Return to Moondilla by Tony Parsons

minute.’ She made a quick trip to the loo and then came back to the bedroom, reached down and started unzipping her skirt.
    Baxter put up his hand to stop her. ‘I didn’t come here for sex. I want to talk to you and I’ll pay you for your time. Is it a deal?’
    ‘Are you a cop or a do-gooder?’ Rosa asked, wide-eyed.
    ‘I’m neither. I’m a writer. How much do you usually charge?’
    ‘It depends. Sixty dollars for nothing special,’ she said and shrugged.
    Baxter fished out his wallet and extracted a hundred-dollar bill. He handed it to her and she took it, lifted the mattress and slid the note underneath.
    She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked up at him. ‘Are you from one of the papers? There’s always someone from the papers or the telly poking their noses in up here. When they need a bit of news, they come to the Cross.’
    ‘It’s a famous place,’ Baxter said and smiled. His smile seemed to do a lot to put Rosa at ease, and she opened her bag and took out a cigarette.
    ‘Do you have to smoke?’ Baxter asked. ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
    ‘All right. You some kind of health freak?’
    ‘In a way,’ he said. ‘I’m an athlete of sorts.’
    ‘You’re the healthiest-looking bloke I’ve seen in this place,’ she said, running her eyes over him lasciviously. ‘So what do you want to talk about?’
    Later she’d tell Baxter that it was a new experience having a man who simply wanted to talk to her. Some men would talk a lot, but they always wanted sex.
    ‘You’re right, I am a journalist,’ he explained, ‘although I’d like to write books. I don’t work for the gutter press but for a respectable broadsheet, and I’m working on an in-depth investigative piece. I’ve talked to some of the other girls and they’ve helped me a lot. I’d appreciate it very much if you’d help me too.’
    Rosa stared into his eyes—it seemed she was still sizing him up. Then she shrugged again. ‘You seem all right to me. You don’t come across as a man who uses a girl badly and leaves her feeling rotten. How can I help you, mister?’
    ‘I’m Greg. Greg Baxter.’
    ‘What do I call you? Mr Baxter?’
    ‘You can call me Greg. I’d like to know what influenced you to get started in this business. If I had to make a guess, I’d say you come from a good family and that you didn’t plan on becoming a prostitute. So what went wrong?’
    Rosa thought about this question for a while. ‘No,’ she said finally, in a quiet voice. ‘I didn’t plan on becoming a prostitute when I was going to school in Albury.’
    She looked at Baxter, who was now sitting on the end of her bed. He was wearing new clothes, and he hoped he seemed clean, decent and honest, because that’s what he was. And it seemed Rosa knew it, because the whole story fell out of her—Albury, her stepmother, Prue, Alan, heroin. And the endless men and their endless wants. ‘Once you get on the roundabout,’ she concluded with a sigh, ‘it’s hard to get off.’
    Baxter nodded. ‘Ever thought about trying to give it up?’
    Rosa’s hands clenched in her lap. ‘What would I do?’ she asked, her voice strained. ‘Where would I go? I haven’t got much money. I often don’t have enough to buy food. That’s when I have a slack week, and I need what I earn to buy heroin.’
    ‘You must earn a fair amount?’
    ‘Yeah, sometimes I do, especially when there’s a Yank ship in port. But heroin costs big bikkies, mister.’ She sounded tough, but her smile was sad. ‘If I don’t get it I’m a wreck and I can’t work.’
    ‘There’s places you can go if you really want to get off the roundabout,’ Baxter suggested. ‘I can point you to them, if you’d like.’
    Rosa shook her head and stared into the distance. He’d never seen a young woman look so lost and full of despair. ‘I think I’m past all that,’ she said. ‘I’ve sort of given up. There’s not many ways you can leave the game. One is by dying, and