We’d been a year at the boarding house. I left our dingy room with a lingering backwards look. Robbie was hefting his bags of stuff, coming to stay for a little while. I was moving on again.
MY HOUSE WAS FURNISHED with my own belongings. I rented a van and moved my stuff out of my parents’; for the first time in my life I had my own house. I borrowed a table, I made a couch out of cushions, I brought along bookcases and put all my books on them. I rarely actually pulled them out to read.
The bedroom was decorated with vintage dresses from my university dress-ups days, and with perfume bottles and candles I bought from Dolores at work. It wasn’t like my old rooms in share-houses; this was like the house of a grown woman. I loved spending money on it.
When Dolores came in now I was the first to browse, to set aside cushions, exotic drapes of gauzy embroidered material, elegant dresses, sharp streetwear, girly paste jewellery. With every purchase I felt I was restoring myself in the world.
It didn’t take long for my landlady to discover my deception. The first month’s rent, though achievable, was late, and when she turned up at my door and I let her in, she looked at me shrewdly. Her little boy, playing in the kitchen, opened the bottom drawer in which we kept our clean syringes; she kicked it shut quickly. I couldn’t tell if she’d seen the contents.
‘You’re not an entertainment organiser,’ she stated. I was sitting in my dressing-gown, without my contact lenses in, blinking and dishevelled; at a disadvantage, I let her press me.
‘No.’
‘I rang to check up on the business,’ she said. She glared at me. ‘Well.’ There was a pause. ‘So long as you can make the rent.’
The idea of having someone come to share the house never worked. I realised that I’d have to explain my hours; it would be hard to watch television with a stranger sleeping in the next room. I had no idea how someone would react to the news that I was a prostitute. And, of course, I was a drug addict. And my boyfriend was taking up the space.
He was melancholy, and full of dreams and plans that required more organisation than he was capable of at that time. It was too easy for him to keep extending his stay, his reliance on me and my income; and too easy for me to allow this to go on. I was alone in the world outside the brothel. Robbie was the boy I loved, and he was warm against me in the night; he scored when I needed to sleep; sometimes he brought me gifts—a scarf he’d found in the street, a t-shirt he’d bought, a small tube of chocolates. His sweetness was undiminished by his lack of finances, and the fact that he used my own money for these treats. I understood how much he wanted to be generous in turn.
We fought often; when I came home exhausted from a night’s work to find the house uncleaned, him sitting sullenly on the couch, when he reproved me for not having enough time for him.
‘I’m
working
,’ I said. ‘Working for us. I spend half my money on you! And you’re meant to be moving out.’
‘I just want you,’ he said.
I began to calculate the money I spent on him, the hours I worked, the awful transaction that was taking place between us. He took money to score when I was at work, and when I challenged him, my face hot with outrage, he said only, ‘It’s because I’m miserable.’ It was also because he was hopelessly addicted to heroin.
He had odd moments of paranoia, when he accused me of being in love with my clients, of blackening his name with gossip, when he lied to my face over small things and the more I pressed him to tell me the truth, the more vicious the insults he threw at me. I would end up staring at him, this mad stranger; underneath I could still see the man I loved, but he made it difficult to remember that.
More and more I was afraid of what might happen if I separated from him. I couldn’t imagine leaving him altogether, he was so frail, so close to despair and defeat. And how alone I would be without him. He was there to talk to when I got home. In the pale dawn light I’d kiss the skin between his shoulder blades and wrap myself around him, and be wrapped in turn.
I still had some friends: Max, who had a steady girlfriend now with whom I got on well, David, and others, like Matilda, who had never told me I wasn’t welcome, but whom I had no time to contact. Now I got my own phone. There was little time, between work and sleep, to ring anyone, and I was hesitant to approach old mates, but at least I didn’t feel so isolated. I got an email address too, at an internet café. Occasionally I’d make it over to St Kilda, en route to the doctor’s for a new methadone prescription, and I’d have a coffee with Max; he talked to me just as he always had, about books and cinema and the problems of love. I never saw any of the films, or read the books, but when he hugged me goodbye at the end of each visit, I clung back.
He knew what I was doing for money. ‘I just hope you’re okay, lass,’ he said. ‘Watch yourself.’
‘I do,’ I said. His neck was warm against my face. ‘I do.’ Then the tram arrived, and it was time to go home to get ready for work.
I’d started seeing Douglas, my client, outside of work. Not for bookings, but for lunch. He’d asked me after a few months if I wanted to come to a meal and, to my own surprise, I’d said yes. I went off in the bright sunshine one day to lunch at the Windsor Hotel, and we continued our chats about war and history and life’s lessons. The two of us sitting at a stiff-linened table, him in his tweed jacket and cufflinks, and me in my tight girlish shirt. The waiter eyed us. We talked about the British in Afghanistan, and the descendants of Alexander the Great in India, about Oscar Wilde and Rabelais and
Fanny Hill
. He joked and made me laugh as I worked my way through the hierarchy of cutlery, trying not to look as though I didn’t lunch in fine hotels all the time.
Douglas was warm and unjudgmental and seemed to see something in me beyond the articulate working girl. He knew I used; he knew I had a difficult boyfriend and a demanding job, and that it had been a long time since I’d been out to have fun. And so, every now and then, he organised something for us to do. A picnic, a movie. It was difficult to get out of bed early and go into the world with little sleep, but the outings were wonderful. The simplicity of sitting in a sunny park with good company, of driving out of Melbourne into the hills, of talking with someone who seemed to value me in the way my old friends had. The sunlight made me blink, the colours made me happy.
I rang him once, and asked him to come see me at the brothel. It was the only time I had to spare, and I was desperate for comfort—it had been a difficult week, with Robbie crazed and jealous, the clients wheedling, the money short. I’d been seeing myself from the outside, struggling under the bodies of man after man; wondering what had happened to the dreaming girl in the library, with her Greek books and princess turrets. I had told Douglas my childhood dream of an island where I could sit under the geraniums in dense silence and the humming of crickets; my trite fantasy of worn marble and shelves of golden books. The hunger for it tore at me now.
He arrived, and I pressed myself into the warm wool of his jumper. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘To make you come in here just to talk.’
He patted my head. In the room we lay together quietly. My belly was taut with unhappiness and the effort to not shatter.
‘What’s going on?’ He stroked my forehead.
‘It’s my—’ I stopped. ‘I don’t know where I’ve gone—where I’ve
gone.
’ The world was cracking around me. I was so small. A flood of shame spilled from my eyes. ‘I’ve lost myself—I’ll never get out. Where’s my island? Where’s my island gone?’
He held me. It was dark and safe against his chest.
‘I’ll never find it.’
‘You will.’
Nearly a year and a half since I’d begun at Mood Indigo, things at work were changing. Nora gave up running the place, although it seemed she’d still be around; Bea stepped up. With her bouffant hair and clucky manner, she was like a darling auntie, always on our side, always looking out for us. We looked forward to a new style.
Bea made an announcement one day. ‘Staff meetings, they’ll be held once a month and if you have any suggestions, let us know.’
‘What about having one of us attend the meetings?’ I asked. The other girls nodded.
‘You, Lucy!’
Bea agreed, and so I became the girls’ representative. It wasn’t the kind of responsibility I’d ever looked for; I was more one to make quiet suggestions and let others do the shouting. I was, however, astute and articulate. I’d paid a lot of attention to the way the business worked; the issues of regulated prostitution interested me with their paradoxes and intricacies. At times I contemplated becoming a madam myself one day. I had a few ideas of how to create a truly high-quality brothel.
One of the things that made me uneasy in the profession was the lack of rights of working women. As far as we knew we were covered by no union apart from a loose, government-subsidised collective that advocated for prostitutes. Because everyone was anonymous, and paranoid about being ‘outed’, there was barely any possibility of mobilising for rights. Management could fire a lady on a moment’s notice with no consequences. And we all knew there were dozens more women out there to take her place. We were all independent contractors, with no representation or organisation. This move of Bea’s, at least, would give us some voice at Indigo.
I took my duty seriously, with a hot sense of justice that was new to me: I went to a staff meeting, gathered around a bed in one of the rooms with the receptionists and Bea, and wrote up my notes. Then I stuck them on the mirror for all the girls to see. This was a licensed brothel, with duties of care.
Our requests were small. We wanted a fire exit; we suggested that the coffee levy was in fact illegal; we wanted better security. ‘That’s something I’m working on,’ said Bea.
Her changes were mild: the book where our periods were recorded—in case of faking—was updated; new bedsheets were bought; a security man was briefly hired before it was discovered that he’d been in jail for rape. Lola listened intently to all the conversations in the girls’ lounge and was seen whispering to Bea; the atmosphere altered somewhat. Bea was much busier and brisker now; her tiny lips pursed quite readily.
Then she announced that she’d organised something big. A spokeswoman for an agency came to talk to us, an agency that managed working girls’ affairs, providing a contact phone number, carefully phrased references for landlords and employers outside the industry, and a taxation system. We could—in fact, would—give them control of the books and our pay. Tax, the coffee levy, and a handling fee would be deducted, and a receipt given for the cash we then received.
There was discontent in the girls’ lounge. Valentina was outraged. ‘It’s a scam,’ she stated. ‘The fees are illegal and I don’t want my real name on any documents.’
Everyone muttered. ‘And did you hear? The receptionists get a cut. And Bea gets a bigger cut.’
We were all astonished. Bea had more responsibilities now, but she knew us well, knew the difficulties of working, seemed concerned to give us the best environment she could. Surely there was a mistake; maybe the management hadn’t considered the ramifications. Bea had always treated me as a favourite. I’d even confessed to her one miserable night that I needed to leave my shift briefly to score, and she had patted my knee gently, and never mentioned it again. She kissed me hello when I arrived and shared gossip about the other girls. Now she was working against us.
The agency was a definite; things were going to change no matter what we wanted. And the Goods and Services Tax was about to be introduced—even prostitutes gave a taxable service. Regulation would rule us. I had enough money troubles at that moment: my plan to use my house-budget to control my heroin use hadn’t worked; my rent was late. My landlady was literally beating on my door and I needed to get to a dentist for expensive fillings. I absolutely couldn’t afford this rip-off. But all we could do was protest, and I did so passionately.
The next Saturday was a bad night. Plum had been cutting our deals and we had had to buy twice as much just to stave off sickness; it had taken all my cash and a plea for credit. The taste I’d had was barely holding me. Stressed by the need for a big night’s earnings, of course I couldn’t get a booking to save myself. It was busy; all the other girls were in and out of the rooms while I sat at the table, going out again and again to meet the men, the only girl available, practically marked with ‘loser’ on my brow. If I couldn’t make enough cash by Monday I might get evicted; I had to ring the landlady and put her off, and I dreaded making another begging call.
There was a new receptionist, Sophie, on that night, starting off and drowning under the deluge of clients. I heard her spiels and didn’t like them; she wasn’t trying hard enough to get me booked. I smoked alone at the table feeling more and more tense and desperate; changed my outfit, to red satin pants and a red halter-top.
Siobhan walked in.
‘Are you fucking stealing my look?’
I glanced up; she was already dressed almost identically. I hadn’t meant to copy her, but perhaps unconsciously I’d hoped to borrow some of her luck. She was my pal. Now she was glaring at me.
‘You fucking bitch,’ she said, and left the room for her next booking. I was nearly in tears; the night went on and on; all I wanted was to throw it all in and go home. One man after another looked me over and said no. Sophie took ages to do my books at dawn, though I’d only had two small bookings.