Eight Pieces on Prostitution Read Online Free PDF Page B

no more than an acknowledgement of love.

The Birthday Party
    For the birthday party, I ordered a sponge from the Hungarian cake shop in Fitzroy Street. I collected it early, before midday, and sat it on the kitchen table. It was so hot that by two o’clock the icing had melted and something awful was happening to the cream. Our fridge had finally given up; only when the door would no longer shut on the bulging ice would I say to Freda, ‘We must defrost the fridge.’
    As well as the cake we had some dips, biscuits and cheese, cabana and nuts and potato chips. The cheese had sweated as much as it could and turned dark and cracked along the top. The dips were very strong. One was smoked oyster and the other had a lot of garlic.
    I put a damp tea-towel around the cake, but it didn’t do much good. Icing subsided into faded flowers, and the silver balls that made up the number seventy looked like tiny plants where the soil has washed away and uncovered their roots.
    As fast as we drank our beer, it came out again on our foreheads.
    â€˜What a scorcher,’ said John the birthday boy, John from Kangaroo Valley as he was usually known.
    John’s face was mottled with the heat; the white line around his forehead where his hat came to shone in a strange, phosphorescent way.
    Maria wore a green satin shirt for the occasion. It was beginning to perish underneath the arms. When she lifted her glass, the remaining threads stood out, and in between was a kind of decaying gauze.
    We talked about the luxury block of flats and the new people they had brought to our area. No one had bothered about us for years, and now we were an eyesore. On hot days like this we looked at the sea with a special frustration. When you most needed to slip away for half an hour and let your body slide into the cool water, the phone would not stop ringing.
    â€˜The heat brings them out,’ Maria said.
    John told us not to worry. He was happy that we’d made the effort.
    The smell from the Cowderoy Street drain doubled in intensity and the effluent from Port Melbourne thickened, its whitish colour becoming yellow-grey.
    â€˜Pooh,’ said Maria as she closed the window.
    Birthday John slumped in his chair as though his muscles were in danger of giving up altogether, but with a look of concentration too, as though by effort of will he could reduce himself and make the heat more bearable.
    â€˜Don’t mind me,’ he said.
    Maria said, ‘It isn’t every day you’re turning seventy.’
    After that, none of said anything for quite a while. The phone rang. Freda and I were busy in the rooms, and after we came back, John and Maria were just sitting quietly, Maria with her hands spread so that they made a lattice on the table.
    I drank beer while Freda began a conversation about ways of keeping cool during a heat wave, a desultory conversation that seemed to follow the weighted movements of air around the room. John offered his recipe, which was to open both the front and back doors and lie in the corridor on a bed of damp towels.
    Maria said that might be okay in a farmhouse, but it wouldn’t be practical in a house of sin.
    No one seemed to consider this remark unusual.
    Freda had been Christmas shopping that morning, and as well as John’s present, there was a laundry basket in the kitchen, along with three pot plants, each with its own wooden stand. We’d clubbed together to buy John a fishing rod. He was pleased with it and told us about the fishing lines he’d made when he was a lad.
    â€˜Just be sure that if you catch anything out there in the bay, you throw it straight back,’ Freda told him.
    As well as the fishing rod, Freda had picked up a folding canvas chair on special.
    â€˜You can sit on the veranda and watch the sunset,’ she said, smiling, and I thought it was strange that he’d never invited any of us up to his farm; and then I thought that it was not so