Study of Her
he was near the corner, a few careful metres from a phone-box. I lapped the block slowly, wearied by intimate knowledge of long St. Kilda summer daze, and watched from the broken kerb opposite. Supine on a low brick wall, a thick book grasped before unprotected eyes, she had one slender leg bent up as she leant against a paling fence, swept up in the pages of a novel. Just as I remembered her.
It had been a year since we lived together and although it was her who left the rent unpaid when she bussed off to Queensland with Amber, (a woman as brittle and transluscent as her name), it was I who felt the guilt.
We were thrown together as strangers in a share house and gender made us friends. In our own ways we were lonely and late night talking helped...as talking sometimes does.
I was with her when she rang 93 "S. Britains" hoping one of them was her mother, and when she snorted a line of speed, laughed, and rang a massage parlour for a job.
I watched her from across the street and cried.
"Do you think I'm pretty?" she asked me once, and I gushed, praising long legs and curls of thick auburn. It didn't matter. It was as if she looked at herself in a mirror clouded by loneliness - and loneliness can be a great deceiver.
"If I see a ring on their finger, I get them talking...ask them about the wife and kids. How old the daughter is, what she'll be when she grows up. If they had an erection to start with they soon lose it." she explained to me as we sat cross-legged on my bed, pretzel crumbs spraying from open mouths as unexpected giggles filled the room.
I was entranced and listened intently, but her stories sometimes stopped abruptly and she would gather her cigarettes and leave and I could only call after her.
"Goodnight...."
She stood from her place on the wall as a car slowed near the phone box. A man squeezed his bulk into the glassless cubicle, removed something from the directory' s pages and replaced it with something else.
"One day," she said "I want to go overseas, America or Europe....Norway, I think." And there was a map inside her wardrobe, her name repeated, stamped crudely in the middle of continents. ANGELA. ANGELA. ANGELA.
"I'd love to be known, really famous." she said after a movie one night. We sat up for hours, drinking alcohol from vast coffee mugs and imagining glamorous stage names for ourselves, our lips and teeth stained vermillion from the wine.
"You have to have a stage name." she announced. I considered it and disagreed.
"You are," I drunkenly advised, "Angela. You can only be Angela. You don't need a stage name. You are you. Be true to yourself."
She walked to the phone box and rummaged in her bag, slumping down onto the grey street only minutes later. A woman ran from further down the street, her body swooping down around the prostrate form, her voice mostly lost amongst the traffic drone. It filtered through my open window as I sat and watched her rouse the body and lead it down the street.
"Tiffany, Tiff.......can you hear me?"
She did a mad dance around the kitchen once, a shimmy, made decent only by her thick tracksuit and moccasins.
"Hello, I'm Tiffany." she drawled in a low husky voice. Then she went on in breathless monologue, cradling her coffee cup lovingly before unseen admirers. "I'd like to thank God and the Academy and my wonderful husband, Sebastian." she bowed before me, arms oustretched, sending the hot dark liquid spilling onto cracked linoleum.
"Tiffany?" I spluttered, dumbstruck. She turned to me, faking a menacing glare before she broke character, winked and was once again Angela.
As she stumbled over the buckled footpath, supported by the arm of her scantily clad rescuer, I lurched out of my car and caught up to their high heel tottering. I faced them, walking backwards as I spoke.
"Angela, Angela, it's Julie. Are you OK?"
Forsaken eyes rose to meet mine briefly and she muttered only two words before drifting back into her own oblivion.
"Angela's dead."
My footsteps slowed until they overtook me with laboured shuffles and I bowed my head, alone in the laneway, before heading back to my battered Holden. I was twenty-three. I didn't know what else to do.
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