The Women in Black Read Online Free PDF Page B

Staff Entrance into the city in its Saturday afternoon and Sunday condition: so silent, so deserted as to suggest a terrible and universal disaster, the visitation of some dreadful plague, or of the Angel, even, of Death itself. Each footfall could be heard as she walked down Pitt Street and Martin Place; as she passed the GPO she saw a woman posting a letter, and in George Street she saw a man in the far distance, going towards Circular Quay; the streets were otherwise quite empty.
    She walked down the dark mysterious concourse of Wynyard Station towards the trains, and by the time her own arrived, there were only three other passengers on the platform. She had never before been in town on a Saturday afternoon, and the episode, following upon the novelty of the interview for her very first job, induced a feeling of awful strangeness—and yet, of a certain ghostly familiarity; for Lisa believed herself to be in all likelihood a poet, and this experience seemed to her to be one about which one could certainly find oneself writing a poem, as long as one could manage to recall this feeling, this apprehension, of a world transformed, and oneself in it and with it: a sensation and an apprehension for which, for the moment, she had no precise words.
    Lisa, she said to herself, sitting in the train as it rattled across the Bridge. My name is Lisa Miles. The feeling of strangeness was still within her, and equally, she within it, as she knocked on the door of the house in Chatswood where she lived with her parents—she had as yet no key.
    Her mother opened the door. ‘Hello Lesley!’ she said.
    In the few weeks between the ending of the Leaving Certificate examinations and her first day at Goode’s, Lisa went to the Blue Mountains with her mother, read Tender is the Night and part of Anna Karenina , went twice to the pictures, and most of all stood silent and impatient while her mother, making her some new clothes, adjusted pins.
    ‘Stand still,’ she commanded. ‘You want to look nice, don’t you?
    It’s your first job.’
    ‘Yes, but I’ll be wearing a black frock ,’ said Lisa. ‘They won’t see me in my own clothes.’
    ‘They will when you arrive and when you go home,’ said her mother.
    ‘It won’t matter then,’ said Lisa.
    ‘It always matters,’ said Mrs Miles.
    ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night,’ Lisa began.
    ‘Oh, you and your tiger,’ said her mother. ‘Don’t distract me:and stay still.
    ’ Lisa was an only child, and this fact was believed by onlookers to account for her general queerness. Her father was a compositor on the Herald and was rarely to be seen, generally arriving home in the wee small hours, sleeping till the afternoon and going off to a pub to drink beer for an hour or two until it was time to go to work. During his waking hours on Saturday he glued himself to the wireless to listen to the racing, having placed several off-course bets. Mrs Miles had not the slightest idea of the size of his salary, and would have been stunned if anyone had told her. If she had known how great a proportion of it ended up in the pockets of the off-course bookmakers she would have fainted dead away.
    She had not known him well when they married, during the war: he was a handsome soldier at a dance she had attended, and when he had suggested after a brief acquaintance that they make a go of it, she had seen no reason at all to say no.
    She had until then had a hard life, for she had been born into a bakery business, and had been covered with flour since the age of eleven when she had been drafted in to assist her elders as soon as she came home from school. She was shown how to put the glacé cherries on the fairy cakes, and subsequently instructed in more difficult operations, until by the age of fifteen there was almost nothing she didn’t know about fancy baking.
    At this stage she left school and joined her family at their trade on a full-time basis. She was paid a