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.Up against a Judge.”“Are you saying my father isn’t good enough for a kept whore? What does that make you?”“Don’t you dare call Genevieve that awful word, that whore word.She’s a lovely person.And I tell you this, she’s a very talented hairdresser.Just look at what she’s done for my hair.” She pats the peach-tinted do on her head.It is wound into her favourite cone-style, a candy floss of hair higher than ever before, twinkling sugary with hairspray.A do she wraps in a turban of toilet paper and hairclips at night to keep it in place.Winks cups its length in his hands and helps lower it onto her pillow like a baby.“Must be impossible to sleep with that pile on your head,”I say.“You get used to it.That’s why your father and I sleep in separate beds, so as I can spread out and he doesn’t roll onto Betty.” Betty being the name she calls the do because since she spends so long in the mirror with it she might as well talk to it like a friend, therefore it might as well have a name.“You’ve lied to me in that case.You said you had single beds because of the old man’s heart, so his heart wouldn’t get all scrunched up and kill him.He only had five years to live I was told and that’s why I had to be well behaved, because our time together was going to be so brief.”She lets out a dismissive spurt of air through her lips, then smiles and sips her drink.“Well I suppose we said that.But you know …” Her sentence peters out.“No,” I raise my voice.“I don’t know.”She raises her voice.“We said that to make you appreciate us a little more and do right.”The bathroom door opens and Winks steps out, newspaper under his arm, leaving behind him the sound of the toilet flushing.He’s tucking his singlet and shirt into his pants.“What’s the story here? What are the loud voices all about?” he frowns.I ignore him and move straight on to my next topic of argument.“Why don’t we use Mr Hush Hush’s real name when we speak about him? Does anybody know his real name? What is his real name?”“For our purposes it’s Mr Hush Hush,” says Heels.“Frankly I don’t know his real name.”“Does anyone call him Mr Hush Hush in his presence?”I ask sarcastically.“That would be ridiculous.I’ve never actually met the man.”“I wonder if Brett calls him Mr Hush Hush?”“Now you’re being stupid.”“I’m going to ask him.”“Don’t you dare.”“I definitely am going to ask him,” I insist.“I’m going to ask Brett what it’s like to have a kept whore for a mother and how it feels to be the bastard son of a kept whore.”Heels jumps to her feet and points her finger at me that I’m to do no such thing.Winks says if I use that kind of insulting language in the boy’s presence, or Genevieve’s too for that matter, he’ll clip me so hard.He grips his belt buckle as if to draw it against me and tells me I’m not too old or too big to be given leather across my hide.If I feel this way, if I’ve got this attitude to Genevieve then to hell with me, I shouldn’t come to her place.Who’d want someone in their presence who talks rudely as I’ve just talked, spoiling the party.But I do want to go to Genevieve’s.She’s no longer the woman she was, she admits that herself.I never knew Genevieve when she was the woman she once was but she doesn’t mind boasting that when she was that woman she would put today’s girlies of the racecourse to shame.She was the girlie of the girlies.Now she has to dress up and be a glamour puss.She wears furs to turn heads but the heads she turns are other women envying her the furs.But back then, back when she was at her peak, she didn’t need furs, no siree.She put it all on show and didn’t dare cover her god-givens, even in winter.Now she has to apply makeup like a surgeon.She must dye her roots or the blond goes to blazes.And sit-ups.So many sit-ups.Her cleavage is going to jelly before her eyes.“I hate the young,” she curses through clenched teeth.“Hate them, hate them.That’s my mantra.”But when she’s with me, just me, out of earshot and eyeshot of everyone, she apologises.“I don’t mean you, handsome.No, no, no.Not you.” She curls my hand in her hand.“I mean, the new batch of girlies with their wiggles in all the right places.They’ll know what I mean when they’re forty.But look at you,” she says squeezing my hand
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