You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (18 page)

Tim was confused. Brent continued.

‘It's just that I'm giving up smoking, so my temper's a little . . . you know. And our bedroom is joined to your house. And I know it wasn't that late at night but I was just trying to sleep and she was talking for a long time and I . . . well, when she started talking about rye toast I guess I lost control. I punched the wall. And I'm sorry.'

This should have been comforting—the gangs of rapists and street urchins disappeared in a little overdramatised and slightly embarrassing puff—but all I could think about were the other loud and obnoxious conversations I'd had in my study, unaware that there'd been an audience all along. I'd cried in there—blubberingly, gracelessly, in that way you do when nobody's around to monitor your dignity or admire how pretty you are with one solitary crystalline tear sliding down your porcelain cheek. I'd watched pornography on the laptop not bothering to turn the sound down because Tim wasn't at home. I had confessed secrets and given medical details to doctors. And Brent had been
listening all along
. How mortifying. To this day I don't know who was the worse neighbour.

Alan and Cara's front door was opened by a stony gentleman wearing a dark grey suit. This was clearly ‘security'. We presumed that he was paid extra to turn a blind eye. There was likely a whole niche market for sex party security. For the right price they wear an apron and wash up afterwards.

We had done our best not to get there too early (‘There's no way I'm standing around for four hours making small talk with Cara about her hall throw,' I had insisted beforehand) and already mingling in Alan and Cara's tastefully decorated living room were about five well-dressed couples, holding glasses of champagne and speaking in polite, muted tones. Alan greeted us like long-lost friends. We'd clearly passed the test.

‘Don't you both look
lovely
,' he said, beaming.

Alan himself looked very interesting. He was wearing a pair of leather pants that clung like terrified orphans to his muscular thighs, and a revealing black mesh t-shirt. The outfit seemed at odds with the cream-coloured settee and floral-print curtains.

‘Champagne?'

He was carrying a tray laden with flutes. In his leather and mesh outfit he looked like a waiter on a BDSM cruise ship.

‘Thanks, Alan, that'd be very nice.'

I didn't know about my boyfriend but my plan was to get as drunk as possible before anything weird happened so I'd be in a better headspace to deal with the absurdity of it. We accepted a glass of champagne and looked around the room with courteous smiles.

‘What a nice lounge suite,' my boyfriend said, wisely ignoring the fact that at that moment, directly next to said lounge suite, Alan and Cara's widescreen television was showcasing a video of a not unhappy lady being stuffed full of penis by some willing pool chums.

Outside of the pornography on the television—which, like a racist uncle, the guests seem to be doing their best to ignore—the place was intensely normal. It wasn't gaudy and it wasn't bland. There was no plastic sheeting on the floor. Just a few expensive looking lamps and a mahogany dining table covered with platters of dips and crudités.

‘Is that . . . a
cold meat platter
?' I whispered to my boyfriend.

Alan had heard my question.

‘Cara loves to feed her guests,' he explained.

I'd never given much thought to the sort of food one would serve at a swingers party. I hadn't really thought about anything but The Moment. That tiny click of transition after everyone had arrived that signalled it was time for the small talk to be over and for the descent into lustful depravity to begin. I was obsessed with The Moment. How did everybody
know
when to start? Was there a bell? Did one particularly forthright partygoer stand up, clap his hands together manfully and say, ‘Well, I suppose
I'd
best get stuck in' before coyly revealing his erection?

In pornographic videos, I had seen The Moment occur seamlessly when some doe-eyed blonde giggled naughtily and unzipped a fly, saying ‘Why don't we get
these
off.' None of the people around us looked as though they were close to unzipping a fly, their own or anyone else's. They stood around, chatting amiably, like colleagues enjoying a welcome break at a Gold Coast sales conference. It was as though they had no idea they were at a swingers party. They just seemed happy to be at a social gathering with new friends. For a brief moment I wondered if perhaps Alan and Cara had tricked them into coming and we were all about to be a part of some horrifying sex slave ordeal, but the pornography and Alan's revealing outfit seemed to put that theory to bed.

‘I won't be playing tonight,' Alan told us with an expression not far from disappointment. ‘These nights are more . . .
Cara's
thing. I'm just the host with the most!'

He looked across the room to where Cara stood, laughing outrageously at some quip a strapping young man in a pinstripe shirt had just made. She was wearing a leopard print negligee, a feathered bed jacket and high heels.

‘Yeeeep . . . Cara sure loves to play,' he said flatly, not taking his eyes off his lively wife.

Eventually he took us for a tour around the customised downstairs ‘area', a lavishly converted basement that would have been the envy of Josef Fritzl.

‘So here's our famous circular bed . . . the stripper pole was my wife's idea. She's a playful little thing, like I say! Just you wait and see! Ahahahahaha!'

His leather trousers rubbed together and made a noise like a poorly lubricated goose honking for urgent medical attention.

Lord knows how long it had taken him and Cara to put their sex basement together. One got the sense that Alan had put in all the hard yards while Cara stood in her leopard print negligee, barking instructions. It was a windowless room, decked out with wooden Chinese screens and silk wall hangings. On one side an enormous modified bed—‘kingsized' doesn't really do it justice, this thing was essentially two king-sized beds put together—took pride of place, with a chaise longue at its end. (‘For the observers,' Alan winked.) The stripper's pole was surrounded by comfortable couches. At the back of the room, the famed ‘circular bed'—white leather—sat in dim, foreboding light.

The rest of the room was filled with cushions, mattresses, and two slightly rigid looking massage tables. There was a doorway off to a side room which Alan told us was the ‘smoking room—we don't allow cigarettes in the house'. It was so dark we kept bumping into each other, which may have been the intention.You had to admire the effort, though. The place looked terrific. We weren't at some run-of-the-mill, let's-put-the-wipe-and-wear-Twister-mat-down-and-take-it-from-there sex night for amateurs. These people had done this before. A lot. When it came to swingers parties, they were the Calvin Kleins of the scene.

Upstairs, the conversation twirled in light, balletic circles. Obviously people wanted to know each other well before the night unfolded, but not
too
well.

‘So you work in . . . ?'

‘Media.'

‘Right.'

It was as though we were spies, trained in the art of speaking around a conversation. Or enjoying a game of Hangman (‘Is there a letter . . . A?'). I didn't want somebody I was having a conversation with to suddenly widen their eyes and say, ‘You mean Marieke Hardy from
The Age
?' So I sidestepped. And so did they. A handsome older man wearing expensive jewellery told me he ran a live music venue in St Kilda.

‘Oh, I see a lot of live music,' I said enthusiastically. ‘Which venue is it?'

He looked instantly cagey.

‘Just a venue,' he replied. ‘You probably wouldn't know it.'

Eventually the conversation about what a nice apartment we were in ran dry and we both looked away awkwardly, which was no small feat considering the most prominent thing in our eyeline was
Anal Invaders 8
on the wide-screen television.

I pointed, figuring I may as well acknowledge what was going on directly in front of our faces.

‘She certainly seems to be enjoying herself,' I said clumsily. He looked at me and edged away. Perhaps I had committed a faux pas. Nobody was allowed to talk about sex until the sex was actually occurring. This was a fairly impossible task.

It came as a relief to know my boyfriend and I weren't the only ones new to the experience.There were about eight other amateurs, all looking as nervous and inept as us. One younger couple picked us as newbies—possibly due to the fact I had started giggling hysterically—and sidled up, sensing with relief that we would be from that moment on friends and confidantes.

‘All
I
want to know,' whispered the girl to me, ‘is when it
starts
.'

She was wearing a tight satin evening dress and heavy eye makeup. I took her to be about twenty-four years old. Her boyfriend was shorter than her, one of those boys in their mid-twenties who look about twelve. He had acne and was wearing a dreadful comedy tie. His leg jiggled nervously.

‘I mean, is there a bell or something?' he said impatiently.

Around the room, all the other newcomers shifted shyly with sidelong glances. They had come here for a deeply pornographic experience, not a garden tea. And yet here we were, chatting gaily about our day jobs, or aspects of them (‘I'm not going to tell you exactly what I do, but you can guess. Here's a clue. It rhymes with Pairplane Filot'), and passing around trays of finger sandwiches. It was like being at dancing classes in year seven when all you could do was gaze agonisingly across the room at all the members of the sex you weren't allowed to touch. One young man was offered a breadstick by Alan and actually blushed.

Swingers parties have a fairly low rate of returning guests, which is both a comforting and alarming fact. Obviously the majority of couples only dip their toe in the depraved world of partner swapping once and return to their ordinary lives, curiosity sated. They carry on their existence, allowing the memory of group sex to fade to a comfortable anecdote. This was clearly preferable to those who made a career of it, selling precious family heirlooms in order to fund their latest kinky episode. The last thing anybody wants to see at a swingers party is a pair of sixty-year-olds wearing vinyl teddies and saying, ‘Don't worry, you're in safe hands' with leering, suggestive smiles.

Then again, I wondered why there
were
suspiciously so many fresh faces at Alan and Cara's soiree. What occurred in that downstairs garage to ensure that over half of last month's guests hadn't come back? Were we to skin a goat alive and stand in a circle singing Skyhooks songs while Alan sodomised its corpse? ‘I'm just the host with the most!' The question ‘
what exactly constitutes “too far” at a swingers party?
' kept rattling through my brain. I wished I'd kept a copy of the rules handy.

But when did it start, when did it start? I saw my boyfriend look at his watch. He glanced up at me and shrugged. It was now nine-thirty. We had been there for over an hour, eating olives and talking to people about what they didn't do for a living. This tortured exercise in June Dally-Watkins etiquette could only go on for so long.

A couple in the smoking room had quite clearly flaunted the no drugs policy and were speaking to everybody who entered at high speed and volume, flitting from topic to topic like a pair of amphetamine-addled hummingbirds. One of them had a bloody nose, which he cheerfully wiped away without a second thought. I wondered if the security guard would step in at any point and request they move into the time out corner until they'd both had the chance to calm down. I didn't blame them for wanting to alter reality. At that point I was so on edge I was tempted to ask them where they'd purchased their powders and if they'd mind ever so much sharing their stash around.

We were lingering in the hallway, discussing in muted tones whether we should leave, when a small group burst through the front door. An Amazonian woman dressed in a trench coat led the way, followed by a smaller woman with cropped hair and spectacles, who looked oddly like the cartoon character Penfold from 1980s children's TV series
Danger Mouse
. Behind them stood a rake-thin ghoulish man with a pencil moustache. They were a no-nonsense blast of energy, nodding a curt hello to Alan and without any further ado making their way downstairs. Everyone watched them go, stunned.

‘Ah,' said Alan, pleased. ‘Anita's here.'

And then one of the young men we had spoken to previously crept up from downstairs. His excitement was palpable. He looked like Ginger Meggs having just been told he was about to have a one-on-one training session with Don Bradman.

‘It's started!' he squealed in a high-pitched, thrilled voice.

Meggs was right: it
had
started. We edged our way down into the garage to find that the charming ‘Well,
I
find Earth First is best when really trying to get rid of stubborn stains' middle-class dinner party from upstairs had turned into Sodom and Gomorrah. In the semi-darkness, we could see five bodies writhing on the satin bed. The amphetamine-fuelled couple from the smoking room did everything but shout ‘STACKS ON', and flung themselves into the mix with abandon. A girl who looked like Lily Allen twirled shyly and slowly around the stripper's pole while her proud boyfriend looked on. In the corner, just out of view, somebody was already making a spectacular amount of noise on the round bed. We edged our way towards it, stepping over the anarchy of flesh.

‘I do believe,' I said in hushed, reverent tones to my boyfriend when our eyes adjusted, ‘that nice lady in the trench coat over there is being fisted.'

There she was, spreadeagled on the bed, while her bespectacled companion held a sideways human rights rally up her vagina. She was emitting a series of wails and moans but nobody much looked as though they were enjoying themselves. They all wore expressions of intense concentration, as though studying for an upcoming fisting exam at the Vagina Academy. We stood to one side, staring in amazement, curious bystanders waiting for a bus that would never come.