It was called a garden flat because the bedroom opened onto a small courtyard with enough room for a table and chairs and a few pot plants. The courtyard floor was terracotta pavers and the fence around it was wood. The wood was old, with cracks running lengthwise down the palings and across the beams, like the lined forehead of a very old man. The crossbeams were flat and heavy and full of nails bent over to prevent accidental injury. The fence needed painting. It felt like sandpaper and splinters flaked off when I touched it.

I liked the privacy of the courtyard. It was surrounded by trees on two sides, large gum trees where I hoped I might see a bird or two. That first time I saw the flat I peered into the branches, hoping to see a nest. I thought I might by a cheap outdoor setting, a dark green one perhaps, and sit outside to read on summer evenings. I didn’t realise then how many leaves gum trees shed, nor how many spiders like urban outdoor settings. I thought I might get one or two potted trees as well; the courtyard looked sunny enough for gardenias or azaleas.

I saw her first through my lounge room window, which faced on the garden into which all the flats opened. She had long legs and strode with purpose. The purpose seemed to be moving as fast as possible. Her long skirt swished about her legs. Her hair was cut short, a bowl cut, longish everywhere with a fringe above the eyes. It was ash blonde. The left side of her face had that delicate rose beauty that is prized in women, the type of beauty that a common girl could use to marry higher than herself. She had a pert nose and flushed skin that looked soft to the touch. There were a few freckles under her eye. It was the right side of her face which betrayed her. It was covered by an angry brown birthmark. The mark began next to her right eye and wandered downward, across her cheek, briefly touching the corner of her mouth before angling upward, towards her ear. There was soft pink skin on her chin and lower cheek, and on her neck. I rather envied her thinness and felt sorry for her face.

I was unpacking in the bedroom when I heard a knock on the door. Three loud raps. I opened the door to the woman I’d seen in the garden. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Marilyn, I’m your neighbour.” She stood with her hands behind her back, shifting the weight from one leg to another. She was impeccably dressed in a black sundress with a long flowing skirt and a front panel embroidered with surreal flowers and swirls in red and bright orange. She’d matched it with a carnelian necklace and black shoes. She was beautiful, except for that birthmark.

“Hi,” I said, putting down the make-up case I was carrying so I could shake her hand. “I’m Laura.”

“Can I come in?” she asked.

I moved aside and she walked past me. “Very similar to my place,” she said. “These units are all alike. Big lounge area, small bedrooms.”

“I like the way the bedroom opens onto the back courtyard,” I said. I didn’t mind the small bedrooms, I had the whole flat to myself. “Can I offer you some tea or coffee?”

Marilyn walked over to my cluttered dining table and sat. I rushed after her, moving books, computer and various ornaments and dishes I hadn’t found a place for yet, so there was room on the table. “Coffee would be lovely,” she said. “Black, with half a teaspoon of sugar.” I put on the coffeemaker.

“So, how are you finding it?” Marilyn asked.

“Well, I’ve barely been here a week. It seems nice enough. People seem friendly.”

Marilyn cocked her head to the right, covering her birthmark. “They do seem friendly,” she said.

“They aren’t?” I asked.

“Well, you know, some of them are. The young couple above me are fairly quiet and keep to themselves but their baby cries a lot and they can’t get her to calm down. First time parents, I guess. You might hear if from your bedroom, I hope you’re a heavy sleeper.

“The Gios in number 15 are Italian or Greek or something. I think their real name is longer. They’re nice enough people but noisy when they argue, yelling and screaming and waving their hands around. Old Mr Kovacs in number 7 below always shakes his head when they go at it. I think he’s Eastern European, he’s hard to understand sometimes.” She kept leaning forward and spoke firmly, so I felt I shouldn’t comment except to agree.

I had a sense that Marilyn liked you to think of her as a font of knowledge you might never have without her. She told me about cheese: “Real Neapolitan bocconcini is made from buffalos’ milk. You can get it here too but it’s three times the price.” She told me about her expertise with art and how she visited the art gallery regularly, especially the display of high school artists every year. “So I know whose work to watch in the future,” she said. She said she was an artist herself and made beautiful lace tablecloths. She sounded quite put out when I told her my grandmother used to make lace and had shown me various techniques. I didn’t dare tell her that old Mr Kovacs was probably Hungarian, like my grandmother.

“Watch out for Julie in number 2,” she said as she left. “She had a dog. She leaves it locked in her flat all day and it barks all the time. I’ve told her we’re not allowed to have dogs in these units but she ignores me. I don’t trust her.”

Julie was a scruffy woman in her late forties. When I met her outside the mailboxes, she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt which said: ‘Whatever your problem, I’m sure mine is worse’. Her dog, Buster, was one of those little dogs that run up to everyone with wagging tails. He had curly hair, dirty white in colour with brown patches, as if someone had thrown coffee all over him. “Come on fella,” she said when he came up to me.

“He’s friendly,” I said.

“That he is.” She held out her hand: “I’m Julie by the way.”

I shook her hand. “Come and have a drink,” she said.

It was hard not to like Julie, she was the type who called a spade a spade. She was a paramedic with the NSW Ambulance. “What do you do?” she asked.

I told her that I trained people to use computers. “I don’t like them much,” she said.

Back then, many people reacted that way. “Why don’t you buy a computer?” I said.

“What would I do with it?”

“Lots of things,” I said. “You can search the Internet, do your banking and pay bills and look up movie times. And send email to friends.”

“I’d never use email. I reckon that’s too impersonal.”

“Not true,” I said. “I have an aunt in England and a cousin in Belgium. We used to write each other once a year. Now we hear from each other regularly and know much more about each other’s lives.”

“I don’t have anyone overseas,” Julie said. “No, my new career’s going to be something outdoors. I get itchy sitting inside.” Julie squirmed in her chair.

“Maybe gardening,” I said. It was the only line of work I could think of where people were regularly outdoors.

“Yeah,” Julie said, “that or something with animals. I’d like to work with polar bears or big cats at the zoo. I’m sure my medic training would come in handy there.”

“Don’t you like working for the ambulance?”

“I like the people I work with and the people I meet. I like being able to help, especially when people really need it. After fifteen years I just feel tired. Some days there’s so much death and pain, I come home and I can’t sleep.”

“Well, if you need to know anything about computers,” I said, unwilling to give up so easily on the subject, “you can always ask me.”

“Sure,” Julie said, “I bet you’re really good at teaching computers.”

The next afternoon Marilyn came over. “Saw you talking to Julie,” she said.

I wondered if I was meant to feel guilty. “I met her at the mailbox.”

“She works for the ambulance. I don’t like ambulance officers. They pretend to care but they’ve seen it all and they’re callous about people’s pain.”

“I didn’t get that impression from Julie.”

“They’re all the same. It’s just a job. Listen,” Marilyn leaned forward to impart more knowledge, “you’ve seen my birthmark. It’s hard to miss and I’ve seen you staring at it. When I was a child they said I would have been beautiful if it wasn’t for the big red mark on the side of my face. I remember trying to scrub it off. I got the hardest, roughest soap I could find. I tried my mother’s emery board and sandpaper from my father’s toolkit. Nothing worked. One day I found a metal scraper in the toolkit. I rubbed it across my scar and lacerated the skin.” She turned to show me the scar and I noticed it was full of cracks like the wooden fence in my courtyard. They crossed her birthmark diagonally in both directions, like a million games of noughts and crosses.

“The whole right side of my face was bleeding,” Marilyn said. “My mother called the ambulance. The paramedic came. He wiped the side of my face and bandaged it and patted me on the head. ‘Silly girl’, he said. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

“Have you considered plastic surgery?” I asked. “I mean, if the birthmark upsets you…” I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.

“They’d have to take skin from somewhere else to cover it. And there’d be scars. On my face and elsewhere.”

“I thought they could make the scars so fine no one could see them.”

“Not at a price I can afford. Maybe when I’m richer. You know, when I was a child I thought plastic surgery meant they covered your face with plastic. I thought it might be a bit stiff but I figured it would be OK if my face was all the same colour. That’s a beautiful picture on your computer,” Marilyn said, leaning over to look at my laptop which was open on the table. “Did you take it?”

“I downloaded it from the Internet,” I said.

“I love the Internet,” Marilyn said. “You can meet lots of people through the Internet. I have a date tomorrow night with a man I’ve been emailing for a couple of weeks. He likes sailing and eating at expensive restaurants. I bought a beautiful blue cocktail dress to wear, strapless and with silver lace around the mid-section. I have a beautiful bracelet and some lapis lazuli beads to go with it. I’m really looking forward to meeting him. His name is Owen.”

Julie and I were coming home from the movies the next evening when we heard shouts from Marilyn’s flat. “She’s so busy complaining about the noise everyone else makes,” I grumbled.

“Shhh…” Julie said. She stood still, listening. There was banging and there was Marilyn’s voice, speaking softly. She might have said “don’t”. There was a man’s voice, low but clear. “Why not?” it said. “Come on woman. You’ll like it.” Marilyn probably likes playing reluctant, I thought.

“No,” Marilyn said.

“You didn’t mean that, did you?” the male voice, probably her date.

Julie knocked on Marilyn’s door. “Are you all right?” she called.

There was some whispering on the other side of the door. “I’m fine,” Marilyn said. Her voice sounded a little shaky. Julie hesitated.

“Come inside for a drink,” I said. Julie followed me into my flat. “I’ve got beer or coffee,” I said.

“Uh..beer, thanks.” I noticed Julie had left the door open. There was more banging from Marilyn’s flat and more whimpering.

“She really likes making him work for it,” I commented.

“I don’t think that’s what’s happening,” Julie said.

I shrugged. “She told you she was fine.”

“Sometimes it’s confusing,” Julie began. There was a sound like someone falling. Cloth ripped and Marilyn screeched. Julie was up and out my front door before my mind even began to register what was happening. She started banging on Marilyn’s door, grabbing the door knob and trying to open it. “Call the police,” she yelled back at me, “000”. I froze, uncertain what to do. This isn’t happening, I thought, Julie’s overreacting. “Call the police,” she yelled again.

Marilyn’s door banged open and a man stood there. He looked Julie up and down. “Maybe you want it,” he said. “You’re almost as ugly as she is without that birthmark as an excuse. Are you jealous or something?” He had a knife in his hand, held down by his side. I’m not sure if Julie saw it. She pushed past him into Marilyn’s flat. I grabbed the portable handset and started dialling. Maybe the man heard me, he started walking towards the building exit. “Police, fire or ambulance,” a voice said in my ear.

“Police, fire or ambulance,” I asked Julie.

“Call the police first, then the ambulance. Tell the ambulance ops that you’ve called the police and that there’s no longer any danger here.”

“No, no. No ambulance,” Marilyn said. She was lying on the floor. Her blue satin dress was ripped from the hem to the V-shaped waistband with its silver lace. There seemed to be a little blood under her chin. It must have been a beautiful dress, I thought.

Julie took the phone from me. “Sit next to her and take her hand. Talk softly,” she said.

I bent down next to Marilyn and took her hand. The other hand was holding tightly to a bracelet made of six linked silver panels, with a dark blue stone inlaid, probably lapis lazuli. There was no sign of the beads Marilyn had mentioned. Her neck was bare except for the blood. Maybe they were in the flat somewhere, rolling around after he ripped them of her neck. Or maybe he had taken them. “It’s OK,” I said to her, but she turned her head away. I kept holding her hand, half expecting her to pull it away and get up, striding across the room to tell Julie to mind her own business. There were tears in her eyes.

“I only want someone to like being with me,” she said. “He seemed so nice. He took me to dinner in a wonderful restaurant. We had lobster and champagne and we danced. He has a business, he said, it’s very successful. We were talking and talking and before I knew it, we were here and he came inside. He was wearing a suit and a gold watch and he seemed decent.”

“It’s hard to tell sometimes,” I murmured.

“Yeah,” Marilyn said. “He said I owed him because the dinner cost so much. He pulled that knife and grabbed my beads till the chain broke. They were such a beautiful shade of blue.”

Julie hung up the phone and knelt down on Marilyn’s other side. “I’m sorry, Marilyn, but I have to ask, did he penetrate?”

Marilyn stared at her for a minute, then shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“You have to go to the hospital,” Julie said, “at least for tonight. You might be safer there anyway, in case he comes back,”

Marilyn nodded. “She doesn’t like ambulances,” I said.

“They have to come, and so do the police, in case she wants to press charges later. They’re on their way.”

Marilyn shook her head. “I don’t want to go to court.”

“Don’t decide now,” Julie said. “Trust me, it’s better that it’s all documented. If not for you, then for the next woman he attacks.” I expected Marilyn to protest, I was fairly sure she probably didn’t trust Julie, but Marilyn closed her eyes and lay back down and gripped my hand tighter.

They called from the hospital next morning. Julie had given them my number. She was working.

Marilyn was sitting fully dressed in the waiting room when I arrived. “Let’s go home,” she said and walked past me out the door.

“Thank you for what you did last night,” she said in the car.

“It was Julie,” I said. “I just did what she told me.”

Marilyn was silent. I kept my eyes mostly on the road, but when I glanced across at her, I could see her lips pressed together firmly. “You know, she might have saved your life,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t think it would have come to that.”

When we got home, Buster was barking. “That dog,” Marilyn said.

If it had been left to me, I thought, I would have done nothing, assuming that she was just playing hard to get. It was Julie’s quick thinking that had saved Marilyn. I’m not sure if, even now, I would have the courage to intervene. Most people don’t. If something like that had happened to me, I would want someone like Julie to be there. I told her so later.

“You think she’d be a little bit grateful,” I said.

“Oh, she just needs someone to hate. Don’t worry about it,” Julie said.

Soon after that Julie got a job at the native animals park and moved up north to be nearer. She looked after kangaroos and emus that tried to pick her eyes out. She used to laugh about it. I visit her at the park sometimes, especially after I too moved up north to start a web business. I see Marilyn too, when I visit the city. She’s still living in the same flat. She likes art galleries and concerts and calls where I live a cultural desert. She doesn’t like to invite men back to her home.