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frighteningly unstable. He had joined the RAAF and was training as a wireless air gunner. I thought asking him to do two things at once was ambitious. There was an older brother but he had headed for the Gulf in ‘39 and hadn’t been heard from since.
    My first impression of Polly was that she laughed too easily and too loudly. She was not unaware, if I may indulge in that litotes, of her effect on men. She moved with a casual and sinuous grace that hinted at the sensual possibilities her acquaintance might offer. I was not attracted to her initially. I thought she made rather a fool of herself by asking Annie Hudson for her autograph. Annie, of course, took full advantage of the opportunity, and found a copy of that day’s Chronicle and attached her signature to her advertisement for Tampax. She handed it to Polly with the condescension of a Garbo or a Crawford. She could have signed the Colgate advertisement, but that would have meant explaining that the chap in the last frame, with the back of his head to the camera, was me. Naturally, Polly would have wanted my autograph as well, and Annie wasn’t having any of that. Hogging the limelight was one of Annie’s less endearing qualities. Fortunately, the opportunities to indulge it were infrequent, and we did not come to blows over it.
    I saw Polly Drummond late in the afternoon on the day following the dinner. I was sitting in the dining room tinkering with the script. Arthur Rank was with me. He was a shy man who had lost his arm and a testicle in a harvester accident in outback New South Wales. He had been barely sixteen then, and in the intervening twenty years had learned to use his single arm with astonishing dexterity. He could roll a cigarette more rapidly and skilfully than any man I have known. I don’t think many people knew about his other injury.
    One night, not long after he had joined the Players, he drank too much rum and told me tearfully what had happened the morning of the accident. He took off his shirt to reveal the ghastly damage done to his flesh. The left-hand side of his torso, from the blunt stump of his amputation to the belt of his trousers, looked as if it had been flayed and the pieces put back willy nilly. The thick hair on his chest grew normally on the right side then stopped abruptly where it met the quilted, discoloured expanse of grafted and ruined skin. Without a word, and with tears streaming down his face, he unbelted his trousers and lowered them to show what else the harvester had taken from him. His thigh was heavily scarred, as was one side of his groin. He lifted his penis, which had escaped injury, to expose fully the place where one half of his scrotum had been torn from his body. We never spoke of it afterwards. He was a lousy actor, but I didn’t care. He was the only one in the company in whom I could confide. I suppose I believed that the badly injured live in a sort of permanent state of grace.
    The hotel was quiet. There were a few men in the bar, and I could hear Tibald bashing about in the kitchen as he prepared that night’s meal. Augie was expecting good patronage after the newspaper article. He’d been strutting and preening all morning and trying to engage me in conversation. A couple of RAAF officers had come in earlier and booked tables for themselves and their girlfriends, and there would also be a few walk-ins, no doubt. Arthur noticed Polly first. She was leaning in the doorway.
    ‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’
    I thought she was doing a bad imitation of some movie star she’d seen at the pictures. She was smoking and striking an attitude that was unnaturally cinematic, as if she was aware of how the curve of her silhouette looked from where we were sitting. She pushed herself away from the door-frame and came over.
    ‘I think I left my lipstick here last night.’
    Her voice was slightly nasal, with vowels hammered flat by the pounding heat of her many Maryborough summers. She took in Arthur’s