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smuggled off the docks. On 3 December 1954, in the front bar of the Hell’s Bells, dock workers were trying to trade half-thawed Narragansett turkeys for whisky, brandishing the birds at the publican like the treasures of Montezuma, when a lone customs agent held his badge aloft and shouted, ‘That poultry is the property of Macintosh and Sons Importers. Everybody is arrested.’
    The wharfies looked around, back and forth, to confirm he was alone, before clubbing him with the thawing birds until both he and they were at room temperature. Nineteen fifty-four is still known as the Year of Premature Christmas in Port Melbourne, because on the night of the third the whole suburb reeked joyously of yuletide feast as the murderers ate their weapons and toasted Santa, and Macintosh and Sons.
    Mireille will answer the door barefoot and bright-toenailed in a silk nightshirt blaring nipples, he thinks. With minted breath she will pretend to be surprised to see him, then pivot on emeritus ballerina’s legs, carefully oiled, into her apartment where incense burns and Serge Gainsbourg plays.
    Except when the door opens she is wearing grey overalls spattered with paint, brush smears on her thighs, the fingers of her right hand covered in wet green. She is so sure he is bought and paid for, she hasn’t even stooped to the clichés of allure. No lipstick or mascara, no cleavage, no lingerie, not a whiff of perfume. He’s insulted anew. Wiping her hand on a cloth she tells him, ‘You look like shit, kid.’
    â€˜I don’t dress up for odd jobs.’ He has been bought, but he doesn’t have to be nice about it.
    â€˜Death warmed up, I mean.’
    â€˜I did some nightclubs.’
    She stands back and he walks past her into the house. ‘Up the stairs.’ Up a flight of pressed metal stairs and into an enormous room, the floor of which is covered in sisal matting rained on with paint here and there where easels have stood. Floor-to-ceiling windows look over Port Phillip Bay, the clouds bulging low and cerebral atop the water. His bubble-wrapped paintings are stacked against a wall.
    On an easel sits the canvas she has been working on, and across which, at the sound of the doorbell, she has run her fingers back and forth to deface it to a cross-hatch of greens, yellows, pinks – nothing of its previous structure discernible.
    â€˜You paint?’ he asks.
    â€˜Everyone paints sometime. I used to hike in the mountains. Next I do piano, maybe.’
    He sits on a sofa of embroidered French farm scenes, submerged in a jigsaw of spillage and stain. Popping his press-stud shirt open, he rubs his hands across his flat stomach, his eyes half-closed and his lips pouting gently, wanting to bring the crass commerce of this situation out into the open, not let her get away with kidding herself this is an affaire de coeur. Youpaid for it, come and get it. He reaches down and caresses himself through his jeans.
    She backs away from him as if he might be some sort of dangerous fiend liable to attack ladies before lunch. Her face whitens and she takes up a brush and begins to wash it in a jar, studying its bristles closely. ‘What are you doing?’ she asks softly.
    â€˜What you paid for.’ He strokes his fingers across his nipples and smiles, happy to have unmasked her, to have told her what she really is.
    â€˜Get out,’ she says softly.
    â€˜Hard to get? Hard to get’s good. Good for the soul.’ He undoes the button on his jeans.
    â€˜Get out.’ She throws the paintbrush and it leaves a wound of green on his chest.
    â€˜Hey?’ His voice lifts an octave in confusion.
    She looks up at him. ‘Go on.’
    He buttons his jeans and shirt slowly, allowing her time to recant, not quite believing she wants him to go. Her anger could be all part of her masquerade that this is a natural affair of lust and hormones, and not a transaction.
    â€˜I won’t come