Published in coastlines 2: new writing from southern cross (copyright 2001)
I’ve been assigned a most unpleasant task. One of the worst to date, I think. Why can’t the fingers on the keyboard spare me, and us, such ugly and debasing scenes? I’d much rather play a part in painting pretty pictures with pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, wouldn’t you? But people’s lives are rarely like that, are they? Pardon the cliche but shit happens. I’m about to witness certain events, see certain people and go to places that I would rather not have anything to do with. But the fingers on the keyboard will give me no choice, they will push me forward unceasingly, and I, appointed as narrator, will have no option but to yield. The fingers are moving on the keyboard now so my job officially begins here…..
It’s Friday night and from the top storey balcony of the Nevada, anorexic girls smile and blow insincere kisses at the men in the street below. One of the girls’ names is Tracy. She’s an attractive girl. Straight shoulder-length brown hair with auburn highlights. Features sharp. Green eyes stunning. She has a long and slinky figure too and it is this aspect, along with her unusually long eye teeth that give her a cat-like appearance. It’s a nice effect really. She lives in Bondi but she’s here most nights of the week. Her boyfriend’s a kick boxer. At least he likes to think of himself as such. In reality he’s a junkie with a big ego and an even bigger temper and he feeds off her like an insatiable flea and she doesn’t seem to care at all. She’s a cheerful sort.
The Nevada is famed for having the biggest bed in the district. It sits ugly as grime in a dirty little side street off Darlinghurst Road. There are used syringes in the gutter outside and the smell of spew attaches itself to my nostrils like mould to a damp cloth. A song by John Cooper-Clarke comes to mind, but I can only remember bits of it. Let’s see, oh yeah:
‘…easy, cheesy, queasy, sleazy, beastly, Beazley Street…’
Where …’People turn to poison, quick as lager turns to piss…’
Rosie’s doing the rounds tonight. Right now she’s heading, bold as brass, into the Nevada. I know all the girls who work there. It’s my job as omniscient narrator, right? It’s sometimes hard to keep up with all the people and goings on though, even for someone in my position. Kings Cross is such a transient place. Rosie goes into all the parlours around this side of Sydney selling off her gear – mainly clothes. The girls are always interested in what she has to offer and they always have money to spend. Rosie has her usual assortment, lace underwear in both red and black, and some really gorgeous dresses and tops if I do say so myself. A lot of the stuff still has the white plastic electronic tags on them, you know: the ones that beep loudly when you try to walk them out of the shop without paying? Rosie’s good at what she does. I saw her in action in the previous draft of this story, but that scene was later discarded.
Chantelle’s working tonight. Quite pretty. Very young. Around sixteen or seventeen. She’s new to the game and this stands out clearly to Tracy. Chantelle is a brown-skinned girl with large brown eyes. Long, chocolate-coloured hair sits softly on her pretty shoulders. She has a baby daughter in Darwin her mother has been looking after. Chantelle’s been putting money aside for the airfare to get her here to Sydney. Tracy tells her it’s safe to put the money in one of the drawers in the unit beside her bed.
‘But do you really think it’ll be safe here, Tracy?’, Chantelle asks.
‘Yeah, sure.’ Tracy watches as the young girl slips four one-hundred-dollar notes into the bottom drawer underneath some papers. ‘It’ll be safe, Chantelle. No one knows it’s there except me and you.’
A faint bell rings and Tracy and Chantelle make their way to the lounge together, along with a couple of the other girls working tonight, to greet the client who has just walked in off the street. Rosie stays behind the scenes. She’s not a working girl. Margaret, the receptionist, who used to be a champion roller-ball player, introduces Kim to the girls. He’s a tiny man. From Japan. Over on a business trip.
‘Kim, this is Nina, Tara, Tracy and Chantelle.’
The girls nod their heads, say hello, and put on their own individual smiles. After a short moment the small man points to Chantelle who then leads him shyly by the hand to her room. The rest of the girls go back to Rosie and the clothes.
Inside Chantelle’s room the client takes a shower. She takes the money out to Margaret who writes it into the worksheet and deposits it in the cashbox. On her return Kim is standing with a towel around his small waist. His suit is neatly placed on the chair beside the bed. He smiles nervously, his hairless chest still wet and glistening like a seal. Chantelle again takes him by the hand, this time leading him to the spa bath. She closes the door behind her.
An hour later Chantelle is sitting on her bed in her room. She is crying.
‘It’s OK. You can save up again. It’s only a night or two’s work you’ve lost,’ says Tracy with feigned concern, her arms around the sobbing girl.
‘Yes, but I want my daughter here with me now.’
‘Well there isn’t much you can do about it for the moment. It must have been the client you were with. I’m sorry I told you it was safe to put it in there. He was alone when you took his money out to reception. He probably looked in the drawer and thought “Wow, lucky me. I get a fuck and get paid for it”. ‘Fucking bastard’.It’s almost eleven o’clock in the evening. A Siouxie and the Banshees song is playing on the tape recorder in Tracy’s room. She sings along. ‘This is the happy house, we’re happy here, in the happy house, oh isn’t it fun, fun, fun. We come to play in the happy house, and waste the day in the happy house, It never rains, never rains…’
All the girls here have their own rooms. There are four in all and they’re all pretty much the same except for the one with the big bed. That room attracts a higher fee and is reserved for special functions. The other rooms have red carpet, double bed with cotton sheets, white pillow cases, and red bedspread. A small sink and shower receptacle add to the decor. A white towel is thrown at the end of all the beds and is tapered in at the middle like the way napkins are sometimes placed on tables. And there are side cupboards beside each bed too with a lamp, condoms, Johnson’s Baby Powder and lubricating gel on the top. Also, at the end of every bed is a menu, typed up on coloured cardboard and laminated.This one reads:
Straight Sex (1 Hour) $30.00
(2 Hours) $55.00
French $25.00
Full French $40.00
But sex acts are always negotiable. Once, Tracy had to stand on her hands, with her body against the wall for support, wearing a school uniform and reciting nursery rhymes while the client slid his fingers in and out of her vagina.
In her bedroom Tracy lifts up the corner of the mattress and takes out four one-hundred-dollar notes from underneath it, returns the mattress to its place, puts the money down her pants, and leaves her room. Strutting confidently through the corridor and past reception she tells Margaret she won’t be long and goes down the front stairs that lead out onto the street. Margaret purses her lips in disapproval. She knows what Tracy is off to do but can’t do much about it. Tracy is one of the most popular girls here and the boss has stated that such liberties are to be tolerated in her case.
Out on the street now Tracy walks past a young woman plastered on the wall without giving her a second glance. I know this young woman well. She stands there every night of the week and I’ve seen her heaps lately because the fingers on the keyboard keep revisiting the site, going over the details of what she looks like again and again till it’s just right. She’s a small, thin woman. One leg is bent at a forty-five-degree angle so that the palm of her shoe rests against the wall for support. Her shoulders are slumped forward, arms dangle by her side, her head is fallen to her chest as if in prayer. Suddenly, and with a jerk of surprise at having fallen asleep standing up, she neatly composes herself. Her eyes are light blue and because she’s off her face the blue seems somehow brighter, more intense. Perhaps it’s because her pupils are so small that it shows up more of the iris. The glassiness adds to the effect. She’s wearing a white lace bra, white G-string pants, and white fishnet stockings that go to the top of her thighs. They are fastened to her pants with white clips. Her shoes are white too, stilettos, and she has on a waist-length, rabbit-skin coat. Her hair is a dirty blonde, greasy and stringy and her lips are cherry red and she’s got really bad pockmarked skin. She’s around twenty-five. A black vinyl bag hangs sadly over her shoulder. The sound of the Stranglers, ‘Let Me Down Easy’, wafts like a fart from the pinball parlour next door.
Tracy heads up towards the fountain at the other end of Darlinghurst Road. Just before you reach the fountain, across the road from the Norgen-vaaz ice-cream shop, and near where you can get the best ever felafels, is a tattoo shop. The fingers on the keyboard direct me through the entrance of the tattoo shop and down the corridor to one of the back rooms. A young woman is naked and on her knees, her face impaled on the tattooist’s dick. It was circumcised when he was an innocent young babe in arms, leaving the head of his penis permanently exposed so it looks like a limp mushroom with a long, sad stalk. It’s pencil thin and erect right now and the hair around it is black and wiry and excuse me for saying, and you understand I have no choice, but it stinks of piss.
‘Come on, suck harder,’ he says. ‘You can do better than that.’ He’s sitting on an office swivel chair with his jeans around his ankles and his T-shirt rolled up to his chest. Every part of his skin is blotted out with tattoos, from his neck all the way down to his ankles. A bottle of Jack Daniels sits beside his thonged feet. The young woman, who is naked before him, tries to oblige his demands but his dick being shoved down her throat and his hands forcing her head down on him are making her gag. The rhythm of his thrusting intensifies and then his body tightens itself up like a knot. He groans loudly and a sudden burst of warm, acrid-tasting fluid shoots into her mouth. She swallows every drop, then wipes her mouth with the back of her hands and washes it down with a slug of whisky.Tracy walks through the lounge of the Rex and through the doors that lead to the public bar and approaches a man sitting on a stool at the front bar. His name is Vince. He’s a disgusting little cretin who reminds me of Bjorn from ABBA only he’s short, dark and fucked-up looking.
‘Got something for me, Vince?’ says Tracy, plonking herself down beside him. He looks up from his rum and coke.
‘Got plenty for ya darlin,’ he says, wetting his puffy lips with his dirty, fur-coated tongue.
‘Have you got two fifties?’ asks Tracy.
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Come over to the table.’ He walks with an air of importance. He thinks he’s Mr Big. She follows with quick, eager steps. They both sit down at a table and Vince reaches into the pocket inside his leather jacket and takes out two small silver-wrapped parcels. He holds Tracy’s hand for a moment as if they are lovers and places the packages in the palm of her hand. His smile makes her physically sick. She withdraws her hands, makes small talk for a few moments while her hands, under the table, search for the money hidden in her pants, then she discreetly hands him a hundred-dollar note.
In the toilet at the Rex she takes a spoon and hypodermic needle from her bag. She can feel the butterflies in her stomach. She wants it done quickly. (You know, as much as I hate to witness this event, it is strangely fascinating to watch. It never ceases to amaze me how far people will go for their kicks).
She holds the needle under the running water and draws back the plunger. Holding it up to the light, she pushes the plunger forward, letting the water squirt out of the tip of the needle. She keeps 10 mls of water inside the barrel. She goes into the cubicle now and puts down the lid of the toilet, places the spoon on it and empties out the contents of one silver wrapper. She does this as if she’s done it a thousand times before. She would have made a good nurse or doctor. She’s not squeamish at all. She squirts the water into the spoon with the powder, takes a cigarette out of its packet, rips off a bit of the filter and places it carefully into the spoon with the mixture. The tip of the needle is placed gently onto the floating piece of cotton and stirred very lightly. Then she draws the fluid into the syringe. She places the needle between her front teeth while she fixes a belt around the top of her arm, taps the vein, and pumps her hand until the veins are of an adequate size. The butterflies in her stomach are stampeding like a herd of elephants now. The deed done, a warm rush explodes into her like dynamite, blasting into every cell in her body. She holds back the urge to vomit.I’m being called back to one of the sites I’ve already visited. The fingers on the keyboard drag me back past the ice-cream shop, the tattoo shop, back past the place where you can get the best ever felafals, back to where the woman in white underwear is standing against the wall. A different Strangler’s song, ‘Life Shows No Mercy’, is playing this time and I’m reminded once again of the song by John Cooper-Clarke. The fingers on the keyboard won’t let me forget it. The owner of those fingers thinks that music, particularly this song, adds to the potency of the story.
But I don’t want to utter the words. They sound like an omen. I want out of this story. But no, I have to recite more of the song for you; my job isn’t over yet.
‘…In the cheap streets where murder breeds, somebody’s out of breath. Sleep is a luxury they don’t need, a sneak preview of death. Belladonna is your flower, manslaughter your meat. Spend a year in a couple of hours on the edge of Beazley Street…’
A man approaches the young woman in white.
‘So how about it?’ he asks.
The man is in his mid-thirties. A huge specimen, an absolute gorilla of a man with dark curly hairs on the back of his hands and on his back and chest and arms. He’s dressed in black jeans with a brown leather belt, a blue singlet, and Blundstone leather boots. He’s an interstate truck driver and his blue eyes are wide and on the ball and he’s so wired with ephedrine he can hardly keep still.
‘Waddya reckon?’ says the woman in white through a stoned smile. ‘We can go to a place not far from here. It’s on Challis Avenue.’ She speaks with a nasal twang and her words are slow and sleepy, her eyelids half shut.
‘How much?’ he asks.
‘Whaddya want?’
‘Doesn’t matter, we can talk about it when we get there.’
‘Follow me,’ says the girl in white. She leads the way, her stilettos clacking loudly on the sidewalk. She takes him along Victoria Street, the street behind Darlinghurst Road. The people are beginning to thin out as they make their way through the back streets of the Cross. A skinny, pimply-faced youth with purple spiked hair and a studded dog collar round his neck, and his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, slips rather conspicuously into a darkened laneway.
‘It’s not far now,’ says the woman in white. ‘Waddidya say ya name was?’
‘I didn’t, but me name’s John.’
‘So whaddya do John?’
‘Um, I’m a plumber.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Nup’
‘Don’t talk much do ya?’ says the woman in white.
He looks toward her and smiles, exposing a broken front tooth and she notices for the first time the great size of the man. Not a person is in sight now as they turn into Challis Avenue. It’s an ugly and frightening place.
‘Don’t go!’ I call out. ‘Go back to where it’s safe!’ But of course, she can’t hear me. I’m not a character in her story.A young man is walking past outside the Rex Hotel where Tracy still sits inside with her head resting on the toilet cistern. His name is Sissy. He is dressed in pink trousers, white T-shirt under a pink vest, and white cowboy boots. He has short, trimmed blond hair and like a lot of people around here his eyes are pinned. He is pathetic-looking really. He sniffles continuously and the jacket he has slung over his shoulders has silvery snot on the sleeve. A group of youths hanging out at the fountain catches sight of him and the smallest member among them calls out.
‘Hey poofter.’ There are four of them in all and one of them is a young Maori girl. She gives the nod to the biggest boy who steps out and starts laying into Sissy, who hits the ground and curls himself up in the foetal position while two sets of boots kick into him. Somewhere beyond the threshold of his pain, the sound of the other two egging him on taunts Sissy.
Ruby, a fifteen-year-old girl, who is six months pregnant, and who has been watching the scene, runs to Sissy’s aid. She’s a pill freak and she should be at home, not out soliciting in her condition. She lives in the Cross in a rented room with her boyfriend.
John Cooper-Clarke is pushing his voice into my consciousness again. Why don’t the fingers on the keyboard just lay off?
‘…Where the perishing stench of squalor impregnates the walls…it’s a fully furnished dustbin, sixteen Beazley Street…’
Her boyfriend’s at home, pissed off and wondering where she is. Her baby will not survive.
‘…Saint Joseph smiles and a baby dies in a box on Beazley Street…’
There’s a garbage bin at the scene where Ruby has come valiantly to Sissy’s aid. She takes hold of a beer bottle sitting on top of it and holds it behind her back. She approaches one of the boys but before she has time to hurl any abuse or make any threats the bottle is snatched from her hands by the Maori girl, who has sneaked up behind her.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she says.
‘He’s my friend,’ screams Ruby, standing her ground. ‘I can’t stand by and watch him get beaten up by youse turkeys.’
‘Get the fuck away from here or I’ll crack this bottle over your head, bitch.’
The Maori girl means business. Ruby backs down. The young boys are still hitting and kicking Sissy as the fingers on the keyboard direct my focus back to Tracy.
She leaves the Rex and makes her way back to the Nevada. She walks through the blood on the sidewalk without paying any attention to the fact that a boy dressed in pink is being dragged over to the toilets in the park. She walks past the fountain, past the ice-cream shop, past the tattoo shop, past the pinball parlour. She does not notice that the woman in white is gone as she makes her way up the stairs and back into the Nevada. She calls out to Margaret on the way in.
‘I’m back.’
‘Good,’ says the receptionist. ‘One of your regulars is waiting for you. He didn’t want to see anyone else but you. By the way, you don’t know anything about Chantelle’s money do you? It was stolen from her room.’
‘No. Why should I know anything about it? Perhaps you should screen the clients better than you do. I told her it was safe to put her money in one of the drawers in her room but she should have known better than to listen to me.’ Margaret frowns and purses her lips yet again in disapproval. She’ll have Tracy one day.
As she walks down the hall to her room Tracy sings softly to herself.
‘…We’re happy here in the happy house. Sing along, sing along, ho! This is the happy house, we’re happy here in the happy house, to forget ourselves, and return as well, there is no hell, ho! ho! ho!’‘…There’s a dead canary in a swivel seat, there’s a rainbow in the road. Meanwhile, down in Beazley Street, silence is the code…’
Behind the main strip, a young woman has been murdered and raped, in that order.
Nobody saw or heard a thing. Her body has been shoved in a garbage bin in one of the alleyways at the back of the Cross. She will never be identified. She has on one white stiletto shoe. A pair of white G-string pants is knotted tightly around her neck.
John Cooper-Clarke’s song reaches me one more time.
‘Eyes dead as vicious fish…The name of the game is not cricket, caught out on Beazley Street.’
