Angel

Monday,January 4th, 1960

I started work this morning. Nine o’clock. Royal Queens is so much closer to Bronte than Ryde! If I walk the last mile-and-a-bit, I only have a twenty-minute bus ride.

Because I applied at Tech, I’d never been to the place before, only gone past it on a few occasions when we went south to visit someone or have a picnic. What a place! It’s got its own shops, banks, post office, power plant, a laundry big enough to contract out to hotels, workshops, warehouses—you name it, Royal Queens has got it. Talk about a maze! It took me fifteen minutes at a fast clip to walk from the main gates to X-ray through just about every sort of architecture Sydney has produced for the last hundred or so years. Quadrangles, ramps, verandahs lined with pillars, sandstone buildings, red brick buildings, lots of those ghastly new buildings with glass on their outsides—stinking hot to work in!

Judging by the number of people I passed, there must be ten thousand employees. The nurses are wrapped up in so many layers of starch that they look like green-and-white parcels. The poor things have to wear thick brown cotton stockings and flat-heeled brown lace-up shoes! Even Marilyn Monroe would have trouble looking seductive in opaque stockings and lace-up flatties. Their caps look like two white doves entwined, and they have celluloid cuffs and collars, hems mid-calf. The registered nursing sisters look the same, except that they don’t have aprons, flaunt Egyptian headdress veils instead of caps, and wear nylons—their lace-up shoes have two-inch block heels.

Well, I’ve always known that I don’t have the temperament to take all that regimented, mindless discipline, any more than I have to put up with being maltreated by male Uni students protecting masculine turf. Us technicians just have to wear a white button-down-the-front uniform (hems below the knee), with nylons and moccasin flatties.

There must be a hundred physios—I hate physios! I mean, what are physios except glorified masseuses? But boy, are they up themselves! They even starch their uniforms voluntarily! And they all have that gung-ho, jolly-hockey-stick-brigade air of superiority as they nip around smartly like army officers, baring their horsey teeth as they say things like “Jolly D!” and “Oh, supah!”

It’s lucky I left home early enough to make that fifteen-minute walk yet still arrive at Sister Toppingham’s office on time. What a tartar! Pappy says that everyone calls her Sister Agatha, so I will too—behind 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!