In My Skin (9 page)

‘How much does she make on a busy night?’ I sipped my coffee. He made it strong and sweet.

‘A few hundred, usually; more at the moment. They’re so easy to please, her mugs. Most of them just want a chat and a cuddle. She’s really popular,’ he said, looking at her sleeping face with affection.

She seemed exhausted. I could imagine why.

‘The cops are out, too,’ Jake added. ‘They’re all over town. I’m keeping my head down. ’We sat in silence for a moment.

‘Better go,’ I said, and scrambled up. ‘See you soon.’

I went home and told my parents how good my chat with Juliette had been.

Most of the time I did go to my counselling appointments. It felt awful, letting Juliette down. She urged me to try a group session, where she introduced me to Mandy, a frail girl aged about twenty. ‘Mandy’s from a nice family like yours,’ Juliette said. ‘She’s been using for a couple of years. Next week she’s going to prison.’

I looked at Mandy. She was pale, haunted, morose; I compared myself to her, and I thought of jail, of how I’d be beaten there, how I wouldn’t last ten minutes, and I thought how impossible it was that it should ever happen to me. I was still cruising on confidence, on my own preciousness. I had ways to get by, I would always get through. Mandy smiled at me sadly. I twitched my lips politely, not identifying.

Juliette was no fool. ‘So. Tell me. Have you been thinking of working as a prostitute?’ she asked a few meetings later. I’d begun talking to Vicki, when she was awake. She’d answered slowly, in a pragmatic voice edged sometimes with savagery, sometimes with pride. Jake watched me. Vicki warned me of how tiring and dangerous her work was. There was another police blitz on, and a girl had recently gone missing.

‘Maybe,’ I said to Juliette.

‘I knew you would be. And I’ll tell you, I’ve met a lot of pros, and if you start, within a year you’ll be
screaming
to get out. I’m telling you. It’s not what you think it is.’ Her face, broad, roughened, was beautiful amid the clatter of the café. She had recently asked me to compose a passage to be read at her wedding.

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said. Juliette’s smile was rueful. She cared for me, but she knew a trajectory when she saw one.

There was a boy I knew from the bookshop. He had been a customer, and he was very beautiful. He’d asked me out, and now, months later, I rang him and said yes. I thought some affection might cheer me up. Richard’s skin was golden, his eyes were dark and serious. He was only nineteen.

We sat in a café and he ordered drinks. Hot chocolate. He smiled at me. We were both nervous as we chatted. Then I crossed my arms on the table and leaning over them said, ‘There’s something I should tell you. You won’t be expecting this.’ I paused. ‘I use drugs. I use heroin.’

He gave me a kind of skewed smile. ‘I thought maybe you did.’

‘Are you scared of me now?’

‘No.’

We kissed in my room that night. He was lovely, and he offered me company, offered me admiration when no one else did. I kissed him, but he was too young. Abruptly I felt monstrous.

‘I don’t care if you’re six years older than me,’ he mumbled. ‘I just really like you.’

I fixed up drugs, sitting at my desk. I made him watch.

It was only two months since I’d been in rehab but it felt like my life was skidding fast. I no longer knew what to expect, and that gave me a kind of freedom. One cold winter afternoon I met an old man on a tram. I was on my way out of St Kilda, and we started talking. His name, he said, was John.

He was a classic old guy: tweed car-coat, hat, kindly smiling wrinkled face. We were talking so easily—about St Kilda, about life there—that he invited me to stop for a coffee. We had one, still chatting happily; then as I walked him back to the tram stop he said, ‘Would you give an old man a kiss?’

I bent to his cheek. He turned it and kissed me on the mouth.

His mouth was warm and it was a good kiss. That was another surprise. People passing looked at us, as we kissed, and this scrutiny, if nothing else, made me defy the reflex reaction of repugnance. I thought, so what if he’s old? Does that make a mouth less warm, an instinct less powerful?

He asked me to his place for dinner. Why not? I was up for anything that day, bored and stressed. And I’d already slipped out of respectability and its rules; I loved to test the expected. We got to his old-guy flat: overhead lights and piles of magazines and dusty cheap furniture. John made soup from Promite and boiling water; we sat at his old laminex table. A glass of warm milk and Weet-bix with jam for dessert. He told me that since his wife died twenty years before he hadn’t found anyone else, but he still had plenty of sex drive. Porn and peepshows weren’t to his taste. Masturbation was boring. I kind of knew what he meant.

I thought,
I might be his last ever lover
. He was young and full of sexuality once, he might even have been handsome.
Will it hurt me?
No. Will I make him happy? I think so. Can I do it?

We moved into the living room. He laid me on the couch and took off his hat and jacket, which he’d kept on through dinner. I was surprised to find his silver-haired head bald on top; suddenly he looked a lot older. His body was white and spongy. But I kept thinking,
It’s just flesh, it’s not beautiful or ugly, it’s a body. It wants me.
I undressed. I caressed his body, I sucked his tiny old nipples. His penis was small and shrunken, the musty scent of old man in the hair around it. I told him he had nice legs. He wasn’t getting hard, but he said, ‘Just lie there and touch yourself.’

He embraced me, he stroked me with warm hands, tender hands, we kissed; then he stood and made himself come. There was only a little fluid. I came back to reality, wondered what I was doing in this flat with this old guy; remembered. We smiled at each other and he went off to wash. I pulled my clothes back on.

More than anything, I felt like I’d done something good, something kind. As he walked me back to the tram stop he told me he was eighty-three. For some reason this made me feel even better. I had done something unusual, I had had sex with an eighty-three-year-old stranger; how free I felt. Perhaps he regularly seduced young women, with his kindly manner and impertinent kisses. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who would have done this. I wasn’t hurt, I wasn’t soiled, I had crossed a line and having done it for amusement I now felt I could do other things for need. I knew the days of need were coming.

A WEEK AFTER JOHN, ON A winter’s night, I asked Jake and Vicki to take me out on the streets. It was time. As far as I could see, it was the only thing I could do. I was living on borrowed money, and hardly any of that. It was a choice between giving up heroin or taking what seemed like the most responsible, independent option. I knew I didn’t have the strength to beat heroin away. It owned me.

I couldn’t do street crime. I couldn’t imagine knocking old ladies to the ground and pelting away with their handbags. I wasn’t smart enough to run scams. And I’d hurt enough people already; I didn’t want to hurt anyone else.

This way I could make enough money to pay my way. No more selling off my little possessions at pawnshops, no more days terrified about having no cash. I could make money out of nothing, out of my body. The work was right there on the side of the road, driving past every night. I could work, and be my own person, and extricate myself from the nightmare of lying and having stolen from those who loved me. I could be as honest as possible.

The voices of my feminist upbringing might insist that prostitution was a form of enslavement, that it objectified and demeaned women, women who whored were to be pitied. I guessed that this was very often true, but I didn’t like simple judgments. Novels and a couple of first-hand accounts I’d read, flipping through the books in my bookstore, suggested that perhaps it needn’t always be so. Perhaps it could be a route to independence, to empowerment. It would be a new kind of adventure. There was a kind of glamour to it, too.

I had simple images in my head of what prostitutes were like. Blowsy blondes, with cheerful bosoms and scarlet lipstick and cackling laughs. Svelte brunettes in plush hotel rooms, wearing suspender belts above long thighs. The stoic girls I’d seen in St Kilda, standing glumly against walls in the street. I thought of prostitution in colours and textures. Red, black and cream; lace and skin and nylon.

In my reasoning I recalled the soulless fucks of my youth. Sweating and gasping beneath a boy I liked, but didn’t want to have sex with—surely everyone had had bad sex, out of politeness, or greed, or convenience. It was how things were. If I could do that, then I could do it and get paid as well.

I already knew the dark St Kilda streets by then, knew the unshaven, sweaty face of the underworld. I had met jailheads and murderers, I spoke the argot of smack. I had a tough face I could put on over my gawky shy smile.

But first I had a date with Richard. He took me to an early dinner. I was awkward, knowing that he thought we were starting something. I knew I was going places he couldn’t follow. In the street outside he went to kiss me; I flinched out of the way. We were both embarrassed. He was looking at me so bashfully, with tenderness and the preparation for hurt.

‘I’m going out tonight,’ I told him. I said this as cheerfully as I could. ‘Starting something. Tonight’s the night I learn to be a hooker.’ The word had a kind of bravado.

He said nothing.

‘It’ll be okay. I’m going to make some money and then I’ll be home.’ I put my arms around him, breathed into his neck. I wished him to know how grateful I was for the sweetness he’d offered me. ‘Wish me luck.’

At home I threw his number away. I didn’t want to hurt him any more.

I dressed that night in black, with eyeliner and a determined red mouth. Here we go.

It was Jake, in fact, who took me out. Vicki was sick. ‘Stand here,’ he said on the footpath, up on St Kilda Road. ‘I’ll wait for you in the pub over there. When you get in the car, tell them it’s fifty bucks for oral and seventy for sex. Come over when you’ve got some money and I’ll keep it safe for you. You’ll be right.’ He strode across the road and I stood there, my heart going fast, my thoughts stalled.

The streetlights were white and the road was glossy black. There were no other girls around that I could see; it was a nasty, chilly night. I wondered if there were bitch-fights over territory, like I’d seen in movies. Fishnet stockings and big hair and yowling.

I needed a fake name. I knew working girls used fake names. The only thing I could think of was the one I had used to tell drunks in pubs. My fingers trembled as I lit a cigarette. It was very cold. I was glad I’d just had a taste.

My parents thought I’d gone out with Richard again. It occurred to me, stupidly, that some of my old customers from the bookshop might drive past and see me. The thought amused me.

I watched the glaze of headlights, the windscreens of oncoming cars: a series of trapezoids with the silhouette of a single, male driver. One pulled up in front of me; I reached over and opened the door, slid in. The smell of an unfamiliar car. A woolly-haired, middle-aged man looking at me. It was happening.

‘Hi, I’m Lucy,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

‘How much for a headjob?’

We pulled out into the traffic and he drove us to a side street. Winter-bare plane trees shaded us from streetlights; the air outside was foggy with cold. With the engine off, everything seemed very quiet. All around us, houses were full of family lives. The lights were golden down here.

I got out a condom from the handful Jake had given me. The man looked as nervous as I was; he abruptly lifted his hips and pulled down his pants. He was hard. I started to bend across to his lap, got caught on the seat belt. ‘Just a minute,’ I tittered.
Jesus, I
sound like an idiot
. ‘Okay.’

Down I went. Condom on. It didn’t take long. I remembered I’d been told I was good at this. I hoped I was giving value for money.
What if he bashes me? What if he…Shit, Jake told me to get the money first.
I kept on tonguing; the unfamiliar smell, the sense of this man’s face above me, looking down at the back of my head, the sound of his breathing.

A gasp, a pulse in the flesh between my lips, a sharp scent; it was over.
I’ve done my first job
, I thought, as I pulled the condom off him and wrapped it in a tissue. What to do with this? I stashed it in my bag. He handed me money.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ken,’ he said, smiling a bit now.

‘Ken, you know, I’ve never done this before. Was that okay?’

‘Me neither. You were all right. Where do you want me to drop you?’

I found Jake in the pub and gave him the money with a smirk. And then I went back out into the street and picked up another man. This one was an Indian guy in a small beat-up lorry. ‘Hey, mate, what are you after?’ Mugs, Vicki called them. A mug. Another blowjob. And again.

Time went fast. It was so easy: stand, wait, look; get in, drive, suck. Pocket the cash. The men seemed shy, friendly enough under the nerves, their desires basic. There had been four men. They all asked for oral. I wanted to keep going, the money a wad in my pocket when Jake, tired, insisted we go. He didn’t ask me for a cut but I gave him forty. It seemed fair. I went to his place, scored and fixed up. Took a taxi home; the news-screen we passed said the time was half-past midnight and the temperature was zero. The lights of the house were off, everything was silent. I got into my bed in this other world, the soft lights of home, the softness into which my hardness no longer fitted. My heart was blank, my veins full, my mind gloating.