Eight Pieces on Prostitution by Dorothy Johnston, Port Campbell Press

would be to waste the night. Sophie lies next to Simon, listening to his breathing. When light begins to come in under the door and through the curtains, she squeezes her eyes shut and nervousness takes over. Will he like Melissa? Will he recognise his own high cheekbones, sunny hair?
    She remembers wanting to squeeze all of Simon’s loveliness up into herself, as if you could make a young man’s beauty cleave to you. He’s still asleep when she leaves to fetch Melissa, who stares at the stranger lying across her mother’s bed. When Sophie puts her down beside her father, she crawl to the edge, turns round, and begins to slide off backwards. Simon opens his eyes.
    Melissa toddles three determined steps and grabs hold of Sophie’s leg. ‘Da-da-da!’ she cries.
    Simon laughs and stretches, holding out his arms.
    All morning Sophie watches him, watches them together. When Simon walks over to the fridge for juice it’s like a miracle, and Sophie has to pinch herself time and time again. She forgets that she’s supposed to be at work. When the phone rings, he tells her not to answer it, and this seems like a promise to make up for all the promises he never kept.
    Simon is like a jaguar or a cheetah, Sophie thinks. He sits on the end of the bed and smokes and shakes his head so that the light flies out of it. He breathes blue smoke into the waiting air.
    The anger towards her is gone, for what can it have been but anger that took him to
Capital?
She can’t conceive of Simon paying for sex in the normal run of things. ‘Maybe when I’m eighty Soph?’ she imagines him replying if she asked him; but not believing it, not believing there’d ever be a time when women didn’t line up to pleasure him for free.
    Simon lifts Melissa into her cot for her afternoon sleep and they lie side by side on the bed, Sophie staring at the wall, at a dirty patch of plaster, wishing it was dark. She thinks that if only it were night now she could read Simon’s mind.
    He closes his eyes. She doesn’t know if he’s asleep, or pretending to be. ‘When Missy wakes up,’ she whispers, ‘we’ll show you the house.’
    They stand under one of the big trees, in deep, perfect shade. As usual, the doors are shut and there’s nobody about. But Simon likes the house.
    Melissa giggles whenever Simon’s hand or any other bit of him comes within her field of vision. She giggles and kicks out with her bare feet.
    â€˜Hey baby, want an ice-cream?’ Simon says.
    Sophie humps the stroller up the milk bar’s single step and says hello to Mr Loukakis. She feels both delighted and faintly embarrassed while Simon studies the list of ice-creams and icy-poles and Mr Loukakis catches her eye and winks. For the next few moments, she is entirely happy. They are a family buying ice-creams on a hot afternoon. Mr Loukakis is impressed by her man, and who wouldn’t be? This evening they will sit together making plans.
    Simon says it’s too hot to be shut up in the flat. ‘How about a beer, Soph? The Terminus. Come on, they’ve got air-conditioning.’
    Melissa sits on Simon’s knee while Sophie goes to the ladies, wets her hair and straightens it.
    They stay till ten, when she’s aching with hunger and Melissa has fallen asleep in her arms. Simon’s drunk, but can still walk and talk normally, which amazes her all over again because she’s practically forgotten how he does it.
    After she’s changed Melissa and settled her, Sophie finds Simon asleep diagonally across the bed.
    Light brown hair falls across one amber cheek. Sophie bends and gently lifts two curls. She knows why she’s never kept a photograph of Simon, because no picture could ever hold him the way she holds him in her mind. His real, sleeping presence lets out all the memories of before Melissa was born; it’s as if the bad times never happened.
    She strokes the