Eight Pieces on Prostitution (9 page)

Sue wondered what would have happened if it had been Camilla who'd been on with Laura. Would Camilla have rung her? Would Laura have insisted on it?

Already, there was a conspiracy of objects in her flat. Sue wished she'd shaken Laura till her teeth rattled, slapped her hard, whatever it took. She wished she'd ignored Camilla and phoned the police.

Camilla said, when Sue went back to the kitchen, ‘Nothing so far.'

Laura hadn't moved.

A voice announced the eleven o'clock news. There was more fighting in the Middle East. Then, just when they decided Josef could not have been discovered yet, there he was.

‘The body of a man was found in Simpson's Road early this morning by camel farmer Clive Lambert. Police are questioning property owners in the area, and asking anyone who saw a red Daihatsu sedan yesterday afternoon or evening to come forward. The man's name has not yet been released.'

The newsreader moved on to an item about hospital waiting lists.

‘Did you put the brake on?' Sue asked Camilla.

‘No.'

‘What about the engine?'

‘You
saw
what I did. I ran the car into the fence and left the engine running. Laura,' said Camilla firmly, ‘are you listening?'

Laura made a wry mouth, as though this was the wrong question, not the one whose answer she'd prepared.

‘What happened last night? You've got to tell us.'

‘My dead man,' Laura said.

Sue recalled occasions when Laura had taken upon herself the child's prerogative of becoming tired first, of being waited on. It had been Laura's way, and they'd gone along with it because Laura was young and popular and pretty.

‘He wouldn't talk,' Laura said suddenly, ‘but, you know -' she appealed to them – ‘it isn't
that
unusual.'

‘Not talk? You mean, not a word?'

‘He just like nodded.' Laura giggled. ‘Maybe he was like
mute
or something.'

‘What about his tie?' Camilla asked.

Laura shook her head, her expression taking on a stubborn aspect.

‘You tied it round his neck,' Sue said.

‘Not
tightly
, Susie. Not enough to
hurt
.'

‘What happened then?'

Laura looked from Sue to Camilla and back again, appealingly. ‘He didn't
look
as though there was anything wrong with him.'

‘Why didn't you knock on the wall?' This was their agreed signal if any of them needed help.

‘Shut up, Sue,' Camilla said.

There was a tense silence before any of them spoke again. ‘He must have had a weak heart,' Camilla said firmly. ‘Or arteries full of cholesterol or something.'

Sue said, ‘Kafer, is that German?'

‘What difference does it make?' Camilla asked, while Laura fiddled with the teapot.

‘He couldn't've been a smoker because he didn't have any with him.' Sue's voice carried a small edge of defiance.

‘Or in the car,' Camilla said. ‘I looked. There was nothing in the glove box except a street directory and a manual.'

Sue said, ‘It's not too late to call the cops.'

‘Yes, it is.'

Laura's head was bowed. She smiled as she stroked the teapot.

The red car filled the morning screen, pushing itself out into Sue's living room, so that she moved her hands involuntarily in front of her eyes.

From behind half-closed eyelids, Sue pictured the sunrise moving across paddocks full of yellow grass, and those strange, observant beasts watching the sudden, unusual activity, the police cars and the cameras.

Sue opened her eyes again to notice one camel in the background, smaller than the others, out of focus against an adjacent fence. The fence they'd run the car into was blocked off by police tape. Sue imagined the farmer out early in his ute, checking on his camels, brought up short by the unexpected brilliance of the car.

‘I thought it might be stolen,' Mr Lambert told the interviewer, speaking slowly under a grey Akubra hat. ‘But then I saw there was a man inside. I looked through the window. I knew he was dead.'

‘Did you think it was suicide?'

‘I didn't know what to think. The engine was still running. The keys were in the ignition. I switched it off.' A deeper note of uncertainty entered the farmer's voice. When the reporter speculated - ‘Carbon monoxide poisoning?' – he shook his head.

The reporter ventured a last question about the camels.

‘All for market,' Farmer Lambert said.

‘Whoever heard of eating
camel
?' Laura sounded disgusted.

‘Shh,' Camilla said.

A police sergeant, tanned underneath an open-necked blue shirt, looked as though he'd been dragged back from his holiday. He asked again for anyone with information to come forward. The man's identity was still to be confirmed.

When the next news item came on, Sue said, ‘They're looking for his next of kin. That means they're not in Canberra.'

‘They might be overseas.'

‘The cops didn't say anything about the cause of death. If they were certain then they would have.'

Laura's face took on an indrawn, secret look. She twisted a strand of hair round and round one finger, then began to suck on it.

Sue said, ‘We can't stop working. It would look suspicious.'

‘We'll go in my car,' Camilla said, but Sue objected. ‘No, I want to take my own.'

Were milky eyes a sign of incipient cardiac arrest? What other signs were there? Josef had not been fat. His body had been healthy, nice.

Sue knew that Camilla believed in luck, and courted the best of it with her cards and star charts, her gap-toothed, winning smile. When events took hold of Camilla, she acted decisively. She had told Sue it was two to one, back there when Sue might have insisted, might have picked up the phone and dialled 000, ignoring both of them.

It wasn't too late to backtrack, even now, but Sue knew that Camilla would lie to the police and might blame her, leaving Laura out of it, in order to punish her for breaking ranks. As matters stood, Laura might, or might not, have the wit to lie. They would have to coach Laura, prepare her answers in advance.

At work that afternoon, standing at the window of the girls' room, staring through the glass, Sue thought of disappearing, leaving without saying anything, jumping in her car. She could go to the shops. How she would enjoy that! Browsing in Woolies, buying something nice to eat.

They were bound, the three of them, each one to the other. Whichever way it fell out and however long it took, the three of them were bound.

Standing at the window of the girls' room, Sue accepted this. The sins of the fathers: how did the old prophecy go? Once well-versed in Biblical sayings, Sue could now barely remember them. The Presbyterian benches, she remembered those all right, the cold and gleaming eyes behind the altar. And standing outside afterwards, the church on the hill, and she one of the congregation of her own free will.

‘But I
want
to go to church, Mum.'

‘Have it your way then.'

Her rebellion against her parents' hard-won secular position had embarrassed them. They'd looked at each other, overcome by embarrassment. ‘If she really wants to, I don't suppose -'

She had embarrassed and disappointed them. It seemed that everything she'd said or done after that had been, in some large or small way, disappointing.

Sue recalled standing on the Sunday school steps in pale pink organdie with a wide, tight sash. She'd had to be baptised before she could attend confirmation class. She recalled the excitement of this as though it had been yesterday, a conscious, willed excitement, the church light-filled on the day of her confirmation, its lack of ornament a form of grace.

She asked herself if Laura had committed mortal sin. Laura and Josef Kafer had been playing the choking game. Was this the first time Laura had played it with a client, or the first time the game had gone wrong?

Why had Laura never told them she was doing this? Sue was sure it hadn't been the first time. They'd promised to tell each other everything important, just as they'd agreed to share the money each one earnt.

Josef Kafer had trusted Laura to release the pressure and she hadn't done so, or not until it was too late. But who had pulled the tie tight in the first place? Must it have been Laura? Did that explain why she was acting strangely now?

Sue tried the words out, rolling them around her tongue, the idea that the three of them were linked by mortal sin.

Another memory surfaced, from years after she'd stopped attending services. Sue sat with her legs apart, holding a squat, satisfying hymn book between them, pressing it hard into her crotch.

She contemplated retribution, and her fear of it, in a way she had not done since she was a child.

‘Why me, God?' she demanded of the walls, the view from the window of the girls' room, which refused to answer.

Sue had not been tempted; Laura had; or, to put it another way and more accurately, it was
after the act
that Sue had been tempted, and had given in.

The walls of the girls' room were painted white, a washing machine bleach white that took the voice of compromise away. Two bedrooms, in which they entertained the clients, were decorated with a softer touch. No client was ever allowed to cross the threshold of the girls' room, which was tiny by comparison, but had answered to their needs.

A co-operative their business had set out to be, still was. Tough that word, but they'd risen to its challenges. Now a crisis was held unevenly in six hands: three women held a broken thing in common against further breaking.

They'd built up their business carefully, painstakingly, not anticipating that, after two good years, there would be a glut, that suddenly there would be too many women trying to make a living as they were, by selling the same thing. A downturn they had decided they could weather. But business had gone on turning down. And then the hot weather came, and Christmas. A year turned over, a hundred years, a thousand.

‘Everyone's away,' they'd told each other. ‘Using credit cards to pay for things, draining money from accounts. More people than usual have gone away to celebrate the new millennium.'

Had it not been for the glut, the downturn, would Laura have said no, sent Josef off to try his luck elsewhere? Would Laura have knocked on the wall, so that together they could have persuaded Josef that it was too dangerous, that they weren't into that?

But Laura
was
into it, she had been. Faced with so many uncertainties, Sue was sure of that. This had been the first betrayal, or had it? What else did Laura's secrecy entail?

They'd respected one another's privacy. There were always two of them on together, there was always someone to call on if you needed help, but trespass was a word that meant something. Privacy had been respected, while income was shared equally between them.

There were lines, both visible and invisible inside the concrete building, that, until last night, had not been crossed. Now these lines were as obvious to Sue as though painted on the floor. An outsider might trip over them. Oops, down he would go! Barriers acquired flesh, became objects of derision as the punishing sun began its descent.

Sue knew Laura was in the bedroom she thought of as hers, sitting on the bed. She strained for sounds and heard none. Only one client had turned up, and Camilla was doing him in the second bedroom; Sue would almost have preferred it to be her.

The girls' room was where the three of them gossiped, sorted the laundry, watched TV. Camilla was avoiding it and so was Laura, because they didn't want to talk. The girls' room was where Camilla blew smoke rings and produced answers to her favourite quiz shows more quickly than the legitimate contestants. It was no more than a tiny alcove off the hallway, but it had a strong lock on the door.

By common consent, the room was left without ornament of any kind, not even a floor rug. Laura, who practised yoga, had to unroll her mat and roll it up again after she had finished. This mat lived in a corner of the laundry, which was next to the girls' room, separated by a sliding door. Indeed the room they'd taken as their own had originally been a kind of anteroom to the laundry, with its industrial-sized machine, its wooden shelves and ironing table.

A two seater couch, TV and CD player, plus a small table, took up all the space. A narrow bench held an electric jug, three mugs, tea and coffee and the bits of food they brought in. Laura had to lie with her legs under either the TV or the table when she did her yoga.

By chance, the view from the window angled itself across the timber yard and past a cemetery for abandoned white goods at the end of the commercial block. Flat paddocks beyond it were sometimes stocked with young beef cattle, but were empty now. Last spring, heifers had grazed on grass already turning yellow, each stem bearing a fat head of seeds.

Sue believed she liked this view better than either Laura or Camilla, that it meant more to her. Its atmosphere changed every day, according to the light. From unpromising beginnings, a first glance that did not invite a second, the aspect had become dear to her. Who could have predicted that a wedge of paddock, often empty of any but vegetable life, could provide such variety and pleasure?

Laura and Camilla had grown used to Sue sitting on the couch, not facing forward towards the TV, but curled around, looking out. She never minded the others coming in and finding her like that. She never snapped or said leave me alone. But neither could she explain to them why it mattered to her, why she found enjoyment in the ordinary scene.

That afternoon, as Sue stared out, as snatches of memory returned to her from church, she realized that they should have taken Josef much further than they had; they should have taken him way out in the country.

Sue knocked gently and found Laura curled up on the bed. She bent over Laura and put her arms around her.