
‘We reckon you’re a bloke,’ the spokesman says menacingly.
Later the woman will tell Sandra how she responded. How she opened her robe so that she was perfectly naked. How she leaned back on her elbows and splayed her legs. ‘Do I look like a bloke?’ she asks evenly. ‘Do I fuck like a bloke?’ She addresses this question directly at one of the men.
‘No,’ comes the muttered reply.
‘Well. You best get word round town that you’re dreamin’,’ she says lightly.
Down the hall, in the room that feels like a cage, Sandra’s heart is racing as the men clear out. If someone told her then that eighteen years later this town would elect a transgender former prostitute and brothel madam as a local council member she would have died laughing.
She flies back to Melbourne and the memory of Maria to testify against Phillip John Keen. Back also to the doctor who refills her prescriptions for hormones and for drugs. Back back back.
There were two reports in the Age on the coronial inquest into Maria’s death. The first, 28 February 1980, described evidence that ‘[a] bouncer at a disco jumped on the stomach of a pregnant girl before she died…Maria Gloria Paten gave an awful scream and moaned before the bouncer dragged her outside’. The coronial court was also told that ‘Miss Paten was dressed as a male at the time’ and heard evidence from Miss Amanda Celeste Claire ‘who described herself as a trans-sexual and Miss Paten’s lover’.
One month later, the ‘pregnant girl’ had become ‘a 19-year-old woman’ who incidentally happened to be ‘three months pregnant at the time’. This article shows how, in committing Mr Keen for trial on a charge of manslaughter, the Coroner laid a good deal of blame on the small shoulders of the victim: ‘Mr Griffiths said Miss Paten had provoked Keen…but that his actions in refusing to re-admit her to the disco on June 26 last year had “overstepped the mark”.’ The Coroner said: ‘I have no doubt that the deceased provoked Mr Keen into doing what he in fact did, that is when she was on the floor, he jumped on her, landing knee first on her stomach area.’
It would be twenty-five years before the Victorian legislature recognised this language for what it was and repealed the defence of provocation on the grounds that it predominantly operated to excuse male violence towards women.
Sandra gives her evidence, reliving that night on the stand, and afterwards she drinks alone and takes her pills and sleeps with the television on in a shitty motel at the edge of the city. Then she catches a plane back west where she sits still for five hours straight, grey as a dead tooth.
Sandra remembers how Keen responded to the suggestion that his attack on Maria was racially motivated by offering his Asian fiancée as proof that he wasn’t a racist. But she has forgotten whether he was found guilty of the crime. She thinks he went to jail; can’t say for sure. The court file on the matter contains only the charges and various adjournment orders. I wonder whether Sandra’s uncertainty is proof that, in the end, retribution is irrelevant. Or whether it just shows how good she is at escaping.
She leaves the first brothel to go work for another Hay Street madam who made her a good offer. One day she wanders into the shared kitchen and opens a cupboard. Sorts through its contents, throws out expired packages and cans, arranges others according to size and shape. Inspired, she moves on to the fridge. Then the pots, the pans, the cutlery. She goes shopping for food. From her own pocket, she starts cooking meals for the house.
‘You’ve got a flare for this,’ the madam comments appreciatively. ‘You make a home for them.’ Looking to retire and move to the suburbs of Perth, the madam asks Sandra if she would be interested in taking over the business. Sandra is flattered by the show of confidence but declines.
‘I sorta really don’t want to make a life career out of this, you know,’ she replies. ‘It isn’t really what I want to do long term.’ And by the time Sandra leaves Kalgoorlie, they are—perhaps strangely—very good friends.
Sandra left Kalgoorlie but where did she go? In the fathomless cosmos of her twenties and thirties, dates and places float completely free of each other. The name of the Swedish girl is lost. The names of the madams are lost. The names of the brothels, the precise length of time in Kalgoorlie, all lost. I scrap draft after draft of my timeline and even when I am assisted in my task by Sandra’s recollection, the narrative remains a tangled necklace. Events link into one another only so far before they halt, abruptly, at some great knot where they loop over each other so tightly that some seem to disappear altogether. Still, I pinch at it and pick at it, seeking slack, until, sometimes, it loosens and a line—a dented, mangled line—spreads out.
It is most likely that sometime in 1982 Sandra took what she had managed to save and bought a ticket to Sydney, perhaps on a tip from the madam or one of the other girls. There, she worked for a few months at a brothel in Lidcombe because that is where she met Rick, a client who kept coming back just to visit her and, soon, to take her out. Rick, who looked like Clint Eastwood and whom she called Clit Eastwood. Rick, for whom she went to sleep wearing make-up and for whom she woke up early to reapply it. Rick, who told her he would’ve married her if it weren’t for this ‘mental problem’ he had with ‘the whole gender thing’. Rick, who was never faithful to her and who lived off her like a gut worm for years and called her ‘Frank’ behind her back.
But Rick keeps coming back and for that she is willing to pretend it doesn’t hurt so much. She is excellent at patting this pain down, blending it into the landscape the way she contours her foundation. They make plans to move to Melbourne together.
Despite all her hard work, her savings are drained by the money she spends on drink and drugs, on partying, on the people around her and on Rick. When she moves back to Melbourne she returns with nothing, to nothing; she discovers that Robyn has ripped her off, selling the furniture she left in her care as well as everything in their secondhand shop. Sandra never even knew she was a junkie. She has to start over again, sleep on floors again, work long shifts again at the brothels to save enough to make things comfortable for Rick when, eventually, he joins her.
The line between who she once was and who she is now is concrete, but it is also porous. She gets dressed up one evening and drives back to Barkly Street, Footscray with a friend to play bingo, have a few drinks. Does she return to her old neighbourhood that night out of pride? As a claim of right? Perhaps it is a test, a personal challenge. Or it could just be hard loneliness, that type of desperation that makes one accept the stab wound of familiarity as a substitute for true connection.
Her friend Kat, chain-smoking rollies held between thumb and index finger, reminds her of Maria; dresses and acts like Maria. Adrenaline shooting down her arms, Sandra steers past the darkened Sims grocery store where she still expects to see her mother walking out with flour and sugar, past the post office and the barber shop and the floors she used to sweep while the men smoked and laughed at her for being such a little poof. She parks and gets out of the drivers seat, hoping and dreading that she will see a familiar face. But even if she does run into someone, she will be protected by her make-up and her hair, her clothes, and her body. Like the time her cousin walked into the brothel. Looked right at her before he chose another girl. Didn’t even recognise her.
‘You’ll never guess who’s here,’ Colleen hisses urgently into the phone near the bar.
‘Can’t hear you!’ Linda yells, standing in her kitchen. Between the noise of her brothers drinking at the table and the kids playing footy inside and the roar of the pub behind her sister on the other end of the line, it is impossible to hear what Colleen is saying. ‘Hush, will you? It’s Colleen,’ she yells at the boys.
‘Peter’s here!’ Colleen says, louder now. ‘Dressed like a woman again! But I recognised him! The bingo down near Barkly Street!’
Linda herds both boys outside to play. Closing the back door, she explains hurriedly to her brothers as she runs into the bedroom to change her clothes, ‘Pete’s down at the pub near Barkly Street. I’m going, you’ve gotta go home.’ The large men exchange looks. They slowly finish their ciggies, drawing down to the filters. They leave their beer cans on the table and shuffle outside to jump on their motorbikes. Too pregnant now, at eight months, to catch a ride, Linda jogs over to borrow the neighbour’s car.
She scans the crowd for the blondest head. Walks over and stands at the end of the table and sees, almost, like words erased from a blackboard, her Pete chatting with ‘a girl that looked like a guy’. Sandra looks up with a polite smile that shatters into shards. ‘Linda!’ she says too brightly over her heart beating so hummingbird fast it feels still. She turns and strains to explain casually to Kat, ‘Just going to catch up with an old friend, love.’
They sit on the steps for close to an hour as people push by to get to the toilets. Linda explains about her new man, how he is good to her and to the kids, though he doesn’t live with them. How Ailsa stopped speaking to her once she got pregnant. About the boys, how big they are now, how they’re doing at school, the way they remind her so much of their father. Maintaining eye contact, like a bird seeking land, she tells it all to Pete, but Pete is not there.
‘Hmmm,’ Sandra says. And also, ‘Really?’ And then, oddly, ‘I don’t like men anymore.’
Linda nods at the words, too perplexed at first to feel a sting. Wonders whether that means he’s a lesbian now. Sandra stands suddenly and says that it’s been nice, really. Bingo is long over, and the pub is closing up. Sandra finds Kat’s familiar face; they join the people wandering out into the night. Absently stroking her stomach, Linda starts to ask for a phone number, but then she sees her brother out on the footpath, scanning everyone streaming out: hunting. His anger is a dark gift to her but she doesn’t want it, not now.
And then it happens quickly. Linda’s brother pulls his fist back. Linda throws herself between them. Sandra reflexively raises her long, thin arms high in the air and stands there, eucalyptic, in the shadow cast by the street lamp. Then she pivots and runs down the street, her stomach lurching. He pursues her. ‘Look at that man chasing that woman,’ people shout on the footpath. Heads whip around in alarm.
‘Hoy!’ Kat barks and takes off after them.
Linda, with her huge belly, follows for as long as she can before she has to stop, puffing, under that great weight.
‘It’s funny, I know. It’s funny now,’ Linda tells me, though everything in her eyes and her face and her yellowing photo albums spread out before us says otherwise.