Читать книгу Angel - Колин Маккалоу, Colleen McCullough - Страница 19

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.