Five rows away Penny was standing beside a tall Aborigine. She was wearing a flame-red dress of some satiny material that touched a fetishistic nerve inside me like a dentist’s drill going into tooth pulp. A poplin trench coat was floating out around her shoulders; it was too big for her; someone else’s coat, and her eyes were shining and the Hash of her white, chunky teeth was a stark, erotic signal. She moved her head a fraction, saw me, and looked straight through me. I stood still, empty and cold, and the fellow-feeling I’d had with the blacks around me ebbed away and I was back where I’d been before – alien, excluded and hostile.
Jerome said something to me and I grunted in reply. I started to move off and found Tickener by my elbow.
“Great fight, Cliff,” he bubbled.
“Wonderful,” Toni said.
“I don’t know,” I said blankly. “I think Sands would have been home sooner.”
A while later I was driving to Mosman to see Ailsa, but I didn’t expect the visit to be a good one. My head was too full of the images of women: wild ones, rushing to the edge; ambitious ones with their toeholds on the ladder of preferment; old ones with their greed and the need for security showing in their eyes, and young ones with the illusions being scrubbed off their faces by the long days and nights.
