Window Gods by Sally Morrison

Author:Sally Morrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2014-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

Apart from that, which I’ll admit was a debacle, I’ve steered clear. The first time I bought a house, I did my own conveyancing – I remember ringing up the lawyer of the woman whose house I was buying to get some needed particulars and being told I couldn’t have them because I wasn’t a lawyer, so I had to go to the woman herself. It worked out right enough, although the seller, a divorcee who’d been given the house in a settlement, thought I was strange, by which I suppose she meant that I wasn’t what she’d been expecting – a man, or a man’s representative. No. I was just me: one of the first unmarried women in the state of Victoria to be allowed to have my own mortgage. I owed my luck to a recommendation from Vance – a mere PhD at that time, a post-doctoral fellow no less, not even on the permanent payroll. I’d gone first to the bank with references from Beryl Blake and been turned down, because Beryl, though a distinguished Doctor of Science, had never had enough clout to have a mortgage of her own – wrong reproductive organs.

I’ve had much more need of GPs than I’ve had of lawyers. Although I go on about my mother’s GP, I like and appreciate my own very much. Mine is a soft-spoken, middle-aged chap of Greek heritage. He’s not ambitious; he’s in practice with a friend in a dilapidated house several doors up from mine. You can have your pathology specimens taken on the spot, they bulk bill and there is a woman dentist in the practice, too. ‘It’s not ideal,’ my GP tells me, resignedly. The Greek Church owns the land and won’t update the premises, but ‘I meet people I like and sometimes I go home happy with a job well done. If I had my time over, I’d do it again.’ They speak Greek at the practice and most of their patients are Greek immigrants. Sometimes people have to stand in the waiting room with its array of mismatched chairs, and usually there are kids playing with donated toys on the floor, and there’s trust. Where would we be without trust?

In a lawyer’s office.

The lawyer is in town on the twenty-fifth floor. When you exit the lift, there’s a wall in front of you with the names Raven and Barrat in golden printing on it, so that you see your face distorted by the ‘a’s and ‘r’s as you glide to the right where an unpersoned shiny plank is attended by a bright red upholstered chair in a chrome cage that does for legs. Something slim and black lies on the desk beside a screen and you can see as you approach that it’s a gadget – perhaps for rounding up lost sheep.

A person eventually teeters in stage left in a too-tight lime-green frock and black heels that throw her arch forward so far you can see the articulation between tendon and bone at the ankle joint.

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