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Delvecchio Schwartz in her wake. Because I was standing in the doorway, I saw the visitor reach into her bag, withdraw a thick wad of brick-coloured notes-tenners!-and hand them over a few at a time. Pappy’s landlady just stood there with her hand out until she was satisfied with the number of notes. Then she folded them and slipped them into one pocket while the fashion plate from Sydney’s most expensive suburbs left the room.
    Back came Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz to throw herself onto a mate of the four chairs inside, bidding us sit on two more with a sweep of a hand the size of a leg of lamb. “Siddown, princess, siddown!” she roared. “How the hell are youse, Miss Harriet Purcell? Good name, thattwo sets of seven lettersstrong magic! Spiritual awareness and good fortune, happiness through perfected labour-and I don’t mean them lefty politicians, hur-hurhur.”
    The “hur-hur-hur” is a kind of wicked chuckle that speaks volumes; as if there is nothing in the world could surprise her, though everything in the world amuses her greatly. It reminded me of Sid James’s chuckle in the Carry On films.
    I was so nervous that I picked up her comments about my name and regaled her with the history of the Harriet Purcells, told her the name went back many generations, but that, until my advent, its owners had all been quite cuckoo.
    One Harriet Purcell, I said, had been jailed for castrating a would-be lover, and another for assaulting the Premier of New South Wales during a suffragette rally. She listened with interest, sighed in disappointment when I finished my tale by saying that my father’s generation had been so afraid of the name that it didn’t contain a Harriet Purcell.
    “Yet your dad christened you Harriet,” she said. “Good man! Sounds like he might be fun to know, hurhur-hur.”
    Ooooooaa! Hands off my dad, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz! “He said he liked the name Harriet, and he wasn’t impressed by family claptrap,” I said. “I was a bit of an afterthought, you see, and everybody thought I’d be another boy.”
    “But you wasn’t,” she said, grinning. “Oh, I like it!” During all of this, she drank undiluted, uniced threestar hospital brandy out of a Kraft cheese spread glass. Pappy and I were each given a glass of it, but one sip of Willie’s downfall made me abandon mine-dreadful stuff, raw and biting. I noticed that Pappy seemed to enjoy the taste, though she didn’t glug it nearly as fast as Mrs.
    Delvecchio Schwartz did.
    I’ve been sitting here debating whether I might save a lot of writer’s cramp by shortening that name to Mrs. D-S, but somehow I don’t have the courage. I don’t lack courage, but Mrs. D-S? No.
    Then I became aware that someone else was on the balcony with us, had been there all along but stayed absolutely invisible. My skin began to prickle, I felt a delicious chill, like the first puff of a Southerly Buster after days and days of a century-mark heatwave. A face appeared above the table, peering from around Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s hip. The most bewitching little face, chin pointed, cheekbones high beneath the orbits, flawless beige skin, drifts of palest brown hair, black brows, black lashes so long they looked tangledoh, I wish I was a poet, to describe that divine child! My chest caved in, I just looked at her and loved her. Her eyes were enormous, wide apart and amber-brown, the saddest eyes I have ever seen. Her little pink rosebud mouth parted, and she smiled at me. I smiled back.
    “Oh, decided to join the party, have youse?” The next moment the little thing was on Mrs. Delvecchio
    Schwartz’s knee, still with her face turned to smile at me, but plucking at Mrs.
    Delvecchio Schwartz’s dress with one tiny hand.
    “This is me daughter, Flo,” said the landlady. “Thought I had the Change four years ago, then got a pain in the belly and went to the dunny thinkin’ I had a dose of the shits. And-bang! There was Flo, squirmin’ on the floor all