Girl with a Monkey by Thea Astley Read Free Book Online

is now, what with trying to better himself so his girl won’t look down her nose. Think it’s about time I worked me way into the upper crust!”
    â€œIt’s an idea, anyway. Changing your job, I mean.”
    Elsie was far too absorbed in her anaemic artistic efforts either to hear or really to care what he said.
    â€œWell, what about it?” Elsie added two more outhouses to the quarantine station, balancing the heavy land-masses with the hump of the island. Complete isolation of the mind was the trick to which she resorted during the trivia uttered by others, whether it concerned her or not, and she found that she was perfectly capable of maintaining a more or less intelligent front while within its esoteric circle the personality intensified its self-searchings.
    â€œHow do you fancy me as a garage man? Bit classier than digging, and I know a thing or two about cars. Two bombs and a semi-ute learnt me.”
    Elsie gave him her profile. She had tied her thick brown hair into two little pigtails and looked surprisingly young.
    â€œThey cost thousands. You’d never be able to buy one, not unless you had a returned serviceman’s loan. And even then you’d be battling.”
    â€œYou know I was mining all through the war,” said Harry petulantly. “So that’s out. Unless you’d rather be married to a miner?” He smiled reminiscently, remembering the pitch-black walls splashed with light from his forehead lamp, the crib tins, the fooling in the shower-rooms. “I had a favourite lamp called Sal. She saved my life once in a rock-fall down at theold Limekiln. No. I think it had better be cars. I’d rather wipe the exhaust pipes of the rich than dig their drains.”
    â€œIf we’re aiming so high,” suggested Elsie, “why not a country pub? Then we can fleece the wealthier tourists, have them pleading for accommodation the way I’ve pleaded in vain, every time I was on transfer.”
    â€œMaybe some bank might finance it,” Harry said. “Give us a kiss to seal the idea, anyway.”
    She rebuffed him gently, preferring fantastic, impossible dreaming to having his shortcomings as spiritual lover or future hotelier brought home to her by being forced to relinquish what she was doing, and give him her whole attention instead of this simulacrum. He was hurt.
    â€œListen, Else, if you wanter talk we’ll talk, and you’ll hear somethink all right. Within two months my job winds up, see. We’ll have fixed up the lower functions of every householder in Pimlico and Hermit Park. No one else has ’em. Anyway, whether they have or not, I’m getting out. I’ve had it. It’s spoiling me hands.” He grinned, complacent with his humour. “When I first heard I was worried. So I saw Art Mason, who’s the union boss for the sugar loaders on the waterfront, and arst him if he had a job coming up for the next season. And he said no. Why? Because there isn’t going to be any loading. Not onto boats anyhow.”
    Rodomontade, this? Elsie laid aside her sketching block prepared to make a burnt offering, as it were, of her whole attention.
    â€œI feel in my bones this is going to be an unpleasant little tale.”
    â€œIt is. And it’s strictly on the Q.T. Art’s a pal of mine. I did him a good turn once back in Ipswich, and he’s for ever grateful like the song. Well, friend Art has quite large interests in a carrying business that runs down to Sydney and back. And what he really wants is to get sole loading rights on sugar for this company of his. I don’t know yet how it will go, but at the moment things look so smooth Uncle Harry might come right in on the ground floor. Art offered me a job as his repair man on the whole fleet of trucks. There’s fifteen of ’em. If things go the way he wants, I might even get set up in a repair shop, name on the door and all.”
    â€œBut how