At last, she thought, I've done something right.

"You're so much nicer," she told the sleeping man. "You're not hard and scratchy any more. Can you hear me?"

"Mm," said Herbert Badgery, and started snoring.

"I love you," said Leah Goldstein.

She peered at him closely in the dark. His eyes were shut. He was breathing through his partly open mouth. "You are asleep, aren't you?"

"I hate this place," said Leah Goldstein.

47

You may recall me mentioning a certain widow in Nambucca. I said she had a shell shop and it was her I left behind when I cycled up to Grafton looking for a job with the General Motors dealer.

In truth it was a milk bar, but I always liked the idea of a shell shop. I had a picture in my mind of glass cases with those twisted shapes, soft and pink on the inside, all set out neatly on beds of tissue paper. I had no objection to cleaning the glass myself. I knew all the bus drivers on that route and many of them said they would have stopped there if there had been shells but we never got around to it.

I came into that shop in 1937. I had been working for an oyster farmer down at Port, and that was pleasant work most of the year, but I was not getting ahead. I did not have a scheme in mind, but I bought a second-hand Malvern Star bicycle and thought I'd ride it up to Queensland. There was a small buckle in the back wheel, but in every other respect it was a good machine. I left Port at sun-up and I was in Nambucca for lunch and that was where I found Shirl's Milk Bar (although it was not called that at the time) and I parked the bike and went in for a pie.

You know the sort of place. It stands back from its own little patch of yellow gravel. It has a peppercorn tree or a big old gum tree in front of it. There is a wooden veranda with its floors a few feet up from the ground. The boards are a bit rotten. When you walk into the shop there is a torn fly-screen and a little bell rings down the back. You look at the curtain hung across the passage and you expect to meet a big-bellied woman with breathing troubles, or a bent one with a dangerous mole in the middle of her forehead. You look at the lollies behind the streaky glass -tarzan jubes, traffic lights, licorice allsorts, musk sticks in three colours, freddo frogs, jelly babies, eucalyptus diamonds, and just the way they sit there in their cardboard boxes tells you to expect goitre, canker, wall-eye, gout, crutches.

So when I heard Shirl coming – click, click, click, click – it was not the right walk for a shop like this. I knew what she looked like the minute I heard her – short, broad, verging on muscly, with brown skin and a nice set of lines around very lively eyes. She emerged from behind her curtain with her make-up properly done, the seams of her stockings straight, and her hair fresh from the domed oven at Mrs M. Donnelly, the Nambucca hairdresser. She could not have been more than fifty.

I put off the pie a moment and bought a threepenny glass of lemonade, to give me time to consider the matter.

I asked her if the shop was hers. I was surprised to hear her say yes, because it was a shop for dying in, and she did not look like the dying sort. Then she told me about her dead husband and I understood.

When I finished the lemonade, I ordered a strawberry spider. I told her she didn't belong there. I came straight out with it and although she did not look up – she had her arm deep into the ice-cream tub, scratching around to get enough into the scoop to make my spider – I could tell she was pleased to hear me say it.

"No," she said. "I deserve a ruddy big palace, and silk sheets and a little black boy to do the housework and rub my back." She dropped the scoop of ice-cream into the glass, ladled on the strawberry and splashed in the lemonade. The spider frothed up pink inside the glass and spilled down the sides. She had bright red nail polish on and her nails looked pretty holding that frothing pink glass.

"You do," I said.

If I'd been stuck with the shop I would have opened the place out a bit, like one of those Queensland fruit stalls, or even like a Sydney milk bar where all you have at the front is a sliding door, and once it is open you are truly open. You smell the ocean and the dust. You'd be alive, not half dead.

The truth does no harm on occasions. I told her what was on my mind. I gave her a bit of a sketch. I used a piece of wrapping paper which she was kind enough to tear off a loaf of bread.

She leaned across the counter. She had that smell of a woman fresh from the hairdresser. "That's all very good," she said, "but you're forgetting the westerly."

"Your shop faces east."

"That's so," she said, but she did not lean back, or start wiping down the counter. She ran her finger over the plan, as if it were a road map. "So you're a handyman, are you?"

She looked up and we considered each other a moment.

"I was looking for a place to board," I said. "Give me a room and my keep and I'll do the job for you. It'd be a pleasure. You could have oranges in racks right down the wall…"

I could see the choice of oranges, or perhaps the numbers I suggested, puzzled her.

"And sea shells," I said, "in glass cases, for the tourists. The main thing though is the light. It's that mongrel wall that makes the shop so miserable."

"What about materials?"

"Don't worry. I'll supply them."

"You'd have to have a permit from the council."

"You like to dance?" I asked her.

"Don't mind."

"There's a dance down at Port tonight."

"Oh yes."

"You want to go?"

She pursed her lips and looked at me. "How would we get there?"

"I got a bike."

She laughed. I laughed too. Any mug could see we were not discussing bicycles.

"You're going to double-dink me," she said. I always liked women with lines around their eyes. "Put me in my ball gown on your bar."

"I'll double-dink you," I said. "It'd be a pleasure."

"You think you're capable?"

"More than."

I was too, and by three o'clock we'd made a mess of her clean sheets and I was lying on my back with her hair in my nose, thinking how much nicer the room would be if we could lift the roof like the hatch on a ferret box.

Shirl was a good woman. She had a great appetite for life and would have a go at anything. We went rabbit shooting, fishing at night, swimming, dancing. We won a silver cup for mixed doubles at Taree. She liked to play the piano and sing.

She wasn't much of a cook but neither was I. We ate meat pies and baked beans and fried eggs. She used to fart in her sleep.

I got a job at Bobby Nelson's garage, working the pumps when he was away driving the school bus. This gave me enough cash to buy materials and I soon had the front of the shop pulled out and I put a big steel RSJ right across the front of it. Then I built the sliding doors myself, modelling them on the ones at Nelson's garage. This was more expensive than I thought, but Shirl made up the difference. I felt happy ripping open that bloody coffin of a shop. I rigged up a clever canvas canopy to go out the front for the summer mornings, and we started to buy in fruits and vegetables and I would stack these out there.

I put signs up and down the highway, "shirl the girl for FRUIT amp; VEG", "SHIRL THE GIRL FOR ICE COLD DRINKS", "SHIRL THE GIRL FOR A CUPPA TEA".

Naturally it wasn't long before she wanted to marry me. I was not averse to the idea at all, although there were a couple of previous arrangements I would have to sort out, and I think I went as far as to write off for my old wedding certificates. I was under the impression, I think, that they might have lost the old ones, but this was not so.

But the impediment to marriage was nothing technical. It was a dog.

If the dog had been there on my first day, I would not have spent my money buying lemonades and spiders. I would have doffed my hat and off up the road. But little Rooney (that's right, and yes, named after Mickey) was in the care of the vet at the time, suffering from mange, being shaved and painted with some violet-coloured tincture.