Eight Pieces on Prostitution (4 page)

Harry said that perhaps powder would be more in keeping. ‘If you would wear white,' he added, ‘or a blonde wig, or the mask of a young virgin, I could submerge myself in my part with greater vigour.'

Maria reassured Harry that she would think about it, and told him to shut his eyes.

Night was falling outside the parlour. When Harry opened his eyes again, they gleamed yellow in the dusk. Maria was reluctant to switch on electric lights, know they would accentuate the worn patches on the cod-piece, and on every piece of furniture as well. She thought about the principle of disorder in the universe, and it was as though this principle floated above the massage table like the curse of an angry god. She felt that someone, somewhere out there, was preparing for them – for herself and Harry - a disjointed, disorderly end.

Sometimes Harry came to the parlour disguised as any other client, in a grey suit and white shirt, but more often he got himself up as a combination of historical characters, bearing on his skinny body the knick-knacks of the centuries. It amused Maria to think how long the dressing-up had taken him, and how impatient he was to divest himself of his costume once inside.

Striding the boards like any period actor, taking his cue from some internal clock, Harry's short legs tripped over the uneven floorboards, down the corridor that led nowhere but to the bathroom and the ancient shower. He paid Maria first because that was the rule. When he asked her why she kept the day's takings in the oven, and she told him, ‘For the fairies,' Harry nodded with a serious expression.

Maria, whose daily experience was that of being inhabited by the body of another, saw landlords and tenants everywhere. She worried that her landlord was about to put the rent up. She'd been warned by, and had tried to ignore, the glitter of teaching her a lesson that shone in her landlord's eyes. Maria watched coffee laced with brandy and hot orange tea disappear into the bodies of her clients and marvelled at the disappearance, the internal workings of it all.

Outside, Maria was like a person who wore stage make-up on the street. She did not ask why mad Harry had chosen her; some days it seemed to her a miracle that there weren't more like him; others that Harry was the miracle. He made her laugh. She did not ask why he put such a variety of obstacles between them, or why he returned faithfully every second week. For a man whose preparations for love were unusually elaborate, Harry had little to say; most of his sayings Maria knew by heart.

Harry liked to sing. ‘Oh, little sail boat floating in the bay,' he sang in a strong discordant baritone, ‘carry me away to my own countree.'

Harry side-stepped on nimble feet, daring Maria to chase him round the table; he was slippery, though she had not yet oiled his skin that was as porous as a child's.

Curious, against her better judgment, Maria asked him who he was, and he replied, ‘I'm Harry Cod the Cod-maker.' He smiled, delighted both with her question and his answer.

Maria heard, with her inner ear, a military band tuning up, so in time were her fingers, then the movements of her body, on the rug laid ceremoniously underneath the massage table, with the little flat cushions shining white in the shadows of its legs.

Harry called the parlour home, as he arched over her, as he sang in praise.

They listened to the rain, standing by the window, Harry frowning at the thought of spots on his velvet jacket, Maria's mind stretching out towards some backyard of a future house where rent was not a problem, and where clients were predictable and bland. The problem was, she told herself, that she was too attached to routine. The extraordinary had become a habit.

Harry left her a bonus, each time a few cents more, and for this she was grateful. She had not told him how she struggled to find the rent money each fortnight.

Maria heard the walls cracking around her, the low sounds of timber giving way, and watched age patches on the plaster growing so as to cover the whole ceiling. She imagined Harry and herself engulfed by shadows, the only bright thing left the ancient cod-piece in its smelly bed. She thought of layers of concealment and how each one finally would be stripped away.

When her rent was increased further, Maria knew that she would have to leave. She turned away from her landlord's silver eyes as from a blindness that might conquer her remaining days. Time was short; her landlord, now he'd acted, wanted her out within the week. She would have liked to ask Harry what she ought to do, but had no idea where to find him in the city. She did not know his last name, or his first one, come to that, since ‘Harry' might have been invented on the spot the first time he had rung the doorbell. Harry never missed appointments, and she was always there. She didn't even know if he had a phone.

Maria did not mind the contempt of other tenants, or of passers-by, as she gathered her belongings on the footpath. As she bundled the last of them into her ancient car, she thought of the goose that lay, and then finished laying, golden eggs.

In her new place, Maria missed Harry and his costumes, and was angry with herself for doing so; she missed their hours together and told herself not to be a fool. Looking back, she could not shake the feeling that she'd been on the point of understanding something important while in Harry's company, that understanding had been no more than a breath away. She missed the creaking of the old flat with its recalcitrant shower and shadows on the ceilings, though her new one was cleaner and her list of clients at last began to grow.

She pictured Harry walking up to the door in his finery, knocking and then waiting, knocking and at last going away. She thought of leaving him a note with her new address, but the likelihood of her old landlord finding it deterred her. She pictured Harry pacing the footpath in his disguise of a normal human being. In the dusk, she glanced over her shoulder down the corridor, at a nostalgia she could not allow herself to indulge.

Maria no longer kept her money in the stove, but, superstitious, banked it twice a day. There was enough left, from her rent and food and other expenses, to save a little more each week.

Returning from the bank one afternoon, she decided that she might as well keep a diary. It would do no harm.

Maria chose a child's school exercise book. She thought that seventy-two pages would be more than enough.

‘The first thing,' she wrote, ‘was that we fitted. Most pricks fit most cunts – that is the heterosexual experience. You could set it out like an equation. Even ageing, battle-scarred cunts will lick their lips and smile as if for a hidden camera, since, though they know in their deepest folds that every prince turns into a frog, still, still….'

Maria listened to the rain and thought, then she continued writing.

‘The mind may know, but the cunt, in spite of its struggle with rubber, wads of cotton and daily over-use, is naively generous. It holds no memory of disappointment, or fear of being turned out in the street.'

Maria thought again and bit the end of her pen. ‘We do not put aside our knowledge that love disintegrates and the ash is dry in the mouth and the warm places empty holes. We wrap it tenderly around and these wrappings become the body's sought-after amnesia. That we must continually take off our costumes and replace them means no more to us than it did to Harry. It means no more than an acknowledgement of love.

For the birthday party, I ordered a sponge from the Hungarian cake shop in Fitzroy Street. I collected it early, before midday, and sat it on the kitchen table. It was so hot that by two o'clock the icing had melted and something awful was happening to the cream. Our fridge had finally given up; only when the door would no longer shut on the bulging ice would I say to Freda, ‘We must defrost the fridge.'

As well as the cake we had some dips, biscuits and cheese, cabana and nuts and potato chips. The cheese had sweated as much as it could and turned dark and cracked along the top. The dips were very strong. One was smoked oyster and the other had a lot of garlic.

I put a damp tea-towel around the cake, but it didn't do much good. Icing subsided into faded flowers, and the silver balls that made up the number seventy looked like tiny plants where the soil has washed away and uncovered their roots.

As fast as we drank our beer, it came out again on our foreheads.

‘What a scorcher,' said John the birthday boy, John from Kangaroo Valley as he was usually known.

John's face was mottled with the heat; the white line around his forehead where his hat came to shone in a strange, phosphorescent way.

Maria wore a green satin shirt for the occasion. It was beginning to perish underneath the arms. When she lifted her glass, the remaining threads stood out, and in between was a kind of decaying gauze.

We talked about the luxury block of flats and the new people they had brought to our area. No one had bothered about us for years, and now we were an eyesore. On hot days like this we looked at the sea with a special frustration. When you most needed to slip away for half an hour and let your body slide into the cool water, the phone would not stop ringing.

‘The heat brings them out,' Maria said.

John told us not to worry. He was happy that we'd made the effort.

The smell from the Cowderoy Street drain doubled in intensity and the effluent from Port Melbourne thickened, its whitish colour becoming yellow-grey.

‘Pooh,' said Maria as she closed the window.

Birthday John slumped in his chair as though his muscles were in danger of giving up altogether, but with a look of concentration too, as though by effort of will he could reduce himself and make the heat more bearable.

‘Don't mind me,' he said.

Maria said, ‘It isn't every day you're turning seventy.'

After that, none of said anything for quite a while. The phone rang. Freda and I were busy in the rooms, and after we came back, John and Maria were just sitting quietly, Maria with her hands spread so that they made a lattice on the table.

I drank beer while Freda began a conversation about ways of keeping cool during a heat wave, a desultory conversation that seemed to follow the weighted movements of air around the room. John offered his recipe, which was to open both the front and back doors and lie in the corridor on a bed of damp towels.

Maria said that might be okay in a farmhouse, but it wouldn't be practical in a house of sin.

No one seemed to consider this remark unusual.

Freda had been Christmas shopping that morning, and as well as John's present, there was a laundry basket in the kitchen, along with three pot plants, each with its own wooden stand. We'd clubbed together to buy John a fishing rod. He was pleased with it and told us about the fishing lines he'd made when he was a lad.

‘Just be sure that if you catch anything out there in the bay, you throw it straight back,' Freda told him.

As well as the fishing rod, Freda had picked up a folding canvas chair on special.

‘You can sit on the veranda and watch the sunset,' she said, smiling, and I thought it was strange that he'd never invited any of us up to his farm; and then I thought that it was not so strange.

Freda was unfolding the chair. ‘Come on. Don't you want to try it out?' The chair was striped green and yellow. Its seat was scooped and deep. John regarded it with some anxiety. ‘What if I can't get out again?'

Freda laughed and told him he'd be fine; and he was. For a moment the sight of John's white head against the stripes seemed absolutely right and fitting, and at the same time cheerful, throwing the rest of the room into shadow.

‘I tell you what,' he said proudly, ‘help me finish off this bottle and that's one less we'll have to keep cold.'

We all helped him. The doorbell rang again.

‘Now we'll have to wait for Lil,' Freda said. ‘As soon as you've done him Lilly, we'll light the cake.'

‘Hurry up,' Freda said to John after I came back. ‘Hurry up and blow the candles out.'

And John did, obligingly he hurried, and we helped him, laughing over the ruins, and after all it didn't taste too bad.

‘Those Hungarians make good cakes,' Freda said.

The icing stuck to our fingers, and the body had fallen out of the cream totally, but we didn't care. I apologised to everyone and they told me not to worry.

Freda, who was drunk by then, suggested that we should sing a song. John sang Waltzing Matilda. He sang it from beginning to end and we all joined in the chorus. He said he remembered the swaggies on his parents' property, and the way he sang made the landscape come to life with jumbucks and ghosts calling from billabongs.

‘Does anyone know any party games?' said Freda. ‘I know, let's play killer.' She took us all in with a bright look. ‘One person is the killer and she – or he -' with a deferential nod in John's direction – ‘has to kill people by winking at them. But you're not supposed to see her do it. Say you're the killer Lilly, and I see you winking at Maria. I can accuse you and you have to say yes. But if you wink at Maria and no one sees you, then Maria has to say, “I'm dead.” Have you got it?'

John and Maria said they did, but I demurred. ‘I've never been able to wink properly.'

I had a go. John laughed. Freda said, ‘Do you want to play or don't you? Look, I'll break off a bit of match and we can pick whose going to be first.'

John gave me a subtle wink. ‘Not yet,' Freda said.

John was the first killer, but this time he winked loudly and unsubtly and everybody saw him.

When it was my turn, John was looking straight at me so I winked. It wasn't a bad wink either, but almost a minute passed before John said, ‘I'm dead.'

We played a few more rounds, laughing at Maria's slit-eyed look, the way she winked sideways, as though, if she did it this way, nobody would notice. Freda was best, which, all things considered, wasn't so surprising.