When Lesley Miles arrived for her interview for a position as Sales Assistant (Temporary) at Goode’s, she was given a form to fill in, and the first word she wrote on it, very carefully and with a spooky sense of danger, was ‘Lisa’.
This was the name she had chosen for herself several years before: she disliked the one she had been given more than she could say, and had long since resolved to take another at the first opportunity. This was the first opportunity.
‘Lisa Miles!’ cried a voice; and Lesley-Lisa sprang to her feet and followed a woman into the small room where the interviews were being conducted.
‘Well, Lisa,’ said the woman—and Lesley’s new life, as Lisa, commenced.
How very simple it was: she was sure she would get used to it immediately. She sat up very straight, like a Lisa, and smiled gaily. Now it would all begin.
Miss Cartright, who was conducting the interview, looked piercingly at the teenager seated before her: one had to be careful to get the right kind of girl here at Goode’s, even if she was only a temporary hired for the Christmas rush and the New Year Sales which followed. This one was at least evidently intelligent: the form she had completed showed that she was about to sit for the Leaving Certificate. But what a face! What a figure! She had the body and the mien of a child of around fifteen, and an immature one at that: small and thin, even skinny, with frizzy blonde hair and bright innocent eyes behind utilitarian-looking spectacles. Still, she would look more adult in the black frock: her own clothes were impossible—obviously homemade, and not well-made either: a little cotton print frock, with badly set-in sleeves, and a peter-pan collar. Poor kid.
Lisa, having ironed her pink frock—which was her best—with the greatest care, and wearing her high-heeled shoes with a brand new pair of nylon stockings, was confident that her appearance approached the condition of Lisa-ness as nearly as was possible in all the circumstances, and sat on, smiling and eager and absolutely oblivious of Miss Cartright’s inner thoughts.
‘And what are you thinking of doing, Lisa,’ asked Miss Cartright, ‘when you leave school?’
‘Well, I’m going to wait and see what my Leaving results are,’ said Lisa, looking vague.
‘I don’t suppose you mean to make a career in the retail trade?’ said Miss Cartright.
‘Oh, no!’ cried Lisa.
Miss Cartright laughed.
‘It’s quite all right, Lisa. It doesn’t suit everybody. But as long as you are working here, you will be expected to work hard, and as if it were your permanent job. Do you understand that?’
‘Oh, of course,’ said Lisa, desperately. ‘Of course; I do understand. I’ll work very hard.’
And Miss Cartright, thinking it might be rather quaint to see the girl in such a context, decided to put her in Ladies’ Cocktail, where she could give a hand to Magda in Model Gowns now and then because, although she looked so childish, she was evidently bright as well as willing, and might be quite useful, all things considered.
‘You start on the first Monday in December, then,’ she informed the new Sales Assistant (Temporary), ‘and your wages will be paid fortnightly, on Thursdays. Now we will go and see about your black frock.’
It was only now that she realised that it was very unlikely that there would be a frock which would fit this skinny child. Oh, well: perhaps she would grow into it, once the strain of the examinations was behind her. Lisa followed her from the room, up the fire stairs to the Wardrobe Room, and so enchanted was she at the idea of wearing black that she did not care in the very least that the frock she was given was one size too large, she being an XXSSW; for in any case, she had never ever had a frock which fitted properly.
The interviews for temporary staff had been held on a Saturday afternoon, after Goode’s—and every other shop in the city—had closed for the weekend, and Lisa had arrived just at closing time, when the streets were still busy with people going home or to the pictures or to restaurants. Now, a good hour later, she emerged from the Staff Entrance into the city in its Saturday afternoon and Sunday condition: so silent, so deserted as to suggest a terrible and universal disaster, the visitation of some dreadful plague, or of the Angel, even, of Death itself. Each footfall could be heard as she walked down Pitt Street and Martin Place; as she passed the GPO she saw a woman posting a letter, and in George Street she saw a man in the far distance, going towards Circular Quay; the streets were otherwise quite empty.
She walked down the dark mysterious concourse of Wynyard Station towards the trains, and by the time her own arrived, there were only three other passengers on the platform. She had never before been in town on a Saturday afternoon, and the episode, following upon the novelty of the interview for her very first job, induced a feeling of awful strangeness—and yet, of a certain ghostly familiarity; for Lisa believed herself to be in all likelihood a poet, and this experience seemed to her to be one about which one could certainly find oneself writing a poem, as long as one could manage to recall this feeling, this apprehension, of a world transformed, and oneself in it and with it: a sensation and an apprehension for which, for the moment, she had no precise words.
Lisa, she said to herself, sitting in the train as it rattled across the Bridge. My name is Lisa Miles.
The feeling of strangeness was still within her, and equally, she within it, as she knocked on the door of the house in Chatswood where she lived with her parents—she had as yet no key.
Her mother opened the door. ‘Hello, Lesley!’ she said.
In the few weeks between the ending of the Leaving Certificate examinations and her first day at Goode’s, Lisa went to the Blue Mountains with her mother, read Tender is the Night and part of Anna Karenina, went twice to the pictures, and most of all stood silent and impatient while her mother, making her some new clothes, adjusted pins.
‘Stand still,’ she commanded. ‘You want to look nice, don’t you? It’s your first job.’
‘Yes, but I’ll be wearing a black frock,’ said Lisa. ‘They won’t see me in my own clothes.’
‘They will when you arrive and when you go home,’ said her mother.
‘It won’t matter then,’ said Lisa.
‘It always matters,’ said Mrs Miles.
‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night,’ Lisa began.
‘Oh, you and your tiger,’ said her mother. ‘Don’t distract me: and stay still.’
Lisa was an only child, and this fact was believed by onlookers to account for her general queerness. Her father was a compositor on the Herald and was rarely to be seen, generally arriving home in the wee small hours, sleeping till the afternoon and going off to a pub to drink beer for an hour or two until it was time to go to work. During his waking hours on Saturday he glued himself to the wireless to listen to the racing, having placed several off-course bets. Mrs Miles had not the slightest idea of the size of his salary, and would have been stunned if anyone had told her. If she had known how great a proportion of it ended up in the pockets of the off-course bookmakers she would have fainted dead away.
She had not known him well when they married, during the war: he was a handsome soldier at a dance she had attended, and when he had suggested after a brief acquaintance that they make a go of it, she had seen no reason at all to say no.
She had until then had a hard life, for she had been born into a bakery business, and had been covered with flour since the age of eleven when she had been drafted in to assist her elders as soon as she came home from school. She was shown how to put the glacé cherries on the fairy cakes, and subsequently instructed in more difficult operations, until by the age of fifteen there was almost nothing she didn’t know about fancy baking.
At this stage she left school and joined her family at their trade on a full-time basis. She was paid a derisory wage, in cash, and continued to live at home, over the shop. She might still have been covered with flour to this day if her Ted hadn’t come along in his smart military outfit. Once that was removed, he had less to say for himself; but that was life, wasn’t it. She might have felt as badly as she suspected his doing, that she had not provided him with a son, were it not that her Lesley was the utter apple of her eye.