Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
So she’s sitting on the chaise lounge on the balcony, overlooking Pall Mall. The drunkards and patrons downstairs are stumbling towards the tram stop. Like an angry mosquito, the tram driver rings his bell signalling for the drunken thugs to move off the tram lines so he can get to the next stop.
She can hear the honky tonk piano playing, and the boozy punters and working girls chorusing in any key they choose. She can’t see them but she knows Maisy, Dot, Pearl and Colleen are dancing for their dinners. She’d heard there had been a lucky strike at Golden Square and the Mayor had warned her to expect hungry, and thirsty punters. Well she knew that hunger comes in many forms. She put to work some of her newest, youngest, prettiest and healthiest girls. There had been problems in Ballarat and the Mayor believed (and possibly she would have too, should she care to think beyond her business) that if you kept the diggers fed, boozed and bedded, there would be no talk of rebellion in Roslyn Park, no disputing the authorities while basic needs were met.
Josephine, also known more infamously around Bendigo as Madam Bellefleur, had money to make, girls to keep honestly working, plying their custom to pleasure politicians, police and panners. The warm, smoke-filled air of the saloon below mingled with the cooling summer dusk, and filtered up to the balcony. The young, wizened woman felt a renewed sense of purpose. She had never imagined herself enjoying her current position. She had more money at her disposal than she had ever dreamt of. She had come by it in ways which made her hard and worldly for her age. But that was a fate much better than starving back in Ireland or accepting the low place reserved for women of her birth and race. And she was proud she now looked after other girls, steered them right, and away from the problems she had met earlier on. After all, there were many men here, hoping to find their fortune, who needed comfort at the end of their day’s toil. Her girls were clean mostly, and knew how to pleasure the high and low, the rich, the poor, the English, American, French, and Italians. The Chinese knew not to bother here, and the constabulary took their share of both pleasure and profits in exchange for protection.
She turned to her friend, whose figure was silhouetted in the doorway from the balcony to the front Rosette room, and guarded herself.
“Do they know you are here?” , she tried not to look directly at him.
In the folds of her full layered skirt, in a concealed pocket, she could feel the nugget brushing against her thigh.
He scratched his beard, and looked towards the fading sunset beyond the wrought iron balcony.
“Now, Jo, how would they know I’m here? I stowed away on the coal coach and came up the laneway.” He paused when there was no reply, and looked more intently at her. “What are you so worried about? That I might tarnish your good name?” He snickered, then laughed unreservedly.
Jo saw in him something she most detested in men, in anyone for that matter; arrogance. “He thinks he’s safe”, she thought. “Thinks he has less to lose than I do, thinks he’s better, more rights to a good life than I do….he thinks he’s on top.”
“It has been a long time since a man has been on top of me, Brendan Murphy. And you are certainly no match for the last one I had.”
He looked at her with a mixture of fury and injury, unsure whether to scold her and treat her like the child she was behaving like, or remind her of her place as the gold town’s purveyor of female flesh, or appeal to her better nature. Either way, he refused to be belittled by her. He strode up to her couch, tipped his beared face close to her ear and whispered “You have no idea of the delights you would be missing, Jo.”
She wheezed as she drew breath and laughed like a pipe clearing itself. One of the drunk customers below looked up and saw her talking to what looked like no one, shook his head and threw up into the street’s open drain.
He looked even more hurt than before, then laughed with her. When their laughter died down, he asked “So, Jo, when will you leave this and be with me?”
The smile drained from her face as she realised he was serious.
“You know I…well, I can’t and you wouldn’t really want me caged like that, would you?” She looked around waiting for his reaction, then continued speaking into the silence between them, while the honky tonk piano played in the salon below.
“You wouldn’t have a family life with me, Brendan. No children….and I’m not the right sort for you. Besides, what would happen to the girls? They need taking care of. I see no reason to change my life, Brendan. Or is it my money you are after?” She thought, from his silence, his suggestion had been genuine. “You like my freedom, my wild ways. That disappears with a wedding ring.”
He turned silently, and disappeared. She wouldn’t see him again, and felt the cold nugget graze her thigh again.