THE RAINBOW BABY This is a voyage around a person. The setting was 1981 at Prince Henry Hospital, founded a century earlier for infectious diseases, remote beyond Sydney’s then south-east margin. The site was wind-swept with impoverished scrub. There were graves with headstones in the bush nearby, seamen and Chinese, victims of diphtheria, smallpox. One Saturday afternoon I was paged for a problem patient in the lazaret (leprosy ward), a wooden hut. I learnt that the patient was a new admission, who was uncooperative. Various sedatives had been tried to no avail. The patient was a slim androgynous individual, wearing only an off-white hospital gown which half-covered her pubic region. We shared the same height, 180 cm. She had short dark hair, matching her eyes. Her pupils were neither constricted nor dilated, indicating freedom from opiate or amphetamine abuse. Her breasts weren’t prominent, showing that she hadn’t had augmentation surgery and that she had not taken massive doses of estrogen. Her face was thin and angular. Her healthy skin was olive. However, across her face and nose was a dusky, raised, purple rash: Vladimir Nabokov, the author/lepidopterist, would describe the rash on the left-hand side of her face as shaped like the major wing of a butterfly, but on the right-hand side it was as though an accident or a cruel schoolboy had plucked the major wing off, leaving the minor one, less severe leprosy, known as paucibacillary. A scratchy cassette was playing Roy Orbison songs, ironic given both the sentiments ('Only the Lonely', 'Pretty Woman') and Orbison’s falsetto (and baritone) voice. On her bedside table was a bottle of what I assumed was Cottee’s Cordial, only to find it was Crème de Menthe with which the nurses were plying Suzie (a pseudonym) in an attempt to placate her. She offered me ‘Ficky, fick’ in her falsetto, histrionic voice in return for releasing her. Without optimism, I ordered the administration of Largactil syrup 200mgs, a major tranquilliser. Suzie became more agitated. There was no choice but to summon four wardsmen (one for each limb) and transfer her to a locked room in the infectious diseases building. She threw a food tray at a kitchen hand. Suzie threatened the medical superintendent with dire legal consequences if she was not released. A truce was declared. Suzie wasn’t to work and to fully cooperate with the six month treatment. After one month she could be chauffeur driven in her olive Rolls- Royce to her fancy unit for a weekend day and confine herself there. If she followed instructions, she would potentially be discharged home after three months. This in fact occurred. Suzie had me paged. She told me her mother was a poor Thai and her father a Portuguese sailor from where she took her business name, an explorer. She intended to attend university but for ill-understood motivations she became a homosexual prostitute for Asian students. She had gender reassignment surgery in Singapore. One of the problems is that the artificial vagina readily closes over, needing stretching with graduated glass dilators. Suzie then worked as a high-class prostitute, her fees as high as $1,000 per hour. She wasn’t a drug addict, alcoholic nor smoker. Suzie was careful over STD. She had bought one Gold Coast unit per month over the six months prior to her departure overseas, intending to retire in another six months, living off the rental income. She asserted that she travelled to Egypt for shaving of her Adam’s apple and it was there that she caught leprosy. (Travellers in Brazil can catch leprosy from undercooked armadillo.) Suzie then plied her trade in Italy. However, her rash emerged, so she fled home. Her photo album of her clients showed a prominent Melbourne QC against her car. Suzie gave me her business card, offering a fifty percent discount. I was reminded of thirteen years earlier when I spent a night alone in Mount Hagen, in the Papua-New Guinea highlands, during a Tribal Dance Festival: I was sorely tempted to avail myself of a native prostitute, distinguishable by a triangle of dense bright white fur worn over her pubic region, harvested from a tree kangaroo known as ‘cuscus’. Or was it ‘kiss-kiss’?