Eight Pieces on Prostitution, page 5
Simon takes his time to look her up and down. He turns his head and says as if speaking to an invisible companion, ‘My ex is standing here like the cleaning lady. Will it help if I sit on her lap?’
Sophie clenches her hands by her sides.
Simon says, ‘I thought I might have a nice cool drink.’
‘They don’t serve alcohol.’
‘An upmarket joint like this? Don’t kid me. I’ll have Jack Daniels with ice.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. Otherwise I might have to make a fuss.’
‘How long have you paid for?’
‘As long as it takes.’
Sophie comes back with his whisky and one for herself, though she never drinks when she’s working. She stands watching Simon nod approval; she stands still as a fountain with the water off.
The wall lights give him a halo. Brown hair curls away from his temples and above his head, and it’s like each curl exists in its own bubble of light.
Simon laughs when Sophie says in his voice, ‘How is Melissa? I miss my daughter and from now on I’m going to stay around and be a father to her.’
Sophie watches his throat; she plays that trick of fixing on some vulnerable part of a client, keeping her eyes there. It doesn’t work. He’s too good to look at; she’s had so many flabby men.
‘Melissa’s thirteen months old. Where have you been? There’s such a thing as child support. If you don’t pay it you’re breaking the law.’
Simon laughs with his head thrown back, and out of the blue she’s laughing with him. ‘You little law-breaker,’ he says. He pats the bed beside him. ‘Relax, Soph. Just sit down.’
‘Seriously, Simon.’
‘I’m here now, aren’t I?’
Sophie puts out her hand and touches Simon’s arm, fingers light and quick, a miniature hydrofoil on the surface of his skin.
‘Come home with me,’ she says. ‘Melissa’s beautiful, you’ll see.’
Mrs Dawson lifts her eyebrows and stares through the brown rings of her make-up, and though part of Sophie is already out the door, another part is held by the older woman’s eyes. Though she cannot read their expression precisely, she knows what it is not: it is not surprised.
To sleep 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.
‘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 creamy olive places and Simon doesn’t wake. She’s always loved his skin. She wishes, and is shocked by the wish, that he would never wake.
She goes to the kitchen and sits with a vegemite sandwich and a glass of water. She does not think of making plans.
The young man’s smile ushers Sophie forward from the waiting room. He smiles with his head on one side, in a considering way. Sophie smiles back, plonking her bottom onto the chair, setting her bag on the floor beside her.
‘I filled in my form,’ she says. ‘Boy, they come thick and fast, those forms!’
She stares at a potted plant. Why do Social Security clerks always give her that daffy smile? Maybe they hate the routine as much as she does.
They’re so high up there’s a view from the window of the lake, a part of Civic, the Canberra she feels over her shoulder but hardly ever sees.
When she glances at him again, the young man’s smile has vanished. He clears his throat like a bad actor before reading a part.
‘It’s come to our notice that you have a second income. You know there’s a limit to what you can earn over and above your benefit.’
Sophie shakes her head emphatically. ‘You’ve got the wrong girl. I haven’t got a job. No way.’
She feels Simon’s fine hair brush her face, remembers how he kissed her outside the flats as she was leaving for Fyshwick, told her to have a good one, and did not come back.
The young man rocks on the heels of his chair and asks, ‘Where’s Melissa’s father?’
‘He left. He was here for two days, then he left again.’
‘Don’t you know his address?’
The young man makes it sound like it’s her fault Simon disappeared. It will be just like it was the first time; no one will believe her.
‘Did Simon come to you with some bullshit story? Like, your accusation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But Simon trying to get out of paying child support, that does make sense, if you follow me.’
Sophie thinks of Mrs G, but Mrs G would never dob her in, of that one fact she is certain.
‘The trouble with girls like you is that you think you’re invisible, and then -’
‘While you’ve got eyes everywhere, like Superman!’
The young man lets his chair legs fall with a small, self-satisfied thud. ‘I was behind you in the bank.’
‘Oh Jesus, that’s cool. That’s really something. You haven’t got the resources to chase my prick of an ex, but you follow me to the bank!’
‘I happened to be there. I live in Woden if you must know. Look, Ms Robertson, I could throw the book at you, but I prefer to try and work something out. Your benefit will have to be suspended, but you can re-apply. That is, if you give up your job. You have to make a choice. And if you’re caught again, don’t expect to get off lightly. The most you’ll have to do right now is re-pay what we’ve overpaid you. And believe me, if you think that’s tough, you don’t know how tough we can be.’
Sophie feels herself begin to spiral downwards, out of the high, air-conditioned office, down and down, like a leaf that’s been dead too long. Her throat’s all choked up with dead matter and when she tries to speak the words won’t come.
Two days later, she makes another special bus trip, but this time gets off at the lake.
She takes her G-string from her bag and throws it as far as she can out into the water, watches it slowly float away. ‘That’s pollution, that is,’ she tells Melissa, who nods as though she understands. Sophie thinks of a storm, waves tearing at green silk. But hey, it’s only old Lake Burley Griffin. ‘It’ll return to nature,’ she tells Melissa, and then, ‘I never liked the colour green. If I decide to go back, I can buy another one. A different colour this time. Black maybe, or pink.’
Lake Burley Griffin’s just a lake and not a river; there’s no outlet to the sea. What if her G-string just goes circling round and round?
Melissa has fallen asleep in her stroller, but Sophie goes on talking.
‘At any rate, I pissed that Simon off. I’m sorry for your sake, but what a shitty father, eh. He would’ve just sponged of us, Missy. That’s what he’d’ve done.’
So that’s it with Simon, she thinks. It’s goodbye to that. She thinks about changing the lock on her door and decides that it’s a good idea. She doesn’t have the energy for making plans right now. She thinks that when she’s feeling stronger, when she’s over all this shit, she’ll take Melissa to visit their house again. Maybe there’ll be someone there this time, maybe they’ll strike up a conversation and she’ll find out something about the history of the place.
‘All in good time,’ she tells Melissa, staring down at her sleeping daughter and thinking, what if he’d hung around long enough for Missy to fall in love with him: what then?
Names
My name’s Sandy, my parlour name. I answer to it now. In the beginning it made me laugh when some guy calling himself John said, ‘Is that your real name?’ I’d start to giggle. ‘Come here Sandy and let me kiss those pretty tits.’ They broke me up.
I was nervous in the beginning. I repeated the patter over to myself in order to fix it in my mind; what Gail said about acting as if I had a purseful of money, being suspicious of questions, never going through the prices at the door, never saying the word sex until the client had his clothes off, until I was sure of him under my hands and he’d broken the law himself. And if he demanded to know, if he said, ‘I don’t want to waste my money, will I get a relief or not? saying no. Better to lose a client this way than take the risk of him being a cop. And another thing to remember: if he left his underpants on, or a towel wrapped round him after he’d had his shower, he was probably a cop. Cops had blue eyes more often than brown, Gail said. Cops fancied moustaches more often than not. Gail knew a girl who’d been busted by a cop lying on the table in a towel. She knew another girl who gave this guy an oral and as soon as it was over he said, ‘You’re busted’ and flashed his ID.
If I forgot to go over these warnings every time the doorbell rang and it was my turn, I’d get slack and get caught. I wasn’t quick like Gail. I couldn’t think on my feet like Gail did. Gail used to say after a bad night, ‘You’ve got to be a split personality.’ She said it regretfully, but I was full of admiration for her. I thought that, if I could split my personality like Gail did, then I’d be okay. Gail often repeated this advice. Sometimes she said it the way another person would say, ‘You’ve got to eat breakfast if you want to stay healthy.’
Gail was putting herself through university. She had a Commonwealth scholarship; as I’ve told you, she was smart. You could get a living allowance if you signed up for a teacher’s studentship, but Gail didn’t want to be tied down. When she’d finished her degree, she wanted to travel and then decide what to do with her life. That was another phrase she often used. She was always telling me I should work out what to do with my life. But for me, at that time, it was enough that I continued to exist, that I went on breathing in and out.
‘Listen,’ she’d lecture me, ‘it’s us who exploit the men, not the other say around.’
But if the doorbell rang when we were just about the switch the lights off and go home, she’d say, ‘Go on, do him love. You need the money.’ It would have been pointless to argue that she needed it as much as I did, that this was an excuse; for the truth was, I was dependent on Gail. I needed her smart talk and her savvy. I would have been hopeless on my own.
The evening the subject of law reform came up, it was very quiet; by midnight we’d only had two clients.
Gail came back into the kitchen and dumped the dirty towels in the basket behind the door. ‘Yuk,’ she said, ‘That Alan!’
I nodded, relieved that she’d done him this time.
The phone rang and I said, ‘Well, we have a very nice general massage for twenty-five dollars.’
Gail put the kettle on and asked me if I’d seen The Truth. ‘What did they do with our ad this week?’
I told her I thought we should go back to a plain border. ‘Just “Discreet Massage” and the phone number.’
Gail moved around the kitchen rattling cups. She never let herself fall into a chair like I did when she came back from a client, slumping my stomach and letting the smile drop off my face.
I said, ‘Have you seen that stuff about legalising prostitution?’
Gail angled herself around her coffee mug and said, ‘It won’t come to anything. Every few years it comes up. The government makes an issue of it when they want to take attention away from something else.’
‘But would you rather it was legal?’
‘Sandy,’ Gail said. ‘Think about it. If anyone from the Vice Squad turns up, you’ll know it. You’ll smell it in their brylcreem. Haven’t I told you what to look out for? If it was legal, there’d be some system of licensed brothels. You’d have to pay tax. It’d become public knowledge that that’s what you did, you fucked for a living.’
The doorbell rang just as she finished speaking. ‘Here love,’ Gail said, ‘Give your hair a bit of a brush. And pull your shoulders back. Don’t slouch.’
If I could get away with doing a relief, I would. Then it was a matter of having something – nice tits, a nice arse – something for them to look at while you massaged them. If you could keep them looking, maybe they wouldn’t hassle you for sex. You had to work on your saleable assets; constantly giving, constantly holding back.
I told Gail about my visit to the VD clinic. I described lying on the table with my legs in stirrups, a piece of paper towelling across my belly, while the doctor poked away inside me and continued, in a low voice, with his special subject - how disease could be spread by hand, how I must keep my hands away from a man’s bottom and not ‘not put my hands around behind his penis’, or ‘let him rub himself against me’. I described the doctor glaring at me as he poked and talked, while the nurse, plastic-gloved hands folded across her chest, gave me advice on the best way to wipe yourself, and outside in the street a shout went up, a blare of horns as a water main burst right in front of the clinic. I watched through the window, still tied to the table by my stirrups, as a fountain of water shot up from between parked cars.
The nurse clapped her sterilised hands and grinned at the doctor. Together they rejoiced that there was no more water in the pipes and they could close their doors on the unclean world for the rest of the day.
Hearing that program about COYOTE was what first gave us the idea. Those women were amazing. There were things I realised would take months to talk through, if ever we got started.
Everyone was talking at once. Weren’t West Action a bunch of shits? What were we going to do about them?
It wasn’t only the pros, someone pointed out, ‘but homosexuals, single mothers, the old men in boarding houses.’ West Action wanted to clean up St Kilda and who would be left?
The Council responded by saying prostitution should be legalised, so that it could be controlled. There was going to be a big public meeting in a couple of weeks’ time.
We set about writing a leaflet, hoping to put the prostitutes’ point of view.
Gail wanted nothing to do with it, neither the meeting nor the leaflet; but for once I didn’t go along with Gail.
‘Another thing a group like ours could do,’ said a tiny woman who introduced herself as Bonny. ‘We could put together a booklet on the legal stuff – you know, what to say when you get busted, stuff like that. When a girl starts working, she’s often told to use a false name. But that can work against you when you get to court.’
Not everyone agreed with her. Someone told the story of a case in America where a girl was charged with soliciting and pleaded not guilty, using the defence that the cop had solicited her, and won her case.
Fifteen women came to our second meeting.
‘We don’t want it legalised,’ said Bonny. ‘It’d mean more compulsory visits to the VD clinic.’ Bonny had three rows of sleepers on her ear-lobes. When she shook her head, shells and silver charms made small, determined sounds.
‘But the law should be changed,’ said someone else. ‘When you’ve been busted once, the cops can pick you up going to buy cigarettes. Especially in St.Kilda. The girls who work here get hassled all the time.’
